Scale Model of the 'Matriarchal Response Vehicle 002' created for Family Dynamics, a Durational Performance by Dietrich Schulze, Goat Barn Exhibition Space, 2022
Performance Art
Performance art, while perhaps less central to contemporary artistic discourse now than it was during its heyday from the late 1960s into the early 2000s, remains a vital element of [neo] rural contemporary art practice as it creates direct, embodied connections between people, place, and especially as it potentially articulates rural cultural practices and traditions. It challenges the boundaries that media art inevitably only encodes, it encourages participation, and re-imagines rural life as dynamic and evolving.
While traditional Western performance art tended to emphasize the body of the artist as the site or nexus of conflicting discourses of power and privilege, it mainly foregrounded individual experience. In a rural context, performance art must also find ways to meaningfully express collective experience, and activate landscapes, local histories, and community rituals in ways that static art forms cannot, offering a living dialogue between past and present. A good example of this strategy is a recently commissioned project:
[ Project 001.018.04..001 ]
Performing Horticulture : Growth | Power | Jouissance
Gardening v. Farming as expressions of rural dichotomies and social practice
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Below, FARMING performed by Richard 'Dick' LaSalle Centre-Island Agricultural Land Reserve, ca. 2018
Above: GARDENING, performed by Desdemona Hyuryniyuk, Gabriola Gardeners Collective, ca. 2018
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Performing Horticulture : growth / power / jouissance is a performance project in four parts that examines gardening and farming not as separate activities but as variations of a shared act: the cultivation of life. Through this lens, the work explores how differences in scale, embodiment, gender, and labour structure the way we understand, value, and politicize rural practices.
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Gardening, often coded as feminized, domestic, and aesthetic, is performed at the scale of the body—localized, responsive, and relational. It is intimate and largely uncommodified. Farming, by contrast, is masculinized, instrumental, and tied to productivity and capital. It operates across landscapes, labour forces, and economies of scale. And yet, the gestures remain: to dig, to plant, to tend, to harvest.
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What distinguishes the two is not function, but framing. Performing Horticulture : growth / power / jouissance contends that gardening and farming represent polarized performances of rural labour—miniaturized versus industrialized, unalienated versus alienated, invisible versus infrastructural. The garden becomes a site of care, ornament, or hobby; the farm a site of extraction, ownership, and state legibility. The garden is also both a private space and a site of social discourse, whereas the 'field' calims to be exclusively utilitarian, and articulates different modalities of power to contain and control.
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This project investigates how these distinctions reflect and reproduce broader power imbalances: between genders, between human and non-human actors, and between forms of land use that are either sanctioned or sidelined by dominant agricultural and economic systems. It considers how miniaturization—scaling down a practice—can both disempower and radicalize, turning care into resistance, subsistence into refusal.
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Through a constellation of research, fieldwork, artistic response, and performance, growth / agency / power seeks to reconceive cultivation as a political act. It reframes rural labour as a form of knowledge production—embodied, situated, and contested. Whether in garden or field, this project insists: every act of growing is also an act of world-making.
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Within Performing Horticulture : growth / power / jouissance, gardening and farming are also explored through the psychoanalytic lens of jouissance—a mode of pleasure that exceeds utility, moving beyond satisfaction into the realm of intensity, excess, and sometimes discomfort. Unlike conventional enjoyment tied to achievement or consumption, jouissance is unruly, embodied, and often transgressive. Both gardening and farming, despite their associations with discipline and necessity, are saturated with this dimension of affective overflow: In gardening, jouissance manifests in the repetitive gestures of care—the kneeling, weeding, pruning, touching—that tether the body to the earth in ways that blur the boundaries between subject and environment. It emerges in the pleasure of form without function: the gratuitous bloom, the excessive growth, the compost pile teeming with life and decay. In farming, jouissance may surface through scale, through the rush of seasonal cycles, the sensual exhaustion of harvest, or the ecstatic risk of dependence on unpredictable weather and yield.
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Both practices reveal how rural labour, far from being merely instrumental, holds the potential for a bodily and psychic surplus. Performing Horticulture : growth / power / jouissance considers how this surplus destabilizes the opposition between labour and leisure, use and excess—recasting cultivation itself as a deeply affective, erotically charged form of engagement with land and time.​
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Below: GARDENING, performed by Daniel Alistair French, Private Garden, Whalebone Hollow, ca. 2020
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Above, FARMING performed by Carol Higgins, Centre-Island Agricultural Land Reserve, ca. 2018
Domestic Garden Plot, Whalebone Area, Gabriola, ca. 2022
[ Project 001.022.03.002 ]
[RE]ncounter
Situated Performance Series
REncounter, Performance by JeniFer SpiritHawk, Netloft, Photograph courtesy the artists, ca. 2022
JeniFer Spirithawk’s REncounter draws its concept from a canonical moment in performance art, yet it deliberately departs from the original’s assumptions, context, and aesthetics. While the work clearly references Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present the staging is deliberately and significantly different, foregoing the institutionalized space of the museum, and with it the assumption of an urban spectator and their self-awareness. Instead, Spirithawk reimagines the core gesture of the “encounter” within a radically different framework: one shaped by land, slowness a deeply rural understanding of presence and an individual mode of encounter.
Where Abramović’s work foregrounded the performer’s will, pushing the limits of body and audience through an almost monastic discipline of self as art object, Spirithawk’s REncounter refuses to present as spectacle. Her durational performance does not elevate the artist as a singular presence to be witnessed, but diverts attention outward—to the environment, the surrounding silences, and the shared vulnerability between artist and participant. Seated in an open field, a repurposed barn, or a remote grove, Spirithawk meets each viewer not with confrontation but with welcome—a gesture that is as much about the land as it is about the body. This is an encounter informed by hospitality, rather than hostility.
Again, in contrast with Abramović's, this is not a performance of endurance but of attunement. Spirithawk’s stillness arises not from control but from listening, not from transcending discomfort but from sinking into it with grace. The rural setting is not a backdrop; it is collaborator, co-performer, and witness. Wind, birdsong, distant dogs, and shifting light are folded into the piece as active elements. By locating REncounter outside institutional time and space, Spirithawk signals a departure from the authority of the museum and an allegiance to forms of knowledge and connection that are spiritual, ancestral, and land-based.
Her performance is as much ritual as it is art. Drawing on traditions of sitting vigil, of spiritual watchfulness, and of Indigenous and rural modes of being-with, Encounter is a performance that does not ask to be interpreted so much as experienced—slowly, respectfully, bodily. Conceptually rigorous, it is at the same time grounded in the ineffable: an offering rather than a provocation, a ritual rather than a presentation.
In its rural setting and its spiritual intentionality, REncounter redefines what it means to be present. Spirithawk does not replicate Abramović—she moves past her, into another form of encounter altogether: one that listens, waits, and belongs.
REncounter, Performance by JeniFer SpiritHawk, Private Garden, Whalebone Area, Photograph courtesy the artists, ca. 2022
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REncounter, Nester's Food Mart, Performance by JeniFer SpiritHawk, Photograph courtesy the artists, ca. 2022
[ Project 001.025.01.003 ]
Comedia dei Coloni
A Rural Theatre of Masks and Mischief on the Islands of the West Coast

One of the more curious traditions among the performing arts on the Salish Sea Islands is a hybrid form of masked theatre that has continued to thrive, albeit at times only as an underground activity, since the mid-1800s and is refered to as Comedia di Coloni.
Rooted in the improvisational structures of the traditional Comedia dell’Arte, it first arrived with European settlers in the mid-1800s as a rustic echo of the way that the original characters challenge the affectations and vacuous pomposity of authority, but quickly adapted to its new surroundings and was retooled to reflect the social conditions of ‘frontier’ life. What began as itinerant mimicry evolved into a localized, living folk theatre that continues to the present day, reflecting the changing rhythms, tensions, and absurdities of settler life in remote communities.
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In its first documented appearances on the Coast, the Commedia's Arlequino becomes the Dock Rat—a wiry trickster in patchwork oilskins, always one step ahead of authority, smuggling truths and moonshine. Pulcinella is now the Oracle, a hunched and raspy driftwood philosopher whose jokes are as sharp as his knife. Pantalone morphs into the Storeman, the miserly shopkeeper or cannery boss who counts every nail and nickel, a stand-in for colonial greed and local power. Il Dottore reappears as Doc Bouvier, the self-declared island expert on everything from whale migration to marriage laws—full of gossip, booze, and half-truths, often quoting Darwin and always getting it wrong.
The Innamorati, the archetypal lovers, re-emerge as the big landowner’s daughter and the young Snuneymouxw warrior—romantics caught between dreams of escape and duties to their social class and culture.. And Il Capitano, once the cowardly braggart soldier, becomes the Mainlander—a puffed-up outsider full of grand schemes, lumber baron ambitions, or bureaucratic mandates, laughed off the island but always finding ways to return.
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Performed in a blend of English, Hulquminum and Chinook Trading Jargon, Comedia performances oscillated between scripted parts and zany improvisations while the masks gradually changed with the characters, incorporating elements from both the Coastal traditions and the Noh theatre of Japanese fishing communities along the Fraser River. Satirizing everything from land ownership to transportation calamities, performances reflect the cultural resilience of small islands grappling with isolation, scarcity, and bureaucratic absurdity. Early performances were open-air and exuberant, often following seasonal rhythms: the fall cider play, the spring thaw farce. Stories satirized local authority, colonial bureaucracy, and the theatre of settler respectability.
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Over time, these events took on the character of seasonal community celebrations as they expanded in scope and duration to involve feasting, the exchange of gifts and tools, and presentations by different settler families. By the late 1890s, this began to draw the attention of the provincial authorities, as the tonal resemblance to potlatches—banned under Canadian law from 1885 to 1951, alerted church officials and colonial administrators. Although its informal nature made it difficult to ban outright, church officials and school inspectors found ways to discourage Commedia dei Coloni performances along with any event that involved communal feasting, gift exchanges and masked performances. Soon, theatres were subject to punitive 'fire and safety inspections' by the local Fire Departments, the RCMP kept tabs on individual performers, masks and props were mysteriously stolen or destroyed and informants began to keep lists of participants .
The plays retreated indoors, renamed as “Harvest Revues” or “Winter Frolics.” During the 1930s, as pressure continued, the traditional masks were abandoned, and the Comedia camouflaged itself as the annual staging of Shakespearean drama. The characters morphed once again, with Pantalone as Shylock, Il Dottore as a portly version of Hamlet and the other characters drawn from As you Like it and a Midsummer's Night's Dream. This strategy appears to have worked in keeping the authorities in the dark.
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By the late 1960s, Comedia dei Coloni had gone fully underground. Revived by young artists, draft dodgers and old-timers, the characters once again shifted shape. The Dock Rat became the haplessly incompetent Islands Trustee. The Storeman evolved into the Credit Union Manager. Tanglefoot, always a shapeshifter now reappeared as Auntie June, a grandmotherly oracle and editor of the local paper. The lovers were transformed into a pair of old hippies, while Il Dottore and the Mainlander remained as they had always been: pompous paragons of authority without foundation. Feasting and Gifting reappeared and performances were staged in barns, boatsheds, even car repair shops—invitation-only events, operating on oral scripts, passed hand to hand, and eventually the masks returned.
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While it never regained to sheer outrageous wit and energy of the original, today, Comedia dei Coloni endures as a contemporary, intergenerational, and interstitial practice. Performed by enthusiastic amateurs, as always, it has lost the connection to material exchanges but it survives as a theatre of resistance and subversion, as a satirical strategy for surviving climate anxiety, and as a masked dialogue with power and place. Never fully visible, never quite extinguished, it continues to grow in the shadow of the empire, laughing back.
Comedia dell Coloni, Foreshore of Gambier Island (?), Daguerrotype by William Ferenc, ca. 1900
Comedia dell Coloni, masquerading as The Merchant of Venice,
Performance at Drumbeg Park, Gabriola Island, Photographer unknown, ca 1952
Comedia di Coloni Masks, Left to Right: Pulchinella, Pantalone, Il Dottore, Arleqquino
Comedia dell Coloni, Performance at Gabriola Automotive, Photograph by May Koons, ca 1974
Comedia dell Coloni, Performance at the Gabriola Theatre Centre, ca 2024
[Re]Embodying Rural Performance Art Practice
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