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?
