Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

Theatre at UBC Graduate Symposium April 27-28, 2013

http://tugs2013.blogspot.ca/2013/04/performingplace-theatrein-pacific.html

PERFORMING PLACE: Theatre in the Pacific Northwest

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

Conference Theme Questions

• How does theatre capture the "here and now" in ways that other disciplines cannot?

• How can theatre reconcile the erasure of indigenous, and/or other minority narratives that have been overlooked or forgotten?

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• How does performance connect us to history and places near and far?

• Does theatre in the Pacific Northwest accurately represent the cosmopolitan demographic of the region?

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• Although Project Barca was not designed to address these questions I will argue that it does respond to them in its own unique way.

PROJECT BARCA: New Architectures of Memory and Identity

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

Deconstructing Identity, Performing Memory

• How can embodied personal and collective memories be shaped into new architectures of identity and belonging in the form of innovative performance works that speak to wider sections of society?

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• Project Barca is interested in the dynamics of interaction between different communities affected by the events surrounding August 3rd 1492; the day Columbus left Spain on his cross-Atlantic voyage.

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• The architecture of “Going west to find east/going east to find west” speaks to this. The first part of the phrase is inverted in the second and the opposition of the parts plays on the idea of going in either direction to find the other.

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• Project Barca is interested in the implications of Columbus’ 1492 journey across the Atlantic from the perspectives of the descendants of the people he encountered there, as well as the descendants of those who subsequently made that crossing by choice or through force.

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• The word Barca means boat in both Spanish and Portuguese. It signals my intention of building a structure that is capable of accommodating a small crew for an extensive journey.

• Performance Studies and PaR are vehicles for a journey that connects geographical, historical, and cultural spaces.

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• Performance Studies and PaR are vehicles for a journey that connects geographical, historical, and cultural spaces.

• Barcelona, an ‘Old World’ city at the edge of the Mediterranean connects with Vancouver, a fast growing metropolis that sits on the edge of the Pacific at the limits of the ‘New World’.

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• On Friday August 3rd 1492, six months after the last Moorish stronghold in Granada had fallen, and one day after an edict expired compelling all Jews to leave the country, Columbus with his three ships and crew of ninety men floated down the mouth of the Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain on their way to the Americas.

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• Encounters 2 is one of several mixed-mode productions generated within Project Barca. There are others which you can see and read about on my website and blog.

• http://www.sfu.cs/~hdaniel

• http://projectbarca.blogspot.ca/

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

References

Aeterna Regis, Treaty of Alcácovas, 1481. http://clc-library-org.tripod.com/Aeterna.html

Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494. http

://www.thenagain.info/WebChron/Americas/Tordesillas.html

Morison, Samuel Eliot 1942. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A life of Christopher Columbus. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• Morison, Samuel Eliot 1971. The European Discovery of America: the northern voyages, A.D. 500-1600. New York: Oxford University Press.

Morison, Samuel Eliot 1974. The European discovery of America: the southern voyages, 1492-1616. Oxford University Press.

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/caribarch/columbus.htm

Dr Henry DanielProfessorDance and Performance StudiesSFU Contemporary Arts

• Deleuze, Gilles, & Guattari, Félix 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

Williams, E. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

http://archive.org/stream/capitalismandsla033027mbp#page/n9/mode/2up