[Candrama] Videocan

[Peter Dickinson]

Dear Colleagues,


I’m part of a group that has started something called <http://videocan.ca/> videocan<https://videocan.ca/>, and I wanted to invite you to contribute to the project, if you were so inclined, or to spread the word to your artistic and research communities. I'd also like to suggest videocan as a new pedagogical tool for the teaching of theatre and performance in Canada.


In a nutshell, videocan is an online video archive for Canadian performance. Currently supported by a Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategies Fund grant, it was started in July 2019 and is currently run by Patrick Blenkarn, Milton Lim, Sophia Wolfe, Mariah Horner, and myself. Milton, Patrick, Mariah and I presented on the project at the recent CATR/SQET Partition/Ensemble Online Conference. Feel free to have a look at that information here: https://partitionensemble2020.com/video-could-building-an-online-video-archive-of-canadian-performance-possibilites-video-creer-des-archives-audiovisuelles-numeriques-du-spectacle-vivant-au-canada/.


To paraphrase Patrick: Entirely artist-driven and always free to access, videocan's mission is to gather full-length archival video of contemporary performances from across Canada on a single private Vimeo account and create a catalogue that can be explored by professional artists in their studios and by art students in their classrooms. We’re doing this in order to create an accessible, critical resource for Canadian artists and curators to engage with the work of their peers.Why? We can’t always travel to see each others’ work. And sometimes one night at a show isn’t enough to fully digest a work, or learn from what it is introducing into our arts landscape.


In our current COVID moment, when so many artists, teachers, and audiences are pivoting to the digital, videocan can also serve as an important resource for extending the event horizon of a performance, including the dialogue around that performance.


To be clear, videocan does not support the idea that a video can be a replacement for live performance. However, we do think video can still help us better understand the performances we are all making. Structures, techniques, gestures, and more. As you are of course aware, performing artists in our country are culturally conditioned to document their works in video format, and yet we have a cultural resistance and sometimes fear of that very documentation. Our project aims to clarify for artists and publics what can and cannot be done with video documentation in the digital age, and we seek to democratize access to documentation materials as educational materials in order to create a more engaged, open, and connected conversation between Canadian artists working in the performing arts.


In short, our initiative builds a centralized infrastructure for the already-being-created and historic digital material in order to better share the knowledge and innovations of each performance production—large or small, urban or rural. We hope that this could change both the way professionals learn from each other and the way students are being taught performance in schools. For most performance makers and students in Canada, there simply is not enough performance happening in their region to maintain a rigorous practice and artistic dialogue. Video can help us see more/different bodies, more/different forms, and more/different ideas.


We have a ‘judge not by resolution’ policy—among others for taking care of the entries—and so we have both lo-fi and hi-fi entires. Most current entires are works that no longer tour. In the future we also aim to create a resource for helping performance makers produce their own documentation. We have also started to host director/choreographer commentaries/interviews overtop of works—think scrolling, pausing, rewinding, etc. while discussing. If the latter is of interest to you, let us know—the first episode is online already.


Thanks for reading this somewhat lengthy proposal and considering the project! Feel free to zoom around our website to get a sense of our access policies, and ask any questions. If you're potentially interested in having your work archived on the site, let us know. If you envision using some of the work on the site in your teaching and research, there are instructions on how to do so.


And please, by all means, forward this message on to your respective communities of practice and research.


Peter

___________________
Peter Dickinson, PhD
Professor and Graduate Chair
School for the Contemporary Arts | SFU
Director, Institute for Performance Studies | SFU
T:  604-908-0993
W: http://www.sfu.ca/~ped

At Simon Fraser University, we live and work on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

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