Mapping the Canadian landscape : the performing arts and experiential perspectives

Focusing on a specific time period in Canadian performing art history--from the 1970s through to the late 1990s--this thesis "maps out" three artists' experiences in the landscape and the way these experiences are represented to an audience through performance. Using specific examples from the repertoire of Davida Monk, Paul Thompson, and R. Murray Schafer, I make a case for considering these performing artists as landscape researchers. I suggest that their performances explicitly and implicitly explore foundational questions about the meanings, uses, and affective power of landscape in ways that are analogous to the writings of cultural geographers during the same period. Like Yi-Fu Tuan, John Jakle, Denis Cosgrove and Jay Appleton, these performing artists examine the experience of humans in the landscape and focus on issues of place and space, homeland, and the meaning of landscape. Monk, Thompson and Schafer extend the perspectives of the geographers and bridge important gaps in their ways of knowing landscape.