Mining Main Street memories
Storymobile collects Calgary anecdotes
The ultimate act of preservation for every city is to save people’s stories.
This weekend, a group of story harvesters will prowl the streets of Inglewood ( Saturday) and Kensington (Monday), recording various Calgarians’ ‘main street’ memories.
Lisa Marie DiLiberto and Charles Ketchabaw are a pair of Toronto theatre makers (Fixt Point Theatre) manning the Storymobile across Canada, collecting people’s Main Street memories as part of The Tale of a Town — Canada, an ambitious project being presented across the country in partnership with the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and The Walrus Magazine.
The duo will present a performance installation of some of the stories they collect in Medicine Hat Aug. 26, at the Esplanade Heritage and Arts Centre. (They are also creating podcasts that will be available on The Walrus website and mapping the stories of each city they visit across the country).
For DiLiberto, who directed The Keith Richards One Woman Show at the 2015 High Performance Rodeo, nothing beats the sound of a real person telling a story.
“To me, it’s really interesting to hear the actual people telling their stories,” she says, “and mix that with a live performance — because then people really understand.
“It’s one thing to capture it through pictures and writing,” she says, “but to hear someone’s voice and anecdotes is quite spectacular.” Why Main Street memories? “The idea of the project,” she says, “is how people remember the kind of community that was formed around Main Street in their life and then inspired them to continue to frequent main streets and go downtown.
“What’s happening (to our Main Streets)?” she asks. “Why do people care about Main Street? What memories that building holds (for us), why we should preserve it — and what is the vision for the future?”
As the duo travelled across Canada, several recurring themes have cropped up, whether on the drive from Winnipeg to Churchill, Man., or in Saskatchewan or any of the other provinces they’ve visited (Alberta is their ninth).
“We hear a lot of stories about old hotels,” she says, “lots of stories about gathering at the old post office, tons about cinemas and that being like the centre focal point (of a place) — we try to cover a lot of torn down buildings, things about development, how big boxes have changed the main street culture.
The Storymobile will be parked somewhere on 9th Avenue S.E. by 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning, where people who want to share their main street memories will be invited to jump in and be recorded.
It’s a project inspired, in part, by Storycorps, a National Public Radio project in the United States that uses a mobile recording studio to drive around the country, collecting oral histories from citizens, DiLiberto says.
Storymobile seeks to create a kind of institutional memory, to preserve individual experiences at a time when stores get bigger, and more corporate, and personal connection with the community feels as if gets smaller, DiLiberto says.
“It’s just more interesting,” she says, “to have downtowns full of unique places and shops that you know. It’s a lot more interesting and artistic than a whole bunch of big stores where you’re just a number, nobody knows your name and there’s nothing unique about them.” www.thetaleofatown.com.