Anne Nothof, Athabasca U
Performing History Backwards: Love and Death in the Crowsnest Pass

In two very different versions of a story of rum running along the B.C. border in the Crowsnest Pass in the 1920s, Sharon Pollock and John Murrell perform history as tragedy. From the perspective of the rearview mirror of the “Whiskey Six” McLaughlin in which the rum was smuggled, the death of Filumena Lassandro, recast as Leah by Pollock, is inevitable. Her accomplice, Emilio Picariello, or “Emperor Pic” in the opera Filumena, and “Mr. Big” in Whiskey Six, is both a perpetrator and victim of crime. Librettist John Murrell, collaborating with composer John Estacio, performs the “passion and pathos” of the “exceptional true life-story” (Program Note ) of the last woman to be hanged for murder in Canada at the age of 23 in the context of an Italian community compromised by bigotry and ambition. Pollock’s play dramatizes the story as the consequence of personal choices, complicated by socio-political forces imagined as the lights of an onrushing train, leaving in its track the detritus of smashed families and communities.In an installation mounted at the Banff Centre during the production of Filumena, Gisele Amantes also interrogated the way history is “read” by exploring the role of subjective impressions, assumptions, and stereotypes in historical narratives in terms of the Filumena story. Each of these performances engages in an exchange of public and personal which “dramatically emphasizes the contradictions of how the personal can be implicated in the way we negotiate traditions, customs, and belief” (Anthony Kiendl, Exhibition curator for “Reading History Backwards” by Gisele Amantes).