Documents Perform 3: Rewriting the Massey Commission
“The Massey Commission shaped Canada's cultural imagination. Now watch it be rewritten.”
Documents Perform 3 is a live research action asking a simple question: Who gets to define the value of culture, and how? What happens when those historically excluded from its vision become its editors and, in turn, the co-authors of a new cultural blueprint?
The 1951 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (better known as the Massey Commission) established a foundation for how Canada has understood arts, culture, and national identity for more than seventy years.
By inviting artists, researchers, and cultural organizers to “hack” and rewrite the Commission in unison, in real time before a live audience, this performance aims to make visible the perspectives, lived experiences, and forms of artistic practice that were historically excluded from the Massey Commission's vision of culture and nationhood. Collectively, our rewriting underscores the need to rethink how the civic impacts of the arts are understood, documented, and made visible, while opening space for new cultural value and policy frameworks to emerge through collaboration. TAIP was founded to fundamentally rethink how we define, measure, and value the civic impacts of arts and culture. Documents Perform asks what it would mean to undertake that reassessment not behind closed doors, but collectively and in public.
Save the date!
Sun. Sept 27th, 2:30PM EST
Factory Theatre - Mainspace Theatre
125 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON
Runtime: 120 minutes
This performance marks the first iteration of what we envision as a seven-year collaborative research process. Over the life of the Partnership, we hope to develop a digital platform and living archive that will support ongoing, asynchronous, crowd-sourced editing and rewriting by artists, researchers, policymakers, and communities across Canada, with future editions of Documents Perform periodically bringing these evolving contributions back into the public sphere through live performance.
We hope many of you will join us in helping to author this first public experiment in reimagining cultural value for the next generation of Canadian cultural policy.
Stay tuned for more information (including tickets!).
The event is co-presented by TAIP, the New York City Players' Incoming Theatre Division (ITD), the Hemispheric Encounters Partnership (HEN), and Aluna Theatre. It is co-created by Natalie Álvarez, Katiana Gonçales Rangel, and Richard Maxwell of the New York City Players, and co-organized by the TAIP leadership team: Sarah Bay-Cheng, Owais Lightwala, Shawn Newman, Robin Sokoloski, and Project Manager Antoine Damiens.