Department of Arts and Cultural Management
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Item Research recast(ed): S2E5 - Who they are, not who they will be, with Robyn Ayles and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey(2022) Ekelund, Brittany; Cave, Dylan; Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons Frey, HeatherToday we sat down with research duo, Robyn Ayles and Dr. Heather Fitzsimmons Frey to talk about their collaboration with some very tiny researchers. We talk about their interactive theatre project, where children are invited to be co-researchers and guide, transform and participate with the experience. This project tugs at the heartstrings, as we explore the importance of meeting kids where they’re at and considering them for who they are, not just who they are going to be. All of this conversation is seen through the lens of the Urban Wildlife project.Item Youthsites : histories of creativity, care, and learning in the city.(2023) Poyntz, Stuart R.; Sefton-Green, Julian; Fitzsimmons Frey, HeatherThis book is an original study of the youth organizations in London, Toronto, and Vancouver that offer creative and arts programs mainly to youth from diverse and socially marginalized backgrounds. It describes a sector that is often not recognized, organizations that don't like being institutionalized, forms of education that exist outside the mainstream, types of aesthetic expression that often go unrecognized, and unusual learning and cultural opportunities for socially marginalized young people. Rooted in the history of community arts movements from the 1970s, Youthsites, or the non-formal youth arts learning sector, is now part of cities around the world. Technological change, shifts in educational discourses, changes in policy rhetorics, including a turn away from traditional public institutions and a decline in funding of formal public schooling have all impacted the growth of youth arts organizations. Yet there are to date no systematic studies of the history, structure, and development of this sector. Youthsites: Histories of Creativity, Care, and Learning in the City fills this gap and is the first book to develop an internationally comparative, evidence-based, structural analysis of the development of the youth arts sector. Based on an original 4-year study examining the history, priorities, and tensions within this sector between 1995 and 2015, Youthsites explores the organizations and people who are helping young people to become creators, citizens, or just themselves in times of austerity, crisis, and change.Item Afterwards: a conversation about devising and higher education in a post-pandemic world.(2024) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Hyland, Nicola; McKinnon, JamesOff 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.Item Teaching devising for young audiences(2024) Fitzsimmons Frey, HeatherDevising in a post-secondary context offers the appeal of exploring ideas, issues and images that resonate with the creators. Yet, the practice of developing work for young audiences requires the student devisors to think and create for an audience that is clearly not them. But who are they? What matters to this audience? Of course, instructors who teach devising for young audiences facilitate a creative process to make a piece that draws from their students’ skills and knowledge, but experience shows them that, all too often, their students’ beliefs about children, and about theatre made for them, are limiting if not actually wrong. Thus, the process of creating work that is meaningful for young audiences – and also, for the creators – involves encouraging the student devisors to unlearn some of their assumptions about young people, and about the process of creating work for young audiences – which they generally imagine is simpler and easier than creating work for adults.Item Up top/down low: devising and higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada(2024) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Hyland, NicolaThe chapters in this book tell the stories of devised projects originating in three regions, integrating the voices of practitioners and academics who traverse across those spaces: Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. We must acknowledge our implicit biases, as well as our own worldviews here; as editors, these three regions are where we have, between us, studied, taught and lived. This chapter explores what we perceive as a gap in the existing discourse: the relationship between devising and higher education in Canada and New Zealand.Item Throw away the book: devising and higher education(2024) Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather; Hyland, Nicola; McKinnon, JamesIn the theatre world, ‘off book’ signifies a deadline in the creative process: the date by which performers are to have memorized their lines and will no longer be allowed to carry their play script – the ‘book’ – on stage. As such, Off Book makes a strangely appropriate title for a book about devised performance in higher education. In its usual context, ‘off book’ captures the tension between ephemeral, live performance and durable, authorized literature: in one sense, the book – the written play – is the essential core, the seed that gives the performance life and meaning. Yet the opposite could be equally true: an ‘on book’ performance would not really be a play at all, and an actor reciting lines out of a script in hand is not really acting. A play is only realized in, or through, a performance. We cannot really learn, or play, our part until we can put the book down and enter the stage without it.Item Creative process and co-research with very young children through flight(2023) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons-Frey, Heather; Leach, JamieWith 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.Item Producing the past: the changing protagonists of Canadian heritage(2022) Gunter, Christopher; Nelson, RobinThe 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.Item Harnessing the power of flight: devising responsive theatre for the very young(2022) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons-Frey, Heather; Mykietyshyn, MargaretSuccessful 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.Item "True when no one would listen": scripts for young readers and young audiences(2022) Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherPlayscripts present the vision of the playwright, while simultaneously opening spaces for multiple voices to tell stories their own ways. Since characters in a playscript are meant to be embodied, they immediately invite interpretation. And since scripts rarely, if ever, answer all the questions a reader, actor, director, or educator may have, they encourage complex ways of listening and having conversations. Selfie by Christine Quintana, A Bear Awake in Winter by Ali Joy Richardson, and Winky & Stinky by Curtis Peeteetuce are all recently published scripts that engage with some similar issues: consent, agency, voice and choice, bodily autonomy, gendered expectations, and controlling your own narrative. Selfie, published by Playwrights Canada Press as a standalone script, was first performed in English in 2018 (Young People’s Theatre Toronto), and in French in 2015 (Théâtre la Seixième in Vancouver). A Bear Awake in Winter was first workshopped in 2018 (Canadian Stage Toronto) and produced by Binocular Theatre in 2019 in Toronto. Finally, Winky and Stinky is part of Boca del Lupo’s pandemic project Plays2Perform@Home, which features five box sets containing four scripts each: British Columbia, Prairie, Ontario, Québec, and Eastern Canada. Winky and Stinky is part of the Prairie Box Set and was created with support from Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon.Item Gumshoes and blanket wings: care in pandemic performances for youth(2021) Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherWhen 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.Item Reenacting the past(2022) Fitzsimmons-Frey, Heather; Schweitzer, MarlisThis 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?Item Time travelling girls: bravery, know-how and can-do in girl volunteers at Fort Edmonton Park(2022) Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherEditor’s Note: Costumed interpretation is also the subject of Dr. Frey and Gigliotti, who work with Fort Edmonton Park in Canada. Utilizing observations and interviews with girls volunteering as interpreters, Frey and Gigliotti reflect on how flexible first and third-person interpretation provides an interpretive tool to understand both the historic and modern lives of girls. Notably, Fort Edmonton’s girl volunteers become activists in re-performing the past, countering traditional narratives of gender, age, and history at the Fort while also challenging visitor assumptions about the abilities of modern girls.Item Acting charades in 1873: girls and the stakes of the game(2021) Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherIn 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.Item Turning the light on: the Ontario Historical Society and museum governance(2022) Nelson, RobinSince 1953, the Ontario Historical Society (OHS) has played an important role in establishing the legislative and training framework within which museums in Ontario operate, providing the first recorded museum training workshops in Canada, establishing a newsletter to connect museums, and successfully advocating for provincial support to museums. This article considers the organization’s self-defined role in museum governance since the establishment of a provincial museum policy in 1981, asking: how has the OHS’s role evolved and why and how does their work contribute and relate to support for museums in Ontario more broadly? It examines the OHS’s role in publishing, training, and advocacy or capacity building in three periods. Most recently, the OHS’s focus has shifted to capacity building due to municipal amalgamation, governments’ divestment of heritage resources, and decreased government support for service organizations. Their role takes place within a broader network of relationships aiming to support museums based on the assumed value of heritage preservation and museum work rather than a call for excellence.Item Performance for/by/with young people in Canada(2020) Chamberlain-Snider, Sandra; Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherThis 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.Item Flight paths and theatre for early years audiences(2021) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons-Frey, Heather; Mykietyshyn, MargaretThis 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.Item Miss Toronto acts back: observing and thinking in montage(2016) Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherBased 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.Item Deking out reality: the challenges of staging hockey(2017) Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherThrough 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.Item Flying hearts and sharing joy: Theatre for children with multiple exceptionalities and their adult companions(2016) Fitzsimmons-Frey, HeatherFlying 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.