How We Gather Now:

Critical conversations about the practices, politics, and histories of performance in Canada and Turtle Island are now circulating across multiple networks, digital platforms, and formats. How We Gather Now: A Finding Aid is a virtual exhibition project that gathers, documents, and curates a selection of these conversations generated within this extraordinary moment of performance production’s pause that continues to be defined by both the global Covid-19 pandemic and protest and civil unrest in response to anti-Black racism following the murder of George Floyd.

Online gatherings have proliferated during this period—bringing rare perspectives together in often intimate moments of digital collaboration to discuss crises within the theatre and approaches to its recovery. The digital residues of these synchronous conversations are a particular record of the Covid-era and a unique new format within the archive. Our exhibition explores various methodologies for collecting, documenting, and contextualizing these online gatherings so that they might inform future research and pedagogy on theatre and performance. At the CATR roundtable conference session, we will showcase a prototype of the virtual exhibition and invite feedback from participants on the conversations, contextual writing, images, and methodologies represented.
The materials showcased within this exhibition reflect contributions and suggestions made by researchers and partners of the Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance research project (www.gatheringspartnership.com).

Bios

Seika Boye is a scholar, writer, educator and artist whose practices and research revolve around dance and movement. She is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream/Director of the Institute for Dance Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of the Toronto. Seika curated the archival exhibition It's About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now. 

Sasha Kovacs is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria (Canada). Her research focuses on Canadian theatre historiography, with a special interest in non-traditional performance-related archival materials.

Rohan Kulkarni is a second year PhD student at University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. His doctoral research explores the rise of South Asian diaspora theatre in Canada over the last three decades, with a focus on examining its aesthetics, themes, and politics.

Marjan Moosavi is the Roshan Lecturer of Persian Studies and Performing Arts at the University of Maryland. While working on her monograph about theatre and dissidence in contemporary Iran, as a member of the Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities, she is engaged with transnational projects in digitizing the rare and illustrated archives of Middle Eastern theatre.  

Anna Paliy is a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at University of Toronto, where she is also a research assistant in the Institute for Dance Studies. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation analyzes the dissemination of ballet across cultures at the start of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on women's drawing, painting, and sculpture as modes of audience reception.

Atefeh Zargarzadeh is a third-year PhD student in Theatre Studies at University of Victoria. Her doctoral research identifies paradigms of cultural appropriation in the politics of theatre production that propagate and commodify images of Middle Eastern identity within North American intercultural theatre spaces.