Archiving the Utopian Performative

The Centre Internationaliste Stanley Ryerson

BY Matt Jones

In the summer of 2007, I was taking a course at the Atwater Library in Montréal. The small community library is housed in a restored 1920s Heritage building that was once home to the Mechanics Institute of Montreal: an organization dedicated to providing after-work education for the city’s working class. As I wandered through the halls looking for my classroom, I came across a door covered with posters advertising demonstrations, activist campaigns, and political talks. Curious, I decided to try the door. 

I walked into what looked like a mid-century living room with a small library attached to it. To my left was a well-worn armchair and in front of me was an aging wooden bookcase stacked with the complete works of Marx and Engels. The room, it turned out, was now home to the personal library of the historian Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson. After his death in 1998, Ryerson’s vast book collection had been moved from his home in the McGill Ghetto, and a research centre, Le Centre Internationaliste SB Ryerson/Fondation Aubin, had been founded in his name. During his life, Ryerson had used his living room library as a space for organizing, hosting reading groups and salons for activists and workers, so the former Mechanics Institute would be a fitting resting place for the collection. Since my visit, though, it has moved twice and is now lodged at the Comité Social Centre-Sud in Montréal’s Gay Village. This location is no less suitable. Founded in the 1970s, the community centre is dedicated to three objectives: “Dépanner, éduquer et lutter,” which we might translate as “mutual aid, education, and struggle.” In the early 2000s, when I encountered the space, its main hall had become a hub for anarchist and anti-war organizing. 

Born in Toronto in 1911, Stanley Ryerson spent most of his adult life in Montréal, where he lived through—and wrote about—some of Québec’s most turbulent political history. His career spans from the 1930s, when he returned to Canada radicalized after completing his doctorate at the Sorbonne, to the late 1970s, when he published his final books. As his name suggests, his family was highly connected to Canada’s anglophone elite – his second middle name is Egerton, in honour of his ancestor, the notorious architect of Canada’s residential school system. However, Ryerson’s work aimed to expose the Canadian colonial project as a violent and anti-democratic system. While some aspects of his methodology may seem crudely deterministic today, in many respects he was ahead of his time. He was one of few anglophone intellectuals of his time to see value in the struggles of francophones and his 1960 work, The Founding of Canada, documents Indigenous resistance to English and French intrusion, the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples, and the repression of the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. A lifelong Marxist, Ryerson held leadership positions in the Canadian Communist Party, but often found himself in conflict with the Party’s dogmatic pro-Soviet positions (he eventually abandoned the party in 1971). His academic career was likewise fractious. He lost his teaching position at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in 1937 after it was discovered that he was publishing Communist Party pamphlets under a pseudonym. He didn’t return to academia until 35 years later, when he took a position at the Université du Québec à Montréal.  

Ryerson’s book collection is not merely a repository of his professional interests. It offers an archive of ideas that circulated through radical communities in Québec over the forty-year period of Ryerson’s active life. Wandering through the stacks, I stumbled across all manner of defunct periodicals published in Toronto and Montreal: an issue of the IWW's (still running) newspaper The Industrial Worker from 1966, copies of Parti pris, the journal of the Quiet Revolution, La Barre du jour, Nicole Brossard’s literary journal from 1965, which aimed to revolutionize Quebec literature. Around another corner, I came across pamphlets on Québec feminism, chapbooks of radical poetry, collections of songs sung at street protests.  

As I moved through the stacks, I found myself confronted with a feeling similar to what Jill Dolan calls “the utopian performative” (456). Dolan is speaking of performances that shake us out of our everyday headspace, and that stimulate a feeling that the world might, after all, be changed. She describes this utopia as a “boundless ‘no-place’ where the social scourges that currently plague us […] might be ameliorated, cured, redressed, solved, never to haunt us again” (456-7). What hits me, though, as I look over these documents is not exactly this feeling, but rather nostalgia for such a feeling. In these old pamphlets, there is a palpable utopian energy that swells up from the pages. The research centre presents an archive of that utopian spirit as it existed in the particular times and places that Ryerson lived through. It’s not that the spirit no longer exists, but today it manifests in different ways and expresses itself in different language.  

Poster for Poèmes et chansons de la resistance (Poems and Songs of the Resistance), 1968. Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec

One item that stands out is a pamphlet called Spectacle : Poèmes et chansons de la résistance (Spectacle: Poems and Songs of the Resistance), which documents an evening of political poetry and music in 1968 in support of FLQ prisoners. The event, which would be repeated in 1971 and 1973, featured performances by many of the leading figures in Quebec arts at the time, including the nationalist poet Gaston Miron, the singer Gilles Vigneault, and the autonomist artist and poet Claude Gauvreau. But the event is best remembered as the moment when Michèle Lalonde first performed Speak White, perhaps the most famous protest poem in Quebec’s history. Lalonde’s poem is a bitter attack on Anglophone colonialism. Like many other Quebec radicals of her time, Lalonde tries to align the francophone struggle for self-determination in Quebec with anticolonial movements in the global south. She does this by drawing a parallel between the politics of whiteness in colonial states and anglophone linguistic imperialism in francophone Quebec. In caustic prose, Lalonde describes the imposition of English as a civilizing colonial mission. In the poem, English appears, by turns, as the language of business and the managerial class, the language of the Vietnam War, and the elevated language of Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, whose words don’t quite speak to the “uncultured and stammering” Quebecois people, who prefer the humiliated “chagrin” of Quebec’s poet laureate Émile Nelligan. The poem articulates a similar frustration with cultural imperialism to the Malawian poet Félix Mnthali’s 1961 poem, “The Stranglehold of English Lit.” Mnthali writes: “Your elegance of deceit,/Jane Austen,/ lulled the sons and daughters/ of the dispossessed/ into a calf-love/ with irony and satire/ around imaginary people” (172).  

Michèle Lalonde performs during the Nuit de la poésie on March 27, 1970, at the Gesü theatre in  Montreal. Photo by Daniel Kieffer. © 1970 National Film Board of Canada. 

Lalonde’s poem has aged better than some other attempts to describe Quebec’s situation using the language of anti-colonialism (notably Pierre Vallières’ much more problematic White N* of the Americas). As Philip S. S. Howard has recently argued (in reference to Vallières), these arguments “shored up the legitimacy of the nationalist struggle of Quebec’s white Francophone majority by identifying it closely with African American liberation movements, while supplanting actual Black people in Quebec and erasing their struggles against antiblackness” (132). Lalonde is less crude that Vallières, yet she too conscripts the anticolonial struggles of the global south as support for her cause in Quebec without considering how the very whiteness of the movement in Quebec makes it so different from the deeply racialized struggles of Black Americans or African and Asian colonial situations. The fault lines in that analysis continue to mark Quebec nationalist politics today.  

Newspaper article announcing the show Poèmes et chansons de la resistance (Poems and Songs of the Resistance). Le Devoir, May 21, 1968. 

A couple of years ago, I showed my students at the University of Toronto Scarborough a video of Lalonde’s performance of the poem at another evening of poetry in 1970 called La Nuit de la poésie and was surprised to find they were quite moved by it. Much of the power of the work lies in Lalonde’s delivery: she is forceful, ironic, and outraged. She never breaks a smile. She looks earnestly into the dark auditorium and speaks a language of defiance. Watching the video gives me goosebumps. I find myself almost carried away by the utopian spirit of the performance. It seems almost unimaginable today that a night of poetry could be a historic event. I admire Lalonde’s command of tone and language, the way she speaks an eloquent franglais that produces sentences like: “mais quand vous really speak white/ quand vous get down to brass tacks.” I love the untranslatability of her description of English “avec ses mots lacrymogènes/ avec ses mots matraques.” She’s describing English as a language of tear gas and nightsticks, but since English doesn’t have an adjective form for those words, the phrase can’t quite sit comfortably in English. It resists. 

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The Centre Internationaliste SB Ryerson/Fondation Aubin is located at 1710 Beaudry Street in Montreal and maintains an active roster of study groups, film nights, and public talks. The entire catalogue of 8000 works in the collection is searchable on the Centre’s website: centreinternationalisterfa.org/  

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Works Cited 

Dolan, Jill. “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative’. Theatre Journal, vol. 53, no. 3, 2001, pp. 455-479.  

Howard, Philip S. S. “Getting Under the Skin: Antiblackness, Proximity, and Resistance in the SLĀV Affair.” Theatre Research in Canada, vol. 41, no. 1, 2020, pp. 126-148. 

Lalonde, Michèle. “Speak White.” [1968] Dormira Jamais n.d. http://dormirajamais.org/speak-white/. 

Mnthali, Felix. "The Stranglehold of English Lit." [1961] The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry. Fourth Ed. Edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier Translated by Gerald Moore. Penguin, 2007. 

Ryerson, Stanley B. The Founding of Canada: Beginnings to 1815. Progress Books, 1960. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/foundingofcanada0000ryer  

Tasting Through Time: Exploring Food Experiences at Living History Museums in Alberta

By Madison Francoeur

In the summer of 2023, as a part of my work as a research assistant with Young People are the Future, I was tasked with site visits to living history museums and cultural sites across Alberta. As a lover of museums, this was the ideal way to spend my summer. I had had previous experiences with living history museum, as my “day job” was as an education interpreter at Fort Edmonton Park, Edmonton’s own living history museum. I was beyond excited to explore living history across multiple Albertan sites and learn more about this weird and wonderful world.

In these journeys, I developed a bit of an obsession: Food. I began to notice the role that food played in these settings. Food becomes a catalyst for action. History comes alive with smells, tastes, and textures. Food isn’t just food in living history museums. It becomes a vessel for storytelling and performance that acts to enhance the experience of visitors, especially for youth. I collected many observations about the way that food enhances the way that living history is experienced through the addition of multisensory elements that encourage collaboration and participation. 

What is a Living History Museum?

Before diving into my adventures and observations, it is important to establish what a living history museum is. Living history museums are institutions that recreate historical settings with historical buildings that are brought to life with interpretive staff, who are typically in historical dress, to simulate different time periods. Interpretive staff, better known as interpreters, communicate with guests about what is in the museum’s exhibits and explain the artifacts and the buildings. 

Interpreters lead different activities and programs related to the exhibits of the museum that help to enrich the overall atmosphere of the space. These programs can vary in their content, structures, and audiences, from highly scheduled field trips for school groups to much more fluid drop-in style programs for the general public. A popular theme for this programming is food. Interpreters are often seen working through the various actions that surround food: Gardening, fire starting, cooking, baking, eating, and more. The performance of these actions draws in guests to observe, ask questions, and even try their hand under the guidance of an interpreter. 

Interpreters take visitors on a garden tour at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village to highlight the variety of historically relevant produce that is grown and used onsite (photo from Larysa Hayduk)

Preparing Pierogi at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village

From butter to bannock, I have made my fair share of food at living history museums. In my own role as an education interpreter, that was just a part of the job. I helped children read their recipes and made sure that everything was measured and mixed correctly. I told stories about how people used to grow their own gardens and shop at general stores. It all becomes a part of the motions of leading a program, and it was easy to forget how impactful the experience of preparing food can be. It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to be the student learning that I was reminded of the feelings that are connected to making food in these historic spaces.

During a visit to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, I had the opportunity to learn how to make pierogi with one of the interpreters. She guided me through the entire process: rolling, filling, and pinching shut. She let me know when I added too much flour to my dough, how much filling was just the right amount, and the right way to pinch the pierogi shut. With her years of experience, she didn’t have to think about the right way to do things - she just did it. Working alongside her, I was guided not just by her knowledge but also by the knowledge that her family shared with her, which stretches back so many generations. For her, this was not just food but a piece of her history. 

Through this experience, I was reminded of the significance of how the act of preparing food provides a way, especially for young people, to connect with people of the past. For one, it allows young people to not only observe performance in living history museums, but also to participate in the performance themselves. As well, being able to see the way that people used to prepare their food serves to help bring their stories to life today. There is a physical manifestation of one of the most basic parts of the lives of people of the past, one that young people of today can see reflected directly in their own lives and foods that are prepared in their own homes. It invites us to think about the labour and love that goes into the foods we eat, especially those with close cultural and community ties. 

An interpreter demonstrates the correct way to roll, fill, and close pierogi at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village (photos from Larysa Hayduk)

The completed pierogi! (Photo from Larysa Hayduk)

New Tastes at Fort Edmonton Park

Food tastes different at a living history museum. It is not necessarily that food tastes better, but eating something that is part of a larger story and that has a history to tell makes the food taste something more than what it is.

For example, the chokecherries that grow abundantly in Fort Edmonton Park. In a normal setting, the unique berries tend not to play well with young people. They can be bitter and sour, with a large seed in the middle. There are way sweeter, easier-to-eat berries. But at Fort Edmonton Park, chokecherries become the star of their own performance. With the guidance of an interpreter, young people can learn about how to identify the plant and what the fruit will look like when it is ripe and ready to be picked. They can learn about the significance of chokecherries to Indigenous people as a nutritious food source full of vitamins. Finally, there may be the opportunity to taste the berries. Suddenly, the berries aren’t just bitter berries; they have a story and a history. 

It becomes less about the flavour of the food today and more about the fact that this is a flavour with history. That butter on a cracker is the same butter that the child who lived in this house 150 years ago ate. That hard candy is the same candy that could have been found at an actual 1920s midway. Those chokecherries are the same berries that Indigenous people have picked, eaten, and dried since time immemorial. The taste of these foods becomes a connection to a child in the past, who tasted the same flavours that are being experienced by a young person today. 

Creating Atmosphere at Heritage Park

While there are these intimate moments of the creation of food in living history museums, food also contributes to the overall ambiance at Heritage Park. Walking through the Town Centre, you are met with the delicious smell of freshly baked bread. In the Settlement area, you can smell coffee brewing on the smokey wood stove. While participation in the activities that create these smells is very specific and often limited for many reasons, the very presence of the smells allows you to sink deeper into the idea of the past. During my visit to Heritage Park, these smells enhanced the overall atmosphere of the space, adding a new dimension to the livelihood of the museum. 

It wasn’t only smells that Heritage Park provided but also opportunities for tasting that complimented many of the programs and demonstrations across the site. After seeing a demonstration of historical ice cream making, you can head over to an ice cream shop and get a cone for yourself. A warm cinnamon roll from Alberta Bakery is perfect after learning about wood stove baking. While it can be a bit commercial at times, there are nevertheless opportunities to be had for tasting the past as it connects to the rest of the programming offered by the museum. 

Through these various activities, Heritage Park is creating a multisensory experience on all levels, which can be difficult to achieve. When engaging the senses with the past, seeing and hearing tend to come easily. Even touch can be relativity easy to engage with. It is smell and taste that are harder to incorporate, especially in a more traditional museum setting. Living history provides a unique opportunity to engage with all five senses. 

Sharing Food to Share the Past

Sharing the food itself is a wonderfully special experience, but so is sharing the knowledge and the story that goes along with the food. In the previous examples, it is the element of sharing that brings the foods to life. The stories that are attached to foods allow young people to form deeper connections with the foods themselves and the histories that are associated with them. 

Sharing food also allows young people to build connections with their own lives and the past. Young people can draw similarities between the foods that they eat today and the foods of the past. They can see the same ingredients and methods being used in their own homes. In some cases, young people are even able to connect the stories of different foods to the stories of foods that are important to their lives. 

Through the variety of food experiences at living history museums, young people are invited to dive deeper into history and strengthen their connections to the past. It allows connections to be built between the foods of now and the past, providing a vehicle for developing questions about the relationship that we have with time and history. Food creates opportunities for exploring history through a level of participation that is truly unique to living history museums. 

The Performance Calendar and the Database

The Performance Calendar and the Database

By Stephen Johnson

The Performance Calendar is a standard research tool for the historian, in which the researcher assembles a chronological list of the performances that took place, focussing on a particular location, or genre, or performer, or all of these at once.  This is one way of wrestling with the materials we collect about the historical events we want to understand better.  The assembling of such a 'Calendar' helps us to organize the archival material we have found, and it allows us to grasp, in part, the changes in the character of these events over time. 

            Most historians have a few of these 'performance calendars' in their archives.  For those of us old enough, they are made up of stacks (and stacks...and stacks...) of file cards, stored in purpose-made boxes...or shoeboxes.  More recently, they are stored one of the many generations of database software, or simply in word-processing programs. 

            Some studies of performance are, in effect, prose performance calendars, organized chronologically and providing all the material information necessary to draw that timeline.  Some studies only make passing reference to this tool, at which point it becomes an appendix, or an endnote, or is erased forever from the published work, though it is one of its foundations. 

            Recently I was given two shoeboxes, found in a corner of a storage room at my university.  In it were hundreds of cards, each with an individual reference to a performance in Southern Ontario during the 19th Century.  As it turned out, this was the raw material for a Calendar published as part of the book Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800-1914, compiled by Richard Plant.  It is now stored with Canada's Theatre Museum, and it will be included the database listed below. 

            The Database of performances has more or less replaced the hand-compiled calendar, for the simple reason that many searches can be carried out in a moment, with the same material.  The power of these databases has changed considerably over the decades, something I know because I have been using them for decades.  Saying this may seem archaic, because anyone reading this can create a database without difficulty.  But at one point, I assure you, it was difficult--and it was new. 

            I began twenty years ago to compile databases on two subjects, one focussing on the development of early blackface minstrelsy in Britain, and the other on the movements of itinerant 'popular' performers in Southern Ontario (known at one time as 'Canada West').  The results of these research projects can be seen in any of the publications they have generated; but as for the information itself, it would remain inaccessible to other researchers, on paper and in a box, if it wasn't for the databases you can link to below. 

            These databases are part of a larger project using the same essential online tools, now housed at the University of Toronto Mississauga.  That project is called On the Road Again (OTRA), and includes databases focussing on the touring professionals of late-medieval England, a part of the Records of Early English Drama, as well as my own.  See the links below for more information:

The Fringes of Show Business in Canada West traces the history of Western-European itinerant performance throughout Southern Ontario from the early colonial settlement of the area prior to 1867, through to 1920.  You can find out about the history of this database at

https://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/otra/canadawest/about

The database itself is available at https://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/otra/canadawest/

            From the Website:  "Searching period newspapers, journals, and archives, this database will record and make accessible information on a wide range of events, using a broad definition of the word performance--amateur and professional, resident and itinerant, narrative and variety, street performance and Grand Opera, church recitals and burlesque. 

            And about the Performance Calendar as a Research Tool:  "Researchers in any area of theatre history typically create, at an early stage of their project, a performance calendar (or itinerary) that structures and relates the 'brute events' of study--the performances. Only then can the historian of performance proceed to locate potential repositories of extant archival materials--through this 'mapping' of a performer's movements--and begin the process of accumulating documentary evidence, and writing history. The performance calendar is all the more important for popular performance, because the performances were unsettled, itinerant, ephemeral."

There are many other such Performance Calendars, though few that relate to performance in these lands referred to as 'Canada,' and most of them are inaccessible, private.  We hope, as a part of the Gatherings Project, to find ways to provide greater access to this 'raw data' in ways that will help to diversify the subject of performance. 

For reference: 

The Juba Project--Early Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 1842-1852 is a legacy project (that is, it is no longer active) that traces the growth and dissemination of the racist practice of blackface minstrelsy during the earliest years of the professional 'minstrel show,' particularly in the United Kingdom.  It exploded in its popularity during these years, forged most of the characteristics we associate with that form, and became one of the pre-eminent entertainment 'businesses' in the English speaking world for decades afterward.  Its effect was extreme, and its influence remains.  See: https://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/otra/minstrels/about

Audience Experiences and Archiving

By Kelsey Jacobson

In February and March 2021, Kelsey Jacobson interviewed eight “avid audience members” as part of the Gatherings project: people who identified as theatre aficionados due to their consistent attendance at various theatre productions over the past several years. Sandy Moser, for instance, was nearing 1000 shows attended before COVID-19 hit, while Vera Kadar had attended over 1300. Perhaps more impressively, both had records tracking their attendance at all of these shows.

Each of the eight interviewees offered passionate descriptions of their theatregoing past, describing their personal memories and the individual forms of archiving they use. In conversation, they walked Kelsey through their past experiences with rich detail, thought, and reflection. Taking their interviews together, themes emerge about theatrical valuation, the audience experience, and the ways in which micro acts of preservation offer insight into both individual and collective meaning-making processes.

Research Assistant Chanel Sheridan, who assisted in the analysis of the data, put together this audio project to share the voices of the Gatherings interviewees: Don Kendal, Francie Kendal, Kit Moore, Barbara Moore, Vera Kadar, Shirley Davis, and Janis La Couvée.

Photos from left to right: Robin Hood by the Lakeside Players in Kingston, ON August 2023. Audience photo of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre in London, UK June 19 2019. Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the Dan School of Drama and Music in Kingston, ON in March 2023.

Audiences as Archivists

Written by Kelsey Jacobson

Where is the audience in theatre and performance archives? What is their role in archival practice? My research as related to the Gatherings project is concerned with the ways in which audiences and spectators create and maintain their memories of the productions they attend, what those collections--those archives--reveal about their relationship with performance, and the extent to which audience members are included or excluded in current and future archives. Audiences are a fundamental part of the theatrical or performance event, but their presence can be difficult to find in archival materials that may privilege actors or performers, production details, and so-called “official” accounts.

Kelsey Jacobson’s ‘unofficial’ archive of audience experiences: a bulletin board in her room with ticket stubs, programs, and other ephemera pinned to it. Inevitably, the most recent experiences are layered on top.

Rather than seeking to find the audience in pre-existing archives, then, I decided to speak to audiences themselves to understand how best the audience may be invited into the archive as creators, spectators, historical witnesses, and curators. How might the necessary multiplicity of perspectives of audience members and inclusion of broader communities productively reshape the hierarchies and interrogate the accessibility of archives? If audiences themselves are amateur archivists--taking photos, preserving tickets and playbills, creating Tweets or posts about the show and their response--to what archive do these materials belong? What might non-expert audience methods of archiving reveal?

Image of Barbara Moore’s notebook documenting her record of plays, organized alphabetically per page.

From February to July 2020, I interviewed eight audience members – Kit Moore, Barbara Moore, Don Kendal, Francie Kendal, Shirley Davis, Sandy Moser, Janis La Couvée, and Vera Kadar - who were living variously across the lands we now call Canada. I sought these people out through leveraging my personal networks: the only requirement for participation was that I was interested in speaking with people who had seen a lot of theatre but were themselves not professionally involved in theatre-making. In my interviews, I began by asking each interviewee to describe some of their most poignant theatre memories. Their theatre-going histories were deeply impressive: some had seen upwards of 1000 plays, some had been dedicated subscribers of particular theatre companies for decades, some had sat on numerous award committees and juries, and one had been such a fan of a specific production of Angels in America that they volunteered to usher it twenty-one times out of the production’s entire 105-show run. I became fascinated with the question of how these dedicated audience members were tracking and archiving their own experiences. How had they selected what to describe to me? Did they keep records of their theatre-going? How do audiences curate their own archives and what insight might such processes offer to other performance archivists, historians, and theatre scholars?

Don Kendal’s record of his volunteer ushering housed on an Excel spreadsheet, organized by date with record of the date, time, company, and play.

Each of the audience members I interviewed had impressive personal theatre archives, some of which are pictured here. For some, these “archives” were entirely without documentation, but for many they resembled material archival practice: Janis La Couvée created a blog that eventually housed over 800 reviews of performances, Don Kendal maintains an Excel spreadsheet detailing his volunteer ushering, Vera Kadar has a significant collection of playbills, Barbara Moore keeps all her ticket stubs as well as a notebook with brief entries, Shirley Davis has a wall of photos in her home based on productions and actors she has supported, Francie Kendal keeps programs (organized initially by theatre company but in subsequent re-cataloguing by year and alphabetical order), and Sandy Moser has an ongoing computer document that stores brief details of each of the 973 shows she has attended over the past nine years.

Janis La Couvée’s popular blog houses hundreds of reviews of performances from fringe and community events to professional productions.

Each of these personal archives reveals something of the audience member: their preferences, their values, and their interests. As Kit Moore described, he is drawn to shows that “capture my attention, and I just don’t think of anything else. It’s like meditation, it’s just all you’re thinking about is this play and you sometimes feel that you’re a part of the play: those are the ones I remember.” Francie Kendal described being drawn to shows that were intimate and felt “close.” Barbara Moore described an admiration for performances that feature strong, subtle performances. Shirley Davis offered her love of musicals and what she described as entertaining theatre. None of their personal recollections are therefore what we might consider to be “complete” or “neutral.” Archives are, after all, always limited. They tend to hold material that is removed from the direct effect of the event in a way that mirrors human memory: fragmented and subjective.1 What the limited nature of these audience interviews and audience archives might do, then, is help to maintain an awareness of the limitations and framing of archives in general. This is perhaps both a more challenging, but simultaneously more ethical approach to archiving: it performs the limitations of the project of understanding performance through archival fragments and trying to understand an ephemeral, live, emotive object through its remains. 

Why include the audience in archival practice? It feels impractical to capture the response of every audience member (and indeed selectivity is a key component of research and archiving) and yet the preservation of non-expert, non-insider reports may help illuminate the complexity of live performance. Audiences are invariably composed of a multitude of individuals who may respond differently, or remember differently. This doesn’t challenge accuracy so much as offer insight into how audiences come to understand what they view and the many possible ‘methods’ of archival practice.

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footnotes

Auslander, Philip. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. U of Michigan P, 2006. 96-7.

Finding Connections in Isolation: The Process of Connecting Twenty-First Century Girls with Early Twentieth Century Girl Guides

June 21, 2021 

Written by Jenna Kerekes

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, I dived deep into physical culture drills and past Girl Guide performances using the 1911 Strathcona Trust Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Schools to find out what kind of similarities exist between present-day girls and early 20th century Girl Guides. I discovered these similarities through embodying movement vocabulary and physical culture drills performed by early 20th century Albertan Girl Guides and by reflecting on my own doubts, emotions, and learnings as well as those of other Albertan girls to determine how early 20th century Girl Guides compared to Albertan girls today. Interpreting movement vocabulary, creating drills, teaching other Albertan girls (aged 7 – 22), and keeping notes of all my discoveries allowed me to further understand and share my process. Learning about the difficulty, the ambiguity, and the importance of teamwork made me realize that I may not be all that different from early 20th century Girl Guides.

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“I’ve just started reading the [Syllabus]…” (Fieldnotes, May 9, 2020). 

May 9, 2020. The COVID-19 Pandemic is hitting Albertans’ head on and my Research Supervisor, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, and I have just started our research into early twentieth century Girl Guides and physical culture drills. 

My process revolved around the 1911 Strathcona Trust Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Schools (which I will refer to as the Syllabus). At the beginning of my research, Heather gave me an electronic copy of the Syllabus as a resource and guide to help me learn about physical culture and familiarize myself with the language past Girl Guides likely encountered while teaching and learning drills. The Strathcona Trust was introduced in 1909 as a way to create uniformity in physical education in public schools across Canada and was used to encourage children and teens to participate in physical and military training (Strathcona Trust 184). The Syllabus itself was a textbook used by Canadian schools to teach children physical culture. Physical Culture (sometimes called gymnastics) was a form of physical training in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. 1 The Syllabus featured movement vocabulary that encouraged children to test their strength and perform routines in unison in march time (two-four), or waltz time (three-four). However, schools were not the only ones to utilize the Syllabus. Past Girl 

Guides also used it. Our research focused on Girl Guides2 between the years of 1913–1918 who also used the Syllabus – not solely for exercise, but as a form of performance and team building via gymnastic drills and playlets (Fitzsimmons Frey 2020).3 

[click on an image to enlarge]

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Early twentieth century Girl Guides performing physical culture drills taken from the Girl Guides of Canada Album, 1912–34, Girl Guides of Canada Archive (Scrapbook 1912-1961).

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Images from the Syllabus and stills of workshop participants (Strathcona Trust 39, 81, 111).

At the beginning of my research process, Heather and I set out to answer the question of what can be learned about physical culture and how it can be used to find temporal links between past and present girls. However, with the onslaught of the COVID-19 Pandemic, we became interested in how this new layer of isolation can impact relationships and perhaps help girls find more similarities between themselves and past Girl Guides. 

I broke my process into two phases. The first phase consisted of using the Syllabus to learn the movement vocabulary and create my own drill. The second phase involved twenty-three girls from Edmonton and the surrounding area in eight Zoom-led workshops where they learned about physical culture, virtually collaborated to create their own gymnastics drill, and performed it on Zoom. At the end of the workshop, all participants had the chance to share their thoughts in workshop debriefings and participant surveys. 

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Workshop participant demonstrating a pose from the Syllabus (Strathcona Trust 132)

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(Strathcona Trust 132)

My first task was to start familiarizing myself with what a physical culture drill was and to gain a better understanding of the movements and commands. I was given the Syllabus4 as my only resource and was encouraged not to do any external research into how movements were to be done, to imitate the probable isolation of resources past Girl Guides likely faced while teaching themselves and others the drills. 

This isolation from external resources made the task of creating a drill very difficult for me as I often learn best when I have the freedom to find examples and ask questions. Not having that luxury forced me to read the Syllabus carefully and rely solely on my own interpretation. Below is a quote from my early fieldnotes expressing some of the confusion I was experiencing with the language in the Syllabus. 

“I still find the language so different from the terms we use today. Like ’ankle stretched‘ (page 32), what does that even mean? How do you stretch your ankle? Do they mean to push the ankle out or let the ankle lead as you come back to feet open?” (Fieldnotes, May 10, 2020) 

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Page thirty-two of the Syllabus describing the foot placing outward movement (Strathcona Trust 32).

Did past Girl Guides learning these drills have similar doubts about the vocabulary? Did they have people to turn to for help? Were they unsure if their interpretations were correct too? 

“[The Syllabus] is all so dated and at times it is hard to understand what [it] means when it says “trunk” or “stretch,” but from rereading some passages and following the [Syllabus] step by step, I am starting to be able to do the moves quite well” (Fieldnotes, May 11, 2020). 

Once I felt I had a better understanding of the movements, I started putting together my own drill and I found myself considering something early twentieth century Girl Guides would never have had to consider: will these movements fit on a computer screen? As mentioned earlier, these workshops were being held on Zoom, meaning whatever drill I ended up putting together had to be one that could be easily understood and performed through a computer. Marches? No, I cannot have participants march right off the screen. Exercises that require participants to walk side by side? No, we cannot even be in the same room let alone side by side. Luckily, there were a lot of movements to choose from and creating a drill that was easy for me to teach and participants to understand virtually was not too hard. 

My final drill.

Once my drill was complete, Heather and I had a conversation about how my drill was very physical and perhaps less performative compared to some of the drills done by girls in the early twentieth century. We discussed how my drill was more comparable to a gym warmup rather than the rhythmic and more theatrical performances done by past Girl Guides. We speculated on whether past girls would have faced a similar experience. Did past girls in different communities interpret movements and rhythm differently? Was there really a right way of doing the drills? This idea was further investigated in the workshops. 

The first phase of Zoom workshops was with girls ages 12 – 19. In these workshops, I was teaching the girls the drill I had already developed, and I encouraged discussion and reflection during the workshop debriefing at the end. 

“One of the struggles I had while teaching this drill online was determining whether the participants were off time, or their computer was just lagging … Both of the participants had their screens angled so I could not see their feet … This made it difficult … because I ... had no way of knowing if they were doing [the movement] correctly.” (Fieldnotes, May 29, 2020). 

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Stills from two of the Zoom-led workshops.

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Stills from two of the Zoom-led workshops.

The second phase of workshops was with girls ages 7 – 22 where I taught them all the movement vocabulary in the Syllabus and encouraged them to interpret the movements themselves and create a drill. This is where the earlier idea of differing interpretations and different understandings of rhythm shined through. 

Drill created and submitted by research participants.

I also found that girls who had the freedom to work together and ask questions were able to learn the movement vocabulary more quickly than I could when I was working alone. 

“I feel it may be a lot easier to make a drill in a group because one group member can bounce ideas off the others and try to come to a consensus on how the move should look.” (Fieldnotes, June 5, 2020). 

This realization made me wonder if past Girl Guides often worked together to create their physical culture drills or if they too, had to figure out the movement vocabulary on their own like I did. Did a past girl choreograph and lead a drill based on plans she made at home or did all the girls work collaboratively to create the drill on the spot? 

This research has left me with many unanswered questions but has also taught me many things about myself and my relationship to past Girl Guides. Being isolated due to COVID-19 and limited to only the Syllabus at the beginning of my process taught me about resiliency and made me realize that past Girl Guides, living in isolated and rural areas and using the same text, may have faced similar struggles and concerns. Being able to teach my drill and the movement vocabulary to other girls helped me see the importance of collaboration, even during times of distance and isolation, and I like to think that collaboration and teamwork helped past Girl Guides just as much as it helped the present participants. 

“These two worlds, separated by so many years, can still find harmony together!” (Fieldnotes, May 20, 2020). 

For more information about this research, check out Fitzsimmons Frey, H. and J. Kerekes. “Physical Culture Drills and Alberta Girls Stepping Together Across Time,” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14 (3), December 2021.

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FOOTNOTES

1. For information about women and physical culture training in Canada, see Hall, Ann. M. 2016. The Girl and the Game: A History of Women’s Sport in Canada (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

2. Girl Guides were established in Canada in 1910 and performed for family and friends through the first World War. In Alberta, from 1913 to 1918, Guide units were launched in Banff, Calgary, Cochrane, Coronation, Olds, Red Deer, Wainwright, and possibly Edmonton (Cormack 1968). In 2021, Canadian Girl Guides range in age from 5 to 17. Sparks are aged 5 to 6, Brownies, 7 to 8, Guides, 9 to 12, Pathfinders, 12 to 14, and Rangers 15 to17.

3. Never be Dull by Heather Fitzsimmons Frey provides some context into how physical culture was used by early twentieth century Girl Guides (Fitzsimmons Frey 2020).

4. Here is the link to the 1911 Strathcona Trust Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Schools https://archive.org/details/syllabusof11west00stra/page/n13/mode/2up

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to say a huge thank you to Heather Fitzsimmons Frey for all of her support and guidance throughout this project. Thank you, Heather!

REFERENCES

Cormack, Barbara Villy. 1968. Landmarks: A History of the Girl Guides of Alberta. Edmonton: Alberta Council, Girl Guides of Canada. 

Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather. 2020. Never be Dull Girl Guides of Canada Performing Physical Culture and Gymnastics Drills in 1910-21. Performance Research: A Journal of Performing Arts, 25 (1), 25-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1738191 

Scrapbook. 1912–1961. Girl Guides of Canada National Archives, Toronto, Ontario. 

Strathcona Trust. 1911. Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Schools. Toronto: The Copp, Clark Company Ltd. https://archive.org/details/syllabusof11west00stra/page/n13/mode/2up

Show Business in Canada West

Welcome to the Fringes of Show Business in Canada West.

This project begins the process of creating a comprehensive on-line database of popular performance culture in Canada West (now 'southern Ontario') from its formative years prior to Confederation until just after World War One. Searching period newspapers, journals, and archives, it will record and make accessible information on a wide range of events, using a broad definition of the word performance--amateur and professional, resident and itinerant, narrative and variety, street performance and Grand Opera, church recitals and burlesque. 

Researchers in any area of theatre history typically create, at an early stage of their project, a performance calendar (or itinerary) that structures and relates the 'brute events' of study--the performances. Only then can the historian of performance proceed to locate potential repositories of extant archival materials--through this 'mapping' of a performer's movements--and begin the process of accumulating documentary evidence, and writing history. The performance calendar is all the more important for popular performance, because the performances were unsettled, itinerant, ephemeral.

The development of powerful database software, and the ease with which the web can offer access, has begun to alter in a radical way the study of performance history and culture, by making this primary data available both during and after research. Two joint projects at the University of Toronto are representative of this kind of work: the Records of Early English Drama (REED) Patrons and Performers database, and The Juba Project. Both projects have been able to use the database to better explore a broader and more inclusive range of performances, from aristocratic venues to the back rooms of saloons and the courtyards of inns.

This database transposes the model to another time and place--that is, applied to the popular performance culture of 19th Century 'Canada West'. See HENRY LAMB AND MRS COWELL for more on performance culture.

The database is available here: https://canadawest.library.utoronto.ca/

Stephen Johnson, University of Toronto

Immersive SF: Imagining EXPO 67, 70 AND CNE 67

by Sanja Vodovnik
Edited by Matt Jones and Jimena Ortuzar

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Postage Stamp of Expo 67. © Hagley Museum and Library.

Sanja Vodovnik interviewed Professor Stephen Johnson about his memories of Expo 67 (Montreal), Expo 70 (Osaka), and the Sideshow at the CNE in 1967. This interview was part of her interest and research into world fairs of the 20th century and the large-scale public performance of futurity.

An interview with Stephen Johnson about his memories and experiences of the Sight Show (CNE) at Expo ‘67 & Expo ’70.

Please see below for an essay in which Sanja Vodovnik considers Johnson’s experience of these exhibitions through the lens of science fiction and performance. The essay touches on two key points that will be of interest to theatre and performance studies researchers: (a) Vodovnik contextualizes the Expos in the history of world fairs and international exhibitions dating to the 19th century; (b) the Expo offered visitors an immersive experience that can be thought of as a precursor to contemporary immersive theatre and performance.

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Expo 70, Osaka, Japan. © Special Collections Research Center, Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno

In August 2018, Jess Watkin and I sat down with Stephen Johnson, a professor of theatre and performance studies at the University of Toronto, to talk about his visits to the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition) in Toronto in 1967, Expo 67 in Montreal in the same year, and Expo 70 in Osaka in 1970. As Prof. Johnson began describing his memories of visiting these three events, he pointed out that the sights and sounds made a lasting impression on him, an affective response that he relived when I showed him a photo of the Labyrinth Pavilion.

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Host of the Kaleidoscope at Expo 67, Montreal. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada

In the Labyrinth was one of many astounding projects presented at Expo 67, featuring a precursor of IMAX projections (35mm and 70mm) across multiple screens and displaying filmed excerpts from across the world and close-ups of nature and people’s faces.

In the Labyrinth at Expo ’67 in Montreal.

Upon seeing the image of the Labyrinth Pavilion in the book I brought with me, Prof. Johnson said he felt “a rush of emotion, and something like a recognition”, although he didn’t actually remember being in the Labyrinth itself. Even if this memory faded, the first impression of the Labyrinth was so powerful that he bought a copy of the music from the Labyrinth’s films during his visit at Expo 67.

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View of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), 1967. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada

Prof. Johnson described Expo 70 with a similar mixture of amazement, wonder, awe and alienation. He explained that it was not just the site of Expo 70 that left an impression on him: he was even more amazed and affected by the sights of Japan itself, which was a world completely different from his familiar landscape in southern Ontario. In contrast, CNE in Toronto in 1967 had been a more familiar sight, but what he remembers vividly are the people he interacted with. These included performers such as contortionists and fortune-tellers who engaged with visitors by offering strange performances, like optical illusions made with black light, that he, even as a child, saw as deceptive, but nonetheless entertaining. Thinking about these three expositions, Professor Johnson, a lifelong reader of science fiction (sf), said that going to these events was like visiting another planet, knowing that he was entering another world and attuning his expectation to encompass potential experiences at these exhibitions. This is a poignant remark that combines experiences of world fairs like Expo 67 with experiences of what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay calls science-fictionality – a term he defines as a “mode of thought … which is neither a belief nor a model, but rather mood or attitude, a way of entertaining incongruous experiences, in which judgment is suspended, as if we were witnessing the transformations happening to, and occurring in, us.”1 In this text I wish to consider the relations between world fairs and science fiction, and outline some of the ways in which science-fictionality can be invoked to understand events like CNE or Expo 67/70.

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Expo 67 Visitor’s Passport. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada

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Expo 67 Visitor’s Passport. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada

Expo 67 and Expo 70 follow the lineage of world fairs that were most visible and popular in Europe and North America in the 19th and 20th century. The world fairs transformed cities where they took place; new buildings and landmarks were built, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1889), or the Crystal Palace in London (1851). The Fairs also served as exhibition grounds that introduced their visitors to new inventions that later became everyday additions to people’s lives2. Expo 67 was no different in this regard, placing the Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 on the Montreal cityscape, and prompting the development of IMAX film technologies among other novelties. Marking the Canadian centenary, it was a massive endeavour, the cost of which was estimated at around $1 billion. Sixty-two countries from all sides of the Iron Curtain participated in this exhibition and attracted over 50 million visitors from all over the world. Additionally, a new island (Île Notre-Dame) was built on the St. Lawrence River for the exhibit, while the existing Île Sainte-Hélène was enlarged and connected to the city with a new underground transport system (now the Montreal Métro’s yellow line).

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United States Pavilion and view of the mini rail at Expo 67, Montreal. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada

The aim of this exhibition, as well as world fairs in general, was to impress its visitors and furthermore, provide an embodied experience of imagined technological progress. In other words, the visitors of world fairs were to be immersed into the best version of the imagined world of the future – a world filled with technologies that prompted new bodily sensations and ways of interacting with the world. The origins of world fairs are entwined with the industrial development of the late 19th century,3 a time when technology and advancements in transportation and communication provided a new and tangible perspective of the world, reflected in the everyday lives of people in industrialised countries. These changes not only questioned human relationships with other people, but also the human relationship with nature, and the planet, shifting the individual’s attention to the external world and prompting a cognitive and embodied engagement with these experiences. In combining the notion of a changeable future and the human capacity to create a better one, world fairs, including Expo 67 and Expo 70, built a new world in which a visitor could temporarily travel as they would in a work of science fiction. However, unlike in a sf book, this experience was created via an embodied immersion in the utopian world, where a visitor could interact with objects, exhibits and other visitors, and attain a private, individual experience of how they might inhabit the imagined world.

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Clowns in front of the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67, Montreal. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada

Visitors of Expo 67 became performers themselves, roaming around and exploring an immersive and purposefully designed environment that was separated from the daily experiences of their familiar surroundings. In this new world, visitors were able to interact with other participants from all corners of the globe, engage with new technologies, new fashion and means of transportation, exalting new ways of embodying the world. Often designed as a total work of art, these sites were fueled by innovative imagination, but also tangible, ready to be experienced with all human senses as a communal event. Expo 67, for example, offered such an experience by providing its own transportation system, dress code and fashion, food and even a passport. The latter was given to each visitor upon entry and further solidified the experience of border-crossing and traveling to a new place. But while individual installations, pavilions, artifacts and interactions emerged from utopian aspirations, the event itself left a different impression on some of its visitors, who, like Prof. Johnson, reported a sense of fatigue and sensory overload, induced by the sheer vastness and imposition of the awe- and wonder-inspiring structures. As Professor Johnson recounts, he remembers feeling distanced from the sights and objects at the Expo 67, admiring the grand architectural design, but also being unable to completely integrate it into a familiar worldview.

Expo 70, Osaka, Japan. © Special Collections Research Center, Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno

Oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and shifting perspectives that allow the visitor to see the familiar in a new, stranger light, are some of the key characteristics that many sf scholars see as central to the work(s) of sf. Drifting between familiar and unfamiliar sensations at Expos and CNE can on the one hand evoke the experiences of awe and amazement when wandering amongst the impressive newly constructed architecture; however, they can also cause the participant to feel strange in and estranged from the immersive environment. Professor Johnson remembers Expo 67, Expo 70 and the CNE as distinctly separate experiences that, each in their own way, induced the feelings of unfamiliarity, strangeness, amazement, astonishment and wonder. In Expo 67 these affective responses seemed to have been triggered by the innovative architecture that actively reached out to its visitors with new technological inventions. In Expo 70, the unfamiliar and different architecture and socio-cultural landscape of post-war Japan prompted similar experiences, unlike the CNE, where it was the people and performers that left the strongest impression on Prof. Johnson. Because these events were established as interactive spaces that focused on the visitor’s experiences of new technologies and visions of the world, they encouraged visitors to incorporate these new architectural models, landscapes, possibilities of interaction and communication, technologies and other novelties into their worldview. By familiarizing themselves with new technologies and using them as part of their experience of Expo, these events could be read as examples of how collective embodied practices of interacting with new technologies create meaning for technologies-under-development.4

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The USSR Pavilion at Expo 67, Montreal. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada

Just like sf novels that often delve into thick descriptions of extraterrestrial or future architecture and the creatures inhabiting these landscapes, blending technical and scientific findings with fiction, world fairs, too, bring together the “most advanced, yet acceptable”5 technologies of the future and combine them with guiding narratives that orient visitors within the imagined world. They introduce novel technologies and propose ways of using them; however, unlike sf films or novels, the worlds of world fairs are to be inhabited, experienced and performed individually and collectively by eager visitors.

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Habitat 67, a housing experiment in a high-density urban enviroment by architect Moshe Safdie, created as part of Expo 67 © Special Collections Research Center, Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno

Works Cited: 

Balsamo, Anne. 2011. Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Durham; London: Duke University Press. 

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 2008. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press. 

Jameson, Frederic. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2007. 

Marchessault, Janine. 2017. Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press

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1. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 3.

2. The pay toilet, for example, was introduced at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851; it cost 1 penny to use it, and the phrase ‘to spend a penny’ became a euphemism for urination. The Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 introduced the world to the first electrical dishwasher and the Ferris wheel among other inventions.

3. Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies. MIT Press, 2017, 132.

4. Cf. Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture, Duke University Press, 2011, 9.

5. This exact phrase, often shortened to an acronym (MAYA), is also a famous design directive of the mid-20th century architect and designer Raymond Loewy, who amongst other things, created iconic designs for the futuristic looking PRR S1 locomotive, Skylab space station, kitchen appliances and the Coca-Cola vending machine.

The Ceremony of Killing Suhrāb

Iranian diasporic Theatre in Toronto

Written by Marjan Moosavi 

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The Ceremony of Killing Suhrāb [Majlis-i Suhrāb Kushī] (1989), Toronto. Created and performed by Sāsān Ghahrimān. Photos by Sa’id Kārdar.

The Ceremony of Killing Suhrāb is the most performed Persian dramatic piece of the last four decades. It was staged in Toronto on several occasions between 1988 and 2000 by theatre artist Sāsān Ghahrimān (b. 1961). Inspired by the 11th century Persian epic Book of Kings (Shāhnāmih), Ghahrimān’s performance blended familiar conventions of Naqālī (Persian public storytelling) with modern Western theatrical conventions. The play’s premiere, staged at Toronto’s Science Centre in 1988, coincided with the UNESCO celebration of the thousand-year existence of the Book of Kings. 

The play tells the story of Rustam, a great Persian hero who, unaware of the existence of his son Suhrāb, faces him in a battle, fighting on the opposing side. Not recognizing his son, Rustam wrestles Suhrāb to the ground, stabbing him fatally. As he lays dying, Suhrāb reveals that his love for the mighty Rustam, his father, has brought him there. Seeing his own arm bracelet on Suhrāb, Rustam realizes the truth and mourns the tragic death of his son. For Ghahrimān, however, what makes the story relevant to Iranian immigrants, particularly the second generation, is the fact that Suhrāb is the offspring of an inter-racial marriage and represents the desire for cosmopolitan connections and the change that stems from them. He starts his narrative with the romantic encounter between Rustam and Tahmina (Suhrāb’s mother) and culminates in the cross-cultural confrontation between two opposing sides who must pay the cost of their reluctance to know each other.

What makes this performance distinct from a traditional Naqālī is its modernist approach to the use of sound, light, make-up, and stage design. In addition to meaningful use of props such as a shawl, a cup, and a screen taken from Ta’ziyeh (Persian passion plays) and Pardih Khānī (public screen-readings), the play’s dramaturgy hinges on several estrangement effects such as role-playing, addressing the audience, and using a mask. In terms of acting, Ghahrimān, as a solo performer, plays the role of the narrator, but when needed, he also assumes various characters, swapping between Rustam, Suhrāb, Tahmina, and even himself as the actor impersonating the role of the narrator. This fusion in aesthetics and acting style, according to Ghahrimān, made the performance even more palpable for its young audience.

Throughout its production history, The Ceremony of Killing Suhrāb has always benefited from collaboration with various artist-volunteers in the Persian community. Among these are Levon Haftvan as production manager, Mahmūd Mi’rājī and Hussiyn Zarasvand in stage design, Shāpūr Shahīdī in costume design and make-up, Bahrām Dilāvarī in sound design and music, and Guītī Mīrzanīya in publicity. 

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The Ceremony of Killing Suhrāb [Majlis-i Suhrāb Kushī] (2010), Toronto. Photos by Simcu Sālihī.

Recently, following a general tendency among Persian theatre artists to adapt European plays, Ghahrimān has moved to adapting European dramas into Persian for a Persian-speaking audience in Toronto. For instance, in 2013 he staged Brian Friel’s Yalta Game in Persian and kept the title of the play’s source, Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Lapdog, to attract more audience members. In 2015, he directed and performed in Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Partners in Crime. Ghahrimān has maintained his passion and tenacity for staging plays in Persian. In these productions and other recent performances with other artists, he relied on private funding, a semi-professional cast, and a minimal crew. 

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Many thanks to Sāsān Ghahrimān for sharing information and photos from his personal archive.

Mayday Memory Work

Written by Maria Meindl

Abstract

Founded in 1881, Alma Ladies’ College in St. Thomas, Ontario drew in young women from all over the world before closing in 1988. Life at Alma was richly documented in photographs, newspaper coverage, personal memoirs, films, pamphlets and other and ephemera, focusing particularly on the school’s tradition of performance. An amphitheatre created in 1930 became a site for performance of all kinds including dance, drama, music and physical culture, as well as rituals to mark various holidays. Especially beloved and well documented was the annual May Day celebration, including the crowning of the May Queen and the students’ performances for her court. Though the Alma site was destroyed by fire in 2008, its archives are preserved and readily available online through the Elgin County Archives. In the summer of 2019, Maria Meindl partnered with the Elgin County Archives, exploring its extensive collection and meeting with a group of alumni to pilot a group interview format. Prompted by print documentation and a recently acquired film, these women drew on their strong relationships and sense of community to unearth and contextualize memories from the May Day celebrations of 1948 and 49.  

May Day Memory Work at the Elgin County Archives

“Do you think it was over there?”

“There, more likely.”

I stood peering through the grid of a tall steel fence with Gina Dewaele of the Elgin County Archives. We tried to make sense of what lay in front of us, an expanse of dry ground, rutted with tire-marks, and in the distance: trees. I walked along the fence, searching fruitlessly for an opening. Instead, I saw the remains of a stone gate, bordered by tall grass, tiger lilies, and vines heavy with blackberries. The fence that was keeping us out had created a rich grazing ground for animals, birds and insects. At least for now.

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Image 1: Alma site now.

[click on an image to enlarge]

This site in St. Thomas Ontario was once the grounds of Alma College, a school for young women which opened in 1881 (Riddell 11). Built in Victorian Gothic style, in the yellow brick which is used often in the area, Alma College focused on music, art, literature, elocution and physical culture. It lasted just over a century, closing due to financial hardship in 1988 (72). Then its buildings stood empty for twenty years before burning to the ground. The conflagration was captured on numerous camera phones, a scene straight out of a Brontë novel immortalized on Youtube.  

But the college has not faded from memory. Founded in 1901, its alumni association still meets on a regular basis. It has commissioned two books on the history of Alma College and has strong ties with the Elgin County Archives, which houses the Alma College collection. The archive has a robust program of digitization, making photographs and other memorabilia available to researchers from near and far. 

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Image 2: Amphitheatre Booklet. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh6 B5 F3)

In the woods beyond the fence, Gina and I were trying to establish the location of the college’s amphitheatre, which formally opened in 1930 (Butlin 13) and provided seating for up to 800 people (Riddell 38). A system of pipes was installed soon after the amphitheatre was built, creating a water curtain. This masked changes of scenery and provided a backdrop on which coloured lights could be projected. The ensuing effect was described as “enchanting” (Dobson 6). The amphitheatre was a storied place. Alma’s then-principal Perry Dobson wrote that the location was a former creek-bed which had become a dumping ground for the community, with “discarded eaves-troughs, baby carriages, cook stoves, wire mattresses, all intermixed with coal ashes and cinders, to say nothing of rotting garbage, with a bit of sewage trickling through” (1). The college purchased the land and protected it, “(b)ut there was still the hole” (1). Writing in the third person, Dobson recalls attaching a hose to a fire hydrant one day: “Then, what fun he had as he turned a gushing stream of water on the dirt and piles of ashes surrounding the dump” (2). 

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Image 3: St. Thomas TJ Consecration. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 to 2 M6 and 7)

At its dedication speech, reported in the St. Thomas Times-Journal, Dr. Edmund H. Oliver brought up a nearby archeological site, the Southwold Earthworks, “the remains of a once great race of people.”[1] He was likely referring to the Chonnonton people (also known as the Attiwandaron), sometimes called the Neutrals because of their position in conflicts between the Wendat Confederacy and the Haudenosaunee (Dickason and Newbigging 84).

The Chonnonton people had disappeared or disbursed by the mid 1600s due to disease, famine (Jackes 365), and other effects of colonization (Dickason and Newbigging 90-1). However, by the time the amphitheatre was consecrated there were other nations in close proximity to St. Thomas: the Oneidas of the Thames, the Chippewas of the Thames, and the Munsee Delaware Nation.

Oliver went on to remark that the site of the amphitheatre also held historic remains: “a sort of ash place, a Gehenna. It has been turned into a beauty place – beauty for ashes.” In recounting the origins of the amphitheatre, he referred to the Christian hymn, “He Gave Me Beauty for Ashes,” and concluded, “We find here the notes of beauty, art, literature, reverence for the past, and appreciation of the folk. We find it being made into an appreciation of the universal song.”

The amphitheatre, and the performances taking place in it became the focus and inspiration for a wealth of documentation. Alma was seen, from the start, as a cultural centre within the Southwestern Ontario community of St. Thomas (Riddell 19),[2] and it became the subject of newspaper coverage, both in St. Thomas and in neighbouring London. In the 1920s, the St. Thomas Times Journal ran regular columns called "Alma College Notes," and "Alma College Activities."[3] There were entries in the student journal, the Almafilian, not to mention a scrupulously maintained archive at the school itself. The amphitheatre was the site not only of plays, dance performances, concerts and graduation ceremonies, but of demonstrations of physical culture. A torchlight Christmas carol service took place there each year (Riddell 38), not to mention a much-loved and long-remembered event: the annual crowning of the May Queen. 

Despite the richness of its heritage, Alma College is hardly a household name. I learned about it myself through word of mouth, just after the death of my grandmother, the poet and broadcaster Mona Gould. When she read Mona’s obituary, Judge Edra Sanders Ferguson – one of the most famous Alma Daughters – invited me to a meeting at the University Women’s Club. There, she and a number of her schoolmates told me stories about my grandmother’s years as a young reporter in St. Thomas (see Butlin 99-100).[4] The conversation soon turned to memories of the women’s schooldays at Alma College. They recalled that from the start, Alma was a sort of United Nations, bringing not just young women from the local area, but international students to live and learn together. The school began by including a variety of Christian denominations and later welcomed students of different religions, as well (Butlin 44). 

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Image 6: Edra Sanders amid debating team. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives.
Winners of Girls' Series of Western Ontario Secondary School Association, 1926. Left to Right: Ruth Sparling, Mary Sibley, Edra Sanders, Betty Andrew, Irma Walker. ( R6 S3 Sh3 B4 141 )

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Image 7: International students. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 to 2 M6 and 7)

Some years later I met a native of St. Thomas who had attended Alma. Her family was originally from Greece, and she told me she felt like an outsider, a lesser member of the student body. But all that changed one spring day. Now her face broke into a smile, and her eyes teared up as she told me of the day her schoolmates found her in the kitchen (where she worked) and announced that she was to be that year’s May Queen. She described a procession, white dresses, garlands of flowers, and dancing under the apple blossoms on a warm spring day. This was a Cinderella story, but instead of a handsome prince, it was a group of friends who swept in and changed this young woman’s life. My husband and I visited the derelict site soon afterwards, wandering among the saplings and weeds which were springing up among the crumbling buildings, along with evidence of numerous campfires and late-night parties. I stole a brick. 

When the opportunity arose to do some archival research on performance history through Gatherings, May Day at Alma College immediately sprang to mind, and I contacted the Elgin County Archives. It so happened that not long before I phoned, a 16mm colour film had been donated. It documented the May Day celebrations of 1948 and 49, followed by the graduation ceremonies of both years. In the summer of 2019, I worked with the Elgin County Archives, using the film as a focus for discovering the history of the amphitheatre, particularly of the May Day ritual. 

Access Film: https://inmagic.elgin.ca/ask/permalink/175233/

[Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. Elgin County Audio-Visual Collection.]

I had two goals. One was to put the Alma College Collection on the map as a source for research on performance history in Southern Ontario. At Alma young women created and shared performance of all kinds, not simply music, dance, theatre and physical culture, but also rituals, and much of this activity took place in the amphitheatre. My second goal was to try a group oral history interview, modelled on Reminiscence Cafés in the United Kingdom. The latter are sometimes set up by chapters of the Alzheimer’s Society and use photographs, music and activities to help stimulate memory and reinforce identity. However, they also appear in conjunction with reminiscence theatre. For Rikke Gjærum reminiscence theatre serves the purpose of promoting health through connectedness among the elderly, an often-marginalized population (246). It also draws on the resources that older members of society can offer (247). I recalled the web of long-standing relationships I encountered during my visit to the University Women’s Club. What memories would surface if the graduates of Alma recalled May Day, together? 

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Image 8: May Queen and her court, 1948. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S3 Sh3 B7 128)

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Image 9: May Day 1949. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S3 Sh3 B7 #79)

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Image 10: May Day 1949. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh5 B4 #20)

Courtesy of Elgin County Archives.

Alma College was not alone in celebrating May Day but it adopted the custom wholeheartedly starting in 1921 (Butlin 10).[5] The celebration moved to the amphitheatre as soon as the facility was built. Through depression, world war, and post-war upheavals, the event maintained a remarkable consistency through the years. Each year, the students selected one young woman to be the May Queen, along with two counsellors. The Lord of the May, who crowned the queen during the ceremony, was selected by the staff (Sifton 2). Preceded by young flower girls and musicians, the May Queen and her court moved in solemn procession into the amphitheatre witnessed by friends, family, alumni, students and community members. She would then be crowned and say her vows. Positioned on a dais, the court would be entertained by a series of dances, songs, recitations and demonstrations of physical culture, including a Maypole dance.

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Picture 11: May Queen qualifications. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh5 B4)

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Image 12: Charge to the May Queen. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh5 B4)

The event is scrupulously archived, including the scripts for the May Queen’s vows, and a Memory Book with signatures of the May Queen, her court and of the various alumni who attended and sent written greetings. The programs were kept as well, listing every performer and participant. The programs indicate the importance of dance within the school’s curriculum. Dance was not only a form of self expression but of cultural exploration, as there were many folk-dances included. Sometimes international students would perform dances from their own countries. 

The documentation shows clear links between the physical culture practiced at Alma College and the tradition of Francois Delsarte, widely popularized in North America by Genevieve Stebbins (Ruyter 2020, 2025). A program from the 1912 commencement exercises lists the Eastern Temple Drill as performed by the Senior Physical Culture class (Riddell 30). This Drill is found in Stebbins’s 1898 book, The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training (84-90). The same book also includes an “English Drill” called The May (19-5). Programs from the 1920s and 30s mention a department of Expression, another name that Stebbins used for her work (1886, 1898 133). The film shows a processional dance performed barefoot with half-circles of flowers held over the dancers’ heads (Branton 1:45 – 2:12). A similar dance is depicted in a book on the work of Hedwig Kallmeyer, a student of Stebbins (cover, frontispiece, 12). The documentation of May Day celebrations at Alma College is evidence of the prevalence and persistence of physical culture in southern Ontario.

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Image 13: Program 1948. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh5 B4 F3)

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Image 13: Program 1949. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh5 B4 F3)

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Image 15: Memory Book 1948. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh5 B4)

Image 16: Memory Book 1949. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh5 B4)

The group interview took place in the Elgin County Museum/Heritage Centre, which is adjacent to the Archives. The participants, Jean Dollar (née McKellar) and Evelyn Smith (née Knight) Louise Sifton (née Lyle), and Mary Virginia Towers sat at a long table, watching the film and matching it with materials from the collection including programs, music and scripts. The interview was recorded on both audio and video. In addition to discussing their memories, they sorted and ordered the material in the Elgin County Archive’s May Day files. Some had brought materials with them to donate, along with their own historical writings. Louise Sifton had chosen the May Day celebration as the topic for an essay in a university anthropology course, and Mary Virginia Towers had also written about the history of the amphitheatre. 

We decided to show the film one time through, and encourage the women to free-associate. On the second viewing, we stopped the film, matching what they saw to the programs and other print materials that the archives had in its holdings. For the sake of time, we decided to focus on the May Day celebrations. I had formulated a series of questions in consultation with the Elgin County Archives. My questions centred on finding out what the film did not show: the sounds and smells of the day, what was involved in preparing for the event, and what came afterwards. I also planned to ask about their feelings, and what the event meant to them.  

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Image 17: Left to right: Jean, Evelyn, Louise, Mary Virginia.

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Image 18: Jean McKellar. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh2 B5 F1)

Image 20: Louise Lyle. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh2 B5 F1)

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Image 19: Evelyn Smith. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh2 B4 F10)

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Image 21: Mary Virginia. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh2 B5 F4)

The interview itself turned out to be more chaotic than anticipated, with people coming and going, and the conversation veering off into what might have been called digressions, except that they offered useful information. Whatever experience I have in interviewing – be it in qualitative research or in radio – has led me to frame my questions in such a way that a concise and clean quote is produced, without the need for much editing. Even as an interview proceeds, a part of me is imagining listening to the tape, wincing when an answer is too diffuse or is cut off at the end. In the group interview, I kept wanting to clean things up, single out one woman at a time and make the pointed and slightly challenging inquiries that I knew would produce a distinctive clip. The results of the group interview would not be useful for creating a radio program or the soundtrack of a film, but they were a rich source of information. They could also form the basis for individual oral history interviews. To satisfy my concern about clips, I made a point of setting up segments of the recording where they would read from their writings, sing the school song, and answer a few key questions.

I witnessed the dynamic between these women, the group project of memory work. More and more details emerged as the day proceeded and they supported each other’s memory-building. Not only were they able to identify people in the film and describe the proceedings in detail, they also expanded their wide-ranging discussion to include elements of town history.[6] This interview was not just providing information for future researchers, it was reinforcing community and relationships, not only among the Alma College graduates, but inter-generationally, as well, as I, the Elgin County Staff, the film-maker and visitors became part of the project of memory work. I closed the interview by asking what they would wish to see done with the site of the amphitheatre in the future. They spoke of the need for housing in St. Thomas, and said that Alma was “in the past” though there should be a photograph of the school in whatever building is built on the site. 

They also spoke of restoring the amphitheatre to look like “the original, beautiful amphitheatre that it was before.” It could be used for weddings. Here is their concluding discussion.

Towers: There’s lots of use for it: plays, concerts, church services . . .
Dollar: Weddings, beautiful spot for weddings.
Towers: Many uses. It would be well used.

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footnotes

1. The exact date and page of this publication has been cut off, but it is from spring or summer, 1930.

2. Performance had long been an important part of life in St. Thomas. According to historian Hugh Joffre Sims, visiting companies had offered performances in an old drill shed near the town hall. With the building of the Opera House in 1873 came even more visiting performances including minstrel shows, Tom Thumb’s Company of Lilliputians, and a travelling version of The Merchant of Venice (82). The Agricultural Gardens, near the tracks of the London Port Stanley Railway, had seen visitors as famous as Buffalo Bill Cody (Sims 75). With the growth of the town in the early 1900s, more theatres were built, offering both vaudeville performances and movies (88, 91, 93, 99).

3. Back issues of the St. Thomas Times Journal are available on microfilm at the St. Thomas public library.

4. Judge Ferguson was awarded the Order of Canada just before her death, at the age of 104. It was Tara Mazumdar, an employee of  nursing home where Ferguson spent her last years, who found out about Ferguson’s career through the scrap books the elderly Ferguson kept in her room. On her own time, Mazumdar assembled the necessary documentation. The fight to have the award given at the nursing home, rather than at Rideau Hall, was detailed in the Toronto Star (Gillis).

5. The Whitby Public Library has scanned photographs of May Day Celebrations at Ontario Ladies’ College. The College, now known as Trafalgar Castle School, still celebrates a May Court Festival.

6. Of particular interest was the relationship between the performances at Alma (particularly but not entirely the May Day celebrations) and the local woman-owned sewing business.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Gina Dewaele, Mike Baker and Brian Masschaele of the County of Elgin, as well as to Drs. Kim Solga and Jill Carter for their support in formulating this project.

For images used courtesy of Elgin County Archives, any subsequent reproduction is strictly prohibited without an additional agreement. This includes reproduction by any means, be it electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise.

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Works cited

Alma College Alumnae Home Page. http://www.almacollege.20m.com/index.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

Branton, Jack. Alma College May Day & Commencement Exercises, 1948-1949. 1949, https://inmagic.elgin.ca/ask/permalink/175233/. Elgin County Museum and Archive.

Butlin, Susan, and Alma College International Alumnae Association. All the Girls Have Gone: Alma College, the Latter Years. Alma College International Alumnae Association, 2011.

Dickason, Olive Patricia, and William Newbigging. Indigenous Peoples within Canada: A Concise History. Fourth edition, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Dobson, Perry. BEAUTY FOR ASHES Story of the Alma College Amphitheatre.

Elijah, Mary, et al. Lotikwina’ta:shu. Vol. 1-2. Oneida Language & Cultural Centre, 2010.

Gillis, Wendy. “Time Running out for 103-Year-Old Order of Canada Recipient.” Thestar.Com, 30 July 2011. www.thestar.com, https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2011/07/30/time_running_out_for_103yearold_order_of_canada_recipient.html.

Gjærum, Rikke Gürgens. “Art, Age & Health: A Research Journey about Developing Reminiscence Theatre in an Age-Exchange Project.” Nordic Journal of Art and Research, vol. 2, no. 2, 2, Dec. 2013. journals.hioa.no, doi:10.7577/information.v2i2.736.

Jackes, Mary. “The mid seventeenth century collapse of Iroquoian Ontario: examining the last burial place of the Neutral Nation.” Vers une anthropologie des catastrophes: 9e Journées anthropologiques de Valbonne: 22-24 mai 2007, edited by Luc Buchet, APDCA : Institut national d’études démographiques, 2009, pp. 347–73.

Kallmeyer, Hade. Lehrerin der harmonischen Gymnastik : ein neuer Frauenberuf. Berlin-Zehlendorf : Kulturverlag, 1912. Internet Archive, Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/b28055044.

Oneida Nation of the Thames – Oneida Nation of the Thames. https://oneida.on.ca/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.

“Our History.” Chippewas of the Thames. www.cottfn.com, https://www.cottfn.com/chief-council/our-history/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.

Reminiscence Cafe | Alzheimer’s Society. https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/support-services/Mole%2BValley%2BDistrict%2BCouncil/Reminiscence%2BCafe. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.

Riddell, Katherine. Alma College, St. Thomas Ontario. Centennial Book: 1877-1977.

Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa. “American Delsartism: Precursor of an American Dance Art [1].” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 26, no. 13, 2009, pp. 2015–30. Scholars Portal Journals, doi:10.1080/09523360903148853.

Schaefer, Kerrie, and David Watt. “Not Going Quietly: The Royal on the Move Procession Place, History, Memory and Community-Based Performance.” About Performance; Sydney, no. 7, University of Sydney, Department of Performance Studies, 2007, pp. 117-131,201.

Sifton, Louise. A Ritual From One Cultural Community. 10 Nov. 1988.

Sims, Hugh Joffre, and Irene Golas. “St. Thomas.” Sims’ History of Elgin County, vol. II, Elgin County Library, 1986, pp. 64–109.

Stebbins, Genevieve. The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training. New York : E.S. Werner, 1913. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/genevievestebbin00steb.

Taylor, Scott. Alma College Burns. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA4AvqzaLwg. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

Toddberticus. Alma College Up in Flames. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bESrThA7SY. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

Vertinsky, Patricia. “Transatlantic Traffic in Expressive Movement: From Delsarte and Dalcroze to Margaret H’Doubler and Rudolf Laban.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 26, no. 13, Oct. 2009, pp. 2031–51. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/09523360903148879.

Delving Among Ruins: Settler Dreams of Enlightenment in the Wilderness

Written by Stephen Johnson
Curated by Jimena Ortuzar

“Romulus… a melancholy ruin—far more desolate than the majestic forest that Henry Lamb found. Now there is nothing but tumbling walls and broken roofs and weed hidden paths and cold and barren fireplaces.” 1

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Illustration by J. R. Seavey, published in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897.

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Ruins of the Romulus Grist Mill. Illustration by J. R. Seavey, published in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897.

In the mid-1890s, the poet and local historian Robert Kirkland Kernighan traveled the rural township of Beverly, halfway between Hamilton and Guelph in Southern Ontario, delving among the ruins for local stories. He found the tale of Henry Lamb, a pioneer settler of Upper Canada who, during the early part of the nineteenth century, mapped out a great city called Romulus, which he intended to build in Beverly Township. Like any great city, Romulus was to include a "first-class theatre." 2

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Wentworth County circa 1875, showing its location at the western tip of Lake Ontario, and its separate townships. Beverly Township is one the left. From Wentworth County: Illustrated historical atlas of the Count of Wentworth, Ont. Toronto: Page and Smith, 1875.

Kernighan reports that this venture was a significant failure, and then takes readers on a tour of the ruins of Lamb's house, tavern, and gristmill. He describes the hubris of someone who would plan such a place in Beverly—most famous for its swampland—and expresses nostalgia for a time when "there were giants" in the land.2 So fully conceived was the plan for Romulus that local residents still referred to "the site of the proposed Catholic cathedral" some seventy years later.3 Clearly Henry Lamb had left a mark on the community, though there were no architectural traces.

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Building on the site chosen for the Catholic Cathedral. Though never build, local residents still identified specific locations according to his now-lost city plan, as if it had been surveyed and build. Illustration by J. R. Seavey, published in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897.

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The Lamb Homestead as it looked circa 1897. Illustration by J. R. Seavey, published in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897

According to local legend, Lamb advertised in Britain for immigrant settlers, promising to build a city with a market square, cricket grounds, race course, concert hall, ballroom, and "a first-class theatre." The promise of a theatrical venue in a town plan was unusual for the time and region, not least because it was in the middle of an old growth forest. There is a strong possibility that the plans for Romulus were informed by Lamb's devotion to the secretive, and theatre-friendly, Freemasonic movement. The Freemasons were bastions of both enlightenment radicalism, and then of British imperialism; as such, they encouraged Lamb to build a prosperous life as a self-made man in a hostile environment, to dream of building a city in the wilderness—and to misjudge his intended community. Settlers at this time were more at ease with and in need of a popular performance culture, of outdoor rituals and kitchen parties, tavern songs and mechanics institute meetings, and not (or not yet) a theatre. Lamb’s plans for an enlightened city expressed the desire for the orderly, architectural administration of society in a world of improvised spaces.

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From an 1875 map. Henry Lamb’s son George remains in possession of some of the land, south west of the village of Sheffield, but by this time the area had been subdivided, sold and cleared of all but traces and ruins of Romulus. From Wentworth County: Illustrated historical atlas of the Count of Wentworth, Ont. Toronto: Page and Smith, 1875.

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The graves of Thomas Lamb, his wife and brother, as they looked circa 1897, the ruin of a ten foot high cairn. Illustration by J. R. Seavey, published in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897.

“Henry Lamb built his city on a rock, and he and his were determined to be buried in the middle of the town. The bodies were placed in their rude coffins side by side on top of the ground and were covered with tons of great stones. A stonewall was build around them and this filled in and over with soil, so that when it was finished it formed a cairn 18x27 at the base and ten feet high. There they slept peacefully like the ancient Egyptian kings and queens in the pyramidal tombs, and every night the wolves foregathered above them and fought for the highest seats of the mighty. Today these graves are unkempt and the wall in ruins. Groundhogs make their homes there down among the dead men’s bones and the wind and weather of three quarters of a century have left the cairn only four feet high.”4

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Postcard of “The Wigwam,” a log building at Rushdale Farm, Rockton, Ontario, where R. K Khernigan (The Khan) did his writing, according to local legend. From the Toronto Public Library.

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1 R. K. Kernighan (The Khan), “A City that Was Not Built” in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks, Mrs. Dick-Lauder et al. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897, 118.

2 The text for this exhibit was adapted from an article by Stephen Johnson: "Romulus and Ritual in the Beverly Swamp: A Freemason Dreams of Theatre in Pre-confederation Ontario." Theatre Research in Canada 35:1 (Spring 2014) pp 9-30.

3 R. K. Kernighan (The Khan), “A City that Was Not Built” in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks, Mrs. Dick-Lauder et al. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897, 118.

4 R. K. Kernighan (The Khan), “A City that Was Not Built” in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks, Mrs. Dick-Lauder et al. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897, 123.

5 R. K. Kernighan (The Khan), “A City that Was Not Built” in Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks, Mrs. Dick-Lauder et al. Hamilton, Ont: Spectator Printing Company, 1897, 120.

Clement Cantin

Written by Gabrielle Houle

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Clément Cantin (1933-2013), singer.

This photograph shows Québec singer Clément Cantin in performance. It comes from the personal collection of Nadia Cantin, Clément Cantin’s daughter. It is undated and the location of the performance is unknown. Given what we know about Clément Cantin’s artistic career, it is safe to assume that this photograph was taken during the early- or mid-1960s at one of Gérard Thibault’s cabarets in Québec City. Photo credits: Roussel.

Known on stage as Endré Clément, Clément Cantin livened Québec City’s nightlife through his performances as a singer and as a master of ceremonies during the late 1950s and the 1960s. It is unclear when, where, or how Cantin began singing professionally. According to an article published in Dis-Q-Ton, some time in 1961 or at the beginning of 1962, Cantin started “dividing his time between La Porte St-Jean, Chez Gérard, and Chez Émile.” All three were cabarets in Québec City and were owned by Gérard Thibault. The article continues:

Before this, he was applauded in a dozen other cabarets of Québec City and its surroundings, and at Château Deblois in Trois-Rivières. He also presented his singing act at Goose Bay in Labrador to entertain the American and Canadian troops that were stationed there. We have also seen André [sic] Clément on several television programs, including “La Boîte aux chansons.” (L. Cantin 27)

As a singer, Clément Cantin was known for his versatility and the possession of a “well-balanced voice, a great deal of personality, and a remarkable stage presence” (Ibid.).  His repertoire comprised Canadian, French, and American songs that he liked. It included songs by Connie Francis, Billy Daniels, and Frank Sinatra, the last of whom was one of his favourite artists (L. Cantin; N. Cantin).

As a master of ceremonies, Clément Cantin would have had to expand his skills beyond music. The role would have obliged him to introduce guest artists to the public, entertain the audience in between acts, and sometimes participate in sketches with other performers. According to Gaston Boileau, who worked as a master of ceremonies at Chez Émile during the 1950s, the following would have been an emcee’s typical duties:

In the mid-1950s, the master of ceremonies facilitated the performance, sang three or four songs, told a few jokes, and then introduced the novelty act and the star. […] We generally changed the show every week unless it was a great success, as was the case with Ti-Gus and Ti-Mousse for example. The new programming started on Monday […] During the six years I worked [at Chez Émile], the place was always packed. (Qtd. in Thibault and Hébert 117)

A francophone, Clément Cantin also spoke English, something that would have helped him communicate (and mingle) with guest artists coming from the United States and from the rest of Canada to perform at one of Thibault’s venues. His linguistic abilities might also have been helpful when addressing English-speaking spectators from Québec City and American tourists.[1]

Cantin would have been within a minority among Québec residents who could understand both languages. According to data collected in the 1951 census, only 28.5% of francophones and 32.4% of anglophones aged 5 years and older in the province of Québec reported being able to speak both French and English; by 1971, these numbers were 27.6% and 38.9% respectively (“L’évolution du bilinguisme”).[2]

During his years as a performer at Chez Gérard, À La Porte St-Jean, and Chez Émile, Clément Cantin was approached twice by American scouts who offered him the opportunity to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show (N. Cantin). He declined both invitations. By the time he married in 1968, Clément Cantin had retired from the stage. What survives of his performance days are documents—including several photographs, handbills, personal letters, and music scores, many of which have been preserved by his daughter—and the memories of those who performed with him or heard him sing.

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 [1] According to data collected in the 1951 census, 8,006 of the 164,016 people living in Québec City at the time reported that English was their mother tongue (Dominion Bureau of Statistics Ninth Census 5). And of the 171,979 people residing in Québec City who participated in the 1961 census, 6,048 reported having English as their mother tongue (Dominion Bureau of Statistics Population 36).

[2] Between 1951 and 1971, the percentage of Canadians aged 5 years and older who reported speaking both French and English was much higher in Québec than in the rest of the country. In 1951, 7.5% of Canadians residing outside Québec declared they had the ability to speak both French and English. In 1961, the percentage raised to 7.6%, and in 1971, 8.5% of the Canadian population aged 5 years and older residing outside of Québec declared they had the ability to speak both languages (“L’évolution du bilinguisme”).

Works Cited:

Canada. Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Ninth Census of Canada 1951 – Population by official language and mother tongue. Ottawa: DBS, 1952.

Canada. Dominion Bureau of Statistics. 1961 Census of Canada -- Population: Mother Tongue, Counties and Subdivisions = Langue maternelle, comtés et subdivisions. Ottawa: DBS., 1970.

Cantin, Lucille. “Nos artistes de Québec.” Dis-Q-Ton, vol. 6, no. 12, p. 27, December 1962.

Cantin, Nadia. Personal phone conversation. August 2017.

“L’évolution du bilinguisme au Canada de 1901 à 2011.” Statistique Canada. www.statcan.ge.ca. Accessed on 18 September 2017.

Thibault, Gérard and Chantal Hébert. Chez Gérard: La petite scène des grandes vedettes. Les Éditions Spectaculaires Enrg, 1988.

CHEZ GÉRARD: A Glimpse into Québec City’s Cabaret Scene.

Written by Gabrielle Houle

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CHEZ GÉRARD: A Glimpse into Québec City’s Cabaret Scene.

These images are digital copies of a bilingual handbill for performances at Chez Gérard and À La Porte St-Jean, with an advertisement for À La Page Blanche. All three establishments were founded by Gérard Thibault (1917-2003), who was Québec City’s “king of cabaret” from the late 1940s to the late 1970s (Boivin-Allaire). While undated, this document is from the summer of 1963; it was shared with the Theatre Documentation and Reconstruction Project by Nadia Cantin, daughter of Clément Cantin (1933-2013). Clément Cantin, whose nom d’artiste was Endré Clément, performed in several of Thibault’s cabarets as a singer and master of ceremony in the 1960s.

On 10 July 1938, Gérard Thibault, with his brothers Émile, Paul, and Jean, opened Chez Gérard, a small restaurant situated on rue Saint-Nicolas, in the Lower Town of Québec City.  Thibault had bought the place for $750 (Thibault and Hébert 24). At the time, it had only three tables and “a minuscule kitchen” (Ibid). “A full meal – which included a soup, entrée (among which boeuf à la mode was a favorite), desert, and beverage – costed 25 cents and, even at that price, it was profitable,” exclaims Thibault. “[We made] about $1500 in profits in the first year!” (Ibid) When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Chez Gérard opened 24 hours a day, feeding workers of the nearby arsenals and Morton shipyards, as well as “many travellers, politicians, military personnel and others, and convoys of troops that arrived by train from all over the country” (Thibault and Hébert 25). Chez Gérard eventually relocated to rue Saint-Paul, also in the Lower Town, only steps away from Québec City’s train station, the Gare du Palais.[1]

After the war business slowed down, which led Thibault to think of new ways to attract customers. In 1946, he invited Will Brodrigue’s orchestra to perform twice a week in his restaurant, on Fridays and Saturdays. On 6 November 1948, he hired accordionist Fredo Gardoni, French singer Michèle Sandry, and local radio-celebrity Saint-George Côté to entertain his clientele. “In the early days,” actor Paul Berval remembers, “Chez Gérard was not known as a cabaret. A proof of this is that we dressed in the kitchen with the pots and pans. There were no dressing rooms for the artists at first. We found ourselves standing between chickens and hors-d’oeuvres. Sometimes we laughed!” (Qtd. in Thibault and Hébert 52) The consecration of Chez Gérard as Québec City’s premier “Parisian-style” café-concert happened in 1949 when Charles Trenet offered to sing in Thibault’s restaurant. He performed there from 01 to 18 February and from 27 February to 05 March, attracting well-to-do spectators from Québec’s bourgeoisie who would otherwise not set foot in the Lower Town (Thibault and Hébert). Numerous local and international artists followed in the steps of Trenet (who returned several times to Québec City), making Chez Gérard a first-choice establishment for night-life entertainment, and an important venue that promoted French and Francophone music. Here is how French singer Monique Leyrac, who first performed at Chez Gérard in 1950, describes her experience at Thibault’s institution:

At the time, singing in Québec City, alongside friends like Saint-Georges Côté, felt like vacations. […] I knew the club by reputation, but I had never met the owner. He was approachable and extremely friendly. […] Before presenting my singing act, I rehearsed with three musicians and it took the time that it took. The musicians were not supervised by the union and it was cheaper. For my repertoire, I looked for Québécois songs. […] The rest of my repertoire was made of French songs that I liked. As for stage costumes, we wore what we wanted, […]. I had a sophisticated look. My hair was pitch-black, pulled back up into a bun like a Spanish lady. I wore elaborate custom-made dressing gowns that suited my personality. Shows unfolded according to the European model, with an artist in the first half and another, usually the star, in the second. (Qtd. in Thibault and Hébert 68-9)

For many French-speaking artists, Chez Gérard became a gateway to America:

Indeed, there were many French artists who, after performing at Chez Gérard, obtained a contract in the United States. It had become usual that impresarios and owners of American cabarets-- from New York, Washington, and Los Angeles especially-- should come to Québec City, at Chez Gérard and, later, at À la Porte St-Jean, to see and hear “the best and the brightest” of French artists, and to offer them engagements that would secure a breakthrough in the land of Uncle Sam. (Thibault and Hébert 56)

Chez Gérard’s success was such that Thibault opened other cabarets in the city: Chez Émile (1942-63, first a restaurant, it started offering performances in January 1950), À La Porte Saint-Jean (1951-67, hosting its first performances in October 1951), À La Page Blanche (1958-65), and À La Boîte aux Chansons (1960-65). Between 1948 and 1977, Thibault’s venues welcomed hundreds of entertainers, including actors and comedians such as Gratien Gélinas, Ti-Gus & Ti-Mousse (Réal Béland and Denise Émond), Olivier Guimond, Dominique Michel, Denyse Filiatrault, musical comic duo Les Jérolas (Jean Lapointe and Jérôme Lemain), and La Poune (Rose Ouellette); singers, musicians, and song-writers, among them Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, Félix Leclerc, Ginette Reno, Michel Louvain, Jacques Normand, Fernand Gignac, Sasha Distel, Gilles Vigneault, Jean-Pierre Ferland, Willie Lamothe, Les Baronets (René Angélil, Pierre Labelle, and Jean Baulne), and the Duke Ellington Orchestra; as well as female impersonator and cabaret artist Jean Guilda, and global entertainer Josephine Baker, to name only these few.

 Chez Gérard, Thibault’s first and longest-lasting cabaret, held its last performance in December 1977. This ended a thirty-year chapter in Québec City’s night-life.[2]

Works Cited:

Boivin-Allaire, Émilia. “Gérard Thibault: Le roi du cabaret.” Cap-aux-Diamants, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 27-29, Winter 1989. www.erudit.org. Accessed on 18 August 2017.

Thibault, Gérard and Chantal Hébert. Chez Gérard: La petite scène des grandes vedettes. Les Éditions Spectaculaires Enrg, 1988.

[1] Gare du Palais is referred to as “Union Station” on the handbill.

[1] The Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec (BAnQ) is the repository of a large number of photographs, written documents, paintings, architectural drawings, a wide variety of audio-visual material, and other types of documents that trace the life and work of Gérard Thibault. Collections kept at the BAnQ that would be useful to anyone interested in researching the topic include the “Fonds Gérard Thibault” and “Exposition Gérard Thibault”. Further research into Thibault’s career could look into the Productions Jacques-Gérard (1961-63), through which Thibault produced shows that were performed at La Comédie canadienne in Montréal and often toured across the province. Another area of inquiry would be the performances by French and Québécois artists Thibault organized for patients at the Sanatorium Bégin between 1949 and 1962.  

Royal Alexandra Theatre

Written by Dave Degrow

 

Address: 260 King Street W.

History

DESCRIPTION OF HISTORIC PLACE

The Royal Alexandra Theatre is an early-20th-century, Beaux-Arts-style theatre. It is located in downtown Toronto. The formal recognition consists of the building on the legal property on which it sat at the time of recognition.

HERITAGE VALUE

The Royal Alexandra Theatre was designated a national historic site because it is a nationally significant example of a theatre which was built specifically for the presentation of live theatrical performances.

The Royal Alexandra is an intimate but lavish version of a traditional 19th-century theatre built exclusively for live theatrical performances. Designed by noted Toronto architect John M. Lyle (1872-1945), who had worked in theatre design in New York, the Royal Alexandra was a direct importation of the small, lavish and more intimate type of theatre being built in New York. Its design allowed a relatively large number of seats in a deceptively small space. The Royal Alexandra was one of the last theatres of its type built in Canada and likely the best surviving example. Since its rescue and rejuvenation by Ed Mirvish in 1963, the Royal Alexandra has played a central role in the social and cultural life of Toronto. Its Beaux-Arts style continues to provide an elegant setting for theatrical and musical events.

Sources: Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Minute, 1985; Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Plaque Text, 1988.

CHARACTER-DEFINING ELEMENTS

The key elements that relate to the heritage value of this site include:
-its symmetrical, five-bay composition, in which a central, two-and-a-half-storey, mansard-roofed, three-bay block is flanked by smaller, recessed wings
-its tripartite facade, composed of: a channelled base; a pilastered main storey capped by a pronounced parapet edge; and a steep mansard roof over the central block and partially concealed behind the parapet edge
-exterior detailing loosely following the Louis XVI style, including: the channelled stone base with radiating voussoirs over window openings; elaborate entablatures and balconies at each of the massive windows on the main storey; Ionic pilasters; a heavy, dentilled cornice; and a stepped and decorated parapet
-its fenestration, consisting of: small, mullioned windows at street level; massive, heavily mullioned windows on the main level, and small, hooded dormer windows at roof level
-its interior plan, with the front third of the building devoted to reception and administration; the auditorium occupying the central third; and the back third taken up by stage and backstage areas
-curving staircases which ascend from either side of the lobby to a promenade foyer at balcony level
-the broad, shallow proportions of the auditorium, bringing the audience closer to the stage
-its steeply pitched, cantilevered balconies and boxes, allowing clear sightlines
-the heavy, lavish, Baroque-inspired classicism of its interior décor
-its use of durable, fireproof materials, including: brick, reinforced concrete, steel, terracotta and stone

"Royal Alexandra Theatre National Historic Site of Canada." Canada's HIstoric Places. Parks Canada. 2017. www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=1137. Accessed 10 May 2017.

History

A masterpiece of beaux-arts architecture, the historic Royal Alexandra is Toronto's senior theatre and, at 108, never having been converted to any other use, the oldest continuously operating legitimate theatre in North America.

The Royal Alexandra embodies the ambition of the young Toronto stock broker Cawthra Mulock, who sought to put his home town on the cultural map by building for it "the finest theatre on the continent." What he and his architect - John M. Lyle - created has since been called "an Edwardian jewel-box", a treasure chest of imported marble, hand-carved cherry and walnut, fine silks and velvets, crystal chandeliers and ornate, gilded plaster - all constructed on the city's first steel-framed structure (allowing cantilevered balconies, with no internal pillars to obstruct lines of sight) - and over a huge ice-pit that made this theatre one of the first "air conditioned" buildings in North America.

The Royal Alexandra is also North America's first truly "royal" theatre - "royal" by patent from Edward VII - named with royal permission for his consort, Alexandra, a Danish princess and great-grandmother of the present queen.

Since its opening in 1907, almost 3000 productions have played the Royal Alexandra. Its roster of stars is an honour-roll of twentieth century theatre: John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Katherine Cornell, Helen Hayes, Orson Welles, Ruth Gordon, Al Jolson, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Pickford, Cedric Hardwicke, Sydney Greenstreet, John and Ethel Barrymore, Fred and Adele Astaire, Harry Lauder, Maurice Evans, Alan Bates, Marilyn Miller, Deborah Kerr... Edith Piaf sang here, Paul Robeson played Othello here, Pavlova danced here, the Marx Brothers made Alex audiences laugh and Mae West made them blush.

Edwin "Honest Ed" Mirvish purchased the Royal Alexandra from the Mulock estate in 1963 and closed the theatre for extensive modernisation, repair and renovation, restoring the old house to the splendour of its early days. Ed Mirvish personally oversaw the operation of the theatre for the next 23 years, until 1986 when he handed management and administration over to his son, David, and David's company, Mirvish Productions.

The Royal Alexandra was named a National Historic Monument in 1987, on its 80th birthday.

INSIDE THE THEATRE

There are three levels of seating in the Royal Alexandra: orchestra, balcony and upper balcony(gallery). Each level offers a lobby, bar/refreshment area and washrooms. The largest lounge area, the Yale Simpson Room, is on the lowest level, beneath the auditorium. The Royal Alex has a wheelchair-accessible washroom on the street (orchestra) level, on the east side of the main lobby.

“History - Royal Alexandra Theatre.” Mirvish.com, Mirvish Company, 2017, www.mirvish.com/theatres/royal-alexandra-theatre?open=history#view. Accessed 10 May 2017.

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Royal Alexandra Theatre - Exterior

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Royal Alexandra Theatre - Interior

“History - Royal Alexandra Theatre.” Mirvish.com, Mirvish Company, 2017, www.mirvish.com/theatres/royal-alexandra-theatre?open=history#view. Accessed 9 May 2017.

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Royal Alexandra Theatre - Interior

“History - Royal Alexandra Theatre.” Mirvish.com, Mirvish Company, 2017,

www.mirvish.com/theatres/royal-alexandra-theatre?open=history#view. Accessed 9 May 2017.

To visit Dave Degrow’s larger database on Theatre Buildings, click below:

Girl Guides of Canada

Written by Heather Fitzsimmons Frey

Just prior to and during the First World War, the newly formed Girl Guides of Canada (established in 1909) did a wide range of performances to entertain, showcase skills, participate in rituals created by the Guides, and raise money for various causes such as the Red Cross, local hospitals, and going to camp. These included musical concerts, dance performances, 'Empire' pageants and tableaux as well as plays, operettas, and comedic sketches written by the girls or their troupe leaders. There were also 'spectacles' of physical culture (also called Swedish exercises or gymnastics), demonstrations of First Aid skills and military drills (such as flag signaling), and other forms of performance such as rituals, marches, and ceremonies directly related to the Girl Guides' activities and achievements (receiving badges or honours, “flying up” to a higher level, etc.). The culture and goals of the Girl Guides suggest that girls had a great deal of control over the content of these performances, and they probably built their costumes, props, and sets themselves. 

The following documents are from the Girl Guides of Canada Archive where researches can find scrapbooks that contain images and reports from across Canada, including photographs, newspaper clippings, and performance programmes, starting in 1913 and reaching to the present day.

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The Girl Guides of Toronto present their original play “The Adventures of the Princess Ring” on the grounds of Casa Loma.

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“Empire Pageant” Toronto.  Performing “the Empire” featuring Britannia in the middle, surrounded by her colonies, was a popular form of entertainment throughout the nineteenth century.  Performed in “national” dress, these entertainments offered opportunities to wear costumes and fancy dress, and to solidify a sense of loyalty to the crown.  They were also used in schools as ways to teach geography.  Note, for example, in this tableau on the far right that Australia is represented by a girl wearing a kangaroo dress, and next to her is a girl dress with long braids, presumably representing Canada in a way that engages with stereotypes of Indigenous people.

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“The Magic Kiss” by Jean McConnell Casa Loma. In 1914, Lady Pellatt invited the Girl Guides to perform another play at Casa Loma, the perfect performance space for a fairy tale. The images were printed in The Globe on June 20, 1914 and Toronto Sunday World, June 21, 1914, but it was performed on June 13.

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“Triangle Club Girl Guides, 14 – 18 years of age Dumbell Drill” Kenora; Burnaby Club Girl Guides “Club Swinging”. These images are two of many in the collection of girls performing physical culture drills. These exercises were intended to improve strength, flexibility, endurance, and grace. They were often performed to music. Note that the girls in Burnaby are probably wearing clothes that were not their regular Guide uniforms, but were probably specifically worn for exercise drills.

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“8th Girl Guides Club, Toronto” performing First Aid Drills. For an audience, girls had to speedily create stretchers from found objects, performing bandaging, and other safety and rescue drills.

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Girl Guides across Canada offered entertaining programmes to raise money to go to camp, for the Red Cross, or for other local charitable efforts.  Some programmes seem very amusing and comedic, while others were very serious. Here is an example of one programme in which the main feature may have been pantomime, dance, or even a series of tableaux. The programme was given during the First World War, although the performance confidently asserts victory for the Allies and peace.

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For this inventive tableau and performance, Girl Guides were promoting the importance of Victoria Gardens to address First World War food needs. The scrapbooks do not indicate what the girls did while dressed as vegetables. These images were collected in the scrapbooks in the Girl Guides of Canada National Archives, but may actually represent American girls.  

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Guiding involved particular performances of rituals loosely connected to Juliana Horatia Ewing’s story “The Brownies.” Involving recitation and pledges, the girls performed their commitment to Guides and Empire.

Rise Up Against Racism: Black Canadians and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

Written by Jimena Ortuzar

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) is widely known as one of the most racist films ever made and also as a groundbreaking work of early cinema. Adapted from the novel and play The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Birth of a Nation is a wildly twisted account of the American Civil War and Reconstruction period that demonizes African Americans and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. It is frequently taught in film studies classes for its significance to the development of narrative film, and more importantly, as a history lesson in race relations, media, and propaganda. 

This landmark film was an event in itself, released like a roadshow “with all the ballyhoo of a circus coming to town.” 1. Billed as “the eighth wonder of the world,” it was a feat of technical artistry and innovative storytelling, with a high ticket price and a full symphony orchestra playing live musical accompaniment. First released in the United States, the film was lauded by audiences and critics alike. But it also sparked protests in the streets and censorship fights in the courtroom, as outraged progressives aimed to shut down the film. Many attempts to cut, ban, or limit the film’s exhibition failed, namely because racism was not grounds for censorship at this time. 

The Birth of a Nation had extraordinary success in Canada, playing to huge crowds in various cities across Ontario and having multiple runs in Toronto. It premiered at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on September 20, 1915 (with audiences in formal dress), and soon after at Massey Hall, which extended the show for an additional week in the winter of 1916 and added a second run that summer. The film showed a remarkable ability to return repeatedly to the screen, and on Sep 12, 1916, The Birth of a Nation had its 100th performance in Toronto. It returned to Massey Hall again in 1917 and many more times after. 

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Article from the Toronto Star, September 17, 2015.

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Ad for D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (“8th Wonder of the World) playing at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. From the Toronto Star, September 18, 1915.

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Article from The Canadian Observer, a newspaper published for the black community by J.R.B Whitney from 1914 to 1919. September 18, 1915.

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Article reporting a mass meeting held in Windsor, Ontario to support the prohibition of the film The Birth of a Nation (sometimes referred to as ‘photoplay’). From The Canadian Observer, December 4, 1915.

The reception of The Birth of a Nation in Canadian theatres was overwhelmingly positive (astonishingly, audiences applauded and cheered the KKK vigilantes). For white Canadian audiences in 1915, Griffith’s civil war epic, filled with spectacular battlefield scenes and melodramatic narratives of sacrifice, spoke to their own experiences of the Great War. The Toronto Star reported that black Canadians were the only opponents to the film, which suggests white audiences happily accepted the film's grotesque distortion of history and incendiary racial messages. The black Canadian community in Toronto, likely aware of efforts to ban the film in the US, protested against the exhibition of Griffith’s film. Organizing together through church congregations, black Canadians in Toronto formed a delegation led by Reverend A. W. Hackley of the A. M. E. Church and William P. Hubbard, an African Canadian elected to the Toronto City Council in 1894. The delegation made an appeal to the Theatrical Inspection Board, and after being refused, brought their case to Premier Hearst. On Sep. 20, 1915, Hearst agreed to send an inspector to the first performance of the film to “eliminate the most objectionable scenes.” As a result, two scenes were cut (or rather “trimmed”) by the censor board.

Another delegation of black citizens joined the fight to ban the film before its release in Windsor. The delegation attempted to have an injunction issued against theatre management, but just as it was preparing to do so, the film was suddenly cancelled, allegedly due to a legal oversight during the purchase of the film rights for exhibition. However, as the Winsor Star newspaper later reported, the cancellation of the film may have been a way to avoid the legal battle that the injunction was sure to bring about. News of the successful suppression of the film was reported in The Canadian Observer, a newspaper published for the black community by J.R.B Whitney: “Fight is Ours, Birth of Nation Play Cancelled.” 

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Article from the Toronto Star, September 22, 1915.

Opposition to The Birth of a Nation took place elsewhere in the country, with reactions to the film recorded in the press across major cities: Montreal, Vancouver, Saint John and Halifax. In Montreal, a mass meeting was held at the United Congregational Church on September 22, 1915 where a resolution was passed against the film. The following day, the Princess Theatre in Montreal, where the film was to be shown, was burned. After rumours that protestors of the film had been responsible, the police began an investigation. But despite news reports linking the protests to such violent action, struggles to block the film were mainly fought in provincial government offices rather than in theatres. 

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Announcement sent to J.R.B. Whitney, publisher of the The Canadian Observer, after The Birth of a Nation was cancelled in Windsor. From The Canadian Observer, December 4, 1915.

Nova Scotia was the province where such efforts were most successful. Arguing that it constituted a threat to public order, a delegation of black leaders (and white allies that supported their efforts) lobbied the provincial government to ban the film. While never officially banned, The Birth of a Nation was not shown in 1915 or 1916. 2. This may seem like a small win given the film’s theatrical run and historical significance a century later, but it nonetheless reveals that Griffith’s hate-filled epic did not go unchallenged among black Canadians.  

1. Thomas Doherty. “The Birth of a Nation at 100: Important, Innovative and Despicable.” The Hollywood Reporter. Febrary 7, 2015.

2.  Greg Marquis. “A War Within a War: Canadian Reactions to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.” Histoire sociale/Social history, 47(94): 421-442, 2014.
   
   

A Cross-Burning on Hamilton Mountain

Written by Stephen Johnson

Additional Research and Curation by Amelia Nezil and Jimena Ortuzar

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A cross burning at the top of Hamilton Mountain, from the Hamilton Herald, 1 October 1931.

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Poster for D.W. Griffith's 'mighty spectacle' The Birth of a Nation (1915).

This image shows a public performance created in an attempt to revive the fortunes of a long-dormant movement in North America, the Ku Klux Klan. Originally forged in the American South during the period after the Civil War, where it actively and violently promoted segregation and a related series of 'Jim Crow' laws, the 'Klan' had fallen on hard times, and all but disappeared.

Then, in 1915, D. W Griffith released his 'epic' film The Birth of a Nation, which was a paean to the Klan, a powerfully sentimental piece of propaganda, and the most successful and widely seen film up to that time. Its release was protested extensively but nothing could stop its wide circulation across North America, or its attraction despite the subject matter--it was a technological as well as a propagandistic achievement, and much like some advance film technology today, it was difficult for audiences to avoid seeing it and still be a part of the general cultural conversation. So they went, and they were either appalled or moved.

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A march of members of the KKK south on James Street North circa 1930, no doubt to draw attention to the Klan, to create a photo opportunity for local newspapers, and to promote membership. Courtesy of the Hamilton Public Library.

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From the Hamilton Herald, 1 October 1931.

One of the results of the circulation of this film was a resurgence of groups calling themselves the KKK, all attempting to galvanize their membership in the interests of discrimination against anyone not Protestant and European in origin. This was true in Southern Ontario, and the newspapers of the 1920s and early 1930s had frequent reports of public gatherings, organizational meetings, and more.

Hamilton, Ontario, was a typical and not an unusual case. The 1920s was a disruptive cultural moment, when changes in communications and industrial technology, the movement of people in both urban and rural settings, and sudden changes of economic fortune drove many to look for stability in organizations both old and new--organizations with many different political and social 'soap to sell.' They protested the presence in the community--in any way--persons of colour, any non-Western-European immigrant, any Jewish immigration or presence, any Catholic immigration and presence...and the French. First Nations populations were not even countenanced with prejudice--they simply did not exist.

I have a personal family history with this event. My father was born and raised in Hamilton, and remembered these events. He remembered a cross burning on the side of Hamilton Mountain, an image only, burned into his memory (so to speak), and image without any history at all that he could remember. He remembered that his next door neighbour was a member of the local chapter of the KKK, and that everybody thought he was a 'flake' (if memory serves me, this was the word used). But he also remembers that the film The Birth of a Nation came to Hamilton not just once or twice, but in his recollection, annually, playing to broad audiences, for no defensible reason. It was simply on tour, and local communities accepted the 'tour.' That particular piece of inflammatory nostalgia had apparently become normalized.

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Members of the Klan marching on King Street West circa 1930. Courtesy of the Hamilton Public Library.

So what are we to take from these memories? The KKK was not a group that many people joined or respected. But they could not be ignored, and they could not be forgotten, because of their own performance of their existence, through the visceral power of a burning cross and through the endless circulation of a film by a touring monopoly that had no interest in local culture.

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From the Hamilton Herald, 23 March 1935.

Canadian National Institute for the Blind

Written by Jessica Watkin

Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. Easily share your publications and get them in front of Issuu's millions of monthly readers.

Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. Easily share your publications and get them in front of Issuu's millions of monthly readers.

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Founded in 1918 at the end of the First World War, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) devoted its first year to engaging both the public and a small blind community mainly made up of veterans. The organization provided rehabilitation services for blind and partially blinded people in Ontario while focusing on creating living and working opportunities for Toronto’s blind community. Exploring the particular needs and varying conditions of blind people, the CNIB developed programs and staff positions that still serve as the primary structure of the organization that continues to support blind people across Canada. 

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The Bulletin, first published in October 1918, served as a public notice for changes within the organization, its staff and board, and the programs in development. I discovered this publication after a trip to the CNIB archives where my experience went beyond the visual; it became a tactile search through an extensive collection of braille documents spanning the last hundred years of the organization. Held at Library and Archives Canada, The Bulletinwas generously shared by Jane Beaumont, CNIB’s current Archivist, upon preparations for the 2018 centennial celebration of the organization. Beaumont and her team created a “living history” exhibit based on these documents and many others like them to celebrate the conception of the organization, its growth and its future (visit the special online exhibit by clicking the link below).

The November 1, 1918 issue of The Bulletindescribes an exhibit in which blind people show “what they can do” at a local event called “Carnival of Nations.”  The carnival featured blind people performing activities in a curated setting. While this exhibit may invite comparisons to the more popular freak show of the late 19thand early 20thcenturies, the CNIB’s efforts centered on advocacy, showing blind people successfully doing “normal” things. These performances are the first recorded instances of shared experience between the private and public lives of blind Canadians and the general public in Toronto, which also suggests a context and relationship between the two. The need for blind Canadians to “prove” their competence while also showcasing their exoticized private lives gives us a glimpse into the CNIB’s understanding of public attitudes towards blind people; this is what needed to happen for their experiences to be understood and supported by the public. While the organization has developed extensively over the last 100 years it continues to showcase blind skills today in various ways.

An example of this would be in the November 1, 1918 issue pictured here The Bulletin editors chose to showcase an exhibit in which blind people show “what they can do” at a local event called “Carnival of Nations”.  Real blind people performing real blind activities in a curated setting, possibly a small hint of freak show, but more prominently the CNIB gravitates towards advocacy in showing a successful blind person doing those “normal” things. These performances act as the first recorded instance of shared experience between the private and public lives of blind Canadians and the public in Toronto, but also suggests a context and relationship between the two as well.  The need to “prove” their competence while also showcasing their exoticisized private lives creates an idea of what the CNIB believed the public thought of blind people, but also possibly hints at what needed to happen in order for their experiences to be understood and supported.  The organization has developed over the last 100 years but continues to showcase blind skills today in various ways.

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In the May 1, 1919 issue of The Bulletin, the editors announced the inclusion of blind persons in the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) through a sensory experience of artifacts in its collection. The museum’s guided and tactile tours of exhibits act as a performance history: an experience that introduces blind people to historical artifacts previously understood through vision. The excerpt above reveals that CNIB’s advocacy within the community integrated performative qualities within everyday experience, enlivening the museum visit that is otherwise passive. The tactile tours at the ROM have developed over the past 100 years and remain a key part of blind culture and inclusion in Toronto today (blind patrons can request a tour at any time). These interactive explorations of exhibits have now been integrated into the patron experience, extending this particular performance history to the general public and normalizing the inclusion of blind people in Toronto’s popular culture.

 Link to CNIB’s special online exhibit: http://thatallmayread.ca/explore-history/

The Great Wizard of the North

Written by Joe Culpepper
Curated by Jimena Ortuzar

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Professor Anderson performing his famous bottle trick with his son in his illusion act "The Magic Scrapbook" at the Boston Melodeon in 1852. Image from Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, an illustrated periodical digitized by the Boston Public Library.

John Henry Anderson, known as The Great Wizard of the North, was one of the most famous apparatus conjurors of the nineteenth century. He joined a traveling circus and then a theatre company with which he toured the smaller towns of Scotland as a young boy. Shortly thereafter, he witnessed a magic show (most likely a performance by Ingleby Lunar) and decided to become a professional magician. Though he spent most of his career performing in Europe, he also enjoyed great success in Canada and the United States during three separate tours beginning in 1850, 1860 and 1865 respectively.

Anderson, as suggested by the primary records of his performances in the Ontario region, was a master of publicity, mise-en-scène and presentation. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and Carl Herrmann were far better sleight-of-hand artists than their Scottish competitor, but Anderson owned beautiful, elaborate apparatus, was a shrewd marketer and presented himself well as an exotic performer. Part of his appeal for European and North American audiences came from his cultural identity. In his illusion, "The Magic Scrap Book," the Wizard of the North produced an impossible number of large objects and concluded the routine with the magical appearance of his son in full Highland costume. In addition to such references to his Scottish heritage, Anderson frequently ended a run of his magic shows by performing the part of Rob Roy in local theatre productions. His wife, four daughters and two sons all, at one time or another, were involved in magic acts, both before and after, their father's performance days, which ended with his death in Darlington, England in 1874.

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Advertisement for Professor Anderson's magic performances at the Music Hall, Mechanic's Institute in Toronto during the Agricultural Exhibition of 1862 in Toronto. From the Global and Mail, 19 September, 1862.

Hodge Playbill

Written by Stephen Johnson

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Hodge Playbill

This Playbill is a part of the history of the Peters Family, a large group of early settlers in Southern Ontario, stretching back to the early 19th century.  This particular document describes the performance of a boy, probably no more than twelve years of age, as a comedian, ventriloquist, character singer, and magician.  The source is southwestern Ontario, likely from the Chatham area.  The bill is from the early twentieth century, likely 1900-1905, based on the date of birth of this 'Boy Comedian.'  Herbert Omer Hodge was born in April 8, 1887, and would have been 13 in 1900; the bill itself advertises the entertainment as 'a rollicking twentieth century play,' as if that was something new. 

The only context to this document is oral history, through the grandchildren of this boy.  According to these stories, William Hodge, the 'director' of this performance, was a farmer and house-painter, who in the wintertime travelled to the rural communities with this son to raise additional funds for he family through performance.  Although information is difficult to confirm, there are some reasonable assumptions to be made.  They would have travelled by sled, the only means of transportation at this time of year in southwestern Ontario.  They would have performed either in church basements or halls, or in people's homes, the assumption being that the communities would have been too small for anything like a 'town hall.'  They would have had a minimal means of advertisement, primarily this handbill, which would have been distributed shortly before the performance.  This assumption is based on the fact that no post or advance announcement would have been possible--although it may be that the phone was then a means of advance warning.  The entertainment would have been family oriented, and wide-ranging, for an audience that was steeped in an English cultural tradition, but without any exposure to touring performance.  All performance they experienced would have been self-created, for each other.   

This kind of performance--the locally touring semi-professional--is particularly difficult to find.  There would have been on newspaper to advertise in; and in any event, the performers would not be able to afford to advertise, and no newspaper would have been delivered to potential audiences prior to the rather sudden appearance of the performers.  This kind of performance, in effect, was an elaboration on the kinds of amateur entertainments that were most prevalent, by default, at this time in the rural areas of the country.  A particularly enterprising (and needful) parent decided that his son was particularly talented--that is, capable of attracting a local audience, and perhaps more widely known than in his own community because of this.  News travelled from church to church during regular regional events, and a name might be 'known.'  There is little evidence of this kind of performance, making this document of particular importance.  It speaks to a local culture that had hierarchies of entertainment, from local amateur through local and regional touring, that was both an education and a preparation for touring professionals when they did come through town.   

As an addendum:  I have an eyewitness account that saw a performance by Fred Hodge, Herbert Hodge's brother, circa 1948, in the Odessa Methodist Church Hall.  The performance was a marionette show, using puppets that were family heirlooms, as I understand it from other accounts, belonging to the father, William, and to Herbert.  These 'puppets' (as they were called--not marionettes, which is what they were), were well-remembers in the Peters family, as a part of the expertise of one part of the family, as a regular feature of the family and the community performance experience, and as artifacts.  I have recollections of performances in the 1950s at home, and one reference to seeing the puppets in disarray in a garage later.  They are long gone.  What is of interest is that the culture of performing, and the expertise, persisted so long.  It is also of interest to compare the existence of these marionettes with the handbill, which mentions no puppetry, and yet in the family memory is closely tied to those other, long disappeared artifacts.  It may be that the puppetry was a later addition to the 'act'; surely if they had been a feature of this performance, they would have been advertised! 

If further research was to be done on this subject, a tour of archives in southwestern Ontario would be important, a look through local newspapers (just in case), and a concerted effort to find the descendents of this family, in case there are family archives.   

Written by Stephen Johnson, with information supplied by family members James Johnson (brother), Pearl Johnson (mother), and Terry Johnson (cousin).  The original of this playbill has not been located, but early photocopies are extant.