Changing the narrative

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This article was published 23/06/2017 (2496 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the minds of most Winnipeggers, Dalnavert has always been the same. More than a century has come and gone, and the historic Carlton Street house remains superficially unchanged, its rich red brick whispering of stately luxuries.

Yet the house has changed since 1895, when it was built for Sir Hugh John Macdonald. It was a rooming house for four decades — then bought and threatened with demolition. At last, in 1974, it was rescued to become a museum.

Still, in all that time, the house’s image has remained more or less the same. Now, that’s about to change: On the eve of Canada’s 150th hullabaloo, a group of Manitoba artists is turning to Dalnavert to challenge a nation’s narratives.

These are their Postcolonial Postcards. The performance, which kicked off last week and runs until June 30, fills Dalnavert’s rooms with vignettes of historic threads not usually represented in the preserved houses of old money.

Audiences move through the house as if on a standard tour, but what unfolds inside is far from typical. No longer are the rooms static tableaux, frozen recreations of upper-class Victorian life; now, they come alive with disruptive stories.

“We wanted to really subvert what the story of the house is saying now,” director Mia van Leeuwen says, chatting on Dalnavert’s porch one sunny afternoon.

In the vignettes, some objects seen within the home are not quite what you expect: a hockey puck, a haz-mat suit, a pair of modern sandals. Considered separately, these items are jarringly out of place in a stately Victorian home.

Yet in the context of this performance, they connect the house to something bigger. They widen the frame past Macdonald, a prime minister’s son who later (briefly) became premier of Manitoba, a son of colonial power.

Dalnavert was his house, once. But in Postcolonial Postcards, it is connected to everything that came before and after: indigenous lives, diverse immigrant experiences, and shifting conceptions of what it means to be Canadian.

For this, the performers — which include award-winning Anishinaabe playwright Frances Koncan, Hong Kong-born Winnipeg artist Ming Hon, and renowned cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph — draw on their own experiences.

What they unfurl — we don’t want to give away too much — challenges the more stoic, polished stories about Canadian identity. But it also marks an evolving understanding about Dalnavert’s role in telling Manitoba history.

For instance, it might have been easy for Dalnavert to a host a traditional Canada Day event; Macdonald, after all, was once a young soldier dispatched to quash Métis resistance, and smooth Manitoba’s entry to confederation.

But since the museum reopened in 2015, after a two-year closure and under new ownership, staff members have been rethinking its place in an evolving downtown Winnipeg, and its relationship to the Macdonald family’s colonial history.

“With Canada 150, it felt really not a place to celebrate that Macdonald family narrative anymore,” says Charlene Van Buekenhout, who performs in the show and works as Dalnavert’s marketing director.

“It was time to invite other perspectives and other voices to tell their stories inside this home, which was built around that time, on land that was stolen. That narrative needed to be told.”

One thing the show does not aim to do is give any lectures: there are no hard answers here.

“We’re presenting a lot of questions,” Van Buekenhout says. “I really hope audiences leave here asking questions of their own identity, their own heritage, and their own ideas about celebrating Canada Day.”

Postcolonial Postcards runs twice nightly through June 30, except for rest days on June 26 and 27. Tickets are $15. The building is not wheelchair accessible, but from June 28 and 30 there will be accessible video tours available.

Visit FriendsOfDalnavert.ca or call 204-943-2835 for more information.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca