Roadshow Pilot Projects

The Gatherings Roadshow is a playful, curiosity-driven series that invites artists, scholars, and community members to share the personal archives, objects, and practices that shape their creative or scholarly work. Inspired by the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow—but replacing monetary appraisal with emotional, cultural, and communal value—the series offers a space for intimate storytelling and collective reflection.

Each short presentation is a kind of “academic show and tell,” spotlighting early works-in-progress, recent discoveries, and questions still without answers. Over the past four years, Roadshow guests have introduced audiences to theatrical artefacts such as masks and musical instruments, performance archives like ticket stubs and genealogical records, and embodied practices from breadmaking to beadwork to repairing a birch bark canoe.

The Roadshow thrives on moments of connection—when a colleague’s eyes light up over a newly unearthed document, or when a family heirloom prompts questions about inheritance, preservation, and memory. These stories often transcend the object itself, opening up larger conversations about how we remember, what we value, and the many forms a (performance) archive can take.

Whether rooted in the theatre, the kitchen, or outdoors, the Gatherings Roadshow celebrates unfinished ideas, early thoughts, and the joy of saying, “Look at this cool thing… what do you make of it?”