A Hoarding of Memories: Conversations about Feminist Theatre and Its Documentation in Canada

This intergenerational conversation focuses on the histories and representation of feminism in Canadian Theatre Review through a rereading of the authors’ individual contributions to the journal over several decades. Situating themselves within the contexts of their creative work and scholarship, the authors reflect on their relationships to and understandings of feminist theatre. Examples including Nightwood Theatre, the collective creation This Is for You, Anna, #MeToo, and the Equity in Theatre project reveal repeated themes across time, such as how racialized and/or queer-identifying artists negotiate their relationship to feminist theatre and the degree to which they have been included within it. The problem of the lack of documentation of feminist theatre and performance in Canada, including documentation of foundational artists and of key debates within the movement, is underlined. These unrecorded histories, the authors argue, have created barriers to understanding how the past shapes the present (and future), both for artists and scholars and for students learning about feminist theatre for the first time. At the same time, the limitations of the archive are interrogated as the authors question which histories—and whose histories—are inevitably erased or excluded as publications like CTR document important moments within Canadian theatre history. The authors conclude their conversation by asking how the archive might be reconceived to reveal gaps within its narratives of history and better reflect the plurality of performers and perspectives constituting feminist theatre and performance in Canada.