Gatherings Partnership

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Stephen Johnson is a full professor in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. His university training was at the University of Guelph (BA), the University of Toronto (MA), and in the Performance Studies Department at New York University (PhD). He has published widely on 19th and 20th century popular performance, including in Theatre Research in Canada, which he (co)edited for ten years. He has been active in a number of scholarly organizations, serving on the executive of the Theatre Library Association, the Society of Dance History Scholars, and as president of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research / Association canadienne de la recherche théâtrale (CATR/ACRT).

The Spear Carrier

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Justin A. Blum is Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, where he teaches theatre history and theory, dramatic literature, and dramaturgy. His academic research deals largely with performance and/as visual culture the long nineteenth century in Britain, Canada, and the United States, with a particular focus on popular, itinerant, and other forms of theatre and performance not always considered artistically legitimate. His writing has appeared in journals including Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Theatre Research in Canada, and Theatre Topics. He also holds a conservatory degree in Dramatic Writing from New York University, and has worked as a dramaturg, playwright, and translator in professional and academic settings across North America.

Current Research
My research program is divided between historical research on modern visual culture in/as performance, and work as a translator of historical dramas and dramaturg. In the former case, much of my work focuses on the long nineteenth century in Britain, Canada, and the United States, with a particular focus on popular, itinerant, illegitimate, and other forms of performance that are often poorly preserved in the literary and archival records. Ongoing research projects include a reexamination of public reactions to the visit of Edmund Kean to what is now the province of Quebec in 1826, archival research into the use of literary and theatrical tableaux in the work of itinerant photographers in the West in the early twentieth century, and a paper reevaluating the influence of the popular theatre on the early cinematic work of Alfred Hitchcock.

CO-INVESTIGATOR
Dr. Seika Boye is a scholar, writer, educator and artist whose practices revolve around dance and movement. She is a Lecturer in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Director of the Institute for Dance Studies, University of Toronto. From 1995-2010, Boye performed and presented her choreography across Canada as a modern/postmodern dance artist. More recently she has worked as a movement dramaturg with many artists/collectives including current projects with Natasha Powell, Dances With Trane, 2020 premiere; Syreeta Hector, Black Ballerina, 2019; Mix Mix Dance Collective, Reclaiming My Time, 2019; mentor/process facilitator with Heidi Strauss/adelheid dance projects, re:research Choreographic Intensive. Invested in movement histories and the archive, Boye curated the archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2018-19), where she began the archving project This Living Dancer. Most recently Seika co-curated Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario, with Mona Stonefish, Peter Park, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Evadne Kelly, and Sky Stonefish. Seika works as a consultant across the dance sector.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Based in Tkaron:to where she was born and largely raised, Jill Carter is an Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi theatre-practitioner, researcher and educator at the University of Toronto. Her research and praxis base themselves in the mechanics of story creation, the processes of delivery, and the mechanics of Affect. She is an active member of the Talking Treaties Collective, founder of the Collective Encounter, and serves as researcher and tour guide for First Story, Toronto with which she also devises land activations, mapping interventions, and personal cosmography workshops.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Jenn Cole is a mixed-ancestry Algonquin Anishinaabe-kwe and Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Trent University. She researches Indigenous Performance as it intersects with settler/Indigenous relations and reciprocal relationship to the land, especially at the site of the Kiji Sibi/Ottawa River in Algonquin Territory. In programming, curation, publication, public talks, teaching and performance, she works to create experiences that enable participants across generations to decolonize their relationships to place and one another through multi-arts practices. She is Creative Director of the Aging Activisms Research Collective; Co-Investigator in the SSHRC-funded partnership development project, Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Canadian Performance; Associate Artistic Producer for Nozhem: First People's Performance Space; Editor for the Views and Reviews section of Canadian Theatre Review; Co-Conveynor of the Indigenous Performance Research in the Americas Working Group for the American Society for Theatre Research; and editor of Gatherings, a publication for the collection and distribution of creative scholarly work in performance.

Current Research
My research follows the performance histories of two rivers, the Kiji Sibi (Ottawa River) and the Odenabe in order to amplify Indigenous stories, presence and cosmologies. The most valuable contribution I can make to the field of Indigenous Performance and to my community is to remap Kiji Sibi/Ottawa River territory, layering back the lands’ and waters’ stories and the vibrancy of Indigenous presence, and to document the difficulties of doing so in the aftermath of colonialism. I research artistic acts that engage lands and waters as I try to decolonize my relationship to the place I grew up and the place in which I live. In this work, I am undertaking short auto-ethnographic studies and personal performances that engage the Kiji Sibi and my Algonquin ancestry, including the sacred site Migiziz Gishgaabikaan/Oiseau Rick, Atomic Energy of Canada, and the Ottawa 2017 spectacular illumination of sacred Chaudiére Falls, Miwate. This research treats the Ottawa River as a performance archive for Anishnaabe stories histories of early encounters between settlers and the Algonquin nation, and the continued witnessing of shifting settler/Indigenous relations (as well as gender play in lumber camps). As part of this exploration, I continue artistic research I have begun on intergenerational storytelling and the family archive.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Heather Fitzsimmons Frey is an Associate Professor of Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University in Edmonton. Her research focuses on the arts and young people, and in particular, performance for, by, and with young people (a frequently neglected demographic in performance research). She has recently worked with the Girl Guides of Canada archives, Dance Collection Danse, Fort Edmonton Park, the WeeFestival, The AMY Project, UNITY Charity, and Early Learning at MacEwan in order to conduct research that engages a variety of communities, and stretches definitions of where and how performances are meaningful. Besides being a co-investigator with Gatherings, she is a co-investigator for YouthSites (principal investigator Stuart Poyntz), and is principal investigator for Young People are the Future: Youth Representing Settler and Indigenous Histories at Fort Edmonton Park. She is on the International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network (ITYARN) Board of Directors. Recent work is published in Girlhood Studies, Jeunesse, Journal of Childhood Studies, Oxford Review of Education, and Youth Theatre Journal, and in books such as Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2019), Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance (Routledge 2014) and in her edited collection Ignite: Illuminating Theatre for Young People (Playwrights Canada Press 2016.)

Current Research

Heather Fitzsimmons Frey’s research focuses the arts and young people, and in particular, performance for, by, and with young people. While her contemporary research focuses on Canadian youth arts organizations (particular organizations working with multi-barriered young people), contemporary Canadian Theatre for Young Audiences, and practice-based research in theatre for the early years demographic, she also has research that has an historical focus, more in-keeping with the objectives of

Gatherings. One project involves archival and performance-based research methodologies to examine physical cultural / gymnastics drills and performances in Canada prior to the 1930s. To date, she has been looking at the Girl Guides of Canada archives, Dance Collection Danse archives, and the documents created for Ontario public school teachers. Another project is called “Young People are the Future: Youth Volunteers Representing Indigenous and Settler Histories at Living History Sites.” This project aims to understand how young people perform and present the past, how their presence and their ideas shape the performance of the past, and how (if) the approach to incorporating young people into living history museums has changed since the 1980s.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Gabrielle Houle is a multilingual artist, educator, and theatre scholar specialized in the recent staging history of the Commedia dell’Arte, masked performance, movement for actors, oral history of performance, and the creation of masks. She holds a Ph.D. in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Toronto. Gabrielle trained internationally as a physical performer and as a mask-maker with people such as sculptor Donato Sartori, Commedia specialist Antonio Fava, members of the Odin Teatret in Denmark, actor and mask-maker Bruce Marrs at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California, and co-artistic director of SITI Company (New York) Ellen Lauren. Gabrielle performed in Canada and in Europe as an actor. She also designed masks for university programs, theatre and dance productions, and film. Since 2009, Gabrielle has taught a wide variety of theatre courses, given acting workshops, and directed plays in universities across Canada. Gabrielle's research projects have been funded by SSHRC, FQRSC, and OGS. Gabrielle's scholarly work has been published in Theatre Research in Canada, Theatre History Studies, Canadian Theatre Review, Cuadernos de teatro (Universidad de Costa Rica), International Year of Astronomy 2009: Bringing Galileo to the World (Legas Press, 2015), and Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance (Legas Press, 2011).

Current Research
Her current project is called "In search of Michel Saint-Denis' masks: Provenance, design, use, and stories from masks kept at the National Theatre School of Canada." This study is part of Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance. A Co-Investigator on Gatherings, Gabrielle has served as Chair of the project's Oral History Subcommittee during Year 1 of the grant. She now co-chairs the task force on collections and archives with Dr. Mark David Turner, Adjunct Professor in the School of Music at Memorial University in Newfoundland. Her upcoming publication titled "Teaching Cycles REPÈRE: A Conversation with Jacques Lessard" will appear in the collection of essays Why Devise? (Intellect Books, publication date TBA).

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen's University and a co-founding director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies and her MA from Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on audience and spectatorship studies, and in particular on the ways in which audiences impact, receive, and make meaning through performance. She was awarded funding from SSHRC to study copresence in a project called Being Together (2021-2023) and is also currently involved in a project on pandemic responses to the live performing arts across the G7 countries funded by the British Academy (2023-2024). Kelsey has shared her work at CATR, ASTR, ATHE, IFTR, MATC, TAPRA and in AllStages Magazine, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, Research in Drama Education, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Canadian Theatre Review. She has published one co-edited collection, Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research Through Performative Research (Springer, 2020) and one monograph, Real-ish: Audiences, Feeling, and the Production of Realness in Contemporary Performance (McGill-Queen’s Press 2023). Kelsey is also series co-editor of the Routledge Theatre & Performance Series in Audience Research with Kirsty Sedgman. Additional research interests include: affect theory, applied theatre, qualitative methodologies, and equity and access in audiences.

Current Research
My current academic work is in audience and spectatorship studies and qualitative methodologies. While my focus is in theatre and performance studies, considered broadly, I am also co-founder and director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research which works with colleagues across museum studies, visual art, health care, sports, and disability. My current and recent projects include: editing a collection about global drama classrooms and student perceptions of citizenry, conducting research into digital audience research methods and the performance of social media, and completing a manuscript on audience perception and valuation of realness in contemporary performance practice. I have additional research interests in applied theatre and education and decolonizing and indigenizing pedagogy. I am currently working on a new project entitled ‘Audiences as/for/by design’ exploring how we might think about audiences as scenographic and dramaturgical tools in performance: how do other spectators impact my experience of a performance? This involves three different areas thus far, including digital audience,s immersive theatre audiences, and crowd/public audiences.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Matt Jones is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. He researches issues of war, terrorism, security, and racism in performance. His dissertation, is The Shock and Awe of the Real: Political Performance in an Age of War and Terror, is a transnational study of theatre, live art, direct action protests, and new media installations about the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. His published writing has addressed problems of representing war in performance as well as the performative construction of war in reality. He is the recent co-editor, with Barry Freeman, of a special issue of Canadian Theatre Review exploring the subject of “Post-Truth.”

Matt has taught courses in performance theory, theatre history, academic writing, and creative writing at the University of Toronto, Seneca College, and Concordia University. His writing has appeared in academic and journalistic publications, including Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, SubStance, alt.theatre, the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, This Magazine, and Canadian Dimension. As a playwright and theatre devisor, his work includes the plays Dracula in a Time of Climate Change, The Mysterious Case of the Flying Anarchist and the collective creations Death Clowns in Guantánamo Bay and ASMRtist. As a dramaturg, he has worked on Mohammad Yaghoubi’s A Moment of Silence, Djanet Sears’s production of Scorched, and Arshad Khan’s award-winning documentary film, Abu. His work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Martin Julien is a professional actor and singer of over forty years, as well as an academic researcher in the field of Canadian theatrical performance and legacy in the mid- to late- twentieth century. He is currently a full-time lecturer and instructor in Sheridan College's Honours BFA Music Theatre Program in Oakville. In 2019, he was senior editor for the recently published Theatre Passe Muraille: A Collective History (Playwrights Canada Press), which solicited, documented, and illustrated scores of written testimonies from practitioners who have worked at this ground-breaking theatre since its founding in 1968 in Toronto. He holds a doctorate through the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in the University of Toronto, specializing in the field of acting theory and methodology.

Current Research
Dr. Julien's primary research outcomes will involve the collecting of audio interviews with a cohort of professional Canadian actors who are in their ‘senior’, or ‘veteran’ years. Specifically, these will focus primarily on practitioners whose earlier careers negotiated the performing and vocational ‘space’ that extended from an ‘amateur’ or ‘semi-professional’ arena of practice to the fully professional cultural and financial milieu that flowered in the regions and territories of Canada, circa 1950 to 1980. A dozen such interviews have already been conducted, and are in the process, through Gatherings, of being transcribed and time-coded. Pursuant to these outcomes is the establishment of an accessible archive of subjective histories that will contribute often-undocumented narratologies to Canadian theatre history research regarding the establishment of a professional performing class during the mid-to-late twentieth-century.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Dr. Alexandra (Sasha) Kovacs is Assistant Professor of theatre history at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on the historiography of Canadian theatre made by women, with a specific (though not exclusive) consideration of the construction of the performance history of late Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka) Six Nations writer/performer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). Her essay related to Johnson, published in Playwrights Canada Presses collection Canadian Performance History and Historiographies (2017; Edited by Heather Davis-Fisch), was awarded the 2018 Canadian Association for Theatre Research Richard Plant Award for the best English-language article on a Canadian theatre or performance topic. Her research on Johnson is also included in the collection Canadian Performance Documents and Debates (2022). Kovacs’ research work has also been published in Performance Research, Shakespeare International Yearbook, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review (where she also edited the issue “Performance and Human Rights in the Americas” with Jimena Ortuzar and Natalie Alvarez), and the collection Space and Place: Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere. Her research work is informed by her decades of experience as a theatre professional, working as performer, director, curator, and arts manager. Kovacs brings to this project extensive experience working with non-traditional performance related archival materials, as well as a research interest on and practical experience in facilitating and structuring partnerships between University and Not for Profit organizations.

Current Research

My primary research project focuses on the investigation of histories of Canadian women performers and creators. I am presently engaged in the development of a monograph that develops a critical performance biography of Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) poet-performer E. Pauline Johnson. My research work on Pauline Johnson inspires and intersects with a broader interest in the politics and pragmatic challenges of archiving women’s performance; this prompted my organization of the 2020 Symposium “Preserving Performance in the Pacific Northwest” held at the University of Victoria and Royal BC Museum and my co-leadership (with Dr. Heather Davis-Fisch) of the Performance in the Pacific Northwest: Pilot Project (https://performancepnw.uvic.ca). I also investigate the documentation of living women creators, and am collaborating with Dr. Michelle MacArthur on a critical scrapbook that advances scholarship and consideration of the contributions made by Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch.

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Allana C. Lindgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria. Her publications, which are based on archival research and/or oral history interviews, have appeared in a variety of journals and collections, including Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, Dance Research Journal, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, American Journal of Dance Therapy, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Recent publications include The Modernist World (co-edited with Stephen Ross) and Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s (co-edited with Kaija Pepper). She is also the Dance Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.

Current Research
Allana Lindgren is currently co-editing three book projects: Canadian Performance Documents and Debates (with Anthony Vickery and Glen Nichols); Moving Together: Dance and Pluralism in Canada (with Batia Boe Stolar and Clara Sacchetti); and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernist Dance (with Lynn Garafola, Susan Manning, Janet O’Shea, and Danielle Robinson). She is also working on a single-authored cultural history of dance in Canada from the late-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. In addition, she continues to work on the Oral History Dance Collection, an online oral history repository at the University of Victoria. This project seeks to understand the career trajectories and working conditions for professional dance artists. Finally, she is currently serving as the Co-chair of the Program Committee for the upcoming Dance Studies Association conference, which will be held in Vancouver in 2020.

Mark David Turner is a cultural historian and facilitator who works at the intersection of media, performing arts, and archival practice in the Northwest Atlantic and Circumpolar North. He regularly works with the Nunatsiavut Government and OKâlaKatiget Society as a Manager of Audio-Visual Archives and Media Literacy and is an Adjunct Professor of Music at Memorial University’s School of Music. Mark co-owns Brack and Brine with Morgen Mils.