Location: Roger Bishop Theatre
Aster Brae and Matt Jones
Mythography is an opera about place, family legacy, and belonging to the landscape currently known as the Rocky Mountains. Written and composed by Aster Brae and dramaturged by Matt Jones in 2024, the opera features dramatic confrontations with family mythologies set against the geological story of the mountains’ formation, the arrival of the railroad, and the ongoing crises of colonial settlement and climate catastrophe. These personal, generational, and geological tellings meld into a mythography of place, lore, and inheritance, told through family photographs, videos of landscape, furniture-sculptures that act as set and prop, and chamber music. All told, this work is a land acknowledgment set to music.
Mythography had a workshop presentation in Calgary in June, 2024, but questions still remain about how the piece’s many elements hold together.
This 90-minute workshop performance will have two parts: a staged reading and a participatory dramaturgy exercise. In advance of the conference, we will circulate a call for up to five interested readers. Readers do not require training, but they must be available for a 45-minute rehearsal the day prior to the workshop.
The workshop will begin with the staged reading of the visual score for spoken voices, accompanied by selected audio-visual excerpts from the larger production (45 minutes). Next participants will be led through a participatory dramaturgy exercise, in which small groups will discuss specific aspects of the work that interest them (e.g., characterization, coloniality, ancestry, geology, staging, score), before returning to the larger group for a general discussion. Observers/audiences are welcome.
Biographies:
Matt Jones is a writer, dramaturg, and educator. His research explores activist performance, archival histories of theatre, and strategies for communication. He is a Co-Investigator on Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance and Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for Academic Communication.