UBC Graduate Research

The Outport Masque Boone, Nora

Abstract

Mummering is a common masking tradition in Newfoundland and Labrador, practiced in the many contemporary and resettled outports that populate the island’s coastline. Drawing from historic and contemporary political and social conditions in outport Newfoundland, The Outport Masque imagines a floating festival, inspired by the practice of mummering, that travels to different outport communities, inciting a temporary performing arts industry. This thesis seeks to understand and conceptualize the practice of mummering in relation to typical social and spatial order in outport Newfoundland. Drawing from folklore, psychology, material culture, and sociology, this work first conceptualizes the cognitive, social, and spatial patterns of mummering: temporality, inversion and reversal of the typical, exaggeration, imitation, collage, and performance, and studies common outport typologies as sites of intervention. This work explores how the conceptual patterns of mummering may be applied architecturally, to generate a contemporary outport Newfoundland architecture that reflects local history, folklore, culture, and art.

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Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International