Performance Studies in Canada 9780773549869

Table of contents :
Cover
PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN CANADA
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Figures
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Performance Studies in Canada: Mapping Genealogies and Geographies of Performance Culture
PART ONE: PERFORMATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
1 Calgary’s Cultural Topography: The Performance of a City
2 X̲eyx̲elómós and Lady Franklin Rock: Place Naming, Performance Historiography, and Settler Methodologies
3 Choreographies of Place: Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn
4 Travelling Soles: Tracing the Footprints of Our Stolen Sisters
PART TWO: SPECTACLES OF NATION
5 The American Girl Comes to Canada
6 Presumptive Intimacies and the Politics of Touch: “Strategic Culture” in Simulations of War
7 Sochi Olympics 2014, Canadian Truth and Reconciliation, and the Haunting Ghouls of Canadian Nationalism
PART THREE: REFRAMING POLITICAL RESISTANCE
8 Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection: Listening to Anger, Being Idle No More
9 On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives
10 Occupying the Object: Leslie Baker and Andréane Leclerc in Performance
PART FOUR: PRACTISING RESEARCH
11 Two-Way Street: The Icon in the City
12 on love: Performance as Pedagogy
13 Writing the Red Trench: Performance, Visual Culture, and Emplaced Writing
14 Working Art – Working Knowledge: Doing the Visual and Making the Material Matter
AFTERWORD
Performance Studies and Canada
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

P E R F O R M A N C E S T U D I E S I N C A N A DA

PERF O RMAN CE S T U DI ES I N C AN ADA Edited by Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 isbn 978-0-7735-4984-5 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4985-2 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-4986-9 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-4987-6 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Performance studies in Canada / edited by Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4984-5 (cloth). – isbn 978-0-7735-4985-2 (paper). – isbn 978-0-7735-4986-9 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-4987-6 (epub) 1. Performing arts – Canada. I. Schweitzer, Marlis, 1975–, author, editor II. Levin, Laura, 1978–, author, editor pn2301.p47 2017

791.0971

c2017-900344-5 c2017-900345-3

This book is dedicated to our students, who continue to challenge and inspire us with their passion for all things performance.

CONTENTS

Figures ix Acknowledgments xiii I N T RO D U C T I O N

Performance Studies in Canada: Mapping Genealogies and Geographies of Performance Culture 3 Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer P A R T O N E : P E R F O R M AT I V E G E O G R A P H I E S

1

Calgary’s Cultural Topography: The Performance of a City 43 Susan Bennett

2

Xeyxelómós and Lady Franklin Rock: Place Naming, Performance Historiography, and Settler Methodologies 67 Heather Davis-Fisch

3

Choreographies of Place: Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn 90 Peter Dickinson

4

Travelling Soles: Tracing the Footprints of Our Stolen Sisters 115 Julie Nagam P A R T T W O : S P E C TA C L E S O F N AT I O N

5

The American Girl Comes to Canada 137 Marlis Schweitzer

6

Presumptive Intimacies and the Politics of Touch: “Strategic Culture” in Simulations of War 161 Natalie Alvarez

7

Sochi Olympics 2014, Canadian Truth and Reconciliation, and the Haunting Ghouls of Canadian Nationalism 184 Helene Vosters

viii

Contents P A R T T H R E E : R E F R A M I N G P O L I T I C A L R E S I S TA N C E

8

Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection: Listening to Anger, Being Idle No More 211 Dylan Robinson

9

On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 236 Laura Levin

10

Occupying the Object: Leslie Baker and Andréane Leclerc in Performance 262 Erin Hurley PA RT F O U R : P R A C T I S I N G R E S E A R C H

11

Two-Way Street: The Icon in the City 287 MJ Thompson

12

on love: Performance as Pedagogy 316 Naila Keleta-Mae

13

Writing the Red Trench: Performance, Visual Culture, and Emplaced Writing 340 Brian Rusted

14

Working Art – Working Knowledge: Doing the Visual and Making the Material Matter 358 Pam Hall A F T E RWO R D

Performance Studies and Canada 383 Ric Knowles Bibliography 389 Contributors 435 Index 439

FIGURES

0.1 Not your typical head of state. Photo: Bespoke 5 1.1 The Grand Theatre on 1st Street sw. Photo: Susan Bennett 45 1.2 Part of the Famous Five installation on Olympic Plaza. Photo: Susan Bennett 51 1.3 Jaume Plensa’s Wonderland, in front of the Bow Tower. Photo: Susan Bennett 55 1.4 The Peace Bridge over the Bow River. Photo: Susan Bennett 56 2.1 View of the rock, looking north up the Fraser River, taken 9 March 2015. Lady Franklin Pass is on the left side. Photo: Heather Davis-Fisch 75 2.2 View of Xeyxelómós and the pass, with Th’exelis at the right of the image. Photo taken 9 March 2015, looking down the Fraser River from the west bank. Photo: Heather Davis-Fisch 78 3.1 Yvonne Ng and Brendan Wyatt in Julia Aplin’s Onward Ho, My Love, part of Dancing on the Edge Festival’s 2013 presentation of Dusk Dances in Vancouver’s crab/Portside Park. Photo: Wayne Worden and Dancing on the Edge 99 3.2 Performers in Kate Franklin and Meredith Thompson’s Incandescent at Dancing on the Edge Festival’s 2013 presentation of Dusk Dances in Vancouver’s crab/Portside Park. Photo: Wayne Worden and Dancing on the Edge 101 3.3 Performers in Kokoro Dance’s 2013 presentation of Wreck Beach Butoh enter the Pacific Ocean. Photo: Yvonne Chew and Kokoro Dance 108 3.4 The Wreck Beach site imprints itself on Kokoro’s 2013 dancers. Photo: Yvonne Chew and Kokoro Dance 109 4.1 Walking with Our Sisters at Brandon University’s Down Under Space, 2016. Photo: Julie Nagam 122 4.2 Walking with Our Sisters at Brandon University’s Down Under Space, 2016. Photo: Julie Nagam 126 4.3 Walking with Our Sisters at Brandon University’s Down Under Space, 2016. Photo: Julie Nagam 130 5.1 Isabelle, the American Girl “doll of the year,” on display in the Indigo boutique, 2014. Photo: Marlis Schweitzer 138

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Figures

5.2 Entrance to the American Girl boutique and Indigo Books & Music. Photo: Marlis Schweitzer 146 5.3 “Create the doll just right for you!” A chorus of identically dressed American Girl dolls greet potential consumers. Photo: Marlis Schweitzer 153 6.1 The arid Alberta prairie serves as the backdrop of a mock Afghanistan and rows of shipping containers furnish a mock Afghan village. Photo: Natalie Alvarez 166 6.2 A wooden structure with plastic breads and produce serves as the makeshift stand of a street vendor against a backdrop of shipping containers. Photo: Natalie Alvarez 171 6.3 The carcass of a detonated vehicle signifies the presence and past activity of insurgents and the “performance remains” of previous scenarios. The prop is used repeatedly in scenarios involving suicide bombings and other ied explosions. Photo: Natalie Alvarez 172 6.4 Propaganda by insurgents decorates the walls of the village and serves as a clue to soldiers-in-training of an insurgent presence. Photo: Natalie Alvarez 175 7.1 Bus shelter “We Are Winter” ad featuring still image of bobsledder Kaillie Humphries. Photo: Jenifer Sutherland 185 7.2 Rhymes for Young Ghouls featuring Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs as Aila. Courtesy: Prospector Films 199 7.3 Rhymes for Young Ghouls featuring Shako Mattawa Jacobs as Jujijj. Courtesy: Prospector Films 200 8.1 Gingerbread bc coastline. Photo: Dylan Robinson 223 8.2 Slahal game at Park Royal Mall, 23 December 2011. Photo: Mique’l Dangeli 227 9.1 Toronto mayor Rob Ford giving away his candy at the Toronto Santa Claus Parade, 21 November 2010. Ford marched against the wishes of parade board members concerned about protests, following his admission that he had smoked crack cocaine. Photo: Jason Verwey. Courtesy: Creative Commons on Flickr.com 243 9.2 Campaign poster Hummer for Mayor, 1982. Left to right: Jenny Dean, Deanne Taylor, and Janet Burke. Photo: David Hylnsky. Courtesy: VideoCabaret 249 9.3 Toronto mayor Rob Ford (left) takes on professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in an arm-wrestling match to promote Fan Expo in Toronto on 23 August 2013. Photo: Canadian Press/Chris Young 253 10.1 Leslie Baker in Fuck You, You Fucking Perv, 2015. Courtesy: Leslie Baker 273

Figures

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10.2: Andréane Leclerc in Cherepaka, 2015. Photo: Frédéric Chais 278 11.1 Louise Lecavalier in Human Sex, the Spectrum, 1985. Photo: Linda Dawn Hammond/IndyFoto 289 11.2 Detailed map of the Plateau neighbourhood. Courtesy: Ville de Montréal 290 11.3 Édouard Lock and Louise Lecavalier, of La La La Human Steps, at Metropolis, 1994. Photo: Linda Dawn Hammond/IndyFoto 291 11.4 Street view of the Cooper Building, 2014. Photo: Étienne Tremblay-Tardif 293 11.5 The Blumenthal Building, home of Véhicule (Musée d’art vivant). Photo: McCord Museum 295 11.6 Broken surface ornamentation on the Blumenthal Building, 2014. Photo: Étienne Tremblay-Tardif 295 11.7 Restaurant as proscenium, social space as theatre: Café Express, 2014. Photo: Étienne Tremblay-Tardif 297 11.8 Street scene on St-Denis, at the former Gateries café, 2014. Photo: Étienne Tremblay-Tardif 299 11.9 Left to right: Lecavalier, Marc Béland, and Claude Godin performing in La La La Human Dance Steps, Human Sex, Spectrum, 1985. Photo: Linda Dawn Hammond/IndyFoto 300 11.10 Lecavalier’s signature “barrel jump,” with Carole Courtois (left), Spectrum, 1985. Photo: Linda Dawn Hammond/IndyFoto 301 11.11 Exterior view of the Spectrum, formerly the Alouette Cinema, circa 1950. Photo: John Swift. Courtesy American Classic Images, www.americanclassicimages.com 302 12.1 Poster for the UWaterloo Drama production of on love. Courtesy: Kevin Hanson, Monster Farm 320 12.2 Top to bottom, left to right: Marielle Lyon, Bob Stan, Carly Derderian, Robert Motum, and Zac Gungl in the UWaterloo Drama production of on love. Photo: William Innes 329 12.3 Left to right: Alan Shonfield, Leeanna Caligagan, and Chantaine Green-Leach in the UWaterloo Drama production of on love. Photo: William Innes 333 13.1 Don Wright, Clears Cove October 9, manuscript page. Used by permission of the estate of Don Wright. Originally exhibited as part of Don Wright: Of the Moment, 16 May–6 July 2008, the Rooms, St. John’s, Newfoundland. Photo: Brian Rusted 341 13.2 Don Wright, Red Trench. Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador Art Collection. Photo: Brian Rusted. Used by permission of the estate of Don Wright 353

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Figures

14.1–9 All images throughout this chapter were created and photographed by Pam Hall. Some are from the Bonne Bay and Great Northern Peninsula Chapter (2012), and others are from Fogo and Change Islands (2015). The full Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge can be studied online at http://encyclopediaoflocalknowledge.com/, where all contributing co-authors are listed along with all pages from both chapters and a detailed overview of this ongoing project 363–4, 366–8, 373, 376–7

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

All books are collaborative efforts, but edited collections are unique in the amount of time, patience, and labour, both intellectual and affective, required to see the project through to completion. As editors, we are extremely grateful to our contributors for the many hours they have invested in this project and for engaging with us in lively, rigorous conversations about researching, teaching, and practising performance. This project has also allowed us to indulge, alongside our friends, our own obsessions as passionate performance theorists / pop culture fans / political culture junkies / career close readers. Along the way, we were fortunate enough to have support from a crackerjack group of graduate and undergraduate students from York University who served as research and editorial assistants. Thanks to Alicia Bacile, Miranda Campos, Megan Davies, Alanna Dunlop, Benjamin Gillespie, Shannon Hughes, Signy Lynch, EmmaRose MacDonald, Shana MacDonald, Julie Matheson, Yasaman Nouri, Dylan On, Jiv Parasram, and Molly Thomas for their contributions. We would also like to acknowledge and express our sincere thanks to Meryl McMaster for allowing us to include her artwork on the cover of our book. In her award-winning performative photography, and especially her series “In-between Worlds,” McMaster uses her body as a stage on which to explore her bicultural heritage as an artist of Indigenous (Plains Cree) and Euro-Canadian ancestry. Sentience (2010), featured on our cover, exemplifies the pivotal role played by Indigenous artists in developing interdisciplinary, performance-based practices and their significant contributions in wrestling with histories of settler-colonialism in Canada – if we are to look here at the tree gripped in defiance of a destructive colonial gaze, a powerful assertion of Indigenous territory and self-determination. So, too, Sentience is a reminder that Indigenous artists have long been challenging settler conceptions of what performs, what can be understood as living, sentient beings. To perform between settler and Indigenous worlds, for McMaster, is also to politicize the deeply entwined relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, which is central to Indigenous knowledge – here explored through the blurring of boundaries between self and tree, and elsewhere

xiv

Acknowledgments

in the series through the merging of self with other features of the land: sky, snow, birds, butterflies. The initial idea for this book arose out of a series of conversations held in the spring of 2012 at Massey College at a Performance Studies Methodologies workshop held as part of the sshrc-funded Performance Studies (Canada) project on the development of the field in Canadian contexts (performancecanada.com). Thanks to Patrick Alcedo, Natalie Alvarez, Bruce Barton, Susan Bennett, Ian Brodie, Heather Davis-Fisch, Peter Dickinson, Jim Drobnick, Jennifer Fisher, Bradley High, Erin Hurley, Madgalena Kazubowski-Houston, Naila Keleta-Mae, Ric Knowles, Shahrzad Mojab, Julie Nagam, Bethany Osborne, Brittany Ross-Fichtner, Kate Rossiter, Brian Rusted, Hyacinth Simpson, Carla Taunton, MJ Thompson, and Ellen Waterman, for their scholarly generosity and keen contributions. Thanks also to several of these colleagues who served as co-investigators for the sshrc-funded 2014 Performance, Placemaking, and Cultural Policy Workshop (Brian, Erin, Ian, Julie, Peter, and Susan), an event preceded by magical days in Banff where we rehearsed ideas that appear in this book … while writing a grant proposal. Our ongoing conversations about performance studies as a discipline have benefited immensely from engagement with exciting national and international scholars who have participated in the Performance Studies (Canada) Speaker Series. Thanks to Carmen Aguirre, Roberta Barker, Sarah Bay-Cheng, Larry Bogad, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Doris Difarnecio, Jill Dolan, Lindsay Eales, Chevy Eugene, Regina Galindo, Alana Gerecke, Catherine Graham, Andrew Irving, Shannon Jackson, Kirsty Johnston, Morgan Jenness, Sasha Kovacs, Petra Kuppers, Shelley Liebembuk, Erin Manning, Daniel David Moses, Wanda Nanibush, Yvette Nolan, Danielle Peers, Rebecca Schneider, Diana Taylor, Helene Vosters, and Harvey Young. We have also learned a great deal from collaborators in related research groups: the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas (ccppa), the Disciplinary Misfits Reading Group, the Toronto Photography Seminar, and the Toronto Performance Studies Working Group. Of course, no project can flourish without funding and infrastructural support. We are therefore grateful to the following organizations and funding bodies for their generous contributions: the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Performance Studies (Canada) Project, ccppa, York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design and Faculty of Graduate Studies, York’s Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, Massey

Acknowledgments

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College, New York University’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, the Theatre Centre, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada, Performance Studies international, and the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. At York we are fortunate to belong to a large community of scholars invested in questions about performance studies as an inter-discipline. Thanks in particular to Elizabeth Asselstine, Guillaume Bernardi, Marcia Blumberg, Camila Bonifaz, Shawn Brixey, Ines Buchli, Sheila Cavanagh, Barbara Crow, Gwenyth Dobie, Jennifer Fisher, Mary Fogarty, Honor Ford-Smith, Ian Garrett, Michael Greyeyes, John Greyson, Darren Gobert, David Goldstein, Alberto Guevara, Sharon Hayashi, Magdalena Kazubowksi-Houston, Janine Marchessault, Allyson Mitchell, Carlota McAllister, Mary Pecchia, Liz Pentland, Sarah Parsons, Alice Pitt, Danielle Robinson, Kenneth Rogers, Judith Rudakoff, Barbara Sellers-Young, Doug Van Nort, Lisa Wolford Wylam, Belarie Zatzman, and Michael Zryd. And with this list we also include all of our brilliant and inspiring graduate students in the ma/PhD Program in Theatre and Performance Studies. Outside York, our understanding of performance studies has been enlivened by conversations with many wonderful colleagues, including Natalie Alvarez, Moe Angelos, Roberta Barker, Erin Brubacher, Franco Boni, Warren Cariou, Jill Carter, Nikki Cesare Schotzko, Roewan Crowe, TL Cowan, Tracy Davis, Jess Dobkin, Christin Essin, Julia Fawcett, Alan Filewod, Barry Freeman, Kathleen Gallagher, Alana Gerecke, Helen Gilbert, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Paul Halferty, Nicholas Hanson, Jen Harvie, DJ Hopkins, Shannon Jackson, Shauna Janssen, Kirsty Johnston, Stephen Johnson, Smaro Kambourelli, Peter Kulchyski, Peter Kuling, Sasha Kovacs, Stephen Lawson, Shelley Liebembuk, Mark Matusoff, Michael McKinnie, Kimberley McLeod, Mary Pecchia, Aaron Pollard, Pilar Rilano, Kim Solga, Mark Sussman, Jenn Stephenson, Joanne Tompkins, Dot Tuer, Jayne Wark, and Joanne Zerdy, among many others. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, we thank our editor Jonathan Crago for his incredible support, good humour, and deep engagement with the interdisciplinary questions we raise in the book, managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee and associate managing editor Kathleen Fraser for expertly overseeing the book’s production, and copy editor Ian MacKenzie for his meticulous edit of the manuscript. Thanks also to our anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and suggestions. And last, but certainly not least, we thank our families, for their spontaneous dance parties, craftathons, unceasing questions, love, and support.

P E R F O R M A N C E S T U D I E S I N C A N A DA

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Performance Studies in Canada: Mapping Genealogies and Geographies of Performance Culture

lau ra l e v i n an d ma rli s sch we itz er Canada is going to be a strong and positive actor on the world stage. – Justin Trudeau (statement after swearing-in ceremony as prime minister)1

Scene 1: 31 March 2012 Two politicians enter the boxing arena, each clothed in a shimmering hooded robe – one Tory blue, the other Liberal red. The announcer barks: “From the blue corner weighing in at 183 pounds … the senator Brass Knuckles Brazeau! … From the red corner, 180 pounds, the Papineau pugilist, please welcome Justin Truuuuuuuudeau!”2 Ostensibly these men are there to “Fight for the Cure,” their public appearance as boxing foes meant to raise money for Ottawa’s Regional Cancer Foundation. As the pumped-up politicians converge upon the ring, though, this spectacle transforms into a powder keg of political meaning, exceeding the unassuming pretext of the charity event. Conservative senator Patrick Brazeau is the odds-on favourite – or so say the Sun News commentators framing the televised event, among them reactionary tv host Ezra Levant. As an Indigenous male, they tell us (with no shortage of exoticism), Brazeau is bound to be a strong fighter: “He is a tough guy. His life has been physical … He’s from Maniwake, Quebec. He’s an Algonquin member of the reserve there … He’s from a tougher neighbourhood than [former prime minister] Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin.”3 Hardly a benign or offhand observation, Brazeau’s racial background is repeatedly mentioned throughout the fight.

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Meanwhile, his opponent, the privileged and pampered Liberal mp Justin Trudeau, receives a very different treatment. Trudeau, Levant declares, is a melodramatic “high school drama teacher,” his trancelike preparatory movements lampooned as “overacting,” the product of extensive “ballet training.” Trudeau’s histrionic head bobbing is likened to the “fake Aboriginal tattoo” that appears on his arm, a tat that apparently pales in comparison to Brazeau’s “real” one – in Levant’s words, “a real Aboriginal tattoo on a real Métis man.” His fellow commentator informs Levant that he has the Métis part wrong; Brazeau is, even more impressively, full “Algonquin.”4 Levant also seems to get the tattoo remark wrong. As Trudeau would later clarify, the temporary tattoo was there for a purpose; as the symbol of Katimavik, a national youth service program launched by his father in 1977, and cut in 2012 by the Harper government, it was placed on his arm to show the kind of Canada he was fighting for.5 Following the fight, Trudeau confirmed that the temporary tattoo was a deliberate part of his performance, while also affirming the permanency and authenticity of the Aboriginal tattoo on his left arm, an image of the earth encircled by a Haida raven. Trudeau’s statements about the performativity of his body art thus complicated, though did not necessarily contradict, the story of appropriative whiteness told by Levant.6 Back to the fight. As the two politicians spar, throwing punch after punch until the bloodied Brazeau is defeated, each man’s body becomes a stage upon which national signs and political conflicts inescapably materialize. Liberal versus Conservative, Canadian versus Indigenous, English versus French, Privileged versus Deprived, Masculine versus Feminine, Truth versus Artifice, Real Life versus Performance. When asked by the press if there would be a rematch, Trudeau takes care to separate superficial theatre from substantial politics, perhaps preparing the public for his imminent bid for Liberal Party leadership. “Despite my performance on Saturday night,” he discloses, “I am not a boxer, I’m a parliamentarian … I hope there will be more events like this to raise funds, but for me, you saw Saturday night my first and last boxing match. I’ve got work to do.”7

Scene 2: 6 August 2015 With the federal election just two months away, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau makes another public appearance. In the boxing ring. It is the morning of the first election debate, and Trudeau boxes a few rounds with African-Canadian owner Paul Brown at his Boxfit training studio

Figure 0.1 Not your typical head of state.

in downtown Toronto (naturally with a handful of photographers and reporters in tow to capture the quotidian moment). When asked about the debate after his workout, he proclaims, “I think Canadians need an opportunity to contrast the leaders and our styles and approaches. I’m going to stay focused on the things that matter to Canadians … That means rolling with the punches and offering a couple of my own.”8 Using the last tko as visual and discursive shorthand, Trudeau presents himself as a man ready for a fight, ready to fight for Canadians. But the racial and national ghosts of Trudeau’s earlier match are involuntarily dragged, via performance, into the present with this strategic re-enactment – not least because the match is staged again, it seems, between white and non-white bodies. These anything-but-accidental photos press us, in turn, to ask, For which Canada is Trudeau really fighting? Which shows of the past – colonial, nationalist, masculinist – is he re-enacting, or, indeed, preenacting (if we think of this as prep for the upcoming debate)? In what ways does re-entering the ring now show the show, show the parliamentarian as boxer, as performer? And in what ways does the particular intercultural dramaturgy repeated here inadvertently align the Liberal brawler with his new, mostly white male opponents?

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Scene 3: 20 October 2015 The election results are in. The Liberals have toppled the Conservative government and fought their way back into a parliamentary majority. The image of a shirtless, tattooed, young prime minister–designate, fists clenched, posing defiantly for the camera before the 2012 fight, hurtles through the international press and social media. This time, the pm-inwaiting receives another response to his carefully staged self-image: fullon celebrity adulation. Gabrielle Bluestone in Gawker.com writes, “So meet Justin Trudeau, a square-jawed, 43-year-old, strip-teasing, Canadian answer to the Kennedys. A former high school teacher and amateur boxer, he’s the secondyoungest Prime Minister in Canada’s history and he looks like the product of a drunken hot tub encounter between Tom Cruise and Ken Marino.”9 This sentiment is echoed in countless Tweets exchanged by American admirers; a typical response comes from Sara Benincasa: “Americans: remember in 2004 when smart people were like, “I’m moving to Canada if Bush wins again? new reason pic.twitter.com/xob v3cvyfa [link to hunky Trudeau image].”10 Interestingly, while some of the intended political valences of Trudeau’s boxing persona are lost in this celebrity gawking, the international fan response succeeds in retrieving other politically relevant ghosts from the not-so-distant Canadian past – in particular, the contagious affects of Trudeaumania. This term has been used to describe the public’s cult-like worship of Pierre Trudeau, the charismatic politician who brought drama and glamour to Canadian politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, and who was often photographed like a rock star, with screaming women trailing behind him. As we enter another era of Trudeaumania, these public displays of past and present cite and incite one another, fusing national audiences, affective communities, historical icons, and spectacular forms. #GenerationTrudeau #teamtrudeau #daddytrudeau. vvv

As the brief scenes restaged above make clear, performance is essential to political culture and, specifically, to the success of individual politicians. More often than not, elected officials are evaluated on their ability to manage their public images, with their policies and ability to govern taking a backseat. The realm of the political is one of the more obvious places where performance has taken hold in Canada, especially in recent years when the antics of politicians like Trudeau and Toronto

Mapping Genealogies and Geographies of Performance Culture

7

mayor Rob Ford, as well as disgraced journalists-turned-senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, have thrust Canada (for better or worse) into the international spotlight. Nevertheless we contend that the Trudeau spectacle reveals not just the theatricality of politics, but also the ways in which performance, more broadly, permeates the spaces of everyday life and indeed has become increasingly important to understanding cultural interactions in a Canadian context. At one level, performance’s efficacy as an analytical model resides in its ability to highlight tensions between the aesthetic and the quotidian, between the public and the private. This tension haunts the boxing performances described above, as they entice spectators to gape at a public figure’s otherwise private daily ritual, his sweaty gym workout. Simultaneously, they hint at how an individual’s everyday actions are always already styled for the general public, in this case enacting norms of masculine strength that are demanded of both boxers and parliamentarians, thus implicitly connecting the ring, electoral politics, and burly masculinity itself. At yet another level, performance’s resonance can be found in the ways it draws attention to bodily affects: excitement about an athlete, desire for a svelte and tattooed body, resentment for cut social programs – feelings that can be productively harnessed in the service of transforming, or alternatively maintaining social and political structures. Let’s not forget that Trudeau’s hyperbolic performance of masculinity ends up feminizing him in the eyes of some conservatives and so serves as a catalyst for homophobia; meanwhile, in its overt campiness, his “overacting” courts queer desire – i.e., this picture of “daddytrudeau” is hardly family oriented and certainly appeals to viewers with diverse sexual orientations. Going further, the performance frame exposes those gestures and speech acts through which national identity is produced. It invites us to look again, and look anew, at those perceptions of national selfhood that are sustained through the careful choreographies of public figures, through forms of self-satisfied nationalist boasting (#OurPMis betterthanyours), and through colonial fantasies of the national self now several centuries in the making (e.g. GQ ’s quip that “Trudeau will celebrate his newly-formed government with, say, a full back piece featuring a charging mountie against a backdrop of maple trees”).11 This book brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the emergence of performance studies as a field in Canada in order to respond to precisely such complex and multilayered stagings – performances that routinely appear, and have appeared, in diverse spheres of Canadian life. Since its official inception as a discipline in the 1980s,

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with the creation of the first Performance Studies Department at New York University, and in its subsequent adoption by dozens of universities throughout the world, performance studies has focused on a broad spectrum of cultural behaviours that fall under the umbrella of performance. These behaviours include popular entertainments (games, sports, carnivals, circus, etc.), performance art, festivals, protests, political speeches, ritual, religious ceremonies, and many other forms of cultural expression. Equally important within this area of study has been the popularization of the term performativity as a lens for viewing the construction of identity and the performance of self in everyday life. Many performance studies scholars draw on the speech act theory of linguists like J.L. Austin, who sought to understand the world-altering properties of “performative” language – utterances such as oaths or curses that constitute a doing in saying12 – as well as the philosophy of Judith Butler, who defined gender as performance, as “an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.”13 Accordingly, the theories and methods of performance studies have influenced researchers writing about cultural events as performance and about the performative politics of identity, in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, communication studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, religious studies, folklore, and the performing and visual arts (to name only a few). Performance studies has become even more important in a digital age, as mobile and Internet-based technologies have fundamentally transformed how we project our identities daily; as the Trudeau example illustrates, these technologies have also altered how our identitybased performances are managed and circulated. Social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook have not only opened new channels for sharing previously private experiences; they incessantly encourage us to make them available to ever-expanding publics. Trudeau’s “strip-teasing” performances, in this sense, may be viewed as an effect of digital forms that invite and reward ever more self-disclosure, thereby shifting how we perceive what Erving Goffman, in his sociology-based dramaturgical analysis, called the boundaries between “frontstage” and “backstage” behaviours.14 In fact, it now appears that performance has become the paradigm for the twenty-first century and a valuable commodity within neoliberal and experience economies. Why sell a product when you can sell a dynamic, emotionally rich performative experience? At the same time, in an undoubtedly related development, performance

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art has become the darling of major international museums like the moma and Tate Modern – with formerly obscure performance artists like Marina Abramović catapulting to celebrity and fame, and urban centres like Toronto staging city-wide festivals like Nuit Blanche and Luminato to engage their citizens in interactive, place-based performance experiences. (Interestingly, these trends – performance art and participatory art – coalesced in 2013 as Abramović was the “theme” of that year’s Luminato Festival, which featured a theatre production, interactive performance institute, and public lecture by the artist.) Clearly the “performance” paradigm has significant implications for the Canadian context, and researchers and academic programs have now turned to performance studies to meet growing demands for interdisciplinary inquiry into performances that occur both in and outside artistic venues. Among others, these developments include the steady increase in papers and panels presented at national conferences across the arts, humanities, and social sciences that incorporate the term performance or performative, as well as the expansion of the mandate of theatre-based organizations such as Canadian Association for Theatre Research and publications such as Canadian Theatre Review and Theatre Research in Canada to explore “theatricality and performativity beyond the traditional contexts of theatre and drama.”15 Another important development has been the creation of several graduate and undergraduate performance studies programs at Canadian universities – first at University of Calgary in 2006, and more recently at Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia Okanagan, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, and York University. Meanwhile, some institutions like Concordia University have nested performance studies specializations within other degrees (e.g., Concordia’s humanities PhD), and the last decade has seen the creation of a number of Canada Research Chairs in interdisciplinary performance (“Performance and Culture” and “Digital Performance” at York University; “Interactive Media and Performance” at University of Regina; “Oral History Performance” at Concordia; “Transnationalism and Precarious Labour: Politics and Performance” at ubc). Certainly, each of these academic locations has shaped how performance is understood and taught. For example, York’s ma/PhD in theatre and performance studies, where we are institutionally situated, is housed in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design (ampd), and thus the interdisciplinary training it offers is shaped by cross-listed courses with other ampd departments (cinema and media arts, visual

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art and art history, dance, design, computational arts, music), as well as the school’s strategic positioning within the university as a laboratory for practice-based research. So too, the performance studies classes taught in University of Waterloo’s undergrad program are shaped by the interdisciplinary conjunction of Drama and Speech Communication (the department name), uniquely positioning it to explore the common terrain of performance and communication studies and focus on the expressive dimensions of performance practice, or as their website says, “the processes by which people create meaning in communities.”16 It should be noted, however, that research and teaching in performance studies cannot be reduced to institutionally specific practice. Indeed, the vast majority of researchers and teachers promoting interdisciplinary approaches to performance do so from disciplinary locations outside departments that have adopted “performance studies” in their degree titles or as their program “brand.” Moreover, thanks to particular funding opportunities offered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc), which promote partnerships across universities and beyond academia, numerous alliances outside institutional and disciplinary frameworks have been formed (e.g., the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas; the Kanata Indigenous Performance, New and Digital Media Art Project; the Performance, Placemaking, and Cultural Policy Research Group, among others).17 In many ways, these cross- and parainstitutional formations might be said to better realize the potential of performance studies as a critical methodology, enabling collaborators to explore what lies between disciplines and providing spaces in which to reflect on disciplinary avowals as themselves contextually dependent, self-interested, and often inconsistent performances. Despite the explosion of performance studies scholarship in Canada over the last decade, this body of work remains largely unacknowledged within major performance studies collections circulating internationally, which heavily emphasize the contributions of US- and UK-based scholars.18 When performance studies anthologies do analyze performance practices from different global contexts, they rarely include significant studies of performances in Canadian contexts. This absence is somewhat surprising, given that performance studies has been especially self-reflexive about inclusions and exclusions with respect to disciplinary identity19 and its proclaimed investment in the many manifestations of performance studies around the globe. The latter impulse has led, for example, to the formation of the scholarly organization Performance Stud-

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ies international (PSi) and to collections focused on global genealogies of the field (e.g., Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, and C.J.W.-L. Wee’s Contesting Performance).20 The relative absence of Canadian-based scholars and topics from the international discussions and mappings of the field has a significant impact on researchers in this national context. It affects those of us who hope to place our books with reputable publishers in the field – we are told that books on Canadian performance won’t sell, so don’t bother pitching them unless US-based artists or topics are added. It also affects our ability to articulate what we do, to colleagues, administrators, and funders. Further, since there are no collections surveying the specific theoretical and methodological contributions of Canadian scholars to performance studies, instructors at Canadian universities often rely solely on Euro-American theorists and examples when professing performance and when drawing on performance paradigms in their research. This collection thus seeks to fill this major gap by bringing together researchers located in Canada who are doing groundbreaking work in performance studies but who have been left out of traditional mappings of the field. It also fills this gap by featuring significant works of performance theory and history rooted in the analysis of Canadian culture. In doing so, it enhances recent conversations on the development of performance studies in Canada, a discussion shaped by Laura Levin’s 2008 sshrc-funded study “The Performance Studies (Canada) Project: Mapping the Field,” which investigated how performance studies is rapidly growing as an interdiscipline in Canada.21 It also builds upon the momentum of “state of the field” conversations staged at major events and in the pages of leading publications. These include the 2010 Performance Studies international conference at ocad and York Universities (co-chaired by Levin and Lisa Wolford Wylam); the 2012 Performance Studies Methodologies Workshop (co-organized by Levin and Marlis Schweitzer in Toronto); the 2014 Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at Concordia (organized by Mark Sussman and Stephen Lawson); the 2014 “The Life and Death of the Arts in Cities after Mega Events” conference at Simon Fraser University (organized by Kirsty Johnston, Peter Dickinson, and Keren Zaiontz); the two 2015 satellite PSi conferences, Performing Turtle Island at University of Regina (organized by Kathleen Irwin and Jesse Archibald-Barber) and Trans-Montréal (organized by Amelia Jones and Katie Zien); the 2015 The Other D: Locating Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies in Canada at University of Toronto (organized by Seika Boye, Heather

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Fitzsimmons-Frey, and Evadne Kelly); special sections of Canadian Theatre Review and Theatre Research in Canada; and the recent appearance of Performance Matters, an e-journal out of sfu.22 Following closely from these productive interdisciplinary conversations, this book aims to explore and showcase particularities of the field of performance studies as it has developed in Canada, and, more specifically, to ask how institutional and cultural conditions have produced alternative articulations of “performance” in Canadian contexts. With this approach, we extend foundational work by scholars such as Shannon Jackson and Robert L. Scott, who have explored how material and geopolitical contexts shape cross-disciplinary exchange.23 In Scott’s words, since disciplines are embedded in the resource-based structures of academic institutions (e.g., departments have physical spaces and budgets), there is a “distinctly political face to the circumstances in which interdisciplinary efforts must thrive or not.”24 The chapters included here similarly exemplify and address how performance studies in Canada has been shaped by its local, national, and transnational places of enactment – contexts that influence the specific definitions used, genealogies charted, and methods employed in research practice. In their collision the chapters model a form of critical interdisciplinarity that depends on performance as its methodological lever, a mode of thought that uses performance to pose vital questions about the contingency of disciplinary formations, while also recognizing the political, institutional, and conceptual challenges posed by intersectional models of analysis. This collection aims to both reflect and, more urgently, help build a critical discourse about performance studies in Canada: first, by tracing diverse genealogies of performance studies in this specific national context, and second, by thinking through its central critical preoccupations. In what follows we outline these two central objectives. In doing so, we have no interest in displacing US-based origin stories with definitive Canadian narratives, deposing older disciplinary daddies for new ones. Rather, our hope is to provide a rich example of Jackson’s Foucauldian argument that “an awareness of the institutional genealogies of knowledge [helps] to give a keener, albeit more confounding, picture of the internally discontinuous status of performance knowledge in the academy.”25 The genealogies and definitions presented here embrace this project of confounding self-assured understandings of performance – troubling, alongside our spectacularly slippery pm, what is in and outside the limits of our own disciplinary ring.

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Performance Genealogies There are many possible starting points for telling the story of performance studies’ emergence in Canada. One of the most obvious entryways is theatre studies, in part because the vast majority of conversations about performance studies as a distinct institutionalized field of study in Canada have taken place in that context. This history often chimes with (or bristles against) performance studies’ New York origin story – one that starts with the early performance evangelism of figures like nyu professor and director Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner in the 1970s and 1980s. Inspired by intercultural performance work being carried out internationally, and the potential of using the language of theatre to understand the rituals of non-Western cultures, Schechner and Turner began to discuss what an interdisciplinary or “broad spectrum approach” to performance might add to the study of these and other types of cultural behaviours.26 This appeal to performance as critical tool resonated with Schechner’s experiments with environmental theatre reaching back to the 1960s, which sought to dissolve the borders between on- and offstage spaces, as well as with research on “social dramaturgy” that had been conducted by sociologist Erving Goffman, which viewed performance analysis as a method for understanding social interactions in everyday life.27 Especially important within this genealogy are the founding of the first performance studies department at nyu in 1980, inspiring the creation of other similarly named programs throughout the world over the next few decades,28 and Schechner’s many proselytizing manifestos published in TDR : The Drama Review, which, together with other articles in the journal, promoted the study of performance as embodied practice rather than as dramatic text. Controversially, and significantly for the Canadian context, he pitched performance studies against theatre, predicting that scripted dramas would become the “string quartet of the 21st century.” “The new paradigm is ‘performance,’ not theatre,” Schechner declared in a 1992 TDR editorial: “Theatre departments should become ‘performance departments.’”29 This aggressive portrayal of performance studies as usurper of theatre’s terrain may account, in part, for the delayed adoption of performance studies as an institutionalized field within Canada; its first official materialization came twenty-six years later in 2006 with the creation of a graduate program in performance studies at University of Calgary. By 2011, the scene had not, in U of C professor Susan Bennett’s view,

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improved that much. In her provocatively titled article, “(No) Performance Studies in Canada,” Bennett claimed that despite the “robust evidence for performance studies scholarship in Canada”30 provided by presentations at the 2010 PSi Conference held in Toronto, this work was failing to gain traction as the result of “fragile arrangements”31 made at Canadian universities to accommodate the field. She explains, “The history of performance studies in Canada in the post-secondary domain is, insofar as it exists at all, as an add-on or stream within existing departmentalized disciplinary fields, most typically theatre or communications, or as a non-departmentalized collaborative program.”32 Certainly, the institutional landscape of performance studies has developed since Bennett issued this diagnosis (or, as we prefer to see it, necessary challenge), with the formation of several grad programs with performance studies in their titles. Still, these concerns remain relevant today, and it is helpful to reflect on the conditions that delayed the uptake of the performance studies model. One major hurdle for establishing performance studies in Canada has been its geographically specific struggle with and against a staunchly nationalist field of Canadian theatre studies. While the history of theatre studies in the United States is often told as that of a scrappy underdog struggling for recognition within English and Speech departments, in Canada, theatre studies’ battle for disciplinary autonomy was fought with special vigour. The struggle to articulate theatre studies as its own distinct discipline in the 1970s and 1980s went hand in hand with an urgent decolonizing mission, with efforts to proclaim a tradition of national theatre that was separate from that of the United States and Europe. The story of Canadian theatre studies’ emergence, in fact, is filled with emotional proclamations that rival Schechner’s in their revolutionary zeal. As it happens, they also promote forms of theatrical expression long repressed within conventional Eurocentric theatrical models. For example, in their book English-Canadian Theatre (1987), Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly write, “It has been one of the purposes of this study to show that the factors militating against the creation of an indigenous Canadian theatre were cultural and political, not climatic, and that Canadians were long denied – or denied themselves – full imaginative expression in drama and theatre.”33 Given that this battle was still being fought well into the 1990s and has shaped the curriculum of many theatre departments in Canada, it is hardly surprising that performance studies, often associated with the study of “non-theatrical” or “extra-theatrical” events, has been met doubly with

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suspicion. With a deep stake in the past, theatre studies traditionalists view the emergent discipline as a threat not only to an artistically hermetic theatre studies curriculum (a concern shared with colleagues in theatre in the United States), but also to the hard-won and hypernationalist field of “Canadian theatre.”34 Our collection welcomes the opportunity to deconstruct the false dichotomy that positions theatre studies in opposition to performance studies, a polarization that allows unproductive tensions to persist in newly created and conjoined programs in “theatre and performance studies,” and in departments that have incorporated performance studies–focused courses and methods within their curriculum. Elsewhere, these divisions have been unsettled through a close look at the ubiquity of interdisciplinary performance in the contemporary Canadian arts scene, where more and more theatre takes place in the spaces of everyday life, and where plays unabashedly undermine the borders between the arts.35 But the theatre versus performance dichotomy can also be shaken up by reflecting on how past performances have been marshalled to shore up different disciplinary projects. If we return to some of the staunchly nationalist work of Canadian theatre scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, we can see that theatre studies has long been doing work similar to performance studies, even if it did not (or chose not) to align itself with the terminology of “performance.” Given our interest in tracking discontinuous sites of performance knowledge, we believe that these early articulations of what some might now call “performance theory” are equally valuable to constructing genealogies of the field. Not only do they dispute the presumed traditionalism of theatre studies, an association made by self-avowedly “radical” performance studies scholars, but they also reveal that, in many cases, performance theory takes credit for ideas that can be found in earlier theatre studies scholarship. Scholarly tendencies to ignore or overlook the concepts and histories that performance studies shares with theatre studies (as with several other disciplines in Canada) further contribute to perceptions of performance studies as interdisciplinary usurper, which this collection actively works against by offering a meta-critical account of crisscrossing fields.36 As Ric Knowles has pointed out, one of theatre studies’ major publications Canadian Theatre Review (CTR ), founded with the express purpose of promoting criticism about theatre in Canada, was, in some respects, deeply enmeshed with developments in performance studies in the United States. Knowles notes that CTR was created partly at the

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encouragement of Schechner (an editorial board member for a short time), and, in its inception, “CTR understood itself to be an avidly postcolonial Canadian nationalist version of TDR (The Drama Review) – extending so far as to imitating the three-letter title and consecutive issue numbering system.”37 Paralleling performance studies’ initial rejection of drama as literary text,38 and perhaps taking an even bolder step towards performance than its US counterpart, CTR chose not to include “‘drama’ in its title, opting for what the editors then understood to be the broader and less ‘literary term,’ ‘theatre.’”39 Knowles points out that since the 1980s CTR has promoted an expansive view of theatre, publishing on topics that performance studies now regularly addresses, including performance art, spoken word, dance and movement-based theatre, paratheatre in popular culture, historical re-enactment, raves and parties, to name only a few.40 Further, CTR has, in issues like “Canada, eh?” (2005) and “Alternative Globalizations” (2014), showcased theatre scholarship that has resisted hyper-nationalist conceptions of Canadian performance, without recourse to the performance studies paradigm. While these theme issues provide evidence of a growing interest among Canadian theatre artists, critics, and scholars in defining theatre in an expanded field, precedents for this approach can be found in the writings of artists celebrated in CTR ’s earliest years. This observation should encourage us to look again at our assumptions about the theatrical objects on which Canadian theatre histories have been sutured. In fact, a number of the artists identified by theatre studies as originators of homegrown Canadian theatre might just as easily be viewed as pioneers of performance studies in Canada.41 Distinctions between theatre and performance fall apart if the story of performance studies’ emergence starts with the work of Theatre Passe Muraille (in English, theatre without or beyond walls), a company whose productions are placed at the centre of Canada’s alternative theatre movement. Why not start with the wildly anti-disciplinary manifestos of tpm’s founder, artistic director Jim Garrard, who called in 1969 for “a theatre free of distinctions between actor and spectator, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ between drama as one art form, music as another and dancing as yet another.”42 Other statements by Garrard encourage theatre to move out into the spaces of everyday life: “The professional artist is ruining theatre. They think theatre takes place in glass cages. They think theatre is real estate so they build big amphitheatres but they have no one to fill them … It’s important to get out of the theatre. Out into the streets, into schools and parks, into prisons, and apartment buildings … Theatre in the subways, get a

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truck and do theatre in small towns, real circusy, grab people in the streets … I’d like to make theatre as popular as bowling.”43 tpm’s collective creations, staged in extra-theatrical spaces like “haylofts, auction rings, church basements and union halls,”44 ghost more recent site-specific performances. Works like The Farm Show (1972), developed through living with, interviewing, and learning about the practices of the farming community in Clinton, Ontario, epitomize the fluid relationship between art and the everyday that would become central to performance studies, as well as forms of performance ethnography adopted as one of its core methodologies. And lest we think participants were unaware of these associations, we need only listen again to the words of playwright/company member Ted Johns that foreground the show’s status as performance: “The dramatic techniques, and the songs grew out of the actors’ attempts to dramatize their discoveries in daily improvisational sessions. At first the result didn’t seem like a play: no lights, no costumes, no set, a barn for a theatre, haybales for seats. Simply pure performance.”45 In suggesting that tpm’s theatrical experiments might be an early example of performance-based thinking in Canada (why not think of performance as “theatre without walls”?), we are less interested in claiming it for performance studies, i.e., reading theatre as performance, than in illustrating how performance genealogies are shaped by the narratives their makers want to tell. This historiographic approach foregrounds disciplinarity itself as a contextually dependent and unstable performance – by turns aspirational and appropriative, forward-thinking and forgetful. Additionally, following Rebecca Schneider and Shannon Jackson’s lead, we want to emphasize how theatre’s inherent flexibility – its accommodation of multiple media and “hypercontextual” enmeshment with audience and physical space – has routinely given rise to disciplinary confusions, allowing performance theorists, in various corners of the academy, to productively shake up historical and ontological claims that rest on assumptions of medial specificity.46 While the theatre versus performance debate has shaped the field’s institutionalization as a discipline in Canada, it has often distracted from a broader consideration of other disciplinary areas across the arts, humanities, and social sciences where performance scholarship has been undertaken and nurtured. If performance studies is to fully realize its potential as an interdisciplinary field, it must more actively foreground these alternative genealogies and put them in conversation with one another. A number of the chapters that follow reveal entirely different

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histories that might be traced through performance-based collaborations across the arts (bridging visual art, dance, music, film, digital media). This approach recalls US art critic Michael Fried’s 1967 claim – originally intended as a slight against minimalist artworks addressing their viewers – that performance challenges the meaningfulness of arts as individual disciplines; in his words, “What lies between the arts is theater.”47 Of particular note here are the already rich accounts of the history of performance art in Canada, primarily exploring its emergence in the 1970s as a conceptual and political practice within the visual arts – an arena that centralized the bodies of the previously distanced artist and spectator, and created new forms through which the historically marginalized might speak. Among others, these accounts include A.A. Bronson and Peggy Gale’s Performance by Artists (1979); Alain-Martin Richard and Clive Robertson’s Performance au/in Canada, 1970–1990 (1991); Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars’s Caught in the Act: Canadian Women in Performance (2004 and 2016); and Bruce Barber and Mark Léger’s two volumes, Performance [Performance] Performers (2008).48 Also of note are Jayne Wark’s Radical Gestures (2006), which surveys feminist performance art in North America from the 1970s to 2000, and Barbara Clausen’s long-term research project (launched 2014), “An Annotated Bibliography in Real Time: Performance Art in Quebec and Canada” – a collaboration with Artexte and the art library at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam) to catalogue writings about Québécois and Canadian performance art and animate those writings through the performative exhibition of documents; a “diagrammatic mural” mapping the “historical, institutional, and personal relationships that unite the publications on display”; and curated dialogues with performance artists, curators, and scholars.49 Many descriptions of performance art found in these works frame performance as a conscious “artistic” orientation that cuts across media – as Householder puts it, “as a lens through which all contemporary art might be examined,”50 or in Chantal Pontbriand’s words, “an attitude present at the core of contemporary art.”51 Elizabeth Chitty contends that this attitude needs to be studied in its time and place, as it was explicitly fostered by the “strong multidisciplinary mandates” of artist-run centres in Canada in the 1970s. Her description of a typical event at Toronto’s A Space during this period gives a strong sense of these interdisciplinary crossings: “Photographers-turned-holographers gave performances in lab coats with white rats (Fringe Research); sound poets gave forth wild sounds in poetry readings run amok (The Four Horse-

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men); and the early work of VideoCabaret held forth in the basement in a potent mix of theatre, rock music, and video.”52 This boisterous intermedial ecology of art production is emulated in the organizational structure of performance art histories like Caught in the Act, which places spoken word artists like Lillian Allen next to video artists like Kate Craig and dancers like Françoise Sullivan. To extend Chitty’s insight about the importance of place in shaping artistic collaborations, one could also look at the structure of university programs, which have fostered cross-disciplinary experiments in performance. The “Doctorat en études et pratiques des arts [Arts studies and practices]” at uqam, for example, an important site of performance training and theory, operates across several arts departments and schools, including visual and media arts, design, theatre, dance, art history, and music. Notably, Josette Féral, one of the few Canadian performance theorists to have achieved international recognition in performance studies anthologies – specifically for defining performance’s anti-representational qualities and undoing of theatre’s “competencies” – has been a director of the uqam program.53 Another genealogy of performance studies in Canada can be traced through the sometimes overlapping fields of folklore, anthropology, and communication studies – revealing yet another, and much less documented – series of scholarly contributions that precede the field’s institutionalization at nyu in 1980. In his introduction to a 2012 CTR issue, “Performance Ethnography,” Brian Rusted traces the origins of performance studies in Canada through the work of Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein, whose 1975 book Folklore: Performance and Communication sought to define the “‘contextual’ approach to the study of folklore.”54 Influenced by anthropologists like Dell Hymes who had explored “the ethnography of communication,” Ben-Amos and Goldstein, according to Rusted, “understood the contextual approach as shifting folklore scholarship from archival and literary activity to the socially emergent qualities of performance,”55 privileging cultural activity “for which a person assumes responsibility to an audience.”56 Emphasizing the transnational complexity of performance genealogy, Rusted points out that many of the foundational methodologies inspired by the “contextual approach” emerged in the “folds across national borders.”57 For instance, nyu professor Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, often cited as a pioneer of the folklore strain of performance studies, did her doctoral fieldwork in Canada (in Toronto); so did folklorist Richard Bauman (in Nova Scotia), who later went on to develop

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methods for reading “verbal art” as performance, what some call the “oral interpretation of literature” strain of performance studies. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on the theatrical framing of everyday life – another version of the contextual approach – came out of undergraduate work at the University of Toronto in the 1940s, where he studied under Ray Birdwhistell, an anthropologist who founded “kinesics,” the study of the role played by body movements and gestures in shaping social interaction. Goffman’s performance analysis may also have been influenced by his work at Canada’s National Film Board in Ottawa (nfb), which offered a hands-on view of how theatrical and cinematic “frames” construct representations of the everyday.58 And, significantly, Goldstein, then president of the American Folklore Society, became head of the Department of Folklore at Newfoundland’s Memorial University in 1976. Goldstein’s work would resonate with other analyses of “living folk traditions” in Canada, and particularly in Newfoundland, where the language of performance had been used since at least the 1960s to describe local cultural expressions such as mumming.59 We can track a similar transnational circulation of ideas in Wark’s histories of performance art; in particular, she has mapped the transnational influence of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, an effect of its stated educational goal, starting in 1967, to function as an international laboratory for working out conceptual and performance ideas. This led to a period of intensive cross-border exchange, with many prominent US-based performance artists developing, teaching, and exhibiting work in Halifax.60 Exploring the folklore angle, which foregrounds the study of performance as cultural expression (rather than strictly as art), leads us, in turn, to consider how the preoccupations of today’s performance theorists are deeply entangled with those of Canadian cultural studies, a more established interdisciplinary field and one whose origin stories have received much more public rehearsal. The genealogical aims of this book chime in crucial ways with collections like Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian Culture (2006) and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (2009), which sought to gather the interdisciplinary “conceptual thread[s]”61 of cultural studies as practised in Canadian contexts – the former designed as the first “textbook by Canadians, for Canadians, on Canadian culture,”62 and the latter opening out to consider why “Canadian cultural studies matters for issues and topics taken up in contemporary cultural, social, and political theory around the world.”63 Some of the most exciting analyses of culture as performance are coming out of programs that are aligned with the communications

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strain of cultural studies (communication and culture, art history and communication studies, etc.); indeed, a specifically Canadian version of performance studies could be traced through the work of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s and 1960s and the Toronto School of communication theory,64 which stressed the pivotal role of interpersonal communication in the production of culture. Regrettably, however, with the exception of the intra-departmental dialogues taking place within the amalgamated Drama and Speech Communication Department at University of Waterloo, there has been relatively little formal “communication” in Canada between the communication studies– derived strand of performance studies and the theatre studies–derived strand. In other words, performance studies as an institutionalized interdiscipline, typically housed in theatre departments, has developed largely in parallel with interdisciplinary “Communication and Culture” programs, leading to forms of disciplinary entrenchment around ideas that are ultimately much more fluid and could productively be put into conversation with one another. This non-alliance is something of a departure from the United States, where the two approaches have fruitfully and more self-consciously commingled both in the oral interpretation focus of performance studies programs at Northwestern University and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and in the dedicated Performance Studies Division of the US-based National Communication Association. In light of these genealogical departures, we might ask, how has Innis and McLuhan’s primary emphasis on print and electronic media, a technological focus privileged in many communication and cultural studies programs in Canada, made it more difficult to read embodied forms as modes of communication?65 Or, thinking with even more institutional specificity, could this division be a holdover from philosophical differences between literary critics like McLuhan and Robertson Davies, both at the University of Toronto at the same time – the former a mediaphile who sought an exit from the traditional study of literature through research on communication technologies, the latter a technophobe who broke away from the English Department to establish a centre for the production of live performance (the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, now the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies)? While McLuhan and Davies ended up heading in different directions, they both helped to found disciplinary fields that teach that the medium is inseparable from the message. This point of intersection emerges in this collection in chapters that explore the mediation of self

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through communication technologies – film and YouTube videos in Erin Hurley and Marlis Schweitzer’s analyses of women’s enmeshment with popular culture, journalistic media in Levin’s account of the selfstagings of Canadian politicians. While performance studies research in Canada has generally distinguished itself from cognate fields like communication studies by taking performance as its primary object of study, it has resonated more strongly with the “culture” side of the “communication and culture” disciplinary dyad; its methodological concern with the performativity of identity has strongly resonated with cultural studies’ analysis of the construction of identity through “social practices”; as the editors of the collection Canadian Cultural Poesis put it, Canadian cultural studies is centrally concerned with “the ‘making of culture,’ or the tension between making and being made by culture at the same time.”66 Not surprisingly, this book also devotes a whole section to “Performing and Disrupting Identities” and features a photo of Indigenous performance artist Lori Blondeau on the cover – pointing to the many early examples of performance analysis published under the rubrics of cultural studies, not to mention related interdisciplines such as visual studies, material culture studies, and Canadian studies. Other important inter-texts for this collection include Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture (2002), a book that shares with performance studies a methodological interest in approaching mass-produced culture as a site for studying “everyday experience”;67 Kirsty Robertson and J. Kerin Cronin’s Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada, which examines activist art projects whose “success” often depends on an “immersive, participatory, or performative component”;68 and Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair’s Material Cultures in Canada, which theorizes the agency and liveliness of “things” in Canadian contexts. The emphasis on material culture in performance and as performer is especially pronounced in our book – from Schweitzer’s discussion of how objects of global commodity culture script the actions of Canadian subjects, to Pam Hall’s reflections on the entanglements of the human and more-than-human world in the local practices of rural Newfoundlanders. Again the Canadian context is significant here, providing an important corrective to global celebrations of the “new” within the recent new materialist turn in performance studies.69 As Hall points out in this volume, a new materialist approach is in fact “unremarkable in a rural and coastal environment where fishing practice is deeply embedded in a complex and more-than-human web, where the actions of

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weather and icebergs and fish and boats (not to mention regulations and economies) are clearly and constantly determining our actions as humans” (373). Erin Hurley adds a further twist by exploring how the new materialist turn in performance studies has become disconnected from a longer history of materialist thinking within theatre and performance studies in Canada – a mode of performance analysis that, according to Knowles, “emerges from the conflation of cultural materialism, theatre semiotics, and reception work in the field of cultural studies.”70 While cultural studies and performance studies remain separate in most institutional configurations, the undercurrent of cultural materialist thinking developed by scholars like Knowles and Susan Bennett (both contributors here) remains a strong link between the two disciplines; indeed, it is one of the most apparent methodological ties that bind this book’s disparate case studies.

Performance Stumblings The chapters in this collection emphasize, in overt citations and mappings, their indebtedness to (inter)disciplinary and institutional genealogies of performance-based thinking in Canada. At the same time, they illustrate how performance can be defined in emphatically dissimilar ways, depending on the cultural, aesthetic, and/or geographical perspective one brings to bear on a given analysis. Rather than see this as a problem, we view foregrounding differing, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on what counts as “performance” in a Canadian context as a shared political imperative and methodological approach. Critical reflection on institutional and cultural influences coalesce here to provide a nuanced picture of the way disciplinarity is enacted – modelling a materialist meta-disciplinary consciousness that might be more widely practised within performance studies as an international field. In practical terms, this means that a theatre theorist might define performance in ways diametrically opposed to a visual culture theorist – what the former views as traditional, the other might perceive as radical or avantgarde. A folklorist might have a starting point very different from an Indigenous studies scholar when reading cultural expressions of “national” identity. Meanwhile a writer in Quebec might call performance “theatre,” since the term performance, as Hurley remarks, is “an English word and is listed as a ‘borrowing’ from English in all Frenchlanguage dictionaries.”71 Going in the reverse direction, a word like manifestation (or its short form manif) is likely a more useful term for

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talking about activist demonstrations in Quebec; to substitute the Anglicized performance for manif is to sever connections with a longer history of Québécois protest and to miss an action’s eventness (manif resonates with the related term une manifestation culturelle or cultural event). Following Diana Taylor’s suggestion, we invite our readers to embrace these moments of “untranslatability” and linguistic “stumbling,” viewing them as reminders “that ‘we’ – whether in our various disciplines, or languages, or geographic locations throughout the Americas – do not simply or unproblematically understand each other.”72 By treating performance as a contested, non-identical, and contextually flexible term, we can more easily facilitate meaningful dialogue and alliances across disciplinary, cultural, and professional communities. In showcasing the diverse ways performance has been understood, and methodologically embracing theoretical “stumbling,” we consider how taking Canadian culture as its point of departure might revise genealogies and models of performance studies scholarship found elsewhere in the international field. In doing so, we do not, however, wish to reproduce nationalist discourses of Canadian exceptionalism. Indeed, many of our contributors take issue with essentialist Canadian nationalisms that position Canadian culture as superior to and fundamentally different from that found in the United States. Such an approach, we contend, facilitates an unfortunate forgetting of the continuities between our national trade agreements, our histories of colonial violence, and other significant points of contact. It often misrecognizes national identity as cultural fact rather than as contingent performance. Instead, by identifying potentially distinctive aspects of Canadian performance studies scholarship, we emphasize the discontinuous status of performance knowledge both nationally and internationally. We ask, How might situating Canadian performance studies research within existing genealogies and thematic frames contribute to the larger global field by introducing alternative ways of reading culture as performance, thereby complicating US-centred performance studies analysis? How does the application of performance studies models to artistic performances and to performances of cultural identity in Canada potentially unsettle assumptions of national similarity and difference that underwrite international performance theory? To address these questions, a number of this book’s authors foreground the central importance of Indigenous practices in revising genealogies, definitions, and methodological approaches that dominate performance studies internationally. As Taylor insists, performance stud-

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ies has often been ahistorical and Eurocentric in its critical approach. In both US and Canadian contexts, Indigenous performance is all too often framed as something that came after the birth of performance art and the alternative theatre movement of the 1970s – the product of a later era where identity politics came to the fore. Thus the uptake of performance studies has involved nationalist forgettings of embodied practices that predate colonial contact by centuries. As Julie Nagam argues in her chapter here, the emphasis on the written word in settler-colonialism has repressed and devalued performance-based Indigenous knowledges “that reside in individual bodies, in communities, and in the spaces that they daily inhabit” – what she calls “a living archive” (119). Nagam points to a long history of Indigenous practices – such as healing, smudging, dancing, and drumming – that has been left out of global performance criticism. In her analysis of Christi Belcourt’s installation Walking with Her Sisters, she also hints at the significant contributions of Indigenous artists to the history of community-based performance, installation, and performance art, contributions archived by organizations like Vancouver’s grunt gallery and research studies like Nagam’s Kanata Performance, New and Digital Media Art Project, and centralized in the pedagogy of Aboriginal Arts programs at the University of Saskatchewan and Trent University. In the latter, Indigenous performance courses and stagings in the First Peoples Performance Space assist in exploring “the relationship between the Oral History method and inter-generational transmission of knowledge.”73 By foregrounding Indigenous perspectives, this collection seeks to displace the dominance of Euro-American paradigms in global performance studies and assist in connecting the concerns of Canada’s Indigenous communities to those of Indigenous groups throughout the world. To be clear, our focus on Indigeneity is not simply about adding Canada-specific content into an international field that remains largely unaware of the work of Indigenous artists and activists. Rather, it is our belief that the decolonizing methodologies coming out of Indigenous and (post)colonial contexts in Canada transform the way in which national and international scholars conceptualize performance. Heather Davis-Fisch here contends that decolonizing methodologies emerging “in the wake of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [2015]” (68) demand that settlers reflect more deeply on the “ongoing appropriations of Indigenous knowledge” in Canada and beyond, even by those with “an earnest sense of responsibility for righting colonial wrongs.” The self-avowedly “resistant” settler performance theorist comes to mind here; so does the image

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of Justin Trudeau showcasing his Katimavik solidarity tattoos. (As Knowles perceptively notes in this book’s afterword, the early figures of performance studies share with the Trudeau family a history of appropriating Indigenous rites and symbols.) Davis-Fisch, drawing on decolonizing methods proposed by Indigenous scholars like David Garneau and Dylan Robinson, calls for a more self-reflexive positioning by performance theorists and articulation of responsibilities vis-à-vis the reception and production of knowledge. While stressing the importance of Indigenizing and decolonizing the broader international field, we also acknowledge that trying to insert Indigenous embodied practices into the frame of performance studies also runs the risk of reinforcing the very colonial epistemologies these works critique. In this, we share the concerns of international scholars who have asked, “Is performance studies imperialist?” As Jon McKenzie claims, “The combined effect of [performance studies’] broadly defined object field and wide geographical horizon has helped produce the perception in some of an underlying colonizing project.”74 In his contribution to this collection, Dylan Robinson challenges readers to consider whether performance studies’ desire to read everything as performance is an extension of its disavowed colonial tendencies, and part of a longer history of appropriating non-Western cultural practices to fill out its potentially exoticist broad spectrum approach. What is often swallowed up by an omnivorous performance studies is the cultural specificity of Indigenous actions. Robinson explains that Indigenous cultural traditions, though “often written about as primarily aesthetic … have always held functional significance for what they ‘do’ as politics, acts of history, and law-making” (212). Indigenous practices trouble distinctions between performances onstage and in everyday life on which many of the field’s taxonomies are based. They put pressure on (and in some cases reveal the epistemic violence of) words such as performance and ritual, which, all too often, are applied to diverse cultural expressions in indiscriminate, universalizing ways. Other chapters in the collection point to an even wider range of culturally specific practices that shape what might be considered “performance” in Canada, each with its own rich and varied histories, and each prompting a second look at the terminology through which performance is defined, another stumbling. These include, among others, Pam Hall’s description of embodied ways of knowing in rural Newfoundland – the “everyday world of knowledgeable fishers and builders, of

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knitters and story-tellers,” which reframes performance in the language of “social labour” and “local knowledge practice” (359). Hall’s approach emerges from her training in folklore at Memorial University, a program preoccupied with what it calls “intangible cultural heritage” – i.e., local knowledge practice that “includes ballad singing, snowshoemaking, fiddle-playing, thrum knitting, throat singing, Christmas mummering, berry picking, boat building and much more.”75 Here the local, the regional, and the disciplinary work together to shift what global performance studies scholars view as worthy of study (including material culture practices), while also questioning whether performance is the most appropriate term for engaging with cultural expression in the Newfoundland context. The collection also more broadly explores challenges posed to performance theory by intercultural performance in Canadian contexts. Examples include Naila Keleta-Mae’s invocation of the spoken word, rooted in Afro-Caribbean diasporic forms such as dub poetry, which “[disrupt] colonial English, colonial mentalities, and colonial artistic practices in Jamaica from as early as the 1960s”76 (322), as well as Peter Dickinson’s reflections on Butoh performances, one of many hybrid Asian dance forms found in the contemporary, culturally diverse arts scene in Vancouver. Together, these works foreground the raced, gendered, sexed, and classed dimensions of their respective performances in their local iterations. So too, they complicate singular understandings of national identity and animate nationally specific histories of cultural exchange – in particular those shaped by official Canadian multiculturalism: a set of policies, planning decisions, and ways of perceiving ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural difference. While often described positively as departing from the assimilatory melting pot model found in the United States, Canada’s liberal multicultural framework, our contributors note, has also created problematic separations between minority groups, fostered tokenist and exoticist perceptions of minoritized bodies, and promoted an image of Canada as an enlightened, tolerant nation that obscures racial and ethnic inequalities. Keleta-Mae and Dickinson’s chapters illustrate how a one-size-fits-all approach to the analysis of intercultural performance misses the nuances of Canada’s cultural policies and practices, which do not map directly to those of their US counterparts. Keleta-Mae observes that dub poetry is usually lumped in with other forms of “spoken word,” which, in a US context, is associated with the oral interpretation of literature strand of performance studies. This

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grouping, she insists, misses crucial differences between performance forms “beyond the obvious one of aesthetics,” and “those differences are worth untangling because they are about historicity, nation, and critical engagement” (323). To treat dub as just another form of spoken world or storytelling is to miss how it has functioned historically in Canada as a mode of Black political activism and institutional critique. In a similar fashion, several chapters in the collection highlight the influence of language politics in shaping performance studies in Canada. French-Canadian conceptions of performance have often called attention to language as a performance of power, leading many Québécois artists to vigorously experiment with physical and visual alternatives to the spoken word. While Erin Hurley traces a highly physical and imagistic Québécois lineage of circus arts, as well as queer feminist cabaret and burlesque, MJ Thompson conjures a rich history of image-based performance via the work of Montreal dancer Louise Lecavalier. Here, the image of Lecavalier “exploding” onstage – “using the floor and air in ways that referred to gymnastics, contact improv and breaking” – is seen to powerfully enact “significant ethnic, linguistic, sexual, and political shifts unfolding in Montreal” in the early 1980s (311). Thompson’s descriptions of Lecavalier’s heterogeneous aesthetic resonates not only with what Hurley calls here Montreal’s “alternative and variety performance economy” (271) but also with her reflections at the 2010 PSi conference on the eclecticism of performances in Quebec (e.g., from vaudeville [les Fridolinades, La Poune], to image-theatre, clowning, folk-dance exhibitions, and circus). This heterogeneity was fostered as part of Quebec’s own performance as a nation separate from the rest of Canada – its “effort at proving the nation’s existence via cultural production – despite and because Quebec lacks an independent state which would secure the nation’s existence otherwise.”77 Moreover, these forms were also “valued for their French-language expression, for their ties to oral tradition and rural cultural practices developed in New France … and valued as evidence of Quebec-ness, Quebec experience, or values.” Understanding this history of studied heterogeneity helps to explain the preoccupations of performance theorists writing in or about Quebec; as Hurley notes in her chapter, this includes a burgeoning interest in “circus and difference” (276) and a history of studying corporeal experience in live performance (e.g., by theorists like Josette Féral, Isabelle Barbéris, and Catherine Cyr). A number of the origin stories and definitions highlighted here form the background to discussions readers will encounter in this book, and

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we have encouraged contributors to explicitly foreground genealogies of performance scholarship, alongside moments of linguistic and theoretical stumbling, in order to mark these overlapping and sometimes discontinuous routes.

Performance Landscapes In addition to making visible performance genealogies and alternative definitions of performance, this book investigates some of the central issues, questions, and methodologies driving performance studies scholarship in Canada today – whether understood as a discipline, or more broadly as an outlook, orientation, or pretext for cross-disciplinary collaboration. While we have organized the book around these preoccupations, we acknowledge that there are many other possible ways of arranging this material and encourage future teachers, students, and scholars to seek out other thematic routes through these chapters, to shift the coordinates of this provisional map and draw out other intersections and detours. Indeed many of these alternative routes can be found in the untidy, subterranean mappings found in chapter endnotes, which point to implications, influences, and trains of thought that future researchers might productively follow. “Part One: Performative Geographies” recognizes that space and place have loomed large in the study of performances in Canada, past and present. This presence can be attributed to the vastness of Canada’s landmass and the relative sparseness of its population; to the particular ways in which these dispersed geographies have set up regional tensions and specific forms of interurban competition; to its physical proximity with the United States, the world’s leading superpower; and to its historical displacement of Indigenous groups, who call into question Canada’s existence as a bounded geopolitical entity. Our collection highlights the work of scholars whose writings have influenced the ways in which “place as performance” has been understood in Canada. Dovetailing with and also helping to explain the theatrical language used by Justin Trudeau in his inaugural speech as prime minister (quoted in the opening epigraph), Susan Bennett and Peter Dickinson use the performance culture and infrastructure of urban sites as springboards for thinking about how Canadian cities perform on the “world stage.” Bennett offers the methodological lens of “cultural topography” (52) to analyze how Canadian cities stage their urban ambitions in a global economy, while Dickinson devises an “ambulatory performance ethnog-

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raphy” (111) as a tactic for reading site-specific dance and exposing the “cultural, economic, and social asymmetries historically embedded in Vancouver’s performance of publicness” (91). Also thinking in specifically geographic terms, Julie Nagam and Heather Davis-Fisch explore how performance practice and practices of performance historiography help to retrieve histories of Indigenous presence that are anchored spatially in First Peoples’ territory. These approaches, they suggest, hold the key to accessing forms of oral and embodied knowledge through which Indigenous experience has been transmitted for centuries. When read next to one another, these chapters reveal the usefulness of analyzing Indigenous performance through a transhistorical frame. While Davis-Fisch wrestles with the problem of reconstructing Indigenous histories erased through nineteenth-century colonial place-naming practices and Nagam unfurls the many layers of contemporary Indigenous art practices that tie missing and murdered Aboriginal women to a geopolitics of colonial space, their collision here is a poignant reminder of the enduring violence of settler-colonialism (physical, geographic, epistemic) as well as the formidable resilience of Indigenous ways of knowing. These rigorous analyses of place, anchored in the study of particular cities and sites, open out to larger questions about national identity as performative construct, the focus of “Part Two: Spectacles of Nation.” The chapters in this section explore diverse sites of spectacular nationformation, from the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre in Wainwright, Alberta, to the meticulously designed interior of an American Girl boutique, from the blizzard-like mediascape that surrounded the Canadian Olympic team in Sochi, Russia, to a cinema filled with the raucous cheers of a largely Indigenous audience celebrating the death of a film villain. Challenging dominant narratives that position Canada as a nation of peacekeepers in some contexts and the oppressed victim of US cultural imperialism in others, these chapters foreground the specific techniques whereby Canadians are trained to perform as Canadians on national and international stages. In other words, they identify how performance works pedagogically to support the formation of national subjectivities, upending more traditional approaches to national performance by tracing the movement of performers, ideas, and practices across borders of nation. Together these chapters demonstrate the importance of thinking about Canada from both a global and hemispheric perspective, as a nation that is intimately bound to other nations and one that has always

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defined itself with, through, and against its interactions with other cultures, nations, and peoples. This approach has been promoted in recent years not only by scholars advancing transnational models that track the circulation of performance through the Americas,78 but also by major research partnerships that archive and facilitate dialogue about hemispheric activisms, such as the work of the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, a sshrc-funded partnership between several Canadian universities and nyu’s Hemispheric Institute that explores shared histories of colonial violence, migration, resource extraction, femicide, and so on. Helene Vosters, thinking hemispherically, reminds us that many of the people who live in the country now called Canada do not identify as “Canadian,” viewing such a name as inextricably bound to a colonial project that dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their lands. So too, Knowles’s afterword points out that “[many] Indigenous scholars, artists, and others do not recognize the borders that came late to divide the land that is Turtle Island or the colonial authority of the state apparatuses that police them” (387). Indeed, it is for this very reason that we have called our collection “Performance Studies in Canada” instead of “Canadian Performance Studies.” Marlis Schweitzer assists with this reimagining of performance through a hemispheric lens. She begins with an account of the frenzy surrounding the grand opening of the first American Girl boutique in Canada in order to ask how “the identity of Canadian girls is performed with and through the consumption of US brands” and their circulation with and “through retail environments (or brandscapes) designed for US consumers but transplanted to Canadian locales” (139). Although skeptical of the seductive lure of brandscapes like American Girl, which guide consumers on a journey of “self-discovery,” Schweitzer foregrounds the creative ways that young girls use “haul videos” and other online performances to establish a community of consumption that often extends beyond national borders. Natalie Alvarez transports readers from the bright pink shelves of a doll boutique to the training fields of cfb Wainwright, where soldiers participate in hyperrealistic training scenarios to prepare them, emotionally and psychologically, for the difficult realities of asymmetrical warfare in Afghanistan, where building trust with the local population is integral to their mission’s success. Whereas Schweitzer examines the role of play in children’s performances of national affiliation, Alvarez investigates how immersive simulations function as large-scale rehearsals to “prepare soldiers for engagements that turn on a seemingly irreconcilable paradox of punitive, yet culturally

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sensitive, militarism” (161). Drawing from her own visit to the Wainwright facility, where she observed training exercises and interviewed officers, Alvarez highlights the political potential of something as quotidian as a handshake in moments of intercultural exchange, seeing in this “politics of touch … a way of undermining the foreclosure of the military’s knowledge systems that script in advance the scenarios governing their encounter” (180). Helene Vosters closes the section by juxtaposing three very different spectacles of nation, setting Canada’s Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc) and the 2013 film Rhymes for Young Ghouls by Mi’gMaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby against the backdrop of the public relations performance staged on behalf of Canada’s Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics team. By bringing together these seemingly disparate performances, Vosters demonstrates how the deployment of nationalist narratives of humility and inclusivity work to distract or blind Canadians from reflecting upon troubling colonial legacies or acknowledging the ongoing privileges of white-settler nationalism. She concludes on a note of hope, however, finding potential in the way that “the trc and Rhymes produce fissures, breaks in the percepticidal storms of Canadian nationalism through which to see the fictive innocence of ‘our’ imagined nation” (203). “Part Three: Reframing Political Resistance” extends the politicization of cultural and national identity in the previous sections by looking at how the political is explicitly embodied in local contexts. More specifically, it investigates alternative conceptions of the political that have been shaped by nationally specific histories, social movements, and civic structures. The political actions discussed emerge against a backdrop of stark contrasts – what Robertson and Cronin identify as a collision between vibrant histories of public protest, Indigenous resistance, and “subversive art practice” within Canada and “Canada’s recent role in the international construction and spread of neoliberal economic globalization.”79 Further, they respond to the paradoxical image of Canada as a peaceful, polite, always apologizing nation – a nation that officially recoils from conflict while elsewhere enacting military and colonial violence. Dylan Robinson argues for the political efficacy of Indigenous anger in a variety of public contexts – from its expression at academic conferences to its mobilization at Idle No More protests. Indigenous anger, he argues, registers as particularly threatening in “Canada’s current climate of reconciliation” (217), which is supported, in part, by its recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Working against dismissals of Indigenous activists as “just angry” and “unjustly angry”

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(216), Robinson offers a more nuanced reading of anger as a “mobile affective intensity” that can assume a number of embodied forms, thereby “complicating what the public might understand to be the genre of protest” (217–18). He proposes a methodological shift in the way that scholars write about First Peoples’ activism, from an approach that uses the actions of Idle No More to shore up multicultural conceptions of performance to an approach that would highlight “strategies that may in some small way help Indigenous artists, activists, and academics resist the destruction of Indigenous lands” (213). In his call to reconsider the affective dimensions of political resistance, his chapter resonates with Vosters’s appeal to reject public spectacles fuelled by the “celebratory zeal of Canada-the-good nationalism, or the foreclosing catharsis of reconciliation”; instead, she argues for a critical embrace of “unsettlement” (203). While their approaches and objects of study differ, the authors in this section are united in asking performance theorists to rethink who or what is doing political work in specific cultural contexts. Through a close reading of the works of Montreal-based performance artist Leslie Baker and Québécois contortionist and choreographer Andréane Leclerc, Hurley investigates how these women use material objects in performance, and their own bodies as objects, to work against their objectification as queer women within institutional cultures of the theatre and the circus, and within forms of popular entertainment more broadly. Here political potential is unexpectedly seen to reside in materiality – in the defiant manipulation of self as matter, in the deliberate resistance of matter to mastering relations, and in the recognition of the gendered, raced, and classed labour that produces theatrical commodities. Hurley situates a feminist strategy of “performing ‘thing’” in relation to queer traditions of political burlesque and cabaret in Montreal, which typically use objects drawn from popular culture, and present women’s bodies as visual objects, to literalize and contest the commoditization of female sexuality. In doing so, Hurley acknowledges the contributions of women artists to scholarship on “performative objections” (264), a genealogy that may be charted through Canadian, Québécois, and Indigenous performance art, but also through the unruly political critiques of queer cabaret. Also inviting a reconsideration of what activism looks like, Levin delves into the dramatic world of municipal politics, asking how and whether the public actions of politicians like Toronto’s infamous mayor Rob Ford might be considered political performance art. Along the way, she questions the mechanisms of distinction that performance theorists use when they designate certain

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actions “resistant” or “activist,” and points out that they can get in the way of tracing continuities between performance in Canadian political culture and the racist and gendered popular forms of display described by Hurley – a style of politics re-enacted with a vengeance by US politicians like President Donald Trump. Ultimately Levin argues for a redefinition of activist performance that would enable us to view Ford not as an aberration within Canadian politics but rather a prime example of well-rehearsed hemispheric performance traditions. The fourth and final section, “Practising Research,” reflects on performative methodologies that have emerged within the field to translate sensuous and lived experience into writing. Brian Rusted’s “Writing the Red Trench” provides an excellent starting point for theorizing the creative approaches found throughout the book, as he enacts what he calls “emplaced writing,” a writing that reveals how “embodied knowledge is shaped in relation to the environment” (345). He argues that entanglements of vision, senses, and space were highlighted in the work of maritime artist Don Wright, ultimately pointing to the impossibility of reading his art merely as “visual objects.” Rather than simply write about this paradox, Rusted poetically re-enacts, and so makes explicit, the sensuous and site-specific aspects of Wright’s visual practice: “Making us look with bodies, / the drawings the prints, the sculptures / not objects that represent environment or site, / but the struggle to receive light” (355). Similarly, MJ Thompson offers an emplaced reading of the cultural work of Montreal dancer Louise Lecavalier. At once enacting Lecavalier’s frenetic dance style and an “alternative set of histories, cast off the body and made material in and through the city” (289), Thompson weaves together fragments of oral history, city addresses, images of buildings, and theoretical reflections. Textually, Thompson and Rusted’s wordplay resonates with Naila Keleta-Mae’s on love, a spoken-wordbased performance installation (presented here in excerpts), which centres on place-based memories of Black slavery in Canada that have been erased from public memory. Visually, these chapters converse with the Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge, a socially engaged art project of archiving local knowledge practices in rural Newfound developed by visual artist–curator Pam Hall. Here Hall describes the project and its evocative pages that place ethnographic description alongside photos, maps, recipes, expert knowledge, material culture, and more. This collection of folkloric fragments hails the reader as a political action, an appeal to preserve local knowledge and human-thing assemblages that stand to be lost with out-migration and threats to coastal ecosystems.

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Taken singly or read alongside the collection as a whole, these chapters give us a clear sense of how scholars in Canada are contributing to the development of performance studies as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a way of politically participating in the world. In all of these works, we see authors moving away from the representation of culture as text and instead to its rendering as a kind of sensuous texture, a complex layering of narrative, site, body, and matter that ultimately refuses to privilege any one form of knowing. This reorientation has important political consequences as it demands that we consider the enmeshment of lived experience within larger ecologies and networks. As Hall puts it, “This is about how we ‘do’ the material world and how it ‘does’ us, and perhaps most importantly how we do together” (374). Further, these writings reveal the fluid relationship between practice and theory that is at the heart of performance studies research. Each chapter reveals the growing importance of practice-based research methods in Canadian contexts, and more specifically the field’s insistence that performance practice is itself a form of embodied theory.80 This is implicit throughout the book, but particularly evident in Hall’s Encyclopedia, which uses dialogic art as a vehicle for fieldwork, and Keleta-Mae’s performance pedagogy, which approaches theatrical production as a vehicle through which to research Black histories in Canada and related intercultural forgettings. These works join Rusted in noting how performance studies has been affected by the language of “research-creation” used by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to describe fundable art-based research and creative modes of knowledge mobilization. Though these definitions of research creation are sometimes murky, leaving researchers to wonder if performance is the outcome of research (a “deliverable”) or itself the method of research inquiry, there is no doubt that this funding language has helped foster the practice-based aspirations of the field. Finally, and importantly, these works join the other chapters in the book in foregrounding how scholars not only contribute to an understanding of performance in Canada through their thick descriptions of practices but also how they themselves produce what we perceive to be both “performative” and “Canadian.” They recall Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s evocative claim that autoethnographic methods, as well as “playing with the power of the word,” can “convey the fragmented, contradictory, and unstable nature of power” that characterizes the research process.81 In framing critical discourse as playful and conscious performance, performance studies scholars in Canada

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gain the opportunity to consider the provisional nature of their own stagings of events and histories for wider national and international audiences. Performance, in this sense, becomes a powerful platform on and through which to rehearse the emplaced and political perspectives they publicly seek to advance. At the very least, as the spectacular scenes that opened this introduction so readily and enthusiastically show, this strategy seems to be working quite well for Canada’s legendary pugilist, and most public of public figures, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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no te s Edwards, “‘Cabinet.’” “Justin Trudeau – Patrick Brazeau.” Ibid. Ibid. Lum, “Trudeau’s ‘Badass’ Tattoo.” Ibid. The Haida tattoo also references the fact that the Trudeau family was made honorary member of the Haida in 1976. Size, “Trudeau Declines.” Peat, “Justin Trudeau Boxing.” This is one of several photo-ops that Trudeau staged at boxing gyms across the country after the fight with Brazeau. For example, in February 2013 he boxed in front of photographers at Winnipeg’s Pan Am Boxing Club as a warm-up for the Liberal leadership debate. Bluestone, “Justin Who-Deau? Benincasa, Twitter post. Hofman, “Justin Trudeau, Canada’s New pm.” Austin, How to Do Things. Butler, “Performative Acts,” 519. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 119. Theatre Research in Canada, “Editorial Policies.” University of Waterloo, “Drama and Speech.” Other research partnerships related to performance studies include the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and the Montreal Working Group on Cirque/Circus. Examples of these collections include Phelan and Lane, Ends of Performance; Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction; Striff, Performance Studies; Bial, Performance Studies Reader; Soyini Madison, SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies; McKenzie, Roms, and Wee, Contesting Performance.

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19 See, e.g., Worthen, “Disciplines”; Dolan, Geographies of Learning; Jackson, Professing Performance. 20 McKenzie, Roms, and Wee, Contesting Performance. 21 See http://performancecanada.com/. 22 Also important in shaping this discussion are panels at national conferences (e.g., Barker et al., “Canadian Performance Genealogies” round table at the 2013 Canadian Association for Theatre Research Conference); performance festivals across the country that feature critical conversations (e.g., Vancouver’s PuSh Festival, Toronto’s 7a11D Festival); annual graduate symposia on performance studies topics; pan-institutional working groups (e.g., the Toronto-based Performance Studies Working Group begun by Julia Fawcett); and other sshrc-related projects, too numerous to name here (e.g., Monica Prendergast’s 2013 sshrc Insight Development Grant on performance studies in post-secondary education). 23 Jackson, Professing Performance; Scott, “Personal and Institutional Problems.” 24 Scott, “Personal and Institutional Problems,” 312. 25 Jackson, Professing Performance, 6. 26 Schechner, “Performance Studies,” 4–6. Also see Turner, From Ritual to Theatre. 27 Goffman, Presentation of Self. 28 Performance Studies programs can be found at Northwestern University, Brown University, University of California, Berkeley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Maryland, Roehampton University, Queen Mary University of London, Aberystwyth University, University of Exeter, University of Mainz, University of Sydney, and University of New South Wales, among many others. 29 Schechner, “New Paradigm,” 9. 30 Bennett, “(No) Performance Studies,” 79. 31 Ibid., 80. 32 Ibid. 33 Benson and Conolly, English-Canadian Theatre, 113. 34 Lengthier versions of this argument appear in Levin, “In Search” and “It’s Time.” 35 As Levin notes, the “theatre” pieces presented at major national showcases like Vancouver’s PuSh Festival or Montreal’s Festival de théâtre des Amériques “could easily double as relational art, as urban tour, or as the latest experiment in digital media.” See Levin, “It’s Time.” 36 Ibid., 167; Dolan, Geographies, 66.

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37 Knowles, “Canadian Theatre Review,” 87. 38 Performance studies’ opposition of “performance and “text” has since been challenged by scholars like W.B. Worthen. See Worthen, “Disciplines.” 39 Ibid. See also Rubin, “Moment,” 7. 40 For a fuller list of CTR issues that engage with a broad-spectrum approach to performance (from CTR ’s founding up to 2000), see Knowles, “Canadian Theatre Review.” 41 Consider the intermedial experiments of Videocabaret, a company founded by playwright Michael Hollingsworth and performance artist Deanne Taylor (of the Hummer Sisters), which converged in 1976 to stage spectacles “integrating video-cameras, piles of hot-wired tvs, and live rock’n’roll,” a practice that continues today alongside a carnival arts exchange that connects Trinidadian and Toronto artists. VideoCabaret, “About Us.” 42 Press release, Theatre Passe Muraille, 1969. Qtd. in Wallace, “Growing Pains,” 76. 43 Qtd. in Shain, “Pursuing the Need.” 44 Wallace, “Growing Pains,” 76. 45 Thompson, Farm Show, epigraph (front matter). 46 Schneider, Performing Remains, 164; Jackson, Professing Performance, 6. 47 Fried, Art and Objecthood, 164: emphasis in original. 48 Local histories are also important to this genealogical work. See, e.g., Canyon, Live at the End. 49 Clausen, Annotated Bibliography. 50 Householder, “Apologia,” 17. 51 Pontbriand, Three in Performance. 52 Chitty, “Asserting Our Bodies,” 68. 53 Féral, “Performance and Theatricality,” 179. 54 Rusted, “Introduction,” 3. 55 Ibid., 3. 56 Qtd. in ibid., 4. Hymes, “Breakthrough,” 18. 57 Rusted, “Introduction,” 4. 58 Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz, Erving Goffman, 14. 59 Ibid., 4. 60 Wark, “Conceptual Art.” 61 Mookerjea, Szeman, and Faurschou, “Between Empires,” 3. 62 Sherbert, Gérin, and Petty, Canadian Cultural Poesis, xi. 63 Mookerjea, Szeman, and Faurschou, “Between Empires,” 2. 64 McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964); Innis, Bias of Communication (1951).

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65 It has also made it more difficult to remember Innis’s political belief that the retrieval of time-based, embodied, and oral forms hold the key to finding cultural balance in a fragmenting culture. See Innis, “Plea for Time.” 66 Sherbert, Gérin, and Petty, Canadian Cultural Poesis, 2. 67 Nicks and Sloniowski, Slippery Pastimes, 2 68 Robertson and Cronin, Imagining Resistance, 10. 69 See, e.g., Arons and May, Readings in Performance and Ecology; Schneider, “New Materialism”; Schweitzer and Zerdy, Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. 70 Knowles, Reading the Material, 201. 71 Hurley, “Études,” 86. 72 Taylor, Archive, 15. 73 Trent University, “Indigenous Studies.” Also see Carter, “Towards Locating the Alchemy.” 74 McKenzie, “Is Performance Studies,” 6. Also see Reinelt, “Is Performance Studies.” 75 Memorial University, “Intangible Cultural Heritage.” 76 Also see Keleta-Mae, “Outskirts.” 77 Hurley, “Études théâtrales,” 85. 78 See, e.g., Alvarez, Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance; Alvarez, Kovacs, Ortuzar, “Performance and Human Rights,” 2014; Schweitzer, “‘Unmanly and Insidious’”; Kulchyski, “Subversive Identities.” 79 Robertson and Cronin, Imagining Resistance, 2. 80 See, e.g., articles in Canadian Journal of Practice-Based Research in Theatre; the work of the nationwide network Performance Creation Canada; Barton and Hanson, “Research-Based Practice”; Loveless, “Practice in the Flesh”; Salter, “Research-Creation”; Levin, “Locating the Artist-Researcher.” 81 Kazubowski-Houston, Staging Strife, 197.

PART O NE PE R F O R MATI V E G EO G RAPH I ES

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Calgary’s Cultural Topography: The Performance of a City s usan b enn ett

How does a city become? This chapter looks through a performance studies lens at the still short history of Calgary – it was incorporated in 1884 as a town of 506 people, an act prompted by the selection of a site for the Canadian Pacific Railway station and its sale of adjacent township lots.1 I follow the lead of D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga, who insist, in their introduction to Performance and the City, that “performance is the most apt discourse for understanding our interactions with our cities, the one best able to represent the nuance, diversity, and lived experiences of our urban spaces.”2 My interests, then, are not in the intrinsic value of cultural productions that would comprise a performance history for the city but, rather, in the instrumental role of its infrastructure as fundamental to place identity. In order to explore intersections of place and performance that elaborate not just how Calgary sees itself but how the city is seen elsewhere, I will look at three tranches across its 130-year history: as an emergent nineteenth-century city, the site of the 1988 Winter Olympics, and a contemporary municipality that is now home to more than 1.2 million people. This trio of snapshots will demonstrate how performance constitutes a city in practice, in memory, and in the wider world. A turn to cultural topography is, I think, one way to answer David Harvey’s axiomatic question, “By what social process(es) is place constructed?”3 Thus, this account of Calgary’s burgeoning sense of “cityness” over the last hundred years explores built environment and how it enables literal and figurative performances of place. As Paul Connerton points out in his remarkable How Modernity Forgets, “People build in a certain way because they think in a certain way, and they think in a particular way because they build in a particular way. Produced spaces

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and cultural rules interconnect because both indicate who permissibly communicates with whom, how, when, where, and under what conditions.”4 Topographically coded spaces are, then, how we experience social processes in the everyday and, as illustrated in these examples of Calgary across time, are integral to “a sense of emplacement through their incorporation into the corporeal life” of the city’s inhabitants.5 What I suggest here is that signature architecture in the urban setting is consistently definitional not so much for what a city (Calgary) is, but for what it might become. How people inhabit and interact in and with that environment rehearses, I argue, an urban citizenship that coheres in their performances that create and develop the city itself.

Beginnings There is nothing unusual, of course, in the construction of landmark architecture designed to produce, affirm, and develop identity and presence in the places where people choose to live. The history of settlement in the West, in Canada and the United States alike, is marked by prolific development of cultural infrastructure – theatres, opera houses, libraries – that served as public declarations by newly incorporated towns to themselves and to all points beyond that they existed. These buildings not only stood as key indicators of economic prosperity and civil society, but tangibly imposed a cultural topography upon what had hitherto been seen by European settlers as barren landscape.6 After a towndestroying fire in 1886, Calgary city builders turned away from wood construction and worked instead with local sandstone quarried from the banks of the Bow River to construct safer, more permanent structures and, among them, the Sherman Grand Opera House on 1st Street sw in the downtown core.7 When the Sherman Grand opened in 1912, Calgary’s population numbered a modest 50,000, yet the theatre immediately became the biggest in the Pacific Northwest (with its 1,500 seats) and thus able to attract all major touring shows, as well as serve as a venue for political rallies and speech-making. The theatre’s inaugural performance – Jerome K. Jerome’s Passing of the Third Floor Back, a play that had run for 300 continuous performances in London and 200 in New York – starred Johnston ForbesRobertson, whom the Grand billed as “The Greatest English-Speaking Actor.” Tickets for this première cost as much as five dollars at a time when average wages were in the region of fifteen dollars a week.8 In the lead and largest story on the front page of the Morning Albertan for

Figure 1.1 The Grand Theatre on 1st Street sw.

6 February 1912, James W. Davidson acclaimed, “The opening of the new Sherman Grand Opera House is an event of no little importance to Calgary.” He acknowledged that the addition of “office buildings, wholesale houses, and large retail stores took us out of the village class some time ago, but now, few weeks pass without some new proof that we are entering the big city class … Such is the case in considering the new theatre.” The title of Davidson’s article – “Canada’s Finest Theatre” – indicates an already active nationwide competitiveness; less than twenty years after first incorporation, the planning for Calgary’s new cultural infrastructure was considered ambitious enough to be measured against the older and more widely recognized prestige theatres in Toronto and Montreal.

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Davidson’s conclusion is an astute assessment of why this event mattered: “Few people appreciate the important part played by places of amusement in the development of a city … With the Grand and Colonel Walker’s Theatre to be completed next year as high class houses and the Empire and Lyric with vaudeville, Calgary will soon be exceptionally well equipped to satisfy the natural craving for city amusements which will draw to us the small town resident from a large territory about us and add in no small degree to our prosperity.” He implies that provision of cultural opportunity is how Calgary will make itself into a city. Certainly, in its first decades, the Grand claimed a place on the continent’s top touring circuits, and the venue hosted a spectacular range of theatre, opera, ballet, symphony concerts, and movies, bringing to its stage legendary performers such as Sarah Bernhardt, Sophie Tucker, Ethel Barrymore, the Marx brothers, and Fred Astaire.9 As the building’s current occupants, Theatre Junction, have pointed out, the Grand’s status as the city’s premier venue was relinquished in the 1950s after the construction of the Jubilee Auditorium, built to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Alberta (1955).10 Situated outside the city centre (although part of the campus of the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art11), the Jubilee’s appeal was to a new car-centric society of suburban dwellers, the fastest growing demographic across the continent. For the Grand, this led to an increasingly degraded place in Calgary’s cultural scene and the threat, by the end of the 1970s, of demolition. For several decades, it operated as a movie theatre;12 later the space housed an indoor golf-driving range with plans to convert into a parking garage before a fire in 2004 destroyed much of the interior. City of Calgary funding for salvage and restoration inspired Theatre Junction’s bid to save the theatre and return it to its original function; with additional Government of Alberta and philanthropic support, a $13 million renovation project was undertaken – with the hope that it would reopen as a performance space in time for Alberta’s centennial in 2005. In the end, the Grand reopened in March 2006 and continues today as Theatre Junction’s home – a place the company describes as a venue for “theatre, dance, music, and new forms, providing a national and international context for contemporary live art in Calgary.”13 It is as if in reclaiming the building’s original meanings, Calgary’s old ambitions are new again: to create a cultural destination downtown befitting (and attracting) continued migration to the city. The streetscape of the Lougheed Block, of which the Grand is a part, is little changed today; in fact, as principal architect for the renovation, Jeremy Sturgess

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has noted the original development by Calgary architect L.R. Wardrop was always economically savvy: “It was a real visionary piece of urban design for Calgary or anywhere at the time because the theatre was hidden behind the Lougheed Building, as if Calgary’s land was too valuable to give a whole site away to a theatre, so you better build an office building to support it, which is the kind of stuff we’re doing today.”14 Then and now, the Grand’s role has been to inflect a mostly corporate urban topography with evidence of a city that was – and is – more than the sum of its business interests. Among other important buildings in the city’s cultural history, the Palace Theatre (which opened in 1921 as the very last of seventy-seven theatres that Detroit architect C. Howard Crane built for the Allen theatre chain) provided an anchor presence on another of the city’s main downtown thoroughfares, 8th Avenue sw. Although primarily a movie theatre, the Palace also booked live shows and, from 1923, served as the stage for William Aberhart’s popular Sunday sermons that took place in front of a live audience as well as in simultaneous broadcast on cfcn radio. (“Bible Bill,” as Aberhart was popularly known, would become premier of Alberta from 1935 to 1943.) Like the Grand, the Palace theatre has experienced a variety of repurposings in its history – recently it was a nightclub and then Flames Central, an upmarket sports bar and restaurant owned in part by the city’s nhl team (Calgary Flames). Today it is again the Palace Theatre and operates primarily as a music venue. This building provides a historic presence on what is now a largely pedestrianized shopping street, signalling a conflation of memory of the city’s past and contemporary appetites that contributes to the performance of the city. Even earlier than the building of either the Grand or Palace Theatres, evidence of Calgary’s growth toward city status (granted in 1894, ten years after its incorporation as a town) was a row of hotels located just to the east of downtown. This development was proximate to the Canadian Pacific Railway station and designed to accommodate not only those visitors that James Davidson of the Morning Albertan had anticipated as patrons for the Grand, but more particularly the ongoing influx of new arrivals to the city. The King Edward, built in phases between 1905 and 1910, was as proudly touted as the Grand for its splendour and modernity. Again in the Morning Albertan (1914), an article describes the hotel as “satiating the demands of the modern day traveler and providing a home for the working man, the ranchman and the cattleman.”15 While these properties may have been launched via

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the promotion of tasteful comforts, Hotel Row transformed itself into “Whiskey Row” during Prohibition (1916–24), at that time providing the kinds of entertainment that made the King Edward best known for the policing it required. By the early 1960s, however, business of any type had all but disappeared, especially since newer hotel properties with more up-to-date conveniences and locations oriented to car rather than rail travel held greater appeal. But the King Edward Hotel reinvented itself again and became a celebrated music venue, now less formally known as the King Eddy. Indeed, the hotel rebranded with the claim to be Canada’s oldest blues bar and drew a formidable roster of performers (bb King, John Hammond, Buddy Guy, Pinetop Perkins, Otis Rush, among others) to play there until a city-enforced closure (asbestos, mould, and other hazards) in 2004.16 I will return to the history of the King Eddy, but my purpose in sketching these early twentieth-century examples is to remind us that the processes by which places become cities include not only the acquisition of a significant numerical population but also the development of buildings that both signify and symbolize urban identity. Since Calgary’s beginnings, its most modern buildings have not only housed cultural content but have contributed themselves, figuratively and at the level of the street, to a burgeoning experience of cityness. As landmarks, they have long been vital indicators of civic growth at the same time as they stake claims to the kind of cultural richness that is considered paradigmatic for a “real” city.

Aspirational Performance Calgary’s poly-nucleated growth in the second half of the twentieth century brought about, as it did in many North American cities, a deconcentration of cultural activity in the downtown core.17 But this shift would halt – and dramatically so – in the period before, during, and after the Fifteenth Winter Olympics. In 1981, at its fourth attempt with a bid to the IOC selection committee, Calgary won the right to stage the 1988 Games.18 From the moment this success was announced, Calgary began to think of the event, as host cities generally do, as its opportunity to perform what a great place the city was. In short, it was a chance to appear (to itself and to its global audience) on the “world stage.” The construction of venues for the various sporting events and to house the visiting athletes and media was obviously the priority, but integral to the city’s Olympic vision was, too, a celebration of place that Calgary would host as enthusiastically as the Games themselves.19

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Although not explicitly tied to the realization of Calgary’s successful Olympics bid – and a project that had been talked about at least since the late 1960s – the addition of a new Centre for the Performing Arts would, it was believed, reanimate the downtown’s cultural profile. The new venue was designed to house several prominent local cultural producers (the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Theatre Calgary, and Alberta Theatre Projects)20 and occupy a central location adjacent to city hall. The plan called for the adaptation and reuse of two buildings from Calgary’s earlier years: the Chicago-style Burns Building (1912), originally the headquarters for Burns Foods with a retail meat market on the main level, and the Calgary Public Building (1930), a modern classical style building that housed federal government offices and the main post office.21 At a cost of more than $100 million and involving new construction as well as substantial renovation of the heritage properties, the multi-venue arts centre opened in the fall of 1985 and occupied a full city block. Just as the Sherman Grand earlier, the centre has been host to touring shows as well as home to much of the city’s performance culture over these last thirty years. Again, my interest is not in the specifics of what has appeared on these stages, but in its exterior, contextual performance and especially as its facade became an important backdrop to the city’s celebrations during the Olympics. The debut of this majestic cultural centre was both an invocation of Calgary’s past and an anticipation of the city’s future, tied chronologically to the Olympic vision, itself premised on what Calgary might become. Connection to the Games was visually explicit, since the centre occupied the southwest corner of an open space that became Olympic Plaza, designed and developed to accommodate one of Calgary’s innovations for their production of the Winter Olympics of 1988. It was the first occasion in Olympics history when medal presentations did not take place immediately after the event in question; rather, they were staged at an evening ceremony that encompassed all the finals that had taken place on a given day. The aspiration, then, behind the creation of this outdoor performance space in Calgary’s core was that it might not only foster community among all the athletes (many of whom would have been competing well outside the city limits: skiing events were held at Nakiska in Kananaskis Provincial Park and in Canmore – both more than an hour’s drive away), but draw the city as a whole into a public expression of the “Olympic spirit.” Nightly at 7 p.m., the medals ceremony would offer residents, visitors, team members, and the media a chance to come together and celebrate. For resident Calgarians, it fulfilled the promise of an opportunity for participation in the Games without the need or cost

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or availability of a ticket. But these presentations were not simply national anthems, bouquets of flowers, medals, and applause; instead, these conventional ceremonial practices were encased in what was, by any measure in 1988, a dazzling high-tech performance event. This involved a sound and laser light show (sponsored by FedEx) using a four-storey-high 3-D video screen projection, technology that had only ever been seen before at the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in New York two years earlier.22 Crowds in the tens of thousands came to Olympic Plaza each evening of the Games and, as Lisa Wilton reflected in a twenty-fifth anniversary review, “the raucous celebrations turned the downtown core into a buzzing international meeting place.”23 The construction of the plaza in front of the Centre for the Performing Arts created a cityscape that was from its inauguration performanceoriented and communal. The medal ceremony celebrations rehearsed for Calgarians the possibility of a downtown space that might bring people together for reasons other than work. Post-Olympics, however, the plaza struggled to find the same popularity and was, in the words of a city councillor, “left to languish.”24 As unadorned public space, Olympic Plaza was little more than pedestrian access between city hall, the Centre for the Performing Arts, the transit corridor (on its north side), and corporate offices to its west. What city planners soon came to realize was that the plaza needed reidentification as cultural space within the city, and a refurbishment and reanimation plan set about accomplishing this goal. One strategy was to provide permanent public art that would add definition and interest to the open space and, in 1999, Barbara Paterson’s monument to Alberta’s “Famous Five”25 was unveiled to mark the seventieth anniversary of the “‘Persons’ Case.”26 The installation connected Olympic Plaza to the main facade of the Centre for the Performing Arts, appropriately so as the sculpture represents Nellie McClung (who had given many a political speech live on the stage of the Sherman Grand only a few blocks away) and the other women literally taking up space in their political fight and posed in active performance, not just for each other but for anyone walking by.27 Diametrically across from the site of Paterson’s installation, the refurbished Olympic amphitheatre incorporated commemorative bricks, each of which displays the name, nationality, and sport of a medallist whose performance had been recognized on that stage in February 1988. Tim Cresswell has argued that “the very materiality of a place means that memory is not abandoned to the vagaries of mental processes and

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Figure 1.2 Part of the Famous Five installation on Olympic Plaza.

is instead inscribed in the landscape – as public memory,”28 and so the Famous Five monument and the Olympic Plaza amphitheatre enact, all day and every day, memories of past events that inform contemporary meanings in and of the city. Olympic Plaza has become one of the most used spaces in the city. In the summer months, it is a popular site for outdoor eating and people watching; in the winter, the amphitheatre is converted into an ice sheet for public skating. It is also the site of performance events that make over the plaza in styles that reflect Calgary’s growing and diverse population. Dozens of events take place there annually, including the Sled Island Music Festival, Fiestaval Latin Festival, and Spaghetti Western.29 Thus, the Centre for the Performing Arts has been an important backdrop to the action at street-level, and now as much cultural activity takes place in front of the building as inside it. The edifice frames the complex topography of Calgary as city, with the full variety of human activity that the plaza has encouraged – from the Olympic medal ceremonies to the “home” of Occupy Calgary (2011)

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and as a stopping point, beside the Famous Five monument, on a feminist walking tour held each May as part of “Jane’s Walk” celebrations.30 As Sled Island Festival manager Shawn Petsche put it, “It’s really nice to see Calgary’s arts and cultural scenes put on display where so much of its commercial life lives.”31 That so much of the city’s festival culture happens outside the building might well have been the impetus for the centre’s 2014 rebranding: for ten years (2001–11), it had been the epcor Centre for the Performing Arts in a naming-rights agreement with epcor (the City of Edmonton-owned power and water utility), but the complex of theatre, performance, and ancillary spaces was renamed in December 2014 Arts Commons – “representing ‘the Arts’ which expands our offering beyond the performing arts to a wider variety of arts and genres. ‘Commons’ is derived from the old town square concept where ideas are shared, people from all walks of life gather, and different perspectives are welcomed – the perfect name for our space.”32 It is as if the city-block-sized building has colonized the plaza in front of it along with the activities hosted there and chosen a name for both interior and exterior spaces that acknowledges the need (and responsibility) for cultural programming that is accessible and diverse. Calgary’s Olympic experience provided an experience of what an internationally recognized and tourist-friendly city is and engendered if not belief, then certainly imagination, that this is how the city could be for more than the sixteen days of an Olympic Games. It is worth remembering that these Games predate the financial scandals of Atlanta (1996) and Salt Lake City (2002) when, as Stephen Wenn, Robert Barney, and Scott Martyn derisively noted, the Olympic Rings were “tarnished,”33 and in fact Calgary’s Olympics generated a $66 million profit that launched Canada’s “Own the Podium” initiative.34 For local residents, the completion of infrastructure – edifice and plaza – provided in 1988 a new hub for cultural activity of all kinds. As an “Arts Commons” in the twenty-first century, the space is conceived as “an inspirational gathering place for all Calgarians and visitors alike.”35 In the words of one of the Arts Commons staff, “It’s vibrant and youthful – which Calgary also is. I believe this is the right direction to go.”36

Destination City If the Winter Olympics gave Calgary a new sense of itself and its potentials, it provoked, too, the desire for recognition nationally and globally. To this end, accomplishment of a substantial cultural topography

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has been a much longer – and more expensive – enterprise. Urbanists Saskia Sassen and Frank Roost have suggested that tourism “is no longer centered on the historic monument, concert hall, or museum but on the urban scene,”37 and this is the direction that Calgary has energetically pursued. The purpose of culturally inflected city sites, animated by both local populations and tourists, is, Sassen and Roost observe, consumption; this requires the conversion of strategic areas within the larger city into locales where entertainment incites spending.38 Vital to the effective execution of such a vibrant “urban scene” are buildings that combine what Miles Glendinning has trenchantly captured as “monumental scale and exuberant planning,”39 and Calgary has certainly embraced this trend. Two projects illustrate the kind of urban scene that Calgary has become. Both are endemic to a city that barely felt a ripple of the market downturn that stalled much of the world’s economy in 2008. The first of these was the Bow Tower, commissioned by the Encana Corporation – one of Calgary’s major players in the oil and gas business – as their new head office under the design of Norman Foster, the internationally recognized architect whose projects have included landmarks such as the Swiss Re Building in London (“the Gherkin”), the Hong Kong International Airport, and the Hearst Tower in New York City. The fiftyeight-storey crescent-shaped office tower (thus the tallest Canadian building west of Toronto) started out as a textbook example of public benefit from private investment: the tower project was planned to include a full-height atrium with a series of suspended landscaped pods, as well as a linked six-storey podium building that would house a number of cultural entities (rumours included a new home for the Glenbow Museum, a National Portrait Gallery, and a variety of theatre and/or dance spaces). But the proposal and the project have turned out to be two different things: cost escalations led to revisions that cancelled the second building and scaled a planned full-height atrium for the main tower back to a meagre six stories, although there are apparently three sky gardens on what are described as destination floors. Even in its construction phase, the Bow Tower claimed a dramatic performance place on the city’s landscape. Work ran 24/7, including bright floodlighting at night that made the tower visible from afar and dazzling from close by. The site’s hundreds of construction workers resembled a durational performance, and their interactions with downtown’s other populations changed the landscape in myriad ways – a new enclave of mobile food providers was one small example of the shift.

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Foster + Partners had also put together a clever script by which Calgarians might “read” the growing structure: the site was enclosed by temporary fencing that displayed a narrative – fifty-eight “stories” no less – by which to interpret the Bow Tower’s performance in the city. We were encouraged to see not the size of Encana’s ambitions nor the degree of its vanity, but rather the building’s more benign or remarkable aspects – its sustainability, its use of steel and glass, its situation facing the river valley. In other words, the tower was written into the city’s active imagination well before the completed building took up its role to oversee Calgary’s horizon. Completed in 2012 at a cost of over $1 billion, the Bow Tower stands as the city’s vertical signature, but only the ground-level lobby is open for public access. Nonetheless, the Bow Tower has quickly become a popular destination for residents and visitors, drawn there by the delightful “Wonderland” installation by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa sited right outside its front doors.40 Also commissioned by the Encana Corporation (2007), Wonderland is a twelve-metre-high human head, made of painted stainless steel, a sculptural form common in Plensa’s extensive public space corpus and seen in a wide variety of locations, permanently and temporarily, across the world. Wonderland at the Bow Tower puts Calgary in the company of prestige destinations/cultural centres that also boast a Plensa “head,” including New York City (Madison Square Park, 2011), Rio de Janeiro (Botafago Beach, 2012), Venice (the Biennale, 2013 and 2015), and Seattle (in the Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, 2014). At about the same time, the city controversially approved a new pedestrian bridge to cross the Bow River, a $24.5 million project that did not go to public tender but was directly commissioned from Spanish engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava. Glendinning has described the Spaniard as “the undisputed champion serial signature designer,”41 and perhaps deservedly so, since Calatrava has completed bridges in cities such as Barcelona, Dallas, Jerusalem, Venice, Buenos Aires, Bilbao, and Dublin, as well as other cultural (Milwaukee Art Museum, Palace of the Arts in Valencia, scene designs for the New York City Ballet) and civic (Bilbao Airport, Zurich Law Library, Olympic Sports Complex in Athens) projects. If the Bow Tower stages corporate ascendance over all else, the Peace Bridge, as Calatrava’s bridge is known, came with a rather different vision. Its job was to perform civic ambitions, the more liberal agenda promoted by some of city council, that included a commitment to slow suburban sprawl and to encourage increased residen-

Figure 1.3 Jaume Plensa’s Wonderland, in front of the Bow Tower.

tial density in the inner city. The bridge was, in some sense, to be a performance of their moral imperative. Rick Bell, a columnist for the Calgary Sun, wrote regular attacks on the council and the project alike. A quotation from just one of these pieces,

Figure 1.4 The Peace Bridge over the Bow River.

“Calatravesty of a Bridge Arrives” (23 September 2010), will illustrate the hostility generated from at least a few loud voices in the city: The bridge is $25 million of in-our-face disregard from those who run this city and want to feed their xxxl egos and push their personal agendas on somebody else’s hard-earned dime. They chose a swanky bridge just as the global economy melted down, picking this bridge and this designer with no open bidding and no public debate on whether there should have been a bridge like this at all. To make matters worse, the thumbs-up to the bridge and the middle finger to us happened just before city council passed a three-year budget, which this year means a 6.7% tax hike and $60 million in cuts. Yes, the city shoved the bridge down our throats and if anybody tried to spit it out they were accused of being too stupid to understand. The money, the timing, the arrogance of it all.42

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The city countered negative press with informational billboards, mounted on the foot and bike paths that run alongside the Bow River and proximate to the bridge’s construction site. Here passersby learned that 150,000 Calgarians are employed downtown but only 30,000 of them live in the core, and that projections anticipate 60,000 more people will work downtown by 2025. These pre-completion billboards suggested that in the years ahead more of the city’s workforce will come to the city centre by “foot, bicycle or in-line skate” – a bold claim for the car-crazy culture of Calgary – and that the Peace Bridge was a cornerstone to this forward thinking. In other words, citizens were incited to participate in a version of what Hans-Thies Lehmann describes as “postdramatic energetics,”43 actions based more on patterns of movement than on plot. The city’s aspirations (and citation of statistics) on these informational signs were picked up, almost word for word, in Globe and Mail architectural columnist Lisa Rochon’s August 2009 article, “Is Calatrava the Future of Calgary?” After recording some of the dissident local views, she concluded, “Luckily, such negativity represents only part of Calgary’s collective consciousness. In fact, several Herald readers wrote in to praise Calatrava’s vision … They’re part of the rising tide in Calgary that would clearly love to see their city cultivate and support what so many other cosmopolites have long enjoyed.”44 She captured the more positive sentiments that sought not only to see Calgary recoup the glory of its Olympic year, but also to practise the urban scenes that would more appropriately signal a lively twenty-first-century urban environment: young, active, healthy, and dynamic. It was time, in short, for Calgary to become what the Olympics had gestured towards – “world class.” The Peace Bridge was formally opened on 24 March 2012 by Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi. He had not been a part of council when it had commissioned the bridge, and his remarks were carefully chosen to acknowledge the fraught history but to recognize, as well, the potential this bridge could bring: “We should really celebrate the opening of what is – whether or not you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing, no matter where you stand on the controversy – an iconic and important piece, an indelible piece, to Calgary’s landscape.”45 In the years since then, daily traffic across the Peace Bridge has substantially exceeded all predictions, and it has quickly become what Mayor Nenshi suggested: iconic. It does the work expected of it – to symbolize a city that has become what it has always hoped to be. But the Peace Bridge is not just aesthetically arresting

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– it is also functional, bringing the anticipated foot and bike traffic into the city centre from the residential communities immediately north of the Bow River. Its success and popularity has emboldened the city to introduce bike lanes (protected by barriers from other traffic) on many of the downtown streets, on the basis of a 122 percent increase in daily bike trips into and out of the city core since 1996.46 The Bow Tower and the Peace Bridge illustrate a changed Calgary landscape – literally, of course, but also attitudinally. Perhaps for the first time since the Winter Olympics, the downtown has become a destination as much for play as for work. The two signature additions to the city’s topography signal a new cosmopolitanism, a recognition that the population has crossed the million mark and continues to grow. The new architecture acts out the confidence, optimism, and expansion that characterize Calgary’s twenty-first century self-image. Currently (2017) under construction, Brookfield Place will be the next intervention in Calgary’s downtown vista.47 When completed, it will be taller than the Bow Tower and privilege another oil/gas corporation as anchor tenant, Cenovus. Since ground was broken on this project, however, oil and gas prices have dropped precipitously and Cenovus is apparently looking to sublet some of the building. Calgary now has a surfeit of commercial space and the downturn for the resources sector has led to a significant loss of jobs, yet none of this seems to have much moderated enthusiasm for the city’s new cosmopolitan vibe.48 Like its predecessors, Brookfield uses signage on the site’s temporary fencing to prepare its city audience. The building’s tag is “defining the skyline” (a more poetic rendition, I suspect, of the battle to be the highest tower west of Toronto among a still fast-growing forest of office buildings) and, according to the development company’s website, “A half-acre lit public plaza will traverse the site and will feature restaurants and cafés, public art displays, cultural activities and programmed activity provided by Brookfield’s award-winning Arts & Events program.”49 The boards that proclaim the performance to come are punctuated with line drawings of citizens in a variety of activities – eager Calgarians working, exercising, and making/listening to music, the last of these references far from coincidental and, indeed, a signpost to my final, cultural topographical example. And so this chapter returns to the King Eddy. After the hotel was closed in 2004, the building was boarded up and left to rot, standing forlornly between the Salvation Army Centre (a homeless shelter) and low-income housing: a pleasure palace of a Cal-

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gary that was none of the aspirational things that the Olympics ushered in. This was an inner city area (known as the East Village) long on the city’s drawing board for carefully scripted renaissance, but mostly characterized by empty building lots and derelict properties, and sandwiched between the river and the railway yards. The King Eddy narrowly escaped demolition, thanks to the endeavours of an activist group, and it was handed to the care of the Cantos Music Foundation, an entity “born out of a relationship between the Calgary International Organ Festival and the Honens International Piano Competition.”50 A shared interest in keyboard instruments had led, in the 1990s, to the creation of a small private museum that would house their collection (more than 700 instruments ranging from seventeenth-century harpsichords to late twentieth-century synthesizers) and opened to the public only on Sunday afternoons and for special events. In early 2013, Cantos – by then renamed nmc (National Music Centre) – broke ground on a $135 million building that will be a star attraction in the East Village and, in all likelihood, the city and the province. Cantos held a competition for the design of a National Music Centre that would showcase the extraordinary collection of instruments and other music memorabilia (including the Rolling Stones mobile recording studio), the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame that had been part of the annual Calgary Stampede, and the existing King Eddy building. There were sixty-six submissions and nmc selected a short list of five international firms, including French architect Jean Nouvel and Montreal’s much-lauded Saucier and Perrotte. The five final bids were presented to a live audience (23 July 2009) at the Grand Theatre,51 and afterwards the project was awarded to the Portland, Oregon-based Allied Works (best known for the Museum of Arts and Design on Lincoln Circle in New York City).52 Building costs have been largely covered by federal, provincial, and municipal funding as well as philanthropic contributions (more than $100 million in total); ground was broken early in 2013, and at the same time the King Eddy was carefully dismantled, brick by brick, before its rebuilding later in the development.53 In April 2015, nmc and Bell Canada announced a twelve-year $10 million partnership that named the new building “Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre.”54 Mock-ups of the Allied Works winning design show the centre in both day and night, both views distinctive for the incorporation of performance. By day, they illustrate an outdoor concert and the street populated by cyclists and pedestrians – not a car in sight and in keeping with a recently announced

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nearby condo development, N3 (No Car, No Parking, No Problem – a marketing strategy that recognizes the target demographic will not be car-owners but will walk or bike to their downtown offices).55 By night, the nmc is shown as hosting an event on the rooftop of the King Eddy as well as streaming content on a giant screen suspended across the street between the new and old buildings. The envisioned performances literally exceed the structure anticipated to contain and display the collection and signal a potential for creating new cultural engagements and experiences on the street and for the city. Studio Bell officially opened on 1 July 2016 with free admission for everyone on this Canada Day holiday. At one point on that day, the wait time for admission was close to three hours. Federal, provincial, and municipal governments contributed to the $191 million construction cost for the “arts hub and exhibition and performance space,”56 evidence of public support for a city that does not simply build office towers. Within the new centre, the King Eddy returned to its role as a music venue in time for the 2016 Calgary Stampede (8–17 June), staging the “Bell Live Series” each day. And only a month earlier (30 May 2016), Decidedly Jazz Danceworks (djd) opened their new seven-floor dance studio and performance space, a $26 million venue paid for by federal and provincial governments as well as donors, principally the Suncor Energy Foundation. As Stephan Bonfield wrote in the Calgary Herald, the city “trumpets yet another accomplishment to catapult it to increasing importance on the national arts stage. djd and supportive Calgary dance fans demonstrated just how well the city can put its best artistic foot forward for the rest of the nation to see. We are a dance city and we are proud of it.”57 The East Village neighbourhood where Studio Bell is located may well prove exemplary to Calgary’s aspirations for a vibrant downtown core created by a citizenry (and tourists) who engage its places and spaces as pedestrians and transit-users. Also under construction there is the New Central Library (ncl), a $245 million project scheduled to open in 2018 and designed by Norway’s Snøhetta (architects for cultural infrastructure as geographically diverse as the Busan Opera House in South Korea, the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Honolulu, and the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts at Queen’s University). Snøhetta’s description of ncl’s location suggests that “the site is transformed into a terraced topography that rises up and over the existing Light Rail Transit Line” and that the library will allow “for a visual and pedestrian connection between East Village and Calgary’s

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downtown … and provide a new outdoor civic spaces within the city.”58 The Calgary Public Library has also created “ncl Public Art,” a $2 million initiative that recognizes “public art and a vibrant cultural scene” as “the ‘software’ that gives a neighbourhood its true soul and character.”59 Significantly, the first signal that the long-imagined East Village development would at last proceed was the installation, in 2012, of British artist Julian Opie’s twenty-four-foot-high, four-sided tower installation of twenty lec panels titled Promenade. The work, as ArtInfo Canada described it, “depicts average people walking through mini street scenes”60 – in other words, a then-wishful, now-accurate prediction of the area’s future use.61 Like Calatrava’s bridge and Opie’s Promenade, Studio Bell and New Central Library look to foster an urban cultural setting that inspires spectator-participants in the present, but scaled through what Mike Pearson describes as “retentions from the past, as experience and memory; and projections for the future, as hopes, aspirations … landscape is always a work-in-progress.”62 At its 1 July opening, Studio Bell not only remembered past performances – at the Grand, at the King Eddy, and elsewhere in the city – but initiated a sonic ribbon cutting, asking the Eya-Hey Nakoda drummers to provide the building’s inaugural performance. The group, made up of Nakoda peoples from the Bearspaw, Chiniki, and Wesley First Nations, were followed by a blessing given by Casey Eagle Speaker63 – an official ceremony, then, that recognized a longer history of the land on which Calgary stands at the same time as it recognized Studio Bell’s ambition to definitively position the city on a global destination map. In their 1982 history of the city, Max Foran, Heather MacEwan, and John D. Balcers credited Calgary’s business leaders for the “dynamism and initiative” that had changed the city from “an isolated police post to a vibrant urban entity,”64 but the twenty-first-century city of Calgary has a much more diverse population and this has complicated, in productive ways, relationships between art and money: the newest cultural infrastructure brings together private and public funding with civic energies to foster creative and inclusive spaces that exceed memories of Calgary’s colonial past in order to anticipate the city-to-come.65 So what do I want to assert in this concentrated history of some of Calgary’s infrastructure? I want register a new perspective for its genealogies of performance – Joseph Roach’s ideas of “counter-memories” that sit between history and memory66 – organized on the pivot of an Olympic Games where the world comes together to locate a city on its particular stage. This is a topography that admires urban fluidity and

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active engagement with city life. Performance studies in Canada is an opportunity for a more expansive and expanded vista that moves beyond the process and product of theatre and performance to recognize that for twenty-first-century audiences the show is often literally the street, the past its scripts, theatricality as much inscribed on a building as it would be on a stage, performance acted out in the everyday. Since discursive practices within the discipline of performance studies allow us to capture these experiences of place, we can better interrogate the benefits, challenges, and risks of urban life. As Lehmann would have it, such a critical enterprise involves the turn to “heterogeneous space, the space of the everyday, the wide field that opens up between framed theatre and ‘unframed’ everyday reality as soon as parts of the latter are in some way scenically marked, accentuated, alienated or newly defined.”67 And the city of Calgary, through its past, present, and future cultural topographies, is very much scenically marked.

no te s 1 Dates are given under “Historical Information” on the City of Calgary website; for detailed discussion of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s role in the founding of the city, see Foran, Calgary, 16–17. 2 Hopkins, Orr, and Solga, Performance and the City, 3. 3 Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 261. 4 Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 31. 5 Ibid., 33. 6 Surveys of built environment are not simply the matter of urban history, but underpin a historiographic methodology that has its roots in colonialism. How Western concepts of making place might be decolonized is a subject explored by Heather Davis-Fisch in this volume. 7 Foran’s Calgary details the city’s history to 1965. Foran, MacEwan, and Balcers’s history is more recent, extending to the 1980s. No comprehensive contemporary history of the city has yet been published. 8 This information is drawn from Donald B. Smith, Calgary’s Grand Story, 1–20. 9 Ibid. A detailed account of the Grand’s more than 100-year history is available on Theatre Junction’s website. The early repertoire is cited in Calgary Herald, “A Grand Day.” 10 A Jubilee auditorium was also constructed at the same time in Edmonton. 11 Opened in 1916, this was the first publicly funded technical college in Canada. The campus was significantly expanded in the 1950s, the same time

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12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25

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then as construction of the Jubilee Auditorium, and the institution divided in 1960 into its present forms: the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (sait) and the Alberta College of Art (aca). See “History of sait” for a more detailed history. “Grand Theatre,” Cinema Treasures website. For richly illustrated history of the theatre, see Smith. Calgary Herald, “A Grand Day.” Cited in Sanders, “Calgary’s King Edward Hotel.” Calgary Municipal Land Corporation, “Heritage Buildings.” I saw Pinetop Perkins give a wonderful – long and lively – performance at the King Eddy in 2004 when Perkins was ninety-one years old. He died in 2011 at the age of ninety-eight. See Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 107, for a discussion of the effects of suburban sprawl for city centres. Part of that bid was to extend the usual twelve days of the event to sixteen, allowing the Games to span three weekends, a fact that secured what was then a record US television contract ($309 million); this, in turn, made it possible for the city to generate a profit, something very few Olympics have done (see Spencer, “1988 Calgary Games”). Montreal’s debts from the 1976 Summer Games are said to have taken thirty years to pay off. As, again, is commonplace with Olympic Games, a cultural festival was developed. This took place from 23 January to 28 February 1988 and showcased Canadian performers. The organizers were delighted with sales of more than 155,000 tickets for the wide variety of programming. These first tenants are still in residence. Since then, the number of spaces under the Performing Arts Centre roof has been expanded, as have the roster of companies. This includes One Yellow Rabbit, Downstage, the Calgary International Children’s Festival, the Honens International Piano Competition, and Wordfest. The histories of these buildings can be reviewed at Parks Canada, “Canada’s Historic Places.” Rooney, “Secret Shows.” Wilton, “From Medals to Festivals.” Ibid. The name usually given to Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby – “champions of the rights of welfare of women and children,” as described in Famous 5 Foundation, “Women.” See Famous 5 Foundation, “‘Persons’ Case,” which offers a succinct history

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30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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Susan Bennett of the group’s petition of the Supreme Court of Canada for recognition of women as “persons” so that they might be eligible for appointment to Canada’s Senate. An identical monument was installed the following year on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Cresswell, Place: An Introduction, 85. Sled Island is a five-day music festival that has taken place each June since 2007; Fiestaval is a three-day celebration of Latin American culture that happens each July; and Spaghetti Western is an alt-country music festival scheduled each year in August. The Jane’s Walk concept celebrates the life and contributions of urbanist Jane Jacobs. See Jane’s Walk, “Calgary, ab,” for its activities in Calgary. Cited in Wilton, “From Medals to Festivals.” Arts Commons, “History.” Wenn, Barney, and Martyn, Tarnished Rings. “Own the Podium” looks to “achieve sustainable podium performances at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.” Own the Podium, “Vision, Mission, and Goals.” Arts Commons, “Who We Are.” Hunt, “Performing Arts Centre.” This quotation is attributed to Carmen Patterson, described as a “youth programming sales associate,” in the Calgary Herald’s coverage of the December 2014 renaming. Sassen and Roost, “City: Strategic Site,” 143. Ibid., 147. Glendinning, Architecture’s Evil Empire, 9. See www.the-bow.com/ for more information about the Bow Tower. Plensa’s website provides a series of images and other details about “Wonderland.” Glendinning, Architecture’s Evil Empire, 109. Bell, “Calatravesty.” Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 78. Rochon, “Is Calatrava.” cbcnews, “Peace Bridge Party.” City of Calgary, “Downtown Cycle Track Network,” for the city’s rationale and planning strategy. An article in the Calgary Sun grudgingly acknowledges that since their introduction, the bike lanes have been a tangible success and only cost 1 per cent of the city’s transportation budget: see Kaufmann, “Calgary’s Bike Lane Usage.” Even with the dramatic fall in world oil prices in 2014 and 2015, Calgary’s skyline is still punctuated by dozens of cranes. Under construction, both Brookfield Place and Telus Sky look to outdo the Bow Tower in height and

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48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

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architectural verve: Brookfield is designed by fka Architecture (based in London, Melbourne and Sydney) and Telus Sky by Copenhagen’s Bjarke Ingels Group (big). Morgan, “Calgary’s Soon-to-Be Tallest Tower.” Brookfield Office Properties, “Brookfield Place Calgary.” Lederman, “Calgary’s National Music Centre.” The genesis of the collection can be traced, interestingly, to the creation of the Centre for Performing Arts and the installation of a pipe organ in the largest of the centre’s venues, the Jack Singer Concert Hall, in 1987. This allowed for the development of the International Organ Festival and Competition, which, in turn, spurred the creation of Chinook Keyboard Centre – an entity that would become, in 2003, the Cantos Music Foundation. See National Music Centre, “About Us.” e-architect, “Calgary National Music Centre.” See Allied Work Architecture, “National Music Centre of Canada.” The nmc website provides a 24/7 webcam to show the building’s construction: National Music Centre, “Construction Camera.” National Music Centre, “National Music Centre and Bell Announce Studio Bell.” Information about the condo project can be found at N3 Condo, homepage. Included in a condo’s purchase price is a bike, a lifetime membership of the Car2Go car-sharing club, and $500 in Car2Go credits. Bell, “Ribbon Cut.” Bonfield, “Decidedly Jazz.” Snøhetta, “Calgary’s New Central Library.” See Calgary Municipal Land Corporation, “Projects in Progress,” for a plan of projects comprising the ncl Public Art program. The description of “software” used by the library is taken from the 2009 East Village Master Plan. ArtInfo Canada, “World-Renowned Artist Julian Opie.” This article notes that Opie’s Promenade was, at the time of installation, the largest public sculpture in Canada and that the only other Opie in the country was in Toronto – echoes of the commentary around the opening of the Grand Theatre more than a hundred years earlier. Following Michel de Certeau’s paean to walking in the city, Peter Dickinson’s exploration of Vancouver takes up the creative walk as an embodied experience of the urban space. Municipal policy in Calgary, thanks to the Nenshiled council, has urged Calgarians to become more like Vancouver’s population in transit, cycling, and pedestrian usage. Mike Pearson, “In Comes I,” 219. Bell, “Ribbon Cut.” Foran, MacEwan, and Balcers, Calgary, 274.

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65 Arts production in Calgary has long been imbricated in the business of the city’s resource industries. For discussion of the involvement of Shell in the arts festival attached to the 1988 Winter Olympics, public protest, and implications for ongoing First Nations land claims, see Bennett, “Calgary (1988): A Cultural Olympiad avant la lettre.” 66 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 26. 67 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 152.

2

Xeyxelómós and Lady Franklin Rock: Place Naming,

Performance Historiography, and Settler Methodologies h eat her davi s- fi sch

5 November 2011.1 New to British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, I found myself on a Halq’eméylem place-name tour, led by Naxaxalhts’i (Albert “Sonny” McHalsie), the cultural advisor at the Stó:lō Research and Resource Management Centre. The turnaround point of the tour, just north of the present-day town of Yale, bc, was a large rock in the Fraser River known as Lady Franklin Rock. I was immediately interested in the place name, as I was in the final stages of writing a book about the disappearance of her famous husband, Sir John Franklin.2 Although I knew Jane Franklin was a prolific traveller in her own right,3 until Naxaxalhts’i mentioned that the rock’s name commemorated her visit, I had no idea that she had ever travelled to the Fraser Valley. While at the site, I was compelled by Naxaxalhts’i’s stories explaining its historical and mythical significance in Coast Salish culture, particularly how he blended traditional knowledge, contemporary archaeology, and oral narratives, but as I got back on our tour bus, I found myself wondering why the rock came to be named after Lady Franklin. I was immediately inclined to read the place name as an extraordinary case of a “remote” locale named after a woman who actually visited it, an example of the complex power dynamics that shaped women’s roles in the colonial era. Almost simultaneously, I recognized that my focus on the commemorative renaming of the rock privileged the moment of colonial encounter, reenacting historical erasures that overwrote continuous Indigenous presence at the site, presence that Naxaxalhts’i’s stories so clearly underlined. I realized only in retrospect that my inclination to view Naxaxalhts’i’s work as fundamentally performative, rather than consider its “ontological instrumentality,” underlines the pointed question that Dylan Robinson poses later in this volume: “to what degree does performance

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studies efface a colonial enterprise in its desire to understand, and perhaps in the process normalize, Indigenous cultural practice as ‘performance first’?”4 9 March 1861. Lady Jane Franklin was visiting the Fraser Valley as part of a two-year circumnavigation of the globe after receiving confirmation, in 1859, that her husband had indeed died on his final expedition. From 5 to 17 March 1861 she and her niece Sophy Cracroft went on a sightseeing trip up the Fraser, perhaps because Lady Franklin, having “a lively curiosity in scientific matters,” was “very much interested in the technical side of gold mining.”5 Twelve Indigenous men paddled a canoe with Lady Franklin and Cracroft up the Fraser River to see the “Big Falls,” a wide waterfall spanning the river. As they returned to Yale, the women received a flattering surprise: a large white banner with the words “Lady Franklin Pass” was stretched across the river, the name “bestowed by the inhabitants of Yale” in honour of Lady Franklin’s visit. The banner was “saluted from the opposite bank, by dipping a flag (the Union Jack) 3 times.” The women then stopped in town, where Lady Franklin presented each of the paddlers with a “gay cotton handkerchief” and a “good feast of bread, well smeared with treacle.”6 She was further honoured with an address read by William Burton Crickmer, the Anglican cleric at Yale, which declared, “The inhabitants of Yale … esteem the present as the proudest moment in the annals of our country and in the existence of our Town” because “today is our Town of Yale forever linked in history with the name of one, the memorial of whose abundant kindness and wifely devotion will never die.”7 These cultural performances, recounted by the middle-aged Cracroft in letters home, are memorialized by the place name Lady Franklin Rock. This chapter asks what these performances meant: to Crickmer, as their director; to their intended audience of Lady Franklin, Sophy Cracroft, and other settlers at Yale; and to the Indigenous participants, who – to continue the theatrical metaphor – seem to have been cast as stagehands, both essential to the performance’s success and, at least in my reading of Crickmer’s intentions, meant to fade into the event’s mise en scène. Decolonizing methodologies are quickly becoming ubiquitous in the Canadian academy, particularly in the wake of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Few would argue that this is not an important and welcome development, especially for those disciplines with histories intimately linked to colonial epistemologies. It also, however, raises critical questions about how such methodologies are

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deployed, notably by settlers invigorated by an earnest sense of responsibility for righting colonial wrongs, and whether such methodologies, when applied by settlers, might not in fact contribute to ongoing appropriations of Indigenous knowledge. Métis scholar David Garneau argues that while decolonization is “collective work, it sometimes requires occasions of separation – moments where Indigenous people take space and time to work things out among themselves, and parallel moments when allies ought to do the same.”8 Robinson takes Garneau’s argument to one of its logical and performative conclusions in his 2016 essay “Welcoming Sovereignty,” making the injunction for “nonIndigenous, settler, arrivant, ally, or xwelítem” readers to “please stop reading by the end of this paragraph,” explaining that the following eight pages of the essay “are sovereign space, written for Indigenous readers,” and that non-Indigenous readers should return to the chapter after this break.9 Garneau and Robinson’s comments raise the question of whether it is ethical for settler scholars to apply Indigenous or decolonizing methodologies that emerge from specific Indigenous epistemological frameworks and suggest that scholars of settler ancestry might instead work with – but at times apart from – Indigenous scholars to develop decolonizing methodologies that emerge from their own histories and world views. How, then, might settler allies value Indigenous world views and methodologies, acknowledge the ontological and epistemological limits imposed by their own genealogical baggage and positions, and avoid appropriative research models? Early in “Welcoming Sovereignty,” Robinson poses three questions to what is, at this point in the essay, a readership comprising both Indigenous and settler readers: “What is the place from which you read? What is the positionality of reading? How does this positionality situate your responsibilities as a reader and what do you do with the knowledge you gain from this act of reading?”10 These questions form a germane starting point, as they allow me to begin within Indigenous frameworks, but also explicitly require me to position myself as settler and to specify that the place from which I write is one separate from Robinson’s. I am a Xwelítem,11 a non-Stó:lō person, and a recent settler to the Fraser Valley; a white woman whose United Empire Loyalist ancestors emigrated to the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples, near what is now Kingston, on; and a scholar invested in performance studies, particularly in the use of performance studies as a way to investigate the past. This positionality leads to my sense of responsibility for better understanding the ongoing effects of

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these genealogies, both familial and disciplinary, and for investigating how intercultural performance has been complicit in colonization of the lands now known as Canada. More specifically, this chapter explores settler performance history on the lands on which I now live as an uninvited guest, and contends that the 1861 renaming of Lady Franklin Rock attempted to change how both Indigenous peoples and settlers understood the place and their relationship to the landscape. In this chapter, I apply what I am tentatively terming a settler methodology, one that might be characterized as positional, transparent, intertextual, and imaginative. By positionality, I mean acknowledging the position from which I read and taking responsibility for its implications on my reading practice. This chapter includes moments of what I call “settler creep,” moments when my writing naturalizes my own interpretive practice as a settler, as it did when I assumed Naxaxalhts’i’s work was fundamentally performative. When these moments arise, I’ve attempted to be transparent about them rather than erasing them. I’ve also attempted to be transparent about the limits of my knowledge as a settler in these territories. Naxaxalhts’i generously shared his knowledge of the rock’s histories and his interpretation of Crickmer’s renaming with me; I have also considered a range of Stó:lō perspectives – on story, place, and history – shared in oral literature (narrative performances “captured” in written form). However, there may well be other relevant stories that would inform my understanding of the meaning of the performances; these stories may not be accessible to me because I am not a member of the communities to whom they belong and have not yet built necessary relationships that would permit me access to them.12 My reading practice is intertextual in that I attempt to strategically position Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories and theories in relation to one another in order to bring Indigenous perspectives, often transmitted orally or in oral literature, into conversation with Euro-Canadian perspectives transmitted through supposedly objective archives, providing space for Indigenous knowledges to inform my interpretation of Euro-Canadian artifacts and archival documents. Finally, I see my methodology as imaginative, in the productive sense used by Greg Dening when he points out, in his reflections on ethnohistories of intercultural contact in the South Pacific, “Both European Strangers and Polynesian Natives of the past are distant from us now.”13 Retroactively ascribing motives and reactions to Reverend Crickmer or Lady Franklin might appear both ethically and methodologically simpler – because of my own position and because of relatively voluminous archives – than

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doing the same in relation to the Indigenous male paddlers; Dening’s comments remind us that performance historiography is always, to some degree, hypothetical and reliant on imagination. I situate performance historiography as one of the disciplines I mentioned above, one that has been – and often still is – intimately linked to colonial epistemologies. At the same time, I suggest that performance studies might provide theoretical and methodological tools for decolonizing this field, specifically in relation to intercultural performance and ways of reframing settler reading and analytic practices.14 While it is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the differences between Western and Indigenous historiography, it is helpful to outline features that distinguish many Indigenous cultures’ ways of recounting the past from Western traditions. Arapaho scholar Michael Marker identifies “four themes of indigenous ways of understanding the past that are difficult to integrate into the conventions of Western historiographies.”15 Two explicitly relate to the role of place in history: first, “the often central theme of relationships with landscape and non-humans,” and second, “an emphasis on the local landscape as containing the meaning of both time and place.”16 Marker calls for an approach to history that recognizes how “Indigenous historical narratives place human beings in a landscape that is understood to have mythic forms converging with everyday forms of experience,”17 emphasizing that “for indigenous communities the past is located in the local and traditional territory.”18 Identifying “the circular nature of time and the ways oral tradition is integrated with recurring events,”19 Marker notes that in Indigenous oral history, “the sense of linear time [is] folded and curved to account for the merging of events and characters; this create[s] a circular and recurring moral universe within an indigenous epistemology.”20 For me, the themes Marker outlines resonate with Joseph Roach’s description of how culturally significant places connect performances across time. “Behavioral vortices” are places whose “function is to canalize specified needs, desires, and habits in order to reproduce them”; these places provide space for “condensational events” to occur, events that “gain a powerful enough hold on collective memory that they will survive the transformation or the relocation of the spaces in which they first flourished.”21 Here, Roach is drawing on French historian Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire: sites “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” that emerge at particular historical turning points when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn.”22 Lieux de mémoire exist

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when real environments of memory – milieux de mémoire – no longer do.23 Place names, in Western cultures, are common examples of lieux de mémoire. Frequently commemorating historical events or honouring specific individuals’ local significance, such place names also overwrite prior cultural memories. This interplay of memory and forgetting is obvious in the place names of settler colonies like Canada. For example, Yale, bc, was founded as Fort Yale in 1848, named after James Murray Yale, the chief factor of the Columbia District; its name continues to mark the town’s fur-trading history. Today most of its inhabitants are members of the Yale First Nation, a self-governing First Nation that draws its name from the name of the fort, demonstrating the ongoing and pervasive power of lieux de mémoire. In many Indigenous cultures, however, traditional place names mark the past differently, constructing not only the past but also “social transformations and … personal and social identities.”24 Place names mark traditional and continuous relationships between people and the landscape; colonial performances renaming culturally significant places are, then, no less than attempts to sever these relationships, eradicating milieux de mémoire through the creation of lieux de mémoire. Roach and Nora both suggest that cultural place memory relies not only upon a “will to remember,”25 but also upon acts of forgetting. This cultural amnesia is frequently an “opportunistic tactic of whiteness,” a means by which anxious colonial authority can be exercised through careful and strategic acts of erasure.26 This process, however, is rarely completed: traces of the past almost always remain, and, as Roach argues throughout Cities of the Dead, such traces frequently remain in performance. This chapter examines a range of cultural memories that remain as performance traces, beginning with the details of the 1861 performance that inaugurated Lady Franklin Rock and arguing that it appears to be a carefully orchestrated ritual through which Reverend Crickmer commemorated the extent to which formerly “wild” territory had been tamed. I will then turn to Stó:lō oral traditions concerning the rock to better explain what, exactly, Crickmer might have imagined he was “taming.” Like many Aboriginal peoples, pre-colonial Stó:lō transmitted knowledge orally through two types of historical stories: sqwelqwel, describing the relatively recent past, and sxwōxwiyám, stories from the myth-age describing the acts of transformers named Xexá:ls. I am not aware of any sqwelqwel about Lady Franklin’s visit, but a wellknown Stó:lō sxwōxwiyám explains the origins of the rock and its Halq’eméylem place name. This sxwōxwiyám plays a critical role in a

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sqwelqwel about the rock, the story of the first direct contact between Stó:lō and Europeans and of an earlier renaming of the rock.27 With these contexts in mind, the 1861 performance might be considered what J.L. Austin terms a misinvocation, an act that Crickmer did not have the authority to perform.28 Finally, returning to consider the 1861 renaming in its immediate historical context, I contend that Crickmer’s performance was less stable and even more troubling than it might initially appear: the renaming enacted the colonial agenda it attempted to celebrate as a fait accompli. Examining the histories “forgotten” in the rock’s renaming reveals that the 1861 performance functioned as a colonizing act that attempted – not entirely successfully – to erase precontact cultural memory associated with the rock and demonstrates the cultural power of place naming as a performance genre.

The Rock as Lieu de Mémoire The performance Lady Franklin and Sophy Cracroft witnessed appears to me to have been a carefully stage-managed climax to their excursion to the Big Falls, its theatrical impact reliant upon imperial symbols adapted to the colonial landscape. Cracroft’s account mentions Reverend Crickmer reading an address at Yale; however, she underplays his role as the de facto director of the performance. The women arrived in Yale the evening before their canoe trip and visited with Crickmer and his wife, who had invited the “most respectable people” of Yale to tea.29 The next morning, Ovid Allard, the Hudson Bay Company agent at Yale and one of Crickmer’s guests the previous night, provided the women with a “large and commodious canoe, manned by a dozen stalwart Indians.”30 Cracroft recounts that the “12 Indians” who paddled the canoe were “all dressed in red woollen shirts, with gay ribbons in their caps, in honor” of Lady Franklin.31 Costumed, but not in any form of traditional Indigenous dress, their clothing was reminiscent of the fabled voyageurs of Canadian history. Little did the women know that Reverend Crickmer “had prepared a SURPRISE for the Great Explorer’s Wife”:32 while the women were “conducted up the river,” Jason Allard, Ovid’s twelve-year-old son,33 “constructed a big banner bearing the name ‘Lady Franklin’s Pass,’ which was hung at the entrance to the mountain cleft”34 after the women passed it on their way upriver. Jason must have had help: the terrain on both sides of the river is rugged and the river, even at that point, is fairly wide. Crickmer, who was in the canoe, remembered how as they passed the rock on their way to the Big

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Falls, Lady Franklin disgustedly remarked, “What, Mr. Crickmer, has this magnificent Pass no other name than The Little Canyon?” One can imagine his nervous anticipation for the surprise he had orchestrated; as they travelled back to Yale, he was “in terror that there had not been time to do as [he] had implored the sign-writer on calico, on a pine pole.” Crickmer’s fear dissipated when the canoe rounded the turn in the river, “the tableau above” came into view, and he was able to declare: “Now, Lady Franklin, this Pass has a name, which will last as long as the hills.”35 The banner was “suspended from the rafters of a salmon drying shed,” suggesting how Stó:lō architectural features were repurposed in service of the colonial performance. The banner was then “saluted from the opposite bank, by dipping a flag (the Union Jack) 3 times,”36 likely by Jason Allard and his now anonymous helpers. Because of the scale of the natural setting, the salute was performed not by individual hands but by the British flag itself, an implicit approval of the renaming by the empire itself. Why did Crickmer name the pass after Lady Franklin? The settler community certainly wanted to honour her with its gesture of respect. Beyond acknowledging her status as the “Great Explorer’s Wife,” Crickmer’s address at Yale stressed her exemplary character and her “abundant kindness and wifely devotion,”37 indicating that her significance was not limited to her fateful marriage.38 At a time when few white women even lived in the colony, the visit of a dignified woman like Jane would have been remarkable to them. Her presence at the pass itself was even more extraordinary simply because the area was so difficult for Xwelítem to access. It was not uncommon for explorers to name places they “discovered” after women – Lady Franklin’s name had already been given to a bay and an island in the Arctic – but it was far less common for a “remote” place to be named after a woman who had actually visited it. The place-naming performance commemorating Jane Franklin’s presence at the site is suggestive of changes in attitudes toward both gender and place. First, we might interpret the place name as a sign of progress in the social position of women. It was at least mildly transgressive for an aristocratic British woman to step outside the bounds of her conventional social role and behave like a woman of the frontier – or even an Indigenous woman – rather than of the metropole, visiting a site only Indigenous people could access; the place name commemorates Lady Franklin’s unorthodox behaviour. We must recall, however, that it was Crickmer who named the place. Any feminist reading of the

Figure 2.1 View of the rock, looking north up the Fraser River, taken 9 March 2015. Lady Franklin Pass is on the left side.

place name must be tempered with recognition that the power to name landmarks remained the domain of (white) men. Second, we might consider that the place name marks a turning point in how the territory was imagined by the (white male) settlers responsible for naming. In the half-century that followed Simon Fraser’s “discovery” of the river, the Fraser was transformed into a fur trade corridor and then into a relatively accessible waterway that facilitated more diverse trade between the coast and interior. The resource-based frontier, the domain of relatively transient and rough men, had by 1861 begun to give way to a settler colony, an extension of the civility and domesticity of the British Empire and a place where families might emigrate. Lady Franklin represented the precise qualities the emerging colony valued. In 1861 Lady Franklin was sixty-eight years old, an advanced age at the time, and her niece was forty-five. Inscribing her name on the pass symbolized that Fraser’s wild river had been so civilized that even an “elderly” woman could glimpse the canyon’s pristine beauty.

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Sometime between 1861 and 1867,39 the place name shifted from Lady Franklin Pass to Lady Franklin Rock, which is what the rock is often called today. Lingering uncertainty about why and when the name shifted is symptomatic of the rock’s status as a site of cultural memory with the power to generate affectively compelling but historically unreliable narratives. Anthropologist Andrea Laforet recorded two stories about the rock that suggest its ability to generate both evocative stories and historical misremembering. One informant, apparently unaware that John Franklin’s death was confirmed in 1859, described how Lady Franklin went to Yale to passively wait for her husband, who was planning to descend the Fraser on his return from the Arctic. Lady Franklin “used to get the Indians to take her across and she’d sit on the rock all day waiting for her husband.”40 The second story ascribes a more active character to Lady Franklin and inspired a commemorative plaque, erected in 1973, which read: “The Rock thwarted Lady Jane Franklin in her efforts to proceed up the river in search of her husband.”41 These stories of Lady Franklin’s actions at her namesake rock demonstrate that once a place name is fixed to a site and to a history, creating a lieu de mémoire, the place name can become a placeholder, holding open a space that can be filled with a narrow range of cultural narratives and from which outlying cultural memories are excluded. Pierre Nora’s description of lieux de mémoire relies on the distinction between lieux – sites at which “moments of history” are “torn away from the movement of history, then returned”42 – and milieux – “real environments of memory”43 – and aligns each with a competing way of knowing the past: history and real memory, respectively. History is “the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer … a representation of the past … an intellectual and secular production”;44 memory, in contrast, is not mediated or intellectualized but “social and unviolated … affective and magical.”45 Nora suggests that history is characterized by an alienated relationship to the past, while memory is characterized by an ongoing interaction with it; lieux are sites where the past is commemorated by those in the present, while milieux immerse those from the present in the past. While the binaries Nora suggests are perhaps too tidy, his suggestion that history “is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it”46 – often through the creation of lieux de mémoire – is helpful. The place name Lady Franklin Rock, as a lieu de mémoire, emerged from Crickmer’s desire to memorialize a present moment and create history by monumentalizing a natural landmark. The cultural impulse to remember her

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presence at the site required what Roach calls “public enactments of forgetting”;47 this is seen in the name shifting from the pass to the rock and the stories that reflect very different memories of her agency. Recognizing these errors in cultural memory draws attention to a much more troubling instance of strategic forgetting: that committed by Crickmer when he named the pass after Lady Franklin, overwriting Indigenous place names. This recognition changes the scope of the question concerning why Crickmer chose to rename the pass after Lady Franklin and raises another, perhaps more provocative one: What was at stake if Lady Franklin’s visit was not remembered?

The Rock as Transformer Site Naming the site after Lady Franklin not only memorialized her visit but also overwrote – or attempted to overwrite – Stó:lō histories of the place. The Stó:lō world view that place is intimately linked to both temporality and oral traditions is manifested in sxwōxwiyám, transformation stories that comprise one of two key genres within oral traditions. Sxwōxwiyám describe “the distant past, ‘when the world was not quite right.’”48 During this chaotic time, Xexá:ls, “the transformers who are also known as the three bear brothers and the bear sister … were given a responsibility to travel through the land to make the world right … transforming … ancestors into mountains or into rocks or into resources.”49 Transformer sites mark the actual remains of specific ancestors; stories about these ancestors help listeners “acquire the necessary cultural knowledge needed to make healthy decisions in a variety of situations.”50 The word sxwōxwiyám refers to both the temporal period and the stories from the period,51 demonstrating Stó:lō understandings that time, narrative, and place exist in a complex interrelationship. In December 2013, Naxaxalhts’i shared one sxwōxwiyám about the rock with me.52 In his iteration of the sxwōxwiyám, Xexá:ls53 was walking upriver beyond the present-day town of Yale, and when he reached the west bank, he heard about Xeyxelómós, a shxwlá:m (“Indian doctor”) who “was using his power the wrong way” by asking people to pay for his help.54 Xexá:ls called for Xeyxelómós to do battle with him. Xeyxelómós initially refused, but after Xexá:ls transformed his sister, Siyt’l, into an underwater rock downriver from Lady Franklin Rock, Xeyxelómós travelled through a tunnel to do battle with Xexá:ls.55 Xexá:ls stood at Th’exelís, a “little rock point on the west bank”; Th’exelís, which translates as “showing his teeth (in anger),” is distinguished

Figure 2.2 View of Xeyxelómós and the pass, with Th’exelis at the right of the image. Photo taken 9 March 2015, looking down the Fraser River from the west bank.

by a set of white lines in the rock, marking where Xexá:ls scratched his fingers during the duel.56 Naxaxalhts’i described the battle: “At one point Xexá:ls cast a thunderbolt, a lightning bolt to Xeyxelómós and he missed him. But the … the lightning bolt went right into the rock so if you go up there you can see this vein of quartz rock, it’s about two feet wide, about eighty feet long. And eventually Xexá:ls defeated Xeyxelómós and transformed him into stone, so that’s the large stone that’s in the river that’s now known as Lady Franklin Rock.”57

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The banner reading “Lady Franklin Pass,” according to a sketch Crickmer made, was hung between Th’exelis and Xeyxelómós, indicating that the 1861 performance constituted an attempt to overwrite two of the Halq’eméylem place names associated with sxwōxwiyám. Both are significant place names in Stó:lō culture, not only because they communicate cultural teachings but also because they provide physical evidence of Xexá:ls’s presence. A Stó:lō elder interviewed by anthropologist Gordon Mohs58 told him that Th’exelís “represents a continuity of the present with the past,” leading Mohs to comment, “Th’exelis is where Xa:ls left his mark on the earth so that future generations would remember his passing … Th’exelis is an affirmation of Indian spirituality prior to the coming of the Europeans.”59 In order to register the cultural significance of renaming a place, as Crickmer did, it is critical to understand that Stó:lō place names fall into three categories. The first includes names referring to the “historical happenings” of sqwelqwel. Geographic place names comprise the second category. Place names in both groups evolve over time, reflecting “the ongoing historical experiences of Stó:lō people” and changes in the significance of landmarks. Names in the third category are “associated with the miraculous events from sxwōxwiyám”; they refer to landmarks that are the physical remains of Stó:lō ancestors.60 Transformer sites seem to allow for the “touching time” that Rebecca Schneider describes in Performing Remains; in viscerally collapsing past and present, they facilitate profound affective experiences.61 Although different “subjective meanings” of transformer stories might emerge in different eras, the stories themselves possess “an inherent significance … that must be preserved intact and in unaltered form.” Transformer sites are where the “ancestors come to share their perspectives” with Stó:lō people, marking a material and ongoing connection between Stó:lō and their ancestors; as a result, these place names are “truly sacred and meant to be unchanging.”62 One of the first examples of contact between Stó:lō and Europeans, which incidentally took place at the rock, demonstrates how sxwōxwiyám influenced Stó:lō world views and actions, indicating how the meaning of transformer stories could be both preserved and adapted to new cultural circumstances. When Simon Fraser passed by the rock during his 1808 descent of the river, he heard about the sxwōxwiyám of Xeyxelómós.63 In his published journals, Fraser relates how “the natives informed us, that white people like us came there from below; and they shewed us indented marks which the white men made upon the

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rocks, but which, by the bye, seemed to us to be natural marks.”64 The indented marks to which Fraser refers are almost certainly those of Th’exelís, and the rock that he refers to as “the bad rock” is likely Xeyxelómós. For both Fraser and Stó:lō, however, the encounter appears to have been marked by misreading. Fraser, perhaps because of his interpreter, misinterpreted who Xexá:ls were, thinking Stó:lō were referring to white people or Europeans visiting the rock.65 Fraser’s name for the rock collapsed the difference between Xeyxelómós the shxwlá:m and Xeyxelómós the rock into metaphor – the name was the same for both because both were “bad” – rather than recognizing, as Stó:lō did, that the rock was the transformed shxwlá:m. Stó:lō also misidentified Simon Fraser: Naxaxalhts’i, recalling a story he attributed to Jason Allard, told me that Stó:lō thought “Fraser was Xexá:ls returning.” Fraser and his men, arriving from the direction from which Stó:lō believed Xexá:ls had disappeared, “not only looked different physically, but they dressed oddly and were in possession of technology that could not be readily explained with reference to existing indigenous experiences. Confronted with the new situation, … they tried to fit the newcomers into their existing historical understandings,”66 demonstrating how the transformer story was adapted to incorporate new cultural experiences. Because Stó:lō assumed Fraser was Xexá:ls, they took him to see the scratch marks as a way of “asking him if he had been [t]here before”;67 the scratch marks were not only a visible sign of Xexá:ls’s past actions but also a mnemonic device reminding Fraser of when he, as Xexá:ls, left his mark on the landscape.68 The sxwōxwiyám is crucial to the meaning of the sqwelqwel, the story of Fraser’s visit, exemplifying Keith Thor Carlson’s claim that Stó:lō history “is filled with significant points of interpenetration” across time and between ancient and recent history.69 In this example, the rock seems to act as what Nora terms a milieu de memoire – a real environment of memory – in which the distant and recent past come together at a spiritually and historically significant place. Fraser’s renaming of the rock, although based on a misinterpretation of the sxwōxwiyám, preserved Indigenous historical narratives and place-based epistemologies in its “translation” of the Halq’eméylem Xeyxelómós as the “bad rock.” In contrast to Fraser’s renaming, Lady Franklin Pass and Lady Franklin Rock attempt to erase Indigenous knowledge by commemorating only European presence at the site. Furthermore, if one takes Naxaxalhts’i’s indication that such place names must be preserved seriously, questions about the legitimacy of Crickmer’s 1861 renaming as a performative, in an Austinian sense, arise. In

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How to Do Things with Words J.L. Austin notes, regarding successful performative utterances, “for naming the ship, it is essential that I should be the person appointed to name her, for (Christian) marrying, it is essential that I should not be already married with a wife living, sane and undivorced, and so on.”70 The performance by which Crickmer attempted to rename the pass was unsuccessful because it was both a misinvocation – “there [was], speaking vaguely, no such procedure”71 for changing a place name associated with sxwōxwiyám – and a misapplication – Crickmer, not having the authority to rename the places, was not “appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.”72 When we consider the effects of Crickmer’s performance, it is clear that the legitimacy of his action has not mattered much: despite the shift of the name from pass to rock, his commemoration of Lady Franklin has survived in everyday usage by both Stó:lō and Xwelítem.

The Rock as Geological Palimpsest To return to the question of what was at stake if Lady Franklin’s visit was not remembered, it should now be clear that commemorating Lady Franklin’s visit also constituted an attempted erasure of Indigenous histories represented by Halq’eméylem place names for the site. Such cultural amnesia is often strategic; in the case of Lady Franklin Rock I contend that it was a tactic that facilitated the appropriation of Indigenous lands by settlers in the new colony. Intercultural relations in 1861 were almost unrecognizably different from those Fraser experienced in 1808. When Fraser reached what is now known as the Fraser Canyon, the landscape was getting the best of him. This stretch of the river was virtually impassable in sections and Fraser had to rely on the knowledge of Indigenous guides and on Indigenous architectural structures – pathways on the sides of the canyon – to survive. By the time Fraser reached “the bad rock,” his “Native guides were not simply passive facilitators in the background … but actively guided the newcomers through a landscape entirely their own.”73 The story of the “bad rock” also preserves the memory of how Fraser became the object of Indigenous people’s knowledge through his insertion into Stó:lō sqwelqwel, showing that the unequal power dynamics of colonialism that we often expect to see in intercultural contact zones had not fully emerged at this historical juncture. The most significant catalyst for the changes that took place by 1861 was the 1858 Fraser Canyon gold rush, which saw 30,000 Xwelítem miners arrive in

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a territory whose population included “less than a hundred non-Native men.”74 The governor of Vancouver Island, James Douglas, concerned about the impact of mining, petitioned the British government to create the mainland colony of British Columbia. The 1858 proclamation of the colony led to debates about how to negotiate with First Nations; the colonial government and settlers wanted to avoid what they perceived as expensive treaties, like those negotiated east of the Rockies.75 Douglas, compared to his successors, appeared to be genuinely sympathetic toward Indigenous peoples’ concerns.76 However, he believed that treaty negotiations would not help Stó:lō survive colonization and that the only way they “could escape physical extinction” was by “embrac[ing] the notion of their own cultural extinction.”77 The key to this extinction lay in permanently changing Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land, curbing their migratory nature, and transforming them into farmers.78 It was not enough to mandate lifestyle changes: Indigenous understandings of land had to change. One of the ways that colonial governments and religious authorities severed Indigenous attachments to traditional lands was by changing traditional place names. McHalsie and Thom argue, “The renaming of the landscape was an important part of the colonization of British Columbia by Euroamericans and the marginalization of the indigenous language, culture, and traditions.”79 Place renamings were cultural performances that were frequently achieved with the help of theatrical mises en scène. When Reverend Crickmer renamed the rock, he used the natural landscape as a backdrop to emphasize the performing object – the banner – at the centre of the event. The performance’s affective impact on the British ladies relied upon a range of theatrical elements: props, gestures, and costumes symbolizing empire and the history of settlement in Canada. Renamings were not only performative in a theatrical sense but also constituted performative utterances, in Austin’s sense.80 The success of these performances relied upon the colonizers’ assumption that they indeed had the right to perform such acts, an assumption that – as I indicated earlier – is certainly flawed if we imagine the perspective of Indigenous spectators at such events. The importance of renamings, as performatives, lies not only in their illocutionary power – their effect of naming a specific site81 – but in their perlocutionary power – the broader effects of the naming.82 Renamings attempted to change not only how Indigenous people referred to significant places but also how they understood their fundamental relationship to place and territory: “Nam-

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ing was an exercise in suppressing the Aboriginal landscape – its myriad of historical and ancestral relationships – emphasizing instead the moment of discovery and ‘cultural territorialization.’”83 When I asked Naxaxalhts’i how he thought the Indigenous paddlers might have reacted to the 1861 renaming of the pass, he remarked, “Well, I think that would have been like right at the time where the missionaries are trying to get them away from those sorts of stories [sxwōxwiyám] … and trying to believe in the Bible and that sort of thing. … So, I don’t know how they would have felt about that … Depends how much the priest had explained to them about what was going on, I guess.” Here Sophy Cracroft’s account might yield an important clue. She writes that when the canoe arrived at the pass, the paddlers “stopped their paddling and we were told that this name was bestowed … in honor of my Aunt’s visit” and that, after the banner was saluted, “the Indians to whom it had been explained, worked their paddles more vigorously than ever.”84 Naxaxalhts’i explained that the east side of the rock is a xá:xa, or taboo, site, because it is where Xeyxelómós’s third eye was when he was transformed: “Stó:lō people aren’t allowed to go back behind there … If we do we could suffer from much, it is referred to as xó:lí:s … a sickness that causes you to twist up and die if you do something that you are told that you’re not supposed to do.”85 The paddlers witnessed the renaming and had it explained to them. While their “vigorous” paddling might have reflected enthusiasm, as Cracroft implies, it also seems possible that the paddlers rushed away from the xá:xa site because of the offence of renaming a place associated with sxwōxwiyám. It is uncertain whether Crickmer was aware of the Halq’eméylem names associated with the pass or was familiar with the sxwōxwiyám, so it is unclear whether he was fully aware of the cultural impropriety of renaming the rock.86 Naxaxalhts’i shared an analogous example with me, however, that explains why Crickmer might have deliberately attempted to overwrite the sxwōxwiyám. In the 1860s, a priest from St Mary’s Residential School in Mission, bc, took children to a mountain near Hope, where Stó:lō believed a stl’áleqem, a spiritually potent being, lived.87 The stl’áleqem at the site was a serpent, referenced by the Halq’eméylem name for the mountain.88 The name of the mountain was changed to Devil’s Mountain in an attempt “to create a new identity for the place to erase the first, the Aboriginal[,] identity.”89 This new identity was cemented through the priest’s action of taking children to

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the xá:xa site to prove that it was not spiritually powerful.90 Crisca Bierwart suggests that the name change to Lady Franklin Pass was a “superficial act, not a direct superimposition, but one that in its very superficiality implies that a base of colonial power had been established.”91 However, I suspect that the renaming was no retroactive reflection of established colonial power but an act that, like the children’s visit to Devil’s Mountain, actually enacted that colonial power through performance. If renaming places was an unspoken part of colonial policy – as McHalsie, Thom, Oliver, and Carlson all suggest – and if colonial place identities were enacted through affirmative performatives and ceremonies asserting colonial authority, then the renaming of the pass must be understood within this context, as an act whose real effect was to colonize the landscape. Lady Franklin Rock, as a place name, commemorates the visit of an aristocratic woman to a nascent colony, signifying her exemplary character, the newly tamed landscape, and locals’ affective attachment to memories of her visit. The renaming performance took place in an anxious socio-political atmosphere, when the imperial cultural values that the name, as lieu de mémoire, attempted to memorialize were contested rather than established. Roach notes that the “anxiety generated by the process of substitution” – in this case the substitution of a colonial place name for a Halq’eméylem one – “justifies the complicity of memory and forgetting.”92 So too, renaming in order to forget Indigenous ties to the land was essential to the colonial project. Roach also points out, however, that such substitutions are rarely completely successful: collective memory “works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely,”93 and the forgetting upon which collective memory relies is limited by its vast scale, particularly for “those who ha[ve] the deepest motivation and the surest means to forget.”94 The complex and incomplete forgetting Roach refers to is evident in how traces of pre-colonial understandings of the rock’s meaning and history remain in the present. For example, Bierwart notes that Stó:lō often “disclaim the name’s adherence to the landscape … saying, ‘It’s called Lady Franklin Rock, in the white man’s language’”; even speakers who don’t know Halq’eméylem “can use this disclaimer … to indict cultural colonization.”95 This suggests that Stó:lō might recognize that Crickmer’s renaming of the rock was, to use Austin’s terminology, a misapplication. Another example is Naxaxalhts’i’s place name tours, called “Bad Rock Tours” in reference to Fraser, which educate Stó:lō and Xwelítem about the pre-colonial history of the territory by sharing

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the stories embedded in Halq’eméylem place names. Naxaxalhts’i’s tours not only decolonize the landscape by remembering pre-colonial understandings of place and drawing attention to how colonial performances renamed and reconstructed the landscape, but also decolonize participants through immersion in the natural landscape and exposure to Indigenous understandings of the relationship between individuals and place. Naxaxalhts’i’s stories, told during place name tours, indicate that despite colonial attempts to sever Indigenous relationships to land, precolonial understandings of the landscape endure. Xeyxelómós/Lady Franklin Rock is not only an example of the intimate relationship between performance, colonization, and landscape that emerged in the Fraser Valley in the second half of the nineteenth century but also a case of a geological palimpsest. Jonathan Gil Harris explains that “palimpsested” manuscripts perform in at least three temporal registers: supersession, the production of “a ‘living’ after that is opposed to a ‘dead’ before”; explosion, in which the “‘old’ text shatters the integrity of the ‘new’ by introducing into it [the] radical alterity” of the past;96 and conjunction, in which the infinities of the past and present “converse with each other.” Like an author, the place name Lady Franklin Rock attempts to overwrite and erase the pre-colonial place name Xeyxelómós, but pre-colonial memory persistently erupts at the site, evidenced in the intercultural encounter of 1808 and in Naxaxalhts’i’s performances of cultural memory today. Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains, “Coming to know the past has been part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization,” and “transforming our colonized views of our own history … requires us to revisit, site by site, our history under Western eyes.”97 While Tuhiwai Smith’s remarks pertain to how Indigenous peoples’ views of history and landscape have been colonized, it is crucial that Xwelítem also come to know the past through place-based histories. Sites like Xeyxelómós/Lady Franklin Rock allow the conjunction Harris describes at work in palimpsests, providing a space for the ancient and recent pasts to converse in the present, and through the conversation that such a site facilitates, decolonization of place memory might begin.

n o te s 1 My thoughts on settler methodologies have been greatly enriched through conversations with Dylan Robinson, Jill Carter, Karyn Recollet, and the participants in the “Indigenization, Settler Methodologies, and Intergenerational

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2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Responsibility” seminar convened at the 2016 Canadian Association for Theatre Research conference. John Franklin was commander of an ill-fated expedition in search of a Northwest Passage, which disappeared in the central Arctic in 1845. The two ships under his command, hms Erebus and hms Terror, were located in 2014 and 2016, respectively. See Davis-Fisch, Loss and Cultural Remains. According to Penny Russell, Jane Franklin “saw and recorded more of the world than most women of her generation.” “Wife Stories,” 38. Robinson, “Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection,” this volume, 211–12. Cracroft, Lady Franklin, xv. Ibid., 56–9. Walbran, “Lady Franklin’s Address.” Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces,” 23. Robinson, “Welcoming Sovereignty,” 7. Ibid., 6. Xwelítem is the Halq’eméylem word for non-Aboriginal people; however, its literal meaning is “hungry people,” which carries significant historical and metaphorical connotations. Because I am writing in Stó:lō territory, where the Indigenous language is Halq’eméylem, I will not italicize Halq’eméylem terms. And, of course, some Indigenous knowledge may never be accessible to those outside a given family or community. Dening, Performances, 57. Both Virginie Magnat and Ric Knowles employ performance studies in precisely this manner in relation to contemporary performance. Selena Couture’s 2015 dissertation is an excellent, extended example of how performance studies might be employed to decolonize performance histories from a settler perspective. Marker, “Teaching History,” 98. Ibid. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 101. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 28. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7. Ibid., 7. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 7. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 19. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 6.

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27 The understanding I have gained of Stó:lō oral traditions – both oral literature and oral narrative – concerning the rock is deeply indebted to the work of Stó:lō cultural experts, most notably Naxaxalhts’i. In interviewing Naxaxalhts’i, I have applied Stó:lō scholar Q’um Q’um Xiiem’s (Jo-ann Archibald) guidelines for how researchers might learn cultural teachings by developing relationships with cultural experts and allowing these experts to direct the learning, in Indigenous Storywork, 36–8. 28 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 17. 29 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 54. 30 British Columbian, 2. Allard, a lifelong hbc employee, appears to have had generally positive relationships with the Indigenous population around Yale; this may have been helped by his marriage to an Indigenous woman. 31 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 56. 32 Qtd. in Stackhouse, Churches, 26. All italics in quotations from original. Crickmer’s scrapbook reveals what happened behind the scenes of the renaming and suggests that Crickmer was “performing archivalness,” that is, engaging in “saving activities that displayed the intensity of [his] emotional engagement” in the performance. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 95. 33 Cherrington, Fraser Valley, 119. 34 McKelvie, “Jason Allard,” 250. 35 Stackhouse, Churches, 25–6. 36 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 58–9. 37 Walbran, “Lady Franklin’s Address,” 2. 38 Crickmer’s attempt to rename the pass after Lady Franklin was somewhat controversial at the time – the Daily British Colonist commented that the effort was “a most inappropriate one.” “Arrival of the Caledonia.” 39 The first use of “Lady Franklin Rock” that I have found occurs in the title of an 1867 photograph, Looking down Cariboo Road to Fraser River and Lady Franklin Rock, Stereo View, held in the bc Archives. 40 Laforet, “Folk History,” 253. 41 Qtd. in Bierwart, Brushed by Cedar, 52. 42 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12. 43 Ibid., 7. 44 Ibid., 9. 45 Ibid., 8. 46 Ibid., 9. 47 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 3. 48 McHalsie, Schaepe, and Carlson, “Making the World Right,” 6. 49 Albert (Sonny) McHalsie, interview by Heather Davis-Fisch, 9 December 2013.

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50 Carlson et al., “Spoken Literature,” 188. 51 McHalsie, interview. 52 Before beginning, Naxaxalhts’i orally footnoted the story, telling me that he heard the story from Agnes Kelly of Shxw’ hamel, with additions from Tillie Gutierrez of Chawithil. 53 The term Xexá:ls generally refers to the group of transformers. Some elders use the singular term Xá:ls to refer to just one of the brothers. In the colonial era, Xá:ls is sometimes also called “Little Christ,” reflecting the widespread impact of Christianity (Carlson et al., “Spoken Literature,” 185). 54 Naxaxalhts’i explained that the story’s cultural teaching – that when people with special power are asked for help they are not supposed to refuse or ask for payment – is still alive today. 55 Stó:lō understandings of their territory include the existence of a number of tunnels that function as “portals” linking places that appear to be geographically distant (Carlson, Power of Place, 7). 56 McHalsie, “Halq’eméylem Place Names,” 151. There are alternate versions of this sxwōxwiyám in both Stó:lō and Nlaka’pamux cultures (Mohs, “Sto:lo Sacred Ground,” 12). The most notable difference in Stó:lō variations appears to be in the name of the shxwlá:m, who is called Kwiyaxtel in the versions shared by Mohs (12–13) and Lerman (“Lower Fraser Indian Folktales,” 146–7). McHalsie and Thom also record a variation in which Xeyxelómós is transformed into a rock downriver from the rock with the quartz vein (Halq’eméylem Place Names, 6–7). 57 McHalsie, interview. 58 Mohs’s informant is “TG,” likely Tillie Gutierrez. 59 Mohs, “Sto:lo Sacred Ground,” 13. 60 McHalsie, “Halq’eméylem Place Names,” 134. 61 Schneider, Performing Remains, 35. 62 McHalsie, “Halq’eméylem Place Names,” 134. 63 Naxaxalhts’i expressed skepticism about whether Stó:lō would have shared the sxwōxwiyám story with Fraser. 64 Fraser, Letters and Journals, 100. 65 Fraser’s editor notes that there was no record of “any visit by white men to this vicinity before Fraser’s arrival” (100). 66 Carlson, “Reflections on Indigenous History,” 62. 67 McHalsie, interview. 68 Carlson points out, “Tellingly, the name Xexá:ls is derived from the same proto-Salish root as the verb ‘to write.’” Power of Place, 66. Th’exelís marks a precise instance of Xexá:ls actually inscribing his presence on the landscape. 69 Carlson, “Reflections on Indigenous History,” 64–5.

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70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

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Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 8–9. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 34. Oliver, Landscapes and Social Transformations, 94. Carlson, Power of Place, 161. Carlson, “Legacy of Broken Promises,” 60–6. One reason may have been that Douglas’s wife was of Indigenous ancestry. Carlson, “Legacy of Broken Promises,” 67. Carlson, Power of Place, 168–9. McHalsie and Thom, Halq’eméylem Place Names, 2. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 4–5. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 121. Oliver, Landscapes and Social Transformations, 86. Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 58–9. McHalsie, interview. In 1808, Stó:lō shared the story with Fraser, but it is unclear whether they would have shared it with Crickmer. Some Stó:lō sxwōxwiyám were known by Xwelítem, evidenced by the inclusion of a sxwōxwiyám concerning the origins of the first salmon ceremony in the Daily British Colonist, 11 March 1861. In 1862, however, Colonel Moody commented that Stó:lō were “loath to show” culturally significant sites to government surveyors. Qtd. in Carlson, “Legacy of Broken Promises,” 71. Carlson argues that Stó:lō quickly learned that “not disclosing the location of sacred sites ultimately proved a more effective means of preserving a site’s spiritual integrity.” Ibid. I have found no evidence that clarifies whether Crickmer had heard the sxwōxwiyám. McHalsie, “Stl’áleqem Sites,” 8. McHalsie, interview. Ibid. Carlson includes an extended account of this event in Power of Place, 189– 91. Bierwart, Brushed by Cedar, 52. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 6. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 6–7. Bierwart, Brushed by Cedar, 54. Harris, Untimely Matter, 15. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 36.

3

Choreographies of Place: Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn p e t er d ic ki n so n

Introduction1 Against the backdrop of the north shore mountains, and with the last of the sun’s rays glistening off Burrard Inlet, the Flaming Lips’ “What Is the Light?” issues from jerry-rigged speakers as first one body, then another, and then another manifests on the horizon. Each seems to have emerged directly from the sea, and now advancing up the beach and onto the grass where ranks of onlookers are gathered – some of us purposefully and expectant, others accidentally and merely perplexed – these strangers pause to hail their audience. But who exactly is that? Despite the warmth of the evening, I feel a shiver down my spine and wonder if this is due to my excitement at the “destination experience” I am having in my own city, or a suppressed anxiety about who else in this park is being excluded from the eventfulness of this event. Over successive weekends in July 2013 I attended four different performances of outdoor, site-based dance in Vancouver, each yielding moments that were similarly sublime – in the dual Burkean sense of inspiring aesthetic awe and inducing uncertainty, sensory confusion, even fleeting terror.2 These moments occurred as part of Dancing on the Edge Festival’s (dote) presentation of the Ontario-based series Dusk Dances, from which my opening description derives, and staged for the first time in 2013 at crab/Portside Park; New Works’ All Over the Map midday program of “global” dance and music on Granville Island; and Kokoro Dance’s eighteenth annual Wreck Beach Butoh, held at low tide every summer on Vancouver’s famous clothing-optional beach. In this chapter I suggest that these performances help to map a kinesthetics of place

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particular to the city’s urban geography, and to the cultural, economic, and social asymmetries historically embedded in Vancouver’s performance of publicness. As Lance Berelowitz has argued, that performance owes much to Vancouver’s waterfront setting, with the consequence that much of “Vancouver’s constructed public realm” takes place “at the edge,” especially along its sprawling seawall and in its many beachfront parks, spaces of leisure that “substitute for the more traditional centrifugal public spaces of older cities.”3 However, according to Berelowitz, far from being “theatres for vital, legitimate political expression,” these apparently “natural” and “socially neutral” amenities mask a “highly contrived, ideologically controlled and commodified reality, in which the city’s beaches can be understood as a series of discrete public spaces, in terms not only of built environment but also in social formation, use, and regulation.”4 Contributing to the “artifice” of publicness produced by these spaces are the increasingly choreographed and spectacularized events that take place within them, of which the annual Celebration of Light fireworks festival at English Bay is paradigmatic for Berelowitz.5 The sited dances I discuss in this chapter are in many ways the antithesis of the Celebration of Light’s commercialized ethos. At the same time, each also displays social and environmental awareness and solicits community participation. This attentiveness to the civic dimensions of public ritual is more or less acute, I argue, depending on the extent to which the dances take advantage of their sites in order to either strategically uphold or tactically resist the normative placed-based discourses that adhere to those sites. I suggest, in turn, that these discourses can be articulated as three versions of a distinctive “Vancouver sublime,” producing a cognitive map of the city that moves – east to west – from the bio-political to the touristic to the natur(al)ist. But first I should explain my use of the term sublime and how I link it to outdoor dance environments to make a specifically Canadian, and more particularly Vancouver, intervention into what Laura Levin notes is “the bourgeoning literature on space and site-specificity in performance studies.”6 I follow from Edmund Burke in understanding the sublime as an aesthetic category that is distinct from the beautiful, both in the kinds and intensities of feelings each produces and the differences in scale and perspective between subject and object accompanying them. Whereas for Burke beauty derives from the pleasure we take in our love of small and delicately formed things (the exquisite china teacup or the

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finely embroidered silk handkerchief), sublimity results when we fear being overwhelmed or obliterated by the vastness, infinity, or sheer magnificence of what we are contemplating (be it a looming mountain range or a towering skyscraper).7 Crucially, for Burke, the sublime produces not just psychological, but also physiological distress (nervous tension, eye strain). And while this physical pain might eventually be overcome, the “delight” that Burke suggests replaces it is the opposite of the “pure” or “positive” pleasure that accompanies beauty; it is, rather, a “negative pain,” a trace sensation that reminds us of the perceived threat to the self that has been removed.8 Immanuel Kant would subsequently reject Burke’s observations on the sublime as an empirical measure of the subject’s bodily limits relative to natural objects, arguing instead that in attuning the spirit to “reflective judgement,” the sublime “evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of the senses.”9 However, the physically “unsettling” feelings Burke ascribes to the sublime are worth holding onto for my purposes, and not just for asking how an audience’s kinesthetic response to dance might be magnified in a spectacular outdoor setting. The Burkean sublime also resonates with the performative myth of conquering a terrifying natural landscape that accompanies the dominant narrative of colonial settlement in Canada, and especially with the prior historical claims made upon that landscape in British Columbia and Vancouver. To put it simply, to walk anywhere in this city is to be disquieted by the fact that one traverses the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional lands belonging to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. I will return at the end of the next section to how Indigenous title complicates even further the “delight” Vancouverites take in their experience of public and private spaces in the city. For now, I want to note two additional points related to my use of the sublime in this chapter. The first is that the three subcategories I develop below derive directly from eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy’s theorization of the term within the context of the Grand Tour; that is, not only were Romantic notions of spectacularized nature a product of cultural tourism but, as importantly, a product of the labouring bodies that physically enabled visitors to be transported to and by sites of local wonder. My second point is that my focus on the sublime in relation to local movement aesthetics reflects a desire to trouble the discourse of “universal beauty” that frequently frames discussions of “the essence of place” in relevant criticism on site dance.10 To this end, I follow Levin, who in formulating her concept of the “environmental un-

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conscious,” notes how place animates performance – in locally material ways – rather than merely awaiting animation by performance.11 As such, my analysis contests the “model of influence” between site and choreographic product recently outlined by Victoria Hunter, who argues that in site-specific dance “the type of ‘place’ created is the ‘place’ of performance, transforming the accepted and conventional properties ascribed to a particular space.”12 I am as interested in how different and already emplaced spaces in Vancouver might resist such transformations as I am with how they themselves alter the composition, performance, and reception of the dances staged within them. This idea of place as active and agential in its own right is echoed in the recent spatial turn to performance ethnography in Canadian dance studies, particularly as the method is applied to urban dance communities and movement practices – of which MJ Thompson’s reading of Louise Lecavalier’s dance career in Montreal in this volume is exemplary.13 I see my work participating in this turn and thus include in the following analysis transcriptions of some of the thoughts and observations I recorded on three separate walks I took in April 2014 in an attempt to map, both cognitively and kinesthetically, the physical distances and affective connections between my sites of research. This methodology derives from the sensory and performance anthropologist Andrew Irving, who has pioneered a kind of ethnography of interiority, taking a page from modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf by recording the stop-and-start narratives of his subject-informants’ inner lifeworlds as they wander the streets of Kampala or New York City.14 The narratives of my walks are an attempt at approximating the “itinerant practices” of “emplaced writing” modelled by Brian Rusted in his contribution to this volume (345), and at resituating the visual, along with Rusted and Pam Hall, within a sensuous material world. However, because my walks were task-oriented and tied to routes between fixed points, the dialogues I conducted with myself (when I remembered to speak into my smartphone) end up reproducing aspects of the coercive visuality of Vancouver’s grid system, my remarks often tied to strategic markers of recent urban development. At the same time, I have taken abundant liberties with the performative transcription of my autoethnography, tactically editing, reordering, interpolating, and even inventing in order to interrupt prescribed circuits of movement and excavate their sedimented layers of history through discursive perambulations that derail the logical flow of my argument. As Naila KeletaMae suggests in her chapter, autoethnography may be especially suited

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to such remixing because its focus on the positionality of storyteller requires a concomitant attention to audience. Thus, in the narratives of my walks, I am also seeking to superimpose another kind of map of the city, one that constellates the landscape of performance and performance studies research in and of Vancouver by putting my interior monologue in dialogue with the voices of other scholars and artists. In so doing, I draw on not only Michel de Certeau’s characterization of city walking as an enunciative act similar to writing and speech, but also his distinction between the strategic as what represents the “triumph of place over time” and the tactical as a mobile nowhere “that must accept the chance offerings of the moment.”15 Thinking about sitespecific dance in relation to the social choreography of cities thus means paying attention not just to the (pan)optics of where that dance takes place, but to the more fluid kinesthetics of when, a movement in time between past and present that can produce surprising situational confluence or juxtaposition. As Susan Leigh Foster argues in the context of American site-based dance in the 1970s, “Tacticians seeking insights into the kinds of resistive action pertinent to their moment will find that their responses can only be formulated while in motion, in response to the movement that their situation creates.”16 Applying this principle of kinetic intersection to the aesthetic and identity formations produced through dance communities in Los Angeles, Judith Hamera has similarly argued for contextualizing dance technique as part of a larger archive of the social work of bodies in “practices of everyday urban life,” one in which “movement with and around other bodies” produces a “relational infrastructure” that binds bodies “together in socialities with strategic ambitions” and produces “modes of reflexivity” that “tactically limit or engender forms of solidarity and subjectivity.”17 I am similarly interested in what social, aesthetic, community, and civic relationships get mobilized in outdoor site dance in Vancouver, as well as both the physical and metaphysical limits placed on these relationships by the political horizons through which they are constituted. “Such horizons,” according to Randy Martin, often “promise to enlarge the sense of what is possible,” but can also get “lost in daily experience to the enormous scale of society,”18 a terror in the infiniteness of our local obligations to each other as residents of the global city that I am calling “the urban sublime.” For Martin, the bodily mobilizations of dance, especially as they “contest a given space,” can “condense” and make “palpable” what otherwise remains immensely obscure about political mobilization. While Martin resists idealizing dance as “the so-

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lution in formal terms to absences in other domains of social practice,” he does suggest that an analysis of the “politics of form” in dance can generate “concepts that are available to theoretical appropriation,” including for critiques of different “forms of politics.”19 This is the method I am attempting here, using recent examples of site dance in Vancouver to advance a theory about the sublime experience of the city, and its politics of place.

Walk 1

Test, test, this is a test. Clear skies, so I can forgo the umbrella. A nod to Our Lady of the Lanes, doing her daily sweep of blue boxes. No light at Columbia, so over to Manitoba, following the grade downward all the way to South False Creek. Once a light industrial wasteland. And now, look, a post-Olympics residential playground rises and sprawls, turning salt into craft beer, making lemons into Lululemonade. Thank God for Myfanwy’s birds, oversized and slightly creepy, reminding us how unreal this all is, like the set of a Hitchcock film.20 Now, swiftly, down to the seawall, around a rebranded Science World golf ball, spruced up sentinel from Expo. Concord Pacific’s stalled on the park, but at least we’ve got slick new Carrall Street greenway. Just keep to the marked path. Don’t veer off into Chinatown. Don’t pause to feed the pigeons at Hastings. As Dara would say, there’s nothing to see here anyway.21 At Gassy Jack’s statue take a right on Alexander and follow the cobblestones east, temporarily reversing the tide of settlement: showroom, sawmill, swampland. A left over the train tracks at the foot of Main Street and we’re here: a beach at once ersatz and indigenous.

Site 1: CRAB /Portside Park, Early Evening In her important research on the history of Vancouver site dance, Alana Gerecke notes that the slippage in terms around the form (site-specific, site-based, sited, environmental) points to striking variations in the material and/or conceptual role played by place in animating or hosting movement work relocated from the traditional concert stage. For example, Gerecke examines the documentary traces of works like Karen Jamieson’s River (1998), a one-time roving piece that was choreographed in response to the literal grade of vanished and vanishing ground in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. As Gerecke has carefully established, The River remains crucial to the historical archive of sitespecific choreography in Vancouver – not least because of its early and

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manifestly material engagement with already accelerated gentrification in this part of the city, and also because of Jamieson’s creative collaborations with both First Nations and community performers.22 Together with Jennifer Mascall and Kokoro Dance’s Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi (all founding members, in 1982, of edam Dance in Vancouver, which continues today under the artistic leadership of Peter Bingham), Jamieson has made site work central to her practice. Moreover, as we shall see with the example of Kokoro later, many of these artists remain committed to research into the movement possibilities afforded by a single site. However, as Gerecke’s research has shown, it is also possible for the locations that support certain kinds of site-based dance to be more or less interchangeable. In this context, she discusses Paul-André Fortier’s Solo 30 x 30 (2006), a piece that has toured the world, and in which Fortier, for thirty minutes over the course of thirty consecutive days, restricts his movements to the confines of a taped-off square. As Gerecke suggests, in Solo 30 x 30 the exact location of the dance (it unfolded in front of the Vancouver Public Library’s downtown central branch as part of the 2009 dote Festival) is secondary and potentially even superfluous to the performance, with the theatrical proscenium very much still in place and mediating the audience’s reception of the movement. I would argue that this is also the framework governing Dusk Dances, at least the version of the annual summer festival that tours beyond Toronto – where festival director Sylvie Bouchard originated the concept in Trinity-Bellwoods Park ravine in 1993. Dances inspired by the diverse natural environments of Toronto’s many parks become geographically, socially, and even aesthetically decontextualized when licensed to other regional districts and festivals. Add to this the Dusk Dances conceit of “a theatrical host” leading audiences from piece to piece in different areas of a given park and one can see why a traditional – if invisible – performance proscenium is part of the baggage of this road show. Back for the third time as Vancouver host in 2013 was Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, in character as the gothic undertaker Mr Stone from Highgate (2013), her meditation on Victorian funerary culture. Friedenberg told me that her host characters decide themselves less on the specifics of site than on her recent performance repertoire.23 Nevertheless, the spectral presence of Mr Stone, magically transported from nineteenthcentury London to twenty-first-century Vancouver, did raise for me the issue of what other, much older ghosts haunted this space.

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The official green Vancouver Parks Board sign erected within this 3.31 hectare sliver of green space and shale beach carved out of the city’s bustling inner harbour designates the area as crab Park at Portside. In the 1980s a group of Downtown Eastside (dtes) activists called Create a Real Available Beach began lobbying the city to set aside land for a neighbourhood waterfront park of the sort that dots the city’s western shoreline from Stanley Park to the University of British Columbia. However, the property they sought for conversion was owned by the Vancouver Port Authority (vpa, now Port Metro Vancouver), whose massive orange loading cranes intrude upon the “natural” beauty of the park’s eastern sightlines to truly sublime effect. And so in 1987 the vpa agreed to lease to the city, under a forty-year maintenance agreement, this outdoor public amenity with two names. However, following Friedenberg’s Mr. Stone from dance to dance in July 2013, spectators might also have glimpsed another plaque, listing an older name for the area. Installed a year before crab/Portside officially opened to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the city’s incorporation, the weathered yellow sign tells us that the local Indigenous population used to call this place “Luckylucky,” meaning “Grove of Beautiful Trees.” Likely the name referred to the rows of cedars that once lined the waterfront, back when the marshland served as “a natural portage through the swamp between False Creek and Burrard Inlet,” as the sign dutifully informs us. Regardless, this palimpsest of signs and place names demonstrates how thoroughly Indigenous memory has been overwritten by settlercolonial history in bc, a subject Heather Davis-Fisch explores further in her chapter. In the more than twenty-five years since its opening, the city Parks Board has planted several dozen red cedar trees in crab/Portside Park, no doubt seeking to ameliorate its otherwise industrialized, “inner-city” feel. But the fact that this project has coincided with the steady gentrification of the surrounding residential neighbourhood, and that one is now as likely to find hip young couples pushing baby strollers or walking their dogs in the park, as one is to encounter street homeless sleeping, attests to the bio-politics of place that accrue to this “exceptional” bit of Vancouver waterfront. We can read this park as a synecdoche of the larger originary exclusion built into Vancouver’s dtes, a space of bios (bare life) that, in Giorgio Agamben’s take on Michel Foucault, remains at once outside the proper civic body of Vancouver and absolutely central to that body’s constitution and the zoë (good life) it

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enjoys.24 Telling in this regard is the fact that in the years since its creation by dtes community activists, crab/Portside Park has twice been threatened by, and successfully resisted, commercial development: in 1994, when the vpa announced plans to build a casino in conjunction with a consortium of Las Vegas and Vancouver developers;25 and in 2006, when Vancouver City Council endorsed studies for a new Vancouver Whitecaps soccer stadium in the area. Notwithstanding its value to developers, the park’s social marginality is reinforced by its geographical isolation. Bounded by the port, the cpr railyards, and the Sea Bus terminal, crab/Portside is the only one of Vancouver’s urban beaches not connected to its celebrated seawall. It is perhaps for this reason that Stanley Park was chosen, in 2000, as the site of the first Vancouver edition of Dusk Dances. In 2009, the series decamped to Queen Elizabeth Park, where its 2011 version was also hosted by Friedenberg. For dote’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2013, Artistic Director Donna Spencer decided to move the festival closer to the Firehall Arts Centre, on whose stage many of the festival’s indoor performances unfold. According to Friedenberg, this resulted in some interesting place-based interactions between the performance’s dual “destination” and “resident” audiences. Several in the former group – including families with young children who would have consciously travelled to the venue to take in the performances – expressed unease with the shift in location. At the same time, some of those who became part of the proceedings simply by virtue of their prior or coincident presence in the park “emancipated” themselves as spectators26 by showing a tactical lack of regard for the place-based protocols of the invisible theatrical proscenium. As Friedenberg put it to me, the moment during the dress rehearsal when a blissfully intoxicated park-goer decided to join in the action of Julie Aplin’s Onward Ho, My Love – a comic love duet burlesquing ballet partnering and danced along a plastic slip-n’-slide that becomes increasingly wet (see figure 3.1) – she knew she wasn’t in Queen Elizabeth Park anymore.27 While the artificial surface used in Aplin’s piece would not necessarily be out of place in a park filled with children on a warm summer’s evening, the wooden planks laid down for Carmen Romero’s May I Join You?, an improvised flamenco solo to the live jazz piano of accompanist Scott Metcalfe, is symptomatic of the general choreographic placelessness of the works on the program from Ontario. The urban geography and material social history of crab/Portside Park is largely ancillary to the conceptual focus and formal execution of each piece. Only Vancouver-

Figure 3.1 Yvonne Ng and Brendan Wyatt in Julia Aplin’s Onward Ho, My Love, part of Dancing on the Edge Festival’s 2013 presentation of Dusk Dances in Vancouver’s crab/Portside Park.

based Eury Chang’s Watermark: lost at sea referenced our Western Canadian maritime setting, although in ways that paradoxically decontextualized the place of its performance. Combining a prologue and epilogue spoken by “Captain George Vancouver” (David Geary) with a recitation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (by actor David Beauchesne), a physical score emphasizing the shipboard life of an eighteenth-century sailor (dancer Kyle Toy), and a mysterious Homeric Siren (singer Janice Valdez), the work offers a highly poeticized and historically deracinated take on the settlement of Vancouver. At the same time, in the central solo that Toy performs with his mop – which begins as a pantomime of mundane deckhand labour and gradually builds to an increasingly acrobatic and gravity-defying series of jumps and pirouettes and cartwheels – Chang does succeed in folding time in relation to space by using the contemporary port setting to remind spectators that narratives of physical transport (of goods and migrants) have always been raced and classed.

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It is affective transport that I believe we are meant to experience when watching Incandescent, the opening of which I described at the outset of this chapter, and set by choreographers Kate Franklin and Meredith Thompson on a local cast of professional and community dancers of mixed ages. With its repertoire of individual gestures alongside more complexly choreographed partnering sequences and moments of simple group unison, the work begins with members of the ensemble, each identified by an item of yellow clothing, advancing from the foreshore singly or in pairs. At a certain point one of the women stops and extends her right arm, palm facing out and fingers pointing to the ground. A man raises his arm above his head, while the woman to his right closes her eyes and presses her thumbs to her fingers. Another man sinks to the ground on one knee and lifts a young girl onto it. And so the cumulative repertoire of everyday gestures continues, with the assembled group eventually massing around the first woman with the outstretched palm, forming a jigsaw-like huddle by having each performer place a hand on another’s shoulder and then all tilting their heads to the sky (see figure 3.2). The constellating and breaking up of bodily clusters is a repeated motif in Incandescent, the static stillness of group poses and arrangements frequently giving way to exuberant bursts of running, often in trios leading to a lift. But always Franklin and Thompson bring the ensemble back to some held connection, as when the dancers, staggered in pairs about the grass of the park, bend at the waist and touch foreheads, letting their arms dangle in the space between each other’s bodies, the human arches mirrored in and dwarfed by the loading cranes of the port behind them. In providing spectators the space to contemplate – and potentially reorient – this paradox of scale between background and foreground, human and non-human, the choreographers are clearly engaging with the material and cultural politics of the park site. However, the final section of the piece very much reasserts the place of performance, in Hunter’s understanding of the relationship between site and dance product. Here, after gathering in a circle and raising their arms to the sky, the dancers retrieve small white candles lined along – and, in retrospect it now seems, physically demarcating – the “stage left” and “stage right” borders of the performance area. From “upstage,” they then begin running towards the audience, fanning out to the left or the right to encircle spectators. The piece ends with the dancers extending their candles to the audience, again raising their chests skyward, as if making an offering or saying a prayer. Given the stunning natural backdrop, it is hard to resist the image’s simple and

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seductive beauty. And yet perhaps we should resist it, or at least pause to consider who might be left outside of its collective embrace. In this respect, I am drawn to Mark Canuel’s recent distinction between the bio-politics of beauty and the bio-politics of the sublime as they relate to aesthetic theory’s grappling with ethics and social justice. Referencing Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) and Wendy Steiner’s Venus in Exile (2001), Canuel suggests that the quest to identify and replicate what is beautiful “has troubling implications in that beauty continues to sponsor notions of ideal political community that severely restrict membership to those who symmetrically replicate and share the same heritage, looks, or attitudes.”28 Instead, Canuel argues,

Figure 3.2 Performers in Kate Franklin and Meredith Thompson’s Incandescent at Dancing on the Edge Festival’s 2013 presentation of Dusk Dances in Vancouver’s crab/Portside Park.

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“The sublime leads toward a more conflictual mode of configuring the relations between persons; it provides an aesthetic vantage point that highlights complaint, dissent, and disagreement in the midst of a larger scheme of social cooperation.”29 This, in turn, recalls Kant’s statement, in his Critique of Judgement, that “the mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime in nature; whereas in the aesthetic judgement upon what is beautiful therein it is in restful contemplation.”30 At the same time, I want to resist Kant’s contention that the sublime, because formless, is unrepresentable, both in the physical world and in art. This is to perpetuate additional representational violence in the Vancouver context by whiting out the history of Indigenous oral and embodied performances of placemaking, and by refusing to see – and account as remarkable – the Indigenous bodies living and toiling beside us in the city. To this end, one of the sublime disturbances to our aesthetic and ideological field of vision in crab/Portside Park must surely be the memorial boulder to the missing and murdered Aboriginal women of the dtes that was installed in 1997.31 On the one hand, as was made abundantly clear by the boulder’s failure to impede any of the Dusk Dances performances themselves or, indeed, the audience’s aesthetic enjoyment of them, its strategic placement ends up consigning the lives it is meant to commemorate to a past whose spaces of sublime bio-political terror become measurable only in their distance from this place’s present beautification. Here, as Nicholas Blomley notes in his own reading of crab/ Portside, Kantian perspectivalism divides space by transforming a landscape into “the visual property of the detached observer.”32 However, as Blomley goes on to remark, dtes anti-poverty activists and First Nations groups have also been very successful at producing alternative “community landscapes,” in which the neighbourhood’s network of social relations is enacted through expressly kinetic “countermaps” that result in what we might call a sublime sovereignty – one that insists on a different way of seeing and being seen in this space.33 Indeed, the annual Valentine’s Day Memorial March that wends its way through Vancouver’s dtes as a performative commemoration of bc’s and Canada’s murdered and missing Aboriginal women is a powerful example of how bodies can mobilize to take up space and demand a sublime rereading of the politics of location. Such site-based actions, as Julie Nagam points out in the following chapter, also remind us of the need in Canada to indigenize our performance archives, which in the history of site dance in Vancouver and bc means attending to the fact that Coastal First Nations dance is always already about territory.34

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Walk 2

David, surely you understand this. Especially about this place, where you live and work. And walk. By yourself, with others, once with me. No room for alibis then. Not with all the lives that were around us. I’m actually retracing some of our route, past the No. 5 Orange, past the alley behind the Vancouver Police Museum. But I’m also thinking of another walk I took with you, when your voice played inside my ear, and when you directed me west instead of south from Portside. At first I didn’t think there was anywhere I could go, but you urged me forward along Waterfront Road, showing me the sublime underside of the beautiful seawall that begins at Canada Place: a service road I didn’t even know existed. And trafficked by all those unseen under-classes who maintain and staff our tourist amenities. Like the place I’m off to now, from the opposite shore of downtown. Waiting for a boat that will ferry me, like von Aschenbach, to the Lido side of Vancouver – and to its biggest playground.35

Site 2: Granville Island, Early Afternoon

Granville Island is one of the most visited outdoor attractions in Vancouver. It is especially popular with cruise ship passengers, who can wander between and partake of galleries and artist studios; shops selling a range of wares; restaurants and cafes with waterfront views; a toy market and outdoor water park; and a public market displaying fresh fish, produce, and prepared specialty foods, all packaged for shipboard consumption. The island is also home to a cement-mixing factory (a remnant of its light-industrial past), the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (moving to Great Northern Way in 2017), and the largest concentration of live theatre and performance spaces in the city, making it a crucial part of the city’s public performance ecology, or what, following Susan Bennett, we might also call its “cultural topography” (43). This role is vaunted on its official website: “Just think of Granville Island as Vancouver’s Town Square. Where locals and visitors come together to be inspired, to be entertained or simply to breathe in some of its unique atmosphere.”36 And yet, as Berelowitz notes, Granville Island is also “the closest thing Vancouver has to a theme park,” a place where “even the buskers are programmed,” and where its magic kingdom of strictly controlled building forms is designed “to achieve a careful balance of attractions for the consumer and profit for the vendor.”37 Perhaps this is why, like many Vancouverites, I invariably experience such a sublime mix of

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dread and stupefaction whenever I visit the island: frustrated by all the car and foot traffic, and by my own inability to remember yet again where I’m going; at once exasperated by all the gawking patrons blocking access to the market stalls, and paralyzed with indecision once I get to the counter. It is the terrifying realization that, as part of the “experience economy,” I have been turned into a tourist in my own city.38 In this respect, All Over the Map’s free outdoor summer dance series is arguably more attuned to the dynamics of site than dote’s staging of Dusk Dances at crab/Portside Park. Produced by New Works, All Over the Map’s local presentation of global dance and music is designed to provide audiences with a feast for the senses of a piece with the aesthetically exceptional display and economically assimilable sale of exotic foodstuffs in the public market, where one’s fascination at a stacked tower of star fruit or one’s terror at having to choose between so many different kinds of olives is rendered safely banal by a sales clerk’s assistance, including with payment. Following Rob Horning, I want to suggest that both sensory experiences are versions of the “tourist sublime,” whose local/global interfaces have the paradoxical effect of inducing one to seek out simulated novelty in one’s own city (tickets for Cirque de Soleil’s latest touring show), while simultaneously gravitating to the safely familiar when one travels to a different city (Starbucks for one’s morning coffee).39 Such endlessly reproducible acts of cultural, economic, and affective investment turn hitherto particularized spaces into what Marc Augé has termed “non-places,” those familiar beacons of supermodernity (airports, supermarkets, hotels, highways) that we travel through rather than immerse ourselves in.40 Melanie Kloetzel has recently taken up Augé’s term in the context of her investigations into dances sited within both “sublime” and “mundane” corporate landscapes, suggesting that the “perception of anonymity” that attends such non-places allows one to indulge in fantasy and role-playing.41 Within the already Disneyfied space of Granville Island, All Over the Map’s aesthetic thus makes it easier to imagine we’re in Spain or China. Karen Flamenco, led by Artistic Director Karen Pitkethly, is perhaps the city’s leading flamenco company and dance school. On this particular afternoon nine women (including Pitkethly) and one man squeezed onto the tiny wooden stage outside of Performance Works. Accompanied by three musicians (guitar, percussion, and vocals), the group treated us to a succession of object lessons in flamenco technique: the importance of rhythm; precision of movement; verticality of bodily alignment; tightness and speed in turns. And yet while fla-

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menco, with its music’s complicated time signatures, its virtuosic staccato footwork, and its boneless, blooming floreo, is as codified and ethereal as ballet, its popularity among audiences has largely to do with its theatrical – and mostly non-traditional – embellishments: the frilly, voluminous dresses; the shawls and fans; the castanets. Unlike Robredo’s Dusk Dances performance, there were no castanets among Pitkethly’s troupe. But most of the other visual signifiers were firmly in place and unlike Pitkethly’s longer and expressly narrative works for the concert stage (including evening-length pieces based on Snow White and Alice in Wonderland), the vignettes presented at All Over the Map were designed to showcase power rather than polish. Combined with the location of the performance on Granville Island, this solicits a tourist gaze, in which the fantasy temporality of performance coincides with a fantasy space of urbanism to produce a momentary image of romantic transport: a taste of Andalusia in Vancouver. And the idea of global dance as a neatly packaged comestible was certainly reinforced by the number of audience members snacking on treats purchased from the market. A similar displaced visual aesthetic was at play in the following week’s presentation of dancer Wen Wei Wang, who in his improvisations to the music of the Silk Road Trio relied heavily on props, including an oversized pair of chopsticks, eight peacock feathers, and a bright green fan. At the same time, the musical score worked in counterpoint to any homogenous reading of Wang’s movement as “ethnic dance.” Featuring Qiu Xia He on pipa (a Chinese lute) and vocals, husband André Thibault on guitar, oud, and a variety of wind instruments, and Liam MacDonald on percussion, Silk Road took the audience through an eclectic repertoire of Chinese folk songs, Brazilian samba, and even Memphisinspired blues. In the last of his improvisations, Wang incorporated some of Silk Road’s deconstructive approach to Western and Eastern musical styles into his movement vocabulary, his flowing arms and legs at one point segueing into a version of popping and locking. And, alone among the All Over the Map performers, Wang made canny use of the sitespecificity of the series, beginning his peacock dance, for example, upon the hill where the audience was seated, and slowly wending his way to the stage, tickling a few faces along the way. The hill I refer to is the highest peak on Granville Island, its gently rolling slopes and built-in wooden benches making it a natural amphitheatre for outdoor events adjacent to Performance Works. It forms part of Ron Basford Park, named after the federal Liberal Cabinet minister who spearheaded the redevelopment of Granville Island in the

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1970s and who also scuttled a planned expressway through Vancouver’s downtown that would have levelled much of historic Gastown and Chinatown. Of what importance is knowing this in watching the site dance included in All Over the Map? Or, equally, of the earlier history of territorial use, reclamation, and exploitation that attaches itself to this place – a series of tidal flats and sandbars used for fishing by local First Nations before being dredged and filled in to make way for sawmills and shipbuilding factories? For Boris Groys, who in theorizing the contemporary global city in what he has called “the age of touristic reproduction” reminds us that “it was Kant – in his theory of the sublime in Critique of Judgement – who first philosophically assessed the figure of the globally roaming tourist in search of aesthetic experiences,” mobility between cities has largely obviated the politics of location, turning places near and far, strange and familiar into pre-packaged experiences of strategic similitude.42 But perhaps mobility in the city can tactically intervene against this, prompting sublime moments of self-awareness in which one is able to apprehend not the distance but the continuity between past and present. In the case of Granville Island, if not Vancouver as a whole, such a realization must involve the natural limits of shoreline: both as an impediment and an incentive to keep building.

Walk 3

I have to pace myself. It’s the longest walk. But also the prettiest. A quick pit stop for some provisions from the market, and then underneath the Burrard Bridge and into Vanier Park, once the stomping ground of Chief Khatsahlano – the real bard of this beach, as Steven might say.43 I continue westward from beach to beach: five in total. First up: Kitsilano, with its gym bodies and Filipina nannies. Unequal exchange of leisure and labour that could be a scene from Gerri’s play.44 Next, it’s leafy Jericho, followed by windswept Locarno, and finally the bluffs of Spanish Banks; the activities get looser as the landscapes grow more untamed. But it’s the loosest and wildest beach of all I’m after, a mythic, utopian place of the body whose natural pleasures might be as illusory as the manufactured wants of the city to which it turns its back(side).

Site 3: Wreck Beach, Early Morning

In summer, it’s hard to resist the charms of Wreck Beach, a peninsular oasis that wraps around the westernmost tip of Pacific Spirit Regional Park: old growth trees jut out of the cliffside, bald eagles soar through the sky, the sun dapples the waters of Howe Sound, and bodies in var-

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ious states of undress lounge in the sand. At sunset, as the last rays of daylight slip below the horizon, visitors routinely burst into applause. And yet this picturesque confluence of nature and naturism is not without its sublime disturbances. In exploring Wreck’s importance as a site of homoerotic placemaking in Vancouver, Gordon Brent Ingram acknowledges the highly racialized links between desire, community, and environment mobilized among gay patrons of the beach, in part by walking his readers through the history of Coast Salish place names for the area.45 Then there are the tensions that regularly surface between the Wreck Beach Preservation Society (wbps), formed in 1988 to defend the beach’s nudist traditions and its natural habitat, and the University of British Columbia (ubc), whose residential development of the western edge of its campus includes plans for several condos overlooking the beach. If one adds to this the fact that the beach is technically outside the jurisdiction of metro Vancouver (and so policed by the rcmp and the Greater Vancouver Regional District), and that the whole area sits on traditional Musqueam land, one can see just how choreographically complex is the public performance of place in this part of the city. However, for Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, co-artistic directors of Kokoro Dance, negotiating the different social groups, civic structures, and political ideologies laying claim to Wreck has been relatively smooth. In the twenty-one years they have been staging their Wreck Beach Butoh (wbb) – initially for invited guests only, but now a permitted and widely advertised public event – they have developed an excellent working relationship with the wbps, and with police patrolling the area, who often do a pre-performance sweep of the beach for glass and other hazards. Most of those hazards turn out to be natural ones, including one year a swarm of jellyfish blanketing the sand. According to Bourget and Hirabayashi, who have performed many outdoor works with Kokoro over the years – including in the dtes – part of what makes wbb unique is that the site (in their case, the northern “Tower Beach” section of Wreck) is never the same twice. Indeed, the only constants are the time of the performance (low tide); the fact that the piece is always built on an ensemble (ranging from six to more than twenty); that they always go into the water (see figure 3.3); and that the group’s movement covers as much of the beach as possible.46 Then, too, the performers are always naked. Notwithstanding the white body paint, the sight of a dozen or so men and women of various ages, backgrounds, and physicality moving together without clothes in ritual fashion between sand and surf might almost register as a visual cliché of this particular site. And yet, on the basis of my conversations

Figure 3.3 Performers in Kokoro Dance’s 2013 presentation of Wreck Beach Butoh enter the Pacific Ocean.

with Bourget and Hirabayashi, the experience of watching the 2013 piece that they created, and my subsequent participation in both the 2015 and 2016 iterations of wbb, I am convinced this version of placebased community dance is doing a kind of kinesthetic and social work different from the other examples discussed in this chapter. First, butoh is a dance form – at least as developed by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo – that is as much image-based as technique-based. This means that the performer draws upon different word or sense images to inspire a particular dance and “animate its metamorphosis,”47 building to a state in which she feels her body “being moved” rather than moving mechanically in relation to a set score.48 The cat/cow back that comes from undulating one’s spine and tucking and untucking one’s pelvis;

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Figure 3.4 The Wreck Beach site imprints itself on Kokoro’s 2013 dancers.

mad chef hands chopping vegetables to make a soup in the water; standing on one leg and flapping your arms like a bird; and the repertoire of visual signifiers used to perfect the butoh walk (from the swamp in one’s belly to the forest of trees growing from one’s shoulders): all of these metaphors are key to wbb’s movement vocabulary. But they are more than metaphors. Developed in response to the site, the movement sequences created from this vocabulary (a pitched battle of squawking seagulls was my favourite to watch in 2013, a box-stepping canon of monkeys my least favourite to perform in 2016) encourage a deeper feel for one’s material environment, both in the literal support one is receiving from the space, and also in how one’s movement might reciprocally enrich or comment upon that space. The site-based contingencies of the

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beach – wind, slippery rocks and spongy sand, cold water – arguably compound the sublime effects upon the performer, whose experience of time and bodily vulnerability can be measured only in relation to the “awesomeness” of the natural elements.49 While Bourget and Hirabayashi, who build each new work in a studio, do their best to prepare their dancers for the experience of moving on the beach,50 I can attest to how much the material site acts upon and changes each performance and, as crucially, to how the site’s residue lingers upon performers’ bodies (see figure 3.4). In this respect, wbb also differs from the outdoor dance performances previously discussed in that it unfolds in an almost completely non-presentational style. While this is true of much butoh dance performed on stage, it was striking to me, in watching wbb 2013, just how resolutely the proscenium was not in place in this instance. Clearly company members were playing to each other, and to the site, rather than to the audience, who are often required to locomote as much as the dancers to take in the work. Experiencing this from the inside, as a performer in 2015 and 2016, gave me added insight into how the site always mediates the relationship between wbb performers and spectators. This raises two final points that bring us back to the “place” site dance might strategically occupy in Vancouver’s aesthetic and civic imaginary, and to what additional mobile intimacies it might tactically engender. On the first point, each wbb is built through a similar workshop process. Anyone can join in the creation for a one-time fee that enables subsequent yearly participation free of charge. Through this facet of Kokoro’s mandate, Bourget and Hirabayashi contribute to accessible dance training in the city, with site-based performance offering a way for many pre-professional participants in the Kokoro workshops to test their readiness to make the leap from studio to stage. Reciprocally, Bourget and Hirabayashi take advantage of the workshops to research movement ideas that might develop into an indoor, ticketed performance.51 These professional and personal exchanges of choreographic intimacy are complemented by the kinesthetic labour of the audience in watching its performance. By that I mean that part of our experience of a roving site work such as this is that we must move along with it, negotiating in the moment – and in the absence of traditional spectating protocols – not just the distance we maintain from the performers but also our closeness to each other. Gerecke maintains this is one of the most productive and distinctive aspects of site-based dance, namely its capacity to choreograph audiences – and in ways that ideally encour-

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age more complex considerations of our relationships with each other and the spaces we inhabit and move through.52 With or without clothes, on a beach or in the city, that’s a sublime calculation of boundedness worth contemplating.

Conclusion Needless to say, I took the bus home from Wreck. However, the ambulatory performance ethnography I conducted as an adjunct to my research on site dance in the city was instructive. For one thing, it taught me how consistently walking in Vancouver, as a tactic to speak place otherwise, comes up against strategies to manage and regulate bodily flows. Time and again I encountered barriers of access, or mechanisms to redirect my chosen route: fences; pathways that suddenly cut out; sidewalks that insisted this way instead of that. Blomley notes that this kind of “administrative pedestrianism” is designed not to promote public citizenship through the spontaneous occupation of civic space, but rather to govern what kinds of activities can be trafficked in, where, and by whom.53 In my own travels to my waterfront research sites, it was not sidewalk but seawall that I mostly had underfoot. Encircling Stanley Park, bounding the north and south sides of False Creek (including Granville Island), and stretching all the way to ubc, Vancouver’s seawall is a defining feature of the city’s performance of place. And yet in connecting our urban beaches, the seawall cuts out at two points. I have already noted one of these points, between crab/Portside Park and Canada Place. The other occurs between Kitsilano and Jericho Beaches, when through the tony enclave of Point Grey one is forced to make a detour around the priciest real estate in the city. What might be revealed by a tactical breaching of these enforced reroutings – by, for example, walking underneath Waterfront Station to Canada Place (which I have done), or hopping the private security fences along Point Grey Road and swimming from backyard pool to backyard pool (which I have not as yet attempted)? Among other things, one comes to understand how even the right to a vista is ideologically fraught in Vancouver: publicly contained on the one hand, privately annexed on the other. My aim in analyzing site dance alongside other forms of social choreography through an explicitly local reading of the sublime has thus been partly to expose our too easy thrall to the distant view. Instead I have tried to suggest why, when exploring a kinesthetics of place, it is important to pay attention to what Levin has termed the “politics of ground,” including the (in)visibility of different

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bodies as they move on and through that ground.54 In so doing, I am also advocating for the “place” of kinesis within performance studies scholarship in Canada, especially as it helps to connect, as I have attempted here, the field’s different strands of aesthetic, ethnographic, and social analysis.55

1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

no te s In writing this chapter, I have benefited immensely from conversations with Dara Culhane and Alana Gerecke, whose research on Vancouver site dance covers far more important ground – materially and theoretically – than what is offered here. See Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 57. Berelowitz, Dream City, 128. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 257–8. Levin, Performing Ground, 6. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 113. Ibid., 34. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 81, emphasis in original. See, in particular, Kloetzel and Pavlik, Site Dance, 177–8. Levin, Performing Ground, 105–10. Hunter, “Experiencing Space,” 38. See, as well, Patrick Alcedo’s work in documenting the affective, embodied, and religious bonds at play among members of Toronto’s Filipino community in their local celebrations – including through street dancing – of the annual Ati-Atihan Festival (Alcedo, “Emotional and Religious Landscapes”); and Alana Gerecke’s interviews with both local and non-local site dance artists in Vancouver (Gerecke, “Moving Publics”). See Irving, “Strange Distance.” de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 36–7, emphasis in original. Foster, “Walking,” 144. Hamera, Dancing Communities, 3, 22. Martin, Critical Moves, 14. Ibid., 14–15. Vancouver-based visual artist Myfanwy MacLeod installed The Birds (2010), two 16.5-foot tall sparrows in polyurea and bronze, at the Olympic Village Plaza as part of a Cultural Olympiad public art commission. On the paradoxes of (in)visibility for Aboriginal women in Vancouver’s dtes, see Culhane, “Their Spirits Live.”

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22 Gerecke, “Moving Publics.” 23 See Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, interview by author, Vancouver, 25 March 2014. 24 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9. 25 Blomley, Unsettling the City, 46–7. 26 I am alluding here to Jacques Rancière’s Emancipated Spectator. 27 Friedenberg, interview. 28 Canuel, Justice, Dissent and the Sublime, 28. 29 Ibid., 97. 30 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 88, emphasis in original. 31 The installation of the memorial was also overseen by Don Larson, but without significant consultation of or collaboration with Aboriginal women’s groups from the dtes; see Cultural Memory Group, Remembering Women, 45–8. 32 Blomley, Unsettling the City, 55. 33 Ibid., 65. 34 See, on this latter point, Dangeli, “Dancing Sovereignty.” 35 David McIntosh, co-artistic director of battery opera, has created a number of site-specific walking performances focused on the dtes, including Lives Were around Me (2009) and Portside Walk (2011). 36 See Granville Island, “Visitor’s Guide.” 37 Berelowitz, City of Dreams, 256, 255. Worth noting in the context of my previous discussion of crab/Portside Park is that in July 2014 it was announced that Port Metro Vancouver would take over management of Granville Island from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. 38 See Pine and Gilmore, Experience Economy. 39 Horning, “Tourist Sublime.” 40 Augé, Non-Places. 41 Kloetzel, “Site-Specific Dance,” 240, 249. 42 Groys, “City in the Age.” See also Kant, Critique of Judgement. 43 In Leaky Heaven’s To Wear a Heart So White (2014), director Steven Hill and his collaborators take as their fictional starting point the idea that shortly after “discovering” the city that now bears his name, Captain George Vancouver and his crew staged Macbeth for Indigenous locals. 44 As part of her research on Filipino overseas workers in Canada, geographer Geraldine Pratt collaborated with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia and theatre artist-scholars Caleb Johnston and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson to create the testimonial play Nanay, based on interviews with Filipina migrant domestic workers and their Canadian employers. See Pratt, “Creating New Spaces.”

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45 Ingram, “Redesigning Wreck,” 190, 191–2. 46 Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, interview by author, Vancouver, 8 April 2014. 47 Fraleigh and Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, 52. 48 Hijikata eventually compiled “sixteen scrapbooks of verbal and visual images for dance” – his butoh-fu – that function as a kind of dance notation; ibid., 54–7. 49 Fraleigh and Nakamura note that butoh, with its mud- and chalk-covered bodies, and often unfolding in spaces of physical extremity, has a “somatic intimacy with nature” and comprises “a unique type of performed ecological knowledge”; ibid., 11. 50 Bourget and Hirabayashi, interview. 51 Ibid. 52 Gerecke, “Moving Publics.” 53 Blomley, Rights of Passage, 29–34. 54 Levin, Performing Ground, 17–25. 55 See Conquergood, “Of Caravans and Carnivals,” 138.

4

Travelling Soles: Tracing the Footprints of Our Stolen Sisters ju lie nag am

I want to begin at a crossroads, where great waterways meet, the place that is the origin of Indigenous Treaty Rights within the colonial state of Canada – marking this space as Treaty One territory and the heartland of the Métis. I am honoured to be home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and humbled by the generations of my family who have lived here, especially the women, and the history of their strength and resilience. As I prepare to write this chapter, I am reminded, through limited mainstream media coverage, that yet another young Indigenous woman in Manitoba has been affected by the violence many Indigenous people routinely endure. A grade eleven student from Garden Hill First Nation in northern Manitoba, attending high school in Winnipeg, sixteen-yearold Rinelle Harper was assaulted and left for dead in the near-freezing murky waters of the Red River – where many Indigenous bodies have been lost. With a strong will to live, she pulled herself to the shore, bravely surviving the attack. The strength and resilience of this young woman reminds us of the importance of recognizing more than 1,200 open cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women in Canada.”1 Her body, regrettably, stands in for the ongoing violence of colonialism – as Chief Greg Harper attests, “We see the assault on Rinelle as an assault on all of us.”2 At the same time, in its embodiment of survival, it serves as a powerful beacon of hope. Rinelle Harper’s attack is part of a larger struggle facing Indigenous women as the number of unsolved police cases continues to rise, and also a reminder of the past Conservative federal government’s unwillingness to recognize the murders and disappearances as a “systemic” problem – clearly another act of violence. These cases first attracted public attention in the independent and later mainstream media with the

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International Amnesty report Stolen Sisters (2004) and later No More Stolen Sisters (2009), which documented more than 500 missing and murdered Aboriginal women across Canada. The staggering statistics presented in these accounts call to mind a history of residential schools, the Indian Act, the sixties scoop, Bill C31, forced enfranchisement, and forced relocation – to mention only a few of the struggles facing us as Indigenous men and women living in this settler colonial state. One thousand one hundred and eighty-one open cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada are mapped though the donated moccasin vamps created by artists, community members, survivors, and missing and murdered women’s families. These moccasin vamps are part of Walking with Our Sisters, a community art exhibition and commemorative installation led by Métis artist Christi Belcourt, which opened at the Telus Centre Atrium at University of Alberta in 2013 and has since travelled to Regina, Yellowknife, Winnipeg, Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, Saskatoon, Thunder Bay, Prince George (to name only a few), and will finish touring in 2019. The exhibit is composed of 1,760 moccasin “vamps”: the tops of moccasins, which have yet to be sewn into footwear. Collectively, the vamps have been created to represent the souls of the missing and murdered women. Left intentionally unfinished, the part-moccasins visualize the women’s unfinished lives, reminding the viewer that they deserved an opportunity to live, to move, and to be a part of their families and communities. Arranged in rows on a “pathway” and pointing in the same direction, the vamps imagine a “path or journey that was ended prematurely.”3 Their positioning in the exhibition also suggests that the women are walking towards a healing place for both themselves and their families. This chapter explores the ways in which critical engagement through performance can serve as decolonizing tool: first, by demonstrating how performed visual narratives can (re)map space and place; second, by producing objects that performatively confront the legacies and continued projects of colonialism; and third, by offering a space in which to rearticulate Indigenous memories, histories, and stories through embodied practices, which together form what I will call a “living archive.” This investigation builds on my past scholarship, artistic, and curatorial work, which has explored how the colonized subject’s experience is intensified by gender and by a geopolitics of space tied to histories of colonialism and modernity. I will further tease out this argument through an engagement with the work of Indigenous scholars such as Mishuana Goeman, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Sherry Farrell Racette, and Michelle La

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Flamme; feminist geographer Doreen Massey; and performance studies scholar Diana Taylor. In my reading of Walking with Our Sisters as a living Indigenous archive, I hope to illustrate how ideas of living history and embodied knowledge, which have been central to performance studies as a discipline and methodology, are foundational to Indigenous epistemologies – ways of knowing that have a much longer history and are significantly bound to Indigenous geographies, concepts of space, and stories of place. Thinking the two together offers the possibility of Indigenizing and re-spatializing ideas of “archive” in performance studies – an entity often framed in universalist and temporal terms. At the same time, I suggest that if Indigenous bodies hold what I have elsewhere called “concealed geographies” and “embodied knowledge” – or are themselves living archives of geographical stories, repressed by the official, written colonial archive – their disappearance has material consequences in the politics of recognition and sovereignty.4 Restoring those embodied histories and geographies through performance and art practices not only offers Indigenous people the possibility of being recognized visually and politically, it can also bring Indigenous epistemologies of space and place into view, epistemologies that depart radically from Eurocentric settler classifications of space.

The Living Archive: Remapping Colonial Space The traditional archive gravitates towards “official” histories of nations, places, and people, drawing upon the power of authoritative documents to construct particular stories about the world. However, as performance theorist Diana Taylor points out, the archive is deeply embedded in relations of power and is manipulated by those in power, dispelling the myth that documents are true and objective forms of information. Cultural historian Carolyn Steedman extends this idea through her reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever. She states, “In Derrida’s description, the arkhe – the archive – appears to represent the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, in any place or time.”5 For Steedman, the archive assists in the “establishment of state power and authority” by legitimizing and functioning as “a way of seeing, or a way of knowing.”6 Similarly, Indigenous scholars define archive not only as a “positivist” method for recording history – through tangible, verifiable documents – but also as way of apprehending the world, a “Western system of

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knowledge.”7 Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that Western research often draws on a larger “cultural archive,” governed by “rules” that “help make sense of what is contained within [it] and enable ‘knowledge’ to be recognized.”8 This archive, Smith points out, “brings to bear, on any study of indigenous peoples, a cultural orientation, a set of values, a different conceptualization of such things as time, space, and subjectivity, different and competing theories of knowledge, highly specialized forms of language, and structures of power.”9 Like official national narratives, documents that tell a particular story about Canada’s past, the archive often performs itself as a unitary, cohesive totality, when in fact there are varying or conflicting versions of history. Smith’s concepts are in dialogue with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s metaphor of “the cultural archive [as] an architectural image.” In her reading of Foucault, she contends that “the archive not only contains artefacts of culture” – i.e., it often appears as a solid architectural structure, as coincident with state institutions, such as monuments, archives, museums, and public galleries – but is “itself an artefact and a construct of culture.”10 It is also important to remember that while the archive presents itself as a fixed entity, structure, or artifact, it is actually a performative process. It serves to construct the real; as Smith would say, this happens not only through documentation, but also through a wider set of practices that legitimize histories and documents found in the archive. She argues, “What makes ideas ‘real’ is the system of knowledge, the formations of culture, and the relations of power in which these concepts are located.”11 A central facet of this system of knowledge is the particular written form through which the settler state preserves cultural and collective memory. Taylor argues that the “writing = memory/knowledge equation is central to Western epistemology.”12 This equation is a principal legacy of colonialism in the Americas, which perpetuates the perception that civilized = writing and savage = orality. There is a long history of writing holding power over colonial subjects. When writing was implemented through the colonization of the Americas, it also created class hierarchies within marginalized Indigenous communities: those who had access to this knowledge enabled their community to grow and gain more control and power. More insidiously, it is through writing that settler mythologies were implanted in colonial states, displacing Indigenous cultural memories and title to land. Here, as Taylor articulates, “writing, instead of reinforcing memory or providing an analogy, becomes memory itself.”13 The document, in this sense, has

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the potential to obliterate forms of knowledge that reside in individual bodies, in communities, and in the spaces that they daily inhabit, forming what I will refer to here as a living archive. Taylor calls these embodied forms of cultural expression or “the repertoire.” For her, this includes “performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.”14 In moving away from the written, which was aligned with colonial rule, the repertoire “allows for an alternative perspective on historical processes of transnational contact and invites a remapping of the Americas, this time by following the traditions of embodied practices.”15 If Walking with Our Sisters performs as a living archive, it does so by activating these embodied memories through a kind of performative, and explicitly de-colonial, remapping of space. To understand how this works, let me tease out several layers of this culturally and spatially specific enactment. First and foremost, the exhibition draws on the memories of Indigenous families and communities to render visible those Indigenous women who are deemed invisible to the larger Canadian society, and whose lives have been recognized, or made calculable, within the official national record only as the result of the work of Indigenous activists and the families of the fallen women. It simultaneously can be read as a critique of geographies of power that are embedded in a colonial organization of space – and in the official maps that were produced as one of the effects of Western modernity. As British cultural geographer Doreen Massey states, “What was evolved within the project of modernity … was the establishment and (attempted) universalisation of a way of imagining space (and the space/society relation) which underpinned the material enforcement of certain ways of organising space and the relationship between society and space. And it is still with us today.”16 This perception and framing of space, which went hand in hand with colonial rule, has significantly affected gendered colonized bodies. From its inception, the imperial power/knowledge grid that mapped Canada as nation has denied the existence of Indigenous bodies, presenting the land as empty of original inhabitants, terra nullius. As a result, Indigenous subjects occupy the periphery or have been mapped out of the universalizing settler map; when they do appear within this territory, Indigenous bodies are habitually viewed as extraneous, excessive, and therefore eminently disposable. How else can we explain the over 1,000 open unsolved police cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada today?

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The spatial conditions of colonialism are intensified by gender. The colonized gendered body is doubly at risk – subjected both to the colonial gaze and male gaze. As I have argued elsewhere, female bodies have historically been tied to the land within colonial and patriarchal constructions of space. This promoted the belief that Indigenous women’s bodies are for the taking; they are objects or landscapes to be possessed and controlled.17 Such a belief informs the way Indigenous women are often seen and treated by non-Indigenous and Indigenous men alike. The two men charged for the attack of Harper (the young woman who survived) are both from the Indigenous community, which raises questions about the psycho-affective condition of the colonized person and the ways in which gendered conceptions of space have been internalized by Indigenous men, who have themselves been disenfranchised and marginalized. Walking with Our Sisters offers alternatives to the colonial power/ knowledge grid and its association with the conquest of women’s bodies. It brings to life the unwritten stories – and more specifically the embodied geographies – of the missing and murdered women, and rejects those colonial settler narratives that treat Native bodies as invisible and in need of being tamed. As Indigenous scholar Mishuana Goeman explains, the Indigenous body “can be hypervisible as the abnormal body, and at times hyper-invisible as it becomes spatially disjointed from the map of the nation in both physical and mental imaginings.”18 As a result, Goeman believes that “embodied geographies thus become pivotal to address in decolonization projects,” as they can “play a major role in our thinking about the connections between land, individuals, and constructions of nations. Bodies that are differently marked through the corporeal or through a performance – whether through gender, race, sexuality or nationality – articulate differently in different spaces.”19 As each vamp in Belcourt’s installation marks a woman’s unfinished life, it opens up the potential of (re)mapping the bodies of the missing and murdered women beyond the larger settler narrative and national map – while also playing on the tension between seen (the written) and unseen (the embodied) that characterizes the archive. The vamps, as unfinished objects, invoke a presence that was considered an absence. While Indigenous women are regularly perceived as being as invisible, or seen as an object to be controlled through Canada’s mapping of a nation, the vamps – created by family members, friends, and artists – help us to understand that the missing and murdered women are not devoid of place. They are part of communities. They are mothers, daughters, nieces, cousins, aunties, sisters. They could be anyone you love. As a

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result of the exhibition, many of the men and male elders involved illustrate that they see Indigenous women as integral members of their communities and are actively seeking solutions for treating and dealing with violence against women. Further, the vamps go beyond representing the murdered and absent women through the physical materialization of the women in the installation – by exuding life of their own. Since shoes are here metonymically linked to the bodies of the disappeared (intimately connected to their feet, which also carry them from place to place), they physicalize the spirits of these women’s lives. As a participant at the exhibition you can feel this material presence when you enter into the room. The bright colours, glittering appearance of each vamp, each ornamented by different beading, symbols, and design, summons a sense of a life hovering in the space – of a spirit that demands to be remembered and have its life validated. In many ways, the vamps become the performers in the exhibition and create the embodied experience for the participant or viewer. Display of the vamps depends on the constraints of each physical exhibition space. This is a community-based project, therefore the static rules of mainstream gallery spaces do not apply; the work is not only shown in galleries in museums, but also in spaces that might not normally host artwork, such as cultural centres and band halls, making each install unique. The vamps are placed on a red cloth and are organized in coloured themes such as blues, greens, and reds. While they function as living objects, standing in for histories of the departed, they are also fed, taken care of, and treated as living entities. The volunteers and knowledge keepers treat each vamp with devotion and respect as if they were babies that needed constant love. Specific individuals are also designated as “keepers” of the vamps at each site where the exhibition is installed, tasked with “taking care of the vamps, connecting with local communities, and ensuring that appropriate ceremonial protocols are observed.”20 The keepers have dedicated years of their life to making sure that the vamps are cared for at each exhibition. There is a national collective of keepers, and each person has a role, which varies with knowledge and participation. At each location of the exhibition there is a group of keepers that determine the programming and local protocols for ceremony. The first display was in Edmonton, Alberta, and one of the keepers of the bundle, Tanya Kappo, explains, “When I became the first keeper in Edmonton, I had no idea it would be like a sustained ceremony for myself and my life.”21 Kappo’s

Figure 4.1 Walking with Our Sisters at Brandon University’s Down Under Space, 2016.

deep sense of responsibility to the vamps, similar to the lifetime commitment of being a pipe carrier, resonates with my own limited experience of helping with the exhibition in Brandon, Manitoba. I felt a profound connection to the exhibition and many of the vamps. Each stitch and bead, made with such care and love, stared back into my very soul. At the end of the day, I wept for those we have lost and hoped for my own

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daughters’ future. Sherry Farrell Racette, art historian and one of the four keepers in Winnipeg, argues that the vamps adhere to the Indigenous belief that “special objects should be cared for and kept for future generations … Objects of importance, such as wampum belts, pipes, drums and a range of ceremonial objects, had keepers or caretakers who were entrusted with their care and proper use.”22 Treated as the very soles/souls of the missing and murdered women, the vamps thus need to be protected and preserved for future generations; they remind us of what they have lost and teach the next generations to stand up and unbind the shackles of colonialism and violence against women. Having participated in a small way in assisting with the installation of the exhibition in Brandon, I was able to enact, alongside the official keepers, the powerful understandings of living entities that are at the centre of Indigenous epistemologies. In the process of holding the vamps and gently placing them on the red cloth pathway, I could feel the presence of the heartbeats that each vamp summons into the space. The energy in your hands reminds you of the many lost souls that are buried or that lie beneath the watery depths of lakes and rivers. When placing the vamps carefully on the path, I could sense the ground-ness of the spirits of the missing women. Each vamp is a footprint, a bodily impression left on the ground. Each also brings to light a different sense of ground: the fact that many of the vamps are beaded with creations, or creatures, that form part of the land; these objects are, similarly, perceived as radiating a living presence. If the vamps constitute a living archive by troubling distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, they also resonate with ideas of animacy in Indigenous beliefs about the cosmos and with broader Indigenous understandings of space. In Indigenous philosophy, Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth Bliss Phillips note, “Space is experienced in relation to specific configurations of land, sky and water, [and] the specifics of cosmology in each region affect and reflect upon particular environments and ecologies.”23 For the Anishinaabe, the agency of the animate cuts across all three levels of the cosmos and is distributed across a wide range of beings and things. While distinctions between animate and inanimate are still present in our traditions, they pose a radical departure from the categories found in Western thought. According to Wendy Djinn Geniusz, “Things such as rocks, trees, and plants, which are considered inanimate in dominant society, are considered animate within anishinaabe philosophy … [T]he same verbs that are used to describe the actions of a human being are used to describe

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the actions of other animate beings, such as rocks, trees, and certain religious items.”24 This distributed animacy appears in designs found on the vamps – patterns, motifs, icons, creatures – that display animate characteristics; it also appears in the way the vamps are treated, which invokes the relationship of humans to the cosmos. The vamps move beyond categories of human and non-human, revealing a creative synthesis of the two drawn from Indigenous ideologies of the cosmos. They come together in a living image that is neither a simple anthropomorphic personification of nature nor an animal-like or human-like being. This is seen in the beaded design of mythic creatures – an Anishinaabe thunderbird, for example – breathing life into the vamps and sustaining the spirits of the missing and murdered women. The living archive of Walking with Our Sisters is also embedded in the act of creating the vamps, which draws on embodied memories, practices, and knowledges of Indigenous families and communities. It recalls Canadian Jayce Salloum’s observation that “the material” presented in art exhibitions “has a sense of ‘living,’ a presentness, a relevance, excerpts of life resting in their context of extraction.”25 The moccasin tops as material culture, much like the women’s presence that they materialize, point to the ongoingness of Indigenous life, and its emplacement within the vibrant communities and local contexts. In Belcourt’s installation, it is clear that each vamp has come from a home, a beading group, a survivor, or the families of survivors. There were sixty-five beading groups across North America formed specifically for people to contribute vamps to the exhibition. One example was the Wednesday night intercultural beading group formed in 2013 as a collaboration between Urban Shaman Gallery and Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (mawa), an initiative led by Becca Taylor where women and children gathered to bead together within different traditions. The number of moccasins that Belcourt received (more than 1,760 pairs) far outnumbered those originally requested – with still many more volunteers eager to contribute. Many who created vamps for the exhibit had never beaded before, but joined beading circles to involve themselves in the project. The act of beading brought people together who had never met before, crossed intergenerational boundaries, and gifted new bead workers with the ancient knowledge that has been carried for thousands of years. As Farrell Racette so beautifully articulates in her own archival work, “I imagined a long invisible thread that stretched across centuries and connected the thread in my needles to the fine strands of sinew used by the unknown women who lived long ago.”26 This metaphor extends to the people who participated in creating the

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beading for the vamps and expands to the observers of the exhibition who are witnesses to this ancient thread of knowledge. The beading circles, and individual acts of beading, initiated by Walking with Our Sisters open up the possibility for artists to transform past and the present relations in colonized spaces by prioritizing and offering access to embodied knowledges. The bodily transmission of intergenerational knowledge was and still is the key to thriving Indigenous communities. Farrelle Racette argues in a similar vein that these lived archival practices also transform what we view as “living.” Indigenous objects such as moccasins, hides, and clothing are treated as having animate qualities and are part of the long thread that binds us to the past ways of knowing and creating. She explains, “Women worked with living media on living surfaces to construct messages for an unseen viewer, actively engaging the spirit world through their artwork.”27 Each vamp is a living surface that engages the spirit world by representing the women and, at the same time, breathes life into a collective memory of practices surrounding beading and hide work. The different styles and methods that have been used – such as the kind and colours of the beads, caribou tufts, images, design – are all symbols of different affiliations of Indigenous people. Certain floral patterns have been passed down by multiple generations; colours and designs of the beads would indicate a particular person or beading group that has made that vamp. Each vamp has its own smell and suggests the kind of hide that was used, which would also give a strong indication of its geographic location. For example, the vamps with caribou tufting would have been created by Indigenous people from the subarctic and, depending on their technique or placement, it could have been from Rankin Inlet, Baffin Island, or Labrador, and so on. There are distinctive floral patterns that belong to the Red River Métis, and the stylistic form of the thunderbird or skywoman would explain that the maker would have come from Haudenosaunee or Algonquin territory. Each person has her own story and relationship to the creation of her vamp, and viewers/participants will encounter their own connection through the display of the vamps, as is evident in the earlier description of my experience assisting with the Brandon exhibition. Indigenous scholar Mary Jane McCallum, who learned how to bead in one of the Winnipeg beading groups formed for Walking with Our Sisters, led by Farrelle Racette, states that her vamp’s motif was red-winged blackbirds that were inspired by the name of her (late) Lunaape language teacher, Chohkalihle.28 Meanwhile, Métis artist Amy Malbeuf used traditional

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Figure 4.2 Walking with Our Sisters at Brandon University’s Down Under Space, 2016.

tufting in her vamps – a practice employed by Indigenous peoples before contact. Tufting requires a skilled hand, producing three-dimensional images by trimming and stitching bundles of moose hair onto tanned hide or birchbark. To create the tufts, fifteen to twenty hairs are grouped into a small bundle of uniform size and colour, then laid on the backing material, leading to a stunning final result. Inuk scholar Heather Igloliorte made her vamps out of duffel material that is commonly used in Labrador, and worked from her grandmother’s pattern for the decorative band, which formed part of her amauti (a parka worn by Inuit women, which traditionally includes a pouch for a baby to nestle against its mother). Igloriorte felt connected to her grandmother while beading the vamps because she had used beadwork and sewing to support her family. As these examples make clear, intergenerational connection is at the root of this exhibition and the transmission of this knowledge through creating the vamps. The vamps, in this sense, merge traditional understandings of the archive and the repertoire: the beadwork is a form of cultural writing

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that encodes memory in material form, and the vamp on which it is inscribed is embedded in more ephemeral Indigenous rituals and traditions. Our collective memories are shared through these forms of doing – practices that form part of what I would call an Indigenous living archive. Oral stories, rituals, singing, dancing, and the drum are just a few examples of this type of embodied knowledge. Kahente Horn-Miller explains the multiple layers of sensory experience that are particular to these cultural practices: “The singing begins and your attention is on the beat of the drum, the sound of the rattle, and the men’s voices captured in song. A great feeling of empowerment overwhelms you as you go around and around. Pure energy is created as your feet glide across the floor. Your heart soars as you dance and dance. You feel as if you could dance forever.”29 The feeling that Horn-Miller is describing cannot be fully captured on film or in the written text. It is an embodied experience and “forces us to situate ourselves in relationship to it; as participants, spectators, or witnesses, we need to ‘be there,’ part of the act of transfer.”30 In Walking with Our Sisters, each person instantly becomes an active participant in knowledge production because the sound of the music in the space takes over your body; the almost two thousand pairs of vamps seem to stare directly into your very soul. This experience is possible only through the act of being there, right there in the thick of it. Ceremony, as a means of transmitting collective memory, is an important part of the non-reproducible and affective experience of Walking with Our Sisters. It is also one way that the exhibition bears witness to the politics of the land and the complex relationship the missing and murdered women share with the space. When viewers visit the exhibit, it immediately becomes clear that they are guests in the territory. They are asked to practise and pay attention to ritual protocols. Throughout the exhibition, elders, keepers, and volunteers join the exhibit as part of a community committee established in each place where it is installed; they guide and create a pathway towards traditional protocols and ensure their bodies and spirits are well taken care of. The local Indigenous committee and volunteers transform the exhibition/community space into a sacred space. The room is smudged before the vamps enter and after they leave; sage or cedar boughs are placed on the floor or hung on the walls; and long red cloth is laid down on which the vamps rest. The inclusion of ceremony in Walking with Our Sisters has contributed greatly to creating meaningful experiences for Indigenous participants; however, some responses to the universalization of traditional

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protocols have been critical. Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore did not want to enter into the space because women are required to wear a skirt and smudge themselves beforehand. She described her refusal as a personal one and she could not accept the gendering of the space. Belmore’s critical gesture was offered by an artist who has similarly engaged with the issues surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women in her work – and, to respond to Belmore’s concerns, there are serious repercussions to the universalization of Indigenous practices, especially when it invokes ceremony. As Métis artist David Garneau argues, Belmore’s act reveals “perplexing issues in Indigenous cultural politics that are barely discussed in public – the challenge of the secular Native, and Indigenous criticism of Indigenous culture.”31 In this chapter, my focus is on how the exhibition transforms the space and how community participation creates a space for the vamps/ souls to be seen, heard, and felt. However, there needs to be more dialogue surrounding the decision to have female participants wear skirts (though, in my understanding, this requirement varied with the location of the exhibition and the keepers’ decisions to pursue ceremonial protocols). At the University of Winnipeg we had a similar critical response to the request that women wear skirts in a pipe ceremony on campus.32 For me these responses call to mind the groundbreaking Woman’s Drum (2002), by Winnipeg-based Indigenous artist Lita Fontaine, an installation that features four banners with images of a woman’s naked torso marking the four directions. In the centre of the space a hide drum sits, resonating with a recorded heartbeat and reflecting women’s exclusion from the drum and how women’s bodies are regulated.33 Refusals like Belmore’s and works like A Woman’s Drum prompt us to continue asking tough questions about Walking with Our Sisters. Did this decision to require that women wear skirts have colonial, patriarchal, or religious undertones, or did elders who implemented it have different motivations, such as respect for the vamps? Raising critical questions about practising ceremony is important, but it is equally important to recognize its profound effects and the significance of specific local traditions – particularly since we as Indigenous communities were banned, under the Indian Act, from performing these ceremonies and practices and are still grappling with the effects of residential schools, sexism, and colonialism. Our revitalization of culture and ceremony, since the federal ban was lifted, is still relatively recent and there is still a steep learning curve as to how we want to proceed.

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Participants who engage with the Walking with Our Sisters exhibition instantly recognize it as a Native space. They are invited to pick up tobacco and then leave it in the room once they have walked through the installation, and are also encouraged to smudge themselves. Traditional honour and grieving songs are heard as they move about the space, setting the tone and pace of their walking. This kind of space is fundamentally different from hegemonic settler spaces. Demanding respect for ritual protocols upon entry and engaging participants in Indigenous medicines works against a colonial and gendered spatial organization, which frames a landscape for the taking, something one can master or control. Indigenous scholar Michelle La Flamme describes the importance of medicine in Indigenous practices: “There is medicine involved in seeking advice from elders by way of offering them tobacco. There is participatory medicine involved in being a witness or participant in talking circles, and there is medicine that is physical in the form of tobacco, sweet grass, sage and cedar.”34 The vamps and the medicines draw viewers in as witnesses, forcing them to comprehend the struggle Indigenous women face. These ceremonial practices also serve as a healing ritual in response to colonial trauma. As La Flamme notes, they “bring balance to the witnesses through honouring the deceased by way of naming rituals, they bring balance to communities by showing the humanity of Aboriginal women, and they provide a cathartic ritual or ceremony for the release of trauma.”35 The ritual conditions of the performance have often been described by family members, police, and the general public as humbling, and many have immediately been brought to tears when they enter or have a similarly very emotional or visceral response. Perhaps most importantly, each exhibition actively calls attention to the specificity of place, an act that marks cultural difference and celebrates a vibrant community that is often invisible in colonial understandings of place. Indeed, many participants feel proud when they recognize vamps sent from their community or the style of beadwork found there. Moreover, each location of Walking with Our Sisters must be approved through the community-based Indigenous council and involve the community in which it is staged. The exhibition, in turn, transforms the space in which it is situated – whether a gallery, a community space, or a friendship centre. The installation is integrated into the host space through talks, teach-ins, ceremonies, youth, and community events; the effects will ripple through these places for generations to come.

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Figure 4.3 Walking with Our Sisters at Brandon University’s Down Under Space, 2016.

Performance, in this sense, opens up the possibility of space, which in turn can give the participant or creator the ability to assemble new methods of sharing embodied knowledge situated in the living archive. At the very least, as an experience of witnessing shared by participants across Canada, Walking with Our Sisters has now become part of a larger Indigenous collective memory. Farrell Racette calls it “the most important artistic act, that we (as a collective community) have ever made.” She explains, “It has the power to bring such incredibly diverse peoples together, and gets at our deepest fears and grief. It is unbelievably beautiful. And it reinvents itself with each installation, with each community who wraps itself around it. It is like a giant snowball of change, that leaves pockets of people, relationships and networks that continue to work long after the vamps have been packed up.”36 This sense of community engagement is also present in the calls of Thunder Bay event organizer Leanna Marshall to members of the community to participate in the exhibition and related events. In the pro-

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ject’s media release, she states, “Whether you are a community member or you work in the public sector on issues of social justice, we would like you to come be part of this conversation about what we, as a community, can do to create better awareness, dialogue, healing and safety in our community … The heart of this conversation will be around embracing solutions and ways forward that make sense to us: the community. Each of us brings strengths and ideas and we want to hear them.”37 While Walking with Our Sisters creates new networks for transmitting Indigenous knowledge – here primarily the stories of the missing and murdered women – it also acknowledges how those stories are shaped by the embodied geographies of the local communities that contribute vamps or that serve as host for the show. Everyone who participates in mounting the exhibition is telling or performing a different story about the lives of the missing and murdered women. Each becomes part of the story and brings to life the women who have been made invisible. Indigenous writer Beth Brant argues, “To tell a good story, one has to be a good actor. I remember my granddad telling me stories when I was little, punctuating the sentences with movement and grand gestures, changing his facial expressions and voice.”38 The person listening has to be an active participant in those expressions. The body is present and that person’s voice, pronunciation, language, race, gender, and age are actively involved in the performance. The theatrical approach in the creation of stories could be criticized for its inability to be truthful or concrete, as the traditional archival document claims to be. But this flexibility is situated in the “truth” of that particular moment in time. The message or transmission is not fixed for that particular performance, but has many possible interpretations, just as the traditional archive has with the diverse people interacting with it. At many of the events linked to the exhibition, in fact, there have been storytellers, and elders have been asked to share their embodied knowledge. Further, each time the exhibition travels to a new location it is reactivated through the Indigenous histories of that geographic place. Each site of the project changes the transmission of the stories, because the actors and the community members are different. Each geographic location, whether it is Yellowknife, Thunder Bay, or Winnipeg, has its own specific social conditions. Each territory is recognized as unique, and each Indigenous nation is considered the keeper of the specific land, histories, and knowledges. At the same time, each place shares the loss of missing and murdered women, and transmits the same message: these women’s lives are important, are valued, and need to be seen.

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Indigenous communities continue to be burdened with the legacies of colonialism. Its gendered geopolitics of space will affect the future of Indigenous people in Canada and in particular our women, young girls, and youth. In this chapter I have explored the ways in which Indigenous women mobilized performance as a decolonizing tool to rearticulate Indigenous memories and histories. The visual narratives produced in Walking with Our Sisters can (re)map space and place by bringing into view an Indigenous living archive to which the larger public can have access. This exhibition draws on embodied knowledges that are foundational to Indigenous culture – the creation of vamps, songs, and stories – in order to narrate the women’s stories and lives, and to acknowledge and create a deep connection to place. These site-based actions, performed in multiple locations and communities, and situated within Indigenous knowledges, have the potential to unbind our Indigenous female bodies from the shackles of colonialism, sexism, and racism. The exhibition demonstrates that the voices and spirits of the murdered and missing women are part of our lives and will remind us for generations to come of their fight for emancipation, self-determination, and gender equality. As Belcourt articulates, “Since the [vamps are] on the floor, people’s heads will be bowed, they’ll be looking down … It’s quite humbling, in a way, and they’ll be walking on cloth, so I expect they’ll have to walk softly.”39 The vamps teach this generation and beyond how to connect to those ancient pathways that have been traced by the soles of the past and the future.

no te s 1 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Missing and Murdered.” In February 2016, Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett confirmed that the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada is likely “‘way bigger’ than 1,200” – i.e., exceeding the 1,181 murdered and missing women noted in the rcmp’s 2014 report. See Kirkup, “More than 1,200.” 2 cbcnews, “Attacked Winnipeg Teen.” 3 Walking with Our Sisters, “Homepage.” 4 Nagam, “(Re)Mapping the Colonized Body,” 148. 5 Steedman, Dust, 1. 6 Ibid., 1, 2. 7 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 43. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 42.

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Ibid., 51. Also see Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 48. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 20. Ibid. Massey, for space, 65. See Nagam, “(Re)Mapping the Colonized Body,” 155. Goeman, Mark My Words, 12. Ibid. Everett-Green, “Moccasins with a Message.” Tanya Kappo, qtd. in Rendell, “Walking with Our Sisters.” Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories,” 284. Berlo and Phillips, Native North American Art, 22. Geniusz, Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive, 56. Salloum, “Sans titre/Untitled,” 11. Farrell Racette, Looking for Stories, 285. Ibid., 288. Mary Jane McCallum, e-mail message to author, 8 August 2016. Horn-Miller, Bring Us Back to the Dance, 230. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 32. Garneau, “Indigenous Criticism on Not Walking with Our Sisters,” 78. See cbcnews, “Indigenous Ceremony.” Other Indigenous scholars like Alex Wilson at the University of Saskatchewan have raised similar questions about women having to wear skirts in ceremony at their institution. See Deerchild, “Tribal Feminism.” La Flamme, Theatrical Medicine, 1. Ibid., 2. Sherry Farrell Racette, e-mail message to author, July 2015. Walking with Our Sisters, “Community Conversation.” Brant, Writing as Witness, 15. Qtd. in Everett-Green, “Moccasins.”

PART T WO S PE C TAC L ES O F NATIO N

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The American Girl Comes to Canada ma rl is s ch we itze r

3 May 2014. It’s the Toronto opening of the American Girl boutique. A girl in a lilac sweater and long brown hair smiles at the camera. “Hi guys, it’s Plopper Puppies here – or Amy,” she begins. “And we are at the American Girl store in Yorkdale.”1 The camera zooms out to reveal Amy’s surroundings – a mall parking lot – and then zooms in again to focus on the large billboard and three blue awnings that mark the exterior of Indigo Books & Music. From here, the video cuts to another shot of Amy’s cheerful face, now inside Yorkdale Shopping Centre, where she is waiting for a ticket to the grand opening of the American Girl boutique: “So now we’re inside the store [the mall]. It’s a really, really long lineup, like really long. And it’s gonna probably take a long time, so … for you guys, it’ll only be about one or two seconds, but for us it’s gonna be like almost half an hour, by the length of the line.” In the next scene, Amy’s hair has been pulled back into a loose ponytail and she avoids looking into the camera. Her voice lacks the enthusiasm of the earlier scenes as she explains that she’s just learned that it will be another few hours before she’ll gain access to the store. Two scenes later, Amy waits just outside the entrance. She is finally about to go in: “So, it’s actually a really long time later. I had to go sell cookies at a mall … and then we came back. And I’m out of breath because we ran up the escalator right there and … yes, we’re here! This is so exciting! Oh my God, I’m so excited! Ahhh – we’re gonna get Isabelle and it’s so exciting! Isabelle! Isabelle! … ok, so we just gotta wait. So yeah, we’ll get back to you guys when we are actually in the store.” At last, Amy enters the boutique. As she moves from one tableau doll display to another her voice quivers and the camera shakes with her excitement: “ok, so yay we’re going in the store. Whoo! Oh my gosh, oh

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my gosh, oh my gosh, whoo, it’s Isabelle, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it’s so cool. ok, oh my gosh, it’s Isabelle and there’s her cat. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, ok, ok – wheeeeee! [Amy spins around, her eyelids close.] Whew. We’re so excited … Yeah, I want Isabelle.” After Amy tours the store for another minute, zooming in on displays of books, doll furniture, accessories, and other dolls, the video cuts from the mall to her home, where she – or, more accurately “Plopper Puppies,” Amy’s owner – showcases her “haul” from the American Girl store.2 Running 11:41, this YouTube video, titled “American girl [sic] Store Yorkdale vlog&Haul!,” offers a compelling document of a girl’s consumer adventure as performed through the dual persona of her doll Amy and the pseudonym “Plopper Puppies.” With her future audience in mind, “Plopper” films each step of Amy’s journey – from the parking lot, to the really long lines, to crossing the American Girl threshold,

Figure 5.1 Isabelle, the American Girl “doll of the year,” on display in the Indigo boutique, 2014.

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and to the consumer frenzy that erupts when she comes face to face with the doll she has been waiting (for hours!) to see: Isabelle, the “Girl of the Year.” It is Amy the doll who narrates the shopping adventure, expressing anticipation, excitement, exhaustion, and exhilaration as she gets closer and closer to the boutique. Once at home, though, Plopper drops her Amy guise and assumes the role of thoughtful, observant (human) consumer to describe (in meticulous detail) the items she has purchased, commenting on the size, appearance, and function of each. Her tone is calm and controlled, the opposite of the fanatical, shrieking Amy. Whereas Amy invites viewers to share in the excitement of the consumer experience as it’s happening (wheeeee!!), Plopper urges them to carefully scrutinize her “haul” away from the heady boutique environment and in the privacy of her own home. “American girl Store Yorkdale vlog&Haul!” is a typical example of a “haul video,” a relatively recent YouTube genre in which girls studiously perform their consumer identities by sharing their mall purchases with an online audience.3 Some haul videos focus exclusively on one special purchase, as with Plopper’s trip to the American Girl store, while others document a more expansive shopping experience in which the consumer opens bags and bags of goods, proof of her shopping skill and tenacity. At their most basic, “haul videos” trade in the erotics of consumer desire and the logic of the strip show.4 With each slow reveal, the starring object becomes suffused with an auratic glow targeted more at the anticipated video audience than at the consumer herself. What interests me most about Plopper’s video is its documentation of a Canadian girl’s experience at the American Girl opening at Yorkdale Shopping Centre, one of Toronto’s largest high-end malls. What does Plopper’s video, and others like it, suggest about the way the identity of Canadian girls is performed with and through the consumption of US brands? How is this identity shaped through retail environments (or brandscapes) designed for US consumers but transplanted to Canadian locales? To what extent do Canadian consumers’ contributions to YouTube archives through “haul videos” further the globalization of children’s consumer culture? How might these videos also encourage new forms of connectivity that expand or challenge the public embodiment of national feeling and spectacle? In posing these questions, I aim to expand previous studies of consumer performance, which have often focused on US experiences and brand environments.5 In particular I stress the importance of approaching consumer performance from a broader geographic perspective, one

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that acknowledges the hemispheric flow of consumer goods and ideologies. A study of Canadian consumer performance must necessarily take into account the presence and influence of the United States; but rather than see Canadians as the passive receptors of all things American, or the United States as a monolithic beast breathing down Canadian necks, I seek to identify moments of negotiation, contestation, and affiliation between consumers and corporations on both sides of the border. In this, I also hope to extend previous discussions of national spectacle and feeling in a Canadian context, seen most notably in the work of Erin Hurley,6 as well work on Canadian brand performance undertaken by Peter Dickinson, Susan Bennett, and Brian Batchelor, among others.7 So too by focusing on YouTube performance and the relationship of Canadian to American culture more broadly, I join scholars in Canadian popular culture and cultural studies for whom US cultural imperialism and the articulation of “Canadian” identity remain central concerns. Scholarship on children and consumption has grown rapidly over the last two decades, consistent with the expansion of consumer and commodity culture studies but also, more pressingly, in response to the aggressive pursuit of child consumers by multinational corporations. Although scholars agree that the commercialization of childhood is a worrying phenomenon, they disagree over the extent to which children can be viewed as active subjects negotiating their way through the consumer landscape.8 At one end of the spectrum are books such as Juliet B. Schor’s Born to Buy (2004), Susan Linn’s Consuming Kids (2004), and Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter (2011), which offer exposé-like studies of the tactics employed by North American marketing and advertising agencies to lure children towards branded products.9 These studies often view children as innocent victims and advocate interventionist strategies to protect them from corporate manipulators. At the opposite end of the spectrum are studies such as David B. Hoyle and Patricia Seybold’s BRAND child (2004), which emphasize the influence and power that children possess as consumers.10 This scholarship tends to treat children as active agents, as “sophisticated, demanding and hard-to-please” subjects who make informed choices that reflect their individual desires and beliefs; these rational social actors are hardly the manipulated dupes at the centre of Schor’s or Linn’s studies.11 Both sides of the child consumer debate deploy compelling historical, statistical, and ethnographic evidence, yet, as Daniel Thomas Cook emphasizes, the “child consumer” who emerges from these studies is

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very much a discursive product, “not a living, breathing person, but rather a social construction – i.e., an assemblage of qualities, beliefs and conjectures concerning the ‘nature’ and motivation of children regarding commercial goods and meanings.”12 Scholars must therefore keep the constructed assemblage of the “child consumer” in mind when considering the actual performances of children moving through mall environments, playing at home, or filming their “haul” for YouTube. In performance studies, discussions about consumer culture have followed a similar trajectory. In her important book Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions, Maurya Wickstrom offers a powerful critique of corporate brandscapes and their use of theatrical staging to engage consumers as affective or immaterial labourers. Like Schorr and Linn, Wickstrom fears for the child consumers of the future and concludes with the hope that her readers might draw together “the resources with which we may try to save, perhaps not so much even ourselves, as the young. It is they, after all, at whom so much of the corporate agenda is ever more virulently targeted.”13 Other scholars, notably Susan Bennett, have emphasized the plurality of consumer/audience responses to corporatized entertainment from Broadway musicals to Cirque du Soleil. Without denying the capitalist aims of such productions, Bennett critiques the classist tendencies of those who look askance at “middlebrow” entertainment and overlook the importance of audience pleasure.14 More recently, scholars have steered away from the agency/ victim debate as they unpack the performative aspects of commodity culture operating within neoliberal frameworks. As Shannon Steen argues, “To account for neoliberalism’s performative dimensions purely as threat assumes that its structures of governance really have left those governed with no other choice.” Turning away from this determinist approach, Steen uses a case study of Apple and the Foxconn factory suicides to demonstrate how performance “enacts the rhetorical seductions of neoliberalism” by compelling “its addressee to accept otherwise untenable conditions” and repackaging “enterpreneurial action” as a pleasurable “project of personal and political liberation.”15 Looking across the spectrum of approaches to consumer culture and performance, I find myself somewhere in the middle. I share Wickstrom’s concerns but I also worry like Steen that to treat neoliberal capitalism as a monolithic bogeyman is to adopt a defeatist position that leaves little room for political action. Instead, drawing inspiration from Daniel Cook, who insists on distinguishing between the “child consumer” as

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social construct and the lives and experiences of actual children, and from Steen, who emphasizes the “variety of performance tactics that operate within the domain of neoliberalism,”16 I analyze a series of interconnected performances that together inform Canadian experiences of consumption. These range from the performance of the corporate entity Indigo Books & Music and its forward-thinking ceo Heather Reisman to the performance of the American Girl boutique nestled within Yorkdale’s Indigo Books & Music and the objects that fill its shelves. I examine the kinds of consumers that Indigo and American Girl envision and the strategies they deploy to guide consumers through their stores; and I consider the performances of child consumers as they both follow and depart from corporate scripts. By now it should be clear that this chapter takes an expansive view of performance, one that embraces new materialist thinking to include the performative acts and role-playing games that constitute gender, class, racial, and national identity for human subjects, as well as the acts and scripts that define corporate entities and other non-humans. Like other scholars working from a new materialist perspective (see the contributions of Pam Hall, Julie Nagam, and Erin Hurley in this volume),17 I aim to rethink the historic privileging of the human subject and to understand human performances in collaboration with nonhuman ones. This perspective is useful for studies of consumer culture because it acknowledges the potential agency of all entities and thus promotes a richer understanding of the complex allegiances, negotiations, and struggles that define neoliberal commodity culture, especially where children are concerned.

Managing Performance/Performance Management: Indigo Marries the American Girl Plopper Puppies was one of approximately 4,000 consumers who visited the American Girl boutique at Yorkdale during its official Canadian opening on 3 May 2014; across the country in Vancouver, a similar number gathered outside Indigo’s Robson Street location for the boutique opening there.18 Excitement for the arrival of the popular US retailer had been growing ever since Indigo’s October 2013 announcement that it would be opening two boutiques inside its stores, “complete with a doll hair salon, apparel, books and accessories.”19 According to American Girl’s executive vice-president, Jean McKenzie, the company’s decision

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to come to Canada was motivated in part by the many requests it had received from Canadian customers.20 The 3 May openings thus marked a pivotal moment in the corporate histories of both American Girl and, as I detail below, Indigo Books & Music. The American Girl Doll Company, now a subsidiary of Mattel Inc., was established in 1986 by a woman named Pleasant Rowland who grew disheartened by the rows of Barbies and other glamour dolls she saw in the stores. For her, these dolls failed to convey “anything about what it meant to be a girl growing up in America.”21 Inspired by a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, where she became entranced with the costumes, accessories, and projection of a (supposedly) simpler time, she decided to create a line of attractive, high-quality dolls that would bring some of that history to life. Thus the original American Girl dolls represent key moments in US history: Kirsten is “a pioneer girl of strength and spirit”; “courageous” Addy is a runaway slave from the antebellum era; and Kaya is a Nez Percé Indian from the revolutionary period.22 Accompanied by books detailing the dolls’ personal stories, as well as an array of costumes and accessories, the American Girl dolls were created to instill girl consumers with national pride and respect for the history of the United States. In other words, as Maurya Wickstrom writes in a scathing critique, “The American Girl products are the means by which girls perform themselves as Americans – a process of structuration haunted by the threat of disappearance from the world stage upon which only the American is visible.”23 I’ll return to Wickstrom’s analysis of the Americanness of the American Girl dolls later, but first I want to trace the corporate performances of both American Girl and Indigo Books & Music leading up to their joint venture. American Girl’s corporate history reads like a Horatio Alger novel, complete with a plucky heroine climbing her way up a capitalist ladder in pursuit of the American Dream. After a successful launch, Rowland continued to sell the American Girl dolls, books, and accessories through mail order catalogues, enjoying consistent growth fuelled by word of mouth. In 1998, when the company was twelve years old, she opened the first American Girl Place in Chicago, a department storelike mecca complete with a store, theatre, museum, and restaurant. That same year, having apparently realized her ambitions, she sold the company to Barbie-maker Mattel for $700 million. Four years later, American Girl Place opened on Fifth Avenue in New York City, offering a range of services including birthday parties, afternoon tea, and a special

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salon for American Girl dolls. The Mattel-owned American Girl also expanded the company’s traditional focus on historical dolls to include a line of contemporary dolls (Just Like You) and baby dolls (Bitty Baby).24 According to business reports, American Girl now accounts for 11 per cent of Mattel’s annual profits and is the “strongest performing [doll] in Mattel’s stable,” exhibiting a 20 per cent increase in gross sales for the third quarter (2013) over the previous year.25 Such references to American Girl’s market performance, which equate the doll with a stabled animal, recall Jon McKenzie’s work on corporate performance and “performance management,” the post-World War II approach to managing labour and corporate governance employed to ensure efficiency, productivity, and profits. As McKenzie outlines in Perform or Else, the term performance management often refers to “attempts to integrate the performance of individuals and the organization itself” and also applies to efforts to “designate organizational strategies that focus primarily on ends, results, or targets.”26 The latter definition seems most appropriate for describing the strong performance of American Girl within the Mattel “stable,” evidenced by its ability to meet and exceed sales targets. This definition also contextualizes Indigo Books & Music’s strategic partnership with American Girl during a period of its own active reinvention. As a performance management practice, McKenzie summarizes, reinvention “may include both structural and procedural changes,” as part of a larger strategy to enact “an even more comprehensive transformation, one that focuses on an organization’s fundamental mission and its day-to-day working culture.”27 The ultimate goal of reinvention, as with all performance management strategies, is to refine and reshape an organization’s performance to ensure “excellence, total satisfaction, high performance.”28 Indigo ceo Heather Reisman is a skilled performance manager, whose own performative acts on behalf of the Indigo brand reach from the boardroom to the store bookshelves through cheery signs identifying select books as “Heather’s Picks.” These books, apparently chosen by Reisman herself, prop up the ceo’s image as Indigo’s “chief booklover” and present Indigo as a personable, caring company interested in promoting the delights of reading – no faceless firm here but a cheerful and attractive cultural leader, a friend to book lovers everywhere.29 As Indigo’s founder, chair, and ceo, Reisman has devoted two decades to building the Indigo brand, drawing on the skills and knowledge she developed as the managing director of Paradigm Consulting, a strategy and change management firm she co-founded in 1979.30 Reisman left

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Paradigm to found Indigo in 1996 during a period of amalgamation in the Canadian bookselling industry, marked by the 1995 merger of Coles and Smithbooks into Chapters Inc., which quickly became Canada’s largest book retailer. Indigo soon challenged Chapters’ dominance, however, opening fourteen stores across Canada that sought to “provide the most inspiring, richly stocked and inviting retail environment in the world.”31 After five years of competition, the two booksellers merged in 2001 to become Indigo Books & Music with Reisman as head. Since then, Indigo has responded to ongoing changes within the bookselling industry by expanding its mandate to include a toy department in 2006, launching the Kobo series of e-book readers, and initiating the Plum Rewards program.32 Through these changes, Reisman has demonstrated how charismatic leadership can promote a strong corporate identity, while remaining attentive to the need for constant innovation, especially when dealing with an industry in crisis. American Girl’s official arrival in Canada marked a critical step in Indigo Books & Music Inc.’s five-year self-transformation from a bookstore into the “world’s first cultural department store.” Speaking at Indigo’s June 2014 Annual General Meeting, Reisman affirmed her belief in the importance of books but emphasized how developments in the bookselling industry had led the company to reimagine how it might attract customers looking for an enriched cultural experience. Indigo will continue to sell books but it will also expand its growing lifestyle department, which trades in soap, candles, blankets, pillows, and other household items; its technology department, which includes the Kobo e-reader as well as a range of Apple products; and its educational toy department, which includes the American Girl boutique. In addition, Indigo aims to position itself as a go-to destination for public speaking engagements by authors, politicians, celebrities, and other cultural leaders.33 By remaking itself into a different kind of entity, one where desirable “cultural” commodities, courteous sales personnel, and an attractive environment comingle to create a warm consumer experience, Indigo hopes to maintain a prominent position within Canada’s corporate environment. Indigo’s efforts to diversify its offerings and become a “cultural department store” come at a turning point in the global bookselling industry. In just over a decade, Amazon and other online booksellers have outstripped their bricks-and-mortar competitors, who carry much heavier overhead and thus cannot offer the same low prices. E-books have likewise challenged the viability of traditional retailers with their relative

Figure 5.2 Entrance to the American Girl boutique and Indigo Books & Music.

accessibility, cool factor, and slashed prices. Between 2012 and 2014 alone, Toronto lost many of its most celebrated bookshops, from specialty stores such as the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, the Cookbook Store, and TheatreBooks, to larger venues such as the World’s Biggest Bookstore, Nicholas Hoare, and some Book City outlets.34 Although Indigo has fared better than most retailers, thanks to its expanded business model, it too has suffered losses. In May 2014, the same month as the American Girl opening, the company’s fourth quarter report revealed a $14.4-million net loss, the result of “costs for severance and store closures and continuing investments in its transformational strategy.”35

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Within this precarious landscape, Reisman’s decision to reinvent Indigo and invite American Girl into its midst may seem wise, necessary, inevitable even – the realization of a textbook “evolve or die” strategy. “They’ve got to do something,” Maureen Atkinson, senior partner at the J.C. Williams Group, a retail and marketing consulting firm, advised in a news interview. “You can’t sit back and say it’s going to be business as usual.” Although Atkinson stops short of uttering the phrase, the subtext is clear: Indigo needs to perform … or else. Given this imperative, the introduction of the American Girl boutique into the Indigo stores was an ideal business solution for building its core consumer base. As Atkinson outlined, “The American Girl dolls is [sic] built around a stronger women model. From that point of view, it fits very well with who their customers really are … It gives their customers more reasons to be in the store if they’re buying these kinds of things. It’s complementary and could potentially help them with the main part of their business.”36 Atkinson’s association of Indigo’s customers with the “stronger women model” hints that in bringing American Girl into its stores, Indigo was less interested in targeting girls than women, and not just any women but those who see themselves as “strong.” Strength here refers less to physical strength than to a kind of emotional or intellectual vitality consistent with proto-feminist sentiment. Significantly, Atkinson does not address whether a specifically US model of strong womanhood is appropriate or desirable for Canadian customers. It is enough that the dolls are strong. Indigo’s embrace of American Girl may have made good sense from a business perspective. But the partnership prompts difficult questions about what it means to be a Canadian consumer. Has Reisman simply offered up her youngest customers on the altar of US cultural imperialism to stave off her own company’s demise? Can Canadian-ness arise through playing with American Girl dolls? And what are the implications of these consumer performances?

The Universal American Girl The irony of a fiercely Canadian corporation cozying up to a fiercely American brand was not lost on reporter Hollie Shaw, who began her 29 October 2013 article on Indigo’s American Girl announcement by referencing the company slogan: The world needs more Canada. “But,” Shaw continued, “as the retailer weathers damage to its core business from online and digital reading, Indigo needs American Girl.”37 Seven

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months later, after the American Girl opening, Shaw interviewed Reisman about the boutique and Canadian “gripes” about the dolls’ presumed “American-ness.” Echoing Atkinson, Reisman rejected the nationalist argument, emphasizing the dolls’ universal appeal: American Girl is the name of the company, but the fundamental values are universal. Girls, and some boys, love to play with the dolls, they love the storytelling, they love all of the aspects of nurturing that go with it – that’s at the heart of that brand. It has [its name] but it’s not about the red white and blue, and the stories are not all American. It’s so much bigger than a country. It’s a universal brand and a universal product and the fundamental values are universal. We have been selling American Girl books for a long time because the stories are so compelling. They are obviously entertaining but they are also meant to inspire and teach, about friendship, about sharing, about trying new things. It’s not just about the doll. We knew how important the brand is, and we knew we had to deliver the same experience than [sic] the stores in the U.S., [albeit] on a smaller scale.38 Reisman’s fierce insistence on the universality of the American Girl dolls is striking (she uses it three times in one sentence). Despite the company name, she argues, the stories are “not all American” or “about the red white and blue”; rather, they promote “fundamental values” that are as relevant to Canadian girls and boys as they are to their US counterparts: nurturing and storytelling as well as friendship, sharing, and trying new things. It’s difficult to quibble with promoting these values (and I applaud Reisman’s inclusion of boys). But I find the ceo’s celebratory statements about the doll’s universality and her stated goal of replicating the US consumer experience alarming for several reasons. First, the claim for the dolls’ universality ignores the many significant social and cultural differences that distinguish Canada from the United States. The assumption here is that US culture is Canadian culture and therefore appropriate for all Canadian children. Second, Reisman’s claims that the dolls are not about the “red white and blue” denies the impetus behind their creation, namely Pleasant Rowland’s desire to create dolls that would instill in US children feelings of national pride and a deep appreciation for US history. Although Indigo’s American Girl stores do not sell the historical dolls,39 a decision noted with dismay by some

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girls,40 the “fundamental values” associated with the contemporary dolls, which include “freedom, courage, compassion, optimism, and soul,” are marked as distinctly American. Indeed, as Maurya Wickstrom argues, the American Girl dolls and the narratives that surround them naturalize these values as exclusively and necessarily American. By inviting girls to identify with and re-enact the doll/character’s stories of personal discovery, they “open the space for the human girl to begin to labor to become an American Girl.”41 Wickstrom warns that the cultural work of the American Girl dolls is alarmingly consistent with the ideology of US imperialism. She points to the way that US politicians often proclaim the American-ness of values such as freedom, courage, and compassion in order to position US military intervention in countries such as Afghanistan or Iraq as morally right and good. Such tactics, Wickstrom notes, “deflect attention from the agendas of an American political apparatus that operates according to values that seem the antonyms of those that allegedly sustain the nation.”42 By defining kindness, compassion, and freedom as specifically American values, US politicians attempt to render acts of torture, murder, and surveillance as inconceivable: no American could commit these acts, the logic goes, because to do so would be to declare themselves un-American. The American Girl dolls contribute to this larger cultural project by encouraging American girls to recognize and adopt such values as a form of national performance. Through their play, Wickstrom maintains, child consumers animate the mythos of American exceptionalism, legitimizing US military intervention on geopolitical stages around the world. Seen in this light, Reisman’s insistence on the universality of the American Girl dolls and the values they promote seems dangerously complicit with the goals of American empire.43 By this I don’t mean that Reisman herself is an advocate of US imperialism but rather that her celebration of the presumed universality of the American Girl dolls aligns in troubling ways with the dolls’ ideological labour and also reiterates the performance tropes of US cultural imperialism in the language of Canadian nationalism as evidenced by Indigo’s slogan: “The world needs more Canada.” Third, Reisman’s desire to give Canadian consumers a retail experience equivalent to that of the US stores (“on a smaller scale”) is surprising, coming from a ceo who has worked hard to establish Indigo as a pre-eminent Canadian brand. Reisman promises that children walking into the American Girl boutique in Toronto or Vancouver will enter a brandscape that is virtually indistinguishable from American Girl

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brandscapes in Chicago and New York. No “more of Canada” here but a little slice of US-made territory, albeit “on a smaller scale.” And when they enter this almost-identical world, Reisman implies, children will find themselves surrounded by displays and objects that encourage similar desire and exhilaration. In other words, despite their Canadian nationality and Canadian location, they will (almost) feel like real American girls at a real American Girl store.

A Canadian Strolls through American Girl Reisman’s apparent embrace of a universal-cum-American model of consumption may distress those who avow Canadian national sentiment, but do the stores actually deliver on her promise? To answer this question, I turn now to an analysis of Yorkdale’s American Girl boutique, paying attention to the strategic use of counters, shelves, and other design elements to choreograph the child consumer’s journey. In his landmark study Why We Buy, Paco Underhill identifies the many strategies retailers use to draw customers into their stores and choreograph their movements through the retail environment. Examples include arranging soft objects on low counters, which stimulate consumers’ senses through touch, or placing signs to the right of an entrance in recognition that most people (right-handed ones) move towards the right when entering a store.44 Since the mid-1990s, large corporations as diverse as Ralph Lauren, Coca-Cola, and Disney have accentuated these strategies, developing elaborate brandscapes that invite consumers to experience the brand physically and emotionally. As Wickstrom writes, such brandscapes “produce subjectivity as aspects of their brands through mimetic and identifactory processes akin to those of performance, somatic and embodied.”45 Through the careful arrangement of display cases, shelves, and counters, enhanced by lighting, music, and other sensory elements including scent, retail environments promote the immaterial labour of consumption and remake human subjects into performing consumers. Though shaped by Underhill and Wickstrom’s studies, my method also draws on the work of Robin Bernstein, whose concept of the “scriptive thing” acknowledges the ways that objects or architectural elements direct human actions not unlike a script or blueprint.46 This new materialist approach complicates humanist perspectives by highlighting the role of objects in the formation of human subjectivity. Humans may arrange dolls on shelves but the dolls themselves – their shape, colour, tex-

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ture, smell – direct how humans interact with them. In what follows, I trace my journeys through the American Girl boutique in May 2014 and my encounters with the dolls there, beginning with the store’s two entrances and then continuing on different pathways through the displays. I recognize that as an adult I am limited in my ability to understand how a child might experience the store and its scripts. Yet I hope that by foregrounding the store’s performative use of design elements and my own experience navigating it, I might offer some insight into the way that American Girl (and Indigo) is shaping the Canadian child consumer. The boutique has two entrances. The first opens directly from a short bridge connecting Indigo to Yorkdale’s Cineplex movie theatres. To access this entrance, I must first take the escalator up to Cineplex and then continue past the movie posters and box office to the bridge. At the other side of the bridge, a wall-length photo of a blonde girl holding a blondehaired doll dressed in an identical pink T-shirt beckons. Behind her, shelves of dolls and clothes entice; the pink and purple floor and shelves filled with pink objects make the store appear to glow. When I cross the threshold (past the metal detectors), I enter a world of pink. The second entrance to the boutique is through a wide passageway leading from the children’s books and toy section of Indigo. Above the passageway a white sign proclaims the boutique name. On the boutique’s opening day, black velvet curtains amplified the theatricality of the event, even as they served the more functional purpose of separating the boutique entrance from the rest of the store. Two Indigo employees stood guard to prevent anyone without a ticket from gaining access to the concealed space and to direct those with tickets to the other entrance. On subsequent visits, however, I’ve noticed that the black curtains are always drawn back to encourage Indigo customers to move seamlessly from books to dolls. My consumer journey varies according to the entrance I take. If I cross the bridge and enter the store, I move into the world of Isabelle, a contemporary dancer and American Girl’s “Girl of the Year,” a performer extraordinaire. Between shelves of boxed Isabelles, a tableau vivant– like display shows an unboxed Isabelle in her “design studio,” complete with a large costume wardrobe, a “Judy” dress form, and tiny sewing machine. Isabelle is there too, all eighteen inches of her, wearing the same pink T-shirt and grey leggings shown in the photo. The furniture and accessories (postcards, hangers) hail consumer-me with their enticing cuteness. Across from this tableau, Isabelle stands alone in a glass display case, untouchable now, her Persian cat at her side. A sign proclaims the price for both: $125 for Isabelle, $34 for her cat. The display case

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resembles a museum vitrine, a citation that marks the value ($125!) of the suddenly inaccessible Isabelle. Above and below this case, dozens of identical Isabelles stare out of circular holes in bright pink cardboard boxes, waiting to be claimed, purchased, and touched … If I enter from the bookstore, I first encounter a glass case with two dolls celebrating a birthday. They wear party hats and sit or stand at a table decorated with flowers and birthday treats. A sign at the corner of the display lists prices for the items in the case and promises “a charm with every outfit.” Behind the display is the “Doll Hair Salon,” where small chairs await American Girl dolls in need of a makeover.47 Salon services vary in price from $5 for “Pampering Plus,” basically a bath to remove the grunge of “everyday dirt,” to $25 for an “extra special” “Deluxe Hairstyle,” complete with sparkly tiara. The salon counter is positioned where one might normally expect a sales counter to be; but in the Indigo store, all financial transactions occur outside the boutique’s pink inner sanctum at the sales counter in Indigo’s toy department, an arrangement that keeps the focus on the dolls, accessories, and related services. If, after looking at the birthday tableau, I turn right, I come face to face with shelves and shelves of boxed and unboxed dolls modelling undeniably cute outfits and accessories in a range of scenarios. There are gymnastic dolls on uneven bars; dolls riding bicycles and rollerblading; dolls playing checkers, and dolls performing science experiments. There are also dolls in wheelchairs and dolls with broken legs and crutches. “We are active, versatile, cute, and so much fun,” the dolls seem to declare. Placed on low shelves, within reach of little hands, the dolls invite me (and others) to imagine a future moment when I too might animate the scenarios through play. Although I can certainly refuse such an invitation and look away or walk out of the store, the temptation to touch and play is strong (at least for me). It is the very materiality of the dolls – their cute clothes, pretty hair, delicate physical features, cool accessories – that directs my performance as consumer. This is not to deny the contributions of the architects, interior designers, and store personnel who oversee the arrangement of the dolls but rather to stress that it is the dolls themselves that assert the strongest influence over my consumer experience. I forget that I am in a bookstore as I peer closely at dolls playing in custom-made environments. Moving through this section of the store, I am confronted with the sheer variety of American Girl dolls and the many accessories that accompany them. I am impressed by this diversity, though I notice that the only dolls on crutches or in wheelchairs are dolls-of-colour. “Create the

Figure 5.3 “Create the doll just right for you!” A chorus of identically dressed American Girl dolls greet potential consumers.

doll just right for you!” directs a sign on the wall behind a display of twenty-six different “My American Girl” dolls, hailing the imagined child consumer to find the one that most accurately reflects her (there are no boy dolls). Despite their identical height and facial expression, the dolls’ hairstyles and skin tones vary, suggesting that any girl might find a miniature mirror image on the American Girl shelves. Yet the display complicates the ideal of individuality it seeks to promote. Standing in four rows on elevated risers, the identically dressed dolls recall chorus girl spectacles of the early twentieth century, wherein female performers subsumed individuality in the interests of projecting a coherent group identity and singular beauty ideal. This spectacle of uniform “difference” implies that any girl who fails to create a doll that is “just right” is somehow deficient, undesirable, or simply wrong. Doll ownership requires a willingness to conform to the American Girl mould, a mould inextricably tied to American ideals of beauty, health, and consumption. I slowly leave the boutique, nervous that as an adult unaccompanied by a child I might provoke strange looks. I do not purchase anything but I remain intrigued by the dolls and wonder about their influence on the Canadian girls (and boys?) who purchase them.

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Canadian Child Consumers or Global Child Consumers? If the American Girl doll promotes American values but encourages girls to embrace and embody those values – to become American through play – does it follow that all children who play with the American Girl doll are also at risk of becoming American? While I am inclined to say yes, I realize that such a response presumes that children who play with American Girls follow the scripts that accompany them – that they embrace the values of independence, ambition, and nurturing that the dolls promote. What of those children who don’t accept the corporate scripts or combine them with scripts that seem more appropriate for their personal, social, economic, or geographic situation? As J. Paige MacDougall found in her 2003 study of Barbie dolls in Mexico, “Commodities need not serve exclusively as vehicles for the meanings and values invested in them by Western producers, but may be transformed into representations of indigenous or local identities through a process of creolization.”48 The girls at the centre of MacDougall’s study dressed their Barbies in traditional Mayan clothing and enacted scenarios that emphasized the importance of family and friends, rejecting American depictions of Barbie as an independent career woman. In fact, as Gary Cross and Gregory Smits assert in their study of Japan and US toy manufacturers, traditional arguments about US cultural imperialism through consumer goods fail to account for the way that countries like Japan have always adopted foreign products and cultural forms “on its own terms.” This is certainly the case for the Canadian company Avonlea Traditions Inc., which sells “Maplelea Girls,” billed as “Canadian Dolls for Canadian Girls.” These dolls resemble American Girl dolls in appearance, clothing, accessories, and price, but each represents a different Canadian city, province, or territory and comes with a journal filled with references to typically Canadian hobbies including hockey, ringette, and Scottish dancing.49 Although the American Girl’s arrival has posed a business challenge for Maplelea, the Canadian company continues to build its loyal following.50 Nevertheless, the rapid globalization of children’s consumer culture is indisputably transforming how children play and how (or whether) they see themselves as national subjects.51 The key question then is not whether Canadian or Mexican or Japanese children are becoming American through the consumption of American goods but rather how their consumption of globally produced toys is producing them as globalized subjects.

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In the decade since Cross and Smith’s study, social media have furthered the globalization of children’s consumer culture, inviting new kinds of performances, including “haul” videos. Within YouTube’s everexpanding repertoire, haul videos blur the line between scripted performance and the performance of everyday life as they invite the performer to showcase her skills as a consumer.52 In this respect, they resemble unboxing videos, in which a proud (often male) consumer removes a prized purchase such as an iPhone or a video game console from its package.53 What separates the two genres, however, are the performers’ gender and their relationship to the products: whereas unboxing videos (described as “geek porn”) are typically, though not exclusively, performed by men and boys with the goal of revealing one high-quality, dearly prized tech gadget, haul videos are typically, though not exclusively, performed by women and girls with the goal of showing off a large quantity of goods. This distinction between unboxing and haul videos is not surprising, given the historical gendering of mall shopping as a female activity. Yet before we dismiss haul videos as further evidence of a capitalist plot to undo feminism, I encourage a closer look. The haul video’s emphasis on quantity over quality reaffirms the stereotypical depiction of female shoppers as irrational, easily swayed, and unable to resist a good bargain. And yet the calm, careful manner that most haul performers adopt when describing their hauls flips this stereotype by emphasizing instead the consumers’ skill and expertise, their ability to perform as “economically rational actor[s].”54 In fact, as Plopper Puppies’ video showed, consumer performances often oscillate between the extreme poles of ecstasy and calm reflection, depending on location, mood, and objective. In the haul section of her video, Plopper slowly introduces each item she purchased at the Yorkdale boutique, concluding with Isabelle, the American Girl doll of the year. When Isabelle appears onscreen, however, the new doll does not perform like the animated subject-doll Amy, who dominated the video’s opening minutes, but rather as an object to evaluate and admire. Such complex performances reject the agency/victim binary that has preoccupied consumer culture scholars for decades, foregrounding instead the continually shifting ground (the “yes and”) of consumer performance. Moreover, since these user-generated performances tend to be rough and relatively spontaneous, the opposite of the carefully scripted consumer performances that brandscapes seek to produce, we might see them as ideal vehicles for challenging corporate narratives and asserting

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new forms of consumer independence. It is significant that Plopper’s video performance does not arise from the packaged American Girl narrative but from the archive of other haul videos. But for the specifics of the clothes and accessories she reveals, there is little to distinguish her video from other American Girl haul videos. And this seems to be the point. By demonstrating her familiarity with the genre and its tropes, Plopper positions herself within the community of American Girl consumers, a community that reaches across North America and extends out via YouTube to the rest of the world. Indeed, Plopper’s video suggests first, that where consumption is concerned, performances of national feeling and affiliation are less important than performances of brand affiliation, and second, that consumer performances like these may be more enticing to other consumers than professionally produced advertising materials. The communal responses to haul video performers offer further evidence of the globalization of children’s consumer culture and the affective communities that cohere around specific products.55 At the Vancouver opening of American Girl, DeenaandBeena, a twenty-oneyear-old video blogger from Blaine, Washington, crossed the border for a special “meet up” with Canadian fans of American Girl dolls. With over 13,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, a channel devoted entirely to American Girl “finds,” product reviews, and tips, DeenandBeena is something of a celebrity. In her video of the Vancouver opening (now with over 22,000 views), she chats with girls as they wait in line, asks them about their dolls, and shares in their general enthusiasm for the day. Towards the end of the video, DeenaandBeena sits in the store with a group of four or five other girls and films them opening their American Girl purchases: clothes, hair brushes, dolls. When one girl, identified only by the Twitter handle @AGwinterwonderland, unpacks her new doll, the girls around her ooh and aww. “I love how they smell,” one girl sighs offscreen. The girls continue to comment on the doll’s appearance – her eyes, her hair – assessing her with enthusiastic yet critical eyes. The moment is one of communal celebration in the name of consumption. Like Plopper’s haul video, the DeenaandBeena meet-up points to the limitations of thinking about consumer performance from a strictly national perspective and suggests that a framework that traces the transnational or hemispheric formation of communities of consumption might be more appropriate for future studies of child consumers. Such pro-

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jects might draw usefully on the work of the New York–based Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics as well that of the growing number of Canadian-based performance studies scholars who work hemispherically.56 This is not to suggest that projects that consider the national implications of consumer performance are irrelevant or unnecessary but rather that thinking beyond national borders is critical for understanding the role of global corporations in the daily lives of children and other consuming subjects. And yet … while haul videos may allow for new expressions of consumer identity through their celebration of community and their deliberately unvarnished presentation of consumer goods, I still find myself tripping over the old victim/agent binary. On the one hand, I desperately want to argue that there is something else at work in these haul videos, something that has less to do with what the girls are filming than with how they are developing a critical perspective in a very public, increasingly global forum. Plopper may eventually outgrow Amy and Isabelle, but until then her play with and through these dolls, both on- and offline, is allowing her to experiment with different modes of performance and to speak with confidence about her decisions as a consumer. In time this confidence may lead to other kinds of performances less wedded to the celebration of a new “haul.” On the other hand, I remain disturbed by such videos because I see that in addition to enthusiastically celebrating the commodities they display, they rely on free consumer labour – child labour. Haul videos invite consumers to perform as “free” neoliberal, globalized subjects through both their display of specific branded products as well as their re-performance of the genre’s central trope. They equate democratic choice with the right to choose between pink or purple doll accessories, and to find community with those who enjoy the same goods and socioeconomic status (at $125 each, American Girls are clearly targeted at upper-middle-class homes). There is no denying that Plopper Puppies and the hundreds of other girls who create haul videos are labouring hard (and freely) on behalf of the American Girl brand, nor is there any denying that this labour is pleasurable to them. Ultimately, I’m forced to contend that both arguments are viable. This is the frustrating paradox of neoliberal capitalism, which promises freedom, pleasure, and choice to those who perform according to its logic. Indeed, as Shannon Steen, following Margaret Werry, asserts, we should “see neoliberalism not as the backdrop to performance, but

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rather … see performance as neoliberalism, to understand it as one of neoliberalism’s constitutive mechanisms.”57 In other words, performance is a central “constitutive mechanism” through which neoliberalism operates. What this means, then, is that we should worry less about whether our daughters or sons are playing with Canadian or American toys and worry more about how all forms of performance are producing children as globalized, neoliberal subjects, from the performance of corporate entities like Indigo, to the choreography of consumers in American Girl boutiques, to the enchantments of doll displays and the communal rituals of haul videos. Play is political.

no te s 1 Plopper Puppies, “American Girl Store.” 2 Ibid. 3 There is relatively little scholarship on “haul videos.” Exceptions include Cline, Overdressed; and Keats, “Exploring Haul Videos on YouTube.” 4 Consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow claims that haul videos offer “a vicarious pleasure … it’s a bit like pornography.” Yarrow qtd. in Noll, “Girls Gone Viral.” See also Joel, “Kids and the Haul.” 5 I include my own work in this category. See, for example, When Broadway Was the Runway; Bennett and Schweitzer, “In the Window at Disney.” 6 Hurley, National Performance; Harvie and Hurley, “States of Play,” 299– 315. 7 Dickinson, “PuShing Performance Brands”; Bennett, “Brand Performance”; Batchelor, “‘The Beer Festival Has a Theatre Problem!’” 8 On debates in consumer culture scholarship, see Buckingham, “Selling Childhood?”; Cook, “Disempowering Empowerment.” 9 Schor, Born to Buy; Linn, Consuming Kids; Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter. 10 Hoyle and Seybold, BRAND child. 11 Buckingham, “Selling Childhood?,” 17. These competing perspectives echo earlier cultural studies debates, most notably Stuart Hall’s rejection of Louis Althusser’s discussion of “false consciousness” and Hall’s insistence that consumers of popular culture should not be considered passive “dupes.” Hall, “Toad in the Garden.” 12 Cook, “Disempowering Empowerment,” 38. 13 Wickstrom, Performing Consumers, 154. 14 Bennett, “Theatre/Tourism.” 15 Steen, “Neoliberal Scandals,” 3.

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16 Ibid., 2. 17 See also Bernstein, Racial Innocence; Schneider, Performing Remains; Schweitzer and Zerdy, Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. 18 On 4 July 2015, two additional American Girl boutiques opened, one in Indigo at Toronto Eaton Centre and the other in Indigo at Granville Island, Vancouver. Two more stores opened in fall 2015 in Calgary and Edmonton. Newswire, “Indigo Announces Plans.” 19 Shaw, “American Girl Debuts.” Indigo has plans to open American Girl boutiques in other stores as well, at least one for every province. 20 Ibid. American Girl’s cross-border expansion into Canada represented the company’s first venture outside the United States. 21 Rowland, qtd. in Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, 28. 22 Ibid., 28. 23 Wickstrom, Performing Consumers, 96. 24 Ibid., 97–8; and Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, 28–9. 25 Rhee, “American Girl Dolls”; Shaw, “American Girl Debuts.” 26 McKenzie, Perform of Else, 61. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 On the emergence of the benevolent ceo, see Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul. 30 Indigo, “Our Company: Management.” 31 Indigo, “Our Company: Indigo Timeline.” 32 Ibid. 33 Nguyen, “Books Still Indigo’s Core Business.” 34 DeMara, “Toronto Women’s Bookstore”; Barber, “Farewell, Nicholas Hoare”; Bain, “Toronto’s Beloved Cookbooks Store”; Ouzounian, “TheatreBooks Closing Doors”; Karstens-Smith, “Book City’s Annex Store to Close”; Kopun, “World’s Biggest Bookstore closes.” 35 Nguyen, “Books Still Indigo’s Core Business.” 36 Canadian Press, “Indigo’s Core Business.” 37 Shaw, “American Girl Debuts.” 38 Shaw, “American Girl’s Canadian Debut.” 39 The reason for this exclusion is unclear; perhaps American Girl was concerned that such dolls would not sell north of the border. 40 See Doll Diaries, “American Girl Expanding.” 41 Wickstrom, Performing Consumers, 108. 42 Ibid., 103. 43 On dolls and ideology, see Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House; Bernstein, Racial Innocence.

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44 45 46 47

Underhill, Why We Buy. Wickstrom, Performing Consumers, 2. Bernstein, Racial Innocence. See also Bernstein, “Dances with Things.” See Bennett and Schweitzer, “In the Window at Disney” on Princess makeovers at Orlando’s World of Disney store. MacDougall, “Transnational Commodities as Local Icons.” See Maplelea. American Girl dolls have also been adapted to resemble Canadian icons like Anne of Green Gables. See Pinterest, “American Girl Doll.” Jermyn, “Canadian Doll Maker.” Cross and Smits, “Japan, the U.S., and the Globalization of Children’s Consumer Culture,” 874. Haul videos began appearing on YouTube in 2007. By 2010, over 250,000 haul videos had been posted to YouTube, attracting views from millions of viewers. Forbes, “Names You Need to Know.” “Haul Video.” On unboxing videos see pbs Ideas, “What’s the Deal with Unboxing Videos?” Steen, “Neoliberal Scandals,” 2. On haul celebrities, see Noll, “Girls Gone Viral.” See, for example, Alvarez, Kovacs, and Ortuzar, Performance and Human Rights; the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas led by Principal Investigator Peter Kulchyski; and Alvarez, Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance; Alvarez, Fronteras Vivientes. Steen, “Neoliberal Scandals,” 2.

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Presumptive Intimacies and the Politics of Touch: “Strategic Culture” in Simulations of War nata l ie a lvarez

In 2004, in order to engage in force-on-force combat against insurgents – a move that required a discursive shift away from our country’s nationalizing tenets of peacekeeping to peace enforcement1 – the Canadian Armed Forces established the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre (cmtc). cmtc is a $500 million, full-immersion war games facility at Canadian Forces Base Wainright in rural eastern Alberta, where soldiers engage in ten-day training intensives in an environment that replicates the conditions of asymmetrical warfare2 in Afghanistan. Role-players drawn largely from the Afghan diaspora in Edmonton create a “pattern of life” in mock Afghan villages, training soldiers’ powers of observation as they try to build an “intelligence picture”3 of possible insurgent activity in each village. Chief military personnel collaborate with former film industry professionals in a “story-boarding” of scenarios to inoculate soldiers against stress, while increasing their cultural intelligence through encounters with Afghans in role. This chapter examines the ways in which the military’s instrumentalist use of “strategic culture” – the development of a more robust cultural intelligence of local populations as a “force multiplier” – structures the scenarios that unfold in these immersive simulations.4 It focuses its attention on scenarios designed to prepare soldiers for engagements that turn on a seemingly irreconcilable paradox of punitive, yet culturally sensitive, militarism and asks how the immersive simulation, as a rehearsal for the future, habituates and potentially de-habituates structures of cultural, racial, and political difference. The immersive simulation offers a particularly useful methodological paradigm for performance studies, as evidenced in Scott Magelssen’s recent Simming and Emily Colborn-Roxworthy’s research on the use of

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simulations in fbi training. Simulations in this emerging body of research are positioned as a performance paradigm with a distinctly pedagogical function. Beyond military training sites such as the cmtc at cfb Wainright, immersive simulations can also be found in the training regimes of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) such as in “skills refresher” programs, which allow police officers to rehearse high-intensity and high-risk situations that they rarely encounter on the job but for which they must be prepared.5 Simulations continue to be used in medical education programs, such as the Faculty of Medicine’s standardized patient program at the University of Toronto and Hôpital Montfort’s simulation lab in Ottawa.6 What is distinct about simulations used in training and educational contexts is that they are prospective in their vision and operate as a kind of rehearsal for the future; their pedagogical function turns on a speculative future through scenarios that attempt to anticipate possible “real world” encounters. This prospective dimension of the immersive simulation, as rehearsals for possible futures, is a key aspect of Tracy Davis’s foundational Stages of Emergency, which examines the “coordinated campaigns of rehearsals” for civil defence and preparedness in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom during the Cold War in the event of nuclear disaster. Through the imagined futures they stage, immersive simulations are urgent sites of inquiry, since they lay bare the ideological assumptions that undergird everything from the mise en scène of their recreated environments to the scenarios that guide the interactions among role-players. In these pages, I ask how these immersive environments generate competing models of intimacy that shape bodily behaviours. It may seem misguided or, at best, counterintuitive to examine forms of performative intimacy in the domain of military training. But as I hope to demonstrate, these simulated environments are governed by counterinsurgency doctrine characterized by what Ann Laura Stoler and David Bond call a “rush to the intimate,”7 which turns on the soldier’s ability to “get to know” the local culture and form relationships with local nationals. These forms of knowing often lead to misleading and presumptive intimacies with a local culture that has been “staged” under the imperatives of counterinsurgency doctrine. But I also consider the flipside of these more troublesome intimacies. Ultimately, I ask whether moments of inter-corporeal contact and touch in these immersive training environments have the political potential to undo the totalizing effects of the military’s Cultural Intelligence project. While the cmtc at

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cfb Wainright serves as the principle focus of my discussions here, I briefly turn to the mock Afghan villages at the Stanford Training Area (stanta) in Norfolk, England, in order to examine the role intimacy plays in immersive military training environments within a more comparative framework. In the broader context of the nato-led International Security Assistance Force (or isaf) in Afghanistan – in which Canadian forces regularly train alongside UK and US forces under coordinated strategies of counterinsurgency doctrine – the immersive training environment at cfb Wainright should not be understood as a discrete phenomenon. Rather, the mock Afghan villages at cmtc are part of a broader multi-nation effort to “stage” the cultural others soldiers will encounter in the theatres of war in order to deepen an understanding of the local culture for strategic purposes.8 The ultimate objective of this “cultural turn” in counterinsurgency doctrine is to learn how to build relations of trust with local nationals in order to generate the intelligence necessary for more targeted isaf operations. While I engage in a sustained critique throughout this chapter of the instrumentalist approach to cultural knowledge training, I feel compelled to acknowledge the ways in which my own ethnographic practices are similarly instrumentalist and continuous with the counterinsurgency methods I observed in action. In my role as researcher, I similarly had to establish trust with military personnel, often doing so by performing the role of a militarily naive performance studies scholar in order to not only put interviewees at ease but also to get access to these sites in the first place. Though the imperatives undergirding my approach are ideologically distinct from those of counterinsurgency, I am not innocent of these dynamics.

Evaluating Cultural Intelligence Escorted in a truck detailed to look like an Afghan National Police security vehicle and driven by a staff sergeant in-role as the chief of the Afghan National Police, I arrived on the first day of my visit at a large warehouse at cmtc just outside one of the mock Afghan villages. The warehouse carries on-site “theatrical” supplies, costume items, and props required to stage the mock villages. I was given a knee-length shirt, shawl, and headscarf to put on over my clothes – the costume I was to wear in my role as “woman villager.” My initial plan was to embed myself among the villagers as a participant-observer. When I conveyed my desire to observe how cultural intelligence training unfolds in scenarios

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between soldiers and Afghans, military personnel agreed that it would be best to immerse myself among the villagers. They seemed to recognize the need for methodological continuity with the subject at hand; that is, an immersion as researcher seems requisite when conducting research about immersive simulations and my first-person account here is an extension of this immersive performance ethnography. cmtc personnel repeatedly reminded me that this form of immersion and access was unprecedented and would be next to impossible in the more amplified stagings of their US counterpart at Fort Irwin, which apparently has a contained area designated expressly for public viewing by journalists and researchers. The personnel positioned the opportunity to embed myself and the degree of access I was granted as an extension of national character that informed training environments, made possible by a “friendlier” Canadian training context – an instance of the “Canada-the-good brand” that Helene Vosters so assiduously examines in these pages. It quickly became apparent, though, that the degree to which I would experience “unprecedented access” by being in role in the village as an Afghan woman would be significantly limited. Women in these mock Afghan villages are, after all, typically confined to the shipping-containersturned-homes or their immediate vicinity and do not play a critical role in scenarios beyond grieving wife, mother, sister, or relative. The role would not be conducive to the observer side of the participant-observer dyad, since my observations would be restricted to what I could see from my domestic domain or within the role of mourner in scenarios involving civilian casualties. In order to witness the full range of activities across the four villages, cmtc personnel decided it would be best for me to remain mobile; to do so required me to relinquish my character and costume and wear an armband signalling that I was “out of play.” The chief of the Afghan National Police became my personal escort and we travelled from site to site in the security vehicle. When we arrived at a village, I was free to roam without my escort to observe scenarios unfold, listen in on conversations between soldiers and role-players, and conduct informal interviews with participants and military personnel overseeing the exercise. The only restriction given was that I was not allowed to take photographs of Afghan role-players, as the circulation of their images working to assist Canadian forces could put themselves, their family, and friends at home in Afghanistan in jeopardy. The freedom to decide how I wished to position myself in relation to the village scenarios when the role of Afghan woman did not lend it-

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self to that of researcher, sharply illustrated the kinds of entitlement that come with my position as a Western woman and academic. It also called to mind the emergent tendencies of Western feminist discourse with the onset of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, so keenly observed by Sunera Thobani, that have attempted to build solidarity with women in these countries on the grounds of shared gender oppression, which the tacit privilege of the white, Western subject makes impossible. Now comfortably ensconced in my role as observer-researcher, I was able to observe scenarios without being mistaken as someone who was part of the scene, though my mere presence as an observer-researcher effectively made me so and no doubt affected in subtle ways how scenarios were unfolding before me and how I functioned as a witness. The staff sergeant and I effectively became “scenario chasers,” moving from village to village any time he received a call via radio that a critical scene between soldiers and Afghan role-players was about to unfold. Catching a critical scene proved to be a challenge: while scenarios are planned twenty-four to forty-eight hours in advance at cmtc headquarters, the exercise essentially unfolds as “large-scale, live improvisational theatre,” as managing field director Jesse Hendrikse puts it.9 In his invocation of live improvisational theatre, Hendrikse cites Keith Johnstone, the Canadian pioneer of improvisational theatre who developed the widely used “Impro System” of theatrical performance training – a chilling reminder of how the performance paradigm has been taken up in the instrumentalist rationality of the military-industrial complex as it attempts to devise new training methodologies nimble enough to prepare its soldiers to take on this new frontier of irregular and asymmetrical warfare. While largely improvised, major training scenarios, such as a mock suicide bombing resulting in mass casualties, would be assigned a more predictable time frame so that the majors and commanders overseeing the exercise could assemble at “vip” viewing stations – usually a makeshift platform atop a village shipping container – to observe the successes and setbacks of the scenario’s execution and how effectively soldiers respond to the staged crisis. The training environment at cmtc comprises four mock Afghan villages – Bazzaar e Paniwavii, Salavat, Nahonay, and Zangabad – that have been mapped onto the arid Alberta prairie in more or less faithful geographical relation to their locations in Afghanistan. Allied Container Systems (acs), a private company contracted by the Canadian military, provides the mise-en-scène of shipping containers set dressed to function as stores, family dwellings, mosques, and hires its inhabitants, Afghan

Figure 6.1 The arid Alberta prairie serves as the backdrop of a mock Afghanistan and rows of shipping containers furnish a mock Afghan village.

role-players drawn largely from Afghan community centres in Edmonton. Role-players were recruited by acs’s cultural liaison, Mohammed Ahmadi, who posted ads calling for Afghans “interested in assisting with Canada’s peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan.”10 Each village has a managing acs field director responsible for the Afghan role-players and the orchestration of particular scenarios, as well as a village controller, a member of cmtc’s military personnel, who monitors the scenarios to ensure that there are no abuses against the Afghan role-players. Field directors and village controllers take on a quasi-directorial function in ensuring that the pattern of life role-players perform in each village, as well as all elements of the mise en scène, maintain a level of fidelity that coheres with the Host Nation Operating Environment. In one instance, and to the disappointment of a long lineup of eager customers, a village controller ordered the removal of a makeshift Tim

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Hortons stand operating out of the back of an augmentee’s11 pick-up truck in the mock Afghan village of Nakhonay because it was “ruining the realism.” Village controllers and field directors are, importantly, considered “out of play” during the exercise, which allows them to observe the scenarios at a distance, take notes, and intervene only when necessary. Field directors notate actions to the minute as they unfold, and these notations serve as evidence in the event that members of the training audience attempt to deny or redress actions that took place.12 Each company of soldiers also has two observer-controller trainers, veterans of multiple tours to Afghanistan, who mentor the company, observe their performances in scenarios, and lead a number of afteraction reviews, debriefs, or “hotwashes” – the military equivalent to a post-mortem in theatre contexts – immediately after scenarios throughout the day. At the end of each training day, field directors file a village/scenario report, which incorporates the observations of Afghan role-players. Field directors take informal rankings and comments from “the cast” of Afghan role-players, which serve as qualitative justification for the numerical rankings of the soldiers’ overall performance in each scenario – zero being very poor and five being excellent. This feedback allows the training scenarios to build on patterns of activity that are, according to Deputy Commander Colonel Tyler, to some extent “bottom-up info driven.”13 In the village/scenario reports, the training audience is ranked out of five in three categories: cultural awareness, interpreter use and posture. Cultural awareness encompasses a host of behaviours that arise in the intercultural encounter, from the platoon commander’s comportment in a shura (a consultative meeting among community leaders, which, since the arrival of isaf forces in Afghanistan, now regularly includes platoon commanders and their translators), to the soldiers’ interactions with locals on a crowded market day, to how soldiers manage the press of grieving villagers in a mass-casualty scenario. The second category, interpreter use, is a means of steering platoon commanders and officers commanding toward the effective use of interpreters that not only respectfully engages the interlocutor in the context of a shura, for example, but also builds a level of trust with the interpreter who is pivotal to their ability to “read” the local hierarchy, as well as the disposition of villagers toward the presence of isaf. The third category, posture, refers to how soldiers enter the village and engage in tactical manoeuvres: to echo the words of one staff sergeant in a scenario debrief, “How you

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enter the village is key.” Soldiers on foot patrol, for example, are assessed on the degree to which they enter the village with a comportment that suggests a level of openness, ready to develop friendly ties with the local population while maintaining a state of alertness and readiness. Particular scenarios warrant particular kinds of postures ranging from what’s called the “soft-knock” approach, which entails entering an establishment or a situation with respect, a degree of humility, and consent, to the “hard-knock” approach, which is typically more forceful, violent, and non-consensual. Trainers evaluate whether or not the soldier is employing the appropriate posture relative to the scenario at hand. The supervisory process evaluates the degree to which the training audience demonstrates “good judgment” in a given scenario – “reacting but not overreacting,” as Colonel Tyler puts it.14 Soldiers’ intercultural performances15 are evaluated and rendered into a series of performance review charts. The Host Nation Operating Environment commander presents these performance review charts to cmtc’s chief personnel at the daily commander’s update briefs. These snapshots of “cultural intelligence” progress are rapidly conveyed to the commanding officers in the form of a one-minute summary, occupying only a brief segment of the thirty- to forty-five-minute meeting otherwise devoted to reports on the successes and failures of tactical scenarios that have taken place within the past twelve hours, and an overview of the next twelve to twenty-four hours of activity to come. The qualitative justifications for the numerical data are not discussed at these debriefs unless one of the commanders queries the data. As the substance of the daily briefing between commanders at cmtc reveal, what is prioritized in the exercise is the tactical not the intercultural. While military personnel concede that cultural intelligence saves lives on both sides of the divide, a traditional emphasis on tactical warfare persists. Cultural intelligence building is merely one comparatively modest dimension within military training regimes that are prismatic in their approach to counterinsurgency and that place a range of seemingly contradictory demands on the average soldier. Conditioned in training methods designed to manage and regulate affect in force-on-force combat, soldiers must also remain sensitive to their affective exchanges with civilians in order to establish trust as well as mutual respect – the lynchpins of an effective counterinsurgency mission designed, ultimately, to “get the intelligence” needed to stamp out the enemy.

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The “Cultural Turn” in Counterinsurgency and the “Rush to the Intimate” While cultural intelligence training might, at first, seem to place a set of demands on the soldier that are at odds with the punitive militarism otherwise required of the soldier in force-on-force combat, it is important to note the ways in which cultural intelligence training operates in service of more targeted and effective kinetic operations. Cultural intelligence training is pivotal for a successful counterinsurgency mission in that its ultimate objective, as Derek Gregory puts it, is “to generate actionable intelligence about the insurgency to inform lethal targeting.”16 Cultural knowledge, then, is not “a substitute for killing” as it might be represented in its manuals – such as the Army Field Manual on Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24) published in 2006 – but rather, “a prerequisite for its refinement.”17 Manuals such as FM 3-24 effectively deflected public attention from kinetic operations by positioning counterinsurgency as “armed social work.”18 The military strategy behind the cultural turn is multifaceted: by mobilizing cultural knowledge, the military is able to humanize the conduct of war, hiding its bloody enterprises behind a mask of apparent interest in the local culture, which ultimately allows the military to “refin[e] the kill-chain.”19 Cultural intelligence is, according to military strategists, a “force multiplier.”20 The adoption of “strategic culture” post-9/11, which sets its sights on “the world of mind, feeling, and habit of behaviour,”21 has relied heavily on anthropology, igniting a controversial debate about what is, for some, the discipline’s uncomfortably close historical ties with warfare.22 “Ethnography,” as Ann Laura Stoler and David Bond contend, “has become strategic military terrain”: “While government sights are set on the enemy,” they urge, “ours might be set on them and on how this rush to the intimate structures new sites of imperial governance.”23 But even in the face of the apparent “rush to the intimate” since the onset of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s evident that the utility of cultural knowledge has not been widely accepted by military personnel from all ranks. Some argue that despite the formation of multi-milliondollar mock Afghan villages and extensive courses on Afghan culture, the cultural training and knowledge that soldiers receive remains inadequate and insufficient.24 The inadequacies of the training might be explained, in part, by the nature of the simulation itself which, while seductive in its spectacle, will always obscure the reality upon which it

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is premised in producing its own, one generated from troubling universalisms, stock “types,” and scenarios governed by familiar narratives of benevolent peacewarriors and armed social workers in mentorship roles battling insidious insurgents. These universalisms are encouraged by the ways in which elements of the mise en scène of staged Afghan villages are ostended. The series of shipping containers provided and dressed by acs become de-realized sign vehicles that stand variously for a family dwelling, a store, a mosque, with only minor exterior and interior dressings to signify its type. This interchangeability of a shipping container that stands for a whole class of objects services the military’s ideological abstractions in the acquisition of cultural knowledge. As Gregory argues, while shipping containers “are an improvement on poker chips and Lego bricks, … reducing living spaces to metal boxes … conveys a silent message about the sort of people who live in them.”25 The modest cluster of shipping containers do little more than signify a stark primitivism, which is hardly at pace with the supposedly “new” formations of the three-block war26 and the “urbanization of insurgency.”27 Moreover, these primitive dwellings reinforce the military’s general views of Afghan culture, which emphasize an atavistic tribalism to describe its ethos and motivating forces, even while the US Department of Defense handbook on Afghanistan that is given to soldiers (Canadian soldiers as well) outlines ethnic groups, such as the Tajiks, which do not operate along tribal lines at all.28 As Gregory maintains, there is “little room for an Arab modern” in these cultural imag(in)ings.29 The mise en scène of the mock Afghan villages at military bases in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, are exemplary sites of the cultural-political performances Edward Said identified in Orientialism. They are “living tableaus of queerness,” of the bizarre, and the regressive; a space to be disciplined through the imposition of the order it is presumed to lack – an order that only the West can impart.30 Moreover, the movable, temporary structures of shipping containers also signify a kind of nomadism of a population that has no place, that is borderless, which not only justifies the occupation of their (non-)space but makes it all the more urgent in order to prevent their movement and intrusion into “our” spaces; the mise en scène plays host to cultural anxieties about the insurgency’s mobility and insidious global creep. The tableaus provide the setting for the staged intercultural encounters between isaf soldiers and Afghan role-players. When viewed within intercultural performance frameworks, the problems of ostension and

Figure 6.2 A wooden structure with plastic breads and produce serves as the makeshift stand of a street vendor against a backdrop of shipping containers.

ideological abstraction we encounter in the mise en scène of mock Afghan villages can be seen in continuity with those we often find in intercultural theatre practices that attempt to make the “foreign” familiar. Semiotician Patrice Pavis, through his examination of the work of Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, strives to develop a theoretical model for “the ways in which the mise en scène presents and transmits a foreign culture to the public.”31 Pavis examines how a “foreign” culture is made accessible and comprehensible to a “public” (read: Western culture) and in so doing, highlights the troubling unidirectionality of these efforts. As Ric Knowles points out, an emphasis is placed on the work of the (Western) director who “control[s] the circumstances of the (intercultural) exchange.”32 These “not … terribly intercultural” exchanges, as Knowles says, are reflected in the mise en scène of mock Afghan villages, which have been created by Western military forces on the basis of “conflict ethnography”33 that is unavoidably reductive in its

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efforts to make complex cultural systems, traditions, and practices efficiently legible to soldiers who are undertaking crash courses on culture within training regimes otherwise devoted to the tactical and kinetic. These unidirectional dynamics are further reflections of the macro-structures informing the soldier’s interactions with local nationals within a mission that now emphasizes a mentorship role in the creation of a local, Afghan security force who will be trained according to the Rules of Engagement of “the West.” The equivocal relationship to cultural intelligence training versus unapologetic militarism at the strategic level affects the tactical level and, in turn, the micro-movements and interactions between soldiers and Afghan role-players. The effects of these broader strategic equivocations were made evident to me in one particular debrief following a routine role-play of a village patrol early in the training exercise, in which soldiers walk through the village looking for signs of suspicious behaviour while instilling confidence among villagers that their presence is meant to provide safety and protection for the local population. The observer

Figure 6.3 The carcass of a detonated vehicle signifies the presence and past activity of insurgents and the “performance remains” of previous scenarios. The prop is used repeatedly in scenarios involving suicide bombings and other ied explosions.

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controller trainer, having himself recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan, emphasized a kind of optic in which everything in theatre, from the most quotidian of activities in the village, becomes a readable “sign,” and every action and gesture means – a directive that, in light of my own disciplinary interests, resounded with irony. Here in this simulacra of a mock Afghan village filled with a mise en scène of shipping containers made to look like the homes of Afghans played by Afghans in role, a staff sergeant was educating a squad with a vocabulary uncomfortably close to my own as a performance studies researcher and educator trained in theatre. These soldiers were encouraged to develop an optic analogous to the ways in which I might encourage dialogue with my students in conducting a performance analysis, surveying the performance space and performance actions for metaphoric significance. A group of children flying a kite, the staff sergeant contended, could signal the presence of isaf to nearby insurgents; a soccer game in the street could serve as a distraction for an insurgent strike. But in the course of his lesson on signifiers and signifieds, the observer controller trainer appealed to the talking points of counterinsurgency with emphasis on ways of empowering local leaders toward a 2014 withdrawal. In the same breath, he reminded soldiers that they were “warriors in a foreign land allowed to inspect vehicles, etc.” as they felt necessary. Soldiers were left having to square what, to me, as an outside civilian observer, seemed an irreconcilable contradiction: isaf were, at once, a support system of humble mentors, and “warriors” with the tacit rights that come with a military occupation. This convergence of counterinsurgency doctrine with the tacit rights of “warriors in foreign lands” and the continuity between a military and performance studies optic raises concerns, pointing to the ways in which theatrical “looking” and its ocular-centrism is never innocent but exists on a continuum with other forms of imperialist gazes. These convergences expose the unspoken privileges and powers at work in who is at liberty to look in the ethnographic world view in which what is seen is always already available for scrutiny and inspection; the viewer stands at the assumed vanishing point of this perspectival vision of the world-as-picture – a way of looking haunted by those royal seats of the Renaissance court masque and its Orientalist stagings. This way of looking brings things into being, pointing to the inevitable “imperialism of ethnological knowledge,” to borrow Michel de Certeau’s phrase, in which the “idea” of a culture is constituted in the gaze as the object of its knowing.34

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These questions are not merely disciplinary, but also have implications for the macrostructures of military strategy and geopolitics that form these mock Afghan villages and, in turn, the micro-movements between soldiers and the “local culture.” Knowledge of the local culture is motivated by the instrumentalist objectives of a military invasion; soldiers get to know the local culture in order to get the intelligence. Soldiers enter the villages at the onset of the exercise with the knowledge and the assumption that there are enemies within. Good versus bad, friend versus enemy are delineated ideologically in the form of a well-wrought melodrama. But while these distinctions might be clearly drawn from an ideological point of view, they are obscured within the specific dynamics of asymmetrical warfare and the three-block war, in which the differences between combatant and non-combatant are not immediately apparent. The challenge for the “warrior” within this largescale, immersive war game becomes one of ferreting out the insurgentenemy who is indistinguishable from the average civilian. The warrior discourse invoked throughout the training exercise operates alongside this instrumentalist, ethnographic optic, engendering a kind of “presumptive intimacy,” to borrow Gregory’s phrase,35 that is fostered by the structure of the exercise, which puts the field of understanding uniquely in the domain of the soldier. This presumptive intimacy operates in perverse continuity with the “optical detachment” of drone pilots who kill from a distance through imaging technology that enables extremely detailed – and intimate – views of their targets; drone pilots often spend hours a day for several days at a time keeping the target’s house under surveillance, watching the quotidian activities of the family before receiving the call to strike.36 Together, these viewing procedures and ways of looking create a space that is an open territory of exploration for the soldier, where the soldier is free to get to know and presume to know the cultural other. The soldier’s movements are informed by a sense of that space – and the Afghan role-players within it – as having been made available to and for the soldier – evident in the confidence of the soldier’s approach that one might say is characteristic of an occupying force. The soldier’s movements speak to a presumption fostered by a tacit understanding that this immersive environment has been made expressly for the soldier’s training, posing the question of whether this sense of ownership over one’s space encouraged by the simulated environment carries over into the soldier’s “real world” spatial awareness in theatres of war. But the presumption of the soldier’s approach also speaks to a generalized mode of being and way of seeing of-

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Figure 6.4 Propaganda by insurgents decorates the walls of the village and serves as a clue to soldiers-in-training of an insurgent presence.

fered by modern technology, what Martin Heidegger characterizes as a “challenging revealing,” in which everything within our scope is seized upon and requisitioned for use. Within this militarized world picture, Afghans exist in the mock Afghan villages as what Heidegger would call a “standing reserve” – an undifferentiated supply of the always already available.37 The presumption and confidence of approach within the “open territory” of the simulation were made evident to me after a routine shura, when the officer commanding conducted an informal walk-through of the village with his unit. This training day, May 2, 2011, coincided with the shocking news of Osama bin Laden’s capture by US Special Forces and reports of his assassination. A soldier in the unit decided to use this “real world” information as a conversation starter with villagers, thinking that the topic would goad insurgents and Al-Qaeda sympathizers to “reveal their colours.” The soldier approached a cluster of men with the offer of a cigarette. An awkward pause followed a silent lighting of

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cigarettes. The soldier then casually asked, “So, how do you guys feel about the news of bin Laden?” The question was met with a few incoherent mumbles and a silent draw on a cigarette. The goading soldier had, unbeknownst to him, approached a group of augmentees who were well aware that speaking would reveal that they were not Pashto or Dari-speaking Afghans. They chose to play the reality that they did not “understand” English. But their lack of response – something a soldier might actually encounter if he approached the local population in a village in Afghanistan in English – was read as evasion. The soldier immediately reported the group of shady men to his commanding officer. In this war game, his suspicions were correct – he had identified the insurgent operatives in the village. The war game’s objectives to “get the intelligence; find and extinguish the insurgents” govern the intercultural relations, since every villager is approached as a potential insurgent – a dynamic that points to the structuring force of what Gregory calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”38

Coda: Is Touch Enough? Walking through the mock Afghan villages at stanta in England – another military training site that I discuss elsewhere39 and that I visit briefly here as a comparative touchstone and dénouement – I was struck by the Afghan role-players’ sense of being at home in the village. Unlike at cfb Wainright, where the shift work of the role-players was clearly structured around programmed scenarios and tasks within each scenario, the stanta mise en scène seemed more of an environment in which the Afghans simply lived: creating surrogate family networks during these long durations away from their “real” families and immigrant networks throughout England, cooking meals together, and sitting and talking around bonfires to pass the hours. Over the course of my ten-day site visit, I gathered the sense that the Afghan role-players were not there waiting for the next scenario to unfold. They were simply there, inhabiting the space. Role-players seemed genuinely unaware of when or where the next simulated suicide bombing, for example, was planned for the village. But, as I have argued elsewhere in my analyses of Afghan role-players in these simulations, they knew their roles well enough and had been there long enough, to know what was expected of them “in the scene.”40 On the first day of my visit to one of the Afghan villages at stanta, I witnessed a unit’s arrival and their first safety patrol through the village. The soldiers’ entrance to the village was met by a group of Afghan men

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who greeted them warmly, clasping their arms in welcome. The soldiers seemed uncertain, tentative, taken off guard, and surprised by this warm reception. Some soldiers were clearly nervous, unsure whether or not they could trust this group of men. I got the sense that the Afghan roleplayers had encountered such tentativeness before, enough to know that they simply needed to press on. And they did, until there was a marked shift in the disposition of the soldiers. They dropped their guard; the Afghans’ warm greeting was reciprocated by smiles and handshakes. The staff sergeant accompanying me, a veteran of multiple tours to Afghanistan who had himself gone through the training at stanta, looked on and recalled his own first safety patrol through this mock village: “Some of these boys have never been outside of their small towns before joining the army,” he remarked, “and then they come here and they’re suddenly immersed in a different place, with different smells, different colours. Sometimes, it’s enough to just shake hands with an Afghan.”41 Initially, I was unsettled by the remark. The idea that a handshake with Afghan role-players might be “enough” resounded in my mind as I observed the Afghan role-players inhabiting this mise en scène of the mock village. His remark exacerbated the sense that they were serving as props, merely furnishing the villages to enhance the verisimilitude of these multi-million-dollar simulacras. At the time, the staff sergeant’s remark about the work of a mere handshake seemed to be indicative of the superficial commitment to substantive cultural intelligence-building and meaningful engagements with the Afghan role-players. That a handshake between soldier and Afghan might be “enough” remains, for me, a fraught proposition. It is emblematic of the military’s “rush to the intimate,” its efforts “to regain a tactile human sense,” as former intelligence officer Ralph Peters put it,42 and its use of “conflict ethnography” that totalizes the cultural other under the force of an oppressive instrumentalism as the military attempts to stay nimble and responsive to the new frontiers of asymmetrical warfare and the three-block war. But I wonder if, in this handshake, there lies political potential – a potential that emerges from an intercultural encounter in the domain of touch that, even if momentarily, transcends the epistemological regimes that shape the encounter in advance. I might be accused justifiably of romanticizing things, retroactively substantializing, which is always a risk with the passage of time. But it’s what happens in the handshake – in touching and being touched – that has me asking whether this inter-corporeal exchange might complicate the hazards of the military’s cultural intelligence project, as well as the ways of looking and the presumptive intimacies it generates. I ask whether it has the power to delimit the claims

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of cultural knowledge that inform how a group of soldiers – “warriors in foreign lands,” as they are told – move through a village, eyes “always moving” and scanning the scene.43 This non-verbal, tactile exchange might compromise the unspoken privileges and powers at work in who is at liberty to look in the ethnographic world view in which what is seen is always already available for scrutiny and inspection. We might turn to Merleau-Ponty here to consider the political potential of touch. For him, the handshake is a means to undo an entire trajectory of philosophical thought that places vision and the ocular at its core, since this ocular-centrism proceeds under the assumption that, unlike touch, it surveys things from a distance and therefore has greater veridical quality. For Merleau-Ponty, vision is not a view from nowhere but is, rather, in the middle of things, where things constantly emerge from their horizon, what he refers to as the invisible. Vision, he maintains, is constantly opened up to its difference and possible only if it is made co-extensive with the tangible, to gustation, to olfaction – to the senses. Merleau-Ponty’s interrogation of vision, then, leads to an interrogation of the sensible itself (aisthesis), but this sensible, for him, is riddled with sites of difference, breaks, gaps, and disunities. In a 1959 working note to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty positions the sensible being as an intertwining of the visual and the tangible as a “diacritical, relative, oppositional system.”44 The diacritical is yoked to his crucial notion of the “écart” or divergence,45 which does not, as Jacques Derrida’s critique of Merleau-Ponty suggests, lead to “an intuitionism of immediate access to the other” and a re-appropriation of alterity.46 Rather, écart refers to “a fragmentation of being,” which allows for the possibility of separation and “the advent of difference.”47 This fragmentation of being allows for and makes possible an availability to alterity that is inappropriable, opening up “the surface of an inexhaustible depth, which makes it able to be open to visions other than our own,” revealing “the limits of our factual vision”; “for the first time,” he writes, “I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes.”48 The handshake, for Merleau-Ponty, is the site of an inter-corporeal exchange between touched and touching bodies, one that gives account of the reversibility of flesh and allows for the emergence of this diacritical difference between oneself and another. Of course, there are many ways you can shake hands. It can be a hollow exchange, a routine and compulsory social gesture that happens between enemies and friendly acquaintances alike. It can seal a deal or conceal a hand-off. But what I’m drawing on here is what the sensibil-

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ity and tactility of the exchange opens up – what it makes available and vulnerable in one and another. I touch and I am touched. My skin feels and registers the sensation even before my mind translates it into a recognizable feeling. A touch and the skin flushes. A touch, a shudder. A touch, a flinch. But touching need not refer exclusively or solely to the tactile, as the phrase “I’m touched” suggests. Touch puts us in touch with the interdependence of our sensibilities, ousting the primacy of vision as the sense that is most often privileged. Touch opens up the space and the time of our sensible being that cannot be encapsulated in sentences or explained in words, and that cannot be circumscribed by claims of understanding, reduced to signification or the regimes of representation. Touch is an act of “reaching toward,” as dance theorist Erin Manning writes, “of creating space-time through the worlding that occurs when bodies move.”49 For Manning, touch opens up what is ultimately “untouchable” and “unknowable” about an other: “Touch reminds us that bodies are impenetrable. It is my surface that I risk exposing when I reach toward you and place my hand against yours. The impenetrability of your body is what initiates this political moment wherein there can be … no drowning in a complete knowledge, no sense of an ultimate recognition. Touching resists these tendencies … for an other cannot be discovered as such.”50 But if we were to speak about a politics of touch, what is crucial in this dynamic is that, even in the face of this unknowingness and in a relinquishment of the claims to know, I still am touched and make myself available to the touch. Sara Ahmed, drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, invites us to consider the responsibility the intercultural encounter engenders as one that pivots on an ethics grounded in unknowability: “Levinas introduces this notion of exposure or, as I would put it, touch-ability, as the condition of signification or saying, as that which makes it possible to be for others, before being … This notion … that responsibility is an opening to others that fails to grasp, fails to present the other, and yet is before the other, and for the other.”51 Levinas’s ethical philosophy might suggest that this “touchability” is somehow innocent of the historical relations that shape it in advance. Questions of history are, after all, secondary for Levinas, since his project is interested in exhibiting the primacy of an ethical relation outside of history and ontology. But when we put this notion of touchability into conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s work on institution, perception, and reversibility, which Ahmed takes up elsewhere in her work on collective feelings and “the impressions made by bodily others,”52 we can take account of the

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ways in which the “moment of contact” is both “shaped by past histories of contact … at the same time as it reshapes the bodies in the contact zone of the encounter.”53 While these histories “have already impressed upon the surface of bodies,” Ahmed writes, they also carry the potential to “create new impressions”54 by generating “the surfaces and boundaries that allow bodies to appear in the present.”55 Touch makes the body available for the formation of “new impressions” in the encounter, which have the potential to unsettle and unseat staid, habituated impressions, such as those that predetermine the military’s cultural intelligence training and its stagings of difference. In the end, questions linger on the tacit contracts and presumptive intimacies that undergird the immersive simulation. These dynamics enjoin us to consider how immersive military simulations are themselves part of a longer performance genealogy of mock environments staged for cultural knowledge creation and “experiences of the other” for the consumptive gaze of onlookers – a genealogy that can be traced back to the creation of African, Arab, and Indigenous mock villages, sanctioned by anthropologists, at the 1893 World’s Colombian Exhibition, for example, as well as the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, and Canada’s own Indian Village that has been part of the Calgary Stampede since 1912. These mock villages offered onlookers a fully realized, ethnically specific recreated environment, one that invited, as Harvey Young has recently argued, intimate experiences with “foreign” bodies.56 They provided a temporary sampling of foreign bodies in an environment constructed for the onlooker who moves through it without consequence, and without a sense of complicity or responsibility. But cast within this politics of touch, perhaps the innocuously routine gesture of the handshake between soldier and Afghan in the training exercises I’ve examined here, presents a way of undermining the foreclosure of the military’s knowledge systems that script the scenarios governing their encounter. Does the power of the handshake in this intercultural encounter have the potential to de-habituate what the immersive simulation otherwise habituates through a verisimilitude based on conflict ethnography? Perhaps in the handshake lies the potential for a redressive politics of touch, one that unsettles an entrenchment of the spaces of difference and the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that govern these rehearsals for war.

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n o te s 1 On this strategic shift toward peace enforcement and the formation of the Canadian “peacewarrior,” see Coulon and Liégeois, “Whatever Happened to Peacekeeping?” 2 Asymmetrical warfare refers to the non-traditional and unpredictable actions undertaken within warfare by non-state and weaker parties against the conventional capabilities of major military-economic and technologically advanced state powers. 3 Pattern of life and intelligence picture are common terms in the discourse of military strategy. 4 According to Emily Spencer and Tony Balasevicius, military strategists, guided by counterinsurgency doctrine, see “strategic culture” – the development of a more robust cultural intelligence (cq) of local populations – as a “force multiplier” in that it can generate actionable intelligence to extinguish an insurgent force. See Spencer and Balasevicius, “Crucible of Success,” 40–8. 5 See Clare, “Monitoring the Impact.” 6 See Samur’s study, “I, Patient”; and my discussion of the standardized patient program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine in “Performance as Pathology.” 7 Stoler and Bond, “Refractions off Empire,” 98. 8 In this respect, I follow Marlis Schweitzer’s vital insistence, in her chapter in this collection, that nation-specific performances be situated within broader hemispheric and transnational contexts. 9 Hendrikse, Jesse, interview by author, 5 May 2011. 10 Ahmadi, interview with the author, 1 May 2011. Depending on the extent of their speaking roles within scenarios, role-players earn $200 to $300 per day for a twelve-hour shift. This is seasonal work for Afghan role-players, and the length of the contracts ranges from ten to twenty-five days, depending on the length of the military training exercise and the number of exercises for which the role-player is signed on. 11 An augmentee is the term used to describe veterans of Afghanistan who facilitate the training exercises at cmtc between tours of duty. At cmtc, augmentees are generally called upon to play the role of insurgents since, for safety and security, civilian role-players are not given roles that require simulated weapons operation. 12 Hendrikse, personal interview. 13 Commander Kevin Tyler, interview by the author, 2 May 2011. 14 Tyler, interview. 15 In referring to these scenarios as a form of intercultural theatre, I draw from Ric Knowles’s extensive work on the subject. For Knowles, inter-culturalism

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Natalie Alvarez offers an opportunity to “focus on the contested, unsettling, and often unequal spaces between cultures, spaces that can function as performative sites of negotiation” (viii). See Knowles, “Introduction.” Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 9. Ibid. The phrase armed social work belongs to ex–Australian Army officer David Kilcullen, a key contributor to FM 3-24 who was seconded to the US State Department as chief strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. On this point, see Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 13. Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 21. Spencer and Balasevicius, “Crucible of Success,” 41. Gray, Modern Strategy, 138. At the centre of the debate is Montgomery McFate, a cultural anthropologist, US national security advisor, and former science advisor to the United States Army Human Terrain System. In response to the Human Terrain System’s conscription of anthropology in the war effort, the American Anthropological Association issued a statement on 31 October 2007 (“Executive Board”) identifying its violations of the association’s code of ethics. Stoler and Bond, “Refractions off Empire,” 98. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded coalition forces in 2009–10, has stated that the US had a “frighteningly simplistic” view of Afghanistan when they began the war: “We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough.” Qtd. in Burns, “Afghanistan War.” Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 15. The three-block war is a term that is used to describe the changing frontier of warfare in the form of an “urbanization of insurgency” and the spectrum of demands that are placed on the average corporal within the space of three contiguous city blocks. Within this context of the three-block war, the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant, civilian and insurgent, are also blurred, further complicating the moment-to-moment decisions that fall on the shoulders of the average corporal. For more on the three-block war, see Krulack, “Strategic Corporal.” Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 14. Department of Defense, Country Handbook, 34. Said Tayeb Jawad, former Afghan ambassador to the United States, ridicules this abiding assumption about Afghan culture when he glibly remarks, “Afghanistan is less tribal than New York” (qtd. in Bumiller “Remembering”). Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 18. My objective here is not to give an account of possible responses to these villages by the training audience or entrylevel soldiers but rather to assess the implications of military planners’ design

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choices on the ways in which the insurgent-enemy is positioned in military strategy, cultural information briefs, and counterinsurgency doctrine. Said, Orientalism, 108. Pavis, “Interculturalism and Contemporary Mise en Scène,’” 57. Knowles, Theatre & Interculturalism, 25. “Conflict ethnography” is David Kilcullen’s phrase. See Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 13. De Certeau, Culture in the Plural, 75. Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 15. This tension between “optical detachment,” in Gregory’s words, and intimacy was underscored in a 2012 New York Times article in which drone pilots “spoke of a certain intimacy with Afghan family life that traditional pilots never see from 20,000 feet, and that even ground troops seldom experience.” See Bumiller, “Day Job Waiting.” Heidegger, “Question concerning Technology,” 323. Gregory, “‘Rush to the Intimate,’” 15. See my forthcoming Stages of Difference. For a fuller account of the Afghan role-players’ perspectives based on extensive interviews, see my “Affect Management,” as well as my Stages of Difference. In keeping with the reference practices throughout this chapter, I am keeping this staff sergeant anonymous for security purposes. For Peters’s views on how the military should use anthropology to develop a more “tactile human sense,” see his Fighting for the Future, 21, 58. I allude here to a staff sergeant’s remarks in an interview conducted on 2 May 2011. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 213–14. Ibid., 224. Derrida, On Touching, 191. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 217. Ibid., 143. Manning, Politics of Touch, xiv. Ibid., 9. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 155. Ahmed, “Collective Feelings,” 27. Ibid., 31. Ibid. Ibid., 39. I draw here from Young, “Collecting the Black Body.”

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Sochi Olympics 2014, Canadian Truth and Reconciliation, and the Haunting Ghouls of Canadian Nationalism he l e ne voste rs Since their revival in 1896, the Olympics have become a focus for various displays of statecraft and stagecraft. –Andrew Foxall1

Blizzard’s blind. As a Prairie girl I was raised on stories about bodies found frozen just metres from home or just steps away from the relative safety of a car stranded on the side of the road. Scare-tales designed to keep me safely indoors, to make me wary of disorienting maelstroms. Ghost-story antidotes to the storm’s snowy lure. But the seductive and “percepticidal” blizzards of Canadian white-settler nationalism come without such warnings.2 Delivered through a constantly expanding and dazzling array of national and international public relations performances, Canada’s highly popularized narrative of benevolent multicultural nationalism blinds us to actions – past and present – that do not support dominant Canadian notions of national innocence and geopolitical moral exceptionalism. There were no safe havens in which to wait out the storm of Canada’s 2014 Winter Olympics’ media blizzard. An extension of the “Own the Podium”3 campaign launched in preparation for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, the “We Are Winter” media blitz invaded our quotidian spaces of private and public gathering – our homes, schools, streets, workplaces, cafes, restaurants, bars, movie theatres, cabs, cars, buses and bus shelters (see figure 7.1). Dubbed the “largest brand undertaking in history” by its creators – the Canadian Olympics Committee (coc) – “We Are Winter” extended Canada’s proprietary Olympian claim from the dominion of the “podium” to ownership of an entire season.4 Prolific pre-Sochi promotional advertisements preceded the ubiquitous cov-

Figure 7.1 Bus shelter “We Are Winter” ad featuring still image of bobsledder Kaillie Humphries.

erage of the Games. In its first Olympics broadcast since 2008, the cbc delivered the Games 24/7, and with its “anywhere with Bell” campaign, Bell Canada provided customers with on-demand access to Sochi 2014 on their laptops, smartphones, and tablets. In his study of the origins of nationalism, Benedict Anderson asserts that, from their inception, nations were integral to colonial expansion and contributed to the naturalization of European colonial rule and settler-colonialism. Canadian theatre and performance studies theorists have extended Anderson’s analysis by examining Canadian nationalism as a fiction that is performed though specific practices. Alan Filewod has explored how military and sports pageantry, alongside ideas of a pure Canadian theatre, have helped to consolidate popular fantasies of Canadian cultural authenticity.5 Likewise, Natalie Alvarez and colleagues critically examine the relationship between performance and nation. They ask how situating “Canada” within a hemispheric context, and approaching the hemisphere as Turtle Island, might reposition“Canada”

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(and “America”) not as mapped geographic entities, but as ongoing “contested practices.”6 Not the stuff of fairy tales or innocent fantasies, the Canada of our collective imagining is implicated in a larger colonial process and is itself produced and reproduced through performative acts that range from major spectacles – like the Olympics – to everyday actions and acquiescences. Though different from the “percepticide” that performance studies scholar Diana Taylor writes about – enacted in response to overt performances of violent nationalism – I propose that Canada’s spectacular performances of national innocence have a snowblinding effect that shields the general populace from the historical and contemporary acts of state violence – physical, cultural, and institutional – that have been and continue to be perpetrated on Canada’s Aboriginal populations. As Indigenous humanities scholar Len Findlay asserts, “How the west was won, was intimately connected to how the west was spun.”7 And as the percepticidal spin of white-settler Canadian nationalism continues unabated in its struggle for control of the national imaginary of settler conscience and consciousness, a diffuse network of stakeholders – government, media, military, and corporate – have become increasingly adept in projecting the Canada-the-good brand into the international geopolitical imaginary and market.8 In this chapter I situate Canada’s Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics public relations performance as the snowy cover against which I juxtapose readings of two performances that place redress and counter-narratives of Canadian-ness onto the national and international stage: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc) and Mi’gMaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s award-winning film Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). I begin with a brief analysis of Canada’s Sochi 2014 public relations statecraft and stagecraft to explore what is illuminated through, and what is obscured by, the coc’s visual and textual associations of winter with an imagined and naturalized Canadian identity. Next, pushing through the coc’s pr flurries, I shift my gaze to the trc. Though, as Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi performance studies scholar Jill Carter writes, the trc “is tainted, fraught with confusion and ambiguity for both the actors and witnesses” it exceeds, by far, the imaginary confines of the coc’s dramaturgically staged Canadian winter wonderland.9 Following Indigenous humanities and performance studies scholars – Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, Jo-Ann Episkenew, Eva MacKey, Dylan Robinson, Len Findlay, and Jill Carter – I argue that the

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trc needs to be understood not as an isolated performance of reconciliatory affect or cathartic closure, but rather as belonging to a multimodal assemblage of legal, epistemological, and political interventions designed to expose the ongoing violent effects of Canadian settler colonialism and demand material redress. I then turn to Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls, which, like the trc, addresses Canada’s residential schools. I first saw Rhymes during its mainstream theatrical debut (31 January 2014) at Toronto’s Cineplex Odeon Theatre at Yonge and Dundas. At the time – just seven days prior to the Sochi Winter Olympics opening ceremony (7 February 2014) – “We Are Winter” ads filled Yonge-Dundas Square with an omnipotent presence as giant electronic billboards animated Team Canada’s hovering God-like athletes. Inside the dark, warm theatre, the onslaught continued with “We Are Winter” winds howling across the screen throughout the Cineplex’s preshow commercials. I close the chapter with a reflection on the affective incommensurability of this encounter between the stormy national innocence of “We Are Winter” and the unbecoming Canadian nationalism laid bare by Barnaby’s haunting ghouls. Following Findlay, I propose that the trc and Rhymes might be most productively understood using the concept of “rehearsal” as an organizing trope that allows for “the diverse pursuit of redress as a performance of … academic, cultural, and political theatre which functions as a necessary preliminary to the big show of belated justice.”10 Rehearsal in the context of redress foregrounds notions of practice and resists containment within institutional and structural mandates and timeframes. Rehearsal is improvisational. It generates fissures, leaks, and sticky impressions that make their way into unexpected cultural arenas. Rehearsal offers a frame for understanding testimony as the ongoing and intergenerational labour of refusing forgetfulness and demanding redress. “The idea of rehearsal,” Findlay writes, “suggests review or recapitulation, as in rehearsing an argument; and it also suggests private experimentation, repetition, and refinement in the interests of achieving a better public performance.”11 While I concur with Findlay that rehearsal is both helpful as a framework, and necessary as a practice, I propose that rehearsal in relation to redress is more productively thought of as a public praxis than as a private undertaking in preparation for a public performance. This is not to dispute that survivors engage in reflection

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and review prior to giving testimony at the trc, or that artists undergo rigorous experimentation and refinement before presenting works. Rather, it is to emphasize how the multiple legal, creative, and activist public performances of rehearsals of redress function as a multi-modal epistemological model for an ongoing praxis of decolonization. Though Findlay invokes the term theatre in his definition, throughout his application of rehearsal as an organizing trope, he proposes an extra-theatrical framework. For example, Findlay broadly situates his analysis of Aboriginal performances of redress within Canada to illuminate “the distinctive instrumentality, shared values, and objectives of jurisprudence, performance art, and public celebration.”12 I call this rehearsal as praxis. With this augmented naming, I distinguish rehearsal from its instrumentalist theatrical applications. In the context of professional theatrical production – though often productively experimental – rehearsal remains the hidden labour that is the necessary precursor to the “show” as consumable product. Looking at rehearsal as praxis resituates its productive potential – from its “place” as a behind-thescenes preparation for audience consumption. It relocates rehearsal to the social arena where its performance of an experimental and fluid praxis of redress becomes part of a larger epistemological model for collective capacity-building towards the unsettling of Canada’s settler colonial nationalism. By reading contesting narratives of Canadian-ness across institutional, aesthetic, and disciplinary locations, I draw upon performance studies methodology of critical interdisciplinarity – an approach that is particularly consequential in nationalist projects. Nations, after all, thrive on divides. On constructed borders fortified by nationalist discourses designed to define outsiders, insiders, and outsiders within. On the production of false purities and fictive pluralities. Canada’s spectacularized pageants, as I’ve argued elsewhere in my research into Canadian military commemoration, “effectively reaffirm essentialized notions of settlerCanadian nationalism through the assimilation of difference under the discursive umbrella of multiculturalism’s pseudo-inclusivity.”13 In reading Canada’s trc and Rhymes against the cover of the coc’s spectacular “We Are Winter” pageantry then, my aim is to unsettle the social forgetfulness that is produced and re-produced through the popular, political, and corporatized tropes of Canadian nationalism.

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Sochi 2014 and “We Are Winter”: Spectacles of National Benevolence and Mastery

We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius and to reform those laws, government policies, and litigation strategies that continue to rely on such concepts. –Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action14

One of the world’s most spectacular media and marketing events, the Olympic Games, is an arena in which Canada does more than vie for medals. Feel-good events like the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics provide Canada with an opportunity to perform, for both a global and an enthusiastic home audience, a beguiling act of what Findlay calls “pseudoinclusive re-whitening.”15 With stunning allure the broadcast blizzard of all that was Canada in Sochi – the medals, the tears, the oh-so-Canadian acts of selflessness16 – produced a media blizzard that blinded viewers to – or obscured from their view – the haunting ghouls of Canadian settler nationalism. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s pre-Sochi anti-gay proclamations provided Canada with a particularly salient moment to strut its ambassadorial exceptionalism. Like other countries, when Canada hosts the Olympic Games, organizers capitalize on the extended airtime to promote place and nation through notions of ethnic and cultural particularity. In off years, the coc relies on a more generic branding approach. In this sense, Putin’s anti-gay rhetoric gave the coc an opportunity to augment its “We Are Winter” brand with narratives of Canada as a progressive nation that heralds diversity and values human rights. In contrast with the spectacular performance of “Olympic Aboriginality”17 at Vancouver’s 2010 “native land” opening ceremony, Canada’s muchtouted (and conveniently fluid) embrace of “difference” in Sochi was redirected to a showcasing of Canada as a national leader in the struggle for gay rights. As Hayley Wickenheiser, Canada’s gold medal hockeyplaying flag-bearer, proudly exclaimed of Canada in an interview with then cbc Q host Jian Ghomeshi, “We’re seen as a humble, a gentle country that is peaceful and includes everyone … we’re a huge nation, we’re a vast nation, and we’re very different … we’re this giant poster for acceptance and diversity and that anything is possible.”18

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One could almost hear k.d. lang – Canada’s very own white-suited angel-dyke – croon “Hallelujah” in the background. Lang performed her stunning, and by now, iconic, rendition of Leonard Cohen’s (equally iconic) ballad of praise at the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony. As she sang, lang was accompanied by a choreographed sea of candlewaving audience members, and when she reached her culminating crescendo, flocks of doves took flight up transparent columns. A symbol of peace, perhaps the doves were intended to mask Canada’s (then) almost decade-long engagement in the US-led war in Afghanistan? What I find most unsettling about the Olympian thrall of Canadian humility and inclusivity is its astounding lack of reflexivity and irony. In response to Putin’s homophobia, Canadian cities across the country proudly hoisted Rainbow flags. In concert with the coc’s “We Are Winter” celebratory pr blizzard, the Rainbow flag proliferation further obscured (what should have been) glaringly evident: the lack of racial diversity among Canada’s elite Olympic athletes. If one were to squint to see past the glare of nationalistic pride – contrary to Wickenheiser’s claims – it would appear that not only are “we” winter, but “we” are also white as snow. This is not to suggest that all the Canadian Winter Olympic Team’s athletes were white, only that they were overwhelmingly so in such a way as to contradict the popular narrative of Canada as a bastion of multicultural equity. In fact, it’s interesting to note that speed skater Gilmore Junio, who gave up his spot to teammate Denny Morrison (see note 16), was of Filipino descent and one of Team Canada’s non-white Sochi 2104 athletes. Of course, because she was Canada’s flag-bearing ambassador, Wickenheiser’s message is not hers alone – it is carefully crafted and broadly construed. As critical race and anti-colonial scholar Sherene Razack asserts, “The disavowal of conquest, genocide, slavery, and the exploitation of peoples of colour” that are so much a part of Canada’s paradoxically inclusive, yet snowy-white nationalism may well be considered “a quintessential feature of white settler mythologies.”19 While Canadians basked in the glow of Canada in Sochi, back home debates were underway over the decision of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights not to use the term genocide to describe the federal government’s treatment of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, and former students from Canada’s Indian residential schools were revealing details to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada of abuses perpetrated against them at the state-sanctioned schools.

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On the surface, the not-so-subtle drift of the “We Are Winter” campaign – like Canada itself – seems innocent enough, simply a statement of how place, landscape, and weather shape our identity. But who is this national we the ads speak for and to? And what are the metonymic associations with the glorified winter that we lay claim to? Dig beneath the snowy surface associations and each “We Are Winter” ad can be read as a poetic invocation of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius – intersecting concepts that have provided, and continue to provide, ideological and legislative justification for European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands. In the ads, Team Canada athletes heroically assert their mastery over the no-man’s-lands of Canada’s “We Are Winter” landscapes (see figure 7.1). The crunch of bobsledder Kaillie Humphries’s footsteps cuts through howling winds as she makes her way over an empty snowcrusted terrain accompanied by a gravelly voice-over that intones a stanza of Frederick George Scott’s “In the Winter Woods” – from the aptly named collection A Hymn of Empire: And Other Poems: With a meaning, strange and deep, As of visions seen in sleep. Something in my inmost thinking Tells me I am one with you.20 One with the land, one with winter. The camera zooms in for a closeup of the chillingly underdressed – no hat, coat, boots – Humphries gazing out over the barren snow-scape from behind the white glow of a #wearewinter hashtag. In a second ad, snowboarder Mark McMorris ascends a snowcovered, cloud-shrouded mountain accompanied by a voice-over reading a quatrain of Archibald Lampman’s “Winter Uplands”: The frost that stings like fire upon my cheek, The loneliness of this forsaken ground, The long white drift upon whose powdered peak I sit in the great silence as one bound.21 The ad closes with McMorris – wearing more weather-appropriate gear than Humphries – triumphantly atop his snowboard on the summit as, once again, the haunting glow of #wearewinter appears.

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As is the way with blizzards, the coc’s spectacular “We Are Winter” pageantry passed. But its temporality does not diminish its impact as a performance that contributes to the naturalization of an imagined Canadian nation grounded in a narrative of discovery of, and mastery over, an empty, forsaken land. There is nothing innocent or pure about this naturalized narrative of Canadian white-settler nationalism, or of the Olympics as one of the myriad performative mechanisms through which nationalist discourses are disseminated. Notably, of the trc’s ninety-four Calls to Action five call on the government to take reconciliatory action in the arena of sports, and four call directly for repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius at all governmental levels within Canada.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

The fatal flaw in this historic moment resides in the witnesses’ reception of the TRC investigation (and its accompanying activities) – in their failure to perceive that the “performance” of the TRC and the residential school “actors” was undertaken to effect Indigenous healing … Canadians are invited to play their part in the “drama” through active response that has been engineered and undertaken to effect redress. An undertaking of sympathetic waters is not enough. –Jill Carter22

Alongside the exalted and mythologized narratives associated with peacekeeping and multiculturalism, Canada markets its role as the first Northern nation to engage in a trc as further evidence of its position as a moral leader on the global stage. But unlike truth commissions throughout the Global South that came into being as a result of regime change and citizen pressure, Canada’s trc emerged out of litigation. Public disclosure of the systematic abuses perpetrated on Aboriginal students in residential schools began in the early 1990s when the first of what would become a proliferation of lawsuits by former residential school students was filed against the Canadian government and church groups.23 In 1990, a year after the first suit was filed, Chief Phil Fontaine, then Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, spoke publicly of the physical and sexual abuse he had experienced as a student in the residential school system. Breaking the taboo of silence surrounding the sexual abuse of men, Fontaine courageously disrupted a dominant code

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of hegemonic masculinity that demands disavowal of all forms of vulnerability, but especially those related to the violent (and “feminizing”) perpetration of sexual abuse.24 With his disclosure, Fontaine invited other survivors – men and women – to come forward and, in 1994, the Assembly of First Nations published Breaking the Silence, a report written by and for First Nations communities. During the same period, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was established as one of the first large-scale bodies to hear and document the testimonies of residential school survivors. In response to the growing number of lawsuits, the Canadian government negotiated the 2007 Indian Schools Settlement Agreement, which, in addition to establishing compensation “rates” for residential school survivors through the “Common Experience Payment” process, created a mandate and framework for the five-year-long trc that began June 2008.25 The “irruption of memory of residential schooling into Canada’s public spheres” has, as Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham argue, the status of what Ian Baucom calls a “truth-event”: “The ‘truth-event’ stands as a paradoxically ‘representational anomaly’: an anomaly because its appearance has been controlled, up to recently, such that it has seemed to form an exception to the rule of Canada’s vaunted tolerance, but at the same time it is representative in that residential schooling condenses in itself the truth of a whole colonial system.”26 One way the trc process reflects the paradox of this representational anomaly is in the different ways healing is framed. Within the context of a neoliberal world view, healing from loss or trauma is individualized and interiorized, mediated by experts through sanctioned institutional venues that are, as performance and critical memory scholar Allen Feldman asserts, “emplotted” with a reconciliatory script.27 Within most Indigenous epistemologies, on the other hand, healing is neither individualized nor prescriptively encoded. As is evident in the trc forums, healing is a socially situated process that incorporates meaning-making methodologies including ceremony, storytelling, song, dance, and art.28 Understanding healing as a collective and a political responsibility also helps to resist the trauma trope’s pathologizing and othering stereotypes. Within an Indigenous epistemology, as Jo-Ann Episkenew asserts, “Healing does not imply that Indigenous people are sick … Colonialism is sick; under its auspices and supported by its mythology, the colonizers have inflicted heinous wounds.”29 Taking healing outside the realm of the individual psyche or the institutionalized and privatized sphere of mental health

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professionals refuses the isolating effects of trauma discourse and the “structural forgetfulness” of a de-historicized past and a decontextualized present.30 However, the disavowal of Canada’s history of conquest, genocide, and colonialism is deeply ensconced within white-settler mythology. As Episkenew asserts, Canadian nationalism’s colonizing logic persists within the context of Canada’s trc through denial of the sickness of colonialism within Canada’s white-settler society: “Although Indigenous people understand their need to heal from colonial trauma, most settlers deny that their society is built on a sick foundation and, therefore, deny that it requires a cure.”31 Acknowledgement of Canada’s sick colonial history (and its ongoing condition) was not part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 Statement of Apology in which he framed the Indian residential schools system as an anomaly – “a sad chapter” – in Canada’s (and settler-Canadians’) otherwise amicable historical relationship with the Aboriginal peoples of this land. Aboriginal scholars and critics of the trc note that the de-historicization of Canada’s residential school abuses is possible only by bracketing off “land, treaty, and sovereignty issues from historical consciousness.”32 As Eva Mackey argues, the erasure of links between the Aboriginal peoples and land grabs means that white settlers are not required “to account for the ways that intersecting processes of colonial theft of land and cultural genocide are the foundations of the modern nation-state or to recognize that non-Aboriginal Canadians are all contemporary beneficiaries of this process.”33 Whereas truth commissions as public forums have historically been the purview of the Global South, “political apology,” Henderson and Wakeham argue, “has been the reconciliatory technology of choice of the North – the sphere of those civil societies which imagine themselves to be innocent of the types of human rights abuses that would necessitate investigative commissions often associated with problems such as genocide, apartheid, and dictatorships.”34 Canada’s trc functions as a somewhat hybrid model and one that is rife with paradox. While the Assembly of First Nations advocated for an apology, the Canadian government, with its legal and public relations teams, played an instrumental and instrumentalist role in shaping its rhetoric. And while the apology, the Indian Schools Settlement Agreement, and the trc were all products of a negotiated agreement that can be viewed as a pragmatic compromise by the Assembly, as Stó:lō First Nation scholar Dylan

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Robinson notes, it is a misconception that Canada’s trc is run by the Canadian government.35 The fact that Aboriginal communities organize trcs, Robinson argues, has been critical in shaping the means whereby intergenerational survivors and community members are invited to participate, and in the inclusion of a range of repertorial and artistic presentations that include “plays, songs, stories, art work.”36 In privileging modes of embodied redress and aesthetic expression the trc introduced a praxis model that challenged traditional modes of Canadian national performativity like Harper’s public relations pageantry of apology. In addition to inviting the embodied testimony of survivors, the trc put out an open call to artists, who were invited to submit works directly related to residential schools as well as to cultural oppression, resistance, cultural genocide, resilience, and restoration connected to the violence of settler colonialism.37 The mythology of white-settler nationalism and Westernized notions of healing and reconciliation all invoke the metaphor of closure as the primary measure of successful healing. What would it mean, instead, to think of “redress” as something in need of repetition, review, and refinement? The notion of rehearsal as an ongoing praxis resists the metaphor of closure that is invoked through the Western trauma trope and political apology. What I find most productive about the trc is the multiple legal, creative, and activist processes it has engendered, which situate redress not as a grand finale but as a multi-modal and durational praxis of decolonization. Despite its popularization as a discursive gesture, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang assert, “decolonization is not a metaphor.”38 Meaningful reconciliation demands more than sympathy. Decolonization and reconciliation necessitate active redistribution that “brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.”39 This kind of decolonization requires processes that facilitate the development of a collectively focused gaze that can see past the glare of white-settler Canadian notions of national innocence. I agree with those who argue that the shortcomings and limitations of the trc and the Canadian government’s deployment of a reconciliatory technology of apology are immense. I also believe (like Robinson) that the trc has been a crucial forum for both intergenerational community dialogue and for the production of a rich and varied living counter-memorial. I believe that the commission’s truth telling is not an end, but part of a

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larger journey that cannot be mapped by settler-Canadian concepts of reconciliation. A journey in which settler populations are called on not as sympathetic witnesses, but rather to adopt an “ethic of incommensurability” on the road to an unsettled future.40 Looked at through the lens of rehearsal as praxis, the trc has no ending, no cathartic closing night. It sets into motion all manner of performances – legal and aesthetic, institutional and pop cultural, formal and informal. Performances that refuse the hermetic seal of closure, the legal dictates of legislative bodies, the bracketing off of cultural harm from land grabs and treaty violations. Performances that act as vehicles for ongoing resistance. Performances that make demands beyond the reach of governmental discourses and reconciliatory frameworks. Performances that travel unexpected routes and traverse both geopolitical borders and generational timespans. Unsettling performances like Jeff Barnaby’s award-winning feature film Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). Since its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rhymes for Young Ghouls has garnered awards at film festivals across Canada, the United States, and Europe, and was shown at the trc’s March 2014 gathering in Edmonton.41 Though entirely unlike the blinding onslaught of Canada’s Winter Olympics media blizzard, Rhymes is generating its own impactful momentum. With snowballing appeal, Rhymes’s counter -incursion into the imaginary of Canadian and international audiences traversed the alternative film circuit (national and international) and in January 2014 made its theatrical debut at Toronto’s Cineplex Odeon Theatre at Yonge and Dundas. Since then Rhymes has been screened at mainstream cinemas throughout North America, and in November 2014 was picked up by the mainstream online media distributor Netflix, where it is available to over 37 million subscribers.42

The Art of Remembering: Rhymes for Young Ghouls

This is what brings my people together – the art of forgetfulness. – Aila, Rhymes for Young Ghouls

Set on the fictional Red Crow Mi’gMaq reserve of the 1970s, Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a quintessential Canadian ghost story. Unlike the peaceful and bucolic Canada of the coc’s and the cbc’s Sochi Olympics media blizzard, the Canada of Rhymes is rife with ghouls caught in maelstroms of violence – historical, institutional, and viscerally corporeal.

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Genre-blurring violence that traverses the borders of war-movie realism, film-noir hyperrealism, and graphic-novel mythical realism. Violence slowed, at times to a storyboard pace, and accompanied by a pragmatic “rules for survival” narration. Abject violence that erupts with blood, shit, and piss, and oozes with sound as fists, boots, and bats smash into soft flesh and hard bone. Binary-exploding violence, where the fantastic and the imaginary collide with the real. Violence that fires flares from the past to illuminate the present in its red-hot glow. Violence that exposes the bodies beneath the snow.43 As film critic Isabel Cupryn asserts, “The most shocking thing about Jeff Barnaby’s nightmare world … is that it’s real.”44 Barnaby establishes the realness that underpins Rhymes by opening the film, documentarystyle, with text from Duncan Campbell Scott’s 1921 amendment to Canada’s Indian Act that made it compulsory for Aboriginal children up to the age of fifteen to attend Indian residential schools and a crime punishable by imprisonment for parents or guardians of Aboriginal children not to send them there. With this opening, Barnaby refuses the containment of residential schooling within the confines of an anomalous truth event, and instead unleashes a “temporal drag” whereby past and present “inter(in)animate” one another.45 Through his compositional juxtaposition of traditional storytelling with a contemporary / graphic novel / visual lexicon, and of haunting mythical realism with a (fictionalized) historical narrative, Barnaby makes visible how time touches time. Exposing time’s sticky drag, he collapses Canadian nationalism’s all too common divide between ahistorical past and decontextualized present. From the film’s beginning, thirteen-year-old Aila, Rhymes’s protagonist, heroine, and sometimes narrator, informs us that time is not linear. Not only did she “age 1,000 years” the day her mother hanged herself and her father was taken to prison, she also talks to the dead. As Aila matter-of-factly continues her relationship with her dead mother and young Tyler – the orphan boy Aila’s mother accidentally ran over while drunk – she also navigates the living present with an artful pragmatism. Looming large as the “Kingdom of the Crow’s” hungry childdevouring wolf, St Dymphna’s residential school has an insatiable appetite that demands offerings, either of Mi’gMaq children, or of monthly under-the-table truancy-tax payments. Aila chooses the latter. To fund her freedom, she runs the family’s marijuana grow-op. An artist, like her mother, Aila applies her creative talents to all she does. As she rolls and hawks her honey-, cognac-, and formaldehyde-laced blunts

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at the weekly parties she and her Uncle Burner host, Aila bears witness to the art of forgetfulness that brings her people together. Aila is not a passive spectator sitting back to enjoy the show or waiting for cathartic release. For her, witnessing is dangerous work that requires resourcefulness and accountability. Aila is the transmitter of cultural memory, both within the story and beyond – as a narrator who speaks directly to Rhymes’s audiences. Unlike the trc’s testimonial forums, which, as Robinson notes, few non-Aboriginals attended, with Rhymes’s incursion into the mainstream cultural marketplace, Aila is called upon to communicate – to a mixed Aboriginal and nonAboriginal audience – the myriad ways the violence of the colonial past lives on in the present. The forgetfulness of Aila’s Red Crow community of “rez princes and princesses,” “drum-and-feather Indians,” and “broken rez-rats” is altogether different from the percepticidal forgetfulness of Canada’s Olympics’ white-out, or of Prime Minister Harper’s de-historicizing apology, or of feel-good Canadian white-settler nationalism. The forgetfulness that binds Aila’s people together is born of brutal, incessant, and institutionalized abjection delivered by Indian Agent Popper and his goon squad, and by St D’s ghoulishly faceless residential school priests and nuns. As Nicolas Chare (after Julia Kristeva) argues of Holocaust survivors, because memories of extreme abjection overwhelm language’s symbolic capacity, recollection threatens the self unless a language is found that can reach beyond the “semiotic excess” of the experience.46 Without a language or a forum to facilitate recollection of pervasive and violent abjection, forgetting becomes a defence against one’s annihilation. In Rhymes, art is a vehicle to transmit memory, and to pass on cultural stories and practices while remaining – when necessary – beneath the radar of Popper’s surveilling and violently colonizing gaze. It is a means to rehearse the kind of resistance that is unachievable in a single performance. Just as the trc provided residential school survivors and community members with a forum and a multi-modal testimonial approach, art provides Aila with a language through which to remember and communicate the semiotic excess of her experience and that of her community. Moreover, through its creative and pragmatic application to her role as the Red Crow reservation’s “weed-princess,” art provides her with the proceeds to pay the monthly truancy-tax for herself and her cronies. Donning the same skull-like gas mask she wears to protect herself from her toxic spray-can-art fumes, Aila purposefully avoids inhal-

Figure 7.2 Rhymes for Young Ghouls featuring Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs as Aila.

ing the mind-numbing product she sells, refusing its promise, however temporary, of a reprieve from memory (see figure 7.2). When Popper steals Aila’s drug-money/truancy-tax-funds, Rhymes transitions into a full-blown caper-heist-revenge (with a twist) mode. While hatching their plans to steal back their money, one of Aila’s crew asks, “Why stop at robbing him?” But Rhymes’s vengeance is not the stuff of Hollywood retribution flicks. Nor does it resemble the sadistic, brutal, and random acts of violence that Popper regularly inflicts on the residents of Red Crow. The vengeance that Aila and her accomplices seek is seasoned with a decidedly sardonic teen-aged (and Aboriginal) humour. Shit is their weapon of choice and they have no problems collecting gallons of the stuff – the Rez has no shortage of eager contributors. Dressed as “animal spirits” and ghouls, they execute their revenge caper on Halloween.47 With the help of Jujijj – who, like ghostly young Tyler, is Aila’s devoted young sidekick and a chimerical resident of St D’s – they break into the school and feed the shit into the pressurized water

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Figure 7.3 Rhymes for Young Ghouls featuring Shako Mattawa Jacobs as Jujijj.

system so that when Popper takes his nightly shower he is bathed in the excretions of those he so gleefully subjects to abject treatment.48 Just as Fontaine disrupted dominant gender codes when he publicly disclosed the physical and sexual abuse he was subjected to as a residential school student, Barnaby challenges the colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal women that are perpetrated through popular media. Aila is no Disneyfied Pocahontas. With Aila, Barnaby offers a model not only of powerful femininity but also of non-hegemonic masculinity. Barnaby explains his choice of Aila as Rhymes’s heroine in an interview with Muskrat Magazine: “It just made sense to me to have a young Native girl bring this institution of ugliness to its knees. It made sense to me because First Nations women are the language and cultural keepers, they are the epicenter of our matriarchal society.”49 A trick for going out into a blizzard is to tether oneself to what you can’t see but cannot afford to lose sight of. Rhymes’s mythical realism is grounded in a real history of a particular people, and in the real violence of the state as enacted through Canada’s Indian Act and the residential school system it sanctioned as part of its agenda of “cultural

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genocide.”50 Pitting Aila’s artful strength against the ugliness of Popper’s brittle and hegemonic masculinity (and the institutions it is constructed to uphold), Barnaby tethers her to the history of her family and her community, and to the living and dead who revere her. Aila’s connection to her people – of both past and future – is her salvation. When an enraged Popper endeavours to reassert his domination by raping Aila, young Jujijj – a representative of the generation of the future – shoots him in a brain-spattering moment that explodes the underbelly of settler nationalism (see figure 7.3). Aila’s and Jujijj’s capacity for resistance is not accidental. It is born of Aila’s sustained engagement with – and her mentorship of Jujijj in – a creative praxis of resistance to the cultural genocide of white settler nationalism, its institutions, and its violent hegemonic masculinity. Using art as a storytelling medium, Aila tells Jujijj the stories she learned from her mother and Ceres (the female elder who runs Aila’s grow-op). With these stories, Aila helps to tether Jujijj to the culture that St D’s and its hungry wolves are set on destroying. Unlike archived history, oral history is a process of repeating and one that when performed in conditions of institutional sanction, demands creativity, inventiveness, and the ability to take risks. Through her commitment to artful resistance and personal and cultural survival, Aila models productive risk-taking. Like Aila, Jujijj is no passive spectator. To hear Aila’s stories he must repeatedly escape from St D’s. Through his commitment to Aila and to learning about his culture, he develops a range of capacities. He is watchful, he learns the routines of his residential school captors, he studies the school’s dark crevices, and he provides Aila and her cohort with the information they need to pull off their caper. Taking a step back from the film itself, I should note that Barnaby’s capacity to deliver a narrative that refuses dominant notions of Canadian settler nationalism and the violence of hegemonic masculinity is also no accident. Like Aila, Barnaby has tethered himself to his community and has become a bearer of a First Nations masculinity that resists the violence of hegemonic masculinity. Also like his young protagonist, Barnaby has inherited an arts-based praxis that provides him with a vehicle for the continuous rehearsal (via skilfully executed filmic performances) of resistance.51 Rehearsal that provides Aboriginal audiences with creative models for resistance, and non-Aboriginal audience members with the unsettling opportunity to build capacities for unbecoming attachments to an imagined nation.

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Conclusion: Teetering on the Precipice of Settler Colonialism’s Incommensurability The first time I saw Rhymes during its run was on a night when Barnaby and some of the film’s actors were doing a post-show Q&A. From what I could tell, the audience was predominantly Aboriginal, many of them family and friends of the cast. At the moment of Popper’s explosive demise at the hands of Jujijj – Aila’s doe-eyed guardian angel – the theatre erupted in celebration. Evil was slain! I felt a disorienting range of emotions. First came the relief that I would not have to sit through yet another eroticized rape scene that was justified by a plot trajectory and would end in a cathartic hyper-masculine display of righteous vengeance. Then came an eerie shock at the confrontation: the explosion of blood and brains on the screen, innocent Jujijj thrown to the ground by the shotgun’s force, and the celebration of Rhymes’s cinematic performance of Aboriginal agency. Despite my relief that Popper was stopped and my desire to join the celebration, I could not. More than a character unto himself, Popper was an allegorical stand-in for the all-too-real violence of settler colonialism – past and present – that lies buried beneath the snowy shroud of popularized narratives of Canadian nationalism. The blizzard tales of my youth never spoke of malice. There was only the storm, which though dangerous, like the “We Are Winter” whiteouts of Canada in Sochi, was also a signifier for an imagined shared Canadian identity. Filled with stories of selfless camaraderie, the blizzard tales of my childhood made no mention of the bodies that lay beneath the snow. As Dylan Robinson cautions, too often settler Canadians conflate their audience experience of shared affect with the positive affect of reconciliation. I believe my desire to join in the celebration was a longing for the familiar catharsis of reconciliatory affect. But as Robinson asserts, the shared affective experience generated through performance “may have strikingly different efficacies for Indigenous and settler audience members.”52 For me as a white non-Aboriginal Canadian, the moment of Popper’s explosive annihilation and the eruptive celebration that came in its wake produced a disorienting rupture. Unlike the forgetful narratives of Canadian settler nationalism, Popper’s obliteration set off an implosion that rendered the violence of structural forgetfulness viscerally palpable. For me, it was an encounter with the incommensurability of innocence and settler nationalism. It wasn’t a thought encounter, it was an affective moment of unbecoming, of having my surreptitiously enmeshed attachment to innocence suddenly unloosed.

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In some ways, the trc performs for settler Canadians a comforting commensurability. Apology, truth, reconciliation – are these not precisely the values extoled by dominant narratives of Canadian nationalism? But to presume that the dominance of settler nationalist narratives constitutes the trc could also be considered a colonizing gesture, one that denies the sovereignty of indigenous communities engaged in the trc process. Looking at the trc, not as a cathartic performance of national reconciliation, but rather as a rehearsal for an ongoing decolonization resists setter-nationalism’s demand for the comfortable commensurability of reconciliatory affect. Though Sochi 2014 is long past, there is little reprieve from the spectacles of national and international public relations performances of Canadian white-settler nationalism. With their flag-bearing and anthem-singing invocations of nationalism, sporting events – from World Cups, PanAm Games, and Olympics to the more seasonal sports, like baseball, hockey, football – are transformed into nationalist celebrations. As performances of redress, on the other hand, the trc and Rhymes produce fissures, breaks in the percepticidal storms of Canadian nationalism that expose fictive innocence of “our” imagined nation. The trc and Rhymes produce spaces of unsettlement, spaces that resist closure or completion, spaces that generate openings and invite participation in an ongoing labour of recall and reparation. In contrast to the celebratory zeal of Canada-the-good nationalism, or the foreclosing catharsis of reconciliation, rehearsal as a praxis of redress offers an epistemological approach for increasing our abilities to teeter on the precipice of settler colonialism’s incommensurability.

n o te s 1 Foxall, “Geopolitics,” 623. 2 I’m drawing on Diana Taylor’s theorization in Disappearing Acts of percepticide as a process in which a national population blinds itself to state violence. 3 The “Own the Podium” campaign was launched in 2004 after Canada was awarded the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. In February 2004 the federal government passed a budget that gave the “Own the Podium” campaign $23 million per year for five years. In 2010 it awarded an additional $6 million per year to support team sports. 4 Krashinsky, “Canadian Olympic Committee.” 5 Filewod, Performing Canada. 6 Alvarez, Kovacs, and Ortuzar, “Performance and Human Rights,” 5.

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7 Findlay, “Redress Rehearsals,” 219. 8 I am using the term white-settler Canadian nationalism to explicitly mark Canada’s settler-colonial origins – with its ongoing differential distribution of both privileges and violent effects – and the continuing primacy of whiteness within dominant constructions of the Canadian nation. Throughout this article, regardless of my terminology – white-settler Canadian nationalism, settler nationalism, Canadian nationalism – the reader should assume I am speaking of Canada as a settler colonial nation that continues to operate through institutionalized mechanisms of white privilege. 9 Carter, “Discarding Sympathy,” 417. 10 Findlay, “Redress Rehearsals,” 218. Emphasis in original. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 217. 13 Vosters, “Good Mourning Canada?,” 24. 14 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “Calls to Action,” 5. 15 Findlay, “Redress Rehearsals,” 224. 16 The most obvious act of selflessness was that of speed skater Gilmore Junio who (after being asked to do so by his coach) gave his spot in the 1,000 metre race to fellow Canadian Denny Morrison. While I don’t wish to dispute the validity of Junio’s personal sacrifice, the fact that Junio became a media sensation reflects not only the power of the narrative of Canadian selflessness, but also how narratives of Canadian goodness are used to promote nationalism’s other self-serving interests. 17 Adese, “Colluding with the Enemy?” Using Vancouver 2010 as her point of departure, Adese does a critical reading of the development of Indigenous “involvement” in Olympic ceremonies during the three Olympics hosted by Canadian cities – the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic closing ceremony, the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympic opening ceremony, and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic opening ceremony. 18 Wickenheiser, “Flag-Bearer Hayley Wickenheiser on qtv.” I watched this interview on cbc’s website before its purge of Ghomeshi from publicly accessible archives. While beyond the scope of this article, it is disturbing to note that Ghomeshi’s role in the Canadian imaginary as a signifier of Canadian multicultural and egalitarian value – in concert with the immense success he brought to Q – undoubtedly contributed to the production of a collective blinding to Ghomeshi’s predatory sexual behaviours. Just as Canadians’ quickness to locate homophobia and racism as something that happens elsewhere contributes to disavowal of homophobia and racism within Canada, I think it behooves us to consider the extent to which Canadians’ attachment

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to a national mythology of goodness blinds us to the prevalence of day-to-day sexism, and its eruptions into acts of violent sexual assault. Razack, “Introduction,” 2. Canadian Olympic Team. “#WeAreWinter: Kallie Humphries.” Canadian Olympic Team. “#WeAreWinter: Mark McMorris.” Carter, “Discarding Sympathy,” 417n10. Emphasis in original. Henderson and Wakeham, “Colonial Reckoning,” 9. As Andrea Smith (among others) points out, colonization’s genocidal policies against Indigenous communities have always been asserted “through sexual violence and the through imposition of European [hetero-patriarchal] gender relationships on native communities.” Smith, Conquest, 139. Also see Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” for a critical analysis of the lack of any human rights instruments for discussing sexual violence perpetrated against men. Men belonging to at-risk subgroups or otherized populations are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “Schedule ‘N,’” 11. The trc was extended for one year and its final gathering was held in Ottawa in June 2015. Information about the Common Experience Payment process and copies of the mandate can be found on the trc’s website. Henderson and Wakeham, “Colonial Reckoning,” 5. Feldman, “Memory Theatres,” 170. In his analysis of South Africa’s trc, Feldman critically examines the discursive structures that place biographical narratives of violence within the “redressive and curative trajectory” of human rights frameworks. Feldman argues that, under the umbrella of a popularized Western trauma trope, truth commission testimonies become “emplotted” with “prescriptive expectations … to produce healing, trauma alleviation, justice, and collective catharsis.” Archibald, Final Report, 2. These testimonial and healing frameworks are not confined to trc forums. In 1998, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was established to “address the legacy of physical and sexual abuse in the residential school system” and has supported and documented approaches to healing designed and delivered by and for Aboriginal peoples “in cities and small towns, on reserves and in rural, remote and isolated communities.” Qtd. in Henderson and Wakeham, “Colonial Reckoning,” 16. Feldman, “Memory Theatres,” 172. Qtd. in Henderson and Wakeham, “Colonial Reckoning,” 16. Henderson and Wakeham, Reconciling Canada, 19. Mackey, “Apologizers’ Apology,” 50. Henderson and Wakeham, “Colonial Reckoning,” 11–12.

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35 Robinson’s comments here are taken from “Conversatorio 2: Truth and Reconciliation,” held on 28 February 2014 as part of panamerican routes/ rutus panamericanas (rutus) international multiarts festival on human rights. rutus took place at Toronto’s Daniels Spectrum and was produced by Aluna Theatre in partnership with Native Earth Performing Arts. 36 Robinson, “Conversatorio 2.” 37 See Dewar and Goto, West Coast Line #74 for an excellent series of articles by artists, curators, and cultural thinkers discussing how artists can contribute an ongoing practice of reconciliation in Canada. 38 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization.” 39 Ibid., 1. 40 Ibid., 35. 41 Rhymes for Young Ghouls’s growing list of awards include the TriBeCa Creative Promise Award (2012); the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Best Canadian First Feature (2013); the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award (2014); the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director of a Canadian Film (2014); and the American Indian Film Festival’s best director – Jeff Barnaby – and best actor – Glen Gould (2014). 42 Prospector Films, “Rhymes.” 43 Blood on the Snow (2002), an installation by Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore, brilliantly unsettles the association of snow with Canada’s purified settler identity. A white chair sits at the centre of the installation’s large white quilted blanket. The blood that seeps down the chair makes visible not only the violence of colonialism, but also the coldness of white indifference. 44 Cupryn, “Rhymes.” 45 Rebecca Schneider brings together Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of “temporal drag” with Fred Moten’s notion of inter-inanimation to suggest performance as “a powerful tool for cross- or intra-temporal negotiation, even (perhaps) interaction or inter(in)animation of one time with another time.” Schneider, Performing Remains, 14, 30–1. 46 Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, 107. 47 Barnaby brilliantly deploys Halloween not only as effective aesthetic and plot devices, but also as a cipher for what Joseph Roach has theorized as the uncanny process of surrogation – through which cultural (living) memory is performatively transmitted across time, space, and identity by communities who are confronted with circumstances in which performing themselves through their reportorial practices was prohibited. Barnaby hijacks Halloween’s commodified and hollow spectacle of spirit-evocation – highly popularized throughout North America – and restores to it some of its more transgressive

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meaning as a time in the year when the veil between the living and the dead is believed to be thinnest. The theme of humiliation as vengeance (and shit as its vehicle) is reminiscent of a scene in Tate Taylor’s 2011 film The Help, where Milly serves a shitlaced chocolate pie to her former employer – the white-racist Hilly – after Hilly spreads lies about Minny’s thievery so that no one else will hire her. DaCosta, “Interview.” Throughout the trc hearings, debates over the use and/or non-use of the term cultural genocide became part public discourse. These debates intensified with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision not to use the term genocide to describe Canadian governmental policies toward Aboriginals. Two days prior to the museum’s opening, A Tribe Called Red withdrew from the opening festivities after issuing a public statement protesting the “museum’s misrepresentation and downplay of the genocide that was experienced by Indigenous people in Canada by refusing to name it genocide.” cbcnews, “Tribe Called Red.” Despite Canada’s official stance on the use of the term genocide, with its final report the trc describes the more than 100 years of Canada’s Aboriginal policies (of which the “establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element”) as “cultural genocide.” cbcnews, “Truth and Reconciliation.” Barnaby credits filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin with his introduction to filmmaking, when Obomsawin visited his reserve of Listuguj to make Incident at Restigouche (1984), a documentary film about the violent raids perpetrated by the Quebec Provincial Police on the peoples of Listuguj over fishing rights. Robinson, “Feeling Reconciliation,” 278.

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Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection: Listening to Anger, Being Idle No More dyl an robi ns on Dear Editor, This was bullying on an epic scale: On Dec. 23, the south mall of Park Royal Shopping Centre was closed down by a terrifying mob of natives waving banners. –Lin Rockwell, letter to the editor, North Shore News

This chapter brings together two scenes of anger. The first is academic: a conference I attended. The second scene is of protest. Here I consider three Idle No More gatherings in the winter of 2012, one of which I took part in, and two of which I witnessed remotely through friends’ and colleagues’ video and writing on social media. In bringing these two scenes together, my aim is to examine the reception and efficacies of anger expressed by Indigenous artists and academics. In doing so, I enter into the precarious space of speaking and writing about experiences of my own and others’ anger in order to affirm the work of Indigenous colleagues, and to challenge those who dismiss Indigenous anger as mere “bitterness.” When I was invited to contribute something to this collection on performance studies in Canada, I imagined I might focus on the political efficacy of aesthetic strategies of performance employed by those who participated in Idle No More. The more I wrote, however, the more conflicted I felt about mining Idle No More gatherings for what we might call their “performance resources.” My writing began to bend the singular experience of this activism toward its usefulness for the thing called “performance studies in Canada.” This, in turn, led me to a question that underpins the analytical stakes of the current chapter and to a larger degree the relationship between performance studies methodologies and Indigenous performance: to what degree does performance studies efface a colonial enterprise in its desire to understand,

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and perhaps in the process normalize, Indigenous cultural practice as “performance first”?1 Formulated in another way, we might ask what makes the aesthetics of performance (and the politics these aesthetics carry or represent) the primary point of analysis, considering the fact of what I call Indigenous traditions’ functional ontologies. Though they are often written about as primarily aesthetic (in performance studies, art history, musicology, and ethnomusicology), our traditions have always held functional significance for what they “do” as politics, acts of history, and law-making. For Pacific Northwest First Nations in particular, our songs can act as the equivalent to legal expressions of land title, enact forms of diplomacy between nations, and convey knowledge about the land; they are living documents of our history, affirm our own and other nations’ sovereignty, and provide healing.2 As such, not only do these songs have an aesthetic aspect, they also operate similarly to what J.L. Austin calls speech acts, or what we might instead call “song acts” and “dance acts.”3 They do what they sing. This is not to say that all songs by Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples function as forms of law and healing; such efficacy must be determined case by case, or song by song. It is also not to say that all song-actions achieve those aims on their own, by merely being sung. Like Austin’s speech acts, there are numerous factors at play that result in the “felicitousness” of “song acts.”4 To assert the functional nature of Indigenous song is to emphasize its more-thanaesthetic impact upon the lands that Indigenous peoples are caretakers of, and its capacity to have an effect upon our relations, both kin and other-than-human.5 This chapter thus seeks to refuse using Idle No More as a resource for enriching the discourse of performance studies. More specifically, and albeit paradoxically, I hope this contribution resists two particular forms of contribution. First, it aims to resist an inclusionary call to enrich the thing we might call “Canadian performance studies” to the extent that such field-building co-opts Indigenous content as one fragment of a discursive mosaic. Second, it resists the tendency to disassociate our dances, songs, oratory, and regalia from their ontological significance as living, sensate, and what I am here calling their “instrumental” capacities to do things in the world. Writing that isolates and atomizes the performative elements of Indigenous cultural practices risks perpetuating a discursive sanitization that treats Indigenous culture as primarily a subject of beauty, or aesthetic resource. In resisting such atomizing forms of analysis I follow musicologist Suzanne Cusick, for whom formal and

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structural music analysis can be akin to “the dismemberment of music’s body into the categories ‘form,’ ‘melody,’ ‘rhythm,’ [and] harmony,’” that she sees as perpetuating a kind of violence upon music’s “body.”6 While Cusick focuses upon the violence that analysis inflicts upon music’s body, I would emphasize a similar connection to the violence of mining Indigenous art and culture in order to enrich discourses and fields that are less concerned with the work that such writing does for Indigenous peoples. There is a similarity between the increasing resource extraction in our territories in order to stabilize the Canadian economy, and the efforts of performance studies to extract Indigenous traditions in order to support a diverse or multicultural approach that recognizes Indigenous peoples upon the terms of their contributions to the state. While multicultural values continue to situate First Peoples front and centre in the Canadian national imaginary, and as central to the history of Canada, such initiatives raise the profile of First Peoples’ cultural contributions to the state only to undercut their sovereign status first and foremost as the sui generis expressions of First Peoples. In response to this context, it is imperative to propose methodologies for Indigenous performance studies that resonate with First Peoples’ political and social aims and accomplishments. Consequently, this chapter examines Idle No More activism not for what it demonstrates about performance or aesthetics, but to better understand strategies that may in some small way help Indigenous artists, activists, and academics resist the destruction of Indigenous lands. In focusing on three Idle No More gatherings in Vancouver and Victoria, bc, I illustrate how sensory and affective politics are materialized in public space. The first of these gatherings is a round dance in the atrium of Victoria’s Bay Centre Mall that I participated in. The second is a gathering at the Park Royal Mall (leased to Larco Investments Ltd. by the Skwxwú7mesh Nation)7 in North Vancouver, where those who gathered participated in slahal, a handgame played by many Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest. My focus here is a letter to the editor in the North Shore News sent by a concerned shop owner at Park Royal Mall regarding the fear and anger she felt at this event. The third gathering is the act of copper-breaking led by ‘Namgis hereditary chief Beau Dick, outside the Victoria Legislature. This event was aligned with the Idle No More movement, but also served as the conclusion of a cross-Island walk to protest salmon farming practices on the West Coast of Canada. Paying particular attention to the ways in which anger mixed in these events with the aesthetics of play and other affects (love, enchantment, fear, and

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shame), I will argue that these examples of round dancing, slahal, and breaking copper do not as much envision new aesthetic forms of activism as they affirm Indigenous peoples’ connection and sense of belonging through Indigenous public assembly, both in public spaces and publicfeeling private spaces, such as the mall.

Angry Indians To set the stage for examining these examples of Indigenous anger, I begin with an anecdote. In 2013 I participated in a conference on Indigenous arts that included a large number of Indigenous artists and scholars from across the globe.8 Following one of the keynote presentations on a film about an Indigenous community, a member of that community stood up to voice her discomfort with the presentation. She was concerned, in particular, that the keynote speaker had failed to accurately convey the ambivalence some residents of the community, including herself, have felt about the portrayal of their successes and struggles. Throughout her response her voice quivered upon the threshold of containing her anger. The following day, a second keynote presented on the topic of repatriation. Following this keynote another Indigenous conference participant asked the keynote presenter, along with the wider audience, why after all these years she felt as if she were still “under the microscope.” For me and other participants, being “under the microscope” signalled a shared feeling of alienation with both the format and language of the gathering. As with many academic conferences, this particular conference assumed a standard format for presentation and discussion, one in which the audience was seated in rows, as a speaker read a paper from a podium, with PowerPoint slideshow behind. Yet this participant, to my mind, was also pointing toward more than the conference structure – she was speaking about the normative language of academic conference presentation. Such language, for Indigenous peoples, can often come across as “anthropological,” a more distanced language for “speaking about” a subject rather than speaking in relationship with a subject.9 Indigenous relationalities of knowledge are still often avoided in academic contexts of conference presentation.10 What are the stakes for holding and caring for this knowledge? How did you come by the knowledge, and what is your responsibility to those who shared it with you? Such questions are less frequently asked outside of Indigenous-centred gatherings.11 As another participant expressed of the conference ex-

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perience: “We were, in most of the papers, the object of discussion. When those objects became subjects that spoke back, that’s when the normative language and traditional format of the conference really set up an oppressive us/them opposition. It was about us but not for us.”12 The traditional conference format presupposes its efficacious relationship to knowledge delivery. It is a format where a largely unidirectional flow of knowledge is “deposited” from presenter to listener, with minimal interaction other than a short question period following the presentation.13 Indigenous scholars have been disciplined in a variety of formats for the dissemination of scholarship and have learned to inhabit them as second nature, as I am doing now in this chapter.14 This is not to say that such formats are not of use to us, but they are merely one format of many in which we might share our knowledge with one another. Despite a multiplicity of nation- and community-specific forms of knowledge sharing, the standardized form of the academic conference continues to limit other forms of knowledge sharing and intergenerational interaction. The keynotes and moderators responded to these critiques by Indigenous conference participants with grace, taking more time than was allotted to discuss the important issues that were raised. In one case, a keynote presenter suggested that the conference format be adjusted to include an additional session: a circle where conference participants could debrief and have further dialogue about these concerns. While this suggestion was unfortunately not implemented inside the institutional space, the issues were nonetheless addressed between Indigenous participants outside of the conference space. These additional conversations took place as part of what Métis scholar David Garneau calls “irreconcilable spaces of Aboriginality,” sovereign spaces determined by Indigenous participants.15 While the post-keynote responses from Indigenous artists and scholars featured the most prominent expressions of anger, these moments were not isolated. Several other Indigenous scholars and artists raised their voices in solidarity during other panel sessions, noting a lack of Indigenous methodologies and critical perspectives, while still others (both Indigenous and settler participants) questioned the legitimacy of asking that a conference could be something other than what it was intended to be, to accommodate those who were not familiar with, or did not value, the format. In one instance an Indigenous participant reminded everyone of the privilege we must recognize to even be having these conversations amongst Indigenous colleagues from across the globe.16 While

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the anger expressed through several critical interventions made by Indigenous participants in some cases shifted the conversation into productive reconsiderations of Indigenous methodologies and scholar– artist–community relationships, one particular response stood out. “I know the backstory here,” a senior colleague said to me privately. “That person is just upset they didn’t have one of their proposals accepted.” “Just upset.” “Just angry.” “Just.” By re-narrating the artist’s anger as un-justified – as mere bitterness – this scholar participated in a much larger discourse connected to the pathologizing of negative affect termed resentment, or ressentiment by Nietzsche.17 However, as Glen Coulthard notes, while “resentment is often cast as the inability to come to grips with history [and] indicates an inability to let go … Embracing one’s resentment is not only an entirely defendable position, but actually a sign of our critical consciousness, of our sense of justice and injustice, and of our awareness of, and unwillingness to reconcile ourselves with the structural and symbolic violence that is still very much a part of our lives. Of course we should resent colonialism, as well as those people and institutions who are willfully complicit in its ongoing reproduction.”18 As Coulthard’s work shows, resentment mischaracterized as a racialized attachment to “mere bitterness” is in fact an expression of legitimate concern, here pathologized for the register of its expression. The marginalization of negative affect is especially familiar to Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists who stand up to express our anger at the ongoing lack of government accountability to nation-tonation negotiation, exploitation of our lands, and marginalization of issues such as the exorbitant number of murdered and missing Aboriginal women and girls in Canada. We are the twenty-first century’s “angry Indians” – cousins to the “melancholic migrant” and “feminist killjoy”19 in our unwillingness to let go of less-than-palatable cultural difference in order to participate as proper subjects of both the nation state and academic systems. To express grievance against injustice, whether misrepresentation or exploitation, is to court dismissal as being “just angry” and “unjustly angry.” This accusation of unjust anger obviates the recipient of the anger from being held accountable to the claim of injustice and anger expressed. The speaker’s claim is delegitimized by his or her angry response recognized as a compromise to the capacity for deliberate, rational thought.

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In Canada’s current climate of reconciliation, such anger finds itself further marginalized by the prevailing narrative (and at times imperative) to “move beyond,” “let go,” and “get over” one’s anger. As a member of the public who witnessed the work that took place at Truth and Reconciliation Commission gatherings over the trc’s five-year process, I have asserted to my own communities (Indigenous, academic, and artistic) the important need to resist this narrative and refuse those invitations and demands for reconciliation to take the form of mere friendship-formation, and forms of getting along better.20 I said as much in my own presentation at the very same conference that day. However, my experience of this conference in which anger was heard as “unjust” also gives me pause for thought regarding how the expression of injustice has efficacy in other settings. I have described these expressions of anger in considerable detail, not simply to illustrate the continued marginalization of Indigenous anger in academic settings, but for another reason. I have recounted this experience in order to demonstrate how, despite the necessity of raising our voices in anger to oppose continuing injustice, racism, and abuse, the expression of such anger invalidates the speaker through the perception of being unjustifiably resentful. What in part aids in this categorization of unjustifiable resentment is the mis-recognition of anger as a singular emotional state rather than a mobile affective intensity. Anger, in many instances, is not an affect felt with subtlety. For this reason, some may prefer to understand anger not as an affect at all, but as an emotion.21 And yet, despite its seemingly unambiguous appearance, anger can and does result in many expressions that might themselves be far from angry, as is the case in many Idle No More gatherings.

Love … in the Mall

There are round dances by the dollar stores. There are drums drowning out muzak in shopping malls. There are eagle feathers upstaging the fake Santas. –Naomi Klein, “As Chief Spence Starves”

In response to the lack of nation-to-nation consultation in the Canadian government’s passing of laws that significantly affected the lives of First Peoples – and specifically Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s omnibus Bill C-45 that removed protections for waterways under the Navigable Waters Protection Act – Idle No More spread rapidly across Canada and the United States during the winter of 2012. Yet although Bill C-45

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catalyzed the Idle No More movement, the actions that took place across the country as part of Idle No More should be understood as part of the much larger assertion of Indigenous sovereignty through Indigenous political structures. Importantly, music, sound, and dance in Idle No More gatherings were not simply the media by which political messages were conveyed, but performative forms of politics in and of themselves. They continued Indigenous political forms that take place through song and dance, and did so in public settings.22 A significant number of Idle No More events disrupted the narrative of First Peoples political action as irrational terrorism,23 or as “just anger” without just cause, by complicating what the public might understand to be the genre of protest. Two examples of Idle No More gatherings in Victoria and North Vancouver, bc, demonstrate how such protest re-channelled our anger at ongoing injustice through aesthetic and Indigenous cultural strategies that disrupted the dismissal of protesters as being “just angry.” Through these strategies, Idle No More gatherings decoupled the essentialized object-state dyad of protest and anger, challenging spectators to move beyond the recognition of protest as a single-state affective experience. The work of Jane Bennett is useful here in asking how Idle No More recontextualized protest as a form of “enchanted activism” that publicly affirmed Indigenous cultural survivance, while catching the attention and inviting the participation of the settler Canadian public. At first glance, the words enchantment and activism seem awkward partners. While enchanted connotes a kind of fantastical world outside of the everyday, activism concerns the commitment to engaging with and potentially improving the everyday existence of disempowered communities. Yet I would suggest that in these terms’ explicitly awkward union, they represent the very ambiguity at the heart of Idle No More’s affective capacity to dismiss dismissal. In different ways these gatherings shifted the ontology of protest through Indigenous forms of “doing sovereignty.” In doing so, Idle No More gatherings not only disrupted the normative negative assumptions that settler Canadian spectators may associate with protest, but also reaffirmed the vital possibility of public assembly among Indigenous participants, which in turn has sustained our energies in agitating for further change.24 My first opportunity to participate in Idle No More was at the Bay Centre Mall in Victoria, bc. Just before entering the mall with a friend, a concerned citizen rode by us on her bike, saying, “Didn’t you read the

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signs? They say ‘no drums in the mall’!” Although we had not been carrying drums, two women in front of us carried theirs with them. There was some irony in this prohibition of drums, as if censoring a nuisance or hazard, but perhaps more in the strange enforcement of the rule by the passing cyclist. Once we entered the mall we found ourselves in the midst of singers, dancers, and curious onlookers. Like many of the Idle No More gatherings, participants filled the mall’s central atrium in a circle surrounding a central group of singers and drummers. Lekwungen, Songhees, Nuu-cha-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, Cowichan, those from other coastal nations, and from nations much further away gathered in the atrium that day, our voices at times singing over, and at other times intermingling with Christmas classics. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Let It Snow” played alongside the “Women’s Warrior Song”; “Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer” joined with the heartbeat of the drum. As we sang and round danced, settler Canadian participants joined in a circle that wound its way around the nearly one hundred people who had gathered in the mall. Dancers smiled and joined hands, and in doing so blocked the entrances to stores, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes purposely. To describe the material circumstances of this gathering is much easier than to describe what it felt like to participate in it. Against my lingering annoyance from the concerned citizen’s prohibition of drums, a sense of hopefulness and “fullness” was amplified – our exuberance occupying this corporate space. There were no victims appealing to the state, only strength. In this in-between space of mixed sensation, my experience was as close to the definition of affect as I can imagine, in the sense that a single emotion cannot describe the fluid movement and overlapping of intensities experienced. Anishinaabe writer Leanne Simpson describes her own experience of an Idle No More round dance to Naomi Klein as one of joy: leanne: When people started round dancing all over the turtle’s back in December and January, it made me insanely happy. Watching the transformative nature of those acts, made me realize that it’s the embodiment, we have to embody the transformation. naomi: What did it feel like to you when it was happening? leanne: Love. On an emotional, a physical level, on a spiritual level. Yeah, it was love. It was an intimate, deep love. Like the love that I have for my children or the love that I have for the

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land. It was that kind of authentic, not romantic kind of fleeting love. It was a grounded love. naomi: And it can even be felt in a shopping mall. leanne: Even in a shopping mall.25 Simpson’s description is notable for how affective experience interrupts normative representational operations of perception and judgment. Specifically, these Indigenous forms that remake activism (rather than simply inflecting it) through round dances and slahal, have the potential to interrupt the normative perception of protest as what is based upon anger and fractious politics. The round dance itself, and particularly in the celebratory Christmas space of a mall, issues an invitation for those who are present to join, and hails the participation of non-Indigenous spectators. In doing so, it recuperates the settler imaginary of protest as the result of “angry Indians” and consequently disrupts the ability to categorize and judge activism as the purview of “unhappy Others.” This is to say, while we may still be angry, we are also asking you to dance. Traditionally, the form of round dancing itself is an invitation extended with love. “After all,” notes ethnomusicologist Elyse Carter Vosen, “round dance songs are courting songs, with all of the vulnerabilities those entail.”26 The strangeness of this mix between protest and play, between anger and love, forms part of the aesthetic experience that Bennett calls enchantment. As Bennett notes, “To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday … [E]nchantment involves, in the first instance, a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage. Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more uncanny feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition.”27 It is of course impossible to ascertain the individual experiences of the majority of Christmas shoppers who encountered such an unexpected event in the mall, and to insist that such an encounter was consistently one of enchantment. Perhaps some encountered the gathering with confusion, or merely amusement, an experience that Bennett contrasts with enchantment as “an affective state that shares a certain pleasurableness with enchantment but lacks its disturbing dimension.” Unlike amusement, however, Bennett asserts that enchantment works

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“by slowing down or speeding up the usual tempo of something … The differential in tempo delights but also unsettles. In contrast, amusement is too smooth a feeling to admit wonder and surprise, too contented for critical thinking to emerge as an aftereffect.”28 Bennett’s emphasis on amusement’s smoothness prompts a consideration of the “smooth” space of the mall at Christmastime: Christmas shoppers celebrating the season with Starbucks gingerbread lattes in hand, listening to the ubiquitous Christmas Muzak, passing by babies on the laps of Mr and Mrs Claus. Mall experience is nothing if not a smoothly regulated space of sensory abundance and consumption. That day, as we gathered for Idle No More, we were also celebrants, gathering to celebrate the vibrancy of Indigenous political sovereignty alongside the saturated space of Christmas sensoria. In this mall, our voices and drums remixed Christmas tunes as we sang. The result was an unsettling and pleasurable intermingling of music that disrupted the feelgood atmosphere of the mall: our remix slowed the business as usual tempo of Christmas capitalism. Indeed, this slowing of Christmas shopping was doubly effected through shoppers’ negotiation of dancing bodies en route to the Body Shop, combining the timbral and rhythmic cultural specificity of our drums and voices with the crooning of Bing Crosby. The strangeness and play of these shopping/dancing bodies, these voices of survivance/Christmas nostalgia, and visuals of defiance/ advertisement formed a rough aggregate, irreconciled. Not all Idle No More gatherings were held in malls, however. Nor did all gatherings ask settler participants to join together in action. Following the Bay Centre Mall round dance, we proceeded to the more traditional space of protest in Victoria – the provincial legislative buildings. Yet even here, enchantment disrupted protest’s form. Amongst the traditional protest signs was what could only be described as a gingerbread protest piece: a bc coastline complete with a gingerbread Enbridge pipeline, and ships advertising the sale of Canada on a “Harper Realty” sign stating “all of Canada – for sale – call 1-800 Sell out.” A smaller version of Ligwildaʼxw artist Sonny Assu’s artwork Enjoy Coast Salish Territory, which adapts the Coca-Cola design, adorned the homemade gingerbread Big House. In front of the Big House sits a pretzel-made salmonsmoking rack, with a single salmon atop (represented by a bent jujube). Like the remixed Christmas songs, here was yet another holiday ritual reworked. Such representation brings the realm of protest further into the realm of gastronomic play, not to mention the possibility for a feast

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where we might proceed to dismantle and consume our adversaries’ vessels of resource extraction, Godzilla-style. If such gatherings refuse settler ontologies of protest in favour or Indigenous forms of song, and dance as “enchanted” structures, we might further ask what purpose such enchantment serves. Following Bennett, we might understand enchantment’s efficacy operating through a form of connection. Bennett describes enchantment as: a feeling of being connected in an affirmative way to existence; it is to be under the momentary impression that the natural and cultural worlds offer gifts and, in so doing, remind us that it is good to be alive. This sense of fullness … encourages the finite human animal, in turn, to give away some of its own time and effort on behalf of other creatures. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamoured with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.29 Bennett here focuses on affirmative forms of connection, but I would like to expand this to include a broader ethical dimension that theorizes enchantment’s force of connection not simply as an exclusive or even primary operation of positive feeling. As Bennett characterizes it, enchantment occurs through an oscillation or overlapping of alienation and seduction, and as such, the force of enchantment does not merely result in positive feelings, but entails significant disruption. In its very irresolvability of feeling, enchantment may also entail forms of connection that keep the moment in memory, returning it to us, and in doing so asking us to reconsider the issue tied to enchantment’s force. As such, enchantment does not allow us to move on, to over-identify with the issue as a stable “thing,” but asks us to work through the push and pull of alienation and wonder. Enchantment’s irresolvability puts in motion an ethics of alterity that asks the viewer to treat it as we might a living thing encountered again and again through memory. There is no way to measure the degree to which Idle No More’s particular moments of enchanted protest have resulted in forms of connection where participants have offered their time or material resources to ongoing fights against pipeline development, for example. However, I’d suggest a more general assumption of connection might more easily be made. Prior to participating in Idle No More I felt a certain ambiva-

Figure 8.1 Gingerbread bc coastline.

lence toward the efficacy of protest, due primarily to the presumption that its directional address is by necessity oriented toward the general public and other state and institutional addresses. With Idle No More, in contrast, I came to reconsider protest’s affirmative politics through self-address, back toward those who participated, through felt forms of accumulation. Across our different nation-specific politics, First Peoples gathered in malls, in intersections, on train tracks, in schools, in everexpanding round dance circles, filling spaces with our voices, and dancing through these spaces together. Rita Wong captures this sense of accumulation lucidly in her poem, “J28”: last year, i never imagined we would be round dancing in Glenmore Landing round dancing in Chinook Centre round dancing in Olympic Plaza round dancing in Metrotown round dancing in West Edmonton Mall round dancing outside the Cayuga courthouse

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round dancing on Akwesasne round dancing on Strombo huychexa! mahsi cho! welalin! drumming at Waterfront Station drumming at the United Nations drumming at Columbia University drumming at Granville & Georgia drumming at Dalhousie University drumming at the Peace Arch drumming on Wellington Street drumming on Lubicon lands drumming in Owen Sound drumming in Thunder Bay drumming in Somba K’e drumming in Chicago drumming in Chilliwack drumming in Kitimat taking a much needed pause for thought on tarsands Highway 63 on the 401 on cn rail tracks with Aamjiwnaang courage a human river on Ambassador Bridge time to stop & respect remember we are all treaty people unless we live on unceded lands where rude guests can learn to be better ones by repealing C45, for starters30 I quote Wong’s poem here in its entirely in acknowledgement of the atmospheres of accumulative fullness that it so lucidly evokes, and the sense of capacity it affirms. This experience of possibility should not be understated here. As political theorist Rosi Braidotti notes, what affirmative experiences of affect allow are the endurance and the sustainability of political resistance. And while I cannot support Braidotti’s characterization of the opposite – that, in her words, “negative passions

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are black holes” – I would assert that without the affirmative balance to anger, without the enchantment of protest, Indigenous resistance will continue to be dismissed as “just anger.”31

When the Drumming “Starts to Get Ugly” Not all Idle No More mall celebration was felt equally as celebration by settler spectators, however. Even when protest is “at play,” its ludic qualities may not be legible to those unfamiliar with Indigenous cultural practices. While round dancing and gingerbread protest pieces convey more friendly invitations to join the action of moving and eating together, other forms of Indigenous cultural practice may mark boundaries of settler participation. Such was the case when members of the Squamish nation gathered on 23 December 2011 in in Park Royal Centre Mall, in West Vancouver, bc, to play slahal, otherwise known as stick or bone games. Slahal (or Lehà:l in Halq’emeylem) is a game played by many Pacific Northwest First Nations, with many variations. Historically, it has functioned as more than merely entertainment. As Squamish slahal participant Tiffany Joseph describes it on her YouTube video recording, “Among the Coast Salish peoples it was called the ‘bloodless war game’ as disputes between villages would be settled through the slahal (stick game / bone game). Traditional social songs are used by opposing teams to call on the spirit of slahal to encourage their team.”32 There is often also an element of dance where the person holds the bone or stick while dancing, moving it between her hands, while a member from the opposing team guesses which hand it is in.33 In the Idle No More gathering on 23 December a lively game of slahal was held in Park Royal Mall for all ages, with the same laughter, smiles, and energy as was present at the Bay Centre Mall gathering. Yet not all spectators at this gathering “felt love” at the mall, as Leanne Simpson characterized her experience. Indeed, one of the most publicly vocal spectators felt its antithesis: fear. Following the Park Royal slahal game, Lin Rockwell, owner of the lingerie store Romantique, wrote a letter to the editor at the North Shore News titled “Mob Protest Makes No Point” that took on the quality of a police report, documenting the exact times of the “incident”: Dear Editor, This was bullying on an epic scale: On Dec. 23, the south mall of Park Royal Shopping Centre was closed down by a terrifying mob of natives waving banners.

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The drumming was so loud it was deafening. The merchants, staff and customers were at first scared and terrified – and then angry! We did not know what was going on, why it was going on, or what we should do. At 3:30 p.m., the centre court of the south mall started filling up with natives, security guards and police, and then more and more natives and police. The police presence only justified our fears. The drumming started at around 3:45 p.m. and it just kept getting louder and louder. I let all my staff go home as soon as the drumming started to get ugly, many of them were in tears by then. Customers were fleeing also; the parking lots were gridlocked. I found out halfway through that we were allowed to close up and go, but we were not told that by the mall or the police. At the very least we should have been given that option before this time. If they couldn’t stop the demonstration, why were we not warned? We didn’t know who they were, where they came from, what they were angry about or what it had to do with us. It was bad enough to lose the business but if we had been warned, we could have closed up our stores and kept our staff safe. The merchants probably lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. A lot of us rely on the last few days of December. The livelihood of merchants, their families and staff depend on this business. Shame on our government for allowing it! Shame on the local bands for supporting it! And most of all, shame on the first nation bands who think that closing down businesses and highways with mobs whose intent is to intimidate, scare and terrify peaceful people is an appropriate way to make a point. What is their point anyway?34 The angry “unidentifiable natives” in Rockwell’s narrative – where had they come from? – threatened the safety of the mall staff by their presence, by their game, by their dancing, and by drumming that “started to get ugly.” As described by Rockwell, the slahal gathering more closely resembled terrorism than a game. It is worth noting here that it is the terrorizing sound of the drum that is the focus of the narrative, similar to the prohibition of the drums at the Bay Centre Mall. Rockwell’s exasperated conclusion, “What is their point?” was in fact a frequent response to Idle No More from both the media and the

Figure 8.2 Slahal game at Park Royal Mall, 23 December 2011.

general public. In part, this response was the result of non-mutually exclusive local agendas, and nation- and community-specific issues that were addressed by participants; as with the nation-specific forms that Idle No More protest took, each gathering was inflected by the place and context it was presented in. “Our points” were thus as multiple as Stephen Harper’s omnibus bills themselves that attempted to “hide” a number of legislative changes within a single bill. Yet another significant reason behind the public’s inability to identify “the point” was because the aesthetic and affective timbre of the gatherings themselves made them less legible to the general public as protest. Round dancing in intersections, singing beside advertisements for Future Shop, slahal games by signage for Winners – these actions complicated the reading of Idle No More activism and perhaps to a certain degree foreclosed upon a habitual dismissal of protest.35 Idle No More gatherings here drew spectators in not just as participants, but as active observers. In the case of Lin Rockwell and her staff, this engagement unsettled the quotidian signs of Christmastime, and in doing so questioned assumptions about who is entitled to occupy the public-feeling private space of the mall. This last point is particularly salient, considering that Park Royal mall

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is not only situated on Squamish territory at Xwme’lch’stn, on the Capilano Reserve, but also that the land upon which the mall is built has been leased by the Squamish nation. The presence of slahal challenged the felt fact that underpins settlers’ civic entitlement: that the land upon which the city stands has no memory. To have one’s sense of civic entitlement challenged is a frightening experience, as Lin Rockwell felt keenly.

Casting Shame Witnessing Beau Dick cutting copper at the Victoria Legislative buildings was similarly frightening, but for entirely different reasons. This action was the conclusion to a walk called Awalaskenis (“to make a statement” in the Kwakwala language spoken by the Kwakwakw’wakw people) organized by Beau Dick and his family. Starting in Quatsino, at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and ending in Victoria on the southern tip of the island, the 465 km journey was aligned with Idle No More but also distinct in its aim to bring greater public attention to salmon-farming practices that result in high levels of pcbs and dioxins in salmon and the increase and spread of sea lice and disease. In calling Dick’s copper-breaking “frightening,” I point both toward the degree of intensity in the action itself, and the witnessing of a violent action toward one of the most sacred belongings for many Northwest Coast First Nations. Tears streamed down people’s faces as the copper was repeatedly struck and the group loudly shouted “Hao” with each strike. As noted by Alexandra Morton, a scientist and participant in the journey from Quatsino to Victoria, many “could feel pain shoot through their bodies when the copper was struck.”36 Beau Dick explained before the copper was cut: “We hold this symbol as sacred … [coppers held up, people cheering] [T]o break a copper is a serious action, the threat of breaking a copper is a serious action. Today, breaking our copper Namgamala, the main one, is making a statement. A copper is used in many different fashions in our potlatch system, validating our rights and privileges to our heritage, our territories. To break it is an insult, it is a threat, and a challenge.”37 Coppers are central in the work of Northwest Coast First Nations in witnessing transactions that take place in the longhouse. From the perspective of a speech act, the copper’s presence is what makes the act “felicitous” in documenting the history of an individual or family and validates the transactions that take place during a potlatch. As a living

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witness that carries the history of families, “when you cut a copper you’re cutting through the heart of your ancestors for thousands of generations.”38 For the Kwakwaka’wakw, to break a copper is considered a hostile act, and the equivalent of “wishing someone dead.”39 For these reasons, one of the more extreme actions that could be taken to shame a chief or members of a community who have not upheld their responsibility, or have insulted another family, was to break a copper. With the arrival of Idle No More, Beau Dick decided to cut a copper in order to shame Canada’s Harper-led majority Conservative Government. As with other shaming practices, this action was not directed only toward the individual being shamed, but to a larger community of witnesses. As Morton wrote following the copper breaking, “Beau said that he did not believe gov’t would do anything because of this. That they would still not listen but that the people would. That they would rise and come together to stand up to this destruction.”40 Though the action was directed toward Prime Minister Harper, the intended audience for this action (as with other Idle No More gatherings like that in Park Royal Mall) was just as importantly First Nations people ourselves. This is true both in Beau Dick’s decision to stop in communities along the route to Victoria to share information about their aims, and in his hope that the action might contribute to the increasing mobilization of Indigenous voices speaking together against the countless injustices that Idle No More crystalized around: “I am compelled because of the Idle No More movement. It created an atmosphere that made this journey possible … In breaking this copper, hopefully it will connect all of our voices … There are many voices here that need to be heard. Many voices need to be heard and they must all come together to create one voice that can be heard through these walls [of the Victoria legislature].”41 Idle No More’s exceptional acts of affirmative politics presented through the mixture of cultural practice and protest at the Park Royal slahal, as well as the raising of our voices and dancing in malls, intersections, universities, and railroad tracks across Canada, brought anger into relationship with enchantment. While such work results in the enchantment of the non-Indigenous audience witnessing something between anger and play, between protest and cultural practice, it is important not to characterize this enchantment as primarily for non-Indigenous witnesses. To do so would be to return to mis-characterize these actions as appeals for recognition. Enchantment in these gatherings instead operated through

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the shared hope that kindled our energies in the continued combat against state injustice. As Dick noted in an interview with cbcnews, “There are a lot of layers to this. Some people have described this as a protest and that is valid … [But] it’s beyond that. What it is, is about waking up the consciousness.”42

Conclusion

If history has shown us anything it is this: if you want those in power to respond swiftly to Indigenous Peoples’ political efforts, start by placing native bodies (with a few logs and tires thrown in for good measure) between settlers and their money, which in colonial contexts is generated by the ongoing theft and exploitation of our land and resource base. –Glen Coulthard, “#IdleNoMore in Historical Context”43

Coulthard’s argument – stressing the importance of placing our bodies in opposition to other bodies that serve the continued exploitation of Indigenous peoples’ land – emphasizes a materialization of the unified relationship between Indigenous lands and First Peoples. This materialization upends the settler fantasy of land as an abstract place for development and resource extraction. However, in order for Indigenous bodies not to be seen as a mere mass (or faceless mob) without individual presence, it is imperative that we do more than throw in a few logs and tires for good measure. We must be conscious firstly of how our bodies are in relationship with other bodies so that they are read not just as a mass of disgruntled others and angry Indians. We must think strategically of the aesthetics and spatialization of protest in ways that maintain the singularity of Indigenous political sovereignty, and at the same time disrupt the ontology of protest in ways that ask non-Indigenous audiences to consider the issues our bodies stand for, sing for, and dance for. Writing about the expression of anger by women of colour, Audre Lorde notes, “[We] have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart.”44 I’d like to extend Lorde’s metaphor both toward Indigenous peoples’ protest, and toward

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the future, in asserting that we might continue to re-orchestrate activism across sensory and artistic registers in order, like Idle No More, to disrupt the marginalization of Indigenous activism as being “just angry.” To find productive oscillations, admixtures, and orchestrations of affirmative anger, of playful rage, and of enchanted resentment is to extend and further sustain the resistance to colonial oppression across Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Yet in this larger re-orchestration of affect and activism, we must also consider the role of the listener, not merely the musicians. To place responsibility on First Peoples to modify (yet not moderate) our anger is to continue to locate the problem as one of composition rather than reception. Equally necessary in the larger context is settler subjects’ re-attunement to anger in ways that categorize it not by “type” or “genre” of personal bitterness; this re-attunement must instead engage in the difficult act of listening to the timbres of injustice for the particularities of their range and astringency. Anger’s dissonance will always present a challenge to listeners who prefer the beauty of Indigenous voices singing Christmas tunes to the irreconciled intermingling of slahal songs with “Greensleeves.” To listen through enchantment to irresolved songs is to understand the necessary agonism at the heart of nation-to-nation sovereignties.

n o te s 1 I am far from alone in raising these concerns about continuing forms of academic colonization that treat Indigenous knowledge as a resource to be extracted for purposes other than the development of Indigenous thought, the health of our families and communities, and supporting future generations. Canadian studies of the arts have a long history of using Indigenous topics for “multicultural enrichment.” In raising this issue, I point toward the compelling body of literature on (and critical of) Native nationalism, with its central tenet of demanding that scholarship be responsible to Indigenous peoples first and the social and political exigencies of our communities. See Warrior, Weaver, and Womack, American Indian Literary Nationalism; Fagan and McKegney, “Circling the Question;” and Fagan et al., “Canadian Indian Literary Nationalism?” 2 See Mique’l Dangeli’s exceptional “Dancing Sovereignty” for numerous examples of these actions. 3 Austin defines speech acts as moments in which the speaking of a statement enacts the action that is spoken. A primary example is the statement “I now

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Dylan Robinson pronounce you husband and wife” (or “husband and husband” as the case may be) when uttered by a priest or other legal officiant, constituting marriage. Austin, How to Do Things. Tuscarora art historian Jolene Rickard notes that the affirmation of Haudenosaunee treaty takes place not just through the presentation of a wampum belt, but through “the public recitation of Kayanerenhtserakó:wa, which frames Haudenosaunee philosophy in governing principles – in English, peace, power, and righteousness.” See Alves, Hopkins, and Rickard, “Fair Trade.” Here it is important to recognize different levels of function in different presentational contexts. A song sung in the longhouse, for example, will not necessarily hold the same function in documenting history when sung in the general public (though it does not completely lose its instrumental function in its public presentation). Like performative utterances, the functional aspect of Indigenous songs and dances have various levels of felicitousness dependent upon a large number of variables, including whether the singer is recognized as having the appropriate status to sing the song. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music,” 77. “Most of the South Mall of Park Royal is located on Squamish Nation land and operates under the lease between Park Royal Shopping Centre Holdings Ltd. and the Squamish Nation. This includes the south retail mall, the Village at Park Royal, and 100 Park Royal (the ‘black tower’). On the North side of Marine Drive the Park Royal (rental) towers operate under a separate lease agreement between Larco and Squamish Nation.” Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw / Squamish Nation, “Project Negotiation.” Some of the details have been changed here to maintain the anonymity of participants. Additionally, there is frequently a perceived divide between a language informed by Western theoretical perspectives, and one that resists such perspectives as a Western imposition upon the many embodied Indigenous epistemologies that Dene scholar Glen Coulthard calls “grounded normativity,” or Indigenous “place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge.” Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 60. I hesitate to call the language employed by the keynotes a “theoretical” language that Indigenous conference participants found alienating. Instead, after conversations with participants I would suggest that there may have been, in certain instances, a particular “tone” that alienated Indigenous artists (and scholars) by speaking about us from a distance rather than finding ways to speak with those who were present. While this was not as consistently my experience during this conference, particularly in the case of the keynote speaker who presented on the Aboriginal

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film, it happened frequently enough in other presentations to cause sharp discomfort for me and several other Indigenous participants I spoke with. The irony here is that despite the fact that this conference was focused on Indigenous arts, it did not rethink the ways in which the structures of the gathering itself may reinforce colonial structures and power relations. Interview with anonymous conference participant, 10 December 2014. There are of course many alternative models of symposia, conference, and workshop gatherings that take into account more relational formats for knowledge sharing. Performance studies conferences, like Performance Studies international (PSi) have fared better in the expansion of such new formats, in comparison to other fields. Julie Nagam in this collection notes, “The document, in this sense, has the potential to obliterate forms of knowledge that reside in individual bodies, in communities, and in the spaces that they daily inhabit, forming what I will refer to here as a living archive” (119). I would not draw as sharp a binary as Nagam between written and embodied Indigenous knowledges (as generations of Indigenous essayists, poets, and artists demonstrate, our embodied knowledges are eloquently spatialized upon the page and materialized in our objects), but believe there is an urgent need to support future generations in defining how cultural values lead their writing and material practice methodologies. For more on “irreconcilable spaces of aboriginality,” see Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces.” Such gatherings of Indigenous scholars, artists, and community members from Indigenous communities across the globe had been less frequent prior to the inaugural Native American and Indigenous Studies Association gathering in 2007. Glen Coulthard critiques Nietzsche’s characterization of ressentiment “as a reactive, backward, and passive orientation to the world” where the subject is “irrationally preoccupied with and incapacitated by offences suffered in the past.” Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 111. Coulthard, “Red Skin, White Masks,” 33:45. Sara Ahmed notes, “The melancholic migrant is the one who is not only stubbornly attached to difference, but who insists on speaking about racism, where such speech is heard as labouring over sore points. The duty of the migrant is to let go of the pain of racism by letting go of racism as a way of understanding that pain.” Ahmed, “Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness,” 133. See Robinson, “Feeling Reconciliation Remaining Settled.” At the most basic level, emotion is a categorization of the physiological effects

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Dylan Robinson of affect. Or, as Brian Massumi explains, emotion “is the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience,” a “qualified intensity” that has been inserted into a system of “semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning.” Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28. Some Idle No More gatherings remained within “traditional” forms of protest – blockades, marches – and took place at traditional centres of state power, including government buildings. Yet these established markers of traditional protest reinforced Idle No More activity within the genre of protest, and public prejudice toward protest as being only “for” a certain contingent of the general public. This imagined public that both constitutes protest and represents protest’s larger constituency, operates along generalizations: “special interest groups,” “visible minorities,” “anarchists.” As such, protestors are not seen to represent the broad interests of the public. Pauline Wakeham makes the compelling argument that the turn of the millennium has seen a “simultaneous emptying out and proliferation of the meanings of ‘terror’ that has enabled private media and government and policing services to collapse radically diverse practices – from violence that threatens civilian safety to counterhegemonic resistance in the form of public protest – into one homogenized category of threats that need to be eradicated.” Wakeham, “Reconciling ‘Terror,’” 7. It is important here to assert that, in contrast to the prevailing measurement of activism’s efficacy as the achievement of change, my argument emphasizes that its intangible outcomes are the most significant: first, the sense of hope that emerged for Indigenous participants, changing our sense of possibility in public assembly, and second, the sense of ontological dissonance that Idle No More produced around the concept of protest for non-Indigenous witnesses. To assess Idle No More purely by its measurable impacts and policy outcomes would be to miss a fundamental point of its intangible efficacy. Simpson, qtd. in Klein, “Dancing the World.” Vosen, “Singing and Dancing Idle No More.” Jane Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 4–5. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 156. Wong, “J28.” Braidotti, “Nomadic Ethics,” 182. “FlashMob Bonegame.” For a more detailed description of the rules of slahal, see Galloway’s entry on “lehà:l” in Dictionary of Upriver Halkomelem. There are a number of variations to the game within Pacific Northwest Nations.

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34 Rockwell, letter to the editor. 35 Not only did our songs remix Christmas classics, but they recontextualized the general advertising in interesting ways – for example, the “winners” sign above the slahal, the “future” of Future Shop, and fashion banner “celebrate every side of you” appeared like Brechtian placards calling toward our nations’ vibrant futures. 36 Morton, “All Comments.” 37 “Cheif [sic] Beau Dick.” 38 “Chief Beau Dick.” 39 Gloria Webster, qtd. in Jonaitis, “Chiefly Feast,” 9. While breaking copper is a hostile act among the Kwakwaka’wakw, this is not the case for all nations. For Tsimshian people, for example, it does not carry the same negativity. Others I have spoken to note that it may have been more appropriate to cut the enemy’s copper – in this case, a corner of the legislature’s copper roof – than one’s own family’s copper. 40 Morton, “All Comments.” 41 “Cheif [sic] Beau Dick.” 42 Troian, “Copper Broken on Parliament Hill.” 43 Coulthard, “#IdleNoMore in Historical Context.” 44 Audre Lorde, qtd. in Carpenter, Seeing Red Anger, 15.

9

On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives l au r a l ev i n In This Great City, something terrible is happening. Daily, the news is filled with the scandals, criminal associations and bigotry of the city’s right-wing Mayor. Not only is there no way to remove him from office, but all signs point to his re-election for another term. Within City Hall, all semblance of reasonable discourse and progress has vanished … We meet a small group of left-wing activists who decide to take matters into their own hands. They agree to play dirty in order to rid the city of its problem Mayor once and for all. But will that cure the city? –Studio 180 Theatre, description of Paul Dunn’s This Great City1

The epigraph above provides a brief but gripping description of a play currently in development in Toronto. Presented as a staged reading in November 2015, in a works-in-progress series organized by Toronto theatre company Studio 180, the first iteration of This Great City promised a fantasy return to one of the most riveting periods in the history of Canadian municipal politics: the “terrible” and “[un]reasonable” reign of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (2010–14).2 While the “Mayor” remains unnamed in Studio 180’s tantalizing marketing blurb, those familiar with the allegations of criminality that swirled around Ford, such as his association with known drug dealers and gang members, will not find it hard to see the character’s resemblance. Dunn’s work-in-progress presented the Mayor as an evil character in a civic drama of epic proportions – a drama shaped by salacious journalism and duels between the “bigots” of the right and “activists” of the left.3 In this respect, it epitomizes the fascination that Ford’s political career has held for Canadians, and international bystanders, as a site of political spectacle – a fascination expressed in thousands of news re-

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ports and social media posts, and in dozens of artistic representations, from plays to films to installations to musical compositions. At the same time, it reveals how these treatments of Ford often rely on a particular kind of dramaturgy, on oppositions of good guy and bad guy, moderate and extremist, a city plagued and a city redeemed – even if this melodramatic framing, as in Dunn’s play, sometimes unravels through more rigorous critical reflection. My chapter joins the formidable assemblage of puzzlings through, meditations on, and critical responses to Ford that have followed his rise to power as a brash-but-folksy conservative candidate, elected as mayor in 2010 primarily by voters in Toronto’s suburbs.4 Journalistic reporting on Ford has unveiled every gory detail of the many scandals in which he was embroiled during his time in office. These accounts take up, on one end of the spectrum, the micro-blunders – like that time Ford got a ticket for jaywalking in bc, or when he fearfully called 911 after actor Mary Walsh, from the comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, visited him in character at his home. At the other end, they engage the more politically devastating scandals: Ford’s temporary removal (and later reinstatement) as mayor for allegedly violating city conflict of interest laws, the transfer of several of his powers to the deputy mayor by a demoralized and distrustful city council, and most shockingly, his unintentional performance in the now-infamous cellphone video, which shows a very un-mayoral Ford smoking crack (the video was released to the public in August 2016). This is not to be confused with the other cellphone videos of Ford speaking in a Jamaican patois, shouting at an imaginary opponent that he will “kill that fucking guy,”5 drunkenly touring a St Patrick’s Day festival … The limited space in this chapter doesn’t allow me to offer a full performance history, but a quick Google search will produce a much longer and equally sensational list of scandals, many appearing in “timelines” that present Ford’s political career as a theatrical serial.6 Ford’s re-election campaign ended abruptly in September 2014 following the unfortunate news of a cancer diagnosis, a development that forced him to withdraw from the mayoral race at the eleventh hour and send in his brother Doug to run in his place. Although it seemed the saga would continue with Ford’s re-election as city councillor representing Etobicoke North, and vows to run again in the 2018 mayoral election, Ford died on 22 March 2016. True to his spectacle-filled career, he lay in repose in City Hall for public visitation for two days prior to his funeral, with thousands of mourners pouring in for a final viewing.

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By the end of his term as mayor, so much had been written about Ford that it spawned a perpetually performed, some would say feigned, moralistic exhaustion with the coverage. US monologist Mike Daisey made this point in Dreaming of Rob Ford, a show presented by Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre in its 2014 East End Crawl. In a quip Michel Foucault might have appreciated,7 Daisey indicts the audience for showing up: “You are the people who haven’t had enough. In fact you may have even told yourselves that you have had enough. Most of your culture is doing that; in fact that’s the new hot thing to do, to talk endlessly about how we have heard quite enough about Rob Ford … I just think I’m going to have to write another op-ed [about it].”8 Embracing the spirit of the site-specific festival in which it was produced, Daisey implicates spectators in this “We Other Torontonians” argument while glaring down at them from the stage of Gerrard Street East’s Big Picture Cinema: formerly a porn theatre, later devoted to extravagant Bollywood films, and recently rechristened an indie space for art and “schlock.”9 Ford’s reign was, much like this venue, characterized by the nonstop spectacle of overexposure; more accurately, it attracted the kind of voyeuristic interest communications consultant Gerry Nicholls describes as “watching a train wreck take place aboard the Titanic.”10 Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the lessons that performance theorists might learn from the Rob Ford show – the timely questions it raised about the erosion of boundaries between public and private and the demand for selfexposure not only before a hungry press but also on the micro-stages of social media.11 In this chapter, I shift gears and explore a different set of questions that might interest performance studies scholars. Specifically, I want to think through the public’s characterization of Ford as both witting and unwitting “performance artist” – a label applied quite frequently to Ford as one of Canada’s more eccentric politicians. As Sara Brady claims, “We live in a mediatized era in which politicians are performers, and the best one wins: the one who can raise the most money, and persuade enough voters where reality lies … Politicians are now only worth their weight in performance.”12 Indeed some cultural theorists go so far as to imply that performance is the bad thing that happened to politics after 9/11. While sometimes situated within a longer history of spectacles staged to justify US foreign policy after the Second World War, the intensification of performance strategies after 9/11 is often closely aligned with the era in which the Bush administration tightly controlled

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the media and used it to stage obfuscating spectacles of US heroism and military might. This perspective appears not only in writing about the political arena over the last two decades,13 but also in documentary film. Take, for example, the imagery that composes the antitheatrical rhetoric of US director Michael Moore’s scathing 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.14 Moore’s film presents us with shot after shot of corrupt government officials having their hair and makeup done for press briefings, drawing on the language of performance to equate the Bush administration with two-faced politics and the criminal masking of capitalist, often imperialist, motives. In what follows, I join Brady and other performance studies scholars who have examined the complex entanglements of performance and politics, but also who, through their analysis of a variety of cultural and historical contexts, reveal that the conjoining of theatre and politics is hardly new. Of particular importance is Diana Taylor’s work on the selfstagings of political leaders and counter-performances they have inspired across the Americas (including in Indigenous communities preceding and following colonial contact).15 This body of scholarship also includes work on the performative tactics of specific political figures – by Timothy Raphael (on Ronald Reagan), Jason L. Mast (on Bill Clinton), Catherine Schuler (on Vladimir Putin), Tavia Nyong’o and Jeffrey Alexander (on Barack Obama)16 – as well as detailed accounts of activist tactics responding to political elections by Larry Bogad, Amber Day, and E.J. Westlake.17 In a Canadian context, much of the work on performance and political culture has explored the fashioning of national identity through the figure of the politician – from Anton Wagner’s work on Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s influence on arts and cultural policy, to Alan Filewod’s writing on the “wannabe” aristocratic theatricality of Governor General Vincent Massey, to the recent issue of Canadian Theatre Review (co-edited by Barry Freeman and myself), in which authors like Kimberley McLeod take up antics of parodic groups like the Canada Party running for election in the United States.18 Building on these discussions, I want to ask what it might mean to read politicians not simply as performers, but also, and more specifically, as “performance artists.” The performance art label no doubt still converses with questions about the construction of self in everyday life; nevertheless it pivots us in the direction of something rather more genrespecific, something that allows us to think with more formal precision about the collapse of distinctions between theatre and politics in an

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image-hungry and networked landscape, as well as the uses to which performance may be put in politically divisive local contexts. I am particularly intrigued by the performance art designation, as I suspect focusing on that term might yield a different set of insights into how “performance” circulates in contemporary Canadian political culture, both as an image of politics-gone-wrong and as a form of cultural capital manipulated by public figures. For the purpose of this chapter I refer to this circulation and cultural inscription as the “Fordian performative.” Here I am influenced by Amelia Jones’s19 reading of the performance artist’s actions (linguistic utterances and bodily expressions) not as traces of the creative impulses, intentions, or psychic life of a single individual. Rather, they are “performative,” in J.L. Austin’s sense of the term, as they re-enact previous political performances – operating within larger fields of citationality and participating in the creation and maintenance of specific social realities.20 So too, I emphasize the importance of audience reception in the uptake of Ford’s performances, pointing to the ways in which performative utterances derive their meaning from the various publics (citizens, political commentators, art critics) who interpret them, who shape their meaning and political force. In this sense, by using the term Fordian performative I offer a different take on Ford as performance art “genius.” While his actions may seem utterly distinctive and idiosyncratic, they are not his alone.

The Politician as Performance Artist

So why do we care about performance? Because our political leaders do. They are ever more radical performers. –Diana Taylor21

Let me begin by offering some local context for this particular intertwining of the political and the performative. The Rob Ford-as-performance artist trope has shown up in at least two places. Most directly, it appears in images of Ford in journalistic media, depictions that generally invoke the term performance artist to describe his audacious behaviour. In reflecting on Ford’s ability to unnerve reporters with wacky retorts like “I wasn’t lying. You didn’t ask the right questions” – a defence Ford presented when he finally admitted that he did in fact smoke crack – Michael Stewart of rabble.ca writes, “For the better part of Rob Ford’s

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incredible tenure, I often joked that Toronto had secretly replaced its Chief Executive with history’s greatest performance artist.”22 An even spicier article in Vice begins, “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, performance art genius and Canada’s greatest embarrassment, knows a lot of things. He knows how to drink like a motherfucker, supposedly downing half a 40-ounce bottle of vodka before 9 pm during a legendary bender last Saint Patrick’s Day that ended with the 320-pound mayor charging a dance floor with a bellyful of poutine and (allegedly) a nose full of cocaine.”23 Other journalists frame Ford as performance artist by attempting to situate him within performance art lineages. “Rob Ford Has Entered Full Andy Kaufman Mode,” Doktor Zoom writes. “… If Toronto can’t fire him, they may just install him in a permanent performance space.”24 In many of these instances, the application of “artspeak” to politics resembles what Julia Halperin sees as the trend of attaching the label performance artist to “celebrities with outrageous public personas from Lady Gaga to Charlie Sheen.”25 When used in relation to celebritypoliticians like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump, the term is intended to ridicule public figures that make unseemly spectacles of themselves. New Republic writer Peter Lawler calls Palin a “shameless” performance artist, in order to emphasize her attentionseeking behaviour: “It’s become clearer and clearer, of course, that she’s been going the really-rich-and-famous-performance-artist route. Who could take either the Reality Show or all that shameless ‘look-at-me’ Twittering seriously? She’s narrowed the distance between herself and Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher way too much to be a credible presidential candidate … To be fair, compared to, say, Charlie or Britney, she’s a very disciplined performance artist, and only a fool couldn’t see how savvy she is at media manipulation.”26 In these descriptions, politicians become performance artists when they exceed expectations of their professional role, moving beyond the genre boundaries of “mere political theatre.”27 There is, however, a crucial difference between the appearance of the term performance artist in the realm of pop culture celebrity and in the sphere of politics. As Halperin notes, while celebrities are often elevated in their association with the term into brilliant conceptual artists, “when applied to politicians, it is little more than a dismissal.”28 This would seem to be the case with Ford, for whom the label performance artist is typically only one step away from other terms like embarrassment, circus, clown, or sideshow act.29

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Further, the application of artspeak to politics may signal something of a mini-crisis in journalistic writing, a crisis brought about, in part, by Ford’s time in the mayor’s office. It was not uncommon to see journalists writing metacritical articles or organizing professional discussions about how to write about someone like Ford,30 a politician whose interface with the media involved outlandish public stunts, highly defensive (and therefore uncommonly dramatic) press conferences, and recorded performances in the form of surreptitiously captured cellphone videos. The term performance artist appears in the news at the moment when an uncertainty arises about the boundaries between the staged and the real. It also appears when journalists seem unsure about what should be reported about a public figure. Should an objective recounting of Ford’s actions be presented or a more subjective, aesthetic interpretation? In this way, the appeal to “performance art” suggests an awkward reskilling of the journalist, marking a tension the Ford controversies opened up between traditional journalistic reporting and what we might otherwise call “performance criticism” – a genre of writing in which a cultural event is analyzed primarily as a theatrical staging and requires specialized artistic language and technical know-how.31 A second area where the image of Ford-as-performance artist circulates is in the world of arts and entertainment, where artists have embraced Ford with a special kind of vigour, inviting him into the performance art fold. Consider the adoption of Ford as comedy “act” on the US talk show circuit, where hosts like Jimmy Kimmel invited Ford to perform his buffoonery before a tv audience, even treating Ford, on air, to video replays of his own cloddish flubs (e.g., Ford walking face-first into a CityNews camera). Consider also the appearance of Ford as performer in a growing canon of artistic works, a canon that has become so large that it has spawned articles like Steve Kupferman’s “Eight Reasons Not to Write Another Play about Rob Ford” – another example of the moralistic exhaustion with Ford coverage.32 This popular performance genre includes several satirical Rob Ford operas, musicals, and plays like (the appropriately named) Rob Ford: The Musical by Brett McCaig, Adam Seelig’s Ubu Mayor, Bob Dundas’s Macford, A Tragical Historie of York 2010–2014, and Paul Dunn’s This Great City, among many others.33 They also include numerous performance art works like Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Allegations, a re-enactment of the Ford crack-smoking video by Darren O’Donnell and Toronto teens; and the site-specific RoFo Bus Tour by Cloven Path Ministries, a mock-Satanist performance art troupe that toured spectators to infamous sites in the Ford saga, like the alleged crack house. And,

Figure 9.1 Toronto mayor Rob Ford giving away his candy at the Toronto Santa Claus Parade, 21 November 2010. Ford marched against the wishes of parade board members concerned about protests, following his admission that he had smoked crack cocaine.

again, we have Mike Daisey’s monologue on Ford, an extended meditation on the pleasure that polite Canadians derive from what he calls Ford’s “political performance art.”34 Intriguingly, many of these works participate in performance art’s re-enactment subgenre, as they mimetically pay homage to (or, in Dunn’s fantasy, put a stop to) Ford’s past performances. Daisey’s first act when he arrives in Toronto, in the vein of, say, a re-performance of a classic Vito Acconci or Marina Abramović piece, is to make pilgrimage to Toronto’s west end to, well, smoke crack – to have the full Ford experience. It is also worth mentioning that Daisey’s re-enactment of Ford’s actions, and working through of the media frenzy surrounding them, implicitly functions as a re-enactment of his own public disgrace following the revelation in 2012 that he fabricated personal and factual information in The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, his hit show about globalization and its human costs. This tradition was invoked once again when Toronto rapper Drake released his 2015 music video for “Energy,” a song about how exhausting it is to manage several-milliondollar mortgages, and how gruelling it is to be a superstar when, as

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media analyst Steve Tilly puts it (unsympathetically), “everyone want[s] a piece of you – our hearts bleed for him.”35 In the video, Drake appears briefly as Ford and recreates the much-circulated photo taken of the mayor outside the Etobicoke home where the crack video was shot. Here, as in Daisey’s performance, we see an artist identifying with, and thereby solidifying the image of, Ford as a besieged and infamous performer. Now it certainly can be argued that, in these journalistic and artistic engagements with Ford, the language of performance art emerges as metaphor, as funny but ultimately loose talk about a political figure who has become a public curiosity. But many of these assignations have the ring of truth; they resonate. So I want to go further and ask what it might mean to take these claims seriously and read Rob Ford, and by extension other politicians, as performance artists. What might an understanding of Ford as performance artist tell us about contemporary political culture? And, conversely, what might it tell us about perceptions of performance art, a form that scholars often associate with the resistant aesthetics of the political left? The label performance art, to begin with, often allows the press to transport Ford to the margins, to present him as an irrational presence in an otherwise rational political arena. Taking seriously Ford as performance artist would reverse this gaze and turn it back on the sphere of politics itself. The performance artist could then be viewed as an insider, as someone who fully embodies the norms of a given system – pushing them to their extremes to reveal something about that system’s logic and form. If we try this experiment with Ford, what does it reveal? First, it exposes how politics often depends upon a studied antitheatricality, a disavowal of politics as performance. Evoking a long history of antitheatrical discourse, terms like performance art are roused to signal political disorder. “Good riddance to the Ford circus,” reporter Tom Godfrey writes. “Hopefully, this year residents will get more of the services we pay for and none of the theatre and grandstanding we have had in the past.”36 This narrative of the post-Ford era as a post-theatre era reinforces the belief that “real” politicians are decidedly not performers, and it supports sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s claim that, “because political performance succeeds only when it seems natural, it must not betray its own construction.”37 However central to a politician’s life, performance must be carefully repressed for politics to read as politics.

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Not surprisingly, keeping performance at bay also requires its own performance of antitheatrical normalcy. I think here immediately of equally histrionic performances of “boringness” that Ford’s successor and current Toronto mayor John Tory staged to assure the public that he was restoring political civility to the city. Playing on the idea that effective politics is un-theatrical politics, he held up “boredom as an ideal” of his administration – an ideal, it would seem, that required constant staging in the press. “If anybody said city hall was boring but productive – better results, but boring – I would take that as a major compliment … I don’t look at this as show business,” he boasted to the National Post.38 The same sound bite appears in the Sun: “It will be more likely under the ‘B’ for boring (category) than under the ‘B’ for bizarre in the case of my office and even my administration.”39 When Jimmy Kimmel invites Tory to appear on his show after getting elected, Tory politely declines. Why? “Because I’m too boring,” he says. “I’m not in show business. I’m in the business of getting results for people and trying to build our reputation up.”40 Tory’s efforts at “workmanlike dullness”41 form part of a larger campaign of hyper-efficiency and acceleration – his seizing of every opportunity to perform impatience at the pace at which things proceed at city hall (as Marcus Gee puts it, Tory is constantly “egging on” city officials to “move faster”),42 and his clever use of the city streets as stages, putting in motion highly visible procedures to speed up traffic for commuters. Upon taking office, he initiated a massive crackdown against vehicles parked illegally during rush hour, an action designed to show a mayor at work, a mayor “getting results.” In other words, Tory has actively performed a getting down to business as a retort to the show business that preceded him. Tory’s antitheatrical performances may, in a different sense, allow him to exude the virtuosic authenticity that is normally demanded of politicians – a naturalness and down-to-earth-ness established, Alexander believes, through a convincing “fusing” of politician and public.43 This insight might help us, in turn, to fuse Tory’s performances of everydayness and normalcy with Ford’s attempts to inhabit the figure of the everyman, a regular guy with whom the common folk can relate. This has been something of a problem for Tory and Ford, who both come from extremely wealthy backgrounds (children of millionaire corporate executives), and who have, at various points in their careers, staged performances aimed at narrowing the perceived gap between their privilege and that of their (largely) less-privileged constituents.44

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Take, for example, the public weigh-ins Ford staged with his brother (and fellow city politician) Doug as part of the “Cut the Waist Challenge,” where he invited the public to share his prosaic struggles with losing weight. Here, the Ford brothers weighed themselves each week on a giant scale located outside the mayor’s office, an action initially accompanied by invitations to the public to join them in weekend exercise walks. (By some cosmically weird coincidence, and surely one that reveals more continuity between Tory and Ford than they would admit, Ford launched this campaign with Tory – then a popular talk radio personality “recovering” from crushing failure in provincial politics – presiding as mc).45 What set the weigh-ins apart from Tory’s staging of dull daily routine is Ford’s use of his own body as stage, an act that exposes politics, more overtly, as “symbolic action.”46 Recalling traditions of body art, Ford presents his body in what Rebecca Schneider calls an “explicit” way, an explicitness designed to “explicate” a larger set of social ideas.47 Cutting his own waist visualizes the waste to be cut from the city budget: the “gravy train” would stop and end with his own body.48 Interestingly, Ford’s body is also a site he manipulated to downplay his class status, routinely wearing rumpled jackets and tracksuits to council to promote his image as a “man-of-the-people.”49 To call Ford’s actions political performance art is to view public acts like the weigh-ins not as transgressions of Canadian political conventions but as actualizations of their hidden theatrical norms. Are Ford’s stunts really all that different from some of the over-the-top stagings that politicians like Stephen Harper have treated us to in recent years? I’m thinking here, for instance, of Harper’s rather awkward insistence that a 2011 interview with cbc’s Peter Mansbridge be staged in a patriotic, masculinizing empty hockey rink.50 Much like the weigh-ins that used the bodies of the Fords to make cost-cutting seem both healthy and manly (and ultimately obscure the larger effects of cutting social services), so too the use of the hockey arena – along with Harper’s Canadaemblazoned jacket – endowed the prime minister with the aura of masculine competitiveness and nationalist strength immediately prior to the 2011 election. Political performance art, in this sense, outs what is always already present in the scenography of politics: the careful staging of the politician’s body in relation to an identity-shaping backdrop – a large scale, an empty hockey area, or in Tory’s case, an empty curb lane at rush hour. It literalizes, often through overdoing the conventional rituals of political camouflage, the rhetorical gymnastics, visual and linguistic, on which the twin genre of political “theatre” depends.

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Alex Halperin of Salon.com makes a similar observation, albeit in passing, when reporting on Ford’s charming defence to the accusation that he asked a female staffer to “eat [her] pussy”; actually, he proclaimed publicly, “I have more than enough to eat at home.” In response, Halperin’s byline reads, “The Toronto mayor’s behaviour suggests a performance artist exploring the limits of political discourse.”51 If, in effect, politicians regularly ward off tabloids by cloaking themselves in the rhetoric of family bliss, Ford invokes the same speech convention without the elision of sexuality that we would normally expect to accompany this nod to the supportive wife. His performance art emerges from what J.L. Austin calls an “unhappy” performative: an utterance that fails to “do something” as the requisite linguistic or social conditions have not been met.52 These performative misfires are nowhere more evident than in the speech act Ford most frequently performed: the apology. Ford said “I’m sorry” again and again and again from 2010 to 2014 – a speech act that, through its many iterations, illuminated a larger repertoire of political apologies. These range from the contrite acceptance of responsibility apology (“I used unforgivable language, and I apologize”),53 to the halfassed, vaguely racist apology (“Asian people do work very hard, and are very, very aggressive. If I have offended anyone in the Asian community, I will proudly retract my statements”),54 to the everyman apology (“Friends – I’m the first one to admit: I am not perfect. I have made mistakes”).55 And let’s not forget the many times Ford interrupted himself – channelling the Brechtian style of performance artist Karen Finley – and asked for direction on how to make his performatives more or less “happy”: “How about, ‘I am so sorry.’ Is that as good as ‘I apologize’? Or, ‘So sorry?’ Which one do you want, Madam Speaker? Like, ‘Super, super, super, super, super, super, super sorry?’”56 In this last instance, an apology delivered at the request of city council, Ford intimates a keen, if exasperated understanding of the context of the speech act’s reception: an audience that had, by 2013, already turned on their mayor, an audience poised to reject the truthfulness of his words and predisposed to hearing them as boorish and ill-fitting (cancelling out their performative force). To treat this apology and other Fordian performatives as political performance art is thus to read them as instances in which the speaker shows a hyper-awareness of the theatrical conventions that govern political speech, in this case the implicit contract between Canadian politicians that they will speak professionally and behave courteously (the facile stereotype of the polite, always

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apologizing Canadian comes to mind). At the same, it would seem to demand some element of “infelicity” in the carrying out expected political procedure – as Austin wryly puts it, some “muff” in the “execution of the ritual with more or less dire consequences.”57

Locating Ford within Genealogies of Performance Art

Hilary Clinton reminisces about being “dead broke,” but never feared the homelessness that dead broke entails. Rob Ford hates elites at city hall, but is one. Sarah Palin is a maverick who ran for vice president of the most powerful bureaucracy on earth … [We] must know which way those who give us our performance cues tilt, never more so when the performances we bear witness to are so skillfully enacted that we forget we’re watching insiders masquerading as outsiders, or vice versa. –Shannon Gormley58 I don’t know about Andy Kaufman, but I think Chris Farley is alive … and he’s masquerading as an over-the-top mayor character named “Rob Ford.” –Curt Anderson59

Of course, an objection one could raise to the reading of Ford as performance artist is that he is not always aware of the conceptual brilliance of his actions. Wouldn’t it be better to view him as an involuntary performance artist? If we say yes, the next step might be to distinguish him from a long line of self-professed performance artists who have run for public office. Bogad has called this “electoral guerrilla theatre,” which he defines as the act of “running for public office as a creative prank – not to win the election, but to get attention for a radical critique of policy or to sabotage the campaign of a particularly heinous candidate.”60 In Canada, this guerrilla practice has a rich history, one that includes artists like Vincent Trasov, aka Mr Peanut, who ran an absurd campaign for mayor of Vancouver in 1974, appearing as a tap-dancing peanut to show that politics is art: “P for Performance, E for Elegance, A for Art, N for Nonsense, U for Uniqueness and T for Talent.”61 And then there are the Hummer Sisters, the trio of Janet Burke, Jennifer Dean, and Deanne Taylor who jointly ran for mayor of Toronto in 1982, adopting strategies of video art and political cabaret, along with the slogan “This is no job for politicians.” Hilariously, both Mr Peanut and the Hummer Sisters ran against “real” politicians named Art (Art

Figure 9.2 Campaign poster Hummer for Mayor, 1982. Left to right: Jenny Dean, Deanne Taylor, and Janet Burke.

Phillips and Art Eggleton), in what the Hummers dubbed an “art versus Art” campaign.62 In fact, the Hummer Sisters’ bid for the mayor’s office was so compelling that they placed second in the election, winning 12,000 votes. This history of campaigning performance artists can be traced to the present and includes more recent interventions by people like Chris Lloyd, a man who ran as the Conservative candidate in Justin Trudeau’s riding of Papineau. He would have faced off against the Liberal leader in fall 2015 had he not been exposed, just a few months before the election, as a performance artist who had infiltrated the party. In enthusiastically parroting party talking points on social media and staging selfies with bigwig politicians at Tory events (e.g., beaming proudly in a thumbs-up shot with Harper), Lloyd exposed the rites of blending in through which electoral candidates gain political capital, along with the inner workings of “the Conservatives’ public relations machine.”63

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Given this history of creative campaigning – and the antics of artists like Lloyd, which seem at once parodic and utterly serious – it is not hard to see why commentators joked that Ford might actually be a performance art prankster or genius comedian masquerading as a politician (see epigraph above).64 While it is important to mark the differences between Ford and his guerrilla doppelgängers, I still think it is much more useful to place Ford within a performance art lineage, for at least three reasons. First, performance art might in fact be understood as the dominant mode of performance demanded by municipal politics.65 It is not unusual to see a wide range of performance strategies deployed in mayoral races in Canada. Unlike would-be mps, mayoral candidates cannot cloak themselves in the recognizable branding of larger political parties (New Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, etc.). As a result, they must deploy exceptionally memorable and creative techniques to build their own political brands and stand out from a larger throng of candidates; indeed one thing that distinguishes mayoral races is that the playing field is much more expansive and open to independent candidates from all areas of civic life. It is not surprising, then, that in the 2010 and 2014 elections, we find Rob Ford running against several card-carrying professional performance artists (e.g., queer performance artist Keith Cole and Sketchy the Clown [David McKay]), “obscure” candidates running on highly performative platforms (e.g., dominatrix Carlie Ritch, aka Mizz Barbie Bitch, who promised to whip city hall into shape),66 and mock candidates campaigning through satirical tweets (e.g., the Rebel Mayor by Spacing Magazine editor Shawn Micallef). Second, placing Ford within a performance art lineage reminds us that performance art is a form especially sensitive to performance’s inherent contingency, aware that its intelligibility as art is reliant upon context and audience. Chris Lloyd, for example, may be an artist commenting on the political system, but he would presumably take up a position in the government if he were elected. His campaign thus becomes legible as art only if one is encountering it in the context of the gallery. Relatedly, a politician will not always be able to control when his actions are perceived as performance and when as reality. It would seem that Ford himself has had some inkling of this life versus art tension, which might account for the identity panic that defined his final days in office, leading him to replace most of his communications staff and even, as many suspect, to pose as a fake caller on a radio show trying to resuscitate the mayor’s tarnished public image (though some speculate it was his brother Randy). Caller “Ian from Etobicoke” presciently asks, “How do you know when you

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are being videotaped? Do you know? How do you know what you do exactly? There’s cameras everywhere.”67 This tension around performance’s intelligibility is also found in the journalistic performance criticism that I described earlier. Pop culture columnist Michael Murray writes, “Like Andy Kaufman before him, Ford has the ability to create and live in the Venn Diagram overlap between the fiction circle and reality circle. Ford seems happy there, with the rest of us staring on in bewilderment, uncertain if what we’re witnessing is self-aware performance art or the Frankenstein id of some moron bully unleashed upon the world.”68 Murray’s stumbling reminds us that the retraining of journalists as performance critics required a reflection on their performative role in constructing reality. As Lee Marshall and Kim Magi show in their analysis of the Ford crack scandal, the fact that journalists were forced to report on a cellphone video virtually none of them had seen led to a more active foregrounding of investigative process, which involved stitching together eyewitness accounts, performing speculative readings of photos, mimicking stories from other news outlets, and engaging in various kinds of linguistic hedging (i.e., “it appeared to show the Mayor smoking crack”).69 Journalists were, in this way, complicit in defining the boundaries between art and non-art when interpreting Ford’s moves. Third, and perhaps most importantly, many of Ford’s actions suggest a strategic and overtly political use of performance art to appeal to a right-wing populism, to suburban voters who feel condescended to by the downtown, latte-drinking, liberal “elites.” Take, for example, the performance art-by-proxy campaign that Ford pursued in which he called upon certain types of celebrities to shore up his image as a politician of and for the people. This starts from the moment of his inauguration when he asks ostentatious hockey commentator Don Cherry to deliver a speech as special guest. Cherry showed up in a pink silk jacket and attacked the left-wing “pinko” newspapers, elites, and artsy people for dominating city politics – in his telling words, for “running the show.”70 The speech prompted several counter-performances, most notably the creation of pink “pinko” buttons worn by city activists on the left, and an intervention by several councillors who showed up to work the next day donning pink in protest. Another noteworthy example is Ford’s arm-wrestling match with retired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, a spectacle staged as part of the 2013 Fan Expo Convention. Here, Ford fully embodied the pro-wrestler persona, entering the room to dramatic strains of “Eye of the Tiger,”

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throwing off his suit and tie, and struggling to overpower Hogan. “Oh big man, that’s all you got, huh?” Hogan taunted, “You know something, not only am I going to rip this arm off, I’m going to take your job while I’m at it, brother. They’re going to call me Mayor Hogan!” Playfully matching his opponent’s macho intensity, Ford responded, “I own this town, man!,” smacking down Hogan’s arm and jumping up in victory.71 A bit of fun, maybe, but the act also promoted Ford’s self-styling as a trash-talking, scrappy mayor, the kind of guy who would dare Police Chief Bill Blair to arrest him and surface in a cellphone video fantasizing about pounding another person in the ring. Michael Romandel picks out phrases like “No Holds Barred” and “I’ll call it,” arguing that many journalists missed that “the video is clearly about Rob Ford envisioning himself in a pro wrestling match against an unnamed opponent (Professional wrestling of course, being a fake performance art with amateur wrestling being a real Olympic sport).”72 Taking a cue from Romandel, who speculates that Ford’s prowrestling persona may explain “some of his continued popularity in the inner suburbs with [working-class] men of a certain age,”73 I want to suggest that this is but one example of Ford invoking a hyper-masculine tradition of performance art: a performance art for the populist right.74 This form caters to the theatrical cravings of right-wing populism in its allegiance to anti-elitist forms of popular entertainment – wwe and hockey – but also things like magic shows, a form Ford embraced when inviting world-famous magician David Blaine to city hall. It appeals to a masculinist agonism that Frank Cunningham views as central to rightwing populism: a political doctrine premised on declaring “an enemy of ‘the people,’ which the populist leader promises to combat.”75 It is precisely this performed anger and antagonism that links Ford to the strategies of modern right-wing politicians such as Donald Trump, leading many Canadians to view the American billionaire, reality tv star, and now, incredibly, US president as Ford reincarnate. Hays explains, “The Ford-Trump axis rests on the notion that each candidate is a take-noprisoners, Dirty Harry–style crusader, intent on destroying the established order.”76 By focusing on the aggressive histrionics of populist politicians and treating them as strategic performance, I follow Taylor’s lead in viewing political leaders as “the new radical performance artists,”77 As Brady puts it, “To consider politicians as radical performers is to understand their actions in a context that fuses aesthetics with efficacy.”78 Clearly this fusion is not new in the realm of politics; rather, Taylor’s phrasing

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Figure 9.3 Toronto mayor Rob Ford (left) takes on professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in an arm-wrestling match to promote Fan Expo in Toronto on 23 August 2013.

points to shifts in the style of politics seen across the Americas in the twenty-first century. Ford’s performances could be read as an intensification of the theatrics found in right-wing politics of the past (to riff on Taylor’s point, our political leaders are “ever more radical performers”).79 Surely Ford’s brash, rough-around-the-edges, and seemingly offthe-cuff actions appear as “radical” performance art precisely because they are ghosted by the polished, highly scripted, and “somber” actions of earlier conservative leaders like Hollywood actor turned politician Ronald Reagan, a model of political performance that now appears suspicious and inauthentic to the populist right.80 The bodily control of Reagan as trained actor – in Timothy Raphael’s words, Reagan knew “how to suck in his breath and stomach, straighten his shoulders, and puff himself up till his body grew to its film shape”81 – throws Ford’s lack of bodily control into high relief. Reagan’s studied presidential poise is nearly the opposite of the physical bearing of a confrontational pro-wrestler, though these performances both rely on acting skills to exude masculine strength. Beyond pro-wrestling, reading right-wing populism as a combative art returns us to the Fords’ public weigh-ins, a performance ghosted by

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the chest-pounding battles of reality shows like Survivor and The Biggest Loser, as well as the manly weigh-ins of boxing and ufc. Appropriately, one of the people who came out to support Ford in his bid for re-election was former boxing champion and convicted criminal Mike Tyson. In a show of mutual admiration staged for the press, Tyson described Ford as “the best mayor in Toronto’s history,” a champion who, like him, has fought hard to “overcome adversity.” “We’re cut from the same cloth,” Ford agreed – a controversial but rather apt statement, given Tyson and Ford’s hostile relationship with police and shared histories of drug use, sexual harassment, and domestic violence.82 Going further, this reading casts in a new light the Ford brothers’ weekly radio call-in show, The City, initially presented on Newstalk 1010, and later continued on YouTube after its cancellation in 2013. The City, described by critics as a “bully pulpit,”83 was modelled after the conservative talk radio format made famous by personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, where a brash, right-wing or libertarian man rails very loudly and melodramatically against the liberal media. Comedy Central’s Colbert Report satirized this populist form when actor John Lithgow re-enacted a press release issued by Newt Gingrich’s press secretary in which the liberal “literati” are compared to a firing squad. Listening to Lithgow’s dramatic reading, it is easy to see why Salon.com and Huffington Post describe the Gingrich camp’s Tea Party–style manoeuvre as “performance art”: “The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding … They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods.”84 Conjuring this combative performance art tradition, the Fords used their radio show to bash reporters, most of whom they dismissed as “a bunch of maggots”85 and feminized as “sucky kids” who “whine and cry and moan.”86 To return to my earlier claim that political performances require specific scenographic and linguistic supports, it is worth noting too that the Ford brothers’ affinity for the improvisational, reality-oriented spaces of talk radio and YouTube exemplify the ways in which low-tech, interactive, and easily accessible performance venues have been used by populist politicians to position themselves against a technologically slick, scripted liberal media. These tactics align with Raphael’s contention that exploiting the “techne of performance and the networks of electronic media” has been essential to politics since Reagan, even if the goal is now to produce decidedly ungroomed politicians.87

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Fittingly, talk radio, and related forms like hardball-styled tv talk and reality shows, also turn up in performance artist Guillermo GómezPeña’s writing about the “mainstream bizarre.”88 Here, Gómez-Peña reflects on the late capitalist blurring of boundaries between performance artists and “performative polemicists” like Howard Stern and Chris Matthews, celebrity provocateurs who attempt to occupy the unpredictable qualities of performance artists while simultaneously staging cultural dialogue and difference as crass public spectacle. He laments, “Traditionally known for our ‘transgressive’ behavior and our willingness to defy dogmas, cultural borders, and moral conventions, performance artists must now compete in outrageousness with sleazebags Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, and mtv’s ‘Jack Ass’ [sic] … Public intellectuals (what does ‘public’ mean in this context?) must now attempt to speak to students or write for readers who may regard Bill Maher and the performative polemicists of msnbc as actual public intellectuals.”89 What radical terrain is left for performance artists, Gómez-Peña asks, in a culture where mainstream figures now present themselves as outsiders and traffic in extremes? Following this train of thought, what could be more “extreme” than Ford’s undying commitment to his job as mayor, a form of macho endurance art that he performed through scandal after scandal, refusing to quit, and one that elicited an awfully empathetic reaction from the other outsiders of Ford Nation. Were it not for Ford’s sudden illness and withdrawal from the 2014 race, this performance could easily have delivered him another stunning victory. I realize that much of what I’ve said here may sound equally extreme and may fly in the face of current scholarship about performance art. Indeed many of us who practise and research this form usually align it with feminist, queer, and anti-racist activisms, or with the critically sophisticated conceptual art we would now find at the moma. What then do we make of the incursion of Ford’s brand of performance art into the space once thought to be occupied by these superheroes of the avant-garde and valiant activists of the political left? The most common response is to frame Ford’s brand of political performance art as an “appropriation,” or as Gómez-Peña’s puts it, a co-opting of performance art’s radicality and interactivity by “the new global culture.”90 Similarly Julia Halperin believes that the use of the “lofty” label performance art to describe the antics of Tea Party activists like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain is merely the latest misguided attempt to appropriate “artspeak” within mainstream culture. She adds, “It also suggests a pronounced lack of understanding of what a performance artist actually is.”91 Like Gómez-Peña,

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she implies that the populist political performance art of Ford and Palin is but a pale imitation of the original, a bastardization of “true radical behaviour.”92 But I would like to suggest, in closing, that the Fordian performative offers us instead an opportunity to look back at the assumptions we bring to bear when we define “what a performance artist actually is” and when we historicize performance art as a political form. Here I am influenced by performance theorist John Fletcher’s counterintuitive reading of evangelical, pro-life, homophobic Hell Houses in the United States as a form of community-based activism. Fletcher acknowledges that Christian fundamentalist Hell Houses – haunted houses that stage the gruesome afterlife that awaits sinners – do not exactly line up with the “radical” politics of performance studies, particularly when “activism” is claimed as the exclusive terrain of the socially progressive political left.93 Similarly, approaching the Fordian performative as performance art allows us to think more deeply about the mechanisms of distinction that scholars enact in trying to define its highbrow and/or politically superior counterpart (i.e., the “true” performance art) – a form of elitism to which Ford Nation’s “counter-taste”94 so often and so effectively reacts. As Fletcher warns, by dismissing behaviours performed by right-wing “radicals” as tasteless, cultural theorists on the left can sometimes end up in inadvertent alignment with the very “market mentality of late capitalism” that they view as eroding the sharp edges of enlightened, liberal humanist performance. I’m thinking here of activist performances of “good taste” staged at the height of the Ford scandals in an effort to rehabilitate Toronto’s image and elevate it to its former status as a refined, world-class city. Consider, for instance, the “More Than Ford” campaign, initiated by art directors Marie Richer and Hannah Smit, which invited Torontonians to counteract “the drama at city hall”95 by sharing thoughts, via #MoreThanFord, on why “Toronto is still the best.” This approach draws on the language of Richard Florida’s neo-liberal creative city policy, its promotion of a privileged, gentrifying cosmopolitanism and interurban competition. The neo-liberal undertones also appear in a YouTube video compilation created by the More Than Ford team, which emphasizes Toronto’s greatness through images of a happy, lattedrinking, creative arts–enjoying city constantly engaged in healthy (apparently non-dramatic) play: a barista making espresso on Queen West, diverse bodies in carnival dress at Caribana, and street buskers playing in front of trendy clothing shops.96 The use of creative, healthy, mostly

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thin bodies to divert attention from the Ford show recalls other actions promoted by anti-Ford activists, such as the Steel Bananas Collective’s online instructions for staging “an Anti-Rob Ford Parody Performance Piece,” which include “Rent[ing] a Fat Suit” and “Smearing your face with ketchup or mustard” to “portray Rob Ford in his grotesque reality.”97 In many ways, these interventions chime not only with the classism of Ford’s neo-liberal policies but also the casually discriminatory behaviour these activists found so distasteful in the mayor (i.e., body shaming here strangely doubles as political activism). Accordingly, and to loop back to the theatrical fantasy with which this chapter began, these counterperformance strategies ultimately hint at the dangers of a left activism mirroring the extremism of the right. Treating the Fordian performative as performance art, finally, allows us to think more critically about the “other histories” of performance art that are repressed in purist and avant-garde narratives of aesthetic origin. For performance artist Coco Fusco, in her important genealogical provocation “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” this involves retrieving the very politically incorrect histories of bodily display found in forms of popular entertainment like world exhibitions, circuses, and sideshows. “Performance Art in the West did not begin with Dadist ‘events,’” Fusco insists. “Since the early days of European ‘conquest,’ ‘aboriginal samples’ of people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were brought to Europe for aesthetic contemplation, scientific analysis, and entertainment.”98 Reminiscent of the popular entertainment staged by Ford during his tenure as mayor, a number of the examples identified by Fusco are spectacles commissioned for the amusement of political figures. She offers an example from the 1550s: “Native Americans are brought to France to build a Brazilian village in Rouen. The King of France orders his soldiers to burn the village as a performance. He likes the spectacle so much that he orders it restaged the next day.”99 Charting an alternative genealogy of performance art that leads to Ford might include these racist, sexist, classist, and ableist performance forms. It might also take a detour into the hyper-masculinist physical culture of boxing, wrestling, and bodybuilding, an arena of popular performance that centres on the explicit display of male bodies and dramatic spectacles of masculine competition. Indeed, these gendered and highly physical forms of performance have much longer histories of inclusion, alongside trapeze acts and juggling, within avant-garde traditions of Dada and Futurist cabaret – a tradition often identified by formalist art

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historians as the early twentieth-century precursor to performance art.100 It might even, horror of horrors, directly intersect with “official” performance art histories, linking Ford’s macho endurance art to the inter-gender wrestling of Andy Kaufman or, less directly, to the masculinist martyrdom of ordeal artists like Chris Burden – an interdisciplinary mapping that productively erodes distinctions between a performance art of the right and of the left. Rob Ford attracted one the most powerful political followings in recent Toronto history. He built this support, as municipal politics demands, not through reliance on party platform, but rather through astute rhetorical construction, by experimenting with attention-grabbing repertoires of popular and political display. This, at the very least, makes his performance art hard to forget, and even harder to dismiss.

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no te s Studio 180 Theatre, “Studio 180 in development.” Ibid. Ibid. For votes by ward, see Topping, “How Toronto Voted.” Rob Ford qtd. in LeakSourceCanada, “Rob Ford ‘Inebriated’ Rant.” See, e.g., ctv News, “Timeline: Rob Ford Crack Video Scandal.” Foucault, “We ‘Other Victorians,’” 12. Daisey, “Dreaming of Rob Ford.” Big Picture Cinemas, “Homepage.” Nicholls, “Mayor Rob Ford.” Levin, “It’s Time to Profess,” 167–72. Brady, Performance, Politics, xii–xiii. See, e.g., Kellner, “Media,” 21. Moore, Fahrenheit 9-11. See Taylor, The Archive, 30–3, 161–89; Taylor, Disappearing Acts. Raphael, President Electric; Mast, Performative Presidency; Schuler, “Priamaia liniia”; Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 1–32; Alexander, Performance of Politics. Bogad, “Electoral Guerrilla Theatre”; Day, Satire and Dissent; Westlake, “Güegüence Effect.” Wagner, “Habitus of Mackenzie King”; Filewod, Performing Canada, 35–58; Freeman and Levin, “Performing Politicians.” Jones uses “Pollockian performative” to refer to the “author function” that Jackson Pollock played for body artists of the 1960s and 1970s. She is inter-

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ested in how Pollock, as action painter, has been used both to support tropes of masculine genius, through images of bodily transcendence, and to challenge them via embodiment of dislocated postmodern subjectivity. Jones, Body Art, 53–102. Austin, How to Do Things. Taylor, “New Radical.” Stewart, “On Lying.” Henderson, “Rob Ford Doesn’t Know.” Doktor Zoom, “Rob Ford Has Entered.” Halperin, “Is Politics the New Performance Art?” Also see T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko’s work on celebrities turned performance artists like Shia LaBeouf. Cesare, “#nihilism.” Lawler, “Sarah (Palin).” Halperin, “Is Politics the New Performance Art?” Ibid. Henderson, “Rob Ford Doesn’t Know”; Hepburn, “Rob Ford”; Blatchford, “City Hall’s Clown Prince”; “Evening Brief.” See, e.g., Marshall and Magi, “That ‘Alleged’ Video”; McClelland, “Rob Ford: Professor of Journalism.” Thanks to Kathleen Gallagher for assisting me in making this connection. Kupferman, “Eight Reasons.” See Levin’s “Course Syllabus” for a discussion of more than twenty Ford-inspired plays, including Rob Ford: The Opera, libretto by Michael Patrick Albano; One Wild Night, David Ferry’s adaptation of a Toronto Star article; and Jason Hall’s 21 Things You Should Know about Toronto’s Crack-Smoking Mayor. Crow’s Theatre, “Dreaming.” Tilley, “Drake’s Next Role.” Godfrey, “Good Riddance.” Alexander, Performance of Politics, 12. Alcoba, “‘I Don’t Look at This as Show Business.’” Peat, “John Tory Hopes.” Jeffords, “Jimmy Kimmel Wants Him” (my emphasis). Preville, “Try as We Might.” Gee, “John Tory Wants to Get Things Moving.” Alexander, Performance of Politics, 38, 166. Ford Fest, an annual barbecue thrown by Rob and Doug Ford for the general public, is a great example of an event staged with the express goal of making the Ford brothers seem more accessible. (Thanks to Nicholas Hanson for this insight about class in politicians’ performances.)

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45 Tory lost the 2003 mayoral election to David Miller and resigned as Ontario pc Leader in 2009 after a by-election loss. He thus appeared at the Cut the Waist Challenge as both a “recovering politician,” and, in his words, a “recovering fattie,” having lost forty pounds in a weight-loss program (Alcoba, “At 330”). Tory sought the Fords’ support when running for mayor in 2003, and previously praised Doug Ford as a “smart, button-down, no-nonsense businessperson.” See Huffington Post, “John Tory Was for Doug Ford.” 46 Alexander, Performance of Politics, 12. 47 Schneider, Explicit Body, 2. 48 Ford’s 2010 campaign slogan was “Stop the gravy train” – i.e., reduce excessive spending at City Hall. 49 Dale, “Millionaire Doug Ford.” 50 Harper, interview, 21 April 2011. 51 Halperin, “Rob Ford Is Even More Offensive.” 52 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 13–14. 53 Alcoba, “Toronto Councillors.” 54 Vincent, “After Prodding.” 55 Clarke, “Rob Ford’s Litany of Apologies.” 56 Canadian Press, “Rob Ford.” 57 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 17. 58 Gormley, “Politics as Performance Art.” 59 Anderson, “I don’t know about.” 60 Bogad, “Electoral Guerrilla Theater.” 61 “Mr. Peanut Campaign.” 62 VideoCabaret, “Hummer for Mayor.” 63 Hamilton, “Conservative Opponent.” 64 The joke that Ford might actually be the late actor Chris Farley led to the creation of the fake trailer for “Rob Ford: The Movie,” which narrates Ford’s rise to power through clips from Farley’s movies. 65 Thanks to Ric Knowles for helping me articulate this point. 66 Dale, “Meet the Longshots.” 67 Coutts, “Did Mayor Rob Ford Call.” 68 Murray, “Rob Ford’s Fashion Blog.” 69 Marshall and Magi, “That ‘Alleged’ Video.” 70 Cherry, qtd. in Rider, “Why Don Cherry.” For an analysis of Cherry’s performance, see Levin, “Performing Toronto.” 71 Hogan and Ford, qtd. in Rider, “Mayor Rob Ford Bests Hulk Hogan.” 72 Romandel, “Rob Ford, a Pro Wrestler.” 73 Ibid. 74 At a 2011 event honouring Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty,

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hosted at Ford’s home, Ford helped present Flaherty with a “World Championship Finance Minister Belt” – evidence of how central wrestling imagery is to the Fords and the Conservative party. See Peat, “Ford, Harper Love-In.” Cunningham, “What Rob Ford Can Teach Us.” Hays, “When Canada Looks at Donald Trump.” Taylor, “New Radical.” Brady, Performance, Politics, 4. Taylor, “New Radical” (my emphasis). Raphael, President Electric, 14. Ibid, 15. Tyson and Ford, qtd. in Dale, “Mike Tyson.” Powell, “Ford Brothers’ Weekly Show.” Huffington Post, “10 Celebrity Performance Artists”; Mustich, “Newt’s ‘Sheep’ Statement.” Visser and Alcoba, “‘Bunch of Maggots.’” ctv News Toronto, “Ford Brothers Call Media ‘Liars.’” Raphael, President Electric, 13. Gómez-Peña, “Performance against the Cultural Backdrop.” Ibid. Ibid. Halperin, “Is Politics the New Performance Art?” Gómez-Peña, “Performance against the Cultural Backdrop.” Fletcher, “Tasteless as Hell.” Ibid., 324. Skedline, “More Than Ford Campaign.” Ibid. Correia Da Silva, “How to Stage.” Fusco, “Other History,” 148. Ibid., 146. See Boddy, Boxing, 247–50, on boxing’s inclusion in avant-garde cabaret; and Mazer, Professional Wrestling, on wrestling as performance.

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Occupying the Object: Leslie Baker and Andréane Leclerc in Performance1 e r i n h ur ley

In Fuck You, You Fucking Perv!, interdisciplinary performance artist Leslie Baker is alone save a child-sized white table and chair centre stage and a standing microphone downstage right, just outside the white square that establishes the main playing area. This is a room in her nameless character’s house, as indicated in the text by Montreal playwright Joseph Shragge that forms part of her creation.2 It is her space. But other things keep intruding. Physical objects arrive as they do in dreams, seemingly from nowhere. A black handbag appears, hanging off the end of a long pole extended from the offstage darkness. An empty white bottle of bleach lands suddenly downstage left. Black bungee cords snake across the playing area. The pervasive soundscape (signed by Peter Cerone with original music by Sam Wylie) is similarly intrusive in its extreme volume and its sudden starts and stops; it includes the buzzing of chainsaws, the whoosh of vacuums, and the loud pop of a balloon. Sounds such as these in Perv have a kind of material force beyond their indexical relation to the objects they represent or from which they emanate. Their dense vibrations, high frequencies, and distinctive timbres3 have a strong impact on the receiving body. The haptic qualities of the sounds create the impression of their happening to the character in the way that the physical objects insert themselves into her world. Moreover, this experience echoes the sensorium of a person with bipolar disorder, a condition with which Baker’s character lives4 and whose sensory sensitivities are now extended to the audience. The character’s bipolar disorder is the result of childhood sexual trauma, an experience also echoed in sound when a male voiceover intones the “ten levels of thought for a pedophile” and mental-health hotline jokes while Baker’s character sits at her little table.5

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Most insistent in this dramatic universe, however, is the looming intrusion of the protagonist’s assailant. Just as the white box on the floor is the boundary of her physical space, this phantasmatic assailant figure narratively boxes in the central character. The subject of her several monologues spoken into the standing mic, he belongs to the/her (diegetic) past; he menaces her (onstage, mimetic) present; and he is her destined (diegetic) future. He never appears on stage. But neither does he have to for Baker’s character and her audience to perceive his presence. Theatre scholar Andrew Sofer, whose work has dealt extensively with the material elements of theatrical performance, would call this figure “dark matter.” Dark matter denotes an invisible theatrical phenomenon that both “hold[s] visible [theatrical phenomena] in place” and “observably distorts the visible through its gravitational effects.”6 In Perv, the assailant effectively organizes the representation: he occasioned this story of pain, persecution, and paranoia that now keeps the protagonist “in place” and in her room. Although he has not left traces onstage – a reason one might doubt his reality – Baker’s character’s mind has nonetheless been reorganized around his gravitational effects. Perv ends with the protagonist announcing his arrival into the microphone. As in all good horror stories, he is already inside her place, displacing the water in the bath with his invisible mass. “You can hear the water moving in the bath, shaping the body lying in the bath.”7 Baker sits down on the too-small chair, her head nodding slightly, one hand over each knee. She looks up expectantly. This is the intrusion that all the others have been preparing her for. Blackout. In InSuccube (2012), contortion performer and choreographer Andréane Leclerc stands on a bare catwalk. She faces the actor and burlesque artist Holly Gauthier-Frankel; noise-artist Lisa Gamble scores their encounter. They are Incubus and Succubus, two mythical demons who assume male and female form, respectively, to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women and men, respectively. But here, in their almost matching short black dresses and high heels – as “InSuccube” – the demon-lovers focus only on each other in a choreography that mixes contortion, dance, song, slapstick, and live music. Indeed, their total focus on each other leads critic Marie-Chantal Scholl to characterize the audience as “voyeurs.”8 The dark matter in this performance – and the others by Leclerc discussed below – is this kind of spectator-contortionist relation. Leclerc and Gauthier-Frankel face off. Leclerc moves slowly into a low squat position, her mouth open, hissing, eyes fixed on Frankel. A moment and then Frankel grabs Leclerc by the open mouth (her fingers

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cupped under Leclerc’s top teeth) and drags her down the runway. Their movements are alternately erotic, violent, beautiful, and humorous. The audience laughs as Gauthier-Frankel pulls Leclerc around, causing her to “fall into a sequence of increasingly sexualized poses, such as a standing split where her pelvis and back simultaneously grind against GauthierFrankel’s torso while her foot hovers above both their heads.”9 But mostly they are connected, and usually unusually physically attached to each other, as they chase after each other, get off on each other, and move each other into and out of various configurations. Consistent with the artistic traditions of contortion, dance, performance, and burlesque, their bodies are their artistic material. The only other things they handle are their costumes (they play “telephone” with Leclerc’s heels, for instance), the microphone, and a glass of water. In another sequence from a 2010 performance of InSuccube, Leclerc lies on her left side, her torso propped up with her bent left arm. Her right leg extends back over her head in a deep split; her left thigh is on the floor, the knee bent, her foot flexed in the air. Gauthier-Frankel sits on Leclerc’s right, beside the opening of her extreme split and her flexed foot. On this, GauthierFrankel places a full glass of water and intones sexily into the microphones, “Oh yeah, baby. Don’t move, don’t move.” Multidisciplinary artists of two generations, Leslie Baker and Andréane Leclerc play with, against, and alongside objects and their positions. In so doing, they ask us to reconsider what I suggest is a shared premise of much performance theory and much new materialist scholarship – agential action as a key and liberating feature of both “performance” (as a doing) and of “things” (as active/activated objects with agential force). The recognition of things as a source of action has resulted in “one of the most controversial aspects of thing theory, the question of how much agency to attribute to things.”10 The reverse, more dystopic vision of the dynamic and transformative subject-objectthing relation – instances where humans are ascribed the qualities of objects, behave as objects, or are aligned with objects – has not been as widely explored in the scholarly literature indebted to new materialist frameworks. To be reminded of such unhappy and persistent alignments in Perv and their gendered production in InSuccube is to recall other critical histories of “performance” in relation to materiality and materialism – notably feminist materialist criticism – that I propose to bring back into consideration and read alongside new materialist insights. Baker and Leclerc join a history of Canadian, Québécois, and First Nations women’s performative objections to and critiques of the ways

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in which institutional sites, representational mechanisms, and conceptual categories can transform female subjects into objects. Such transformations have been beautifully sent up by Winnipeg-based feminist performance artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan in, for example, the “Tableau Vivant: Eaton’s Catalogue 1976,” in which Dempsey and two other women wear 1970s gowns with working faucets attached to their bodices. In her mock magazine Cosmosquaw (1996), Lori Blondeau (Cree/Saulteaux/Métis) offers “advice” to Indigenous women that mocks the diminishing banalities of women’s magazines while inserting Native bodies into the frame. “Easy make-up tips for a killer Bingoface!” plays on the semantic slippage between making up your face appropriately to go play Bingo and making up your face to be Bingo. La robe blanche (2012) by Quebec actress, playwright, and producer Pol Pelletier makes explicit and local to Quebec the degradations of this dynamic. In a national allegory rooted in the sexual abuse of a girl-child, Pelletier launches (and lands) a scorching feminist critique of the theatrical institution and Québécois psyche as murderously patriarchal in their investments.11 In following Baker and Leclerc’s object play, I also follow a notable materialist strain of theatre and performance studies in English Canada, identified on the plenary “Performance Studies in Canada” at the 2010 PSi Conference held in Toronto. This strain has clustered around figures like Susan Bennett, Alan Filewod, and Ric Knowles, who have helped to train or otherwise influenced Canadianist cultural materialist scholars such as, in this volume, Heather Davis-Fisch, Marlis Schweitzer, Peter Dickinson, and myself. Although materialist is not a term used in French-language scholarship in Quebec, the attentiveness to institutions, funding, and the like in the theatre history work of Jean-Marc Larrue, Gilbert David, and Hervé Guay, for instance, also has materialist aspects. More immediately, I follow the lead of Laura Levin’s interventions in Performing Ground. In this monograph she analyzes the relational dynamics of subjects and objects from a spatial perspective, exposing the “multiple, differentiated bodies that constitute the invisible ‘ground’ of performance practice,” a ground that has often been the infrastructural condition of dominant culture’s self-figuration as “foreground” and subject.12 Significantly, however, Levin posits the efficacy (even necessity) of a changed relation to the distinction and autonomy of “visibility” in the foreground; she calls this positioning “performing ground.” Levin’s “ground” resonates with my understanding of “object” in that neither “leaps up in a field” of matter.13 This is the territory,

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or field, that Baker and Leclerc occupy and resignify in their performance with and as objects. The performances examined here – Baker’s Fuck You, You Fucking Perv! and Leclerc’s Mange-moi, InSuccube, and Cherepaka – critique the operations and results of objectification, particularly as it is enacted upon girls and young women. Their critiques are notable not only for the visual inventiveness of the shows that enact them, but also for their articulation via the performers’ play with and as objects themselves. Both reinhabit popular forms in which objects and people performed, sometimes as each other. In so doing, they reveal the tensions and possibilities posed by a new materialist encounter, which attributes agency to objects (in their “thing” formation), with feminist performance (that posits being an object as problematic) that I position within genealogies of critique and performance in Quebec.

Performance, New Materialism, and Agency: Some Genealogies Much performance theory emphasizes the active valence of performance. Some of the more influential definitions of performance in the Anglo-American academy cast it as an “ado,” a “restored behaviour,” “disappearance,” or “an aesthetically marked and heightened communication.”14 Even Jon McKenzie’s interdisciplinary, general theory of performance in Perform or Else articulates its various paradigms through their specific “challenges” or outputs: efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness. Definitions from the francophone world dominant in the Quebec academy conceptualize performance as action or event even more strongly. In this discourse, “performance” most readily refers to an aesthetic category in the terms that Josette Féral first used to describe it in her foundational Modern Drama article, “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified.”15 For Féral, performance is autonomous and concrete; it does not represent anything else nor aim to make a particular meaning. It is a set of acts – on the performer’s body, the performance space, and the spectators’ and performers’ relationship to the performance. As an example of the last of her triad, consider the first moments of Fuck You, You Fucking Perv!. A loud song plays in total darkness for ten seconds; the moment it stops, Baker leaps out at the audience as if from nowhere. A spotlight has picked her out on the front edge of the stage, clawing at the air between her and the audience; she growls loudly. We are in this together.

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For French theatre scholar Isabelle Barbéris, of capital importance in contemporary European theatre is the “myth of the live,” the “real,” which is answered by “performance,” where performance is an “artistic act [that] privileges the most ‘naked,’ ‘material,’ ‘spontaneous’ doing, a doing that is sometimes independent of the drama, the fiction, or the narrative continuity by which a show may traditionally establish itself.”16 Such an understanding of performance as actual action enables what Féral has termed théâtre performatif (performative theatre). Québécois scholar Catherine Cyr elaborates on such a theatre’s practices in contemporary work in which dramatic situation is punctured by “fragments of the real” that implicate the performer’s own corporeal experience and draw out that of the spectator.17 Andréane Leclerc’s contortion work is a clear example of such a “real” that implicates the performer’s and spectator’s corporeal experience. As a contortionist performer, her act is her body, a fact underscored by the usual costuming of contortionists in either cache-sexe and bikini or in skin-tight stretchable fabric which reveal and emphasize the workings of the performing body. In performance, Leclerc’s body is really being visually reassembled and disjointed in front of the audience, thereby implicating both their own presumptively normatively arranged physicality and their presumptively more limited movement capacities. In its liberation from representation, performance does.18 This language of action and effect that permeates much performance theory also runs as a key value through thing theory and new materialism, the broader theoretical shift in which the former sits. New materialists view matter as an active principle, as something with performative force, rather than as inert and determined “instrumentalities, techniques of power, recalcitrant objects, or social constructs.”19 For their active qualities, those bits of matter that transform “visibly, tangibly or imperceptibly – the sociocultural, economic, and/or theatrical conditions in which it takes part” are named “performing objects and theatrical things” by Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy in their collection. They write, “We understand physical materials … as actants, with particular frequencies, energies and potentials to affect human and nonhuman worlds.”20 Such an emphasis on doing and effect (as well as its liberatory valence) is evident in the now paradigmatic transformation of an “object” into a “thing.” To American literary critic Bill Brown, whose work has been foundational to conceiving the animations of matter in Western, anglophone humanities scholarship, the distinction between

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objects and things hinges on their greater or lesser degrees of autonomy and activity in relation to another. Objects are mastered by and useful to their users, whereas things exert their independence and push back against such utilitarian mastery; in Brown’s example, a piece of paper is an object when it is being used – written upon or folded into a paper airplane – but it is a thing when it cuts the skin and so announces its physical properties to the sentient being it has wounded.21 A thing, then, is a material substance that in the assertion of its physical properties resists being a tool or instrument in service of another’s fuller or extended agency – the piece of paper and pen enabling the assertion of human subjectivity that is lyric poetry or the autobiographical monologue, for instance. The resistance of the thing, its assertion of its “self” – as when the pen explodes or the paper rips – should similarly endear it to performance studies scholarship in which, per Jon McKenzie, the “transgressive or resistant potential [of performance] … has come to dominate the study of cultural performance.”22 Moreover, and beyond mere resistance, the force of the thing makes for “scriptive things” and “choreographic things” that guide their human partner’s movements.23 In other words, things not only perform (have force and effect) but also catalyze others’ performances (their actions). In this way, performance and the thing (as opposed to the object) evince a certain agency. So, in Perv, the long elastic straps with hand-hold loops at their ends invite their attachment to Baker’s body. She will wear them alternately on her ankles, her wrists, and her neck, in each instance working with and against their (literal) resistance; the push-me pull-you of these moments exhibit the human performer and the bungee cord as actants in dynamic interchange. And yet, for all the doing of performance performing and the actions of things thinging, “performance” also boasts a genealogy tightly aligned with the acted-on and the less lively – that is to say, the object. The object in my usage is the opposite of Brown’s “thing,” though, consistent with an “old” materialist framework and materialist feminist critique, I place a greater emphasis on its historical and cultural surround as consequential. The object then is (1) a material phenomenon that is (2) an artifact of crystallized labour and (3) the result of a particular, historical relation that makes it (4) useful to/used by another. This working definition aims not only to set some terms for my analysis but also to highlight the conceptual companionability of new materialism and old, as well as that of performance and the object. It is feminist performance and analysis that brings these sometimes obscured relations together.

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So, where has “performance” been conceptually allied with objects over (or at least in equal measure with) subjects or, more broadly, actants? To begin with the mundane: a (cultural) performance is something one attends and experiences and for which one generally pays. The “display of skill” (one of Marvin Carlson’s definitions) is, in its display, made an object of perception. And, pace Nicholas Ridout, it is a commodity to be consumed by an audience at leisure watching performers labour.24 In Heiner Goebbel’s 2007 “no-man show” and installation piece for five pianos, Stifter’s Dinge (Stifter’s Things), Ridout spies a general theatrical condition, active in both theatre and in things – commodity fetishism. Following Marx, in the ascription of exchange value (a price) to products of labour – an ascription that transforms the product of labour into a commodity – capital dematerializes the physical properties of the objects, the labour that made such things, and the relations of use that arise from their physical properties. In this abstraction, the “products of men’s hands … appear as independent beings endowed with life, and [as] entering into relation both with one another and the human race.” Thus, in what many, including Ridout, have described as a “theatrical” operation, a wooden table, when it “steps forth as a commodity … stands on its head, and evolves out of its brain grotesque ideas.”25 If this is a transformation of object to thing for new materialists, for historical materialists it is nonetheless a dangerous deception. Such liveliness, as cultivated in illusionistic theatre, is not inherent to the object but is rather a mirage of capital that obscures the people and social relations that produced the object that is the show. As Baker’s piece makes disturbingly evident, and as has been implicit in the above recounting of materialist genealogies of performance theory, “performance” and “object” also unite on the less happy ground of utility. Baker’s “schizophrenic immersion into psychological damage caused by pre-mature sexualization” explores the effects of unwanted intrusions on a child’s person, on her use by another to ends not her own.26 Another social relation that makes objects out of things, this is a kind of use-value gone amok. Like the mastered object, “performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance.” (Significantly, this is another place where anglophone and francophone reflections on performance agree.)27 Like the object, then, performance does not so much have identifiable properties as it inheres in and is produced out of relations of greater or lesser mastery. In its relationality and orientating effects, performance is fundamentally object-producing. Feminist performers and scholars have

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long testified to the female performer’s occupational hazard of being “for” an audience, and have elaborated practices and theories to counter it. Ellen Donkin pinpoints exactly this danger of being for others when she writes, “The history of women’s performance is the history of a struggle for a subject, rather than an object, position in representation.”28 Such positioning affects the way in which histories of art are recounted as well, as demonstrated in the pioneering feminist scholarship of Paula Sperdakos on the forgotten lives of early Canadian actresses, or the redressive studies of Lucie Robert and Kym Bird on early French- and English-Canadian women playwrights, for example. In another materialist analysis, that of black performance studies scholar Fred Moten, “performance” not only inserts itself into a genealogy that ties performance to the useful object, but that also makes vivid the “productive dynamic of capitalism that turns things – including many living human things – into objects.”29 His argument about performance begins “with the historical reality of commodities who spoke” – that is, of enslaved people of African descent in the New World. The liveliness of these speaking commodities is not a delusion, as it is in the case of the dancing table. Rather, it emanates from the enslaved person herself and it is compounded by that person’s transformation into an object for exchange. The challenge, implied by Ridout and Moten and expressly advocated for by Schweitzer and Zerdy, is to think through how “new materialism shares ‘old’ materialism’s commitment to understanding the constitution of sociopolitical and geocultural worlds and how objects shape human relations.”30 Added to that challenge is accounting for gendered, institutional power relations in feminist performance – their object-positions, their objections, and their things.

Fuck You Fuck You, You Fucking Perv! premiered in 2011 at one of Canada’s premiere feminist and queer performance festivals, Montreal’s (regrettably now-defunct) Edgy Women Festival for feminist experimental art events; most recently it was remounted in a full-length version at Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival in January 2015.31 The organization and feel of Perv show the influence of Edgy (1994–2016) and its producing organization, Studio 303 (1989– ), an interdisciplinary arts centre that presents new work and offers workshops and residencies. A bilingual hub for interdisciplinary experimentation, Studio 303 is an important space

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for queer and feminist artists, as well as “artists who escape definition and who seek new models for artistic creation.”32 Such models have included cabaret (an avowed influence of Baker’s) and burlesque (likewise for Leclerc), used in unexpected, feminist ways, in a dynamic cultural scene that features the revival of these and other variety forms. For instance, Montreal actor Danette Mackay produced the Kiss My Cabaret, “a notorious evening of alternative entertainment” that featured “clowns, comics, contortionists, musicians, magicians, drag kings and queens” from 2001 to 2008 at the Sala Rossa (another signal node in the city’s alternative and variety performance economy). In 2014, along with actor and musician Harry Standjofsky, she launched the Fancy Pants Supper Club, an evening of variety entertainment and dancing, again at the Sala Rossa.33 T.L. Cowan and Studio 303’s Artistic and General Director Miriam Ginestier are documenting the histories of Meow Mix (1997–2012) – an almost-monthly cabaret and dance party for “bent girls & their buddies” – and the annual lesbian cabaret, Le Boudoir (1994–2008), both produced by Ginestier and many of whose artists were regularly featured at Edgy.34 Edgy’s repeat artists include Alexis O’Hara, Dayna McLeod, Jess Dobkin, and Nathalie Claude who, notably, says she was able to exist onstage as a lesbian in the vaudevilles she wrote for Le Boudoir and in “feminist, queer and alternative festivals in Montreal.”35 This truncated list of performers is telling of Edgy’s and Studio 303’s ex-centric yet vital place in the theatre/performance ecology of Montreal. It is the place for pieces and artists that don’t quite fit other moulds. Such is the case for both Baker’s and Leclerc’s work, which were presented under one or another of the Studio 303 banners and where each has offered workshops or classes. A series of vignettes of varying tones and rhythms, Perv is shaped into modules – discrete event and/or image-segments that defy chronology and an Aristotelian dramatic arc, and that are emphatically bounded by blackouts. It has the piece-y feel of a collection; Baker says she works in “fragments.”36 Moreover, the fragments dredge up historical artifacts of popular performance culture – vaudeville, tap, Shirley Temple, topsyturvy dolls, torch songs. And finally, the majority of the “turns” that compose the piece are emphatically frontal, clearly on display for the audience. These factors lead me to understand Perv as a collection of objects. The variety of “acts” within this episodic organization are connected through Baker’s continuous stage-presence and the themes of predation, pedophilia, and mental disorder. Her tall, black-clad body, topped by a profusion of electric blue hair curled into ringlets is always

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the dominant vertical line in the stage-picture, but where exactly she will turn up once the lights are turned back on is anyone’s guess. Sometimes she is on the floor, arms and legs akimbo; sometimes she is heaving over the upended chair; sometimes she stands at the microphone. Through her signature use of “corporeal expression in resonance with sound, text, and image,”37 Baker conjures ambivalent scenes of abuse conveyed through bodily pose plus sound effects, and generally made in combination with her crawling figure and the small chair. Images of selfharm likewise flash through the performance; she “drinks” the “bleach” in the bleach bottle, wraps packing tape around her neck, and spreads peanut butter on her arm with a large knife only to roughly eat it off while a voice-over lists a sequence of actions: “Hate yourself / Hurt yourself / Call him back / Take him back / Concuss him with a frying pan.”38 Interleaved with these bits are up-tempo tap-dancing numbers, paranoid direct-address monologues, costume-play, and visual “snapshots” in which her immobile form is discovered by a spotlight or where a scene closes on her pose. In these moments, she is picture. The disturbing entrances of objects into the character’s private world detailed at the beginning of this chapter point to a certain proximity (wished-for or not) to matter – light and dark – as lived by this female protagonist. While the assailant is physically absent, the onstage objects are almost too present. They attach to her in unsettling ways. For example, an over-sized, black, boned neck-ruffle reminiscent of both Elizabethan ruff and dog-cone fastens directly to her neck, rather than to her dress. She also seems to regularly run into or afoul of matter: her head goes through a paper-topped aquarium and work-out elastic loops wrap around her neck. Though few, the objects in her space rival the character for attention in their own theatricality: the top of the little table lifts off to reveal a colourful, pop-up scene of paper children; the main character’s dress rises to reveal a similarly colourful and childish underside entirely at odds with the black and white visual universe onstage. In Levin’s phrase, Baker’s character “performs ground” to the foregrounded things around her. The table-top pop-up positions the paper children’s heads close enough to be bitten off, which they are; the skirt’s inversion occasions its own choreography. Moreover, as in these last examples, Baker’s character makes peculiar use of the objects in the space: she drinks the bleach instead of cleaning with it and drags the terrarium around as on a leash instead of populating it with an animal. In short, the objects on stage are things that maintain their own logic even in the character’s relation to them. In that relation, Baker’s character is made “object.”

Figure 10.1 Leslie Baker in Fuck You, You Fucking Perv, 2015.

In some of the episodes this object, like Marx’s table, dances – in tap shoes. Baker’s blue ringlets are but one reference to Shirley Temple, “America’s sweetheart” of the 1930s; her regular tap numbers likewise summon the Depression-era child-star. In contrast with the object sequences discussed above, during the Temple sequences Baker’s character moves decidedly, though paradoxically, into the foreground. One of these sequences features Baker confidently tap dancing on an empty stage to Temple singing “This Is a Happy Little Ditty” from the 1938 film Just around the Corner. Baker displays her dancing skill while occupying the image of Temple displaying hers. In both instances, the tapping serves the story but it is also just tapping – which is not to imply its ease but rather its is-ness. Her “leaping out of the field” of matter in such a moment might be expected, given Temple’s own cultural and cinematic foregrounding as a “star” frequently backgrounded by other child performers (as in the Baby Burlesks) and by adult performers less interesting than she. And

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yet, the invocation of Temple in Perv links the protagonist’s object status to representational frameworks, such as Hollywood studio-system films, whose high volume of production and contract-players system point to its commodity status. (In her first year of employment, 1932, Temple made thirteen short films.) In our post-Freudian moment, it also points to cultural processes of premature sexualization, another risk of “standing out.” Film scholar Ara Osterweil contends that Temple’s films were structured by “a ‘pedophilic gaze,’ or what can be described as the obsessive looking at, eroticizing, and idealizing of the child body. Certainly, Fox capitalized on the diminutive star’s ‘sexy little body’ by insistently showing off Temple’s precocious physical charms through costume, framing, lighting, and camerawork more appropriate to a leading romantic interest than to a child in diapers.”39 Consider another Temple sequence. Baker lifts her black, below-theknee, soft, A-line dress above her waist, turning it inside out to show its colourful, shiny, childish lining, a move that also reveals her bare legs and underpants. If the dress as commodity grotesquely turned thing displays a certain depth in this moment that risks upstaging the protagonist, Baker undercuts such a dynamic with her own fixed, daring gaze at the audience. When she turns her back to the audience (still watching us over her shoulder), she performs what Osterweil calls the “signature shot of [Temple’s] underpants [that] were crucial to her erotic appeal.”40 Baker’s underwear are covered in rows of white fringe that sway and bounce, like her ringlets, when she moves. In her invocation of Temple, her costume, movements, and expression, Baker’s character seems fully an object of the pedophilic gaze, a position to which she is ferociously attached, even despite having outgrown it. She makes repeated calls to the police, asserting “tonight they’ll realize, it was me that he wanted.” Put differently, the character fails in her attempts at foregrounding herself as “special” and worthy of attention. And so, although she tells herself “get out of here … leave while he’s still in there,” she remains.41 Within the diegesis, the character’s moments of “thingness” tied, notably, to performative display of skill (the tapping) are dimmed by the material conditions of production of the images and objects she occupies, particularly that of Temple. This occupation of the object position produced by the commodity structures of Hollywood cinema (that were, in part, built up around Temple) is dissociative, psychotic, and leaves her divided, waiting for her assailant.

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Andréane Leclerc: Object-Positions Leclerc began her training as a contortionist at nine years old, a notunusually early debut for a contortionist, but one that also entirely normalized her training and the corporeal figures she would learn to assume. At fifteen, she graduated from the École nationale de cirque with a fiveminute act that took her around the world with different circuses. Returning to Montreal in 2006, she entered the worlds of contemporary dance – she has worked with choreographer Dave Saint-Pierre and director Angela Konrad, among others – and burlesque, which has had a significant influence on her creations. In 2013, she completed her Master’s in Theatre (research-creation) at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her focus now is on creation and choreography, largely for herself and her company, Nadère arts vivants. Across her works since 2009,42 Leclerc has investigated and experimented with the kinds of relations fostered between her white, female, contortionist body and that of the viewing spectator. Leclerc has said, “Contortion is very often associated with desire, with seduction, that is with sexuality … I needed to take back control of it all.”43 Leclerc writes eloquently in her master’s thesis of the “horizon of expectation” that many bring to contortionism. Such horizons are reinforced in the material structures of circus contortionism, which is built to be maximally viewable to the spectator, often placing the contortionist on a raised, sometimes rotating platform so that viewers can see the body in all its angles. The imaginary of the circus as a place of extraordinary feats that surpass human limits also influences the spectator’s horizon of expectation, as does contortionism’s history of practice as a circus art, a sideshow display, and an erotic spectacle.44 Consider the poses assumed by the contortionist as well in contributing to the audience expectation. Contortion figures are extraordinary both vis-à-vis quotidian bodily arrangements and for their visual homologies with non-human creatures. Contortionists typically move through poses that mimic the shapes of other kinds of creatures (e.g., arachnoids or serpents) or the attributes of other kinds of materials (e.g., rubber or plastic). In the 2015 performance of Cherepaka, for instance, a sidelight projected Leclerc’s silhouette on the opposite wall, magnifying her crablike and mantis-like positions. Her shoulder blades sometimes rose like horns out of her back. Thus, because the contortionist is positioned within the show as spectacle (to be looked at) and as different from the “norm” (as lived by the presumably able-bodied spectator), the spectatorial

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position produced is generally typified by wonder or fascination, affects and attitudes that distance and differentiate the spectator from the performer. Although this viewing position may of course be assumed, disavowed, or otherwise deviated from by any individual spectator, its preponderance to spectacularization of the contortionism act is evident in the imagery of contortionism that has circulated in venues as varied as muscle magazines, circus advertisements, literature on “freaks,” “hoaxes,” and erotica.45 Consider too the names given to contortionists/ contortion acts. In The Science of Flexibility, Michael J. Alter lists “‘Posturers,’ ‘Limber Jims,’ ‘Pretzels,’ ‘Benders,’ ‘Frogs,’ ‘Kinkers,’ ‘Boneless Wonders,’ ‘India-Rubber Men,’ and ‘Elastic Incomprehensibles.’”46 Indeed, québécistes and circus scholars Karen Fricker and Charles Batson have shown renewed interest in such a history of making strange and the horizon of expectation that accompanies it even to this day, organizing with Louis Patrick Leroux the first international “Circus and Its Others” conference in July 2016. Leclerc herself has been a part of this emerging performance studies scholarship centred in Quebec on circus and difference, having delivered a paper on her creative practice as part of the Montreal Working Group on Circus Research, founded by Leroux and Fricker in 2010.47 If these nicknames and the visual homologies of the contortionist’s poses to non-human creatures indicate her “difference” from the norm, and an attitude toward that difference, they also point to her occupation of the object-position (vis-à-vis the spectator subject-position), which she accomplishes by performing “object.” In Mange-moi, performed at the Tangente dance venue in 2013 with actor Marie-Ève Bélanger and with Luce Bélanger on piano, Leclerc explores the suggestive images of classical contortionism and thematizes performer-spectator relations. Publicity for the piece reads in part: “Mange-moi lays bare the contortionist body, making the performer and the spectator who watches her fully conscious of her fragility, sexuality, femininity.”48 First appearing naked, she performs contortions in front of a seated, clothed Bélanger in the role of the “spectator.” Then in a red and green body stocking, her movements suggest the non-human life forms of the snake and the apple from the Book of Genesis. She eventually clothes herself in the black dress worn by Bélanger. The performer and spectator change roles here as they rearticulate the Christian story of the dawn of self-knowledge and of corporeal reserve, the latter of which is a pointed contrast to the contortionist’s physical boldness and expression.

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Within this framework in which she assumes object-positions, Leclerc strives to maintain her “humanity.” French circus theorist Philippe Goudard avers that humanity is fully attributed to contortionists in performance only while they are in the vertical position and with all their parts in their usual places, that is, in the position in which they most resemble the audience’s presumed physicality.49 InSuccube and Mangemoi register an objection to the objectification of the contortionist by playfully occupying the expected object position but doing so for herself and another performer, as is clear in her focus and attention in performance. In this way, Leclerc “burlesques” circus, as Kelly Richmond has argued: “In InSuccube, contortionism doesn’t exist simply to be looked at, but rather functions as a sex act purposefully performed for the pleasure of the performer and her partner. In burlesquing the voyeurism of the contortion spectacle, Leclerc gains queer agency and subjecthood, sexually acting upon her audience while simultaneously denying them the opportunity to fetishize her.”50 Inspired by and integrating the feel of burlesque performance in these two projects, she understands her work in the frame of “empowerment,” a notion integral to burlesque, as Joanna Mansbridge explains in her excellent article on Montreal’s former burlesque and contemporary neo-burlesque scenes. Mansbridge quotes Montreal burlesque artist Cherry Typhoon’s view of burlesque as “a form that ‘celebrates’ differences in ‘body size, disability, age, race’ and promotes ‘freedom’ and ‘the art of being confident.’”51 Burlesque’s attractions for a performer whose act highlights her corporeal divergence is obvious. Importantly, Mansbridge pinpoints another of its attractions: “Burlesque also offers an alternative to popular culture’s commoditization of female sexuality, technology’s digitization of social life, and heteronormative culture’s privatization of sexuality, giving women – and men – an opportunity to gather and a stage on which to develop ideas, create personas, and make fun of our cultural fixations on sex and female bodies.”52 Against such production as commodity, evacuated of its laborious creation and the social relations that inhere in production, Leclerc proposes Cherepaka (2011). In this fifty-minute piece, Leclerc pursues a different strategy by performing “thing” in the new materialist sense (an object with agential force) in order to take apart the institutional apparatus that frames contortion performance. To undermine the objectifying relations that haunt contortion and circus performance, Leclerc renovates their shared scaffolding – la

Figure 10.2 Andréane Leclerc in Cherepaka, 2015.

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prouesse, or the “feat” – the accomplishment of a virtuosic or otherwise extraordinary act.53 Classically, the contortionist passes from feat to feat in a pattern that builds in complexity and tension over an act lasting approximately five minutes.54 This structure is then repeated at the macro-level across the circus as a whole, which builds its “story” through a succession of acts (contortion gives way to a Chinese poles act, which cedes the floor to clowning, etc.) of varying levels of difficulty, duration, and drama. This dramaturgical principle undergirds most “variety entertainments,”55 the broader category in which circus (and cabaret, an inspiration for Baker, remember) fits. However, Leclerc’s shows are not a “turn” or otherwise part of a sequence of different acts; rather, they are complete to themselves. Defying the logic of variety, she creates and performs full-length pieces with their own narratives. Leclerc argues that it is the structure of the prouesse that invites such a sensationalizing relation by the spectator to circus performance – and to the contortionist in particular, given the emphasis on her body’s doings in performance. Undoing the structural principle of the feat, common to contortionism and to circus is thus a double-barrelled institutional critique. Instead of difference from and wonder at the performer-object of contortion, Leclerc’s audiences are invited into a less hierarchical encounter where her corporeal mastery is deconstructed. As part of his analysis of circus dramaturgy, Leroux writes of Leclerc’s project, “She has ventured a writing system that aims to deconstruct artifice and expectations …, that calls into question the usual syntax of her discipline.”56 In Cherepaka, Leclerc performs not the accomplishment of feats but rather “the path the body takes in such an accomplishment by tarrying over the warming-up of the body rather than the execution of a feat of skill.”57 In our language of materialism(s), she is asserting her own physical properties and thus performing “thing” as she presents the stages through which her contortionist body moves toward “performance.” However, in contrast with the thing, Leclerc’s physical properties – while entirely in evidence on the stage and in the ring – are not presented in Cherepaka as “natural” or inherent. Rather, her deconstruction of the language and process of contortionism asserts her own physical properties (piece by piece, as we’ll see immediately below) as trained and as laboured. Instead of exhibiting “the incredible” (i.e., as Marx puts it, an autonomous being endowed with life and divorced from its material creation), Leclerc exposes its composition. She is foregrounded thing and its background production at once.

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Cherepaka is divided into five tableaux, each of which focuses on two or three body parts. As Tableau 1 is concerned with breathing and the spinal column (its movement is a very slow back bend to the floor begun before the audience enters), it is only in Tableau 2 – which works feet, hands, and head – that the audience sees Leclerc’s face (but not her trunk). She is careful to withhold at least one part of her body from view in each tableau, including the final one where she lies on her back in “T”-formation while her head hangs back off the small, round stage on which she has performed. And so the show ends as it began with a “headless” torso and limbs, denying the audience what Leclerc calls their “release” at seeing the contortionist return to herself and like them in the (human) vertical position, as that “return” would reinforce her contortion figures as strange. Instead, she dis-articulates her bodily parts in an “actual” performance, working with them as distinct yet related entities (as is continuous with contortion arts) but that never add up to a “whole” (an objection to the same). By occupying this image repertoire of the “headless woman” and refusing to give her audience the whole body perceived at once, Leclerc also refuses the human/non-human logic of the contortionist routine. Leclerc skirts that opposition altogether. While performing on the circular platform that evokes both circus and freak-show stagings of contortion acts,58 Leclerc contorts with her thing-body the aesthetic tensions of wholeness/partialness, familiarity/exoticism, and intimacy/distance that undergird both circus and contortion. This risk and reward of being an object for others – inherent to performance as a doing for – subtends these works by Leslie Baker and Andréane Leclerc, just as it structures the institutions of display in which they perform (theatre and circus). This object condition constitutes a kind of ur-dark matter of performance, one that is particularly illuminated in feminist experimentation, for such theory and practice was prompted precisely out of the connection of power relations and social structures to cultural imaginaries and representation, connections Baker and Leclerc light up again. Defiantly occupying the spaces of objecthood demanded by their respective institutional framings of illusionistic performance and circus, Leslie Baker and Andréane Leclerc deliberately and playfully prompt thinking across and between materialisms. If Leclerc becomes “thing” in occupying the foreground and asserting her physical properties (as hers), she simultaneously traces the path to performance for. Leclerc’s focus on contortion’s processes over its prouesses displays her artistry,

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which allows her to assume her “strangeness” while also disallowing her commodification. Fuck You, You Fucking Perv! presents a dystopic vision of the gravitational force of the dark matter of performance. Its protagonist, as object to the things around her and subjected to the challenges of bipolar disorder, is caught in a situation not of her own making. But the situation itself is on display here as well, in the “theatrical things” like the dress and the table that say “look at me” as if they had erected their own small proscenium arch. The evocations of Shirley Temple, and the baggage that attends her, signal a more widespread “situation.” In Ridout’s article cited at the beginning of this chapter, he warns of the deceptions enabled by “more animist incarnations” of new materialism: thing theory, he cautions, “might be indulging in a form of commodity fetishism in which the world of things is rendered more appealing and attractive by the attribution of qualities of ‘liveness.’”59 This is the paradoxical position of the female performer as object-cum-thing that I have tried to unpack in these pages. However, I have also tried to flag the conceptual companionability of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism (treating things as if value inhered in the objects themselves, instead of it being a result of human labour) and the determining role of power relations in thing theory, which make things of objects and viceversa. I think this is the more variegated “ground” on which historical/ dialectic/feminist materialism works in tandem with new materialism – investigation of this transformation and its conditions.

n o te s 1 I extend my sincere thanks first of all to Scott Leydon, whose intellectual accompaniment through thinking through these performances and this chapter has been a real gift. Leslie Baker and Andréane Leclerc generously shared archival video of their performances of Fuck You, You Fucking Perv! and of Cherepaka, and Leslie engaged me on my writing about her work. Abundant gratitude to Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer for their astute feedback and guidance on this piece. All translations from the French are mine, unless otherwise noted. 2 Shragge, “Fuck You!,” 10. 3 Timbre points to sound production and the physical characteristics of sound as elements that make for tonal distinction; thus a fax beep has a timbre different from that of an answering machine beep due to differences in productions (by fax transmission or by recording technology) and attributes such as

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Erin Hurley attack (e.g., the hammer hitting a string in the piano), decay, and frequency changes. In a piece like Perv where tone is so fundamental to the humour and horror of the show, timbre as both indicative and affective seems key. Baker explained in an interview with cbc Montreal radio’s morning show, Daybreak, that Perv explores the negative ramifications of such abuse on Baker’s middle-aged, female character living with borderline personality disorder. See Kelly, “Wildside.” Ibid., 3–4. Sofer, Dark Matter, 10. Shragge, “Fuck You!,” 10. Scholl, “Je sexe.” Richmond, “Teasing Out the Queer Carnivalesque,” 31. Reynolds, “Synge’s Things,” 11. See Hurley, “Que disent les objets?,” on the history of object-play in Quebec’s theatrical avant-garde from the 1970s to today. Levin, Performing Ground, 25. This ground is made resonant by, for instance, Métis/Anishinaabe artist Julie Nagam in her 2008 “Indigenous Oral History Sound Project,” a walking tour through part of Toronto that reanimates Indigenous knowledges, spaces, and histories (“Indigenous”). Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s oeuvre, deftly engaged by Levin, likewise makes palpable such grounding (Levin, Performing Ground, 124–34). Bernstein, “Dances with Things,” 73. Blau, Eye; Schechner, Between Theatre; Phelan, Unmarked; Bauman, “Performance.” For one example of this use of performance, see Guay, “L’immixtion du réel.” Barbéris, Théâtres contemporains; Biet and Roques, “Présentation,” 6. Cyr, “The Workings of the ‘Real,’” 98. See Féral, “Entre performance et théâtralité.” On “la représentation émancipée,” see Bernard Dort; for its deployment in the Quebecois context, see Marie-Christine Lesage, “Scène contemporaine.” Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 47. Schweitzer and Zerdy, “Introduction,” 2, 4. Brown, “Thing Theory,” 3. McKenzie, Perform or Else, 30. Bernstein, “Dances with Things”; Schweitzer, “Nothing but a string of beads.” Ridout, Stage Fright. Indeed, Richard Bauman and Herbert Blau, both cited above, attest to performance’s “happening” once it is perceived as such; thus a regard that is positioned outside of an action or event (even a self-regard, what Bauman calls a “consciousness of doubleness”) turns that event into performance.

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25 Marx, Marx’s Capital, s. 1, pp. 77, 74. 26 Fuck You!, “Project and Collaborators.” 27 Carlson, Performance, 5. Here he recapitulates one of Féral’s postulates in “Performance and Theatricality.” In this collection, Dylan Robinson’s refusal to use Idle No More “as a resource for enriching the discourse of performance studies” is similarly undergirded by a resistance to being useful to others’ plans (212). 28 Donkin, “Mrs. Siddons,” 317. On women’s “object position” in performance, see Davis, Actresses as Working Women; Pullen, Actresses and Whores, and Dolan, Feminist Spectator. 29 Moten, In the Break, 6. Because of this history of dehumanization and black people’s opposition to that objectification, “blackness marks simultaneously both the performance of the object and the performance of humanity” (2). 30 Schweitzer and Zerdy, “Object Lessons,” 5. 31 It will be staged with French super-titles at Théâtre La Licorne in October 2016. 32 Studio 303, “About Us/Mission.” 33 “Danette Mackay,” Recognizing Artists; Schwartz, “Fancy Pants.” 34 See Cowan, “‘A one-shot affair.’” Cowan, Jasmine Rault, and Dayna McLeod are building the “Cabaret Commons,” a “digital environment” for “sharing of histories of trans-feminist and queer artist and activist cultural production throughout (at least) North America.” See McLeod, Rault, and Cowan, “Speculative Praxis.” Ginestier has created an online archive for Edgy, and Studio 303 is running the Edgy Wiki Archiving Project. See Studio 303, “Archives/Edgy;” and edgy women blog. 35 Chanonat et al., “Mises en bouche,” 18. 36 Leslie Baker, interview by Erin Hurley, 19 July 2016. I thank my Winter 2015 Graduate Seminar in Feminist Performance for our productive discussion of Perv, and Valerie Silva in particular, who floated the idea of a text being composed as a collection of objects. 37 Cabado, “Leslie Baker.” 38 Shragge, “Fuck You!,” 5. 39 Osterweil, “Reconstructing Shirley,” 2. For a contrasting reading of Temple and the pedophilic gaze, see Hatch, Shirley Temple. 40 Ibid. 41 Shragge, “Fuck You!,” 2 and 10. 42 Discussion of Leclerc’s performances is based on my viewing of Cherepaka in performance in July 2015 (Nadère arts vivants) and a dvd of its performance in 2011, and on my online viewing of InSuccube and Mange-moi. Leclerc, Cherepaka; Nadère arts vivants, Cherepaka; “Andréane Leclerc & Holly

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Erin Hurley Gauthier-Frankel”; “Insuccube”; “InSuccube @ EdgyWomen 2012,” “Mangemoi d’Andréane Leclerc.” Saint-Pierre, “Andréane Leclerc,” 91. See Bouissac, Circus; and Hotier, L’Imaginaire du cirque, on circus imaginary; and Hurley, “Multiple Bodies,” 133–9 for fuller explication of contortionism’s place within it. See Kattenberg, “Forgotten Acrobats”; Granfield, “Eating Fire”; Adams, Sideshow USA ; and Toepfer, “Twisted Bodies,” respectively. Alter, Science of Flexibility, 93. For information about the conference, see “Encounters with Circus and Its Others.” A key outcome of the Montreal Working Group is the publication of Leroux and Batson, eds., Cirque Global. “Mange-moi d’Andréane Leclerc.” Goudard, Arts du cirque. Richmond, “Teasing Out the Queer Carnivalesque,” 31. Mansbridge, “In Search of a Different History,” 11. Ibid., 7. Leclerc, “Entre contorsion,” 80. Ibid., 36. Wilmeth, Variety Entertainment, 133. Leroux, “Que raconte le cirque québécois,” 19. Leclerc, “Entre contorsion,” 5. See Adams, Sideshow USA . Ridout, “On the Work of Things,” 396.

PART FO U R PRAC T IS ING RES E AR C H

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Two-Way Street: The Icon in the City mj t homp son 1 Maybe watching words is a bit like watching dance in the mirror. I don’t like to rehearse in front of the mirror. It’s always boring. It looks like it’s definitive. Which is bizarre, since supposedly the mirror is just showing me back something that I’m doing. But every time I look in the mirror, it’s totally uninteresting. It’s too finished. I see the end of everything in the mirror. –Louise Lecavalier In the riots of sound language produces, the unmarked can be heard as silence. –Peggy Phelan Truth is in the image, there is no image of truth. –Marie-José Mondzain

When dancer Louise Lecavalier burst into national consciousness in the early 1980s, she did so alongside a world still enthralled by all manner of category and binary: men, women; white, black; straight, gay; avantgarde and popular; and nation, as bounded singularity. As principal dancer with La La La Human Steps from 1981 to 1999, Lecavalier gave dance fans indelible imagery that challenged easy binaries and foregone conclusions. Performing at the centre of a vibrant cultural scene in Quebec, distinguished by the development of a unique movement and theatrical vocabulary that found international acclaim, her career has arced in tandem with enormous changes in socio-political life: notably, the performativity of gender and sex; the rise and fall of Quebec nationalism and the nation state as a viable model; and the use of performance as an overt political strategy. An international icon in and outside the field of dance, Lecavalier’s enormous stature and the political implications of her work pose substantial challenges for biography.

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If the history of the representation of women has been full of red herrings, false starts, screen dreams, and misconceptions, consider especially early European and twentieth-century concert dance history, wherein brutal accountings of the dancer’s body and its ongoing instrumentalization repeat. Often, the significance of the dancer’s work lay elsewhere, in the intellects of others, often men. Historically, the choreographer is cited, the dancer remains mute.2 And the fans remain even farther afield. And yet, if Lecavalier’s dance – its palpable work ethic, disciplined musculature, androgynous costuming, astonishing off-axis barrel rolls, and powerful male lifts – changed the course of Western concert dance history by revising gendered roles and division of labour, it did so in the popular voice. Dance fans and non–dance fans alike drew near, and in Montreal, stories of seeing Lecavalier were common. Working against older patterns of dance historiography, and inspired by contemporary practitioners of dance and performance studies, I map the cultural work of Lecavalier – concert dance artist extraordinaire whose centrality to national and local culture was vividly illustrated in the abundance of representations generated by her appearances. As my research progressed, I found Lecavalier emergent in the city of Montreal, inscribed in the streets and buildings through an outpouring of recollections – some in formal interviews, some quite unbidden as my own friends and acquaintances learned of my research and wanted to chime in. The ideals of coverage, explication, or a somehow more “authentic” representation of history weren’t the goals. Instead, the fragments of oral history that follow, I hope, offer an analogous set of performances – an alternative set of histories, cast off the body and made material in and through language and the city. Guided by proximity to the work and impressions of the dancer in action, the collected and selected fragments risk seeming arbitrary, haphazard even. They are certainly tainted by the passage of time. Yet my hope is that they at once offer thicker descriptions of Lecavalier’s impact and provide a revised diversity of source and meaning for the dance that is yet to be written and that challenges readings of the work as a sign of a singular kind of nationalism.3 Here, my aim is to choreograph pivots in thinking for the reader moving between image and text and analysis.4 Here, and following Lecavalier’s powerful staging of experimental movement and imagery, I extend John Cage’s call for experimental listening to invite the experimental readings compelled by the cultural work of the dancer.5

Figure 11.1 Louise Lecavalier in Human Sex, the Spectrum, 1985.

Sainte-Dorothée I used to hitchhike all the time. Into the city to take dance class. I lived in Saint-Dorothée, which was different then. Now it’s part of Montreal, it’s like a big city. But then it was a village. Sometimes it took many rides to get from home to the Plateau. I met a lot of people. All kinds. And when I told them I was a dancer – I was sure to say contemporary dance – they changed. They thought I was so stupid.

Figure 11.2 Detailed map of the Plateau neighbourhood.

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Figure 11.3 Édouard Lock and Louise Lecavalier, of La La La Human Steps, at Metropolis, 1994.

… I saw that everybody got me wrong: blond hair, blue eyes, this little girl. The more you put gloves on to speak with me, the more I … oooh (shudders). How can I act? People talk to you like you’re an idiot. So I cut my hair, dyed it black. It helped a lot. And that was when I started with Édouard. –Louise Lecavalier, November 2010 I was maybe twenty-one, twenty-two when I started with Édouard [Lock, the choreographer of La La La Human Steps]. Those early days were a great time for the company: Édouard was not yet the big boss, there was no big aura around us, just a buzz, and a lot of openness. I loved everything he was doing. I tried to see everything, to analyze it technically – there was so much miniscule information. I wasn’t thinking “I’m going to copy this or that,” or “I’m going to be a great dancer.” I wanted to get close to what I saw. What I saw was complex, there was a lot of information in his body, and it was different than anything I’d seen. He had a weird mixture of things: he was interested in contemporary dance,

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interested in ballet, interested in everything that was happening in New York. He was fluid and liquid in his way of moving: skinny and loose, something Arabic – he is Spanish-Moroccan – something from there, something from New York. –Louise Lecavalier, May 2012 We had a grant in 1980 to go to New York, to live there and study. Me, Miryam [Moutillet]. I don’t think Louise had a grant, but she came with us; we were buddies. And we just explored and experimented. We went to the place where all the dancers from the musicals train – Broadway Dance Center. We were maybe sixty in a class – a little room full of those incredible crazy show dancers. And we get into Soho and the independent teachers, that’s where I met Larry Rhodes. And at night we would go to the club … I was living on the Lower East Side, I saw this little alternative place, the place where spoken word started, where they had performance, break dancing, and those variations of street dancing and I brought Miryam and Louise … What we brought back to the company was break dance. The street dance, for sure: all of that floor work and way of interacting. Pushing, pulling, smacking each other … we never used the vocabulary, but more of that attitude. –Louis Guillemette, dancer/choreographer, founding dancer with La La La Human Steps, November 2014 Montreal is a city of islands, occurring naturally as per the island of Montreal proper; and manufactured, as per Île des Soeurs. Sainte-Dorothée is now part of the city of Laval to the northeast of the city and bound by two extensions of the fleuve St-Laurent: to the south, Rivière la prairie; to the north, Rivière des mille îles. The island is called Île Jésu, and it was a lush area, known for farms and forests, referred to as le jardin de Montréal. Metaphors of nation circulate readily across terrains like these, abundant in literatures and political life. Metaphors of wholeness and independence, solitude and separation, too. Equally, Lecavalier’s early crossings from rural outpost to inner city, from the stages of Montreal to those of international capitals, foretell a facility for traversing boundaries that will recur in our readings of her work. –mjt

Figure 11.4 Street view of the Cooper Building, 2014.

3981–7 Saint-Laurent (Cooper Building) I always wanted to rehearse more. I was never happy with how I was doing it – I thought, “I can do better.” I just read this biography of Marilyn Monroe, how she always said, “I’m going to do another take – I can do it better.” That’s how I was in the studio – like, “Let’s do it again.” I could ask [the other dancers] twentyfive times, I could do it to the point of exhaustion. It was crazy. But it was not like anyone told us to do it, we did it because it was fun, and we didn’t have to be home for dinner.

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… Oh, I loved that space. But it was cement, so it was hard. And I jumped from it a million times. We worked directly, no carpet. There were two big support columns. A bathtub painted pink with La La La written on it. And a bed hidden in the corner. It was not too charming, but we managed. It was an efficient place. –Louise Lecavalier, May 2012 I had a friend who had a studio in the Cooper Building, when everything was transferring over. The clothing industry was leaving the area, either disappearing or moving to Chabanel, and artists were taking over. Well, you were taking [sewing] needles out of the floor on a regular basis, and these were the environments artists were working in, Édouard included – he had a studio on the third floor, I think. He stayed there for years before moving to Rialto. –Philip Szporer, journalist/teacher/filmmaker, Montreal, November 2014 It always seemed to me to be the combination of those four personalities: Louise, Louis [Guillemette], Miryam [Moutillet] and Marc [Béland]. Those four personalities coming from four different points of view. And Édouard coming from the cinema. My impression was, from conversations with him and from interviews which I read, was that since he wasn’t dance-trained per se, that he counted very much on contributions from his dancercollaborators. –Dena Davida, curator/artistic director, Tangente, January 2012

305–7 Sainte-Catherine (Véhicule) I was standing with Édouard in Véhicule, after it had become le Musée [d’art vivant]. And he said the strangest thing to me. He said it rather dryly, “Dena, how do you choreograph punk?” And I looked at him and said, “You’re asking me that question?” He answered, “I don’t know but I’m going to find out” … What was happening for me wasn’t exactly what was happening for the general public. For the general public, there was a kinesthetic excitement – it was contemporary dance that felt a little like a rock show. I was excited not just about the movement vocabulary, per se; for me, it wasn’t more or less interesting than what I’d seen in

Figure 11.5 Top The Blumenthal Building, circa 1915, home of Véhicule (Musée d’art vivant). Figure 11.6 Bottom Broken surface ornamentation on the Blumenthal Building, 2014.

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contact improv, except for the speed element. But the concepts were exciting! And there was that iconic moment when Louise lifted Marc up on her hand into the air – that women could do that! –Dena Davida, curator/artistic director, Tangente, January 2012 There was a lot of experimental work around Montreal at the time, there was a lot going on at Véhicule, it was a gallery on Sainte-Catherine’s with artists like Monty Cantsin, Zilon, Marie Chouinard … We would work and work in the studio, but when it’s finished, it’s finished, and we would go to a museum or go see something other than dance … We were attracted by these forms of art, very much, but we didn’t talk about it. We were into the contemporary way of processing ideas, instead of just picking up the ideas of others. What we worked on were the gestures, the vocabulary, the movement. That will always be the core and the source of the work. And the rest? The form it takes, the argument, it arrives at the end. The music arrived at the end – we rehearsed without music or with the radio … We worked specifically with body language and energy, and it’s never fast enough. –Louis Guillemette, dancer/choreographer, founding dancer with La La La Human Steps, November 2014 What secret histories of inspiration or appropriation lie beneath first-draft accounts of La La La? Buildings like these testify to immigrant labour at the heart of Quebec’s economic history. The Cooper Building, for instance, built in 1932, takes its name from Morris Cooperberg, then head of the Cooper Garment Company, who had immigrated from Lozma, Russia, through Poland to Montreal in 1907.6 The nine-story concrete structure stood in the heart of the schmata or clothing manufacturing district, a busy hub of immigrant life and trade along St-Laurent that marked the divide between English and French Montreal. The Blumenthal Building, meanwhile, designed by Scottish immigrants David Ogilvy and Charles Mitchell, housed a three-story department store at its opening in 1911 in the more central fashion district along Sainte-Catherine; it was the third location for a business that began as a small tailoring shop run by Jacob Blumenthal on St-Laurent in 1868.7 Later, it housed a Steinberg’s grocery store (1945) and td Bank (1964) before Véhicule, the first artist-run

Figure 11.7 Restaurant as proscenium, social space as theatre: Café Express, 2014.

centre in Montreal, reclaimed the space as an interdisciplinary arts centre until 1983 when internal dissent over management shut it down.8 Today, the Stars of David that ornament the top corners the building make this early history visible. How might shifting our gaze from bodies to building facades, as walkers in the city sometimes do, enable us to see the ethnicities that shaped the aesthetics of so much cultural production in this city? –mjt

3927 Saint-Denis (L’Express) We spent long hours in the studio, and we didn’t have much money. Afterwards, we’d go out to bars – not so much clubs – sometimes to hear music, more just for drinks and talking. We used to go to l’Express a lot. The waiters would bring us bread and any bottles of unfinished wine. And other places too. I liked the characters, the tough girls, the bohemians, the late-night crowd, the Québécois … We were Québécois, but we were not so

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involved in the political scene. Our work was in the studio: it was just the beginning, and we were finding our language. – Louise Lecavalier, November 2010 I was about twenty, twenty-one at the time. I hadn’t yet become a journalist, I was on the cusp of things, and I was taking classes. I remember the excitement of those times, and what was very different was the engagement of the community … It was about watching art and dance that was in the process of making its mark, and it affected everybody. Everybody who was interested in dance, people taking classes, people interested in contemporary work. Groupe de la Place Royale had left the city, Groupe Nouvelle Aire had effectively finished its run, Les Grands [Ballets Canadiens] was catering to a different audience, les Ballets Jazz was doing its own thing and very successfully. So you had this group swell of interesting people, many of them friends who had been with these companies but also came in with their own influences … There was a kind of low-level activism: questions ranging from, “Why should we care about dance?” to the sense that what is happening with the arts and culture at that key moment in the eighties was happening in Montreal as a kind of mecca for convergence. –Philip Szporer, journalist/filmmaker, Montreal, November 2014 There were so many influences coming from all over the world, but I’m thinking about the punk scene that was coming out of England in the late seventies – that affected the way people were thinking about performance and the radical nature of what performance was or could be. I think of Édouard more as an internationalist. He was affected by these elements, he was back and forth between New York. And don’t forget that people like Louise were doing it, too. And people were listening. Nothing was being transmitted by computers, it was all live. And stuff was being sent through mail, on handbills, you were getting information from magazines, records obviously, concerts. It was a very different time. –Philip Szporer, journalist/filmmaker, Montreal, November 2014

Figure 11.8 Street scene on St-Denis, at the former Gateries café, 2014.

3443 Saint-Denis (Les Gateries) I was just back from Berlin when I first saw them. I’d written a piece about squatters there – it was amazing. The scale! Maybe 200 houses, every house had forty to fifty people living in it! It was so organized, it was working so well. That was the first piece I published … They were clean-cut, new wave. We were punks, hippies – they were more like dandies. I was working as a dj at Foufounes [Électrique]. We were part of the Independent movement, but we came to it through the anarchist movement. They were aesthetes. We hated them. But they had our respect – they were out there, opening things up, going international … I remember I had a friend who worked in this café, Les Gateries. She used to come in there all the time. And it was big! She was so strong. I didn’t know much

Figure 11.9 Left to right: Lecavalier, Marc Béland, and Claude Godin performing in La La La Human Dance Steps, Human Sex, Spectrum, 1985.

about dance, I didn’t see much dance. But everyone was like, “Have you seen her?” It was like seeing Isadora Duncan. Everyone was talking about her. She was burning … burning hot. I remember seeing the company: the coded-hand movements, very rapid. Even then, I knew it would get old, and it did very rapidly get old. But it was all her. She was a superstar. –Benoît Chaput, poet/publisher, L’Oie de Cravan Press, 2010 She was absolutely focused on exploring dance, that really was her prime concern. It was rare in Montreal to have that sort of intensity for something that did not pay a penny. She put an inordinate amount of effort into everything, and her discipline was certainly an attraction for me. It was – and is – a shared aesthetic. For both of us, nothing else mattered. –Édouard Lock, choreographer, La La La Human Steps, London Times, 1996 Open twenty-three hours daily, every day of the year excepting Christmas, the Express bistro was the first of its kind, opened in

Fig. 11.10 Lecavalier’s signature “barrel jump,” with Carole Courtois (left), Spectrum, 1985.

1980 by former theatre person Colette Brossoit and designed by Montreal architect Luc Laporte. With its dramatic interior – high-gloss paint, tilted mirrors, hand-written menu, and expert staff – the restaurant has no signage except the tiled sidewalk entryway and its distinctive architectural facade. No orienting language connotes belonging, yet this restaurant draws together culture-makers from the arts, media, and government sectors. Across the street, further south towards Square Saint-Louis, Les Gateries was housed in a townhouse building built in 1875. The café opened in the early 1980s by Giselle and Normand Leboeuf who had in mind a popular gathering place. The first espresso bar in the area, its regulars included playwright Michel Tremblay and writer Dany Laferrière. Such bistros performed near the centre of everyday life and cultural practice, serving despite their ephemerality as important “laboratories for cultural citizenship.”9 Will Straw, theorizing the nature of scenes, notes their ambiguity, on the one hand constituting informal sites of research or innovation, driven by love rather than duty; while, on the other, potentially serving as “alibi,” facilitating only an escapism.10 Yet,

Figure 11.11 Exterior view of the Spectrum, formerly the Alouette Cinema, circa 1950.

for all their ambiguities, the special alchemy generated by the intersection of place, people, and preferred activities that marked the scene along St-Denis circa 1980 was incredibly productive. In a short space of time, St-Denis’s wide boulevard shifted from primarily housing and rooming houses to a heterogeneous mix of meeting places including cafés, storefronts, bistros, nightclubs. –mjt

318 Sainte-Catherine (The Spectrum) I saw Nina Hagen at the Spectrum. And I wanted to play there. We wanted to make dance accessible to everyone, not just the dance world and these special places: theatres and opera houses … When we rehearsed, we danced to … well, I remember Prince, but there were others … He was the most interesting musically. We wanted to do this because this was popular, and we wanted to be popular. –Louise Lecavalier, May 2012

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After [the premiere of] Businessmen, I remember I was not too happy with what we did. We hadn’t rehearsed enough, we put too much funny stuff on the stage. There were a lot of people around, and people liked it. But it was like … Oh, we’re going to put blue in your hair and green … fashion. At that moment, I said, “ok, we’re going to do the dance. And I remember speaking with Édouard. After that, it got more organized, I made a plan for rehearsals, we reworked it. –Louise Lecavalier, November 2010 I was working as a projectionist at Cinema 5. And it was so random, how I saw in the Gazette an article about these guys [playing at the Spectrum]: film, video, and weird dancing. I thought, ok – this is not your average show and so I took a chance on it … And I was completely mesmerized by Louise and the rest of the band. And Louise was the most amazing. Because you looked at her and … Well, first, there was that whole androgynous thing they had going: she had the mustache, and the crazy wild blond dreads, and she’s flying around and you literally don’t know if she’s a man or a woman. It was that eighties thing. Androgyny was everywhere, and we were all questioning sexuality. And with Louise you couldn’t figure it out: there was something so attractive and also scary; it was back-and-forth. I remember literally feeling like I had to move out of the way because it felt like she was going to fly off the stage. It had that kind of impact. –John O’Neil, technical director (1997–2003), La La La Human Steps, November 2014

Two Ways: Doing and Representation As a performer, Louise Lecavalier “gives herself to be seen.”11 I invoke performance scholar Peggy Phelan’s word given – she describes representation as what is “given to be seen” – to mark Lecavalier’s agency and generosity as a producer of imagery. In one interview, the dancer told me that she never trains in front of mirrors; mirrors are only “distractions” that take you away from the movement and towards a kind of fixity. Profoundly uncomfortable with the image, Lecavalier nonetheless gives us an abundance of imagery, onstage and off, and remains committed to doing so in her home city of Montreal, an island city, compressed in scale and resistant to disappearance or anonymity, despite

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her brief sojourns in New York and Paris after she retired from La La La in 1999. For Phelan, following Lacan, the “reciprocal gaze” at once defines the production of identity and readily elides felt divides between live performance and the performance of objects and images.12 Phelan observes, “The potential for a responding eye, like the hunger for a responding voice, informs the desire to see the self through the image of the other.”13 But whereas Phelan will study the psychic trajectory of the exchange, I linger here over exchange itself as devotional, intangible, and evidencing the production and experience of a new hybridity emergent in the city. In pivotal works from the early 1980s through the La La La Human Steps canon and continuing today with her independent work with Fou Glorieux, Lecavalier invites seeing and yet remains hard to see. By seeing, I mean writing. Or, rather, translating action into language in ways that approximate and enter into the record a sense of what happened, some version of truth. Whereas the popular press has tended to lionize her physicality and beauty, dance historians have tended to focus on choreographic meaning situated in the hands of others or, alternately, kinesthetic meaning drawn in musculature and put to work in theorizing dance and gender. Writing the cultural work of the dancer remains difficult,14 troubled as much by the ephemerality of performance, the trouble with gender and the body as floating signifier15 generally, as by the character, speed, and discipline of Lecavalier’s work particularly. When I began researching Lecavalier, I was struck by the proliferation of charged language applied to her in the literature.16 These evidenced a fascination and echoed continuing misreadings of women onstage in the historical record, where speculation about identity, sexuality, and the value of a gendered body have recurred.17 I noted many comparisons of Lecavalier to Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan – including my own!18 – often with little explication. Given the difference in style, it was hard to know what writers were seeing: were they referring to her authoritative stage presence; her international stature; comparable themes of death and transcendence in the content of the dance; or something else? The clustering of the three iconic dancers suggests a genealogy for popular forms of devotion generated by the extraordinary presence of the dancer. I read an abundance of imagery in the popular press and elsewhere: sometimes the movement was the focus, as in various descriptive phrases collaged from different sources: “all human projectile,”19 “violent,”20 “manic,”21 “frenzied,”22 “kinetic rage,”23 “self-abusive athleticism,”24

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“bound up … with no spatial intention.”25 Elsewhere, her artist’s identity becomes fused with her stage roles: “athletic and aggressive,”26 “semi-punk,”27 “a flame on legs,”28 “a soiled angel,”29 “a renegade angel,”30 “half-fiend, half goddess,”31 “androgynous yet feminine,”32 “a mere slip of a woman,”33 “wild thing,”34 “a veritable dervish.”35 Much of the imagery was confusing to the extent that it moved seamlessly between body, movement, onstage characters, and civilian self. Among the thematic clusters, I noted the rubrics of strength, spirituality, star power, science and technology, sexuality, gender, transcendence, death. One could dismiss these as the residue of outdated attitudes about women in the public sphere, evidence of the ongoing sedimentation of gender. Or else one could argue that many images simply resemble the content of a given choreography, as when she is referred to as a “mean little animal” in a review of Businessman in the Process of Becoming an Angel (1983).36 But it seemed to me that the adjectival excess suggested more than desire or misogyny. Lecavalier beckons language. Adjectives and nouns, descriptions and retellings, proliferating from popular critics and historians and equally from fans and concert-goers in an attempt to name the power of this performer. But why? Something about this particular constellation of dancer/individual generated a strong urge to describe, to reproduce, to copy, or to borrow Michael Taussig’s phrasing, “to yield into and become Other.”37 Taussig has written about “mimetic vertigo;” that is, the dizzying reproduction of imagery wherein “the interpreting self is grafted onto the object of study,” confounding access to any objective original.38 Could it be that part of the cultural work of the dancer in this case was to activate the mimetic faculty in the beholder? And, if so, towards what end? What urgent vision was offered up in the mirror held before us by Lecavalier? From the urge to make language, as mimetic sign and marked response to Lecavalier’s work to language as core problematic and material of historiography, I pause over my own methodology. In his etymology of the word history, Raymond Williams notes that the word’s earliest usage in English made no distinction between truth and fiction; imaginary events and those thought to be true were held equally by the same glyph.39 To recall that early usage is to mark the made-up-ness of our stories generally and of history particularly – not as a way to undermine the power of these stories, but to underline the potential of a history told from the ground up told through tandem imagery that draws History near, that makes it one’s own, that brings human scale to the monumental and

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finally that pivots between text and image, language and movement, in generative ways that emulate the form of dance itself. Yet stories, however told, have their uses. Perhaps no one made the point better than Edward Said who, in his “Invention, Place, Memory,” discusses the malleability of the genre and the ways in which history may be spun out in the service of identity formation and nationhood; he asks, “What is remembered, in what form, by whom?”40 His questions mark the politicized nature of a narrator’s vantage point and remind readers of the ways in which history has been manipulated. Proceeding cautiously down this two-way street of doing and representation, multiple truths and fictions, agencies and controls, I implicate myself in what follows, and indeed all the storytellers who sculpt time and offer short penance for stories artificially arrested by print. Hoping to avoid the scholarly habit of putting one’s subject to work, my aim here is to gather up shards of the past in order to glimpse the unseen work of the dancer – whose labour deals wallops in multiples, unfolding in spaces, through encounters and temporality that pressure language. So to the anecdote and the fragment: stories in the vernacular, generated as much by her civilian presence in the city of Montreal as by her onstage presence. Stories told by Lecavalier, as well as colleagues, fans, and neighbours. Resisting the heroic and the official, such stories evidence the dancer’s work as generator of imagery and idea, memory and culture. Here, the work of the dancer moves off the body and onto the porous facades of the city, where artist and passersby, historian and reader collide in a museography of necessity, desire, and dream.

Street In the city, street and building become profane conduits of experience, activated by the presence of a sensory radiant body. To walk city streets is, by now, to take hold of a modernist device of mobility and memory retrieval.41 Yet need and accident compel walking, that most ordinary yet virtuosic quotidian act, as much as desire. Walter Benjamin, of course, understood this, finding in walking a methodology par excellence for the belated recovery of knowledge.42 Nowhere is the attachment of story to a mobile body more alive than in the Arcades Project, the unfinished collection of written fragments that attempt to make the past live in and through his encounter with the artifacts of modernity: buildings, streets, gestures. Susan Buck-Morss describes the Arcades Project as an experiment to show “how images, gathered by a person walking the streets

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of a city, can be interpreted against the grain of idealist literary style.”43 What is at stake in writing history against the grain and in and through imagery? For Benjamin, the significance of the past lies forgotten in official accounts and ordinary experience; yet its radical potential to “flare” in the here-and-now via the dialectical image – that image that collapses temporal divides – holds enormous political energy. For the writing of an alternative dance history, the street promised steps of a different order, shifting the gaze away from the particularities of a body – misread as fact or data, and so often fetishized in gendered dancer for the ways in which he or she makes subject and object one – and onto the memory palace of a city in flux. At the same time, the sidewalks, architectures, and place names seemed to lend a materiality to the vexed project of writing dance – understood here as ephemeral, yet bound by presence and physicality. As in Brecht’s street scene, wherein the ordinary setting prevents illusion and critical distance,44 the street scenes told in the oral history fragments collected here seemed at once candid and evocative, but resistant to easy assimilation. To write a history on the street is to insist on social context. Writing about 1980s Montreal means entering a narrative more often told through street as divide rather than dialectic: east of Saint-Laurent, the French working class, colonized by the English since 1763; and west of Main, an English elite wielding much of the economic and cultural power. After the immense promise of the Parti Québécois’s 1976 win of the provincial election on a separatist agenda, and amid impassioned debates over the passing of Bill 101, which sought to entrench and protect French language rights in Quebec, an unprecedented shift of power took place: away from a conservative, English, moneyed class, a portion of whom left the province,45 and into the hands of a left-leaning, Frenchspeaking state. Still paying for the costs of the 1976 Olympics, the Montreal of the 1980s was a city of flat-line economics. By 1980, a failed referendum in which residents voted 59 per cent against independence would suggest that a different kind of city cartography was in order. More recent scholarship points to a much more diverse set of projects unfolding in the city, in ways elided by the dominant narrative of a national culture. Historian Sean Mills, for instance, writes about the radically diverse range of political projects in Montreal inspired by the discourse of decolonization in his study of activism in the city during the 1960s.46 And his study of the Haitian deportation crisis in 1974 shows how Quebec-based Haitian migrants rallied for broad support from church groups, unions, activists, and artists, in ways that profoundly

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shifted the province’s sense of itself.47 He writes, “If the period was marked by the everyday realities of racism, it was also simultaneously shaped by the growth of international solidarity, with Haiti, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, which became increasing central to the expanding world of political opposition.”48 Literary scholar Sherry Simon characterizes the period as passing from “an ideal of a homogeneous, collective identity to a more problematic and heterogeneous conception of social and symbolic union.”49 Her research notes the rising interest in translation of Anglo-Quebec authors into French; she writes that, after the 1993 conference at uqam, “Montréal, l’invention juive,” there was excitement that “Jewish Montreal was being rediscovered and reinterpreted – in French.”50 At the same time, queer activism became increasing visible in the city, as political voice emerged amid the displacement and ongoing harassment of the gay and lesbian community.51 If queer aesthetics had long been a consistent part of Montreal’s character, in the performance cabarets along Sainte-Catherine that dominated nightlife in the early part of the twentieth century, a queer political consciousness began to emerge in the early 1980s – following the displacement of the city’s gay village around the 1976 Olympics, following raids on Truxx Bar (1977) and Sauna David that provoked large protests, and in tandem with the aids health crisis. Such projects mark the heterogeneity of the city, and the shifting social contexts through which La La La Human Steps and the dance labour of Lecavalier emerge. Lived experience circa 1980s in the downtown, compressed quartiers of the Plateau and Ville Marie offered artists space and proximity to a complexity of aesthetics, ideas, and identities: anarchy, androgyny, immigrant life, queerness, internationalism, and nationalism. Whereas Lecavalier has been taken up as a national figure – winning Europe’s Leonide Massine Dancer of the Year (2013), the Order of Canada (2008), le Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal (2011), suggesting a significance for Quebec nationhood not unlike the French figure of the nation, Marianne – her movement in and through the city produces other narratives in which the artist’s hardcore work ethic and the hybrid city dominate. There is Lecavalier: buying groceries at Soares et Fis on Duluth, dancing at Foufounes on Sainte-Catherine, rehearsing to Prince at a loft on St-Laurent. Her appearance, on stage and off, I argue, became an important point of anchorage for a city in flux. Across story and image, the discipline and charisma of the performer come alive. But perhaps even more telling is a subtext of excitement about a revised sense of heterogeneity, emergent in the city and evidenced in her dance work.

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In the lead-up to the Second World War, Benjamin writes of the urgency of historiography: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”52 The imagery in the Lecavalier stories testifies to some key concern at risk of disappearing, but which? What, I wondered, were we rehearsing in these tellings about the early days of La La La performance? The decade in which Lecavalier’s dancing achieved widespread popularity and fame was the same decade in which Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Brian Mulroney laid the groundwork for neoliberal policies that led to increasing divides in economic class. Yet, in Montreal, cheap rent ruled as manufacturing lofts and rooming houses gave way to studios and clubs, bound by its compressed urban scale. Here, social space was under a few square miles. Here, social space emerged in, through, and because of a moving body navigating its way through places, buildings, streets. Within ten years of Lecavalier’s first work with La La La, Oranges (1981), an emergent digital culture powered by the Internet and the rise of the World Wide Web seemed poised to reduce the significance of liveness, compelling new disembodied forms of sociality. Within ten years, the aids crisis had reached catastrophic levels and risen to national consciousness, prompting new thinking about bodies, sexuality, and producing extraordinary works of lament and redemption, notably American playwright Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991).53

Icon/Saint Moving between these various accounts, hoping not to make locals into universals, anecdotes into truths, or turn dancers into scholarly argument, a small flare occurred, perhaps of the kind Benjamin had in mind in his account of the dialectic image. Rereading my notes, I realized that nearly all the oral history fragments mentioned places that were on streets or neighbourhoods named for saints: Sainte-Catherine, Saint-Denis, SaintLaurent, Sainte-Dorothée. Not unusual for this Roman Catholic city, and yet … Whereas I had set out to resist Lecavalier’s iconicity in the popular sense of the term – that is, her widely seen image, in dance performance proper, in Montreal and internationally, and in circulations of her imagery through media that conceptualized her as angel and demon – here I returned squarely to the problem of the icon. If angels, as mythic guides who accompany us along difficult passages, hovered in the repertoire and representation, so too did saints. If

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angels are God-like, reaching down from the heavens to influence human activity, saints too have quasi-deified status but in the reverse direction: saints are real people whose actions lean toward the mythic – think of Joan of Arc, with her clarity of purpose and burning visions. Saints do things, their agency is consequential and confounding of the polarity between the sacred and profane. As such, their related iconography reminds us of and connects us to their rarefied vision of a better world. Recent scholarship has looked to the performative aspects of the icon, from the object’s lifelike visual qualities to its gestural elements to its efficacious impact.54 Increasingly, it seems it is the doing of the icon – that is, agency of the encounter – that counts. For historian Robert Maniura, the saint emerges on, in, and through ritual acts of worship. He writes, “Locating the saint in the actions of devotees doesn’t trivialize the category. These performed relationships are weighty things, not least because they also, at least in part, constitute the devotee.”55 Placing the power of the icon squarely in the encounter with a live actor, Maniura suggests the importance of an encounter with the saint in the construction of self. Looked at from another angle, the role of the icon as conduit takes place in the movement between icon as thing itself and icon as stand-in. Fusing the sacred and profane, the icon makes the invisible visible through its use as devotional object and medium. Marie-José Mondzain maps an economy of usage deployed by the Byzantine world’s distinction between the image, as invisible and able to circulate freely, and the icon, as visible and more readily put to use in the interests of the church: “The image and the icon lie at the heart of all considerations of the symbol and the sign, as well as their relation to the problematic of being and appearing, seeing and believing, strength and power.”56 For Mondzain, her mind on the nearer question of explicating the grip of the image on the contemporary world, the image/icon may come to serve the “iconocracy,”57 but its power is not external to it – rather, the power of the image/icon resides in the image/icon itself. She writes, “It is not because it is true that it has power. It is because it has power that it becomes true.”58 Mondzain’s chiasmi on power and truth help account for the effect of Lecavalier’s performance, wherein stories collect and generate force in part for the way they allow people to rehearse a new model of the dance, a new model of society in Quebec. How, then, to account for Lecavalier’s invocation of power? And where is her agency in this analysis? In part, the power of her image resides in its compression or containment of her intense devotion to dance

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in training, research, preparation, and performance, a devotion made legible through strength, speed, focus, and nuance of performance. What is work ethic but desire – her own – made palpable and given to be seen? The knitting together of fierce speed, energy, unfamiliar bodily forms, and precise gestural detail gathers attention, compels further thought. Then consider, squinting backwards across time, the implications of the dance itself, rendered in and through Lecavalier’s effort: movement aesthetics that referenced punk rock, break dancing, sign language, and the choreographer Lock’s identity as Moroccan Jew; and movement, content, and costuming that broke down the gender binary and effectively queered the dance. Whereas the punk and queer nature of the work tended to be recognized, the presence of Jewish and Black aesthetics seem to fly largely under the radar, except where writers note Lecavalier’s dreadlocks, often taken uncritically as a sign of energy, radicality, ferocity. And whereas these are yet to be fully researched and named in the work – part of the work of my larger project, the oral histories here mark their location in the story of La La La Human Steps – it is a story that follows the rapidly changing political and social lines of the city circa 1981. Part of her power and charisma, I argue, comes in the way she gave image to significant ethnic, linguistic, sexual, and political shifts unfolding in Montreal, in spite of and in dialogue with her own sense of how images can distort. Clifford Geertz, following Shils, identifies the quality of charisma as operative in “the concentrated loci of serious acts.”59 Less about popular appeal or “contrived interest … in the glitter of personality,” one key manner through which it is produced is through motion, a demonstrated ability to get close to what matters. He writes, “It is not, after all, standing outside the social order in some excited state of self-regard that makes a political leader numinous but a deep, intimate involvement – affirming or abhorring, defensive or destructive – in the master fictions by which that order lives.”60 In Montreal, Lecavalier gave and continues to give her image on stage, then off – “exploding” onstage, using the floor and air in ways that referenced gymnastics, contact improv, and breaking, without looking anything like those forms. Or racing through the Plateau, on her bike, at the grocery store, in the café. We recognize her, and we associate her with the sudden visibility of extraordinary motion, an extraordinary company at a rather extraordinary period in history. In the city, we associate her with the particular events, times, and places in our lives. But seeing the familiar in a city whose downtown core is compressed to a

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few square miles is not unusual. Nor does finding saints in a French Catholic city come as a surprise. What is particular to the set of stories assembled is their abundance and their consistent vision of Lecavalier’s work ethic and generosity as a performer – “serious acts”! – amid a range of recollections whose disparate interests attest to the productivity of her work. Part of the cultural work of the dancer, then, might be to generate discourse – in a productive spaciousness between image and text, action and icon – against a fixity of outmoded binaries: language, gender, nation. In the set of anecdotes and counter-narratives above, people central and peripheral to the La La La story reach for language to describe her impact on their world. Meanwhile, her presence is made visible through dance – and I mean this literally, as in the way her performance life constitutes her public presence, and figuratively as in the way her movement is ever spectacularized and in some real way dance. This presence as emergent in multiple ways and contexts invites an expanding and so always incomplete set of stories, an unofficial set of legacies that queer the historical record, inserting different presences and desires into the official record. From Lock’s yet untheorized Jewish aesthetic to Lecavalier’s alternate view of white femininity, from nationalist to internationalist views, aesthetes to anarchists, punks to neighbours, the hybrid city emerges, as does a heterogeneous aesthetic bound by Lecavalier’s killer work ethic. A return to the street, recalling a pre-digital time, when face-to-face encounters mattered, in the theatre and on the street.

no te s 1 Oral histories gathered by MJ Thompson. With huge thanks to Benoît Chaput, Dena Davida, Louis Guillemette, Philip Szporer, and John O’Neil for sharing their recollections about Louise Lecavalier in the city and on the stage; and to Louise Lecavalier, for the power and beauty of her work and for the generosity and openness with which she approached these interviews. Additionally, the author thanks Tammer El-Sheikh, Blagovesta Momchedjikova, and the editors of this collection for their comments on drafts of this text. 2 On this, see Foster, Choreography and Narrative. 3 Iro Tembeck’s history of dance in Montreal continues to be the foundational source, yet the work has been taken up with singularity and tended to foster patriotic readings of Quebec’s “unique” dance language. Alternate views arise from Erin Hurley’s study of national performance in Quebec, which encouraged me to read the dancer’s work through that lens and against it too. Fi-

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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nally, I benefited greatly from discussions with filmmaker-journalist Philip Szporer, who pointed out a Jewish aesthetic in La La La; and from the work of scholars Lisa Doolittle and Anne Flynn, whose de-centred and anti-hierarchical approach to dance studies developed a critical performance studies in Canada long before this had permeated the field of dance more broadly. This chapter is the first in an experimental biography about Lecavalier that attempts to mark the significance of her contribution while resisting certain biographical traps, among them linearity, easy causality, and misconceived or fetishistic emphases on the individual, heroic or otherwise, as individual. An important precedent is historian Nye’s Invented Self. Equally, Erving Goffman’s embrace of mundane contexts as significant sites of performance was important to my thinking, as was his understanding of identity as constructed and contingent on an exchange between self and/in public, which helped ground the need to represent the biographical subject through multiplicity. See, too, chapters by Naila Keleta-Mae and Brian Rusted in this volume for discussions of the politics of storytelling, the limits of ethnography, and the possibilities of performative writing. Cage, “Experimental Music,” 7. “Morris Cooperberg”; Cohen, “Morris Cooperberg,” 256. “Jacob Blumenthal” in Tapper, A Biographical, 69; Wilkins, “Grand Old Building.” Nemiroff, “History.” Ibid. Straw, “Scenes and Sensibilities,” 256. Phelan, “Broken Symmetries,” in Unmarked, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 16. Thanks to Felicia McCarren, in whose formative seminar “The Cultural History of the Dancer” (Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts/nyu, September 1997) this research began. There was a tremendous sense of possibility in that seminar and in performance studies more broadly as it appeared circa 1998. I still love the promise of its post-disciplinary stance – that is, a discipline without borders, one that simultaneously embraces and resists the boundaries of any field whose research logic seems helpful to the subject at hand. In this project, I aim to continue one of the field’s key emphases: that is, on the body in action. And I’m indebted to the formal play and rigour of scholars/teachers José Esteban Muñoz, Fred Moten, and Peggy Phelan. Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body. I’m indebted to Lecavalier and her agent, Annie Viau, who sent me an enormous packet of press clippings spanning eighteen years of writing about the

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

MJ Thompson dancer back in 1998. Equally, dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright notes this proliferation of language too, reading it as a sign of “unease” at Lecavalier’s corporeality. See Cooper Albright, “Techno Bodies,” 28; Sheppy, “Out of Body Experience.” See Cordova, “Stepping Out in Attitude,” 81–2; Cooper Albright, “Techno Bodies.” More generally, for a critical analysis of representation of women in dance, see Banes, Dancing Women; and Daly “Theorizing Gender.” For a history of gender disciplining in and around dance, see Burt, Male Dancer; and Garafola, “The Travesty Dancer.” For a study of the pathologization of the dancer, see McCarren, Dance Pathologies. Thompson, “Refus Corporeal.” Kisselgoff, “Mixed Media.” Durland, “The Wooster Group.” Cooper Albright, “Techno Bodies,” 48. Gunter, “New Demons.” Gilbert, “How do they do that?” Meisner, “Superwoman.” Cooper Albright, “Techno Bodies,” 48–9. Schmidt, “Thoughts,” 34. Montreal Mirror, “Best Stage Performer.” Roberts, “Let’s Dance!” Jowitt, “Honk.” Time Out, “Super Human.” Mayes, “La La La’s Louise.” Steven, “Whirlwinds of Dance.” What’s On, “Let’s Get Physical.” Warwick, “Wild Thing.” What’s On, “Let’s Get Physical,” 19. Smith, “Eye on Performance,” 24. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiii. Ibid., 237. See “History” in Williams, Keywords, 146–8. Said, “Invention, Memory, Place,” 175–92. See, for example, respectively Baudelaire, Parisian Scenes; and Thoreau, Essays, on walking, reverie, meditation; Buck-Morss, “Flaneur,” on the flaneur; Yates, Art of Memory; and Connerton, in How Societies Remember, on memory and embodiment; and Debord, “Introduction,” on dérive. See also Dickinson in this volume, for his reading of the kinesthetics of place. See especially Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” 3–60. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 27.

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44 Brecht, “Street Scene.” 45 Stats Canada shows an estimated decline in the anglophone population of Quebec by 100,000 people between 1971 and 1981; a drop of 4.8 per cent between 1971 and 2001. The National Film Board documentary The Rise and Fall of English Montreal (1993) notes a higher number, estimated at 300,000 anglophones, many of them business leaders, leaving the province between 1971 and 1991. 46 Mills, Empire Within. 47 Mills, “Québec, Haiti,” 405–35. 48 Ibid., 435. 49 Simon, “Culture and Values,” 167. 50 Simon, “Hybrid Montréal,” 322. 51 See Podmore, “Gone Underground?”; and Stychin, “Queer Nations.” Thanks as well to Dr. Jason Crawford for discussions at Concordia University, 2010, as I prepared to teach the class “Sexual Representation in the Performing Arts.” 52 Benjamin, “Theses,” 255. 53 Kushner’s Angels follows other works of the decade such as German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), in which angels appear among us: messengers in the city, there to bring solace to the profane world, there to trouble dominant narratives. Thanks to performance scholar Mark Sussman for drawing my attention to this phenomenon and for sharing his unpublished paper, “The Society of Angels.” 54 Pantcheva, “Performing the Sacred”; and Pantcheva, “Performative Icon.” 55 Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint,” 654. 56 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, xiii. 57 Ibid., 152. 58 Ibid., 202. 59 Geertz, “Centers, Kings and Charisma,” 122. 60 Ibid., 146.

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on love: Performance as Pedagogy n ai l a k el eta -mae

In 2007, I received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council to develop a series of spoken word poems that would discuss a topic I had yet to fully broach as an artist – romantic love. I researched love in relation to race and gender and eventually produced a text that resembled none of the spoken word I had previously written, published, or recorded. I knew the collection of writing was called on love, but I had no idea what it was or what to do with it. A few years later I was commissioned by Engrenage Noir/levier to create a performance piece for their two-day event entitled “How Many Slaves Do You Own?: Art and the Economics of Exploitation Past and Present.” I thought immediately of on love and decided I would develop it into a new form – I called it an experimental performance installation. It was through Engrenage Noir/levier that I was first introduced to the historic, contested burial site called Nigger Rock in St Armand, Quebec. After a research trip to Nigger Rock, my understanding of on love deepened. It became clear to me that an artistic exploration of love between people who are racialized as Black in Canada must also include a conversation about the histories of Black people in Canada. The unmarked cemetery that is Nigger Rock became the central location for my exploration of love. In the fall of 2012, I designed and taught an undergraduate course at the University of Waterloo called “Performance Creation” that expanded on love into a one-act play that was mounted by the Department of Drama and Speech Communication the following term. This chapter tracks my experiences, as an artist who wrote and performed the initial iteration of on love, and as a professor who designed the course that developed it and then directed the resulting production. More specifically, this chapter is an autoethnographic account

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of the development, teaching, and production of on love. I have chosen autoethnography as the methodological approach because I have found that its narrative prose facilitates the negotiation of performance and power on the academic page. Carolyn Ellis, a foundational scholar and practitioner of autoethnography, describes the positionality of the autoethnographer as such: “[She or he] is the person at the intersection of the personal and the cultural, thinking and observing as an ethnographer and writing and describing as a storyteller.”1 The positionality of “storyteller” suggests an emphasis on the scholar’s relationship with the audience and attention to how to engage them. Ellis writes, “Over time I allowed myself dramatic license to tell a good story, since it was not so much the ‘facts’ that I wanted to redeem but rather an articulation of the significance and meaning of my experiences. I came to feel that while personal narratives should be based on facts, they cannot be completely determined by them.”2 The objectives and methods that Ellis describes resonate with me as an artist whose practice has long been invested in the communication of personal ideas and observations in complex, accessible ways that mobilize but are not beholden to literal interpretations of first personal singular. Within this context, autoethnography emerges as an obvious academic methodology that reflects the tensions of much of the theatrical and performance work that I create and research as an artist-scholar.3 And one of those tensions is power. In her autoethnographic monograph Staging Strife, which explores her work with a community of Roma women in post-Communist Poland, Canadian artist-scholar Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston writes that she hopes her “playing with the power of the word, has managed to convey the fragmented, contradictory, and unstable nature of power I encountered in my research process.”4 When situated within a theatre and performance studies context, autoethnography can take the form of a scholarly output that reflects artistic content and research. It differs from an artist’s reflection on her, his, or their work because it seeks to substantively engage with academic scholarship and situate itself within academic fields of inquiry in ways that artists don’t necessarily do in their own reflections. This methodology also poses a unique set of questions for scholars who want to engage meaningfully with another scholar’s autoethnographic work. For example, how can critiques of autoethnographic scholarship be levied without suggesting that the author’s account of personal experience is flawed? Attempts at criticism can become more tenuous when the positionalities of the author and critic are widely

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different – for example, when the author is minoritized in academia while the critic occupies a dominant place in academia. In such an instance, I would argue that autoethnography makes visible some of the blind spots of academic practices of critique. In other words, I might ask, When is it inappropriate for an academic to think carefully about her own positionality in the profession in relation to that of the academic whose work she seeks to critique? This is, in part, what makes authoethnography as a methodology compelling. Not only does it prod the author to ask new questions about research and personal investment, but it also encourages those who read and review the scholarship to experiment with new forms of scholarly critique. In this regard, autoethnography also affords an opportunity to question some of the practices of meaning-making that undergird European-based academic traditions. Autoethnographic work can and should be critiqued because thoughtful dialogue amongst colleagues can be invaluable in the shaping of ideas. But critiques of this methodology encourage non-traditional approaches to scholarly dialogue, ones that perhaps also make visible the critic’s positionality. African-American photographer Carrie Mae Weems offers insight into the meaningfulness of autoethnography. Though her work is not typically understood as autoethnography, I interpret the performance qualities of Weems’s Kitchen Table Series (1990) and the narrative sophistication of Roaming (2006) as clear visual representations of autoethnography – especially for people who are gendered and racialized as female and Black in North America. In a 2009 interview, Weems said, “I so often use myself, my own of [sic] experience – limited as it is at times – as the starting point. But I use myself simply as a vehicle for approaching the question of power, and following where that leads me.”5 Weems’s conventions in The Kitchen Table Series resemble those of a theatrical performance: the set comprises a wooden table, the stark glare of a pendant light, and a panelled door; and the camera angle places the viewer/audience in a seat at one end of the table. The set and camera angle are identical in each photograph, but what changes is the use of props, the placement of the actors (of which she is one), and the blocks of text that she wrote to accompany each picture. In Roaming, Weems creates a visual narrative that examines the power of the state and how the general public relates to and contests that power. She appears in each picture, clothed in a simple, long-sleeved, floor-length black dress. Her back is always to the camera, which allows her to function not as the protagonist but as the viewer’s guide – the way into a

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complex conversation. Kimberly Lamm asserts that Weems’s work, and her integration of herself into it, is part of a tradition of African American visual art culture that “moved between rejecting the frame of recognition offered by the dominant culture and insisting upon black peoples’ place within it.”6 Autoethnography for me, as an artist-scholar who inhabits a body read as female and Black in Canada, is not only about creating an academic output that reflects the artistic content and research process of its subject matter and author. My use of autoethnography in academic settings like this book is also about a political goal of engaging with power as an individual and as a collective. I intentionally use language that is accessible to audiences – beyond experts in my fields – to invite more readers to think about power with me. I am, of course, familiar with critiques of autoethnography that question the validity of the methodology.7 Over the past couple of decades numerous scholars have addressed such criticisms through their analysis and use of autoethnography as a methodology.8 Regardless of the intellectual energy expended in the array of peer-reviewed publications in defence of autoethnography, there will be those who believe that it is an illegitimate and inappropriate form of scholarship. As a practitioner of the methodology decades removed from its inception, I am far more interested in exploring what the methodology can make possible than I am in justifying its existence, especially given that so many have already done so quite proficiently. As such, my emphasis in this chapter is on exploring how autoethnography can facilitate negotiations of performance and power on academic stages. on love is an informative case study for artistic and pedagogical reasons – it intersects the aesthetic preoccupations of spoken-word performance in Canada with the teaching and dramatization of the historical site of Nigger Rock. In addition to brief depictions of early spoken-word scenes in Toronto and Montreal, this chapter also unpacks the pedagogical challenges that arose in the development and production of a performance about blackness and love in Canada in an undergraduate university setting.

Spoken Word I started performing my texts as a teenager in Toronto in the mid-1990s at high school shows with friends who were rappers, beat producers, djs, and rhythm and blues singers. Most of them were connected to Fresh Arts – a government-funded cultural arts program that helped

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Figure 12.1 Poster for the UWaterloo Drama production of on love.

gestate and launch the careers of artists, many of whom profoundly influenced the development of what is now referred to as “Canada’s urban music culture.”9 In the fall of 1996 I moved to Montreal to pursue my bachelor of arts. Soon after I arrived, I met more rappers and beat producers; they had connections to event producers and to ciut, McGill University’s influential radio station. It was through those connections that I found myself performing my texts on stages around Montreal. The shows I participated in were quite different from those I had be-

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come accustomed to in Toronto. In Montreal shows were bilingual and held in arts venues, community centres, and bookstores. Many of the artists were older than me; they experimented with sound, costume, and genre – their influences and references were based in performance art with content that often sought to position itself as apolitical. My work was the antithesis; it was realistic and heavily influenced by the cadences of rap. The content of my texts grappled primarily and overtly with gender, race, and class. Yet producers consistently booked disparate performance styles and diverse performers in the same show, making for a quirky, unpredictable, and creative scene. Some of the artists I performed with called me a poet, but I was uncomfortable with the title because I associated poetry with white maleness. Many of the artists in the circles I moved in were also event producers out of necessity. The combination of disparate artistic styles was eclectic, and I doubt that funding agencies in the late 1990s would have known where to place it – it wasn’t quite theatre, literature, or music, but it was performance-based and generally well attended. Some of the artists/producers started bringing up artists from New York and with them came the term spoken word. In the landmark book on spoken word in Canada, Impure: Reinventing the Word, artist-authors Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely asserted, “Part of the joy of being part of the Montreal spoken word ‘explosion’ in the mid-nineties was the sense that traditional barriers were being breached. ‘Spoken word’ became not so much a coherently conceived performance as a space within which a wide array of artistic practices could meet: theatre, dance, poetry, storytelling, performance art, popular music, rap, and even stand-up comedy.”10 With the term spoken word came the title spoken word artist. I remember feeling comfortable with that term – because at the time it was new and felt expansive. In the decade that followed I moved back to Toronto, recorded a full-length spoken-word album, remixed the album during an artist residency in South Africa, performed in France, Brazil, and the United States, expanded my spoken-word practice to theatre, had that theatre work produced and published, and completed an mfa in theatre with an emphasis on playwriting. And during that time, spoken word established itself as a recognizable genre in performance and literary scenes in Montreal and Toronto, expanded across the country, became a field of inquiry for graduate students, and was funded by arts councils at several levels of government. The tide had changed definitively.

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In 2007, Canadian Theatre Review (CTR ) published a landmark issue entitled “Spoken Word Performance” that featured articles written mostly by spoken-word practitioners. Issue editor and artist-scholar T.L. Cowan described spoken word in Canada as a “diverse and incoherent”11 artistic practice that traced its origins to Anishnaabek oral traditions, performance poetry practices in Canada, and jazz.12 Cowan urged readers of the issue to “read [the] contributions out loud, as the writing is almost universally attentive to the sound and rhythmic qualities of language. This is critical writing with an everyday cadence.”13 Even the scholarship on offer, at that burgeoning moment of spoken word’s encounter with academia by way of theatre studies, carried with it a conscientiousness about its relationship with the audience. For that CTR issue, dubpoet Klyde Durm-I Broox created the standout piece “Gestures of the Dancing Voice: Reloading the Can(n)on under the Influence of Dub.” He described his text as a “distinctly Canadiancast version of an adjustable, performable, multilayered discourse of text and image woven into a ‘polynarrative’ on the mystique and technique of dubpoetry … It is an attempt to actually mount a dubpoetry performance on the page, to give voice to the gestures represented here and perhaps to break new ground and crack old ceilings, ‘Under the Influence of dub.’”14 Broox’s article includes sixty-three images of dubpoets from across the Caribbean diaspora – most of the images are distorted, altered, and mixed with dubpoems, artists’ names, and citations. The image placement breaks the boundaries of normative use of space in academic journals. Like dubpoetry, there is spacing and rhythm to Broox’s layout. The images are dense in content, sophisticated, and uncluttered. They are interspersed with academic prose and dubpoetry. Broox animates the page with a dubstyled performative writing that at once signals the kind of proficiency with the performative qualities of academic prose that one would require to so thoroughly and imaginatively dismantle it and reload it with “homemade ammunition.”15 In this regard, Broox’s academic intervention is an extension of the critical work of dubpoetry from its onset – the genre’s insistence in content and form on disrupting colonial English, colonial mentalities, and colonial artistic practices in Jamaica from as early as the 1960s. The “distinctly Canadian-cast”16 dubscholarship that Broox presents on the page applies the historical memory and knowledge of dub in Jamaica to the emerging field of spoken word inquiry in Canada. Broox employs seasoned techniques to new

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contexts and so is able to enter the field unhindered by the trappings of conforming to disciplinary standards or to acceptance by the academy. Instead he intervenes in the field equipped with dub traditions and techniques that permit him not only to reimagine how words appear on the page17 but also to reimagine the confines of the page altogether. To this end, I disagree with Cowan’s assessment that all contributors to the issue were “reflective of a collective readiness to take seriously the work we do as artists and to try to articulate the issues at stake both in our performance practices and our critical investment in these practices.”18 From my reading, Broox’s contribution was that of an artist steeped in a tradition born out of political aims and attending clarity of purpose. And while in a Canadian spoken-word context dubpoetry is often grouped with discussions of spoken word, there are differences beyond the obvious one of aesthetics, and those differences are worth untangling, because they are about historicity, nation, and critical engagement. Though 2007 was an exciting year for spoken word in its formal encounter with the academy via the special issue of the Canadian Theatre Review, it was also a moment when the genre felt less expansive to me as a practitioner – it seemed to have collapsed into a style with predictable metres, contents, and performance techniques. That year I reflected deeply on my practice and the years I’d spent as a full-time artist. I reviewed the majority of my writings from the previous decade and noted that within them I had only ever tentatively broached the topic of love, and I rarely performed that work or even shared it privately. Though love had definitely underpinned my work on race, class, gender, and ageism, it had rarely existed at the forefront of it. I was intrigued by my avoidance. With the intention of challenging and renewing my practice, I applied to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for funds to create a new artistic project entitled on love. In the application I described on love as a collection of a cappella poems that would explore love as an act of hope and despair.19 My applications were funded and I set about creating on love, a collection whose title comes from Khalil Gibran’s poem of the same name and is inspired by this line in it: “Even as [love] is for your growth so is [it] for your pruning.”20 I approached the creation of on love as an experiment in methodology and content. Over the course of several months I studied Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins, The Way of Love by Luce Irigaray, All about Love: New Visions by bell hooks, and Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy

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by Tricia Rose. During that time I also went through my poetry archives and selected material to work with as departure points. As I wrote new text I read it out loud, worked through possible physical movements, and revised the text and performances accordingly. The type of inquiry that I engaged in was also profoundly informed by my doctoral studies in theatre and performance, which I commenced around the same time. My doctoral research project was theoretically preoccupied with female blackness in Canada and used autoethnography as its methodology. Working on on love, while formally studying performance, critical race, and feminist theory, taught me that when I moved from written word to stage performance I moved from performance to performance – in the sense that the assembling of words on the computer screen was as much of a performance for me as was the audio and visual representation of performance on stage. Working on on love, while taking graduate courses in theatre and performance studies, political science, and English, led me to think of my body as a performance space not only on stage, but in the mundane everyday performance of life. on love quickly emerged as a collection of performance pieces that differed from my previous work. Its tone, cadence, and approach were less influenced by the rhythms of hip hop (that underscore much of spoken word in Canada), and instead the collection was sung in styles in keeping with the aesthetics of soul and folk. The collection’s manipulation of sound gestured towards traditions of sound poetry. I performed bits and pieces of it, but none of it quite fit on the spoken-word scenes that I usually performed in. I had created a work without a venue or a clear audience; this too was a first for me. When I was subsequently approached by what is now the defunct arts collective Engrenage Noir/ levier with a commission to create a fifteen-minute performance at the Montréal Arts Interculturels (mai) venue I immediately thought of on love. I knew that mai’s space was the right size and had the right relationship with artistic communities to allow me, as an artist primarily known for spoken word, to present experimental performance work. In retrospect it seems fitting that I returned to Montreal to perform experimental work fourteen years after first being introduced to an art scene where experimental performance was de rigueur. I doubt that I ever would have created the version of on love that emerged from the Engrenage Noir/levier commission for a Toronto audience – the version of on love that emerged was most certainly influenced by the mai space and the city of Montreal.

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Nigger Rock Engrenage Noir/levier commissioned the piece for their three-day conference, “How Many Slaves Do You Own? Art and the Economies of Exploitation Past and Present.” They specifically wanted the commission to engage with the site and histories of Nigger Rock, a place that I had had no idea existed prior to entering discussions about the commission. Nigger Rock is a black boulder approximately 300 metres wide and shaped like a whale. It sits on an expanse of private land in St Armand, Quebec – a small town just north of the US border. It is believed that Nigger Rock is the collective headstone of an unofficial cemetery used by the enslaved Black people, Black trades people, and free Black people who lived in St Armand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many have worked hard to have Nigger Rock recognized as an official cemetery, but their efforts have been met with much resistance.21 I suspect that for many it is difficult to acknowledge that slavery existed in this land that we now call Canada, that centuries ago Black people lived and died in what we now call Quebec, and that, given the name of the rock, Black people were likely called niggers at that time. I visited St Armand as part of a research trip for the creation of the experimental performance installation. I got as close to Nigger Rock as I could, which meant standing hundreds of metres away from it at the ruins of a small schoolhouse for Black children used in the nineteenth century. I remember the wind, the sun, and the outline of the boulder in the distance. I remember the feeling of stone walls. I was silent as my imagination filled with the children, their voices, the community, their faces, their breaths, their laughter. I have no ancestral connection to St. Armand that I am aware of but I feel profoundly connected to displacement and to histories of blackness in North America. I returned from that research trip full of feelings and a faint idea that on love was about searching for Nigger Rock – for histories, context, and location. Geographer Katherine McKittrick posits that “black captivity defined exactly how Montreal was spatially created by way of practices of domination. Thus, it is the landscape of Montreal that resonates with the lost geographies of black slavery in Canada.”22 on love, as reimagined for Engrenage Noir/levier, proposed to dramatize McKittrick’s assertion by using the mai theatre space as the performance installation site and setting the St Armand Slave Cemetery in that mai space. It is within this double context that on love sought to explore Black Canadians’ love of self and each other.

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I invited cellist Rebecca Foon and sound artist Pohanna Pyne Feinberg to collaborate with me. Though I was familiar with both artists’ work and had teamed with Foon on one of my spoken word albums, we had never collaborated on a live performance from two different cities before – I was in Toronto, Foon and Pyne Feinberg were in Montreal. We held our meetings on Skype, Pyne Feinberg shared audio files through Soundcloud, and I shared Word documents of the evolving texts. Pyne Feinberg used her studio to record and layer tracks of Foon’s playing, and she recorded excerpts of my speaking and singing text from on love over the phone in order to achieve different sound qualities. She also recorded natural sounds of water, wind, and crackling fire that she layered to create a soundscape that was at once haunting and compelling. When we set the parameters for our collaboration, I insisted that some aspects of our work together be experimental for each of our performance practices. Foon had never accompanied herself live, which Pyne Feinberg’s soundscape permitted her to do, and Pyne Feinberg had never created a soundscape that would influence and accompany a spoken word artist. I was well outside of my comfort zone; I had never performed live with a cellist or a soundscape, I had never revised my text to accommodate the influence of the ebbs and flows of a soundscape, and I had never revised or written text using the feelings that the viewing of a site (Nigger Rock) had evoked in me. During this process Engrenage Noir/levier hired Chimwemwe Miller to translate portions of the text to French from English. This developmental phase of on love was informative for me as an artist. It transformed a collection of mostly spoken word poems into an experimental bilingual piece rooted in a historical site and deeply influenced by a soundscape artist and a cellist. For the first time as a poet, playwright, and songwriter, the telling of a clear discernible narrative had not driven my writing – instead the piece was grounded in the feelings that the multiple elements conjured during the piece. I remember feeling nervous in the dressing room before the performance, but my nerves weren’t about the act of performing; they were about the content of my performance. I have felt the latter a handful of times, mostly when introducing a piece that pushed the borders of acceptable content in spoken word circles. My concerns about the content of on love were different; I did not know if anyone in the audience would understand what we had created and the vision that I had led. And there was a tiny part of me that did not care, because the process had been so

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profoundly rewarding for me as an artist. During the actual performance I remember wanting to communicate feelings to the audience even more than words. I remember wondering if the audience understood. And I remember veteran dancer Zab Mabungo grasping me by my shoulders on the wings of the stage later that evening as she said emphatically, “I expected spoken word, Naila. I don’t know what that was, but you must keep doing it.” In a blog review of on love, Leah Gabrielle Silverberg wrote, “Ce qui m’a paru extrêmement intéressant de cette pièce est l’incapacité de dire si le sujet tournait autour d’une lute personelle ou plutôt sociale ou politique. Les deux étaient si lies et entrelacés qu’il était difficile d’en arriver à une réponse claire. Toutefois, c’est exactement ce qui était intéressant et incroyable de cette pièce de théâtre ou performance; l’impossibilité de séparer le privé du public.”23 I left the mai with an impression similar to Silverberg’s; I did not know if what I had created was theatre or performance, or even spoken word, for that matter, but I knew that I longed for more – more experimentation; more voids to fill; more historical, material, and emotional spaces in which to imagine combinations of words, sounds, bodies, and lights. So when I was introduced to hh 180, a black box theatre space, during a job interview for assistant professor in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo in the spring of 2011, I was immediately intrigued.

Performance as Pedagogy hh 180 reminds me of a stripped-down version of the mai – it has the technical capabilities of a theatre while inviting other performance modes. When asked during the job interview how I would contribute to the annual theatre season produced by the department I emphasized my experience as a published playwright and downplayed my work as a spoken word artist and performer – I have very little formal acting training, and even less training as a director. My contributions would be primarily dramaturgical, I explained. I accepted the position and was quite surprised when at one of my first Drama unit meetings my new colleagues invited me to “direct something in hh 180” in the upcoming season to introduce students to my artistic practice. on love was the first production idea that flew into my mind; not as a remount of the Engrenage Noir/levier performance at the mai but as an opportunity to further develop and experiment with the piece.

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My focus this time was to incorporate a strong pedagogical component that would permit the undergraduate students in the Drama program to participate in all aspects of development and performance of the piece. The challenge, within the material conditions of a theatre department’s undergraduate production, became how to apply my teaching philosophy to the development of an experimental performance piece. I call my teaching philosophy “a pedagogy of justice”; among other goals it seeks to expose students to divergent source materials to deepen opportunities for substantive and sustained critical self-reflexivity. One of my central pedagogical goals is have students “look closely at their moorings and, at times, to untie systems of meaning-making that have held together their world-views for a long time.”24 The majority of the students in the Drama program at my university are non-Black from non-urban centres of Canada; their familiarity with Black theatrical traditions and the historical presence and contributions of Black people in Canada is severely limited, if not non-existent. The creation of a pedagogical context in which they could engage with on love’s focus on Black people, Black love, and Canadian history (as it specifically involves Black people) would facilitate valuable unmooring and critical self-reflexivity. I designed an upper-level course entitled Performance Creation and delivered it in the fall of 2012. I called the course Performance Creation and not, for example “practice-based research” (a term often used in the United States and United Kingdom) because “performance creation” summarized the imperative that drove the course’s learning objectives. A performance script, with production values that met the department’s standards, had to be created by the end of the term, and that was a demand that went beyond students’ individual participation in the course. The course description stated, “Students will emerge from this course with an appreciation of the work required to create a performance with others using the talents and skills of those in the group. We will develop our capacity to be attentive not only to the possibilities of the script, but also, to each other.”25 Similarly, the three learning objectives emphasized cognitive skills required to create a performance script: the development of a foundational understanding of how to create a performance; a practical understanding of the demands of the creation of a performance; and observational and critical skills through constructive responses to each other’s work.26 The course assignments included numerous reading responses to material on spoken word in Canada and on Nigger Rock, a performance review of a local spoken word event, and script development. The last

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was weighted the most heavily and was the central task of the course. Each week, one student was responsible for “carrying the script forward,” which meant incorporating outcomes of class discussions, personal thoughts on the script, and ideas that surfaced through the week’s readings. The student responsible for the week’s script development then had to present and discuss the ways that he or she had transformed the script to the class and lead a table read – identifying areas for further evolution and/or inquiry. Students were assessed on the basis of the changes they made to the script and their in-class presentations. I told the class of predominantly non-Black students about on love on the first day of class and they seemed both excited and petrified. They apprehensively found numerous ways to ask me if they were allowed to write about Black people and Black love, and say the words

Figure 12.2 Top to bottom, left to right: Marielle Lyon, Bob Stan, Carly Derderian, Robert Motum, and Zac Gungl in the UWaterloo Drama production of on love.

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“Nigger Rock.” Some of them had no idea that there had been slavery in Canada and were familiar only with Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. I explained to the students that it could be argued that the transatlantic slave trade made “Black” as an ethnicity possible such that to inhabit a Black body in Canada is to embody histories of violence from which the Canadian state actively distances itself. I explained that the history of racialized violence underpins not only dominant narratives of a Canadian national identity but also the nuances of Black Canadians’ private and public everyday lives. It was their challenge as students to expand and reimagine on love so that it could further experiment with the tensions within and between these spaces in thoughtfully provocative ways. As I reflect on the first few weeks of class now, I realize that in many ways I had to promise the students that I would be an ethical guide for their queries and that I would do my best to ensure that they did not misrepresent Black people or embarrass themselves. There were moments throughout the course when students unknowingly fell into problematic tropes and stereotypes that forced me to teach on the fly in a way that I had never done before. This was because a crucial portion of the course material was unstable – I had no idea how students would develop the script in any given week, and I heard their revisions at the same time as everyone else in the class. This structure required heightened attentiveness and structural flexibility. On several occasions I found myself in the midst of mini-lectures on Canadian history, post-colonial theory, critical race studies, and sexuality studies. And there was an imperative to take up these theories and methodologies, process them, and apply them immediately, because there was a collective understanding that the script would reflect the work of our course when it was mounted the following term. In this regard, within the parameters of “performance creation,” the course’s content became necessarily interdisciplinary and engaged with scholarship in ways that differed from theatre courses structured in a traditional reading/lecture format that include elements of in-class performance. I found the course exciting and daunting. The script that emerged from the course was clearly committed to a Western play structure, and while it was full of moments that captured feelings and ideas, it lacked cohesion. After the class did their final read of the script near the end of the term, there was general awareness that the script seemed incomplete. During the weeks between the fall and

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winter terms I formatted, copy-edited, added new material, and deleted some material. Editing the students’ work was challenging. I sought to reflect and respect the collective ideas of the group while also being attentive to the forthcoming demands of an intense rehearsal period and the needs of the show’s designers. There are certainly pedagogical implications for my interventions without providing opportunities for the students to revise or even review my changes. At the time, helping students to collaborate on a script was new to me. For the course, I had not yet included necessary tasks like standardized formatting or stepping back from creating the work to evaluate it as a whole and adjusting characters, actions, and ideas accordingly. Since on love I have revisited this model of students collaborating in the fall on a script that will be produced in the winter. I continue to experiment with ways to create and revise a new script within the twelve-week term so that I (or another non-student) do not intervene without opportunities for students to review those changes. As an artist and educator it was fascinating to revise a script that had been a milestone in my artistic process but was no longer invested in my artistic preoccupations. Instead, my investments in the script shifted to those of an educator who was intrigued by the ways the students had invested themselves in the script.

The Production The majority of students who work on department productions do so for credit as a part of a major or minor program of study in drama. This means that when the department mounts a production, two imperatives are at play: pedagogy and production values. The first table-read included all students involved in the performance, technical components, and design aspects of the production. I told them about the production history and content of on love and then I told them about Nigger Rock. Some were shocked – for many it was the first time learning that slavery had existed in Canada. Some were angry that they had never heard this story before or the many other stories of historical Black presences in Canada. As I spoke more about Nigger Rock I saw a mixture of disbelief and discomfort pass over students’ faces. I explained that Nigger Rock was the name of the site and that the name suggested that nigger was a word routinely used to describe Black people at that time. Some of the students who had auditioned for and been placed in the roles asked me if they had the right to perform Black characters, given few of

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them were Black. I explained that this project was about facing human differences directly, thoughtfully, and carefully. I said that I was a pragmatist and that we were mounting this play now because if we waited until we had enough Black students in our department to feature Black characters, we would have to wait an awfully long time. We were doing this play now because we needed to figure out how to grapple with the ethical and aesthetic questions raised when predominantly white students, faculty, and staff perform and produce non-white work. I wondered what questions non-white students would have asked if they were working on a production by a white playwright featuring all white characters. To what extent did the very queries of the students gathered at the table indicate the ethnicity of whiteness? Over the course of the rehearsals, the white students, staff, and faculty in the production worked to position themselves in relation to the play and sought a familiar lens to contextualize the fact that nonBlack students were playing Black characters. In my director’s notes for the program, I included the standard fare of production history and historical contexts. But I later revised those notes and deleted most of those sections because students, staff, and faculty kept referring to the idea that they were doing a form of colour-blind casting. I revised my notes to reflect these conversations: “on love is a story about Black people in Canada performed by a cast that is mostly non-Black. In theatre this is often called colour-blind casting, but I find the term problematic. I suspect that most of you reading this program will see the colour of each actor’s skin, just as most of us see the colour of each other’s skin in our everyday lives. But what do [we do] with that information? To what extent does it impact our interactions with one another? These are the kinds of questions that I’m interested in as an artist, scholar, and educator whose primary areas of research are race, gender, and performance.”27

In Conclusion on love began as an exploration of romantic love between Black people in Canada using spoken word as the primary medium. While romantic love was the topic of the work, the driving force was my desire to challenge the boundaries that were solidifying around spoken word in content and form. The commission I received from Engrenage Noir/ levier to create an experimental performance installation permitted

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Figure 12.3 Left to right: Alan Shonfield, Leeanna Caligagan, and Chantaine Green-Leach in the UWaterloo Drama production of on love.

me to create a second version of on love, one that productively located the topic in a historical context. But it also allowed me to collaborate with other professional artists as I deepened my own artistic exploration of the intersections of spoken word and theatre. The third version of on love was defined by its move into the pedagogical context of the undergraduate program at my university, where the piece’s development was structured so that students would collaborate with one another and me. The mutability of on love is due in part to the fact that it is about romantic love and that is a familiar topic for collaborators – whether professional artists or undergraduate students. But on love is also mutable because my approach to it has always been experimental; I worked to be unconstrained by genre or content in my development of the piece, though I am more restricted with most of my work. The three iterations of on love would not have been possible with another one of my texts; I doubt that I would have invited or allowed collaborators to interpret and change my other artistic projects to the extent that they have with on love, perhaps because it was always meant to be experimental and collaborative.

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The primary pedagogical result of my teaching, performance, and directing of on love was that the Performance Creation course and the actual production explored the boundaries of Canadian multicultural liberalism. They asked students to do the work of justice and equity that multicultural rhetoric effortlessly espouses. The central challenge became how to develop the script, rehearse the performance, mount the production, and manage all of the messy, difficult, challenging consequences and possibilities that emerge when non-Black people do work about Black people. The experimental emphasis of the piece became pedagogical; it was no longer a question of form or the nuances of content – those aspects of the piece moved to the background. It was a fascinating exploration for me as an educator. It underscored how live performance can facilitate the exploration of societal concerns. As I watched its final iteration on stage, I no longer focused on the ways in which on love worked as an experimental investigation of love between Black people – instead I thought about the questions it had allowed students, staff, and faculty involved in the production to ask and the kinds of statements its making had permitted us to make. In my capacity as an artist-scholar, the making of on love, in each of its iterations, has emphasized the importance of performance spaces in public and institutional settings where artists, educators, and students can create within and across genres. Within these spaces, imperatives, possibilities, and outcomes can be explored in the rehearsal hall and shift in ways that can affect participants well beyond the stage.

on love,Version 2, Performed at the MAI , 2010 An Excerpt from the Beginning n a i la k e le ta-m ae i hail from somewhere beyond doubt i hail from somewhere beyond pain i hail from mercy and glory despair and hope of love. we are less than one hour away from st-armand, québec thirty minutes to be precise and i am

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sits bones sore from excessive sitting headed back to st-armand in new status part of a committed monogamous relationship we’ve started trying. trying in the only way that childless hetero couples try forecasted ovulation on the horizon il ne reste que cinq jours il y a des moments où je suis pétrifiée et sans carte sans traçage déterrée enter sacred space and place each cloth somewhere between the plane landing and us driving to st-armand i thought “i could have an affair with justice” je dis ces mots pour entendre mes pensées. pour les rendre audibles au-delà des réverbérations de mon esprit. je dis ces mots pour les dépouiller de leur pouvoir. quand les mots semblent être trop puissants pour s’agencer à portée de l’ouïe lorsque leur chorégraphie évoque un silence viscérale d’une transgression qui ne peut s’articuler, je parle. parle pour que leur banalité soit claire. je parle pour les désamorcer. hors de moi-même, mon corps, ma chair. status update: we were refused permission to visit nigger rock. the graves will be dug by night.

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on love,Version 3, Performed at the University of Waterloo, 2013 Excerpt david bui, leeanna caligagan, selin erkaya, jennifer gooderham, lindsay grisebach, naila keleta-mae, lilli markle, courtney palmer, and stefan radic

Preshow set up outside of the theatre space is a table with a covered box. there is also a pile of paper with writing utensils. the pile is labelled “in this life, i want to be remembered for …” if it is helpful, an usher can stand at the table, explaining the concept and encouraging audience members to fill out anonymous entries and place them in the box before entering the space. Prologue the set is divided, using material that actors can move through, to represent past and present tense. chorus emerges from audience while beginning to sing and moves throughout entire space. a symbol of physical restraint (i.e., chains) emerges from and is returned to the chorus. done through movement or props in a ritual, chorus marks out a series of gestures/movements that include bringing an empty vessel and water onstage. the chorus sings the song as they bring the water onto the stage and then hum the song as they return to their seats in the audience. soundscape is full (i.e., thunderstorm), subsides into very light sounds. ... CELESTE and MARIE enter memory place. CHORUS 3 enters and moves in stylized way that signals slave labour. CHORUS 1, 4, and 5 enter stage at various points throughout following sequence and embody different kinds of slave life, including labour, punishment, and brief periods of rest. marie:

seated in my seventh grade classroom tiny desks, squeezed side by side elbows practically touching. learning about the settlement of british north america the impact of english canada the causes of the war of 1812 …

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celeste:

teacher: celeste:

teacher: celeste:

teacher: celeste:

teacher: celeste:

teacher: chorus: marie:

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and the people involved: loyalists, indentured servants, allied nations, first nations … a hand in the second row the only other black girl celeste, my best friend looks around quietly speaks my grandmother says that in 1812 the british and french settlers had black slaves on this land that we now call canada. writes “canada” on blackboard. there was no slavery in canada. my grandmother says that the slaves could buy their freedom if they fought for the british in the american revolution and that some of them chose to work on the loyalists’ farms. no. my grandmother says that i’m a seventh-generation canadian and that my family are descendants of those slaves. writes “peace” on blackboard. there was no slavery in canada. my grandmother says that some of my ancestors, who were slaves, are buried at nigger rock in st armand, québec. there was no slavery in canada, only the underground railroad … my grandmother said that her grandmother told her that nigger rock is beautiful 300 feet wide dark in colour shaped like a whale writes “freedom” on blackboard. no slavery. only harriet tubman. only freedom. do you remember? je me souviens … when celeste and i went to st armand, québec. the harsh breeze coming off the cold lake, the dry fields,

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celeste:

marie:

MARIE

and CELESTE exit.

chorus 5:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

the few stones left from the school house where celeste’s ancestors had studied with the other black children in the community … we didn’t go to nigger rock. i wasn’t ready. too much there. i could almost hear the stories in the wind, almost feel them buried in the soil beneath my feet … so much being covered over. so many stories, deliberately omitted, misplaced, untold … we stood by the school house and there it was, hundreds of feet away, nigger rock beautiful 300 feet wide dark in colour shaped like a whale

sung speak for us whose voices are not heard. share our stories.

no te s Ellis, Revision, 13. Ibid., 107. Keleta-Mae, “An Autoethnographic Reading.” Kazubowski-Houston, Staging Strife, 197. Bey, “Carrie Mae Weems,” 63. Lamm, “Portraits of the Past,” 109. For an example of criticisms of autoethnography, see Sparkes, “Autoethnography.” See Reed-Danahay, Auto/ethnography; Ellis, “Heartful Autoethnography”; McClaurin, “Theorizing”; Duncan, “Autoethnography”; Ellis, Revision. Black, “Remixing.” Stanton and Tinguely, Impure, xi. Cowan, “Editorial,” 8. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 9. Broox, “Gestures,” 72.

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24

25 26 27

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Ibid., 76. Ibid., 72. See bisset and Karasick, “Shards of Light.” Cowan, “Editorial,” 9. Keleta-Mae, Canada Council application. Gibran, Prophet, 1923. Yeoman, “Je Me Souviens.” McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 114–15. Silverberg, “Réflexions.” English translation: “What I found extremely interesting about this piece is that I could not tell whether it was more about personal struggles or whether it was more public or political. The two were so blended together and intertwined that it was hard to come away with a clear answer. However, this is exactly what was the most interesting and amazing about this piece of theatre or performance – that you could not separate the private and the public.” Keleta-Mae, “Pedagogy,” 39. I understand the pedagogical component of my work on on love as a continuation of the theories and practices of critical pedagogy in theatre and performance studies. For more on this area of inquiry, see Dolan, Geographies of Learning; Cooks and Simpson, Whiteness; Solga, “Activist Classroom”; Prendergast and Saxton, Applied Drama; and Gallagher, Why Theatre Matters. Keleta-Mae, “Performance Creation.” Ibid. Keleta-Mae, on love program notes.

13

Writing the Red Trench: Performance, Visual Culture, and Emplaced Writing b r ia n rus ted

Introduction He asked us to paint a fish. Eager, uncertain teenagers gathered in a university classroom wearing dads’ shirts over summer clothes; we stood in front of easels, brushes poised. It must have been one of the first years Don Wright worked as an art specialist with Memorial University’s Extension Service. “Paint a fish,” he said again, as if somehow the task would reveal itself with iteration. For some it did. Others sought clarification about colour, size, or species in case there might be a correct fish. Some, like me, hit a wall that separated whatever fish might have been in our experience from the fish we could render with line and colour. How does a fish swim that deeply into your muscles, your memory? I cannot say why a fish. I am sure he assumed we all had some experience with fish of some kind during our short lives. (I imagine someone tried to paint a piece of deep-fried fish.) I am sure it was a simple way to assess hand-eye abilities, fluency with brush and paint, and even attitude towards a then-iconic aspect of Newfoundland and Labrador’s culture and economy. Over the remaining twenty years of his life, he summoned whole schools of fish to find their way to paper. And he produced schools of his own in drawings, paintings, and lithographs. Four decades later in 2008, Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial art gallery, The Rooms, featured an exhibition of Don Wright’s work. Of the Moment, curated by Caroline Stone, formed part of a series on artists who influenced the province’s visual arts. Included among the paintings, drawings, and prints were pages from Wright’s sketchbook journals from the early 1980s when he was developing work that would culminate in the controversial public art piece Red

Figure 13.1 Don Wright, Clears Cove October 9, manuscript page. Used by permission of the estate of Don Wright. Originally exhibited as part of Don Wright: Of the Moment, 16 May–6 July 2008, the Rooms, St John’s, Newfoundland.

Trench. Displayed on a plinth under Plexiglas, these pages recorded his daily walks to Clears Cove beach, less than a kilometre from his house. They held details about the day, the weather, the temperature. He stretched words around drawings of stones, arrangements of seaweed, elevations of the beach; made marks showing angles of sun and

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described the physical sensations of standing on the beach at the water’s edge early on a fall morning. Two things captivated me about seeing these pages. First, the extent of sensory detail – the stiffness of his back, the firmness of sand in bare feet, the shivers of his dog – connected embodied antecedents to the mark-making and gestures in his creative work. Wright was not looking at this local landscape in an optical or ocular manner. His recording practices were not about extracting the results of light hitting the eye. He was engaged in and tried to convey what Tim Ingold1 or Joyce Brodsky2 refer to as seeing with the “whole body,” or what David Howes and others have referred to as emplacement, “the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment.”3 He became less concerned with representing the environment and what he saw, and he became more concerned with getting his creative work to evoke his experience of the environment. Edward Casey might identify this impulse as “body mapping,” where an artist’s “motions leave traces on the canvas that, rather than representing the landscape’s precise contours, reimplace them on the pictorial surface.”4 Wright’s sketchbook pages were not about representing a specific landscape as much as they were about sketching and revealing the immediacy of being in the environment, of marking his place in nature. Wright’s sketchbook pages also recorded emergent, ritualized activities. What began as repeated movement exercises to loosen stiff joints and warm cold muscles evolved into mark-making practices with the beach and tides as media. He would return to the site, day after day, just before dawn and perform a series of actions to locate the sun’s appearance on the horizon. “I came to think of the events on the beach as a kind of ritual,” he said.5 These actions, while site specific, cannot in themselves be treated as performance art or land art, though Wright was aware of such work.6 Wright did document his actions with photographs, drawings, and book works, and he even tried to reproduce parts of the site in studio settings. Although others saw these excavations and participated in making them,7 they did not constitute an audience, nor were the actions framed or keyed as part of a performance event. Wright’s subsequent work informed by these rituals did engage with what anthropologist Fred Myers understands as performativity, the way that the emplacements of visual art works “give presence to” the embodied experience of place.8 Artist and visual theorist Barbara Bolt describes another dimension of performativity: for her, art work “enacts or produces ‘art’ as an effect” as it enunciates “the conventions of

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which it is a repetition.”9 “Artists,” she says in a later discussion, “engage with, re-iterate and question the ‘norms’ of ‘art’ existing in the socio-cultural context at a particular historical juncture.”10 In the gallery setting, Wright’s art works may have been “unhinged”11 from the site of ritual, but placing them on the gallery floor rather than hanging them vertically on the wall disrupted viewing conventions of the gallery as a site, what Peggy Phelan called “the institutional effect of the gallery.”12 Such an installation choice suggests Kathleen Irwin’s notion of the “spatial performative,” the generative potential released when a site of ritual subverts a site of exhibition.13 The combination of Wright’s sensory and embodied experience with the performative in these sketchbook pages points to the inadequacy and even inappropriateness of reading Wright’s art discursively as a collection of visual objects. His creative work poses a methodological problem for a performance approach to visual culture: how do you write about his work in ways that convey its “muscular consciousness,”14 its “sentient ecology,”15 and its invitation to the viewer to engage seeing as a practice of sensory, embodied movement? This methodological problem reiterates a challenge in writing about performance that Phelan described as “the search for a disappearing performative writing” rather than a writing that preserves and reproduces, and that through iteration subjects the emplaced “to the rules of the written document.”16

Writing Visual Performance This chapter is a response to the methodological problem raised by the sensory and performative qualities of Don Wright’s work; it gestures to the inadequacy of approaching such work as visual objects. The response to such a methodological challenge resonates with David Howes’s exhortation for ethnographers “to be more sensible,”17 that is to attend more fully to the senses in cultural research. Doing so, as he suggests, might undo the print-biased metaphors that encourage us to see culture as a text to be read. But Howes’s call is reactionary in its dismissal and demeaning of those textual and reflexive methods, which he describes as “toying with our writing styles.”18 A performative writing seems to invite just such forms of play, yet with the same sensible intent. In the decade before the sensory became a dominant critical focus, Dwight Conquergood was clear that ethnography “privileges the body as a site of knowing” and that it is “an embodied practice … an intensely sensuous way of knowing.”19 He felt that the combination of sensory

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fieldwork with embodied writing could be “deeply subversive … to the text-bound structure of the academy.”20 As Tieja Löytönen et al. suggest, an embodied writing “disrupts the comfort, taken-for-granted (striated) academic spaces of reading, thinking, and knowing.”21 The methodological challenge of Wright’s work calls for a kind of writing that Tim Ingold has described as a “parliament of lines,” the gathering together of movement, place, the body, drawing, and writing.22 In her discussion of arts-based research methods, Patricia Leavy has suggested that poetic writing offers researchers the opportunity to create “sensory scenes” and to provide for an “evocative presentation of data.”23 Her primary emphasis is on poetic writing “as a representational form,”24 rather than as an embodied and performative method of inquiry, or as Ivan Brady says, “as tools of discovery.”25 A combination of sensory fieldwork with poiesis returns writing to the performative as a way of knowing26 and shares in what Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk have described as “a methodological and epistemological challenge to the argumentative form(s) that have typified much academic scholarship.”27 Their effort to parse the tumult of work gathered under the phrase research-creation yields four separate categories: research that leads to or informs the production of creative work; research that comes out of or is generated by iterative encounters with creative work; the use of creative media to represent research; and finally, creative work as the epistemological basis of research, the “directed exploration through creative processes that includes experimentation, but also analysis, critique, and a profound engagement with theory and questions of method.”28 Leavy’s sense of arts-based research involving poetry accords primarily with the third of these four categories. Performative, poetic, and embodied writing as research creation often exemplifies the fourth category and can range from theatrical to embodied forms of research-creation.29 As an instance of what Rebecca Schneider might consider “an intense, embodied inquiry into temporal repetition,”30 the research-creation underlying this chapter is shaped by two methodological impulses: an iterative and episodic re-performance; and a poetic, disruptive writing that aspires to disappearance and non-representation. Notions of reperformance offer a structured method for sensory experience. Rather than re-enactment’s emphasis on “the performed production of historical authenticity (even when that authenticity is imagined),”31 reperformance recovers gestural practices that visual culture can be said to archive. If performativity and affect, as Laura Levin argues, “privi-

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lege the ‘doing’ aspects of photography, asking how images exceed their frames and directly affect their viewers,”32 they can also privilege the practices of visual artists. Conceding Megan Hoetger’s anxiety that reperformance is an archived experience “folding back on itself … within the structures of experience-making today,”33 it does disrupt institutional and textual practices that dissociate or displace visual objects from practice, performance, and the body.34 In the case of Wright’s work, such dissociation had a decisive impact on how his work was viewed. The choice to develop a poetic mode of inquiry in this chapter has been shaped by emplaced attempts to re-perform actions similar to those Wright recorded, but also by his own practice with words. The notes he left of his activities on Clears Cove beach offer a gestural layering of narrative and sensory observation, with fragments of poetic insight. They provide a starting point for a performative voicing of his work.

Emplacing Writing “Performance,” Soyini Madison says, “helps me see,”35 and for her, writing “is a performance,” one that embodies and performs rather than explicates. Attention to embodiment and embodied knowledge developed in tandem with sensory studies of culture and experience and has often been encouraged by autoethnographic projects that critique the “situatedness” of self in the research context.36 As Bryan Turner suggested, embodiment conveys the tacit aspects of sensory knowledge – the body’s abilities to do and to make – at the same time as it captures the sensory experience of “becoming a body in social space.”37 Attending to embodiment “allowed the recognition that knowledge was not simply something of the mind, but that ‘knowing’ is embedded in embodied practices.”38 This chapter builds on recent efforts to connect embodiment with notions of place and emplacement that understand how embodied knowledge is shaped in relation to the environment, and how those relations are shaped through movement and time. Although this chapter considers work produced by Don Wright between 1983 and 1988, it is not focused on a single work, a particular exhibition, or even his sketchbook journals as texts. It attends to the performative and sensory aspects of his activities on Clears Cove beach and elsewhere loosely grouped as his Trench and Circle project. This chapter offers a methodological example of what might be called emplaced writing, writing that moves beyond portraying “the point of view of the lived body,”39 or

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iterations that preserve and reproduce Wright’s practices as objects for detached or displaced analysis. This writing tries instead to convey through itinerant practices, “the relationship between the sensing body, movement and human perception … in relation to the other elements of the environment.”40 Although not, strictly speaking, a work of autoethnography that connects “the autobiographical and personal to the cultural and the social,”41 this chapter uses embodied experience of the self to guide reperformance and to inquire with and to develop the emplaced qualities of “research poetry”42 or “researcher voiced” poetry.43 Don Wright’s Trench and Circle project is not approached here simply because it affords an exemplary case for a methodological problem. As I navigate my own aging body, as I spend more time worrying about prothrombin ratios, keeping my blood thin, watching lab technicians probe and nudge aside the scar tissue that now shields my veins, or as I note the breathless ache of joints as I try to climb another flight of stairs, I realize that seeing Don Wright’s work is not the same as the embodied knowledge of how to look at it. Perhaps more properly sensory ethnography combined with researcher-voiced poetry than autoethnography, this chapter has involved archival research, visits to museum collections, conversations with family, gallery owners and administrators, curators, museum collections staff, and facilities managers. Fieldwork and site visits to public locations of his practice were an effort to connect bodily with his markmaking rituals and the world he enacted in word, image, and gesture. The transposition of some of these activities to the site of my ethnographic present in the prairie west deepened an understanding of emplacement. I continue to puzzle over what the experience of tides transposed to plains might entail or encompass. As I have indicated, the poetics of “Writing the Red Trench” is derived in part from the layering of language in Wright’s daily experiences on Clears Cove beach. Layering here suggests dimensionality rather than interpretive hierarchy or archaeological sedimentation. His writing and sketches layer immediate bodily observation and descriptive, spatial detail with narrative movement of unfolding encounters with natural elements, seasons and weather, and the expression of his own sense of being in time with nature and the earth. To this, I have added a citational layer of theory, giving a structure of sections organized around walking as mode of knowing, site specificity as problematic for performance, non-representational practices, and so forth. The allusions to

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these ideas betray the complex conceptual layers I had to navigate beyond to begin an emplaced, poetic inquiry. The use of poetic line length is a species of sketching: rapid gestures informed by embodied knowledge that outline shape and sensory experiences. As Ivan Brady says, writing poetry is “conspicuous” on the page, it draws attention to itself and “shows itself as method.”44 Such a method deploys sensory language to disrupt habits of looking and connect writing with place: first through the evocation of Wright’s emplacement, then through my effort to imaginatively re-enact that place, to re-experience it, and then finally to reflect on those emplaced experiences through geographic transposition. These fumbling attempts at re-performance and poetic inquiry are “enacting a way of seeing”45 to replace visual readings that otherwise displace and objectify by layering words, embodying sensuous textures of place, and moving towards a parliament of lines.

Writing the Red Trench (Standing upstage centre, he wears a long, dark overcoat and holds a glass or bottle of water. The pockets of the coat are filled with fast food packets of salt. He walks forward about twenty-five feet to a centre point downstage. He kneels and places the water on stage. Standing, he takes the salt packets from his pockets and begins to scatter them in a line to the left and right of the water. If he has sufficient salt, he will walk backwards to the starting point bringing an open V to a point with the salt. He removes the coat and spreads it behind him upstage, and arranges it as if it were a shadow.)

1. Walking (Itineration)

The artist … is an itinerant, and his work is consubstantial with the trajectory of his or her own life. –Tim Ingold46

Before daylight, a man walks along the road not road, ruts really: iterating the physical tramp of generations walking to their gardens into the woods, hauling logs, hunting,

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wearing the earth down with their repetitions; rain and snow melt, making marks, seeking sea level: a path, emerging from these persistent flows. Before daylight, walking, maybe with a slight limp perhaps a cane. Gnarled, knotted up old fir trees, Stunted, sculpted from wind, shading each other, slowing their growth, rings small, tight, hesitant to grow outward. His joints swollen maybe, blood leaking into the space between bone and bone synovium hardening, gnarled from years of blood, rivulets making a path between. A slight limp, he lets gravity help take him down past the pond, beyond Paddy Alyward’s garden, its celestial gate, past the joyous spires of wood piles, walking, cane, maybe a small pug of a dog. The beach before dawn, tide low, kelp, dulse, and cord weed wound into darkness the lap lap lap of small waves, cackle of rocks resisting the last tugs of tide. Drawing with driftwood, incising a circle, pressing feet deep into the sand he guesses, a ragged line perpendicular to the water guesses where the sun will start, line betraying/revealing time of year, October maybe; pulling more sand away from his ragged line, deepening the mark into an incision, a wound, a trench. Light low, sand, sting of salt, cold light angling off the foam filling his lines, smudging his marks, all the way to his feet.

2. One Place (Site Specificity)

The artist’s body as a whole moving mass, displays its sense of the place it paints, first in its gesticulations and then in the ensuing painted image. –Edward Casey47

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Sand was a drawing surface for Don Wright, a dawning surface. His mark-making incisions like a printmaker’s to receive ink, reveal line, shape; but not representations: his incisions did not stand for, did not show: they were there to do, to receive. “From a technical point of view,” he said, “I wanted my work to be as simple as possible. I wanted to be able to work as simply and directly as I possibly could, in drawing.”48 His was not site specific, not made or unmade for the “bodily presence” of a “viewing subject.”49 Not made to be seen, though later, elsewhere, in a studio this singular place and time was replicated in woodcut prints, drawings, photographs, and sculpture. He is commissioned to sculpt this for a government building, and he sets about moulding and casting with sand, shells, whale bones, urchins, iron oxide, fibreglass and rope 20, 25 feet, gathering a new place around it: government officials, administrators, flowing and eddying beneath, their space interrupted with tangled suggestion from his site.

3. Folly Road (Re-performance)

As place is sensed, senses are placed, as places make sense, sense makes place. –Steven Feld50

When do you get up to be up before dawn? When does light start to leak into the day? I have to walk the whole village, some windows already warm with activity. Thinking of those fishing, getting up earlier and earlier to be the first on the water, to be seen as first; character judged by surveillance. I walk out along Folly Road, Don’s ashes scattered through the trees. His, the last house,

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recognized outside from a view inside some 30 years ago. I keep walking, gnarled trees, Paddy Alyward’s gate, gravity helping me down the hill to the cove. Cloud like gauze stanching any light bleed on the horizon. I tidy up: broken bottles gathered into a sack; flecks of styrofoam, nylon rope, things that float. I take off shoes, socks. I can’t think when my feet last touched wet sand. I burrow in: a statement of presence, deep, sand filling around me, between me, rocking heels, like this is the only mark I will ever make in the world. Driftwood stylus; draw a circle around me; mark points on a compass. Then a long line scribed down to the hemmed decency of tide. These are the things I learn: – there is no such thing as sea level; – drawing a line in the sand is easier said than done; – drawing a straight line in the sand is a reflexive act of humiliation: (mine wobbles its way to impatient water, without a trace of discipline or skill) – a trench is not a collection of lines: it is a major excavation; – the medium is what is at hand: sand prepared by the cycle of tides; rocks, rope, shells, feathers, kelp that make and mark edges. – I need to leave the house earlier and earlier: it is no longer about arriving before light, it is about being ready to receive light; – I learn to read tide tables, matching the high and low with dawn, phases of the moon; my feeble, imitative gestures coming into alignment with their rhythms; – I begin to feel the turn of earth; the pull of tides, the weight of gravity, the ions of ocean air; – I worry about being observed; what people might think of an old man, alone, shivering, gathering trash, pushing sand around the beach;

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– I realize how difficult it is to say, “This wobbled line, this cut in the sand is art; I am making art”; I continually glance over my shoulder, feeling surveilled. There are houses with decks that weren’t here 30 years ago. – I learn how the sun moves along the horizon, my time of year at 90 degrees from Don’s. – I am eager for the next tide, the next dawn. My trench is not art: at best a dialogue with the sun that does not appear but I know is present; for Don who does not appear but who I feel is present; a message of the muscular, bruising labour of moving sand defiantly, joyously. Knowing what happens next: I understand the risk, the strain to hemophiliac joints, the urgency to make this trench despite such risk. I don’t cast much of a shadow.

4. One Place after Another (Re-enactment)

Those who seek to re-present an artwork that requires the actual presence of a live human being must make their re-enactment decisions based on the fact that no matter what the work of performance, no matter what the intention of the creators or performers, exact duplication is impossible. –Linda Caruso Haviland51

Some 4 or 5000 kilometres from any suggestion of tides, 3500 feet above the lap lap lap of small waves; the air lighter, light longer; standing alone on a clay creek bank, waiting for sun. Someone coughs at the neighbour’s, the rasp flows down the creek bed. Scent of skunk. A plover walks out from the night’s hedge, surveys creek edge. The clay cracked, fissured from the dryness of the season, intaglio of cattle hooves, long gone to market; the small paws and claws of coyotes, badgers.

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I imagine a documentary science tracing the sun’s movement along the horizon: I come prepared with sticks to align and record its passage, recording the slow slip of minutes and degrees as the days take me deeper below the equinox. These are the things I learn: – the prairie is not flat; – a connoisseur of light, I know time of day from shade and glow; – I mourn the absence of tides; nothing erases here unless you count the burlesque of snow, the teasing return and revelation of spring, the floods of summer; erosion, riparian deterioration too slow to see, too unpredictable to count on; – I do not incise the clay: such gestures are monumental, commemorative. incised marks all but indelible; seduce with illusion of perpetuation; – I learn the value of having one’s mark-making washed away every 12 hours; of not depending on permanence; the humility of objects not being where you left them; of knowing that repetition is its own skill.

5. A Parliament of Lines (Elevation)

The thing has the character not of an externally bounded entity, set over against the world, but of a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond only to become caught with other threads in other knots. –Tim Ingold52

Back to the door, I’m becoming resident in an elevator; transparent, lexan, contained, framed views of an atrium, gliding, punctuated floor to floor. I am trying for a perfect, uninterrupted vertical rise and fall; No passengers drawn in or exhaled; no pauses as doors open and close;

Figure 13.2 Don Wright, Red Trench. Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador Art Collection.

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Don Wright’s Red Trench stretched over 3 stories on the wall facing. Commissioned by the Department of Public Works, 1983, Red Trench is dusty, fibreglass cloth exposed, the gash of red oxide edges dulled. The trench held its public place for 2, 3 years before a government official declared its shape too much like a vulva to be seen in public. Removed to storage, their press release said, “this sculpture is repugnant to human dignity.”53 Curators and artists rush to defend the object, the artist, berating the public for their lack of sophistication; administering an “elitist scolding handed down by art gurus.”54 It was a desperate, passionless decade before anyone saw such a vulva again. In 1994, a sanitary announcement declared the Red Trench had a new home: the university’s atrium. The artist’s career was celebrated, along with the university’s good fortune to add to its art collection. A photo of its installation opened the old wound: letters accuse the university of being “gullible,” “naive”; the artist a “snake oil” salesman who (even in death) foisted pornography on the sincere and unsuspecting; an “artistic sham” that revictimizes women living under patriarchy by the celebrated and monumental display of genitalia; the university now complicit, biased, and harassing with this “blatantly displayed” object.55 Oddly, only men, make such comments. Women step in to complain that men have silenced them yet again, have appropriated their bodies yet again, have hidden the sculpture after charging it with the crime of representation. Have lately, affectionately yarn-bombed it, knitting a bikini bottom to reveal and conceal its metaphoric resemblance.56

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The consequences of this conversion, effected by object-oriented decontextualizations in the guise of historical recontextualizations are a series of normalizing reversals in which the specificity of the site is rendered irrelevant. –Miwon Kwon57

Every decade it seems, the Red Trench is revisited. A redressive phase now, “time to make amends”58 the contested object has come to represent our failures; the folly of taste; our weak grasp of anatomy;59 inequities of institutions; a political unconscious. Its site now re-placed with gendered discourses of identity. When Don Wright exhibited, the gallery was filled with sand, rocks. Drawings placed on the floor, horizontal, to dis-place habits of looking. Making us look with bodies, the drawings the prints, the sculptures not objects that represent environment or site, but the struggle to receive light. The muscular push and hallowing of wet sand, the desperate risks to bone and blood, “rubbing one environment against another,”60 bruising the paper with charcoal and pastel, pushing pigment deep into the fibres with the energy needed to move the sand, to receive the light, the tide.

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

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Brian Rusted no te s Ingold, “Culture,” 330. Brodsky, “How to ‘See,’” 99. Howes, “Introduction,” 7. Casey, “Mapping the Earth,” 261. Hollingshurst, “Don Wright.” This project would not have been possible without the generous access to Don Wright’s journals provided by his daughter, Catherine Wright. She still has her father’s worn copy of Lucy Lippard’s Overlay, which locates the work of artists such as Mary Fish, Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, and Michelle Stuart in relation to prehistoric practices and rituals. Wright would have been reading about and evolving these ideas soon after the book was published, in 1983. Emerson, “Your Letters.” Myers, “Emplacement and Displacement,” 457. Bolt, Art Beyond Representation, 152. Bolt, “Performative Paradigm,” 5. Kwon, “One Place,” 96. Phelan, Unmarked, 146. Irwin, Ambit of Performativity, 80. Bachelard, qtd. in Ingold, “Culture on the Ground,” 333. Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 10. Phelan, Unmarked, 148. Howes, Sensual Relations, 28. Ibid. Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography,” 180. Ibid., 190. Löytönen et al., “Playing with Patterns,” 238. Ingold, “Bringing Things to Life,” 4. Leavy, Method Meets Art, 63. Ibid., 64. Brady, “Foreword,” xiii. Pelias, Writing Performance, ix. Chapman and Sawchuk, “Research-Creation,” 6. Ibid., 19. See Culhane, “Introduction”; Kazubowski-Houston, Staging Strife; Magnat, “Conducting Embodied Research at the Intersection”; Markula, “Bodily Dialogues”; and Young, “Archives, Heritage, Living History.” Schneider, Performing Remains, 2. Filewod, “Face of Re-enactment,” 9.

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Levin, “Performative Force,” 329. Hoetger, “Re-performance.” Widrich, “Is the ‘Re’ in Re-enactment the ‘Re’ in Re-performance?,” 141. Madison, “Performing Theory/Embodied Writing,” 108. Spry, “Performing Autoethnography,” 710. Turner, Body and Society, xiii. Pink, “From Embodiment,” 345. Anderson, “Embodied Writing,” 84. Pink, “From Embodiment,” 347. Ellis, Ethnographic I, xix. Faulkner, “Concern with Craft,” 220. Prendergast, “Introduction,” xxii. Brady, “In Defense of the Sensual,” 628. Denzin, “Analytic Autoethnograhy,” 422. Ingold, “Bringing Things to Life,” 10. Casey, “Mapping the Earth,” 261. Hollinghurst, “Don Wright.” Kwon, “One Place after Another,” 86. Feld, “Waterfalls of Song,” 91. Haviland, “Repetition Island,” 5. Ingold, “Bringing Things to Life,” 4. Qtd. in Creates, “Don Wright,” 28. Jackson, “The Return of the Giant Genitalia.” Grant, “‘Connection.’” Harron, “Gender Students Get Red Trench Beach Ready.” Kwon, “One Place after Another,” 97. Meeker, “Red Trench Redux.” Squires, “It’s a vulva … but It’s Not!” Wright, qtd. in Creates, “Don Wright,” 33.

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Working Art – Working Knowledge: Doing the Visual and Making the Material Matter pa m h all

Artistic practice in all disciplines can be seen as a sustained and often interdisciplinary effort to make something visible, audible, and discernible – to bring to voice, and into conversation, multiple ways and means of knowing about our world, and for thinking and feeling together about what is happening within it. And “what is happening within it,” most often experienced from within the specificities of location, are complex cultural, economic, and environmental crises in every corner of the planet. Knowledge is fragmented, wildly complex, hyper-specialized, and over-disciplined, more often competing than collaborating. Some ways of knowing are valorized while others are subjugated, marginalized, or erased. In rural Newfoundland on the most eastern coast of Canada, local communities once reliant on the fisheries are facing social and environmental crisis,1 and more populous areas are routinely “flattened” by the corporate global monoculture of McDisney. The complexity of environmental crises alone calls for more than a single voice, discipline, or set of knowledge practices to effect local and global change that is inclusive and sustainable for more than just humans, and for more humans than just “us.” It also calls for more-thanrepresentational forms2 of practice in the arts and in research, and it is no surprise that a social turn in the arts echoes a social and public engagement turn in scholarship. An artist or scholar in any discipline might reasonably ask herself how art and research practice is implicated in these conversations about knowledge, place, and sustainable futures. What is the work – the labour – of art in such a historical moment? How might art perform in service to more-than-aesthetic ends and morethan-market demands? What can art know and how might it perform as a practice of research and inquiry – a practice of making and moving

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knowledge? How might visual art in a text-and-talk-dominated academy reveal marginalized knowledge practices and invite or ignite, prompt or provoke, conversations about how we know the rural and urban, how we live in the local and global spaces that we inhabit together? What follow, in multiple voices,3 are excerpts from a long and continuing effort to investigate and engage these questions from within a specific material, conceptual, and socially engaged art practice. To focus on practice reveals both art and knowledge-making as lively, everyday practices undertaken in relation and response to where and how we make and make sense of our more-than-human environment. Just as Tim Ingold describes participant observation as “a way of knowing from the inside,” he also describes making as a practice in which knowledge emerges from physical, practical, observational, and creative engagements with a lively material world. He names this kind of thinking through making an “art of inquiry.”4 The notions of art as a practice of research and knowledge-making, and as social labour, have informed my own creative and intellectual work for many years. Equally influential is the specific location in which my practice has been forged – a cultural community that is alive with storytelling, song, and material and ecological know-how, and in which artisanal and vernacular ways of knowing have supported centuries of rural and coastal living. This everyday world of knowledgeable fishers and builders, of knitters and storytellers, is supported and enriched by a scholarly community that acknowledges the embodied practices, oral traditions, and performances of everyday life in rural Newfoundland. Whether through folklore scholarship on mummers or making salt fish, through maritime sociology research on fishers’ ecological knowledge (fek), or a historical commitment to rural communities through their Extension Service, Memorial University of Newfoundland has a longstanding commitment to its own place.5 It is not so surprising then that Memorial would support the art-and-knowledge project described here – one that remains more preoccupied with action than analysis and with creative collaboration in rural communities than cloistered conversations in an ivory tower. That project is called Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge – an ongoing collaborative and socially engaged art project that reveals a diverse range of local knowledge practices in rural Newfoundland. The product of interviews and conversation with more than a hundred rural knowledge-holders in coastal communities in Bonne Bay, the Great Northern Peninsula, and Fogo and Change Islands, it comprises more than 150

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“pages” that reveal some of the local, ecological, embodied, technical, and material knowledge practices of its collaborating co-authors. I use the term pages throughout to refer to the unbound image-and-text panels that make up the Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge. In hard copy, they are printed works on paper housed in an archival clamshell box to allow owners to “use” them in ways pertinent to their needs – a class project on the fisheries, a textile conference, a church group pondering a new collection of local recipes, or a conference on boats. The knowledge practices captured in these “pages” are wildly diverse, but in almost all cases can be seen as working knowledge – live and lively, still in fruitful use and embedded in the everyday life of local communities. This knowledge is neither static nor fixed but remains dynamic, often experimental, and always in conversation with other knowledge in other places – sometimes local, sometimes global. One page might include images of salted codfish and instructions for its preparation, another might map locations of specific berries in an area, and another might use images and labels to signal the kind of know-how needed to navigate local waters. The pages appearing here speak without caption or explanation and were specifically designed to do so. One needs no additional information to encounter the knowledge embedded in these pages – each works alone and in conversation with its companions. The Encyclopedia as an art project is also working – to expand how we think about what knowledge is, how it looks, where it is located, and who is invited or allowed to participate in its production. It puts art to work to reclaim specific and embodied knowledge practices still flourishing in small coastal communities, to revalue the rural, to retrieve the “local,” and to contest the devaluing of non-scientific ways of knowing. It sits within a larger artistic and research practice that embraces the profoundly complex, messy, and always-social ways in which we know our common place. As the central focus of my doctoral and postdoctoral work, the Encyclopedia now lives in multiple rural and urban locations as a material and virtual body of knowledge. Hard copies of the first “volume” of the Encyclopedia are owned by the Bonne Bay Marine Station, five community heritage organizations, the school board in Western Newfoundland, and Memorial University libraries on the Corner Brook and St. John’s campuses. Copies of Chapter II: Fogo and Change Islands are owned by the Town of Change Islands, the Town of Fogo Island, the Shorefast Foundation, and Memorial University libraries. Both chapters are accessible online. Used as a research prompt in elementary classrooms, in community museums and heritage centres, and accessible

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through university libraries, the Encyclopedia is being put to work in multiple locations. It also performs through continued presentation in more than a few contemporary art galleries in Canada, where it engages in other, quite different conversations about art and knowledge. Finally, the Encyclopedia performs on another “stage” – serving as a visual/material/conceptual device recruited to inform ongoing conversations about who knows what where. Within the academy, it opens and extends conversations about theory and practice in contemporary art; invites Western science into conversation with local knowledges; engages visual and material practices through which knowledge is formed, framed, and represented; and reveals our everyday embeddedness in complex social and biological ecosystems. Scholarly knowledgeobjects are still most often made of text and remain in conversation with only their own fields and experts. The Encyclopedia is bent to more performative goals – practising what it “preaches” – valuing, through sometimes overwhelming presence, the power of local vernacular knowledge sitting side-by-side and in dialogue with more academic knowledge. Performing at an International Symposium on Rebuilding Collapsed Fisheries and Threatened Communities as an “exhibition,” it stepped into conversation with fish biologists, geographers, other scholars, and community planners – bringing voices of tacit, experiential, and embodied local knowledge about fishing and rural community life into the room. In all of these forms and encounters, I am thinking and doing with a lot of people, who know in many different ways about different parts of the world. Theory sits beside practice – image is as powerfully informative as text. Neither purely social science nor social art – not exclusively critical theory, nor arts-based research – the Encyclopedia practises theory and investigates theories of practice. It is a little unruly but, like knowledge-making and art-making themselves, remains robustly open and optimistic about the power of multiple voices from multiple locations to reveal links and lines of association that will invite new collaborations inside and outside of the academy.

The Work of Art – Art’s Work Contemporary artistic practice is wildly pluralistic, diverse, and differently intentioned. Those who like binaries would say it has “bifurcated.”6 There are practices carrying forward the modernist idea of art’s autonomy, separation from the world, and its refusal of social, moral, or political purpose – and practices on the other hand, contesting high

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modernism and its elitist containment of art by the museum and the marketplace. One might see this tension as one between art for art’s sake and art in service to life, or even between the object of art (the artwork) and its objective (the work that art performs). A well-established and growing body of discourse in a number of locations reconsiders and reframes the nature of the art object and its dematerialization, mapping a range of shifting intentions and locations that move art from monologue to dialogue,7 from studio to site to situation,8 and into locations often quite distant from the authorizing institutions of the art world.9 Here we find art in other places, called other names – public, new genre, and post-studio practices; relational, dialogical, participatory, activist practices; eco-art, community-based, socially engaged, or place-base practices. More recently we can see emerging practices locating forms of art as knowledge production, research, and inquiry – supported by discourse in arts-based and practice-based research in arts education,10 qualitative social science,11 embodied research practice in performance,12 and contemporary art theory.13 While radically different in many ways, whether post-object, socially engaged, or research-led, these practices share qualities that inform the Encyclopedia project and process in many ways. They lean towards generative, responsive, performative, and open strategies. Abandoning the preciousness of the object and the primacy of the “answer,” they privilege the process, its situatedness, and the dynamic relations that emerge through their interaction. Such practices often engage others not (or not only) as audiences or markets for the artist’s expression, but as participants, collaborators, allies, and partners.

Performing the Process – Mixing Metaphors and Methods The Encyclopedia followed a fairly typical process involving extensive fieldwork with local knowledge-holders, intensive studio work, a return to the field with the draft for input and corrections from collaborators, and final revisions in advance of returning it home and setting it to work in the world. Having worked in rural Newfoundland as an artist and an educator for many years, I went looking for participants through a few initial contacts, and it snowballed from there. I found collaborators in more than a dozen communities on the west coast of Newfoundland – and a few years later on Change Islands and Fogo Island. More than 150 men, women, and children shared their knowledge with me in in-

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terviews, conversations, and demonstrations. I worked with fishers both male and female, with homemakers and community museum workers, with school children and gardeners, with quilters and berry pickers. Some of my collaborators were retired schoolteachers, some were nurses, and some worked in fish plants. Sometimes knowledgeholders worked professionally at the practices they shared their knowledge about and other times they did not. A retired fisher shared knitting knowledge, another shared snowshoe knowledge, and a group of five young cartographers researched and constructed a map showing who lived where in their community. I returned to the studio with audio files, notes, and drawings, diagrams of demonstrations, maps and photographs, sketches, pamphlets, signage, and all manner of objects from the field. Once one looks carefully, local knowledge was everywhere – embedded in salted fish drying in the sun, in boats and their building, in bones on the beach.

Figure 14.1 All images throughout this chapter were created by and photographed by Pam Hall. Some are from the Bonne Bay and Great Northern Peninsula Chapter (2012), and others are from Fogo and Change Islands (2015). The full Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge can be studied online at http://encyclopediaoflocalknow ledge.com/, where all contributing co-authors are listed along with all pages from both chapters and a detailed overview of this ongoing project.

Figure 14.2

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Page by page the Encyclopedia unfolded through an old studio practice of making visible – forming, framing, laying things down until they spoke together – image and text, scrawl and font. Quoting the form and “authority” of the “page,” deploying the power of labels and layers. Enacting in the studio the ways most of my collaborators live in the world through bricolage – working with what is at hand. A phone book, a gravestone, a boat, a rope bound and spliced, a lesson about knitting mitts or socks or fishing twine. Through the side-by-sidedness of image and text the Encyclopedia grew, capturing fragments and shards of what is known by a fraction of knowers in those small and coastal places. Technical knowledge about mesh size and fish size, and about fading technologies … About building punts … About moose or about mittens … Ecological, technical, practical, embodied … side by side, the pages began to reveal common knowledge – a knowledge commons. Page by page, call and response, the Encyclopedia revealed itself – those first drafts carried back to their communities where participants came to look and read, to correct, to revise, and to see what I had made from what they had shared with me. From Bird Cove to St Anthony, then to Conche, where the entire allgrade school participated in its making. On to Main Brook, Port au Choix, and Norris Point – six communities in thirty-six days on the west coast of the island. Then, a few years later, a new draft chapter and six more communities on Fogo and Change Islands. Sitting with the work and learning how it worked. From the feedback, it was revised and found its current form … as a set of pages in clamshell portfolios with gold text on their spines. As boxes of un-ordered knowledge, these first chapters of the Encyclopedia are now owned by and remain in lively conversation in the local communities from which they emerged. Feeding and fuelling dialogues about the worth of local knowledge and serving as a prompt for more. And more will come, since knowledge performs – spawns and spills – recursive, iterative, and always-already in dynamic conversation with the world.

From Knowledge to Knowing: Who Knows, How, and from Where? The Encyclopedia attempts to slow down our thinking and reflect on how we do our knowledge-making. It invites us to think together about who is knowing, how, and from where.

Figure 14.3

Figure 14.4

Figures 14.5 (above), 14.6 (opposite)

Our assumptions about how science knows – through the objectivity of a “rational knower” standing outside of what is known – have been revealed by thinkers in more than a few disciplines to be historically and socially constructed. Feminist epistemologists like Sandra Harding and Lorraine Code, scholars in science and technology studies like Donna Haraway and David Turnbull, and science historians like Steven Shapin and Lorraine Daston join a host of others who have dismantled our faith in Western scientific knowledge as pure, universal, and removed from everyday life.14 However efficient in its imperial distribution, science has nevertheless been revealed as a partial and situated knowledge practice, pursued by embodied knowers in particular places, cultures, and temporal locations.15 Science reframed as a local knowledge practice – and I would argue, along with Clifford Geertz and others, that all disciplinary knowledge is “local” and constructed within its specific epistemic cultures – loses its claim to hegemonic power, universality, and dominance. It does not, however, nor should it, lose its role and responsibility to contribute to what must be more inclusive conversations about building sustainable futures.

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In opposition to the way science has been valorized for its universality and objectivity, local knowledges in their place-based specificity have traditionally been dismissed as static, isolated, parochial, beliefbased, value-laden, and hard to mobilize.16 They are often lost to fading memory and lack of inscription. And yet one can identify their hybridity, “contact,” and relation with both the corporations and academies of the “developed” world. Local, traditional, and fishers’ ecological knowledge (lek, tek, and fek) have been appearing in science and social science in the academy for more than two decades, and in global research locations, Indigenous knowledge (ik) has been a focus of discussion for the World Bank since the early 1990s. Local knowledges are both less isolated and more mobile than many might presume. They are “dynamic, and are continually influenced by internal creativity and experimentation as well as by contact with external systems.”17 Of special interest in these reframings is the notion of mobility and its central role in both establishing the power of global science and, I hope, in contesting that power. Books, papers, conferences, a printing press, steam engine, a microscope and telescope, a camera, computer charts and graphs, an atlas, or yes, an encyclopedia, are all examples of the technologies that allowed science to move – to deliver itself to new locations beyond its local construction.

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Thus scientific knowledge is not necessarily universal, but might be seen as local knowledge that travels well from one place to another, from one century to another, and indeed from one knower to another. In many ways the Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge takes its form precisely to enable productive conversations between radically different knowledge practices. It makes visible and moves these ways of knowing and doing beyond their initial places of practice and performance. Locally, this visibility both honours and activates ways of knowing that have been marginalized by urban, industrial, and in some cases technological ways of living and working. It both archives and mobilizes practices that, in the present ecological and economic crises, offer sustainable practices that continue to support self-sufficiency and resilience. Linked deeply to the specificities of place, they remind us that even in a global context, local knowledge about rural practices ties us to particular ecosystems in respectful and revealing co-dependency. Ignoring or abandoning the rural, where individuals and communities are embedded within and tied to the natural world, also leaves us with few models for relation within the environment that are not constructed on the myths of mastery, command, and control. The loss of such communities is not simply the loss of locations where people live, but the loss of important ways of knowing and doing and being in the world. Recruiting the form of an encyclopedia was strategic in another way. Adopting a form well recognized as a source of “authorized” knowledge signals to collaborators and viewers alike the value and worth of what they know at the same time as rendering the form itself and its more usual contributors (authorities in their fields) open to contestation. Not only does it underscore the power and privilege of authorship, but also it reveals inclusion as the political act it always remains.18 Newfoundland, joining Canada only in 1949, continues to hold its unique cultural and linguistic identity. While embracing much of what might be viewed as Canadian and growing more diverse in its population, it remains, especially in rural communities, a place that continues to know its world in its own ways. The Encyclopedia acts to archive and share many of these ways, both as an act of preservation and of valuation – particularly in the face of high rates of out-migration driven by unemployment and the lure of urban centres. Through naming and mapping all its local contributors, it both asks and answers, “Who gets to make and move knowledge?”

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Visuality/Materiality: How We See and Do Knowledge How the world is seen and represented (or unseen and misrepresented) and how it is formed and materialized (or reformed and dematerialized) are profoundly implicated in how we know it, or think we do. The relationships between visuality and materiality, between the representational and the physical, contribute significantly to the way we know and think about knowing. The relationship between vision and knowledge is long, deep, and troubled – from the invention of single point perspective to what has been called the crises of representation: where the innocence, neutrality, and transparency of vision was lost.19 Revealing vision as disembodied, partial, and ideological, many scholars have examined the power of image and screen culture to construct the world, the spectator, the self, and others. The proliferation of visual technologies has enabled us to make visible things we have never “seen” before, whether microscopic or cosmological or only dreamed. John Berger, Stuart Hall, W.J.T. Mitchell, and others have argued that critical literacies in the practices of looking are crucial in a world so dense with spectacle that often seeing is believing and where the practices of making-visible hold more power than ever before. A critical understanding of the visual must also engage with its materiality and material location – the form and context in which we encounter the visual have profound implications on its reception, value, meaning, and performance. There is no such thing as just visual – all media are multiple, are encountered in a context, and are experienced by an embodied individual with a personal and emotional history. In its simplest sense, a thirty-foot curve rendered in bronze beside an abandoned brick factory will be read and will perform entirely differently from the way that the identical curve described at reduced scale on a graph in an economics textbook. The visual is part of the material world and can be seen to act in the same ways. Certainly we interpret, interact with, and act upon the “material world,” but at the same time materials, objects, things, commodities, and technologies act on us. Things have effects upon their makers and their users – beyond what things might mean or signify (and certainly they do both), they also act, perform, and do things in the world.

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The Turn to Action and Emergence: Practice, Process, and Performance In stark opposition to the Cartesian idea that matter is inert, uniform, and measurable, our current understanding of quantum physics, complexity theory, ecosystem interdependence, and interactivity, lend support to a vitalist versus mechanistic view of material form.20 What one might see as the old tensions between the dead matter of the inorganic world and the live matter of the biological one21 are being re-engaged in new proposals about how we might co-inhabit our lively, fragile, and volatile world. The agency of objects – their ability to perform, to act, to have effects – is not a new idea, nor is it necessarily an academic one. Icons, totems, and fetish objects, religious idols of past and current cultures, and countless lucky charms attest to our enduring beliefs in the liveliness of objects and their power to effect action. The way a rope coils, the variable effects of different fishing gear, and the “crankiness” of punts all demonstrate objects behaving in particular and quite independent ways. The destruction of Buddhist artifacts in Afghanistan by the Islamic Taliban, beliefs in the “magical” (or invisibly effective) properties of everything from hag boards to voodoo dolls, from copper bracelets to computers,22 and continuing traditions of imputing gender to boats, tea kettles, and “cantankerous” materials,23 testify to a deep-seated belief that objects do things in the world.24 Certainly those of us who make things, whether artful or not, know what they might do in their encounters with an aesthetic and larger-than-aesthetic world. Alfred Gell’s argument that art is an instrumental object extending the agency of its maker out into the larger world25 is joined by sociologists of science like John Law, Michael Callon, and Bruno Latour who argue that objects and technologies have agencies of their own within networks of relation26 and thus sometimes perform much as humans do. Recent scholarship in performance studies invites us to revisit the power and agency of props and sets and their role in the world building of formal and informal performance,27 and numerous scholars have argued for a view of visual art “beyond representation” – not as an object but rather as a lively thing.28 The idea that the objects, machines, and technologies we have created to bring nature under our control have transformed us is neither new nor restricted to science. Here I refer not only to the insights of theorists

Figure 14.7

like McLuhan, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, but also to the common knowledge and funded wisdom that reveal the irreversible impacts of late twentieth-century fishing technologies on identities, communities, and both human and non-human resources. In calling for a post-humanist social theory that acknowledges mutual constitution of human and material (non-human) agency, Andrew Pickering demands that we attend to the “key sites of encounter” between the material and human, because we cannot explain many features of human practice in the world absent its constitution through struggle with the material world.29 These ideas of entanglement with the material world are unremarkable in a rural and coastal environment where fishing practice is deeply embedded in a complex and more-than-human web, where the actions of weather and icebergs and fish and boats (not to mention regulations and economies) are clearly and constantly determining our actions as humans. The material world is unfolding in ways that acknowledge things and objects as events and effects – constantly shifting, performing, and shaping human actions, just as we shape the non-human world.30 The objects of contemporary material culture and, I would argue, contem-

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porary art, are neither fixed nor stable. They are “things-in-motion,” information, and in-relation, and we can follow their movements (whether as commodities or gifts, as repurposed or discarded) through processes from production through distribution, to consumption.31 We can examine their relations to other actors (human and non-human) in networks enabling the pasteurization of France,32 the successful introduction of the Zimbabwe bush pump,33 or the introduction of make-and-break engines, cod traps, or cod pots to Newfoundland inshore fisheries. We can track their transformative “biographies” through residuality, durability, decay, destruction, rarity, fragmentation, and disintegration. We can engage with them as more-than-representational effects and events.34 Dan Hicks argues that this contingent and unfixed object and the entanglement between human and material agency means that material culture studies can no longer be defined by its object. He argues rather that it must be viewed by its methods – its ways of doing and enacting research and the knowledges it produces or reveals. He identifies the central role of practice in the field – and practice in writing and rewriting the object as entangled and enacted through our practices of encounter. Archaeological practice thus can be seen as enacting its knowledge and as bringing its objects into being, just as the museum catalogue essay or journal article constructs the hooked mat or block and tackle as an object of material culture practice. It is in this sense that an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge co-constitutes and brings into being its contents – and might, in its own practice, invite dialogue about how knowledge is practised. Centralizing the notion of practice opens the questions of how things are practised – how they are effects of practice and contingent on practice. Thus, just as we might ask “How is the boat made?” we might ask, “How is the study of the boat made,” or “How do we practise studying the boat?” And more potently, “How do we practise studying the boat-maker’s practice?” This is ontological rather than epistemological and opens us to questions of mutual implication and complicity, to inquiry into how material networks and relations produce politics, co- and re-constitute the human body, and participate in the bringing forth of worlds.35 This is about how we “do” the material world and how it “does” us, and perhaps most importantly, how we do together. It alters radically how we might hear the question, “How are we doing?” While some will call this doing “performance,” others will call it “practice.”

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On the Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory Practice theory is well described as “a body of work about the work of the body.”36 Qualities of practice described by early practice theorists (mimesis-without-theory, habits and routines, and dispositions to react without thinking) clearly remain characteristic of many embodied practices and are familiar as the “beginner’s mind” or the zone of “flow” that many artists experience and aspire to. On the other hand, some argue that practice involves dynamic, reciprocal, and responsive relationships, and that practitioners step in and out of reflective awareness as they are learning the practice, being socialized into it or engaging it.37 Certainly those who practise a manual or embodied skill know the consequences of losing focus, or of thinking about what one is doing while one is doing it. One aspires to stay in whatever embodied state one’s practice or performance enables – whether playing tennis or playing the piano, whether knitting or dancing or drawing or weaving. If one thinks about what one is doing, one interrupts the doing and starts to do thinking. Laurent Thévenot argues that practice theory needs also to take into account the way practice transforms the immediate environment of the practitioner. This describes a shifting and responsive element in practice – an improvisational and dynamically engaged relationship rather than an unconscious, habitual one. We can sense the truth of this attentive-yetaware state, in practices like ceramics or juggling or dance or playing jazz, that call for instantaneous and immediate adjustments. We might also see such dynamic engagement over longer terms, at larger scales, in activities like fishing, farming, and gardening, where practices must be responsive to environments and technologies and are, at the same time, transformed by them. Brian Rusted’s reflections on Don Wright’s Red Trench in this volume offers us a potent example of a mutually transformative artistic practice rooted in such dynamic and responsive engagements with a specific place. The body knows and does knowingly, in ways that we often do not name but that we respect as knowledgeable practice. We can see that many of those engaged with embodied material practices think with and through their bodies, their hands, and their tools, their memories, and their experiences. To lighten a touch, to increase pressure on a string, to grasp a well-used tool in a certain way – and to know when holding or hefting an object its weight, its stability, or its appropriateness to the task; or from

Figure 14.8

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Figure 14.9

the sound of an engine, to know what ails it. All of these are skills that emerge from practice. Art historian Pamela Smith refers to these tacit, embodied, materialized ways of knowing as artisanal epistemology that are supported by a kind of vernacular science of matter.38 Anthropologists, folklorists, those who study architecture, dance, textiles, and other embodied practices like navigation or cartography, have long noted these kinds of deeply embedded knowledge practices in “makers” and “doers,” regardless of where they might be located historically or culturally. Those of us who are makers – who work with our bodies in a lively material world and a justas-lively array of what might be called “knowledge objects” (questions, ideas, concepts, wonderings) – know well from the inside of such practices that they are neither entirely habitual and rule-bound nor entirely planned and controlled. In practices where the materials and places of the world are involved, decisions are made, accidents are navigated, and spontaneous solutions are improvised. The artist and the researcher are also engaged in a kind of practice that Karin Knorr-Cetina has called epistemic or objectual. She argues

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that such practices cannot be undertaken without intention, conscious awareness of, and agency within their situated environments. Nor can they be undertaken without some kind of self-generating motivation – what she calls “engrossment and excitement.”39 The objectual practices she examines are those within which work may have some elements of habitual practice, but where it ceases to remain routine precisely because of the objects or materials it engages. An artist handling wood or paper or stone in routine or habitual ways is also working with concepts and ideas and accidents. A lab researcher might handle blood cells, glass, and sophisticated technologies within established protocols that fail to behave as expected, demanding new decisions to be taken or introducing new problems to be solved. Knorr-Cetina names these materials at hand, and under scrutiny, “knowledge objects” and describes them as those that are defined by their incompleteness. Thus, her use of objectual to describe these practices refers sometimes to material and sometimes to immaterial objects. “The lack of completeness of being of knowledge objects goes hand in hand with the dynamism of research. Only incomplete objects pose further questions.”40

Incomplete Objects and Further Questions The range and diversity of scholars who embrace contingency, uncertainty, mobility, performativity, practice, and more-than-human agency, promise new alliances towards building a more nuanced and inclusive notion of human relation and environmental “enmeshment.”41 Across the social sciences and humanities, we are deepening our understanding of meaning and materiality as emergent, co-constituted, and enacted in practice and in place. At the same time, public engagement initiatives and participatory, activist research practices are embedding scholars in communities beyond the academy and its often-indecipherable discourses. In the world of contemporary art practice we can similarly find artists in all disciplinary traditions working from an impulse to reclaim art’s social purpose and to engage with others as more than the audience for their own creative expression. They are doing so across or between disciplines, with or without objects, and in a wildly diverse range of locations, sites, and situations. They too are thinking and working in place through practice. As Laura Levin has pointed out, interest in performance, performativity, non-human agency, and practice is not restricted to performance

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studies departments.42 Those of us engaged in art and/or knowledge practices that are intended to work, to perform, to do as well as to critique, interpret, or analyze, can only benefit from forging alliances, however “unlikely.” The interdisciplinary conversations that have opened between visuality and materiality,43 between visual arts and performance studies,44 around lively matter and more-than-human agency,45 and around where knowledge itself might be located and how it is constructed and by whom46 offer us powerful ways to think together about what we are doing. Whether we name this a turn towards “the social” or towards “practice” and “performance,” whether we name it research-based practice or practice-based research, and whether it remains inside the walls of the academy or spills beyond them into non-academic communities, these acts of knowledge-making and art-making help us reframe the work we do in the world. They offer us new places to think and do from – and to think and do together. These new places must remain open, inclusive, and dynamic. They must welcome knowledge from Indigenous and other cultural practices engaged in embodied respectful work on land or water. They must include knowledge practices from inside and outside the academy that trace and map, that show and tell, that make visible and audible to us all the systems and stories that reveal our relations within the human and more-than-human “natures” that form our commonplace. These are places into which, I hope, the Encyclopedia intervenes gently and leaves behind a prompt, a provocation, an invitation to know our place better, more responsibly, and together. Whether in a hockey stadium on Fogo Island, an art gallery in Toronto, a conference on sustainable fisheries in Bonne Bay, a classroom in Conche or Corner Brook, or a text on performance studies, the Encyclopedia performs its work. It argues for more-than-textual literacies, research, and knowledge strategies if we are to communicate with one another across difference. It proposes a broader, more complex understanding of expertise and authority, and contests some of the boundaries between meaning and doing, between representation and action. In a world where both meaning and materiality are co-constituted and emergent, where they both shape and are shaped by sensing bodies in lively material environments, it is more important than ever to understand how we know the world we inhabit and to acknowledge that we know it in many different ways. We find ourselves in a politically charged realm, at a historical moment when more than meaning is at stake and where signification and

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interpretation alone may prove inadequate to the work ahead. Human and more-than-human populations in coastal ecosystems are facing complex crises of out-migration, resource depletion, climate change, and neo-liberal austerity strategies that threaten not only the existence of coastal communities but of cultures. This is true locally, regionally, and globally, wherever rural knowledge and sustainable practice are being overtaken, co-opted, or flattened by global capital. In Newfoundland, with community resettlement programs active again since 2013, we are facing the loss of rural culture if we do not value it and work together towards its sustainability as more than a tourist attraction. In Canada, we have just begun the work of recognizing, reconciling, and repairing the damage we have done to Indigenous peoples, their knowledge and their cultures. Internationally, unesco has recognized that local and Indigenous knowledge “are important facets of the world’s cultural diversity, and provide a foundation for locallyappropriate sustainable development.”47 We have work to do in multiple locations at multiple scales to acknowledge and attend to all forms of local knowledge tied to respectful and sustainable dwelling on land and at sea. That work must be undertaken together in the real world, in the spaces between discourses and disciplines, cultures and communities. It will be work towards more critical practices of looking and seeing, of doing and making – work that might enable more engaged, more emplaced, and more ethical practices of knowing. And finally, it will be work that can attend with new urgency to the ways we produce, construct, and consume our material world and deploy the visual in service of its stewardship, restoration, or continued exploitation. Whether alone or in collaboration, such work promises to enact, enable, and energize a sustainable politics of doing the visual and making the material matter.

no te s 1 Ommer, Coward, and Parish, “Knowledge, Uncertainty, and Wisdom.” 2 Nigel Thrift and others have called for research practices that attend to the more-than-human, more-than-textual, and multi-sensory unfolding material world. For a review of some of this theory and practice, see Hayden Lorimer (“Cultural Geography”), who uses the term more-than-representational to describe a diverse range of work in cultural geography that is more performative, embodied, and lively in its preoccupations and is concerned with what things do rather than only with what things mean. 3 All images are drawn from Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

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(2013), ELK Chapter 2: Fogo and Change Islands (2014–15), Pam Hall and collaborating knowledge-holders. Some text excerpts and field images are drawn from Hall, “Recruiting the Visual.” Ingold, Making, 7. Research by Memorial University scholars in many disciplines has informed my work here and it would be impossible to include them all. The work and thinking most directly pertinent to the Encyclopedia project comes from Barb Neis (working with John Sutton Lutz), Rosemary Ommer, Gerald Pocius, and many other scholars in Memorial’s Folklore Department. These include Kenny Goldstein and others who have been engaged for decades in the ethnography of performance, from music to mumming. Brian Rusted, “Introduction,” outlines some of this important work and its foundational contributions to performance studies. Gablik, “Beyond the Disciplines,” 1. Kester, Conversation Pieces. Doherty, Contemporary Art. Thompson, Living as Form. Sullivan, Art Practice as Research. Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography. Schweitzer and Zerdy, Performing Objects. Slager, “Nameless Science.” Shapin, Never Pure. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.” Turnbull, “Knowledge Systems.” Flavier, de Jesus, and Navarro, “Regional Program,” 479. Inclusion also signals exclusion. The Encyclopedia includes only knowledgeholders who identify as white. Broader representation will be aimed for in future chapters, where I am hoping to work in communities where there are larger populations of knowledge-holders from Aboriginal, immigrant, and non-English linguistic traditions. See Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”; Jay, Downcast Eyes; and Foster, Vision and Visuality. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms. Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life. Pels, “Magical Things.” Jones and Boivin, “Malice of Inanimate Objects.” Certainly the same belief in effect or ability to do things beyond their apparent material properties applies to unformed materials and substances of all kinds – like rhinoceros horn, red ochre, penicillin, the sap from spruce trees, and an almost endless list of herbs and plants. Gell, Art and Agency.

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26 For an overview of actor-network theory, see Law, “Actor Network.” 27 Schweitzer and Zerdy, Performing Objects. 28 These include Barbara Bolt in Art beyond Representation, Tim Ingold in “Toward an Ecology of Materials,” and Bill Brown in Things. 29 Schatzki, “Introduction: Practice Theory,” 13. Also see Pickering, “Practice and Posthumanism.” 30 Hicks, “Material-Culture Turn.” 31 Appadurai, Social Life of Things. 32 Latour, Pasteurization of France. 33 de Laet and Mol, “Zimbabwe Bush Pump.” 34 Hicks, “Material-Culture Turn,” 79–98. 35 Thrift, “Afterword.” 36 Postill, “Introduction,” 11. 37 Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes”; Downey, “‘Practice without Theory’”; and Knorr-Cetina, “Objectual Practice.” 38 Smith, Body of the Artisan, 3–28. 39 Knorr-Cetina (Epistemic Cultures) theorizes knowledge and research practices in a knowledge society – the kinds of practices that cannot thrive on the basis of habit and rule-following alone. While she is talking primarily about science-based research and lab practice and the dissociative break from routine that working with and through knowledge objects enables, it is a short leap to artistic research and creative practice, which also work largely with and in the material and conceptual world. 40 Knorr-Cetina, “Objectual Practice,” 176. 41 Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 187. 42 Levin, “In Search of ps North.” 43 Rose and Tolia-Kelly, Visuality / Materiality. 44 Jackson, Social Works. 45 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms. 46 Among others, see Code, Ecological Thinking; Lutz and Neis, Making and Moving Knowledge; and Turnbull, “Knowledge Systems.” 47 unesco, “Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.”

A F T E RW O R D

Performance Studies and Canada ri c k now le s

In their introduction to this collection, Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer argue that “performance … has become increasingly important to understanding cultural interactions in a Canadian context” (7), but they are rightly circumspect about what constitutes “performance,” “performance studies,” or “Canadian context.” “Performance Studies in Canada,” then, is a necessarily moving target, as the dizzying variety and complexity of the contributions to this volume make clear. It would be easy to emerge from reading this stimulating collection asking “What is the object of study?” And of course that is part of the point of performance studies, which tries to avoid the researcher-as-subject/objectof-study binary and makes an effort not to objectify what it studies. But a volume entitled Performance Studies in Canada implicitly makes a claim for something that sets it apart from other performance studies in other places, and perhaps also for something that is shared about this inter- or anti-discipline across whatever it is that constitutes Canada.

Performance Studies Levin and Schweitzer’s wide-ranging introduction traces “genealogies and geographies” (3), among other things, mapping the genealogies of performance studies within the academy and marking its increasing presence in and as departments and programs in universities across the country. As an inter- or anti-discipline, performance studies sits uncomfortably within the academy, in Canada as elsewhere, and it may be worth taking a moment to consider what this discomfort performs. Arguably, one of the reasons that the social sciences and humanities in recent decades have been under scrutiny, under attack, and underfunded – and this has indeed been going on since the 1970s – is that scholarship on that “side”

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of campuses, increasingly interdisciplinary until more recent retrenchments and backlashes, has been systematically unravelling the ideological suturing together of discipline, subject, and academic unit that produces the kinds of classifications, categorizations, hierarchies, and ownerships of method and meaning that enable and perpetuate capitalism. Until the 1960s it had seemed obvious in Canada as elsewhere in the Western world that the names of academic units neatly and seamlessly stated both a field of study and a discipline. History departments, for example, practising a discipline known and taught as “history,” exerted specialized ownership over the subject “history,” widely understood to mean “the past.” But the increasing dissemination of historiographic method across academic units and subjects, the interrogation of historical narratives as constructions of a scholarly present whose interests they serve, the narratological analysis of the construction of written histories, the historicization of the present as well as the past, the increased awareness that traditionally dominant historiographic methods are ethnocentric and colonizing rather than neutral and universal, and the increasing inter-imbrication of history with other academic disciplines have threatened all disciplinary silos, ownerships, expertise, and objectivity across the academic board. History is only one example here, and historians have been central to its deconstruction – to the point that performance studies is far from alone in functioning as an inter-discipline. Performance studies, however, can be particularly unsettling as it oscillates quantum-like – particle or wave? – between, on the one hand, taking a certain set of behaviours – performances – as its purview, and on the other constituting and analyzing everything as performance, in the same way that literary studies, at least in its semiotic guise, has come to constitute everything as text. Literary studies predominantly “reads” the world; performance studies tracks its doings, and anything that comes under scrutiny – a building, say, or a street – can be considered for what it means or for what it performs. In performance studies, performances are the particles; the waves are the ways they perform (depending on how, or whether, you look at them).

Canada If areas of study within the academy represent the ideologically purposeful suturing together of disciplines, objects of study, and academic units, so too do Canada and other nineteenth-century nation states suture together geographies, cultures, and institutions to specific ideologi-

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cal effect. For several years I have taught a class on intercultural performance in “the land that is now called Canada.” This phrase, of course, makes clear that “Canada” is a latter-day construction that effaces the priority of First Nations, and it productively problematizes what the national anthem could call “our home [on N]ative land.” It also references Canada geographically, as a country with borders that are manifestly artificial. It is clear that in most parts of Canada, especially in the south where most people live, the cross-border, north-south axis makes much more sense than the east-west confederation ideologically held together by the railroad, Air Canada, and the cbc: geographically, the Canadian Maritimes, Prairies, and West Coast have far more in common with their cross-border neighbours than with one another. A “country,” after all, is a region composed of its lands, defined by its territories, and determined by its borders. For the contributors to this volume these lands, territories, and borders manifest themselves in palimpsestic geographies (Dickinson), landscapes and seascapes (Rusted), and the acclimatized bodies that inhabit and know them (Hall). How, the students ask, does this “country,” this land, relate to Canada understood as a nation, an imagined community, which is defined culturally rather than geographically? Like a geographical one, a cultural definition is problematic in a nation that is officially bilingual and multicultural and historically post-colonial, and in the context of a course on intercultural performance, students are very familiar with various “I-am-Canadian” efforts to hold this unstable community together representationally through hockey, beer, moose, maple leaves, and “the idea of North.” Most laugh in recognition when I tell them the story of the late Peter Gzowski’s 1972 contest to name the Canadian equivalent of “as American as apple pie,” the winner of which was “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”1 Levin and Schweitzer in their introduction to this volume distance themselves and the “in Canada” half of the book’s title from the stridently nationalist theatre tradition that has often and problematically traced its origin story to the heady days of the post-centennial “alternative theatre movement.” Many contributors to this volume also cite the problematic or manufactured cultural “Canadianness” of the performances, histories, material cultures, and memories that they discuss and animate. In doing so, most implicitly or explicitly appeal to another “Canada” that attempts more materially than do myths of national identity to suture together this unwieldly entity, country, and nation, to create a more stable unit: the state. This, of course, is a political construction defined by its govern-mentality: its

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institutions, legal and political systems, police, military, religious, and educational organizations, and arts policies that manifest themselves in this volume as everything from the built infrastructure (Bennett, Thompson) through the economic (Schweitzer), educational (Keleta-Mae), political, and legal systems (Robinson, Dickinson), athletics (Vosters), military training (Alvarez), and municipal and federal politics (Vosters, Levin) to the recent Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Vosters).

Unsettling Performance, Unsettling Canada At its best, when it’s not itself being imperialistic (“there is no hors-performance” is no less problematic than “there is no hors-texte”), performance studies can productively unsettle the ideological ties that bind discipline, subject, and academic unit as they suture land, nation, and state. At its best, then, performance studies is profoundly unsettling. But what might be the peculiarly “Canadian” nature of this unsettlement? In his contribution to this volume, Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson registers the concern that performance studies, in Canada as elsewhere, might just be one of the academic technologies of the continuing colonization of Indigenous cultures, and his concern is well-founded. Canada has a long tradition of the performative appropriation of Indigeneity for nationalist ends, as it has a long history of Indigenous resistance to such performances. Levin and Schweitzer open their introduction by invoking Trudeau-fils’s pugilistic performances of masculinity; his father’s took a different form. Throughout his career Trudeau Senior performed his Canadian iconicity through pseudo-Indigenous buckskin and canoes, most prominently in his 1944 essay, “Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe,” and his 1994 televised documentary memoir (both still featured prominently and promotionally on many canoeing and canoe-products websites).2 Settler scholar Helene Vosters in this volume, and others elsewhere, have noted similarly appropriative (if, more recently, negotiated) performances of Indigeneity at various Olympic and Commonwealth games openings as the ground (in Levin’s sense) for Canada’s claims to coherent and singular nationhood based on land, history, and the continuity of place over time.3 But Indigenous performance, rather than the appropriative performance of Indigeneity, grounds this volume, and that grounding is potentially unsettling in its most profound sense: it is either decolonizing or works towards decolonization. Ruth Phillips, in Museum Pieces: To-

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ward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, notes that Canada’s world leadership in the partnering of museums with originating cultures stems from Indigenous people’s own activism around the appropriation and representation of their cultures’ artifacts, art objects, images, and identities dating back to Expo 67.4 Is it possible that similar brands of Indigenous activism might, as in this volume, ground a genealogy of performance studies in Canada that sets it apart from the field as practised elsewhere, and particularly from the early appropriations of Indigeneity in the field’s Schechner/Turner foundational anthropological moment? Erin Hurley briefly discusses one form that Indigenous activism has taken: the refusal to perform Indigeneity in any recognizable or “consumable” way, as in the work of multidisciplinary Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist Lori Blondeau’s Cosmosquaw. Other contributors discuss other forms of unsettlingly decolonizing performance. Settler scholar Heather Davis-Fisch analyzes the quietly activist performance of a Halq’eméylem (Salishem language family) place-name tour on the Sto:lo, Lhtakoh, or ʔElhdaqox – what European “explorers” renamed the Fraser – River. The tour reverses the colonizing practice of claiming and naming, decolonizing history and the land by restoring Indigenous names and the culturally foundational stories associated with them. Settler scholar Peter Dickinson similarly brings into view a ghosting by Indigenous land and bodies that disrupts – or always threatens to do so – the commodified and colonized landscape of the urban Vancouver that overwrites them. Vosters looks at rehearsal (rather than consumable product) as a modelling of the unsettling “public praxis” (187) of decolonization in two public performances: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Mi’gMaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Like DavisFisch, she is concerned with what she calls “the intergenerational labour of refusing forgetfulness” (187), which is also in part the project of Métis/ Anishinaabe artist-scholar Julie Nagam’s chapter on the travelling installation Walking with Our Sisters – Canada’s over 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Dylan Robinson articulates the performative efficacy of Indigenous anger, activism, and communitas in song, dance, and the Idle No More movement in contributing not just protest and resistance, but trans-Indigenous resurgence that is independent of colonial inscriptions. Many Indigenous scholars, artists, and others do not recognize the borders that came late to divide the land that is Turtle Island or the colonial authority of the state apparatuses that police them. Many do not recognize the disciplinary silos that have long characterized Western systems

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of research and knowledge production, preferring a holistic, relational, and reciprocal approach to understanding that is lived and situated. This volume – the first such collection – includes a wide range of innovative approaches and arguments, but centring its attention to Indigeneity, as I do here, suggests its significance in not just naming, but shaping a field. It perhaps performs a beginning in which performance studies in Canada, driven and led by the efforts of Indigenous scholars, artists, activists, and their allies not only problematizes borders and subverts disciplinary authorities and atomizations, but begins to forge a genuinely unsettling, decolonizing body of work.

no te s 1 See Bowman, “Fill in the Blank”; Manning, “Being as Canadian as Possible.” 2 See, for example, “Trudeau: pm, Patriot, Paddler,” which includes the famous essay and several images of Trudeau Senior in Indigenous outfits. 3 See Levin, Performing Ground. See also Simmonds, “Native Earth.” 4 Phillips, Museum Pieces, 3, 9, 24–47. Thank you to Erin Hurley and Scott Leydon, whose research on Anishinaabe artist Maria Hupfield’s work led me to this reference.

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C O N T R I B U TO R S

natalie alvarez is an associate professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock University. She has three forthcoming books: Unknowing Others: Immersions in Cultural Difference (University of Michigan Press); Theatre & War (Palgrave); and a co-edited collection, Sustainable Tools for Precarious Subjects: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave). Research for her chapter was made possible by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. susan bennett is university professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She has published widely on performance studies topics, including essays on the role of Cirque du Soleil shows in North American urban revitalization and on performances of consumerism at the 2010 World Exposition in Shanghai. heather davis-fisch is associate professor of English and theatre at the University of the Fraser Valley. She is the author of Loss and Remains in Cultural Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition (Palgrave) and the editor of Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies and Past Lives: Performing Canada’s Histories (both Playwrights Canada). peter dickinson is professor at Simon Fraser University, where he holds a joint appointment in the School for the Contemporary Arts and the Department of English. He is also director of sfu’s Institute for Performance Studies and edits the online scholarly journal Performance Matters. His current research focuses on a performance ethnography of contemporary Vancouver dance. pam hall is an interdisciplinary artist/scholar and adjunct professor in geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She was mun’s inaugural public engagement postdoctoral fellow in 2015 and taught for sixteen years in the mfa in the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College in Vermont. Her creative and research work explores place, embodiment, labour, and local knowledge.

436

Contributors

erin hurley (McGill University) has recently published in Cirque Global: Quebec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries and authored articles on women and objects in performance for CTR , Ireland and Quebec: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on History, Culture and Society, and Le jeu des positions: discours du théâtre québécois actuel. The French translation of her first book, National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion, will be published by Nota Bene in 2017 as Performance Nationale. naila keleta-mae is an assistant professor of theatre and performance at the University of Waterloo, where she researches race, gender, and performance. Her media appearances include the bbc, cbc, Canadian Press, and the Globe and Mail. She has published in academic journals including Canadian Review of American Studies and Theatre Research in Canada and she is under contract to write a book about Beyoncé. ric knowles is university professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, and former editor of Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review. His most recent book, Performing the Intercultural City, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. laura levin is an associate professor of theatre and performance studies at York University. She is author of Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Book Award); editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto and Conversations across Borders; and former editor-in-chief of Canadian Theatre Review. Her research focuses on urban, site-specific, and immersive performance; performing gender and sexuality; and political performance. julie nagam is the chair in the History of Indigenous Art in North America with the University of Winnipeg and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Her current sshrc projects include The Transactive Memory Keepers: Indigenous Public Engagement in Digital and New Media Labs and Exhibitions and The Kanata Indigenous Performance, New and Digital Media Art (www.transactivememory keepers.org). dylan robinson is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University and scholar of Stó:lō descent. His most recent publication is the edited collection Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). Other recent work includes “Welcoming Sovereignty” in Performing Indigeneity, edited by Yvette Nolan and Ric Knowles (Playwrights Canada Press, 2016).

Contributors

437

brian rusted is an associate professor in the Department of Communications Media and Film, and head of the Department of Art at the University of Calgary. He teaches courses in documentary film, cultural performance, cowboy art, and Canadian folklore. He recently guest edited “Reiterating the Canadian West,” a special issue of Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. marlis schweitzer is associate professor of theatre and performance studies at York University. She is the author of When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture and Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance, and co-editor (with Joanne Zerdy) of Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. Her current sshrc-funded research project considers the affective labour of child performers. mj thompson is a writer and teacher working on dance, performance, and visual art. She is assistant professor, Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices, at Concordia University in Montreal. Her articles have appeared in Ballettanz, Border Crossings, the Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, Dance Ink, Dance Magazine, the Drama Review, Women and Performance, Theatre Journal, and elsewhere. Artist-scholar helene vosters, a sshrc postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba, focuses her praxis-oriented research on the politics of social memory. Performances include Unbecoming Nationalisms; Impact Afghanistan War; and Unravel. She has published articles in TRIC , CTR , CJPRT , Performance Research, and FRAKCIJA , and chapters in Theatres of Affect and Performing Objects and Theatrical Things.

INDEX

Aberhart, William, 47 accessibility, 146 actants, 267–9 aesthetics of performance, 212 affective transport, 100 Agamben, Giorgio, 97, 113 Ahmed, Sara, 179–80, 183, 233 Alexander, Jeffrey, 239, 244–5, 258– 60 Allard, Jason, 73–4, 80 Allard, Ovid, 73 Allied Container Systems, 165 Allied Works, 59 Alvarez, Natalie, 31–2, 39, 160–1, 185, 203, 386 American exceptionalism, 149 American Girl, 30–1, 137–9, 141–60 amusement, 46, 220–1, 257 Anderson, Benedict, 185 Anderson, Curt, 248 anger, 32–3, 77, 211, 213–21, 225, 229–31, 233, 235, 252, 387 animacy, 123–4 anti-discipline, 383 anthropology, 8, 19, 169, 182–3 Aplin, Julie, and Onward Ho, My Love, 98–9 apology, 194–5, 198, 203, 205, 247, 260 Arcades Project, 306, 399; archive, 25, 31, 70, 94–5, 102, 117–18, 120, 126, 130, 139, 156, 201, 324, 344– 5, 370; cultural archive, 118; living archive, 25, 116–17, 119, 123–4, 127, 130, 132; and the repertoire, 119, 126. See also Benjamin, Walter artisanal epistemology, 377

arts-based research, 344, 361. See also practice-based research Assembly of First Nations, 193–4 Assu, Sonny, 221 Atkinson, Sonny, 147–8 Augé, Marc, 104, 113, 395 Austin, J.L., 8, 36, 73, 81–2, 84, 87–9, 212, 231–2, 240, 247–8, 259–60 autoethnography, 35, 93, 317–19, 324, 338, 345–6 Avonlea Traditions Inc., 154. See also Maplelea Girls Baker, Leslie, 33, 262–9, 271–5, 277, 279–80; Fuck You, You Fucking Perv!, 262, 266, 270 Barbéris, Isabelle, 28, 267 Barnaby, Jeff, 32, 186–7, 196–7, 200–2, 387. See also Rhymes for Young Ghouls Bay Centre (Victoria, bc), 213, 218, 221, 225–6 behavioural vortices, 71. See also Roach, Joseph Béland, Mark, 294, 300 Belcourt, Christi, 116, 124, 132; Walking with Our Sisters, 116–17, 119–20, 122, 124–31, 387 Bell, Rick, 55 Bell Canada, 59, 185 Belmore, Rebecca, 128 Benjamin, Walter, 306–7, 309. See also Arcades Project Bennett, Jane, 218, 220–22 Bennett, Susan, 13–14, 23, 29, 43, 103, 140–1, 265 Benson, Eugene, 14

440 Berelowitz, Lance, 91, 103 Berlo, Janet Catherine, 123 Bernstein, Robin, 150. See also scriptive thing; thing theory Bierwart, Crisca, 84 Big Picture Cinema, 238 bilingualism, 270, 321, 326, 385 Bill C-45, 217 Bill 101, 307 bio-politics, 91, 97, 101–2 Black people in Canada, 316, 328, 332 Blomley, Nicholas, 102, 111 Blondeau, Lori, 22, 265, 387 Bluestone, Gabrielle, 6 body shaming, 257 Bogad, 239, 248 Bolt, Barbara, 78, 342 Bond, David, 162, 169 Bonfield, Stephan, 60 Bonne Bay Marine Station, 360 Bow Tower (Calgary), 53–5, 58 Brady, Ivan, 344, 347 Brady, Sara, 238–9, 252 Braidotti, Rosi, 224 Brandon University, 122, 126, 130 brandscape, 31, 139, 141, 149–50, 155 Brant, Beth, 131 Brazeau, Patrick, 3–4 Breaking the Silence, 193 bricolage, 365 Broadway Dance Center, 292 Brookfield Place (Calgary), 58 Broox, Klyde Durm-I, 322–3 Brown, Bill, 267–8. See also thing theory Buck-Morss, Susan, 306 Burke, Edmund, 91–2 burlesque, 28, 33, 263–4, 271, 275, 277, 352 Bush (George W.) administration, 238–9 Butler, Judith, 8 Butoh, 27, 90, 107–10 cabaret, 28, 33, 248, 257, 271, 279, 308

Index Cage, John, 288 Calatrava, Santiago, 54, 57, 61 Calgary, 9, 13, 43–9, 51–5, 57–61, 180 Calgary Winter Olympics, 43, 48–9, 52, 58 Canada Council for the Arts, 316, 323 Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre, 30, 161–5, 168 Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 190 Canadian Olympics Committee, 184 Canadian Theatre Review, 9, 12, 15–16, 19, 239, 322–3 Cantos Music Foundation, 59 Canuel, Mark, 101 Carlson, Keith Thor, 80, 84, 269 Carter, Jill, 85, 186 Casey, Edward, 342 Celebration of Light, 91 Cenovus, 58 Centre for the Performing Arts (Calgary), 49–52, 60 ceremony, 3, 8, 49–51, 61, 84, 121, 127–9, 187, 189–90, 193 Cerone, Peter, 262 Chang, Eury, 99; Watermark: lost at sea, 99 Change Islands, 359–60, 362–3, 365 Chapman, Owen, 344 Chaput, Benoit, 300 Chare, Nicholas, 198 Cherry, Don, 251 child consumer, 140–2, 149–51, 153–4, 156 Chitty, Elizabeth, 18–19 Clears Cove beach, 341, 345–6 colonization, 52, 70, 82, 84–5, 118–20, 125, 307, 386–7 colour-blind casting, 332 commodity fetishism, 269 communication studies, 8, 10, 19, 21–2 Concordia University, 9, 11 conflict ethnography, 171, 177, 180 Connerton, Paul, 43

Index Conolly, L.W., 14 Conquergood, Dwight, 343 consumer performance, 139–40, 147, 155–7 Cook, Daniel Thomas, 140–1 Cooper Building (Montreal), 293–4, 296 copper breaking, 213–14, 228–9 corporate performance, 143–4 cosmology, 123, 371 Coulthard, Glen, 216, 230 countermaps, 102 Cowan, T.L., 271, 322–3 crab/Portside Park, 90, 95, 97–9, 101–2, 104, 111 Cracroft, Sophy, 68, 73, 83 Crane, C. Howard, 47 Create a Real Available Beach, 97 creolization, 154 Cresswell, Tim, 50 Crickmer, William Burton, 68, 70, 72–4, 76–7, 79–84 crises of representation, 371 Cross, Gary, 9–10, 12, 19–20, 29, 54, 151, 154–5, 213, 385 Crow’s Theatre, 238 cultural imperialism, 30, 140, 147, 149, 154 cultural intelligence, 161–3, 168–9, 172, 177, 180 cultural knowledge, 77, 163, 169–70, 178, 180 cultural materialism, 23, 265 cultural studies, 8, 20–3, 140 cultural topography, 43–4, 47, 49, 51–3, 57, 59, 61, 103 Cunningham, Frank, 252 Cupryn, Isabel, 197 Cusick, Suzanne, 212–13 Cyr, Catherine, 28, 267 Dada, 257 Daisey, Mike, 238, 243–4 Dancing on the Edge Festival, 90, 99, 101; Dusk Dances, 90, 96, 98–9, 101–2, 104–5

441 dark matter, 263, 280 Davida, Dena, 294, 296 Davidson, James W., 45–7 Davies, Robertson, 21 Davis-Fisch, Heather, 25–6, 30, 67, 97, 265, 387 de Certeau, Michel, 94, 173 decolonizing, 14, 25–6, 68–9, 71, 85, 116, 120, 188, 195, 307, 386–8 DeenandBeena, 156 Dempsey, Shawna, and Lorri Millan, 265 Dening, Greg, 70–1 Dick, Chief Beau, 213, 228–30 Dickinson, Peter, 11, 27, 29, 90, 140, 265, 385–7 Doctrine of Discovery, 189, 191–2 Donkin, Ellen, 270 Douglas, James, 82 Downtown Eastside (Vancouver), 97–8, 102, 107 Drake, 243–4 drama, 4, 6, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 21, 192, 236, 256, 266–7, 279, 316, 320, 327–9, 331, 333 dub poetry, 27, 323 Duncan, Isadora, 300, 304 Dunn, Paul: This Great City, 236, 242 Index East End Crawl (Toronto), 238 ecological knowledge, 359, 369 Edgy Women Festival, 270 electoral guerrilla theatre, 248 Ellis, Carolyn, 317 embodiment: embodied knowledge, 30, 34, 117, 125, 127, 130–1, 345– 7, 360; embodied practice, 13, 25–6, 116, 119, 343, 345, 359, 375, 377; embodied research, 362; embodied writing, 344; embodiment, 115, 139, 219, 345 Emily Carr University of Art and Design, 103 emplaced writing, 34, 93, 340, 343, 345, 347, 349, 351 “Energy” (music video), 243

442 Encana, 53–4 enchanted activism, 218, 220, 222, 231 Engrenage Noir/levier, 316, 324–7; “How Many Slaves Do You Own?: Art and the Economics of Exploitation Past and Present,” 316, 325 Episkenew, Jo-Ann, 186, 193–4 ethnography, 17, 19, 93, 111, 164, 169, 171–4, 177–8, 180, 317–18, 343, 346 Eya-Hey Nakoda drummers, 61 Farrell Racette, Sherry, 116, 123–4, 130 Feld, Steven, 349 Feldman, Allen, 193 Féral, Josette, 19, 28, 266–7 Filewod, Alan, 185, 239, 265 Findlay, Len, 186–9 Finley, Karen, 247 Fletcher, John, 256 Fogo Island, 360, 362, 379 folklore, 8, 19–20, 27, 359 Fontaine, Chief Phil, 192–3, 200 Fontaine, Lita: A Woman’s Drum, 128 Foon, Rebecca, 326 Ford, Rob, 7, 33–4, 236–8, 240–8, 250–7; Fordian performative, 236–7, 239–41, 245, 247, 251, 253, 255–7 forgetting, 24–5, 35, 72, 77, 84, 198 Fortier, Paul-André: Solo 30 x 30, 96 Foster, Norman, 53–4 Foster, Susan Leigh, 94 Foucault, Michel, 97, 118, 238 Foxall, Andrew, 184 Franklin, Kate, and Meredith Thompson: Incandescent, 100–1 Franklin, Lady, 67–8, 70, 72–81, 84–5. See also Lady Franklin’s Pass Franklin, Sir John, 67 Fraser, Simon, 9, 11, 69, 75–6, 78–81, 84–5 Fresh Arts, 319 Fried, Michael, 18 Friedenberg, Tara Cheyenne, 96–8 Fusco, Coco, 257

Index Gamble, Lisa, 263 Garneau, David, 26, 69, 128, 215 Garrard, Jim, 16 Gauthier-Frankel, Holly, 263–4 Geertz, Clifford, 311, 368 Gell, Alfred, 372 genealogy, 3, 7, 9, 11–13, 15, 17, 19–21, 23–5, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 61, 69–70, 180, 248, 257, 266, 268–70, 304, 383, 387 Geniusz, Wendy Djinn, 123 gentrification, 96–7 Gerecke, Alana, 95–6, 110 Ghomeshi, Jian, 189 Gibran, Kahlil, 323 Glendinning, 53–4 globalization, 16, 32, 139, 154–7, 243 Godfrey, Tom, 244 Goebbel, Heiner, 269 Goeman, Mishuana, 116, 120 Goffman, Erving, 8, 13, 20 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 255 Gormley, Shannon, 248 Goudard, Philippe, 277 Granville Island (Vancouver), 90, 103–6, 111 Gregory, Derek, 169–70, 174, 176 ground, 54, 58–9, 95, 100, 106, 111, 123, 155, 165, 191, 202, 265, 269, 272, 305, 322, 386–8 Groys, Boris, 106 Guillemette, Louis, 292, 294, 296 Halifax, 20 Hall, Pam, 22, 34–5, 93, 142, 358, 385 Halperin, Alex, 247 Halperin, Julia, 241, 255 Halq’eméylem, 67, 72, 79–81, 83–5, 387 Hamera, Judith, 94 Harper, Chief Greg, 115 Harper, Rinelle, 115, 120 Harper, Stephen, 4, 198, 217, 227, 229, 246, 249 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 85

Index Harvey, David, 43 haul videos, 31, 139, 155–7 Haviland, Linda Caruso, 351 hegemonic masculinity, 193, 200–1 Heidegger, Martin, 175, 373 Hell Houses, 256 hemispheric, 11, 30–1, 34, 140, 156– 7, 185 Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, 11, 157 Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham, 186, 193–4 Hicks, Dan, 374 historiography, 17, 30, 67, 69, 71, 73, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 288, 305, 309, 384 Hoetger, Megan, 345 Hogan, Hulk, 251–3 Hopkins, D.J., Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga, 43 Horning, Rob, 104 Horn-Miller, Kahente, 127 Howes, David, 342–3 Hummer Sisters, 248–9 Hunter, Victoria, 93, 100 hyper-masculinity, 202, 252, 257 icon, 6, 124, 287, 296, 304, 309–12, 372, 386 iconography, 310 Idle No More, 32–3, 211–13, 215, 217–19, 221–3, 225–9, 387 immersive simulations, 31, 161–2, 164 imperialism, 26, 30, 140, 147, 149, 154, 173, 239 Indian Act, 116, 128, 197, 200 Indian Residential Schools, 190, 194, 197 Indigeneity, 25, 386–8 Indigenous body, 102, 115, 117, 119–20, 230 Indigenous knowledge, 25, 69–70, 80, 131–2, 369, 380 Indigenous living archive, 127 Indigo Books & Music, 137, 142–6 Ingold, Tim, 344, 359 Ingram, Gordon Brent, 107

443 instrumental, 43, 161, 163, 165, 174, 177, 188, 194, 212, 372 intangible cultural heritage, 27 inter-corporeal exchange, 162, 177–8 intercultural performance, 13, 27, 70–1, 170, 257, 385 interdisciplinarity, 9–10, 12–13, 15, 17–18, 20–1, 262, 266, 270, 297, 330, 358, 379, 384; critical interdisciplinarity, 12, 188; cross-disciplinary exchange, 12. See also anti-discipline inter-discipline, 384 Irving, Andrew, 93 Irwin, Kathleen, 11, 164, 343 Jackson, Shannon, 12, 17 Jamieson, Karen, 95–6; The River, 54, 59, 68, 73–6, 78–9, 81, 95 Jerome, Jerome K.: Passing of the Third Floor Back, 44 Johns, Ted, 17 Johnstone, Keith: Impro System, 165 Jones, Amelia, 11, 240 Joseph, Tiffany, 225 Journalism, and performance, 22, 236–7, 240, 242, 244, 251–2 Jubilee Auditorium, 46 Kant, Immanuel, 92, 102, 106 Kappo, Tanya, 121 Katimavik, 4, 26 Kaufman, Andy, 241, 248, 251 Kazubowski-Houston, Magdalena, 35, 317 kinesthetic, 90, 92–4, 108, 111, 294, 304; kinesthetic labour, 110 King Edward Hotel (Calgary), 48; The King Eddy, 48, 58–61 Klein, Naomi, 217, 219 Kloetzel, Melanie, 104 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 377–8 knowledge sharing, 215 Knowles, Ric, 15–16, 23, 26, 31, 171, 265, 383 Kokoro Dance, 90, 96, 107–8; Wreck Beach Butoh, 90, 107–8

444 Kwon, Miwon, 355 labour, 9, 27, 33, 99, 106, 110, 144, 149–50, 157, 187–8, 268–9, 288, 296, 306, 308, 336, 351, 358–9, 387; immaterial labour, 141 Lady Franklin’s Pass (British Columbia), 73. See also Franklin, Lady La Flamme, Michelle, 129 La La La Human Steps, 287, 291–2, 296, 300, 303–4, 308, 311 Laforet, Andrea, 76 Lamm, Kimberly, 319 Lampman, Archibald, 191 land art, 342 lang, k.d., 190 Latour, Bruno, 372 Lawler, Peter, 241 layering, 30, 35, 93, 119, 123, 127, 230, 326, 345–7 Leavy, Patricia, 344 Lecavalier, Louise, 28, 34, 93, 287–9, 291–2, 294, 298, 300–6, 308–11; Businessman in the Process of Becoming an Angel, 305 Leclerc, Andréane, 33, 262–7, 269, 271, 275–80; Cherepaka, 266, 275, 277–80; InSuccube, 263–4, 266, 277; Mange-moi, 266, 276 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 57 Levant, Ezra, 3–4 Levin, Laura, 3, 11, 33–4, 92, 111, 236, 265, 344, 378, 383, 385–6 Levinas, Emmanuel, 179 L’Express, 297 lieux de mémoire, 71–2, 76 Lloyd, Chris, 249–50 local knowledge, 27, 34, 359–63, 365, 368–70, 374 Lock, Édouard, 291, 300 Lorde, Audre, 230 Löytönen, Tieja, 344 MacDougall, J. Paige, 154 Mackay, Danette, 271 Mackey, Eva, 186, 194

Index Madison, Soyini, 345 Magi, Kim, 251 Maniura, Robert, 310 Manning, Erin, 179, 388 Mansbridge, Joanna, 246, 277 Maplelea Girls, 154. See also Avonlea Traditions Inc. Marker, Michael, 71, 93 Marshall, Leanna, 130 Marshall, Lee, 251 Martin, Randy, 94 Marx, Karl, 46, 269, 273, 279 masculinity, 4, 7, 193, 200–2, 246, 252–3, 257, 386 Massey, Doreen, 117, 119 materialism, 23, 264, 266–8, 270, 279–80. See also new materialism Mattel Inc., 143–4 McGill University, 320 McHalsie, Albert, 67, 82, 84 McKenzie, Jon, 11, 144, 266, 268 McKittrick, Katherine, 325 McLuhan, Marshall, 21, 373 medicines, 123, 129 Memorial University, 20, 27, 340, 353, 359–60; Extension Service, 340 Mills, Sean, 307 mimetic vertigo, 305 mise en scène, 68, 162, 165–6, 170–1, 173, 176–7 misinvocation, 73, 81 mis-recognition, 217 mobility, 106, 170, 306, 369, 378 Mohs, Gordon, 79 Mondzain, Marie-José, 287, 310 Montreal, 28, 33–4, 45, 59, 93, 262, 270–1, 275–7, 288–90, 292, 294, 296–8, 300–1, 303, 306–9, 311, 319–21, 324–6 Montréal Arts Interculturels, 324–5, 327, 334 Moore, Michael, 239 Morning Albertan, 44, 47 “More Than Ford” campaign, 256 more-than-human, 22, 359, 373, 378–80. See also new materialism

Index Morton, Alexandra, 228–9 Moten, Fred, 270 Moutillet, Miryam, 292, 294 multiculturalism, 27, 188, 192, 213 Murray, Michael, 251 Myers, Fred, 342 mythical realism, 197, 200 national identity, 7, 24, 27, 30, 32, 142, 239, 330, 385 nationalism, 5, 7, 14–16, 24–5, 32–3, 149, 184–95, 197–8, 201–2, 246, 287, 288, 308, 385–6 National Music Centre (Calgary), 59 national performance, 30, 149 Naxaxalhts’i, 67, 70, 77–8, 80, 83–5 Nenshi, Naheed, 57 neoliberalism, 141–2, 157 New Central Library (Calgary), 60–1 Newfoundland, 20, 26–7, 340–1, 353, 358–60, 362, 370, 374 new materialism, 142, 150, 266–8, 270. See also materialism; morethan-human New Works, 90, 104; All Over the Map, 90, 104–6 New York University, 8 Nicholls, Gerry, 238 Nigger Rock, 316, 319, 325–6, 328, 330–1, 335, 337 non-places, 104 Nora, Pierre, 71–2, 76, 80 North Shore News, 211, 213, 225 Northwestern University, 21 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 20 object, 16, 22, 26, 33–4, 81–2, 91–2, 104, 116, 120–1, 123, 125, 139, 142, 150–1, 155, 170, 173, 215, 218, 228, 262, 264–77, 279–80, 304–5, 307, 310, 343, 345–6, 354, 362–3, 371–4, 374–5, 377–8, 383–4, 387; agency of, 372; objectual, 377–8. See also materialism; new materialism ocad University, 11

445 Of the Moment (exhibition), 94, 340–1 Olympic Plaza (Calgary), 49–51, 223 O’Neil, John, 303 Ontario Arts Council, 316, 323 Opie, Julian, 61 oral history, 9, 25, 34, 71, 201, 288, 307, 309, 311 Osterweil, Ara, 274 “Own the Podium,” 52, 184 Palace Theatre (Calgary), 47 Palin, Sarah, 241, 248, 255–6 Park Royal Centre Mall (Vancouver), 225 Paterson, Barbara, 50 Pavis, Patrice, 171 Pavlova, Anna, 304 Peace Bridge (Calgary), 54, 56–8 Pearson, Mike, 61 pedagogy, 25, 35, 85, 316–17, 319, 321, 323, 325, 327–9, 331, 333, 335, 337; critical pedagogy, 85; pedagogy of justice, 328 Pelletier, Pol, 265 percepticide, 186 performance art, 8–9, 16, 18–20, 25, 33, 188, 236–7, 239–48, 250–7, 321, 342 performance criticism, 25, 242, 251 performance ethnography, 17, 19, 93, 111, 164 performance management, 142, 144. See also McKenzie, Jon performance of place, 107, 111 performance theory, 11, 15, 24, 27, 264, 266–7, 269 performative, 8–9, 18, 22, 29–30, 33– 5, 41, 67, 69–70, 80–2, 84, 92–3, 102, 118–19, 141–2, 144, 151, 162, 186, 192, 212, 218, 236–7, 239–41, 245, 247, 250–1, 253, 255–7, 264, 267, 274, 310, 322, 343–5, 362, 386–7; performative theatre, 267; performative utterance, 81–2, 240; performative writing, 322, 343;

446 performativity, 4, 8–9, 22, 195, 287, 342, 344, 378. See also Austin, J.L. Phelan, Peggy, 287, 303–4, 343 Phillips, Ruth Bliss, 123, 386 Pickering, Andrew, 373 Pitkethly, Karen, 104–5 placemaking, 10, 102, 107 Plensa, Jaume, 54–5; “Wonderland” (installation), 54 Plopper Puppies, 137–8, 142, 155, 157 poetic writing, 344 poiesis, 344 Pontbriand, Chantel, 18 positionality, 69–70, 94, 317–18 practice-based research, 10, 35, 328, 362, 379 practices of looking, 371 practice theory, 375 presumptive intimacy, 161–3, 165, 167, 169, 173–5, 177, 179–80 public art, 50, 58, 61, 340 public memory, 34, 51 Putin, Vladimir, 189–90, 239 Pyne Feinberg, Pohanna, 326 Quebec, 3, 18, 23–4, 28, 265–6, 276, 287, 296, 307–8, 310, 316, 325 Québécois, 18, 24, 28, 33, 264–5, 267, 297 Queen’s University, 60 Rafael, 254 Raphael, Timothy, 239, 253 Razack, Sherene, 190 Reagan, Ronald, 239, 253–4, 309 Red Crow Mi’gMaq, 196 redress, 167, 186–8, 192, 195 re-enactment, 5, 16, 67, 242–3, 344, 351 rehearsal, 20, 31, 98, 161–2, 180, 187–8, 195–6, 201, 303, 331–2, 334, 387; as praxis, 188, 196 Reisman, Heather, 142, 144–5, 147–50

Index re-performance, 157, 243, 344, 347, 349 repertoire, 96, 100, 105, 109, 119, 126, 155, 247, 258, 280, 309 research-creation, 35, 275, 344 resentment, 7, 216–17 Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), 32, 186–7, 196, 199–200, 387. See also Barnaby, Jeff Richmond, Kelly, 277 Ridout, Nicholas, 269–70 ritual, 7–8, 13, 26, 72, 91, 107, 127, 129, 221, 246, 248, 310, 336, 342–3, 346 Roach, Joseph, 61, 71–2, 77, 84 Robinson, Dylan, 26, 386–7 Rochon, Lisa, 57 Rockwell, Lin, 211, 225–8 Romandel, Michael, 252 Romero, Carmen: May I Join You?, 98 Rooms, The (art gallery), 340–1 round dance, 213, 217, 219–21, 223 Rowland, Pleasant, 143, 148 Rusted, Brian, 19, 34–5, 93, 340, 385 Said, Edward, 170, 306 saints, 309–10 Sassen, Saskia, and Frank Roost, 53 Sawchuk, Kim, 344 Schechner, Richard, 13–14, 16, 387 Schneider, Rebecca, 17, 79, 246, 344 Schweitzer, Marlis, 3, 11, 31, 137, 265, 267, 270, 385–6 science, 9–10, 17, 35, 95, 152, 276, 305, 324, 352, 361–2, 368–9, 372, 377–8, 383 Scott, Frederick George, 191 Scott, Robert L., 12 scriptive thing, 150, 268. See also Bernstein, Robin settler colonialism, 25, 30, 185, 187, 195, 202; settler methodology, 69– 71, 73, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85; settler nationalism, 32, 184, 189, 192, 195, 198, 201–2

Index Shaw, Hollie, 147–8 Sherman Grand Opera House (Calgary), 44–5 Shragge, Joseph, 262 Silk Road Trio, 105 Silverberg, Leah Gabrielle, 327 Simon, Sherry, 308 Simon Fraser University, 9, 11, 12 Simpson, Leanne, 219–20, 225 simulacras, 173, 177 simulations, 31, 104, 161–2, 164, 175–6, 180 site dance, 92, 94–5, 102, 106, 110–11 site-specific, 17, 30, 34, 93, 95, 238, 242 Slahal games, 227 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 85, 116, 118 Smith, Pamela, 377 Smits, Gregory, 154 Sochi Winter Olympics, 187 social space, 297, 309, 345 social turn, 358 Sofer, Andrew, 263 spectacle, 3, 7, 30, 32–3, 135, 139–40, 153, 169, 186, 189, 236–9, 241, 251, 255, 257, 275, 277, 371 speech acts, 7, 212 spoken word, 16, 19, 27–8, 292, 316, 319, 321–4, 326–8, 332–3 Sqwelqwel, 72–3, 79–81 Stanton, Victoria, 321 St Armand (Quebec), 325 Steedman, Carolyn, 117 Steen, Shannon, 141–2, 157 St John’s, 360 Stoler, Ann Laura, 162, 169 Stone, Caroline, 340 Studio 180, 236 Studio 303, 270–1 Studio Bell, 59–61 Sturgess, Jeremy, 46 sublime, 90–2, 94–5, 97, 101–4, 106–7, 110–11 sxwōxwiyám, 72, 77, 79–81, 83 Szporer, Philip, 294, 298

447 Taussig, Michael, 305 Taylor, Diana, 24, 117–19, 186 Temple, Shirley, 271, 273–4, 281 terra nullius, 119, 189, 191–2 Theatre Junction, 46 Theatre Passe Muraille, 16; The Farm Show, 17 Thévenot, Laurent, 375 Th’exelis, 78–9 thing theory, 264, 267. See also Bernstein, Robin; Brown, Bill; scriptive thing Thompson, MJ, 28, 34, 93, 287 Tinguely, Vincent, 321 Toronto, 5–6, 9, 11, 14, 18–21, 33, 45, 53, 58, 96, 137, 139, 146, 149, 162, 187, 196, 236–8, 241–3, 245, 247–8, 253–4, 256, 265, 319, 321, 324, 326, 379 Tory, John, 3, 245–6, 249 touch, 32, 100, 150, 152, 161–3, 165, 167, 169, 173, 175–80, 197, 375 tourism, 52–3, 60, 91–2, 103–6, 380; tourist sublime, 104 transhistorical, 30 Trasov, Vincent (Mr Peanut), 248 Treaty One, 115 Trent University, 25 Trudeau, Justin, 3–8, 26, 29, 249, 386 Trudeau, Pierre, 386 Trudeaumania, 6 Trump, Donald, 34, 241, 252 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 25, 32, 68, 186, 189–90, 192, 217, 386–7 Tuck, Eve, 195 Turner, Bryan, 345 Turner, Victor, 13, 387 Tyler, Kevin, 167–8 Tyson, Mike, 254 Underhill, Paco, 150 unesco, 380 University of Alberta, 9, 116 University of British Columbia, 9, 97, 107, 111

448 University of Calgary, 9, 13 University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, 21 University of Regina, 9, 11 University of Saskatchewan, 25 University of Toronto, 9, 11, 20–1, 162 University of Waterloo, 9–10, 21, 316, 327, 336 University of Winnipeg, 128 Valentine’s Day Memorial March (Vancouver), 102 Vancouver, 25, 27, 30, 82, 90–9, 101–3, 105–7, 110–11, 142, 149, 156, 184, 189–90, 213, 225, 228, 248, 387 Véhicule, 294–6 Vosen, Elyse Carter, 220 Vosters, Helene, 31–3, 164, 184, 386–7 walking, 25, 50, 52, 61, 77, 93–4, 97, 107, 111, 116–17, 119–20, 122, 124–31, 149, 176, 242, 246, 306, 341, 346–8, 350–1, 387 Wang, Wen Wei, 105 Wardrop, L.R., 47 Weems, Carrie Mae, 318–19; Roaming, 318; The Kitchen Table Series, 318

Index Wickenheiser, Hayley, 189–90 Wickstrom, Maurya, 141, 143, 149–50 Williams, Raymond, 305 Wilton, Lisa, 50 Wong, Rita, 223–4 Wright, Don, 34, 340–7, 349, 353–4, 375; Trench and Circle, 345–6 Wreck Beach (Vancouver), 90, 106–9 wrestling, 251–3, 257 Wylie, Sam, 262 Xexá:ls, 72, 77–80 Xeyxelómós, 67, 77–80, 83, 85 Xwelítem, 69, 74, 81, 84–5 Yale (British Columbia), 67–8, 72–4, 76–7 Yale First Nation, 72 Yang, Wayne, 195 Yorkdale Shopping Centre (Toronto), 137, 139 York University, 8–9, 11 Young, Harvey, 180 YouTube, 8, 22, 138–41, 155–6, 225, 254, 256 Zerdy, Joanne, 265, 267, 270