Category: Performance Art Intervention / Object Theatre

More Images of the Canoe and Beaver piece on Flickr – B.E.T.

“Portage!” – performed 2014, devised with James Ashby and Smith Purdy

In Portage, performers wearing red toques with stuffed beavers sewn onto them traveled through Brock campus over the course of a day, carrying or paddling a canoe. The canoe trailed a 50 foot rope and a volunteer (above) for each stopping-site who had been instructed to let the rope out and then gather it after us whilst trying to draw the path they had watched us take on a clipboard. With the canoe were dozens of books that referenced Canadian identity in some way, taken from our own personal collections. We performers and “spectators” read aloud from the books. The path chosen began in the ravine at dawn, through a busy birch-bark decorated cafeteria at noon, up stairs, past portraits of Tecumseh and Brock, into a courtyard with a fake ravine for the afternoon, then up to the modernist concrete roof at dusk.

Created as part of a seminar called 360° of Engagement exploring public performance practice, and occurring, or “intervening” at a graduate conference, this was the most intellectual of my object theatre works. The beavers were named Guy and Raoul after theorists Debord and Vaneigem: we were looking at conference culture as spectacle. Attempting to be situationists, we used Canadiana postcards to pose questions to passersby regarding the academic discourse of wilderness in art-in-Canada / Canadian art.

We ask: How did the space interpolate identities, and support the colonial narrative? For example, this older transportation system, is now made scarce and strange due to the preference for road-building. By inserting moving objects into sites, we call on the multiple identities, personal and political, attached these objects.

Mostly we were just a bold surprise.