Community Submerged Art

Moderator: Barry Freeman

Location: Small Rehearsal Room, Dalhousie Arts Centre 

Hybrid Session

Exploring Canadian ‘Authenticity’ in Early Twentieth-Century Documentary Film and Folk Drama, presented and written by Moira Day

This presentation builds on a 2019 paper that examined W.S. Milne’s reviews in the University of Toronto Quarterly (1935-40) as key to understanding the nexus of Canadian, Irish, and related international currents that contributed to the surprising national success of Minnie Bicknell’s 1936 folk play Relief as an “authentic voice” of the Canadian prairies.

Milne’s reviews implicitly connect the rise of the folk play movement as an alternative to the commercial, professional urban voice of Broadway with the rise of the documentary film, which similarly featured real people speaking and performing everyday functions in their natural environment. Noting the documentary’s impact both in Canada and internationally, Milne credited Robert Flaherty for producing “notable films of regional civilization, such as Nanook of the North, [and] Man of Aran (1939)” and noted the arrival of John Grierson to establish the National Film Board of Canada.

This paper, focusing more on John Grierson, continues to explore (1) the complex intertwining of the extension drama movement in Canada that produced Relief and Grierson’s own ambitions to promote the documentary film as a new national, educational grassroots movement in Canada (2) the NFB’s own early (and problematic) attempts to find and create a more authentic Indigenous voice than Flaherty’s Nanook consistent with Grierson’s own documentary practice and (3) some of the factors in the post-war world that brought both the early documentary and folk play movements to an end after 1945.

Moira Day, University of Saskatchewan

A former book editor and co-editor of Theatre Research in Canada, she has edited two anthologies The Hungry Spirit, by Elsie Park Gowan, an important pioneer in the early western Canadian theatre and The West of All Possible Worlds, an anthology of contemporary Prairie playwrights. She has also contributed chapters on Jamie Portman to Crossing the Boundaries, a major study on English-language Canadian Theatre criticism, and on theatre in translation in to Les Théâtres Professionel du Canada Francophone; her other articles have appeared in Prairie Forum, Theatre Research in Canada, Essays in Theatre, Theatre InSight, Canadian Theatre Review and NeWest Review. She has also spoken at conferences both within Canada and internationally in Ireland and China. She has also lectured on Canadian Drama in the Czech Republic.

Moving Histories: Multimodal Storytelling and Community Impact

Rea Dennis writes, “Stories are imbued with the cultural, social, political, and historical truths and provide a bridge between our sense of self and our sense of other” (186). Within story and performance exists the potential to connect cultures and communities and to speak across differences. These possibilities expand, alter, and shift as different performance mediums come into play, creating new opportunities and limits with each added modality, as each medium holds its own implications and impacts.

From 2018 to 2022, I led a multimodal community storytelling project called Moving Histories. In this project, we worked with community story advocate Jenny Mitchell to foster relationships within three of Guelph’s most underrepresented neighbourhoods to support individuals across generations in telling their own stories of their communities. These storytellers then came together to share their experiences in a 1.5 hr bus tour of their community. These performance events were filmed and edited into 20-minute documentaries that became the foundation of a six-month exhibit at the Guelph Civic Museum. The exhibit interwove these living histories with the museum’s archived documentation of the neighbourhoods. The entwining of live performance, edited video documentation, and curated exhibit created a multitude of framings and retellings of these stories, impacted by time, audience, and location. This paper explores how multimodal approaches to creating and disseminating community-created stories can impact how these stories are claimed, received, and communicated beyond the initial telling. Different modalities of creation wash over the shores of performance and impact the experience of the telling by shifting the contours. Within these exchange shifts exists the possibility of reinforcing problematic power dynamics while dissolving limiting notions about artistic expression and building community.

Kimber Sider, Queen’s University

Bio: Kimber Sider is a multimodal storyteller working predominantly in performance and documentary film. Sider is the Artistic Director of the Guelph Film Festival, holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of Guelph, and is a Lecturer in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.

Local Jazz Musicians Left Out of Local Jazz Festival’: Researching Community Musical Performance Through the Family Archive, presented and written by Sarah Robbins

My maternal grandfather, Vic Hill, was a jazz pianist. Emigrating from Glasgow, Scotland, to Oakville, Ontario, Canada, in 1958, he was a prolific performer in local Southern Ontario bars and public festivals, and his Vic Hill Trio was scheduled to perform in the annual Oakville Jazz Festival the weekend before his death in August 2002.

In my work with Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance, I have begun researching my grandfather’s vocation through archival and oral history methods: from local newspaper articles dating back to 1971, his own clippings and homemade publicity materials, his audio recordings and demo tapes, and through conversations with my 86-year-old grandmother. Initial research uncovered a 1994 open letter by my grandfather in The Oakville Beaver titled “Local jazz musicians left out of local jazz festival,” wherein he voices his disappointment in the dramaturgical choices of that year’s Oakville Jazz Festival, of which he was a regular act. His letter raises questions about the vocational and the professional, the local and the international. A bench dedicated to him located at Lakeshore Rd and Trafalgar Rd (the site of the annual event) points to the intersection of the personal and the public, the temporary and the permanent, of the evidence left behind by the local community artist.

Thinking about my grandfather’s long music career as on the shores of the professional, I consider the role the family archive plays in generating a legacy for the vocational performer.

Dr. Sarah Robbins

Bio: Dr. Sarah Robbins is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, and is currently the Project Manager for the Gatherings Partnership. She studies the relationship between gender and performance in theatrical
institutional culture, and the pedagogy of actor training. Her paper at this year’s CATR conference* about her grandfather’s performance practice is her first attempt at archival research. Her work has been published in alt.theatre magazine and HowlRound Theatre Commons.