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.
