Even a terrible picture is worth a thousand words -- and a million memories: My feminist theatre collective from 1985

 

January 1985: Hecate's Players performing in Fort McMurray, Alberta, at the invitation of Women of the North. 
From left, Amanda Le Rougetel, Kathryn Ivany, Lisa Walter. 

Look at at those serious faces (and bad hair) from more than four decades ago. Oh my goodness.

I want to believe we didn't take ourselves as seriously as these pics suggest, but in 1985 we had so many things to say about the plight of women in this world, and say them we did. To each other, the general public and to politicians, at meetings, around tables and from stages.

I have always enjoyed performing on a stage (ever since I played the shoemaker’s wife in Grade 2), so establishing a feminist theatre collective in the early 1980s with a bunch of university friends was not a stretch for me. Indeed, it was a natural outlet for my burgeoning politics. We named ourselves Hecate’s Players, after the goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology “variously associated with crossroads, night, light, magic, witchcraft, and the moon”. We wove together our scripts from quotes and excerpts from historical and contemporary feminist texts, performing them ‘readers theatre’ style to any group or conference that invited us. It was stripped down theatre — three stools on the stage, a boombox off stage for music, whatever lights the venue could provide.

I think we had no idea what we were doing. Well, no. We knew what we were doing: breaking the silence on topics ranging from violence to work, from reproductive rights to personal power. But I cannot imagine that we were aware of the sheer chutzpah that, in retrospect, we were clearly demonstrating. Looking back, the details are lost in time, sadly, not noted by me in any diary or scrapbook, but the overall experience lives in my bones: the energy of a live performance, the thrill of connecting through women’s stories, the impact that was possible if not on every audience member then, certainly, on some.

So when, just the other day, a writing friend suggested we could write a play for the Fringe Festival, I did not hesitate. Four of us met to throw around ideas, one of us has actual play-writing experience, and every one of us is juiced about what might transpire. As one of us said, This has fun written all over it.

I wanted to impress at this meeting, so I spent some time searching the internet for mention of my long-ago experience at the Edmonton Fringe Festival. Back in 1985 it was much easier than it is today to get onto the roster of shows, so Hecate’s Players staged our play-within-a-play on reproductive rights. The reviewer roasted us, writing that the audience got its money worth if nothing else: “This is two bad plays for the price of one.”

Maybe mercifully, I found nothing online about that, but I did come across an entry in the City of Edmonton Archives that features Hecate’s Players and our January 1985 performance of “Too Much for Any One Woman” sponsored by the Women of the North collective in Fort McMurray. I was so surprised to read the entry — and then to click on the link and find the full performance that someone clever had video recorded all those decades ago — and then kept — and then someone even more clever uploaded the file to the Archives. Kudos to them, and thanks, too. (The photo above is a couple of screen captures from that video.)

I am not alone in my appreciation of artefacts from the past. I have heard countless people fleeing fire and floods this summer telling reporters about what they grabbed before leaving their home, and it is often personal items, including photo albums, that are most wanted — and most missed if not taken. I will occasionally do a mental inventory of what I would take in such dire circumstances and the most challenging to figure out, always, is the paper records of my writing and collage art, and the box of personal memorabilia (including airmail letters from my grandmothers). Yes, I could live without any of those items, but I can well imagine the lingering loss I would feel if they were destroyed by fire or water.

I felt the exact opposite of loss when I landed on that video of Hecate’s Players from 1985 in the Edmonton Archives: I felt amazement and wonder and delight. To see myself from all those years ago, doing something I so deeply believed in and had such joy in doing — it was an unexpected gift of recognition, somehow. Not only of seeing myself, but of being seen. The video is grainy and the sound is not great, but the performance has been preserved and, thus, our political work through theatre exists on the record. 

Consider this my (frequent) reminder to write down your memories, to preserve them — and to share them. Whether the writing is praise-worthy and the photos exceptional is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that you capture your story in some form. Your older self, decades down the line, will be delighted. And those who come after you will thank you for it. 

NOTE: My group of writing friends will pursue the play-writing idea, but we have scaled back from the full-on Fringe Festival objective. Instead, we are planning a smaller, more targeted audience closely connected to the story we want to tell about books and readers and secrets lost among the pages.  

During my online searching, I also found this short piece from the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee newsletter, preserved in the Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archives. It helped me pinpoint the date of the video recording of Hecate's Players’ performance. So great to find these historical artifacts!

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.