7th Cousins
An Automythography
From July 7th to August 6th, 2015, we walked 700 kilometres, from Pennsylvania to Ontario. A stranger asked if we were walking to learn how to work and be together. This was certainly part of it.
In July 2015, Erin Brubacher and Christine Brubaker, two politically left, secular, Canadian women traced the migration route of their Mennonite ancestors by walking from Pennsylvania to Ontario, through the American Bible Belt. Along the way they were hosted by a series of people with whom they had next to nothing in common. They were welcomed into strangers' homes and treated as family. On their journey they encountered folks with religious and political beliefs very different from their own and learned to question what conversations to enter and how far to take them. They accomplished this and so much more while navigating their own relationship and the challenges of being with another person, on foot, for 32 days. 7th Cousins: An Automythography documents the walk itself and the performance text they generated afterwards. Included throughout are photo essays from the journey and commentaries from their collaborators Christopher Stanton, Andrea Nann, Kaitlin Hickey and Erum Khan.
ERIN BRUBACHER is a multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of the poetry collection In the small hours: Thirty-nine months & seven days and co-author of the hybrid, performance-based book 7th Cousins: An Automythography. Her award-winning work in theatre has taken her to contexts including the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico), Theater der Welt (Germany), and the Edinburgh International Festival (UK). Erin lived in ten cities before returning to Toronto, where she makes a home with her husband and four children.
CHRISTINE BRUBAKER is a director, actor and educator. She splits her time between Calgary, where she is on faculty at University of Calgary's School of Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA), and Toronto, where she works in a variety of theatre contexts, including directing, dramaturging new work and performing. Christine is the creator and co-writer of Henry G20, a large-scale outdoor performance. She is the winner of two Dora Mavor Awards for Performance, the 2014 Gina Wilkinson Prize for Direction, and the 2016 Ken MacDougall Prize for Emerging Director.
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