Wages for Housework (with Jimena Ortuzar)

In this Gatherings Roadshow presentation, Dr. Jimena Ortúzar brings forward a vibrant archive of ephemera from the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s: pamphlets, posters, flyers, songs, postcards, and street-level graphics used to organize and agitate. Emerging in Italy through a group of Marxist feminists—and later taken up internationally, including by the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee—the movement positioned the sexual division of labour as foundational to women’s exploitation within capitalist societies.

These documents reveal a radical anti-work feminist politics. The movement argued that housework is a form of hidden labour essential to the production of surplus value: it keeps workers fed, clothed, and able to return to the wage economy, while reproducing the next generation of workers. “All women, married or not, housework is our common problem. Let’s make it our common struggle,” one leaflet proclaims.

Ortúzar examines this material through the lens of performance. To refuse housework was, in effect, to refuse performance—to disrupt the gendered scripts of domestic labour. The posters and pamphlets become gestures: instructions for action, visible markers of solidarity, and tools for re-staging everyday life as something that could be interrupted, resisted, or reimagined.

Interdependent Magic and an Archive of Care (with Jessica Watkin)

In this Gatherings Roadshow presentation, artist-scholar Dr. Jessica Watkin reflects on the archive as a site where Disability performance often disappears. Her artefact is her award-winning book, Interdependent Magic (Playwrights Canada Press), an edited collection of scripts by Disabled playwrights and theatre-makers across Canada. Watkin approaches its scripts as an archive in itself: a place where traces of performance are preserved and where new forms of documentation might emerge.

Yet, she argues, scripts rarely capture the most crucial elements of Disability performance—care, support, access labour, and interdependence. Reviews and production documents tend to overlook these practices entirely. Even in the book, the challenge remains: how do we “leave evidence” of access and care on the page? What gets translated, and what is lost? Watkin points to Chris Dodd’s Deafy, a play performed entirely in ASL, to ask how Deaf performance is archived when its primary language and form are flattened into text.

Watkin reflects on the successes and limits of Interdependent Magic, ultimately issuing a call for an archive of care—one that documents access as intentionally as blocking notes or stage directions. What would it mean for scripts to record care, support, and interdependence as integral to the art, rather than incidental to it?

Historiographies of Performance in the Pacific Northwest (with Sasha Kovacs and Heather Davis-Fisch)

In their 2024 Roadshow presentation, Historiographies of Performance in the Pacific Northwest, Drs. Sasha Kovacs and Heather Davis-Fisch foreground the entwined questions of land, territory, and pedagogy: what does it mean to teach and study performance history across multiple and contested territories? Their collaborative project approaches the archive as both a material and epistemological site of decolonization, investigating how objects held within museums might reshape the historiography of performance in the region.

Through visits to museums and archives across British Columbia—including Nanaimo, Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, and Chilliwack—the research team sought “performance materials” within institutional collections. Frequently met with responses of uncertainty (“No, I don’t think so”), they persisted, working alongside curators and local knowledge holders to reframe how performance might be recognized in the archive. Six key artefacts emerged: from Indigenous Passion Plays and Chinese opera furnishings to the costume of E. Pauline Johnson and media related to early technologies of both theatricality and colonization.

Now expanded into an open-access digital archive, the project reconsiders the museum as a generative site for unsettling colonial narratives of performance. By reading across territories, disciplines, and collections, Historiographies of Performance in the Pacific Northwest asks how performance history might be written otherwise: relationally, locally, and in conversation with the land itself.

"A River Runs Through It" - Mapping Edmonton in Beadwork (with Madison Francouer)

In this Gatherings Roadshow presentation, Madison Francoeur shares a small, circular piece of beadwork—an intricately crafted representation of Edmonton. Through multicoloured beads and a striking blue river cutting through the centre, Francoeur translates a city into a tactile, temporal form: a landscape held in the palm of one’s hand.

The work embodies hours of labour and attention, each bead marking a point of connection between self, land, and history. It is both a personal expression of home and a reflection on being a guest in that place—a recognition of Indigenous land and ongoing relationships of care and responsibility.

By transforming Edmonton into a physical artefact, Francoeur invites us to consider how place might be rendered through touch, texture, and time. How does the land record us, even as we attempt to record it? And what might it mean to carry a landscape—not as image or map, but as a patient act of making?

Traces of Care in the Archive (with Maria Meindl)

In Traces of Care in the Archive, Dr. Maria Meindl uncovers traces of her mother—a typist employed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the 1970s—within letters, memos, and planning documents from that period. Her mother’s work coincided with the AGO’s major expansion, including the creation of the brutalist Henry Moore Gallery dedicated to the British sculptor. Within these papers, Meindl encounters the quiet presence of clerical labour: essential, sometimes invisible, yet deeply embedded in the institution’s history.

To follow these traces, Meindl had to learn a ‘lost’ language—the shorthand and initials of office communication, the phrasing of phone messages. Through these details, she reconstructs a professional world where precision, care, and repetition formed a complex choreography of unseen work.

As she revisits these documents, questions arise: whose labour is preserved in the archive, and whose is effaced?

Blending archival research and personal reflection, Traces of Care in the Archive asks how we might recognize the artistry within administration—and recover the humanity within the bureaucratic record.

Unmarked / Unposted: The Ephemera of the Conference Poster (with Caitlin Gowans)

In this Gatherings Roadshow presentation from 2024, Caitlin Gowans takes us on a journey through a disappearing archive—one that is both physical and digital. From beneath her couch emerge dozens of posters from the Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT), the annual graduate conference at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Once pinned to campus walls for a few fleeting days, these posters—alongside long-defunct Wordpress sites, vanished social media accounts, and broken hyperlinks—form a ghostly record of performance scholarship in motion.

Drawing on Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked, Gowans examines the ephemeral nature of the conference presentation and the quiet afterlives of academic gatherings. What happens to student conferences once the posters are discarded and the websites go offline? What remains of the performances of research that took place there?

By tracing the residues of these events—through images, metadata, and physical remnants—Gowans reflects on the tension between preservation and disappearance.

Shakespeare and Spitballs at the Stratford Festival (with Stephen Johnson)

In this Gatherings Roadshow talk, Dr. Stephen Johnson reflects on the power—and the fragility—of memory in shaping our earliest encounters with performance. As part of a broader oral history project collecting “first gatherings” from artists and scholars, Johnson shares two personal stories of attending the Stratford Festival.

The first is from childhood, at just four years old. Led by his parents, he remembers “walking up a hill with a lot of other people towards a round and imposing building.” Flashes of the event remain: the glint of strings of pearls, the largest crowd he had ever seen, the darkness of the theatre, a hat adorned with feathers. These fragments—light, movement, texture—become their own kind of archive, preserving not a full record but an emotional and sensory one.

The second story returns to Stratford during high school, where he attended King Lear starring William Hutt. In the middle of the storm scene—thunder, flashes, rain—Hutt abruptly halted the performance to announce, “Someone threw a spitball on this stage.” The moment lodged itself in memory as sharply as any scripted line.

Johnson’s stories invite us to ask: What do we remember about our first encounters with theatre, and how do these imperfect recollections shape our personal performance histories?

Investigating Operation Pacification (with Matt Jones)

In this Gatherings Roadshow presentation, Dr. Matt Jones explores the history of the McGill Moratorium Committee, a Montreal-based activist group that formed part of a national network opposing Canadian complicity in the Vietnam War. Drawing from archival materials, Jones focuses on a striking 1969 protest that blurred the lines between activism, performance, and political theatre.

On November 12, 1969, activists staged a reenactment of “Operation Pacification”—a U.S. military strategy in Vietnam—in a small Quebec hamlet. With the help of Vietnamese refugees and McGill students, they staged an encounter, complete with a “propaganda drop” from a chartered plane scattering leaflets over the village. The protest was part of a broader campaign that included attempts to halt trains carrying war supplies to the United States.

Through press clippings, photographs, and leaflets, Jones reconstructs this moment in activist history, examining how the theatricality of protest can serve as a powerful political tool. Asking how might revisiting such events challenge or expand our understanding of Canadian political history during the Vietnam era?

Audience Archives (with Kelsey Jacobson)

In this early Gatherings Roadshow talk, Dr. Kelsey Jacobson invites us into two strikingly personal archives built not by institutions, but by dedicated audience members. Drawing on interviews with eight seasoned theatregoers from across Canada, she focuses on two examples: a meticulously kept notebook filled with decades’ worth of ticket stubs, and an expansive Excel spreadsheet cataloguing every performance attended by a single individual. These self-created archives—born from passion, habit, and a deep engagement with theatre—offer a wealth of knowledge about performance in Toronto and beyond.

Yet, as Jacobson reveals, they also expose the biases, idiosyncrasies, and inevitable gaps in personal archiving. One theatregoer’s shorthand review—“If I stay awake, it’s a good show”—captures both the subjectivity and intimacy of such records. What does it mean to preserve theatre through the lens of a single audience member? How might these archives complement, complicate, or even challenge official records?

By foregrounding the audience’s role as active participants and historians of performance, Jacobson asks us to reconsider what—and who—constitutes a meaningful archive. In a form as ephemeral as theatre, perhaps it is precisely these partial, personal accounts that keep its memory alive.

‘Local jazz musicians left out of local jazz festival’: Researching community musical performance through the family archive (with Sarah Robbins)

Sarah Robbins

Found in a collision of genealogy, local history, and music, Sarah Robbins presents on the jazz career of her late grandfather, Vic Hill. Relying on the archives of local public libraries, as well as her own family narratives, Sarah traces the history of Vic’s relationship with the Oakville Jazz Festival and explores questions related to family, community memory, and the documentation of performance.

Archive, Provenance and Performance (with Stephen Johnson)

Stephen Johnson

In this ‘Gatherings Roadshow’ presentation from October 2022, Stephen Johnson explores an archive that once belonged to his father: a collection of over one-hundred and seventy 78 RPM records—each pressed between 1910 and the 1930s. Through cataloguing the collection, tracing its history, and connecting with LP archivists and enthusiasts, Stephen examines the value of material items and invites the question: what do we hold on to, and why?

acknowledgement of fuNding