In this blog, Dr Mariah (Mo) Horner, Queen’s Drama professor and Cellar Door Project artistic director, reflects on the idea of “guests, hosts, and ghosts” and how historic houses come alive through the people who inhabit them. Drawing from her background in site-specific theatre and her work on House Guest 2 at Macpherson House, she explores how performance, memory, and place can create meaningful, living connections with history.
Guests at the Macpherson House
by dr mariah (mo) horner
I first met the phrase “a guest + a host = a ghost” when I was participating in a residency under the same name at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queen’s in Kingston. Initiated by Sunny Kerr, Neven Lochhead and Dylan Robinson, this residency invited artists to explore “a method for transitioning the [Agnes Etherington House] back into a home that furthers the cause of art in the community, both physically and symbolically…” The house, standing next to the vibrant on-campus museum, was the home of Kingston cultural figure Agnes Etherington, known for her leading role in the creation of the Fine Arts program at Queen’s in the early 20th century. She was also known for her parties. As a key social figure in the early cultural scene in Kingston, her home was a gathering space for artists and arts lovers until she died in the 1950s. After it was donated to the museum, the house remained open to the public as an additional wing to the museum, holding rotating exhibits throughout the seasons. Staff offices sit on the second floor.
Among other programs and exhibitions, “a guest + a host = a ghost” was born out of the desire to enliven the house before Agnes Reimagined, the $100M renovation that would totally change the landscape of this museum. In “a guest + a host = a ghost,” we were invited to find ways to activate the house not as a gallery, but as a home. We found old posters of exhibitions in the basement and tacked them on the walls. We ate lunch and napped in the space. We sang guilty pleasure karaoke in the closets. At one point, we painted fixtures a neon orange. A band rehearsed in one of the empty rooms. I hosted 30 elementary-aged children (mid-pandemic) to square dance with live fiddles. We were noisy. The house shaked. We made a mess. We were guests, the house was the host, I felt the ghosts dance around me.
Later research revealed to me that this phrase was first used as a title to an artwork by French-American surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp in 1953, to reference the alchemic relational and transformational potential of people and the spaces they inhabit. There is plenty of scholarship and artwork about site and space as a key player in our material reality as people. I don’t need to tell readers of this blog the importance and resonance of living history museums. French cultural theorist Pierra Nora writes about these “lieux de memoire,” or places of memory that hold history in complex ways, just like people do. Victor Hugo writes, “Exact locality is one of the first elements of reality. The speaking or acting characters do not alone engrave the faithful impression of facts on the soul of the spectator…. the absence of this sort of silent character makes the greatest scenes of history in the drama incomplete.”
My own obsession with the hosts, ghosts, and guests of site-specific performance is 15 years old. I co-founded site-specific theatre company Cellar Door Project with Devon Jackson in 2012 after a class project for a social history class presented me with an empathetic and embodied approach to six people, later characters, who were once temporarily incarcerated in the holding cells underneath Kingston City Hall. Since that moment, I’ve become obsessed with collaborating with sites as tethered witnesses to the past, present, and future(s). I’ve made this kind of theatre in the Lower Burial Ground at St. Paul’s Anglican in Kingston, the Royal Tavern, Brian’s Record Option, Murney Tower, and the Diefenbunker. Over the years, many of these spaces and their ghosts hosted me as their guest. Site has seen it all. Theatre allows us to activate some of these other past and possible future realities that may share a geography with us.
Enter House Guest 2.
In this case, the guests were five brilliant undergraduate students (Maddie Cottreau, Jo Patey, Kaitlin Schuttler, Taylor Snelling, and Anandi Dajka) from the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. The host? The Macpherson House at Christmastime and the remarkable curatorial team from the Museum of Lennox and Addington: JoAnne Himmelman, Liz Watkins-McLean, Karen Price, Alannah MacGregor, Heather Wilson, and our two ushers Z and Ellah. The ghosts? Mary, Hennie, and Willie of course!
The hosts were the best in the business. The house itself is breathtaking and resonant but the innovative curatorial team are the real stars of the show. Imaginative, generous, and inviting, their dedication to the decoration of the space astounded us. Like true hosts, everyone who attended was served cider or shortbread to drink under the gorgeous and festive kissing ball. These folks brought an incredible openness to our process that is a gift as artists. JoAnne gave us so much creative freedom in the space while simultaneously offering us substantial historical information as inspiration. JoAnne is a supportive visionary, dreaming up creative ways to bring life into this house. This team was exceptional at both respecting the house as a historical artifact and enlivening it for the contemporary community. Bravo!
Photos by Liz Watkins-McLean
The guests, the student team, were playful and dedicated. Maddie, Jo, Kaitlin, Taylor, and Anandi, wrote, directed, starred in, and designed this original show in only eight weeks! When we first met at the end of October, they started by pouring through the research from the curatorial team (one of them even read The Secret of Willow Castle) to find these characters and give them the texture they deserved through performance. Of these five students, none of them had ever worked together before and only one of them worked site-specifically before (last year at House Guest 1!) These students approached this challenge with skill and commitment, bringing so much insight to the process and being very open to collaborating with each other, the folks on the curatorial team, and the house itself. As a professor, working on a project like this is a total gift. Students had the opportunity to face a challenge, make something brilliant, and develop new relationships in the community. I feel lucky to host my students as they develop skills through experiential learning in immersive and participatory theatre in a striking environment.
The ghosts kept us company too. The actors often felt the presence of Mary in the house, faucets would turn on without warning and sometimes we could hear knocking on walls. It was never scary though, rather, it simply felt like we were in good company.
Here’s to finding messy, embodied, and playful ways to commune together as guests, hosts, and ghosts! Here’s to finding ways to bring the vibrant public back into relation with these historical spaces, inviting a kind of up close and personal look at the host and her guests. My sincerest gratitude for the amazing team at the Macpherson House that held up this house and this project.
