About Gatherings
Welcome to the Website for Gatherings—Archival and Oral Histories, a project initiated to serve the preservation and study of our performance histories.
This website archives the outputs and projects completed by Gatherings team members and partners during the project’s development from 2018 to 2025, funded in part through a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant.
In March 2024, Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance was rewarded for its work with a 7-year SSHRC Partnership Grant. See more about that new initiative here.
OUR PROJECT HAS THE FOLLOWING GOALS:
We are interested in developing an infrastructure, archive, publication, and online presence that promotes the interests of documenting the history of performance in Canada.
We wish to be known as a service organization, that will complement and (in effect) provide 'the glue' for the array of projects in this area that already exist, and that we hope we can encourage to exist with our encouragement and support.
We want to develop this study in a number of areas that are often neglected, leading to a more complete understanding of how performance pervades and informs the many cultures that share this country, in particular:
Performance in all regions of the country, including rural areas, smaller urban centres, less populated areas. There has been a focus to date on performance in larger urban centres.
Performance of all genres and idioms, including the commercial, such as vaudeville, burlesque, and circus; community-supported performance of all kinds, including festivals, street performances, traditional performances, performances by groups for their own social benefit and for outreach; performances by a full range of Indigenous, immigrant, refugee and settler communities; and more generally, performances that are not a part of the mainstream study of the theatrical touring and production industry.
Our focus is on the development of two kinds of archive, the documentary and the oral history, with the goal to promote archives that are not normally consulted as repositories of information about performance, and interviews with citizens who would not normally be asked about their own performance histories.
We wish to be seen as an organization providing support to those in the broad community--university, local-history, institutional--as individuals pursue the history of performance related to their own lives.
On This Website Through the links provided on the Homepage, you will find descriptions of our projects, information about our Participants, Partners, and Contributors, and Documents that we hope will help visitors with their own research. You will find here a number of resources, including examples of archival documents and oral histories, access to related research projects and pertinent archival repositories, information on consent and permissions as we pursue ethical practice in all our research, as well as examples of artistic practices that further explore the subject of performance history. Partners, Investigators, Independent Scholars and Research Associates continue to add to these first explorations.
Our research project acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a number of academic institutions from across the country, and with the crucial participation of the Canada's Theatre Museum, Dance Collection Danse, and Playwrights Canada Press, all leaders in the preservation and dissemination of our performance heritage.
