ABOUT THE PROJECT

The Bitter Baby Exhibit is the last stage in the final phase of a three-phase project, which began in a theatre class held at the University of Regina over 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 Bitter Baby Exhibit was first performed at The 25th Street Theatre’s 3rd Annual Women’s Festival on March 10th of this year. It was then an important initial step in the development of a collectively created site-specific performance entitled The Museum of Miss Fortune, performed April 4th to 9th in the former site of the Plains Museum on Scarth Street. In exploring the disused site of a museum, an ensemble of performers became mediums to experiences embedded in the site. While some of these experiences were culled from the site’s actual history, more often they were part of a different truth, a memory, or another previous presence to which our performance was an attempt to bear witness.

In the sense that this performance has been extracted from its site, it explores an absence; moreover, in that The Bitter Baby Exhibit attempts to come to terms with a life once lived, it also examines absence. In the promise of how theatre and memory may fill these absences there is a restlessness, full of our anxieties and desires, and it is this experience that we wish to exhibit tonight.