In June 2017, Mia facilitated a museum-tour-skewer @ The Dalnavert Museum, the former home to Sir John A. McDonald’s son — Hugh John McDonald, located in Winnipeg, MB.
Postcolonial Postcards — part museum tour, part performance, part protest, part object theatre, part installation — all parlous with dashes of disrupts and subverts. Audiences travelled the exotically Victorian and delicate rooms for a short, snapshot-like ‘postcard’ scene, overturning their expectations of the local environment and complicating the colonial narrative before moving onto the next room.
With performances by rascals Ming Hon, Frances Koncan, Kevin Klassen, Jeanne Randolph, and Charlene Van Buekenhout. Lighting & Installation by Jaymez and Sound Design by Davis Plett.
Postcolonial Postcards was devised within a Canadian-Victorian museum setting wherein the housed objects already rest ripe with meaning. The artists confronted the caged artifacts through a variety of improvisation techniques (facilitated by Mia) combined with a mash-up of their own identity (and their own/other objects) as a basis for the generation of material.
From Métis, Anishinaabe, Chinese, Mennonite, Settler, Immigrant, to dancer, actor, performer, writer, videographer and psychiatrist …the project took off from here, developing its own sense of logic and landing in ways only possible with the presence of these artists.
Photography by Leif Norman
Mia Star van Leeuwen 