Performance in the Pacific Northwest (2024)

What can a wooden chair, a costume, a playbill, and a newspaper clipping tell us about the role of performance in shaping a region's history? Performance in the Pacific Northwest is a collaborative research-creation project and digital humanities pilot website that surfaces and examines artifacts of performance history held in museums, galleries, libraries, and archives across the Pacific Northwest — and asks what these objects, still performing on their storage shelves, might reveal about the cultures, communities, and colonial histories that shaped them. The project set out to develop a methodology for performance research that was specific to place — grounded in the lands, peoples, and complex histories of the Pacific Northwest region.

Developed as a Digital Humanities prototype, this pilot website is a research and teaching hub to share knowledge about performance histories that takes performance-related materials and objects out of their museum drawer, display case, or archival folder to uncover the stories of these unique objects and materials, reactivate their creative and imaginative uses, and discuss the significant cultural and political impact made by a range of performances across the region. With support from a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, the research team conducted fieldwork across museums, archives, and heritage institutions on Vancouver Island and the BC mainland, working alongside archivists and curators to identify performance-related objects that had previously gone unrecognized as such.

In total, six significant performance artifacts were identified and became the focus of the project's research: a wooden chair from the Lun Yick Opera House in Nanaimo's Chinatown; a playbill for a 1790 London performance addressing the Nootka Sound Crisis; a touring costume belonging to Mohawk poet-performer E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake; a clipping documenting Opera by Telephone in settler-colonial BC; materials related to magic lantern performances in Victoria; and a newspaper clipping documenting an Indigenous-led passion play performed for audiences of hundreds.

I joined the project as Research Associate and Project Manager, leading the development of the first version of the project website and conducting fieldwork alongside the team — including dramaturgical analysis, site visits, and photogrammetry documentation of the Cantonese Opera chair, which allows users to rotate and examine the object in three dimensions. The project's move away from text-centric approaches to performance historiography, and its focus on objects as living materials still resonant with the histories they carry, has been central to both my research and my dramaturgy practice.

The website continues to evolve as a home for primary research and as an educational resource, with each artifact page featuring multi-vocal web essays, embedded primary sources, reactivation examples, and classroom discussion prompts. The project is now developing its next iteration, Traces and Circulations, which expands its scope to attend to the transnational and transoceanic movements of performance objects beyond their current museum contexts.

At CATR 2024 in Montreal, our team co-convened a roundtable, Intertwining DH Projects in Theatre and Performance Research, bringing together theatre and performance scholars engaged in digital humanities to share knowledge, surface challenges, and imagine possibilities for collaboration.

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