This project created an on-line database of popular performance culture in Canada West (now ‘southern Ontario’) from its formative years prior to Confederation until just after World War One.
Searching period newspapers, journals, and archives, it recorded and make accessible information on a wide range of events, using the broadest possible definition of the word performance–amateur and professional, resident and itinerant, narrative and variety, street performance and Grand Opera, church recitals and burlesque.
Researchers in any area of theatre history typically create, at an early stage of their project, a performance calendar (or itinerary) that structures and relates the ‘brute events’ of study–the performances. Only then can the historian of performance proceed to locate potential repositories of extant archival materials–through this ‘mapping’ of a performer’s movements–and begin the process of accumulating documentary evidence, and writing history. The performance calendar is all the more important for popular performance, because the performances were unsettled, itinerant, ephemeral.
The development of powerful database software, and the ease with which the web can offer access, has altered this study in a radical way, by making this primary data available both during and after research.
A joint project at the University of Toronto, OTRA (On the Road Again), explored this kind of research: databases compiled included the Records of Early English Drama (REED) Patrons and Performers database, and The Juba Project, as well as this project.
Stephen Johnson 