Location: Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Hybrid Session
Sponsored by St. Francis Xavier University, Department of English
Co-Convenors: Sasha Kovacs and Michelle MacArthur
Participants: Amanda Attrell, Bridget Baldwin, Roberta Barker, Kailin Wright, Keren Zaiontz
Historiographing Hannah: A Critical Scrapbook Dedicated to Hannah Moscovitch
“Scrapbooks are archives in and of their own right, whose flexibility invites anyone to engage in
–Cherish Watton, “Suffrage Scrapbooks and Emotional Histories of Women’s Activism,” pp.
archiving […]”
1029
One of Canada’s most prolific and celebrated contemporary playwrights, Hannah Moscovitch, has seen her work produced domestically and internationally, on stage, screen, and radio, for nearly two decades. Moscovitch’s plays have been distinguished with high honours, including the Governor General’s Award for English-language Drama and Yale University’s Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize. In addition, critics have bestowed her with titles such as “our most competent playwright, and I don’t mean that as faint praise” (Cushman), “a heavy hitter in Canadian theatre” (Murphy), and “one of contemporary theatre’s greatest writers of character” (Barker 424). And yet, scholarship within Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies has not kept up with Moscovitch’s abundant and acclaimed output, leaving scant critical discourse on her work (Barker, Demers, Jones, Zatzman).
As CATR 2023 gathers on Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the L’nu (Mi’kmaq) people, now also known as Halifax and Moscovitch’s adopted hometown, this roundtable invites participants to present short reflections on her body of work to seed further scholarship on one of Canada’s most-produced playwrights. Its overarching goal is to generate contributions to and interest in a forthcoming critical collection on Moscovitch’s plays edited by session co-conveners Sasha Kovacs and Michelle MacArthur.
Participants are invited to respond to some broadly conceived artifact of Moscovitch’s work as inspiration and anchor for their contribution–whether a specific scene, design rendering, song, program, photo, review, etc. These artifacts will be gathered and circulated in the lead-up to the roundtable, laying the foundation for a “critical scrapbook” that will also inform the structure of the edited collection in development. Understanding archiving as a site where “knowledge production begins” (Eicchorn 3) and scrapbooking as a “type of feminist archiving” (Watton 1030) that incorporates affective and creative materials and emphasizes collective knowledge-making, our approach uses the scrapbook as a method of feminist theatre historiography.
Co-Convenor Bios:
Bio: Sasha Kovacs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria. The focus of her research is Canadian theatre historiography. Her previously published research on E. Pauline Johnson was awarded the 2018 Canadian Association for Theatre Research Richard Plant Award for the best-published essay on a Canadian theatre/performance topic. In addition, she is a co-investigator of the national research partnership project Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance (www.gatheringspartnership.com), which aims to deepen methodological approaches to studying and preserving Canadian performance history.
Bio: Michelle MacArthur is an associate professor at the University of Windsor’s School of Dramatic Art. Her SSHRC-funded research on contemporary Canadian theatre has appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research in Canada, and several edited collections.
