The Usher Project
To Watch A Video of The Usher Project in Development, Click Here
Overview of the Project In Development
The Usher Project (named after Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher), is a multi-disciplinary piece fusing theatre, dance, music, ASL and video to explore the Gothic era and its relation to feminism, as well as our current cultural obsession with gothic subjects such as vampires, madness, dream states and the connection between sexuality and death. The performance combines a physical performance style, sign language, original music and an installation-like, site-specific use of space (an old mansion). The overall construction of the story is of three illegitimate sisters in a derelict house, abandoned there alone for 25 years. As in The Fall of the House of Usher, the house itself plays the role of patriarch: confining, oppressing, terrorizing the sisters with its own decay and tremulous malcontent. The audience enters the house and becomes “the visitor” as in Poe’s story, bearing witness to its demise. Incorporating both hearing and deaf performers this unique piece has created a language that bridges the gap, integrating both English and ASL into the theatrical core of the work.
As director, Josette Bushell-Mingo explains, “With the Usher Project we compare the male Gothic genre where the female is a victim, conquered, versus female writers’ works, where women explore emancipation through ghosts, cemeteries, and death. Feminism and gothic feminism have similar foundations. Feminism separates sex and gender. Feminists advocate for equality of the sexes and acknowledge patriarchal cultural indoctrination and want to offer remedies. Feminism employs activism. Arguably Gothic feminism is a form of feminism. For the female gothic writer, the male character is a political and social conduit, embodying a male character with a female voice. By taking various pieces of Gothic literature from the 1800s and adapting it to be performed by three Canadian women from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, we are inherently examining our place in the world at large. By incorporating a Deaf performer into the ensemble, we are bridging yet another cultural divide. Ideally, the audience is unaware of which is Deaf, as we will all use ASL.” Indeed the choreographic language will be devised by using the foundations of ASL.
List Of Creators
Director Josette Bushell-Mingo
Creator Anna Hardwick
Creator Lisa Karen Cox
Creator Dawn Jani Birley
Writer Erin Shields
Assistant Director Birgit Schreyer Duarte
Assistant Director Deanna Downes
Video/Installation Design Denyse Karn
