Watts, Rowan2024-03-162024-03-162024https://hdl.handle.net/1828/16148This research interrogates the play “Storytelling Our Lives” (1998), which was produced by the local, Latin American theatre company, Puente Theatre, and is now in the Lina de Guevara fonds in the UVic Libraries Special Collections. This interrogation concludes that, by sourcing dramatic content from the lived experiences of immigrant women in Victoria, the dramaturgical process of this play resembles the accessioning process of traditional archives. Furthermore, this play seems to have generated a sense of cultural unity in its audiences, bridging wildly diverse backgrounds, distinctly due to its inclusion of community members. Archivists might learn from this study how performance constitutes an unlikely archive of marginalised lived experiences and cultures, and how the efficacy of this unlikely archive depends on its ephemeral nature. Theatre practitioners might better understand how including community members in a professional theatre production bridges cultural gaps in diverse audiences, and thus advocates for the function of “local” theatre. I deploy a method intoned by archival theory, Ric Knowles’ studies of intercultural performance in Canada, and Holledge and Tompkins’ definition of interculturalism.eninterculturalismtheatrearchivetheorydramaturgyperformancePoster