Land Acknowledgement

Our research broadly traverses the ancestral and unceded territories of Indigenous peoples across the Pacific Northwest region, comprising many distinct nations with their own identities, protocols, and relationships with the lands and waterways both historic and present day. We honour these caretakers, and acknowledge that the artifacts we engage with in this project reside in museums, archives, and memory institutions that were created and constructed by settlers on this land. The erasure of Indigenous cultural identity in this region is a direct result of colonization, and directly tied to the censoring and banning of cultural practices, including performance.

We commit to un-learning colonial cartographies by acknowledging the distinct territories, languages, and treaties to which each artifact in our project relates. We seek to ground our investigations of performance in a “place specific” paradigm oriented at a “more localized level” to reflect a commitment to understanding, as Eve Tuck and Mackenzie note: “the embeddedness of social life in and with places, such as those of globalization and neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation” (2). We will, when possible, visit and spend time at our research sites, considering land as a holder of knowledge and keeper of memory. We refer to Native-Land.ca as a valuable resource in this work, alongside input and contribution from local knowledge holders.

Tuck, Eve, and Marcia McKenzie., Eds. Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods. (Routledge, 2015).

Project History

This project was first prompted following the organization of a symposium Preserving Performance in the Pacific Northwest, held at the Royal BC Museum in February 2020. Following that symposium, what became clear was that memory institutions and community networks across the Pacific Northwest region held the material remains of dynamic performance practices that have been central to the region’s social, political, and cultural character, but that these materials often remained inaccessible and decontextualized. As a result of this condition, broader public and specialized research understanding of the impact of performance on the region’s character and development was remaining underappreciated.

Following this event, and with the support of the University of Victoria’s Internal Research Creation Project Grant, researchers Dr. Alexandra Kovacs with the support of dramaturg-scholar Laurel Green engaged in further field work to locate artifacts of performance across local heritage and cultural institutions local to their home on Vancouver Island. This early field work suggested that collaborative research with museum and archives was key to identifying performance related material remains (costumes, props and other artifacts) and that these materials could reveal more about performance’s function (culturally, socially, politically) than a printed script or playtext.

Looking to expand the project’s methodology and theoretical underpinnings, the project grew in collaboration and support, partnering with researcher Dr. Heather Davis-Fisch, whose work focuses on the function of performance in processes of colonization and resistance in the region, along with Dr. Matthew Tomkinson, whose research examines historical audiovisual technologies. With funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant, the project honed its research questions and expanded its scope of field work to: surface and examine a range of performance histories in the region, to explicate the role performance played in the colonization of the province, and to suggest how performance practices also create space for potential resistance as processes of settler colonialism proceeded.

In 2023, a beta version of PPNW Website launched as a Digital Humanities project at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) Conference (Dalhousie University). The website continues to evolve as a home for primary research and as an educational resource that invites contributions from an extended and growing community of scholars, artists, and community members.

Our Team

Dr. Sasha Kovacs, PhD (she/her)
Co-Principal Investigator

Sasha Kovacs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria and the Co-Principal Investigator of the Performance in the Pacific Northwest: Pilot Project. She is also Co-Director of the Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance Partnership project. She lives, raises her family, and works (making and teaching theatre) on the traditional and unceded territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees nations.

Visit Sasha’s Faculty Profile at University of Victoria

Dr. Heather Davis-Fisch, PhD (she/her)
Co-Principal Investigator

Heather Davis-Fisch is a professor of Drama and the Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition (Palgrave 2012), which was the co-recipient of the 2013 Ann Saddlemyer award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. Her research on Canadian theatre and performance has appeared in Theatre Research in Canada, Performing Arts Resources, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, Canadian Theatre Review, and several edited collections. Heather is also the Editor in Chief of Canadian Theatre Review. She has edited several special issues of CTR on topics including Commemoration, the COVID-19 Pandemic, Pathography and Extractivism, for which she was the co-recipient (with Kimberly Richards) of the 2022 Patrick O’Neill award for best edited collection, awarded by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. She has also edited the essay collection Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies and the play anthology Past Lives: Performing Canada’s Histories, both published by Playwrights Canada Press 2017.

Visit Heather’s Faculty Profile at University of Lethbridge

Dr. Matthew Tomkinson (he/they)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Matthew Tomkinson is a writer, composer, and researcher. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia and is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in UBC CENES. His forthcoming book project, Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities (Palgrave, 2025) critically examines auditory simulations of mental health differences. As a composer and sound designer for contemporary dance, theatre, and film, he has exhibited his work internationally at venues and festivals throughout the US, Canada, Austria, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and the UK, working with companies such as Ballet BC and Company 605. He is the author of oems (Guernica Editions, 2022), Paroxysms (Paper View Books, 2022), For a Long Time (Frog Hollow Press, 2019), and Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press, 2020), co-authored with Geoffrey D. Morrison. His shorter work has appeared in venues such as Minor Literature[s], Exacting Clam, Anthem Press, The Town Crier, Performance Matters, Sonic Scope, Canadian Theatre Review, Sounding Out!, and Theatre Research in Canada. Matthew lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.

Visit Matthew’s Website

Laurel Green (she/her)
Research Associate and Project Manager

Laurel is a nationally-recognized dramaturg and researcher with over a decade of practice in the creation, development, and production of new performance works. She designs invitations to participate and provocations for change; from the world premiere of a dozen plays, to performance installations, gameful experiences, digital projects, and secret backyard shows. Laurel holds an MA in Drama from the University of Toronto, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Theatre & Performance at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. Laurel’s primary research recovered early Canadian feminist playwright Louise Carter-Broun for Dr. Kym Bird’s anthology Blowing Up the Skirt of History: Recovered and Reanimated Plays by Early Canadian Women Dramatists, 1876-1920 (MCUP, 2020).

Visit Laurel’s Website

Lee Cookson (he/him)
Website and Service Design

Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in Toronto, ON. His artistic practice is rooted in creative process, collaborative methodologies, and experiential engagement. Through photography, creative writing, installation, and performance, he utilizes magical realism, satire, and speculative forms to challenge societal norms, explore collective definitions of place, and question our relationship with the environment. His installation and performance work has been seen as part of One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo, International Festival of Animated Objects, Beakerhead, Sled Island, Ghost River Theatre, La Mama ETC, MASS MoCA, and Court Theatre. From 2017 – 2022, Lee was a Program Manager at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and since 2022 has worked as a Senior Consultant at Overlap Associates, where he leads human-centered design programs.

Visit Lee’s Website

Process & Protocols

Our project’s ethics protocols are influenced and informed by the Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance research project.

Interviews conducted by the project team with curators, archivists, librarians, artists, and other researchers are subject to oversight from the University of Victoria research ethics study #BC22-0653. Questions and/or concerns about the project’s ethical protocols and oversight can be directed to our team and/or the University of Victoria Human Research Ethics Board:

UVIC Human Research Ethics Board
Michael Williams Building, R. B202 PO Box 1700 STN CSC
Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2
Tel: 250-472-4545

Our artifact gallery links to records, materials, and objects of performance history stored within a range of galleries, libraries, archives, museums and other sites across the Pacific Northwest region. This project acknowledges the contributions of curators, archivists and knowledge keepers working within these spaces that have provided our team access to their collections, and facilitated and promoted our critical engagement with various materials.

Our project is not a repository for collection, but aims to surface and highlight the histories of performance that remain dormant within memory and heritage institutions. We hope that the work we have done promotes your engagement with and links you to the variety of spaces where our team has encountered important histories of performance.

Citation and Copyright

This website is hosted by the University of Victoria under its Terms of Service.

All material on this site is compiled and edited by our research team and has not been subject to formal peer review. The website and its contents will develop, change, and evolve alongside our research discoveries and project learnings.

You are free to share material found on Performance in the Pacific Northwest as long as:

You Cite the Project as suggested below,
The material is not copyrighted to another source.

How to Cite This Project:

For the entire website: Performance in the Pacific Northwest. Edited by Heather Davis-Fisch, Laurel Green, Sasha Kovacs, and Matthew Tomkinson. University of Victoria, 2024. https://performancepnw.uvic.ca Accessed [day-month-year].

For an individual essay, post, or page: [Author’s last name, first name]. [“Title.”] Performance in the Pacific Northwest. Edited by Heather Davis-Fisch, Laurel Green, Sasha Kovacs, and Matthew Tomkinson. University of Victoria, 2024. [URL of specific page or post]. Accessed [day-month-year].

For further citation questions, or to request further permissions, please contact our team.

Project Partners

Contribute

Is there a costume, a prop, or any other unique material related to theatre and performance history from the region that you’d like to see highlighted in our digital gallery?

We are interested in hearing from archivists, community members, artists, and curators interested in supporting the growth of our project.