Department of Arts and Cultural Management

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 18
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    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?
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    Time travelling girls: bravery, know-how and can-do in girl volunteers at Fort Edmonton Park
    (2022) Fitzsimmons-Frey, Heather
    Editor’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.
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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.
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    Turning the light on: the Ontario Historical Society and museum governance
    (2022) Nelson, Robin
    Since 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.
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    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.