[Candrama] Call for Readers for Mythography: A Participatory Dramaturgy Performance at CATR 2026

[Matthew Jones]

Hi everyone,

We're looking for some volunteer readers for our seminar at CATR this year. Please see below for details!


All the best,



Matt


Call for Readers
Mythography: A Participatory Dramaturgy Performance at CATR 2026

Our seminar is looking for volunteers to participate in a staged reading of Mythography, an original opera by Aster Brae. The seminar will take place in person at Roger Bishop Theatre at the University of Victoria on Thursday, May 28, from 11:00 am – 12:30. No acting experience is necessary and you will not be asked to sing! Volunteers must be available for a 45-minute rehearsal the day prior to the workshop. Please get in touch with Jadi Darawi, the Research Assistant on the project, at jdarawi at torontomu.ca<mailto:jdarawi at torontomu.ca> to express your interest by May 8th.

About Mythography
Mythography is an opera about place, family legacy, and belonging to the landscape currently known as the Rocky Mountains. Written and composed by Aster Brae and dramaturged by Matt Jones in 2024, the opera features dramatic confrontations with family mythologies set against the geological story of the mountains’ formation, the arrival of the railroad, and the ongoing crises of colonial settlement and climate catastrophe. These personal, generational, and geological tellings meld into a mythography of place, lore, and inheritance, told through family photographs, videos of landscape, furniture-sculptures that act as set and prop, and chamber music. All told, this work is a land acknowledgment set to music. Mythography had a workshop presentation in Calgary in June, 2024, but questions still remain about how the piece’s many elements hold together.

The workshop will feature a staged reading of the visual score for spoken voices, accompanied by selected audio-visual excerpts from the larger production (45 minutes). One week later, participants can participate in a participatory dramaturgy exercise on Zoom, in which small groups will discuss specific aspects of the work that interest them (e.g., characterization, coloniality, ancestry, geology, staging, score), before returning to the larger group for a general discussion. Observers/audiences are welcome.

Bios:

Matt Jones is a writer, dramaturg, and educator. His research explores activist performance, archival histories of theatre, and strategies for communication. He is a Co-Investigator on Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance and Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for Academic Communication.

Aster Brae is a writer, composer, and interdisciplinary project artist, whose practice is rooted in improvisation. Their career has been dedicated to a series of self-produced, concept-driven dramas for performance and installation, including Songs of Manyselves (Calgary, 2024), Reliquary + Nocturne (Whyte Museum, 2019), and Did I escape, I wonder… (Montréal, 2011; Ottawa International Fringe Festival, 2012).





Matt Jones, Ph.D. (he/him)

Assistant Professor

Graduate Centre for Academic Communication

University of Toronto (T'karonto)

mf.jones at utoronto.ca | gcac.utoronto.ca<http://gcac.utoronto.ca/>

[cid:58ed40e8-2064-4361-a73c-29cecce331df]<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4682-9792>       https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4682-9792

[cid:3925f860-bea2-4b07-a919-221fe8e63003]<https://outlook.office365.com/bookwithme/user/2512ea35e60043ebaadfa95c4f67fa93@utoronto.ca?anonymous&ep=signature>



Book time to meet with me<https://outlook.office365.com/bookwithme/user/2512ea35e60043ebaadfa95c4f67fa93@utoronto.ca?anonymous&ep=signature>

*I am proud and fortunate to live and work on land governed by the 'Dish With One Spoon Territory’. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. The land now known as Toronto was purchased for 10 shillings and gifts under dubious circumstances<https://mncfn.ca/the-toronto-purchase-treaty-no-13-1805/> by the settler colonial government, its land privatized, its waterways<https://www.lostrivers.ca/disappearing.html> buried. I support efforts to return the land to its original caretakers.
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