Department of Arts and Cultural Management

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/16

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Acting charades in 1873: girls and the stakes of the game
(2021) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
In February 1873, following the festive Christmas holiday season, Grace MacDonald, age nineteen, created a home newspaper—The Hastings Gazette—with her siblings and cousins. Included in the Gazette is Mac‑ Donald’s “[e]xperience at a tea party in a country town,” an entertaining report of a January country party she and her sister attended. Her essay candidly comments on the clothes, company, conversation, and activities of the country party, including their evening charades: “After tea, charades were proposed and those who were to act soon being chosen retired to the fire lit bedroom to consult and arrange.” MacDonald’s account of the charades offers a glimpse of her experience of this popular but ephemeral game, but it also reveals how Victorians played the game, what the conditions of playing could be like, and what the stakes were for participants and audiences, particularly girls.
Afterwards: a conversation about devising and higher education in a post-pandemic world
(2024) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Hyland, Nicola; McKinnon, James
Off Book has been a slow-burn collaboration, one which was not only delayed by the disruptions of a global pandemic, but all sorts of other ordinary human ‘dramas’: we have overcome serious illnesses, broken bones, cross-hemisphere migration, new positions, rapid restructures, resignations and budget cuts, the introduction of ‘dual delivery’ and online teaching modes and even the output of a new human. And that's just among the editors! We chose to frame this final epilogue as a series of conversations, as this feels the most appropriate reflection of our editorial process. This is a story of endless email chains, coordination across six time zones to meet via Zoom, and innumerable tangential discussions in the margins of essays. Through this, we have learnt so much about our own devising and teaching practices, but also have been challenged to shift and reshape our own assumptions about what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ devising praxes look like. Although the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the lives of all our contributors, when we invited them to speak to this disruption and its implications, they mostly declined. Does this reflect fatigue or a lack of confidence in the future? Both of those conditions aptly express the feelings of many devisors reflected in this book: the exhaustion of doggedly working towards an uncertain something, of having the materials to create, but with little idea yet of what it will become. Talking more than doing may be the nemesis of any devising experience (although others would argue that ignoring the value of relationships is the worst offense against healthy devising). Still, as we worked to concoct a single book from all our contributors’ voices, our conversations were peppered with thoughts around the nature of devising, autonomy, care, universities and the future of devising.
Children's literature and imaginative geography
(2018) Hudson, Aïda; Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
Where do children travel when they read a story? In this collection, scholars and authors explore the imaginative geography of a wide range of places, from those of Indigenous myth to the fantasy worlds of Middle-earth, Earthsea, or Pacificus, from the semi-fantastic Wild Wood to real-world places like Canada's North, Chicago's World Fair, or the modern urban garden. What happens to young protagonists who explore new worlds, whether fantastic or realistic? What happens when Old World and New World myths collide? How do Indigenous myth and sense of place figure in books for the young? How do environmental or post-colonial concerns, history, memory, or even the unconscious affect an author's creation of place? How are steampunk and science fiction mythically re-enchanting for children? Imaginative geography means imaged earth writing: it creates what readers see when they enter the world of fiction. Exploring diverse genres for children, including picture books, fantasy, steampunk, and realistic novels as well as plays from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland from the early nineteenth century to the present, Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography provides new geographical perspectives on children's literature. -- From publisher's website.
Creative process and co-research with very young children through flight
(2023) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Leach, Jamie
With their abundance of openness, curiosity, and imagination, children are natural researchers. They ask questions and seek answers. As theatre artists and practice-based researchers, we strive to welcome these young, sometimes preverbal inquisitors, into our research process in meaningful, democratic ways. Our practice-based research centres on questions regarding the relationships between very young children (aged eighteen months to five years), actors, and materials, with a view toward democratically creating theatre as a collective and immersive event. Through workshops, artist residencies, immersive theatre offerings, and a Cycle of Co-inquiry, we develop a loose scaffold of dramatic work that forms the skeleton of a theatrical piece, which in turn becomes an immersive theatre offering for the very young. Our process creates spaces that welcome active participation for children and actors to play, and where exploration is encouraged and planned with purpose and intention. This intention crystallizes into reciprocity and generosity of ideas between the participants. The final creative work includes very young children as co-creators in the experience. Although our current immersive theatre offering explores local urban wildlife, our process could be applied to any topic or theme.
Deking out reality: the challenges of staging hockey
(2017) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
Through conversations with nine artists about seven performance projects from across Canada, this article discusses complex challenges of staging the speed and finesse of hockey. The artists engage with ideas of Canadian national identity, gender, embodiment, story, and the hockey knowledgeable body.
Exploring the role of virtual exhibition and media design rhetoric in learning history
(2024) Baradaran Rahimi, Farzan; Clyde, Jerremie; Nisenson, Jason
This paper investigates the intersection of media and design literacies in learners becoming more competent in developing complex ideas within a history classroom. Drawing from multiliteracies, design literacy, and media literacy, this paper conceptualizes media design rhetoric as a process. It utilizes a virtual exhibition as a facilitator to deepen the understanding of propaganda. We accumulate qualitative data from artifacts created by 10th and 11th graders (age range: 15–17) in a history classroom within a suburban high school in Western Canada, with written reflections on their artifacts. artefact analysis is followed by thematic and subject analysis in NVivo 12. Results show that media design rhetoric supports learners in deepening their understanding of propaganda, critically reading media, and creatively communicating messages. Results suggest that virtual exhibitions can be pivotal in creating new artifacts with complex but interest-driven topics. This research introduces media design rhetoric as a bridging concept (between multiliteracies, design literacy, and media literacy) and situates virtual exhibitions as a facilitator for developing complex ideas. This research highlights the significance of critical thinking and creativity in the media design rhetoric, as students critically engaged with historical content and creatively adapted it to modern contexts.
Flight paths and theatre for early years audiences
(2021) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Mykietyshyn, Margaret
This article proposes using the holistic play-based goals and model of co-inquiry discussed in Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework (2014) as a way to interpret very young children’s responses to theatrical experiences as theatre criticism. The process encourages wondering and reflecting on multiple possible meanings of children’s embodied, vocal, and play-based responses. Through an exploration of documentary evidence from The Urban Wildlife Project, our immersive theatre research outlines how the early childhood education processes can be adapted to a theatre context to listen to children’s responses on their own terms.
Flying hearts and sharing joy: Theatre for children with multiple exceptionalities and their adult companions
(2016) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
Flying Hearts uses a community-oriented approach to creating work for a previously neglected audience: children with multiple exceptionalities and their companions. The most vital thing about this work is that it uses theatrical performance to engender a shared, joyful experience that expands ideas about what theatre performances and audiences can be.
Gumshoes and blanket wings: care in pandemic performances for youth
(2021) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
When Canadian theatrical performances halted because of the pandemic, artists everywhere bravely reimagined their work. Creating for any remote audience is difficult, but young audiences present particular challenges. Danish artists Peter Manscher and Peter Jankovic (qtd. in Reason 46) explain that in successful child-focused work, spectators “must have the feeling that it would have been different if they hadn’t been there—that their presence matters.” How can children feel their presence matters if a performance streams regardless of a child’s presence? Foolish Operations’ Artistic Director Julie Lebel asserts “Working with children in general and the very young especially implies interactivity. To provide static content doesn’t do the job.” The issue of presence is also related to a second challenge of utmost importance for young audiences: relationship. What kinds of meaningful performance-fostered relationships are possible during this pandemic? In response to pandemic restrictions, Outside the March (Toronto) and Foolish Operations (Vancouver) reimagined projects for young audiences thoughtfully and very differently, but both companies decided that some of their pandemic pivots would avoid screens altogether, and their creative work would focus on intimacy, interactivity, and relationships. Outside the March’s Ministry of Mundane Mysteries Playdate Edition, and Foolish Operations’ Moving, Resting, Nesting boldly use limitations placed on artists and audiences to create opportunities in which a child’s presence matters. While Outside the March is interested in forging relationships between people who cannot be together because of the pandemic, Foolish Operations was interested in “supporting the family unit as the site of the experience.” Through content and dramaturgy that centralize relationships, intimacy, and audience care, each project considers what young people and their caregivers might be craving from a performance experience right now.
Harnessing the power of flight: devising responsive theatre for the very young
(2022) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Mykietyshyn, Margaret
Successful theatre hinges on relationships. In our research, we devised an immersive theatre piece about urban wildlife through key early childhood education concepts outlined in the Canadian document Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework. The project’s guiding question was: How could we better understand audience engagement in the early years demographic by using the reflective process, rights-based perspectives, and holistic play-based goals of the Flight framework to interpret children’s experiences? Our creative team aimed to develop democratic and playful relationships with children during theatrical exploration, and using the Flight framework to analyse what children were communicating grounded our theatre creation and dramaturgy in respectful and agentic relationships between actors, theatrical objects, and young children.
Miss Toronto acts back: observing and thinking in montage
(2016) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
Based on interviews with the DitchWitch Brigade, who created Miss Toronto Acts Back, this review discusses the group’s multimedia, semi-historical, stylistically diverse montage that playfully examined the story of the Miss Toronto Beauty Pageant, while questioning issues of beauty, gender performance, and spectator- performer relations.
'Never be dull': Girl Guides of Canada performing physical culture and gymnastics drills in 1910–21
(2020) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
In their first decade of operation in Canada, Canadian Girl Guides presented numerous performances, primarily as fundraisers, to raise money for the Red Cross or to go to camp. Their performances included a great deal of variety, and often gymnastics drills. While critics suggest that these drills were joyless affairs, girls chose to do them, and many probably took pleasure and pride in developing the choreography and performing them well. Preliminary research with twenty-first-century girls shows that developing the drills can be a lot of fun, and that the movement vocabulary has considerable creative potential. Performing the drills in early twentieth-century communities could challenge expectations about differences between boys and girls while demonstrating girls’ strength, emphasize a hopeful future full of healthy (probably white) girls who would become healthy mothers, and encourage audiences to think about unity. In the early twentieth century, Guides would have been unlikely to have seen a professional physical culture drill. With no professional counterpart, girls could not really be amateurs, but it is important that girls probably had to imagine the best drill possible.
The non-formal arts learning sector, youth provision, and paradox in the learning city
(2019) Poyntz, Stuart R.; Coles, Rebecca; Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Bains, Alysha; Sefton-Green, Julian; Hoechsmann, Michael
The 'learning city' contains a range of non-formal learning economies. In recent years researchers have focused on, what has been termed, the non-formal arts learning sector, to document best practices, the emergence of new literacies and/or cultural practices, and to highlight interventions that support otherwise marginalised and underserved communities. Yet, for all of this attention, the non-formal learning sector has remained an opaque object, defined by hazy boundaries, diverse programme structures, and a presence in cities that is difficult to grasp. In this paper we develop an account of the non-formal arts learning sector for socially disadvantaged youth by treating it as a 'socio-technical assemblage' of the learning city. We draw on data from the Youthsites research project and examine the history, priorities, and tensions in the sector between 1995 and 2015, a period when the youth arts sector has become a significant feature of urban space. We trace the emergence of the sector in three global cities, analyse a series of paradoxes linked to income and property, the labelling of youth, and organisation aims, and show how these paradoxes shape the sector's broader relationship with the state, labour and consumer markets, and related institutions that allocate support for young people.
Performance for/by/with young people in Canada
(2020) Chamberlain-Snider, Sandra; Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
This special issue examines the advocacy for and significance of discussing performance for/by/with young people in Canada. It asks how thinking about young people as audience members, creators, and co-creators can expose ideas about who they are, what they want, and what adults believe is good for them. The nineteen writers who contributed full-length articles and forum essays to this special issue demonstrate how attentive consideration to young people complicates creation ethics, aesthetic choices, affective impacts, content decisions, approaches to training, working conditions, and ideas about risk in connection to the performing arts. As the authors discuss how young people imagine, witness, train, and perform, they are simultaneously advocating for the young people they write about, for the specific issues that concern them, and for these perspectives to expand and invigorate broad conversations about Canadian performance for all ages.
A place where it was acceptable to be unacceptable: twenty-first century girls encounter nineteenth-century girls through amateur theatricals and dance
(2019) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
This self-reflexive article about girl-centered, performance-based historiography uses Carole Lynne D’Arcangelis’s cautions about self-reflexive research writing and Caroline Caron’s concerns about girl studies as activist research focused on social change to explore how the presence of girls and listening to girls shaped the knowledge that was created. By staging encounters between living 21st-century girls and 19th-century girls, the process reveals possibilities about the lives of girls in both eras. Encounters drew attention to issues concerning power, gender, agency, present-mindedness, emotion work, embodiment, and racialized identities. The article demonstrates how girls’ actions and insights complicated understandings about 19th-century girlhoods and at-home theatricals and, simultaneously, exposed power structures influencing their lives today and opportunities to work within or subvert them. Working through concepts like “radical reflexivity” (D’Arcangelis), “theatrical ethic of inappropriation” (Michelle Liu Carriger), “the wince” (Stephen Johnson), and the “foolish witness” (Julie Salverson), the article describes research pivot points and argues that ways of listening to girls alters how meaning is made.
Playce-making: transformation of space in a participatory game design project within a Canadian junior high school
(2022) Baradaran Rahimi, Farzan
When we give meanings to a physical space, we engage in place-making. With technologies, the place-making activities can be extended to virtual and hybrid spaces. In games, actual or virtual space can gain narrative and meaning transforming into a playce (i.e., a place for play). We suggest that playce-making (i.e., transforming a space into a playce) activities in the classroom may provide adolescents with a rich learning context for teamwork, problem-solving, and knowledge creation. In our study, we observed ninth graders’ engagements in game design projects at a Canadian suburban school. We discuss how learners created their own learning paths in transforming the actual space of their school, conceptually and typologically, into hybrid and virtual playces. Our research indicates that the typological transformation of space motivates learners to create or adopt narratives meaningful to them and their community from familiar spaces.
Producing meanings about cultural differences and identities in Canadian TYA: Three case studies
(2016) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather
The article discusses issues related to performing cultural difference in Canadian theatre for young audiences (TYA). Topics covered include the importance of cultural diversity on stage, the challenge of representing cultural difference that is not exotic or overly simplistic, and Eva Colmers' theater play "Beneath the Ice." Also mentioned is the relationship between non-Native and First Nations people for a performance project.
Producing the past: the changing protagonists of Canadian heritage
(2022) Gunter, Christopher; Nelson, Robin
The Canadian private sector also contributes to the heritage commemoration landscape by working with the government and accessing support programs. Arguably, one of the most impactful contemporary examples of the private sector’s heritage commemoration involvement are the Heritage Minutes (Minutes), which are sixty-second videos depicting historical narratives of events and people from Canadian history. Given their notoriety, the production and story selections for each Minute raises questions about the Canadian heritage landscape: who and what is represented or missing, and what are the implications? By examining these questions, this article aims to hold these Minutes—financed and authorized by government—to account and to understand what themes and messages these vignettes aim to impart on and authorize as ‘commemorative worthy’ to the Canadian public. This article focuses on examining the Minutes and documenting their thematic trends with a specific emphasis on identifying how marginalized groups are represented in the Minutes.
Reenacting the past
(2022) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Schweitzer, Marlis
This chapter explores cultural practices of reenacting the past in the present. How have understandings of reenactment, embodiment, and lived experience shaped, constrained, and misdirected interpretations of people’s actions in the present that purposefully reference the past? What is the state of this scholarship? What are the principal critiques and new directions?
Research recast(ed): Imagining chickadees, squirrels, rabbits, and magpies through children's interactive theatre
(2023) Miskiman, Megan; Schabert, Reinette; Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Hatt, Travis; Ayles, Robyn
In today's episode, Dr. Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Travis Hatt, and Robyn Ayles take us through the creative process of theatre production of their company, The Elm Tree Theatre. Focusing on the importance of play-based learning through interactive theatre and their journey with The Urban Wildlife Project. Dr. Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Travis Hatt, and Robyn Ayles would like to acknowledge: MacEwan's Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications; Albert Foundation for the Arts, City of St. Albert, the MacEwan Office of Research Services; Early Learning at MacEwan (ELM) children, families, educators, and Brittany Aamot and Jennifer Sibbald; Margaret Mykietyshyn; Jamie Leach, Lee Makovichuk; and our research assistants: Emma Abbott, Patrick Amyotte, Caitlan Argueta, Iris Baguinon, Camryn Bauer, Chykes Delson, Courtney Dewar, Meredith Fitzsimmons Frey, Ayla Gandall, Tania Gigliotti, Jessica Jalbert, Megan Kause, Chelo Ledsma, Grace Mann, Sydney Maziarz, Rain Matkin-Szilagyi, Carling Ryan, Inder Singh, Emily Smith, Aidan Spila, Savannah Tysiaczny, and Celina Vipond.

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