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