by Sanja Vodovnik
Edited by Matt Jones and Jimena Ortuzar
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.
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.
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.
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.
Expo 67 Visitor’s Passport. © Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada
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).
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.
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
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.
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
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 3.
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.
Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies. MIT Press, 2017, 132.
Cf. Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture, Duke University Press, 2011, 9.
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.
