A research and teaching hub to share knowledge about performance histories in the Pacific Northwest region.
We invite you to engage with the variety of research and educational resources gathered here, and reflect upon performance’s integral function in shaping the region.
Performance in the Pacific Northwest invites an encounter with performance history research undertaken by our team, making accessible primary materials within a range of archival and heritage institutions in the region.
In these spaces lay the remains of critical performance traditions which are not always described as such in catalogue records, limiting an acknowledgement of the cultural power of theatre and performance in the region.
Explore the Gallery
Manager Christine Meutzner at the Nanaimo Community Archives, 2022. Photo by Laurel Green.
Pauline Johnson’s artifacts at the Vancouver Museum. Photo by Sasha Kovacs.
This project facilitates access to a range of performance-related historical objects and materials. Short essays written by research team members re-situate these items as important artifacts of performance; many of these materials prompt a reckoning with the complicit role that performance plays in processes of settler-colonialism, as well as its potential uses as decolonial resistance and cultural resurgence.
We engage and collaborate with cultural communities for whom the research work we are doing matters, building spaces for artistic and scholarly response and conversation about the impacts of the knowledge surfaced through the project’s work. In our gallery, you will see information about individual artifacts, as well as links and resources (including peer-reviewed essays, teaching resources, and artistic interventions) to prompt educational and critical learning, and to encourage reactivation of these histories in the present.
Inside the Cumberland Museum, 2022. Photo by Laurel Green.
Lee Cookson photographing the Cantonese Opera Chair at the Nanaimo Museum, February 2024. Photo by Laurel Green.