Forgetting Asian Canadian Experimental Performance: Haruko Okano and Fred Wah’s High(bridi)Tea

Abstract

In this article, I argue that High(bridi)Tea issues an important challenge to the developmental narratives of both dominant and “marginal” accounts of Canadian history and memory, including a still-formulating, pan-ethnic “Asian Canadian” history and memory that has been in the process of unfolding since the late 1960s. Developed and presented at the turn of the twenty-first century, after the federal government’s 1988 apology for Japanese Canadian internment but before apologies for restricting, and then eventually barring, Chinese immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1947, High(bridi)Tea recalls the painful multigenerational effects of national exclusion and internment on Chinese and Japanese Canadian subjects during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, as a participatory performance event staged around the rituals of presenting, serving, and consuming tea in real-time, High(bridi)Tea articulates this history not just along the lines of narrative or thematic content, but through an embodied and social relational exploration of the high tea service as commemorative cultural ceremony in the present.