Davis, Rae McDonough, 1927-2006 : Rae (McDonough) Davis was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1927. She received her Masters in English from Columbia University in 1952. In 1959, she moved with her husband John Davis to London, Ontario where she commenced a long relationship with theatre direction.
Her first important directorial interpretations began at the University of Western Ontario Drama Society with several of Samuel Beckett's plays - Act Without Words I (1959), "Krapp's Last Tape" (1962), "Endgame" (1964) and "Happy Days" (1966). Collaborative works with artists Tony Urquhart and David Rabinovitch, in 1968 and 1971, involved the play "The Chairs" by Eugene Ionesco. All her theatrical work referenced the avant-garde impulses of the time and, in 1963, Davis wrote her first score for a work that would later be classified as 'performance art' (an artistic term which did not even come into use until 1970). Davis' seminal 1963 play "Simple Activities", involving five separate activities performed simultaneously, sought to break down the tradition of story line and structured plot. She set out to alter naturalistic theatrical conventions so prevalent in the 1950s and, perhaps, mirror the excitement of the 'happenings' of the early 1960s which embraced the chance encounter and, above all, spontaneity. By 1965, Davis focused on writing her own theatre pieces and committed herself to the challenge of bringing to bear on theatre performances innovation and elements of collage which had been enthusiastically taken up in the art forms of painting and sculpture.
Her play "Daily News from the Whole World" (1965-1966) was a trilogy of assemblages for the theatre with a set by a well-known London artist Greg Curnoe. Produced at Hart House Theatre in Toronto, it won the Central Ontario Drama League Award. Plotless and lacking any conventional narrative, it essentially sought to turn theatre on its head. Always slightly ahead of her time, by 1966 she had begun to investigate the potentialities of computer technology. Her computerized language play "ECCE or Greece as seen through a natural environment kaleidoscope" was a piece for theatre that was developed by carefully controlled chance methods mirroring computer processes. Each of four performers had a few sentences to say which were subject to random rearrangement. As a pioneer in the practice of performance, hers was a lonely place at a time when no one in London was engaged in this type of artwork. Her work often demanded patient and reflective participation and was frequently misunderstood by critics and the public.
Davis and her husband John, together with Greg Curnoe and others, founded 20/20 Gallery in London. During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued writing art criticism, including an extensive article on the artists of London for Canadian Art, as well as her own poetry.
In 1974, she produced a key piece entitled "Pink Melon Joy. Gertrude Stein Out Loud" at the University of Western Ontario Drama Workshop, with a set by David Rabinovitch. This was an assemblage of six plays, prose, found objects projected on a screen, and poetry. It included a cast of nine actors and twenty-seven dancers. The artist had long been fascinated with the work of Stein and later wrote an unpublished manuscript entitled "Playing the Plays of Gertrude Stein: A Production Notebook". "Pink Melon Joy" was a performance piece which made manifest Stein's interpretation of experience - many sided, often trivial, overlapping, with a multitude of meanings and interpretations. From 1975 on, all her work was produced for and in art spaces rather than traditional theatre structures. Her pieces were frequently funded by the Canada Council and the Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils. Several major works were produced in the late 1970s, including the performances "Ivy's Night, Edna's Days", 1978 and "Putting yourself into it", 1979.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Davis would go on to create more and more complex projects, often involving new media. Underlying Davis' work produced over this period was an embracing of a theatrical structure in which actors play themselves, engaged for the most part in daily activities, in fabricated spaces. Critical pieces created during this period included "Ghiberti's Doors", 1983; "Vanishing Acts", 1986; "Cataract", 1992; and "Surge" (with filmmaker Barbara Sternberg), 1998. In 2000, she contributed an essay to a publication on the films of Sternberg entitled "Like a Dream that Vanishes" (The Images Festival of Independent Film and Video). Throughout her life, the artist used her extensive explorative readings in philosophy, physics, architecture, poetry and film to charge her creative thinking. Her exhaustive notes on complex texts were the fodder for many of her artistic creations. In addition to numerous articles published on her work, two authoritative catalogues on Davis were published: Being and Doing Rae Davis: Work 1959-1986 (London Regional Art Gallery, 1986) by Goldie Rans; and Rae Davis: Unfoldings (Art Gallery of Windsor, 2001) by Robert McKaskell. The culmination of her career was her retrospective in 2001-2002 at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
Rae Davis died in 2006. She is survived by her daughter Martha Davis and her son Whitney Davis.
