The Museum of Miss Fortune is the final phase in a three-phase project, which began in a theatre class held at the University of Regina a year ago. Originally entitled THE HOST / THE GHOST / THE WITNESS, the objective of this approach to theatre is to animate the various stories a particular site or building (the ‘HOST’) may contain, either in its architecture or history. Each story is considered a ‘GHOST’, and may be animated or performed in such a way as to create new and different relationships between the audience, the ‘WITNESS’, and the building. An attempt is made to involve the audience theatrically with the host building; as witnesses to the event they will be allowed to explore their place in relationship to all the elements at work in the site. 

The host site for The Museum of Miss Fortune is the former location of the Plains Museum. Through theatre, music, film and the practices of inter-media, we have collectively explored the concept of a museum. In the sense that this performance explores the traces of a life once lived, it examines absence. In the promise of how theatre, like a museum or memory, may fill this absence there is a restlessness, full of our dreams, anxieties and desires. Tonight you will witness artists who become mediums to the past, drawing on both personal history and the objects, scars, and traces they have found embedded in this site. In this respect, our performance embodies the liminal potential of what a museum might represent in terms of its relationship to identity and to the past. Anthropologist, Victor Turner has described “liminality” as being on a threshold, where the forms and customs of our culture become pressurized, and potential for experiment and discovery may emerge. In The Museum of Miss Fortune performance meets archive; the past becomes infused with potency and play, and here exists a time not controlled by the clock, a time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen.