Colloquium: A Gathering to think about Gathering

Hosts: Seika Boye, Jill Carter, and Stephen Johnson.

The Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance research-team is composed of a diverse group of artists and scholars living and working in Canada. Within this project, we seek to partner with diverse culture-workers and audiences to enhance, promote and make accessible a full range of performance-related archives from across the nation. Gatherings seeks to make these resources accessible to culture-workers within Canada, as a foundation upon which they might build. It seeks to build bridges between performance-artists and those who present, those who write about, and those who witness their works. For more information on the Gatherings Project, please see our Gatherings Partnership website.

Adhering to Lois Weaver’s Long-Table protocols, the Gatherings Research Group will curate a salon in which to facilitate a long-table discussion around gathering, archiving and accessing the stuff (digital, printed, material) out of which Drama, Theatre, and Performance Histories are woven. The Gatherings Research Group believes that their colleagues—the culture-workers who build, maintain or contribute to performance history archives or who utilize these archives in their research—share questions and, perhaps, share conviction that a collaborative exploration of these questions is a relevant and timely exercise that will greatly inform their research-processes and the works produced therefrom.
 
Questions to be explored at the Long Table include the following: 

(a) What do our graduate students, colleagues and fellow researchers appreciate about the archives they have visited? 
(b) What improvements/alterations to the archives they have visited would better facilitate their work? 
(c) What obstacles/irritants might they have encountered that set back their work or inspired their distrust of the archive? 
(d) What are the ethical questions around the practices of collection, curation and display that inform their approach to, confidence in, and use of the archives that inform their work?
 
If you have any questions, or would like more information, please contact Jill Carter. 

This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP is required.