videocan Report 2021:

At last summer’s CATR, videocan presented their 2020 report on the regulations surrounding video documentation of English-speaking theatre within Canada. Since then, we have expanded our investigations to include Canada, Quebec, and abroad.

In this panel, members of the videocan team will each present their findings and reflections on what has been learned over this first year of research, beginning with a comparative analysis between international archiving institutions and the Canadian context. Our panel will specifically refer to the Theatre of Film and Tape Archive in New York, the National Video Archive of Performance in London, the Archive des Freien Szene in Berlin and more. With this international landscape in mind, we aim to contextualize Canadian and Quebecois artists’ experiences with video documentation. We’ll discuss in-depth the archival restrictions in agreements put forth by the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, Union des Artistes, and the Canadian Association for Dance Artists. Across all our contributions, we will report upon the interviews and conversations that we have conducted with artists and theorize the impacts that policies around documentation have on shaping artistic relationships and artistic processes in Canada. We will conclude by illustrating the ways in which the academic community can play an integral role in shifting policies regarding performance documentation and making access to video a part of a new reality in the performing arts.

Begun in July 2019, videocan is an artist run initiative dedicated to making video documentation of Canadian performance available for educational and professional development purposes. Our main objective is to promote video as a key resource for enriching artistic discourse in Canada. Our website hosts a growing catalogue of works, as well as its videocommentary series, in which artists are commissioned to provide frame-by-frame commentary on their productions. videocan is led by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim. Its 2020-2021 research team included: Patrick Blenkarn, Milton Lim, Mariah Horner, Sophia Wolfe, Tamar Tabori, Karen Gross, and Matthew Horrigan. For more information about the project, go to: videocan.ca