The UC San Diego Department of Theatre + Dance presents: 

Sounding the Minor in Monika Kin Gagnon's Happy Birthday! 

A conversation with Olivia Michiko Gagnon as part of the MOVING (IN) THE WORLD: PERFORMING AND THEORIZING SOCIAL CHANGE series.

About the Talk

In this short talk, I spend time with my mother Monika Kin Gagnon’s 6-minute film Happy Birthday! –– which combines found archival sound recorded in 1970 by her artist-father (my grandfather) Charles Gagnon at her 9th birthday party, with original black-and-white 16mm film that she shot while attending the Film Farm. I ask what it does to sound the minor details of history, and try to think that sounding as a part of project not rooted in historical recovery, but in a return to where and how history lives in the body––as fleeting scrap, as multi-sensuous trace.

About the Panelist

Olivia Michiko Gagnon is assistant professor of theatre & performance studies in the Department of Theatre & Film at UBC. She is currently working on her first book, which theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method of doing history otherwise –– through art & performance and beyond archival stricture.