Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Hybrid Session
Sponsored by the University of Victoria, Department of Theatre
Performance in the Pacific Northwest
This panel arises from Sasha and Heather’s current research project investigating the critical role performance practices played in how newcomers and settlers understood their relationship to land and settlement and the evolving relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century. At this stage, the project is focused on two objectives. First, to explore galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) at two pilot locations (Vancouver Island and the Fraser Valley) to locate, document, and analyze key
pre-twentieth-century performance artifacts, texts, and sources. Second, to develop a methodology for performance historiography responsive to these two sites’ historical and geographic contingencies and could be expanded for application to the greater Pacific Northwest region. Ultimately, the investigation will explicate the role performance played in the colonization of the province and suggest how performance practices also created space for potential resistance from Indigenous peoples and people of colour as processes of settler colonialism proceeded. The project forges connections with museums and archives, enhancing research practices concerning performance history within the region, transforming the
archive/museum’s practices of performance description/curation, equipping researchers with tools in digital humanities, and developing public debate surrounding the important role performance plays in history, culture and society.
The panel will introduce the critical frame for the project, present select examples and analysis of the Performance objects/materials/documents we are working with, and outline our preliminary methodology for analysis, which integrates place-based methodologies and performance historiography. The panel engages with the conference theme geographically and spatially: our project is focused on the role performance played in the reformulation of shores from Indigenous spaces to settler-colonial spaces that could be explored, exchanged, and commodified. It also
addresses the theme disciplinarily: while some of the examples we will explore fit into typical categories of performance/Theatre’s material remains, other examples are of material remains that have not (yet) been considered theatrical and are thus on the metaphoric “shores” or boundaries of performance historiography. Finally, the panel engages with the conference theme methodologically in considering the relationship between performance historiography and GLAM practices.
Heather Davis-Fisch, “Tracing Performances Across Archives”
In this paper, I will introduce the project’s scope in terms of the questions it explores, its objectives, and its significance (as outlined in the first paragraph above). To outline some of the archival/documentary challenges that led to this project, I will outline the case study of Christian pageant plays and passion plays performed for Indigenous audiences in and around Chilliwack, BC, around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
Bio: Heather Davis-Fisch is an Associate Professor of Theatre and the Director of the School of Creative Arts at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Laurel Green, “This Chair is a Mountain (Working Title)”
The journey of a performance artifact on Vancouver Island begins with an Opera Chair in a display case at the Nanaimo Museum. It travels through the history of touring Cantonese Opera performances in the early 1900s. When coal mining settlements in Nanaimo and Cumberland were among the largest rural North American Chinese populations of the early 20th century, bustling Chinatowns featured 400-seat Opera Houses on their main streets. For immigrant coal miners who faced racism, segregation, and harsh working conditions, touring Cantonese Opera productions became the most popular form of entertainment. It constituted the community’s sense of cultural self. They relied on community infrastructure, were a business opportunity and—for some performers—became a pathway to immigration. Compelled by the
story of Cumberland’s Chinatown, now abandoned swampland, author and historian Paul Yee wrote Jade in the Coal, which premiered in 2011. Depicting the lives of immigrant coal miners and those who performed in the Operas, Jade in the Coal blends traditional music and storytelling with contemporary physical Theatre. In Cantonese Opera, chairs are a multifunctional prop, changing coverings as a function of how they areng used in a scene. A warrior can leap over it when it’s a mountain. It can evoke the interior of a royal palace. Looking at this performance artifact in a new context, I will explore how it becomes more than simply a Chair. It was a prop used by Cantonese Opera performers travelling to Vancouver Island from China, observed by immigrant coal miners carving their destinies in a new country. It inspired a new play performed a century later; it is a Chair that survived when so many other artifacts from lost Chinatowns have not. The story of our culture is told through what has been collected,
catalogued, and retained by memory institutions on Vancouver Island, from big museums to small community archives. How are they treating performance materials, and what stories from our region’s performance history have been excluded?
Bio: Laurel Green (she/her) is a nationally recognized dramaturg and creative producer of new work, from the world premiere of over a dozen new Canadian plays to performance events, video games, participatory installations, and secret backyard shows; she creates invitations to
participate and provocations for change. Laurel is a research associate for the SSHRC-funded project Performance in the Pacific Northwest: Pilot Project, developing new methodologies for performance historiography with Dr. Sasha Kovacs at the University of Victoria. Her primary research recovered early Canadian feminist playwright Louise Carter-Broun for Dr. Kym Bird’s anthology Blowing Up the Skirt of History: Recovered and Reanimated Plays by Early Canadian Women Dramatists, 1876-1920 (MCUP, 2020). She was an artistic advisor for the inaugural Dramaturgies of Participation Summit at Queens University, with an article forthcoming in
Canadian Theatre Review. Laurel holds a Master’s degree in Drama from the University of Toronto and is a frequent guest lecturer at York University. She currently lives on the traditional unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples, colonially known as Victoria, BC.
Matthew Tomkinson, “Opera by Telephone”
Matthew will present a case study from his research assistant position on the project.
Bio: Matthew is a writer, composer, and researcher based in Vancouver. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. His doctoral dissertation, “Mad Auralities: Sound and Sense in Contemporary Performance,” examines auditory representations of mental health differences. Working across various disciplines, including text, Performance, installation, sound design, and new media, Matthew’s artistic practice shows a recurring interest in unruly eclecticism and constraint-based compositional approaches. His work explores the limited states of genre, texture, and technology while testing the thresholds of sensory perception.
Sasha Kovacs, “Working with Archivists: A Costume in the Museum of Vancouver”
Prompted by fieldwork undertaken for two related performance history projects (Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance (gatheringspartnership.com) and Performance in the Pacific Northwest: Pilot Project), this paper introduces the museological staging of one costume worn by the E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake, an artist now recognized as a “culture bearer” and “Grandmother” of “Native theatre and performance” (Darby, Mohler, Stanlake, 42). The paper discusses the complex histories of the costume’s bequest before attending to the shifts in descriptive language at the time of the museum’s accession to this important performance heritage artifact. I then critically reflect on the costume’s exhibition history, addressing how this afterlife shapes and informs problematic understanding of this complex figure. Finally, the paper concludes by advocating for and imagining a museological approach to reconnect Johnson’s dress to its costume histories and performative contexts. This research aims not only to better inform future connections with Johnson’s costume that could precipitate new historiographies of this influential Indigenous performer but also to inspire further methodological reflection on the key questions theatre historians must ask when analysing performance artifacts (inclusive of costume) that are often re-staged, and in the process altered, within the museum.
Bio: Sasha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria.
