Toiling, Tolling, and Telling: Performing Dissensus

Abstract

In 2007, Father Keith Heiberg, the parish priest of Ponteix (Saskatchewan, Canada) invited Knowhere Productions to devise a site-specific performance to mark the community’s centennial planned for July of the following year. Knowhere Productions Inc.1 is an artists’ collective that defines its approach, in the words of Grant Kester, as ‘the facilitation of dialogue among diverse communities’ (2004a, p.1). We are, like others who have moved outside the institutions and systems of conventional stage practice, ‘“context providers” […] whose work involves the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations’ (Kester, 2004a, p.1). The project was proposed as a vehicle to catalyse consensus around the specific conditions of this rural and economically marginalized community, challenge stereotypes, valorize its historic culture, encourage its inhabitants to repurpose its accumulated knowledge, and apply it to a strategy for a sustainable future. Over the 12 months leading up to the event, the conversations and processes of consensus-building employed to help the community to ‘imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict’ (Kester, 2004a, p.8) brought the project, in many ways, to a successful, positive, and soughtafter conclusion. However, the notion of consensus — at the very centre of community-oriented practice — is, in part, what this chapter seeks to problematize.