Through the Fictive to the Real(ish): Affective Time and the Representation of “Real Newfoundland” in Rising Tide Theatre’s Trinity Pageant

Abstract

In this article, Jacobson examines the ways in which the Trinity Pageant in Trinity, Newfoundland, Canada aims to animate local culture through a two-hour walking tour around the town’s historic sites that is largely predicated on a sense of realness. Using interviews with audience members and the pageant’s director Donna Butt as primary source material, Jacobson considers the perception and function of realness in the pageant’s re-enactment. She first uses theories of site-specificity, historical re-enactment, and theatrical time to consider the various forms of the “real” at work in the production. Jacobson then suggests the work that might be accomplished by such affectively real performance, as both a marker and maker of real identity, supported by the theories of Elin Diamond and Erin Hurley. Using concepts from Rebecca Schneider and Tracy C. Davis, Jacobson also argues that the affective time created by the pageant’s blending of past history and present-day performance creates a future imperative in which audience members are compelled to save the authentic culture they have just witnessed. Finally, she considers the implicitly conservative preservationist impulse that underscores the pageant’s re-enactment to trouble notions of inclusion, belonging, and community.