Moderator / Animé par: Colleen Renihan
Location: Golden Room, Atlas Hotel

• Kayla McIntyre, “Sapphic Sonics: Vancouver’s Lesbian Auditory Legacy”

Queer ecologies and hauntology can surface through expressions in liminal space. An example, I will elaborate on further is Vancouver Co-Op Radio 102.7 CFRO-FM’s The Lesbian Show (TLS). TLS was a radio station in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, beginning in 1979 that highlighted a plethora of queer feminist-centric performance related works. In this specific episode of TLS, “Poetry”, curated both musical and lyrical performances additionally centring the episode with live slam poetry, giving listeners an experience of sonic intimacy (Pettman 2017). As a group, Vancouver Co-Op Radio 102.7 CFRO-FM’s The Lesbian Show exemplified autonomy, feminism, and showcased the realities of queerness building a strengthen sapphic community. In analyzing the vocal performances in this episode (such as “Rebellious Vagina”), I will conduct an auditory performance analysis to further understand the show’s utopian qualities. Drawing on understandings of ghostly familiarity, The Lesbian Show marks its historic roots in Vancouver’s queer ecology in exhibiting sexual liberation and subverting codified norms all while bringing a sense of escapism past the states of normalcy. In this paper, I argue that in using sonic intimacy and community collaboration, this episode of The Lesbian Show curates sapphic voices that push for bodily neutrality offering uplifting queer representations of female empowerment through their phantasmic traces and the importance of historical legacy.


Works Cited 

City of Vancouver Archives (1980). “Co-op Radio: the lesbian show”, AM1675-S4-F40-: 2018-020.7126, Box: 194-C-10. https://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/co-op-radio-the-lesbian-show .  

City of Vancouver Archives (Nov. 13, 1986), Lesbian Show [poetry], AM1549-S01-F05-: 2009-116.0242-: 2009-116.0242.1. https://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/lesbian-show-poetry.   

Pettman, D. (2017). Sonic Intimacy: Voice, species, technics (or, how to listen to the world). Stanford University Press.

• Grahame Renyk, “Mythologies and Counter-mythologies in Come from Away and Children of God“

This paper is a response to an article I published in 2021, entitled “Welcome to the Rock: Come From Away as Happiness Machine.”  Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s ideas about the circulation of happiness, I proposed that musicals like Come From Away are happy objects capable of infusing other objects – actual or conceptual – with a similarly happy affect.  Many classic American musicals, for instance, not only reflect, but reinforce the myth of American Exceptionalism by attaching their own happy affect to that concept.  Come From Away makes powerful use of happy affect to craft a counter-myth of Canada as ‘exceptionally unexceptional’ in contrast to its southern neighbour.  The Canada it imagines is a welcoming and uncomplicated place where community, simplicity, and tolerance overcome division and paranoia.

In this paper, I explore a contrasting example – Corey Payette’s Children of God – which embraces the musical theatre form to puncture the counter-myth of Canada as a simple and welcoming place.  By leaning into the tropes, sytlizations, and overtly sentimental affect of popular musical theatre, Children of God effectively foregrounds for popular audiences one of Canada’s darkest and most harmful truths, the intergenerational suffering wrought by the Residential School system.  Through potent and skillful use of affect, the ‘happy’ affect so characteristic of popular musicals is repurposed to infuse the story with a spirit of what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance. The horror and suffering endured by those who were victimized is dramatized, but so too is their vitality, spirit, and joy.

Biographies

Kayla McIntyre

Kayla McIntyre (she/they) is a current MA student in Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia. Their academic interests centre around performance studies, gaming studies, and how they relate to theatre. Kayla’s current thesis work investigates RPGs and queer representation and identity exploration from direct player experience.

Grahame Renyk

Grahame Renyk is a Lecturer in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University and a director and performer. His PhD dissertation (at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto) explores how the unique social and cultural characteristics of the Canadian theatre ecology have shaped the development of the popular music theatre in this country.