Location: Chief Dan George Theatre
Abstract:
A birch bark canoe repair, feminist ephemera rekindled, scattered leaflets in a Quebec village, Edmonton in beadwork, Indigenous Passion plays and Chinese opera furnishings in the Pacific Northwest, Shakespeare and spitballs at Stratford, scripts of care for Disability performance, traces of labour and love at the Art Gallery of Ontario, theatre ticket stub collections, dad’s old RMP records, a jazz player in the family, a micronation in the making…
These are just a few of the objects, practices, memories, and personal archives that artists and scholars have shared in the Gatherings Roadshow, a playful, curiosity-driven series highlighting early works-in-progress in creative research approaches to performance histories. Part of the project Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance, the series offers a space for intimate storytelling and collective reflection. Over the past four years, guests have introduced audiences to the many forms of performance practice that can be found in archives and the many forms that a performance archive can take, from cultural traditions and family heirlooms to genealogical records and long-defunct websites.
Taking into account CATR 2026’s theme of inheritance and transition towards a future that is radically different from the present, the Gatherings team will present a selection of (road)show and tell acts that speak directly to these concerns in the various ways we engage creatively with archives—less as sites of knowledge and more as places of relationality, less as vehicles to the past and more as future possibilities for new histories of performance.
Jill Carter, “She”: A Living Archive
An archive is a story, and a story is a container through which to distill, interpret, arrange and perform a life long after that life has fallen to dust, kicked up into action by living limbs—ambling, grazing, planting, burrowing, fleeing, rolling, resting, picking, plucking, mating, murdering. An archive is a performance of story. And a story is a performance of theory. And theory is a performance of a story about how life is and why it is so.
For this panel, I propose to present a visual fragment of testimony that documents a fragment of a durational performance belonging to a specific moment. The performer here is an apple tree. The archive here is the same apple tree. And the digital memento (to be presented here) speaks to me about how the archive both curates itself and has been curated by human agency. The image reminds me that once I encountered a being, that this being told me a story, that she performed a theory on how life is, and that she did all this through the practice of standing, breathing, and continuing to fulfill the function for which she had been created and for which she had been carried to these shores to be planted in foreign soil.
If the subject of the photo is the living archive, is the photo also an archive? Is it an ‘archive in waiting?’ When the subject of the photo is no longer living, and when I am no longer living to lend my words to the performance of an apple tree, will the digital memento — the captured image– become an archive? Will it prove a worthy archive? Will it perform for future witnesses as its subject has performed for me?
Jacob Pittini, “Participation Archived: Cataloguing a Phenomenon of Participatory Theatre in Canada”
For participatory theatre scholar Gareth White, audience participation is so broad and diverse that he approaches it by “putting as little emphasis as possible on defining commonality between diverse practices, and avoiding the task of an authoritative survey, even at a local level” (2024). When what can constitute participatory theatre is so broad, how can it be recognized as a phenomenon in a specific time and place? How can performances which invite audience participation in diverse ways be grouped without imposing commonality? To explore these questions, I will share my experience of contributing to the Gallery section of Dr. Jenn Stephenson and Dr. Mariah Horner’s play/PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation online blog. The Gallery is a publicly accessible ongoing practice of archiving examples of participatory theatre in Canada. I offer this archive as a site of exploration and consider how cataloguing examples of participation can unearth it as a phenomenon.
Heather Fitzsimmons Frey “Blue Gingham, patched and mended”
Living history museums feature historically-dressed staff and volunteers who animate buildings, perform historically located skills, and inspire visitors to think about “past-ness” in a variety of ways. In Alberta, these museums have different approaches to maintaining a costume archive/collection: there are strong ideas about historical accuracy, adjusting, altering, and repurposing outfits that must be functional, worn outside, and can be subject to “up close” scrutiny in ways that theatrical costumes often are not. While recognizing range of priorities in living history museums for their collections, I follow a particular dress from Fort Edmonton Park, in an effort to understand boundaries between collections and archives, while probing the stories that mending, wear, and tear can tell.
Stephen Johnson, “Provenance and Performance: The Archive in the Old Red Trunk”
This talk focusses on a collection of 78rpm records from the early 20th century, for what they can tell us about the words performance, family, home, ownership, and history. The collection remained in one family’s possession, moving from house to house, for over 100 years, against all odds. It is an archive of potential performance, collected by someone for a reason. But was it preserved for a reason, out of sentiment or significance, or was it accidental? With a trick ending….
Additional presentation abstracts and bios forthcoming for Robert Motum, Jimena Ortúzar, and Jessica Watkin.
Biographies
Bio: Jill Carter (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi) is an Associate Professor cross-appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS) and the Transitional Year Programme (TYP) at the University of Toronto. As a researcher and theatre-worker, she works with emerging and established Indigenous artists to support the development of new works and to disseminate artistic objectives, process, and outcomes through community-driven research projects. The research questions she pursues revolve around the mechanics of story creation, the processes of delivery and the manufacture of affect. More recently, she has concentrated upon Indigenous pedagogical models for the rehearsal studio and the lecture hall; the application of Indigenous [insurgent] research methods within performance studies; the politics of land acknowledgements; and land-based dramaturgies/activations/interventions.
Bio: Heather Fitzsimmons Frey is a co-investigator with Gatherings, and an Associate Professor of Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University in Edmonton. Her research focuses on youth engagement in the arts and cultural sector, and especially performance for, by, and with young people. Her youth-centred research methodologies include practice-based creative research, performance-based historiography, conversation and story sharing, and archival research. Her projects with Gatherings are called Young People are the Future, and explore the time-bending complexities of youth engagement in living history museums (as historically dressed interpreters, participants in field trips and summer camps, as volunteers, and as paid staff). Her most recent Gatherings-related publications are in Research in Drama Education
Bio: Stephen Johnson is the Principal Investigator and Co-Director of The Gatherings Project, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Bio: Jacob Pittini (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. He researches audience experiences of participatory theatre and trends of participation throughout Canadian theatre history. Jacob is a research assistant within the Digital Humanities cluster of the Gatherings project.