Difficult stories brought to life onstage
Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa have created a unique way to honour the lives and the stories of Japanese Canadians who were forced into internment camps during the Second World War.
The Tashme Project: The Living Archives uses oral histories based on interviews with second-generation Japanese Canadians to create a theatre play about Japanese internment in Canada during the war. The show was performed in venues across the country last year and made the 2019 short list for the Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Community Programming. Manning and Miwa met when they were in drama school together in Vancouver, and they soon realized that members of their families had been interned in the same camp.
After working together for five years they turned the interview transcripts into a one-hour play that draws on twenty different stories.