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announcinG foldA: festival of live digital Arts

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Last week on Twitter, SpiderWebShow announced the first installment of foldA, a a nation-wide festival of live digital art.

The first foldA will unfold across the country, with a physical base at the recently built “Isabel” in Kingston, ON (Haudensosaunee and Anishinaabe Territory). Digital tools, such as CdnStudio, will network performances together.

A key collaborator is Brendan Healy, formerly of Buddies in Bad Times and recently appointed Artistic Director for the city of Brampton, ON.

Featuring commissioned works exploring both live body and online performance, the festival may be experienced in Kingston at The Isabel, at a local hub, or from home.


The National Arts Centre English Theatre is also a partner.

The inaugural foldA will take place June 20-22, 2018.

For more information, or to get involved, contact SpiderWebShow artistic director Michael Wheeler, michael@spiderwebshow.ca or send a tweet to @spiderwebshow. To support the foldA Festival and other initiatives, you can subscribe to SpiderWebShow.

In The Flesh: arguments for digital performance

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If VR is good enough for the International Space Station, is it good enough for the theatre? (Credit: NASA)

“Know your audience” is the old adage, warning writers of all stripes to consider who will be eventually reading – experiencing – what you are making. The directive also applies to theatre makers.

I have to assume that at least some of the theatre goers out there are consuming culture in the same way that I do: sometimes live, but often mediated by a screen (or three). And to be clear, when I talk about “culture” I’m including that vintage Spanish dance video on Facebook under the same umbrella as the opera Riel at the National Arts Centre. While some might designate one a higher or more refined art form, to me they are the same: cultural products of this time that we live in, now. Someone chose to mount Riel, just like someone went through the effort of uploading that video and posting it online – where thousands of people have since shared it. Including me.

Screen capture of a vintage Spanish music video. One man in gold lameé jumpsuit sings, four men link arms to throw a third into the air with his arms outstretched like a bird, three women in sparkly gowns dance in unison.
Vintage Georgie Dann video for Una Paloma Blanca.

I feel my brain is changing, and I’m not the only one. I can barely stand to be with my family without modelling terrible smartphone etiquette to my children. I check my notifications while writing, pretty much every time I don’t know what to write next. But I have to think that if audiences are consuming cultural experiences through their computers, surely there are some among us theatre-makers who are curious about the intersection of live performance and the digital. It makes sense to start creating theatre and performance experiences for those spaces.

“Wait,” you say, “What spaces?”

Yes, yes in the past we’ve agreed that theatre happens when the performers and the audience are in the same physical space. But with post-dramatic and relational aesthetics breaking down our assumptions about the definition of performer, isn’t it time to challenge our notions around space? And while we’re at it, let’s breakdown some of our ideas about what constitutes attendance or participation in that space.

Consider the definition of “mind” proposed by Dan Siegle, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, and 40 assorted scientists including neuroscientists, physicists, sociologists and anthropologists 20 years ago. Rather than being sites of brain activity, our minds are “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within us and around us [emphases mine].” In this model, the mind can contract to contain one person (if you’re alone) or expand to include many (if you are with others). More on that HERE.

As a “process regulating energy and information flow within us and around us” the mind becomes a shared territory wherever people are connected by eye contact, proximity, or video link. Arguably, we can share some kind of experience with others who may be geographically distant from us by simply extending our intentions towards each other. Presence “in” the space can mean a physical insertion of a body in the location, but “presence” could also be understood as a viewer’s conscious attention to what is happening there.

Pokemon Go Dragon on a dock at a lake in wilderness
Pokemon Go melds digital and corporeal realities.

So if audiences are increasingly literate and savvy in the digital realm, and digital space has the potential to collapse distance (or grow connection) beyond a single geographic room, then why aren’t we all lined up like kids waiting for the new playground to open?

Digital performance is not a replacement for live performance. But conventional theatre (you know, the kind that happens in theatres) could stand to gain from the experiment. Creating work on new platforms spurs invention and ingenuity among artists who excel in the existing forms. Painting was fine until photography showed up, forcing artists to interrogate the nature of representation itself. And now, time-limited, image-based platforms like Instagram and SnapChat, force us to reflect on intentionality, authenticity and engagement.

This is as good a place as any to confess to my bias towards experimental work. I don’t mourn what once was, instead I celebrate what it could be.

Stanley Waterman suggests festivals temporarily transform everyday places into environments that support the creation and dissemination of culture. What happens when the everyday place hosting the festival is a digital space? Does a digital festival have the potential to transform digital space? Is everyday a festival?

In a way, it already is. Being online is a bit like wandering through a flea market, but one that is customized to your tastes. Want to find an old Cyndi Lauper CD? We can do that. Watch all of her videos? Done. Figure out what her real relationship was to WWE Wrestlemania. No problem. And I haven’t even dipped into the rabbit holes that are Tumblr and reddit.

Four figures gathered around a microphone. Cyndi Lauper speaks into the microphone as the other three individuals look at the camera, somewhat surprised.
Cyndi Lauper fires back at Fabulous Moolah.

I think it’s the placement of the self at the centre of the experience that is leading audiences away from the darkened room and towards the event or spectacle. We want to feel necessary to what is going on. We want to be dazzled from the inside of something. We want to feel closer. Closer to the performers, to the action, to each other.

Creating for digital performance has the potential to transform how we as users engage with digital space. Testing the limits, possibilities, and boundaries of the place where the physical and the digital intersect gives us a form-equals-content platform to explore contemporary questions about distance and proximity, consciousness and the mind, the nature of connection, the nature of solitude, and our dangerous confidence that technology-based solutions will save the world. We stand to become more aware that the digital is a space, of sorts, and that our participation in its flow has repercussions for us physically (see my changing brain, above), socially, and spiritually.

Because sometimes it’s necessary to unplug and turn away from the relentless deluge of information. I did just that the other night. Barred from competing for bandwidth I was left to do the dishes with no web-based entertainment. No Netflix, no Spotify, no This American Life, no CBC.ca. I packed up the radio a year ago. It was just me, the dishes, and the uneasy quiet of a house after two kids have gone to bed.

And wouldn’t you know it, I had an idea for a show. A show that can be experienced the way that we live life now: through multiple devices and mediums at the same time – including our good, old fashioned eyes, ears, and skin. A show that is played as much as viewed. A show that can be accessed from afar, but that also speaks to the value of being here and now, in the flesh.

CANADALAND Guide To Canada – a show that points to new live performance models

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View from back of the balcony on Opening Night at The Hot Docs Cinema.

I did some math in my head as I counted the audience in roughly-full 700-seat Hot Docs cinema (still known in my head as The Bloor) for Canadaland Guide to Canada, World Tour of Canada. The last show I directed, Caryl Churchill’s Objections to Sex and Violence, played to about 80% houses in a 2-week run at a 50-seat venue. More people were going to see this piece on its first performance than the entire run of the Churchill.

Huh.

As we started rehearsals I was struck immediately by the intermediality of the performance we were creating:

The material was coming from where?  The book, Canadaland Guide to Canada.

What is Canadaland? It’s a series of podcasts.

Where would our work be viewed? At film festivals and music venues across Canada.

What were we making? We aspired to create a one-hour piece of theatre.  

What was the purpose of this theatrical World Tour of Canada? To sell copies of the book.

So you get back to the book eventually – but you travel through a few media to get there. This was a bit of an anomalous approach to both creation and producing live performance and I loved it for that right away.

 

 

On the producing side, Jesse brought in Frank and Oak as blatant paid content. They sponsored the tour, provided wardrobe and even had a section of the show about Frank and Oak that segued out of Jesse’s family roots in the Montreal garment district. It honestly didn’t fuck up the show, I think because it was on brand as the same ads the audience would have experienced while consuming Canadaland in podcast form. The novelty of experiencing unabashed paid content, in the form it existed legitimately elsewhere, made it almost normal.

On my end, I was not contracted as a director with a set fee. I was more like a consultant with a daily rate. Each day of me cost X number of dollars and we could pro-rate assuming an eight-hour day. This became the first revenue SpiderWebShow has generated working with online-based content creators on how to create live events with their material, and it’s another possibility I’m really excited about as we build the business model.

Final performance of the tour at The Mansion in Kingston, ON.

The night I saw the final show of the tour in Kingston, I congratulated Jesse on completing a National tour of a self-funded and created live performance piece. He was less-excited because he had just committed to one more, secret, invite-only performance for media-types in New York City (okay fine Brooklyn). The goal was to make a play for book sales in a market ten times our own. Which is when I had to give Jesse the bad news: In that case, we should probably take the show back into rehearsal.

There were two things that could be accomplished by re-looking at the show, knowing it would soon be playing to an audience that would experience it in the context of NYC cultural consumption. One, there was the simple benefit of the knowledge gained from a tour. The bits that worked, the bits that didn’t, and the bits that need a little something different. Jesse knew these better than me, but I had a good sense too from watching the first and last show of the tour. It was just about implementing them and adjusting the cues. The other reason was a dramaturgical one related to the meaning of the show.

When you come to hear a guy do a show about Canada for an hour, you want to leave having a sense of what he thinks about Canada. This was a question addressed in the opening and closing monologues, but it seemed it wasn’t coming through. So we worked it quite a bit and what we discovered was a clear narrative about pride in Canada, because of our collective disdain for celebrating it. *Nationalism as pride in the absence of it.* Armed with this refined version and a clear super-objective (maybe super-argument, or even super-contradiction), Jesse took off for NYC a week ahead of Soulpepper, but with no supportive tweets from the Prime Minister. The book now has a much higher rating on Amazon, so we’re claiming success.

 

The experience has me enthused about doing more of this work with SpiderWebShow. Not just myself, but a number of the members of our national organisation are talented in many of the ways that could be useful realising digital work on stage. As an online live performance company, our work can go both ways – we can work to integrate live performance with online technologies – but we can also work with online content to create live performances.

This isn’t a new idea – to stage works from the internet – but there are new opportunities in terms of a performing arts business model. The digitisation of culture has made almost everything online free, which is a big challenge to generating revenue.  Live performance that happens in physical space can still be monetized at the gate as flesh and blood human beings pass through checkpoints to access content. Some creators on the internet are going to add live in-person performances to their repertoire, and many already do. There are no successful bands that do not tour.

This is what I came back to at a sold out Hot Docs Theatre in Toronto contemplating the attendance of this work versus independently-produced Caryl Churchill. What Canadaland has, that most of us do not, is access to tens of thousands of minds. As online content becomes the dominant cultural force, popular players have the ability to drive an audience to the next wave of live performance. How can we work with them?  I think if you are not running a subscriber based theatre, online creators might be your best chance at finding an audience where you can look around a full large theatre and not know anyone who came to see your show.

Thought Residency: Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen

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We are generation gaps filling in what wasn’t passed down: “This Time will be better.” And with each “no more” and “this way now,” our communion of sound morphs into action. We send our defiance out into tiny circles that make up our world through the work of loving, forgiving, and art-making—all without knowing if or how it may land. In the gap of our isolation, we seek its antithesis: connection.

 

I’m on the road heading East. It’s bittersweet; I love the West but I’m also seeing people with bone structures and shades of skin that look more and more like me; it’s a homecoming. It’s another way of Knowing to move over land where ancestors made love, birthed, and died. Knowing is a migration, an arrival, a Mystery. It’s also a shedding… of the skin of the interloper and of the lie that Home doesn’t exist in shades of red.

 

A White-presenting man recently asked me if I knew who I was after he heard that I’m of mixed ancestry. This settler then told me who I was as an Indigenous woman (which is one of my favourite things, by the way). He was reassured that I already know who I am and more: he seemed to feel… affirmed.

It’s one thing to (re)claim something that’s been taken away by Another; it’s a completely different thing if that same Something’s been usurped by another part of one’s Self.

 

We’re quite small inside our potential. It’s humbling to be human, to be awake with no guarantees, armed only with stories we tell ourselves. Some of us dare to tell new stories. These few who speak what was once unfathomable, scootch closer to the latest version of the True(th). New stories defy what was; they inspirit Promise. To enact unfamiliar truths rings a bell; it harkens a new day.

 

When I picture decolonization, I see my father & uncles returning from their traplines. They’d burst in with a kind of joy that I now know was their childhood—before they were scooped up and the layers of their Darkness settled in. Remembering those dripping rabbit pelts, I know how it feels: we are all Food for someone’s heartbeat. We walk the veins of our bloodlines to where we were first snared and when our memories get caught in our teeth? We speak anyway.

 


When I listen to the echoes of the world… mostly, I hear lineage. I feel what’s been forgotten when I hold a tree close. For those of us born blurred between lines of colour and culture, we are its leaves dancing in the wind. We’re the chorus of a song our ancestors prayed—their story rooted somehow in us. Our bodies are our inheritance. A legacy of survival breathes through us. We are why our ancestors had Hope.

 

I met a stranger and discovered that we are deeply familiar to one another. Neither of us understand it but we both implicitly trust it—this Knowing. How little of the world I truly understand, Time being but one of many layers to my wanton ignorance. I wonder how close are we to an Other Life? To intimate knowledge of another? Are we always on the cusp of discovering that we are more than we think we are… were… can be?

 

I am tired. My heart is a little bent in places and I still don’t know what it means to have a Calling. I go to the river and I hold a stone in my hand. This smooth, ancient bone shard reminds me that I am soft and new and a visitor here. This is the way the land speaks—tender even when it burns. Ceremony is its poetry… each stanza an offer, waiting for something deeper than thought to notice, hoping its Call will wake us up.

 

We Anishinaabe think of knowledge as Teachings. We wait for our teachers to arrive. The purpose of all knowledge is to pass it on and those who are, are only Knowledge Keepers for a time.

My son’s arrival was lodged in me for years, but I only recognized that the feeling-he-had-been was gone long after he was born. I didn’t know he was coming. I didn’t know how much I needed his knowledge. He’s teaching me to be a Keeper and in this space, I’m learning to create.

 

There’s very little elegance when creating something from nothing. It’s gangly work to let go of expectation—to endure the growing pains of acceptance and the insufferable lack of clarity that sucks the marrow of your joy. It’s not until an exquisitely lucid moment of connection surprises you and what was a problem, a resentment, or a looming fiasco suddenly becomes a rite of passage.

 


I’ve been trained to hold the space—to fulfill my responsibilities by caring for community. But the older I get, the more I seem to fail at holding the space in a Good Way. And with each failure, I think I may be learning that the space is holding me and my failure… and my actual responsibility is to simply carry my fear, not wield it.

 

Today has been a study in humility. I am collaborating on a new piece, and I was reminded that to be inside my own questions is to be exceptionally open to other peoples’ answers.

Everything is about reorienting ourselves to the Thing (with a capital T) that we’ve lost, which is…the Land. And collaboration is a recall of sorts of what we live without, and how we fill it with what we hope might be more.

Learning this land resonates

By
Canadian Native Flag by Curtis Wilson.
About the flag

My wife and kids love Canada Day. My kids are the colour of Canada, all Red and White. Literally. My wife grew up in Kanata. Her family has settler roots in the Ottawa Valley. My little Indians have red hair. Blue eyes. And status cards. Well, they will… once I send the paperwork away.

For me, it’s more complicated. I’m Nlakap’amux. Indigenous.

How are Indigenous people supposed to celebrate the birth of Canada? Most of what we call British Columbia is still un-ceded indigenous territory. Our people were never extinguished, conquered and our lands were never surrendered. That means Canada doesn’t even own it. It’s occupied territory.

My hometown is in the heart of un-ceded Nlakap’amux territory, in the province we now call British Columbia. The village I am from was called tlKumtcheen for over 10,000 years. In 1858, it was renamed after Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton the popular British novelist, poet and occultist famous for quotes like: “It was a dark and stormy night…” and “The pen is mightier than the sword”. This last one is ironic on many levels, but the shared history between Canada and the First Nations adds another layer.

In 1858, my people, the Nlakap’amux, led an uprising against an American invasion of Gold Seekers who had flooded into the Fraser Canyon in search of the shiny, soft, yellow stones. For several months that summer we were attacked and we counter-attacked hordes of bloodthirsty Americans fresh from the brutal, genocidal Indian wars in the States. We fought and eventually pushed them out of the Fraser Canyon that summer.

The Nlakap’amux signed a peace accord with one of the militias invading our territory. A few weeks later James Douglas, the British Governor of Vancouver Island; having no army or jurisdiction on the mainland at all, took advantage of our rebuttal against the invading Americans. Hoping to discourage the Americans from annexing the territory, Douglas floated into the Fraser Canyon with a dozen Royal Engineers and declared all the mainland to be a crown colony of England.

There were no treaties and there was no discussion with the 198 distinct First Nations who had lived and thrived there. He then went about renaming important settlements in the region after familiar British icons. Like Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The Canyon War was over, but the real war against our people had just begun.

In the following century, our populations were decimated. Disease wiped out entire villages. There are mass graves all along the Fraser Canyon, some just off the side of the Trans-Canada Highway. Forgotten by all except the Nlakap’amux Tribal Council genealogy department where my job as a student was to document them in case someone wanted to build a rest area on top of them. Successive gold rushes farther inland meant that the world ran through our territory repeatedly, renaming and reshaping it as they passed. Alcohol and the disasters that follow in its wake were introduced and to this day remain a continuing threat to our people.

We were resettled to smaller, inadequate, and in many cases arbitrary, reserves. Then we were forbidden to leave them without permission. We were told to be farmers, which we became. But when we started out-competing the white farmers, we were forbidden from selling our goods outside of the reserves. So, our farms went under. We were forbidden from selling salmon which for centuries had been our primary trade good.

We were told our children needed to be educated to live in this new reality and that we had to send our kids to Indian Residential Schools to learn. There we were taught by the priests that we were inferior to whites, that our language was the Devil’s tongue, our culture the Devil’s way, all the while the real devils preyed upon on our children in the night.

It is no wonder that the Nlakap’amux word for white person ShA-ma means White Devil. From our shared history, you can see why.

When I think of Canada 150 I think of the Indigenous soldiers who fought in every war this country was involved in, only to return home to social and legislative discrimination. I think of the Indigenous children who grow up in a hopeless world and form suicide pacts to find a common bond in despair. I think of the unending rage and hatred towards our people spouted on social media and the comments sections of news sites. The legislated inequities that are forced upon us by successive governments. And I think of the continued erosion of the natural world that we all depend upon for survival.

The truth is I want to celebrate Canada. I want to be able to join in and say, “hey, you know what? It’s not so bad. All that history stuff doesn’t matter. It happened a long time ago. It’s all good now, right?”

Except it isn’t. It’s still happening. Today. Right now. In your hometown. My hometown.

I suppose we can celebrate our continued existence. Our resiliency. Our resistance against the government and corporate forces bent on environmental degradation. Our ability to find the humour in the darkest of moments. Our ingenuity. Our passion. Our love. For Mother Earth. For Turtle Island. For each other.

I think of the kind words of my wise friend Terry Aleck, one of the first people to bring charges against the church and the government for the abuses he suffered in the Residential School system. “Everything is a healing journey. We’re all just learning together.”

My grandmother, who was a British War Bride (and the source of my children’s red locks), was recognized as an honorary elder of the N’lakap’amux people. Every year for the Remembrance Day pow wow she would proudly lead the Grand Entry in her Air Force uniform. She was honoured to do it, and the Nlakap’amux people were proud of her. Everyone called her Grandma Love because that was how she addressed everyone. “Hello love.” And you knew she was talking to you.

When my Great Aunt Rita Haugen, our family’s matriarch, met my daughter for the first time, she looked into her sparkling blue eyes and admired her red curly hair. She said to me, “Oh she’s my sister’s baby! Grandma Love would be so proud!”

That’s the Canada I want to celebrate. The one that places us side by side, honours one another, our contributions, our sacrifices, our shared history, our families, unflinching, with respect for all.

We’re all just learning. There is still a lot of history to unpack, a lot of tragedy ongoing, a lot of healing to be done. We’re all just learning to be partners and allies, in the chorus of this land…

Zeitgeist or Die -Part I

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A woman sits in a plaza, leaning over a journal and ipad as she writes.
Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

ZEITGEIST OR DIE

I want to say it was “serendipitous” but something about that word choice feels sleazy.

We, a group of creators – actor, actor, actor, playwright, director, assistant director– got together to work on an embryonic first draft, the same day, the Globe & Mail published “UNFOUNDED: an investigation on how police handle sexual assault cases.”

Our play, Behaviour, was about a certain species of sexual violence that sidles by, frequently eluding the capital “R” designation. So, not the kind you’d structure an SVU episode around, and certainly not the type that the Globe & Mail was reporting on. We were concerned with the more quotidian, run-of-the-mill violations. Ours was the stuff of groping friends and friends-of-friends, handsy bosses and mentors, lecherous cousins and uncles.

“Intimate partner violence.”

“Workplace harassment.”

“Molestation.”

But while the cases profiled in “Unfounded” weren’t really the subject of our work, it did seem to bestow an air of relevance? As Toronto theatre people – and maybe artists writ large— some stamp of zeitgeist-proximate material is all but irresistible. So we noted the coincidence, and read the article with piqued consideration.

Two figures lie on the ground, and two stand, facing the wall, hunched.
Workshop participants.

II.

work·shop

ˈwərkˌSHäp/

verb

gerund or present participle: workshopping

We began with the appropriate gusto. Introductions, table read, discussion, another table read, floor rolling, walking on a grid, walking on a grid lan-guid-ly, walking on a grid and stopping, walking on a grid but also pointing, walking on a grid but now you can stop or point or, I kid you not, swizzle.

It’s too easy to make fun of process! Believe me, depths of feeling are contained in the verb to swizzle. I took them in and tried to, with stick figures, capture the evocative body-shape-contortion-imagery for potential reenactments later. While doing this, I turned myself into a human thesaurus. The director would nod at me for new synonyms to spark inspiration: now ACUTELY, now LANGUIDLY, now IRATE, now BLASÉ!

The thing with ‘workshopping,’ and for that matter regular rehearsing, and maybe any kind of mushy creation process, is an indeterminate amount of the stuff you do, you just do it. The Nike maxim really does hold. You have to go for the “it” with optimism that somehow the tangential comments, the weird off-topic convos, the rolling on the floor and braying and bleating, the twitching and writhing – that all this, will somehow “inform the work.”

It’s too easy to lampoon actors and I sometimes succumb to the easy laugh myself when telling my friends with 9to5s what I did that day. But the best work does happen after the floor thrashing. And even I, non-performer that I am, have a better brain after forced sun salutes. 

Four actors stand in a cluster in the middle of a blackbox theatre, with their arms extended wide.
Actors generating material.

III.

YES! AND?!

Beyond finding the physical vocabulary and emotional landscape of our play, there were certain moments hitherto unwritten that we wanted the actors to explore. I’ve been cornered by enough improv bros at enough parties to know that “Yes and” is not only an incredible comedy directive, but also a creed to live by. Even so, there’s something exasperating about watching polished actors one-up with one-liners. Yes and builds a scene with a galloping propulsion that can eschew certain sidesteps, fumbling, stillness.

YES! we wanted the actors to generate material. AND! we wanted them to do so without being overly conscious of “generating material.” How do you unburden performers from the pressure to perform while observing their actions assiduously? Moreover, the working title was BEHAVIOUR. With our interest largely being in the non-verbal variety. The unconscious shrugs, and tics, and gesticulations, what happens when the words have stopped. How could we encourage the actors to just “be.”

“They’re not SCENES or SKETCHES, they’re ÉTUDES” the director announced. A technique he’d learned while studying at the Moscow Art Theatre. If I was skeptical that a fussy French designation would alter how actors related to each other, joke’s on me. The shift was subtle but potent; there was an immediate adjustment, even just in how the actors held themselves. Somehow they were alright with letting lines drop, allowing things to be boring and in their boringness, in their lack of zings and emotional swells, preternaturally absorbing. The playwright beat notes on her laptop frantically, while the actors “behaved.”

IV.

THEATRE ≠ THERAPY

There’s a lot of contemporizing statements we use when talking about new work. You have to take observational risks to offer something actually useful, but to stray too far from the familiar is dicey. So too when talking about rape – especially for men, especially cis-straight men, two of which were at our table. But when a group of women get started, sometimes it’s hard to stop. In my role as pseudo-stage manager I was supposed to act as a kind of timekeeper. I sucked at this job. I had a strong reticence about trying to push things along. I wanted to share my not-quite-pertinent-but-of-course-tangentially-related violations. Some aspect of that would surely shed light on the piece in some way?!?!

How do you marshal this kind of personal history, trauma, lived-experience into theatre? How do you ignore it? Lots of people are at pains to point out that theatre IS NOT, CAN NOT, be “therapy.” Calling a play “therapy on stage” is worse than calling it sitcom-y. It’s an accusation of unforgivable indulgence; a designation to make pathos humiliating.

TBC Next Week: Stay tuned for Part 2 

 

 

A Buck and a Half*

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The Metis seize Fort Garry and form a provisional government L-R: Ambroise Lepine, a Metis Leader (Kevin Bundy), William O’Donahue, Irish-American Fenian (Jamie Cavanagh), Norbert Leduc, Metis (Kat Letwin), Louis Riel’s Mother (Linda Prystawska). C: Louis Riel (Michaela Washburn). VideoCabaret production of Confederation by Michael Hollingsworth. Photo by Michael Cooper. www.coopershoots.com

It’s that time of year when Indigenous performers become extremely popular for a day or two. True, “National Aboriginal Day” has become an entire month, but not many people have taken note of that. It’s the 21st that really gets congested for artists, with offers of underpaid work all over hell’s back forty. Annually, my art and life partner Andy Moro wisely ponders, “Why is it we’re asked to hustle every day this year, and never just get to enjoy it? Not the stupid fake holiday, but to celebrate the solstice.” The great light. Invariably, we find ourselves shuffling off to this or that venue, as our own PMs, wrangling a car rental, various props or set pieces and a performer or three.

This year is different. This year is Canada’s 150th birthday! Let them eat cake! Slather it with authentic maple syrup! Slap it with a beaver tail! BIRTHDAAAAAY!

This is not the first or last time Indigenous people will be asked along to celebrate something that lives in a very different place for many of us.

The commemorative events for the squabbling that happened in 1812-13 are fresh in the trenches. There was special funding and heaps of strange gatherings with union jacks and dudes in red coats. That year, I was serving as AD of ‘Canada’s’ oldest professional Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. In our season brochure, I penned a message to accompany the aptly named “Treason Season.” It was a way to inform our beloved artists and allies that we would not be partaking in any commemorations, and would be opting out of accessing the earmarked funding. This, in spite of NEPA’s considerable financial struggles at the time. Some colleagues took offense and had words with me. These people had applied for and accepted the funding, and did not want to be judged for having done so.

At the heart of it is the reality that wars like the one of 1812 are much feted. Meanwhile, major homeland conflicts like the Métis resistance remain in the history books as ‘Rebellions’. This means an innovator like Louis Riel – who established a diverse provisional government at 25 – was murdered by the crown, and his so-called “crimes” are yet to be pardoned. A simple walk through Winnipeg makes it evident that ‘Canada’ will use Riel as a poster boy, but they still will not give him his due by granting him a pardon or offering an apology for his slaughter at age 41.

Louis Riel, carte de visite from 1884. Photographer: I. Bennetto & Co. Library and Archives Canada.

Meanwhile, in 2017, the Canadian Opera Company are partnered with the National Arts Centre on an opera called Riel, written by a deceased white man, directed by a vibrant white man who many identify as an ally, with the title role enacted by a white man. This production has several politicized, powerful Indigenous performers in its ensemble. So… what to make of that? I send love to the actors on the inside and hope the experience isn’t painful to them. I hope also that the theatrical industry is shifting so that great performers don’t feel they have to take such work. I hope more of us work to create opportunities that privilege Indigenous agency.

A young woman, her face painted white, dressed in a colourfully striped men's suit with blue hair and a blue mustache.
Louis Riel (Michaela Washburn)
Photo by Michael Cooper

As the COC/NAC Riel runs in Ottawa, VideoCabaret will be offering up their Confederation series in Toronto, starring Métis actor Michaela Washburn as Riel. As she writes on Facebook, “Louis Riel. A role of a lifetime! I have the abundant blessing of playing this fella from a young boy, plucked away to go to seminary school in Montreal, through to his last rites.” Somewhere inside me, I believe this is good medicine, striking a much-needed balance in a world where shit goes wrong every day. Washburn has always spoken her politics through doing the work, and she is in the position now where it is a benefit to many. I am reminded there are many ways to assert an Indigenous voice.

 

One arts leader who teaches me much, who is reclaiming not only her mother tongue but has also been at the forefront of Indigenous arts sovereignty throughout her career, is Santee Smith. Beginning in 2012 and running through to today, the magnificent Santee and her Kaha:wi Dance Theatre have created and performed The Honouring. Andy Moro is the creator of the fantastically striking video score that holds this work in time and space in any venue where it performs. He knew, at the time of creation, that this poetic piece would stand out from the bill it fit. At the time, I did not understand. Even when I saw it, I resisted.

The Honouring celebrates the way in which Haudenosaunee peoples have asserted their sovereignty by forging alliances that would best serve their rich culture. Colonization is inevitable. There was wisdom enough to see that within the Haudenosaunee communities, and they aligned with the British in order to land at what was hoped to be the best possible outcome for their families. The abundance of talented Haudenosaunee artists today is proof that this strategy was effective.

Production still for “The Honouring” by Kaha:wi Dance Theatre. Performers L-R: Nimkii Osawamick, Santee Smith, Emily Law, Montana Summers, Jesse Dell, Jason Gullo Mullins, and Jacob Pratt. Photo by Semiah Kaha:wi Smith

Santee is an activist who effects change through speaking out in her work, supported by Kaha:wi’s primarily Indigenous team, and dancing alongside several Indigenous performers. The Honouring continues to run today, as recently as May 2017. I am reminded that when a work is created and enacted by Indigenous peoples, even if colonizers consider it palatable, it may very well be a work that transcends settler anniversaries, reaching beyond the quota of the moment to be a greater celebration.

I write this, not to express my disdain for the 150 parties, a marker which has already been trumpeted. I write it to give thanks to those of you who live your truth differently than I do. I continue to learn through you. The gift of “National Aboriginal Day” might be that it gives us all that moment to consider what we can do to celebrate our voices, in our own ways. On the day that brings the longest sunshine, may you have a moment to turn your face upwards and take a breath of light.

*Beagan co-directs ARTICLE 11, who bring a new work A Buck and A Half to Theatre SKAM’s SKAMpede this July, in Victoria, British Columbia. Yes, that is an actual place name on unceded Indigenous soil.

When Circus Meets Theatre: A Tale of Two Lovers

By
A woman in a tan leotard leans at a downward angle with a wide split above her head, held mid-air by a teal fabric.
Léda Davies on Silks – Montreal, QC 2014. Photo by Dominic Brunet.

I have been having an affair… I’ve been cheating on theatre with the circus.  I began training in aerial circus (a method of movement in which the artist performs high above the audience suspended by different types of equipment) almost 10 years ago. In 2013 I put my career in theatre on hold and immersed myself exclusively in the world of circus.  While I loved the rigor and discipline required to perform circus, I deeply missed connecting with character, text and story.  Each discipline held a place in my heart and there was no point in keeping them separate any longer.  Now, both circus and theatre are integral parts of my creative process.  Instead of placing boundaries between my disciplines, one supports the other.

I decided to make my ménage-a-trois relationship with circus and theatre public 2 years ago when I began creating a solo show titled Persephone Bound – a multidisciplinary theatre performance that has a conversation with young people about sexual consent.  I chose to tell this story using the circus apparatus “aerial straps”.  Traditionally, aerial straps are used for conditioning and performing feats of strength.   The loops at the end of the 9 feet long cotton covered polyester straps are used for the circus artist’s wrists so that he/she can hang, twist, and suspend in the air.  In Persephone Bound I created a custom pair of straps, with loops wide enough to allow me to hang from different body parts (knees, torso, neck), and integrate more of a dance vocabulary. The effect of the straps in the play is very profound; from the moment Persephone is assaulted she remains attached, or bound in the straps, just as she is bound to her experience as a sexual assault survivor.

A woman with blonde hair in a braided crown, a wine-colored top, and denim shorts is suspended in splits in the air, her ankles bound by two straps of fabric.
Léda Davies on straps in Persephone Bound, performed at Cocktail Cirquantique, April 2017 in Montreal. Photo by Louis-Charles Dumais

Virtuosic movement is a demonstration of skill; a movement that the audience sees that they recognize as difficult, or that they themselves can’t do. Circus is almost entirely made up of virtuosic movements.  When creating Persephone Bound we were constantly asking ourselves: “Does this movement help to tell the story?”.  Sometimes the ego comes in and tempts you force a movement into the performance simply because it is difficult to execute – because it’s impressive.  It’s important to take a step back and ask yourself if the movement is enhancing the story or only bolstering your self-esteem.  One way I found helpful to overcome this tendency was to examine how I was discovering the movement.  Instead of superimposing a movement (randomly doing a cool trick without any other purpose or reasoning), I would use various movement improvisation exercises such as Authentic Movement and Viewpoints as entry points to map the physical journey of the character on the circus equipment.  This opened up my mind and body to new physical possibilities, which in turn were more genuine.

Another technique is to link the movement to a feeling or an emotion. It is common when doing a virtuosic movement to block out the feeling and to let the brain take over. This is especially true with circus for two reasons. Safety is top priority.  You need to make sure that what you are doing is safe and that takes concentration. In Persephone Bound there is a part where I am lifted in the air by my neck.  When I execute this movement need to make sure that I am engaging the right muscles, and placing the equipment in the right place so that I don’t seriously injure myself, or fall.  The second reason why circus artists might not consider the way a movement feels is because the circus equipment is often very painful, and you must train yourself not to feel the pain in order to keep going.

For a virtuosic movement to appear rooted in a character it’s very important that the performer feels the movement.  How does my body connect with the ground?  How does the pain of this movement inform my character?  When the performer connects with the feeling of the movement the audience is more likely to go along for the ride.

A woman with curly blonde hair arches her back as she holds herself in mid-air by two long fabric silks, against a black background.
Léda Davies on Silks – Montreal, QC 2014. Photo by Dominic Brunet.

We discovered the phenomena of saying one thing, and doing another by creating a movement sequence where the character of Persephone is refusing a drink, eye contact and physical contact with her aggressor, Hades, but in the monologue she expresses how much she is attracted to Hades.  This contrast has a profound effect on the viewer, because they are able to read the internal dialogue of the character through the body.

My polyamorous relationship with circus and theatre has been one of great discovery and pleasure.  Whatever tool is applied, whether it’s the way the gestures are developed, the feeling of the movement or the contrast the movement has with the text, virtuosic movement has the ability to enhance the theatrical experience.  When presenting Persephone Bound audiences have told us that they are stuck by the dichotomy of strength and vulnerability the aerial apparatus conveys, and that the image of Persephone in the straps is striking, provoking and “like nothing they have seen before”. As collaborative creations and devised theater productions are moving more into the forefront, there is an opportunity to challenge the existing structure of theatre creation and embrace the heighten form of movement the circus offers.  I love to tell stories, and I’m grateful that I’m no longer limiting myself to telling those stories through the traditional lens.  Now, I can tell my stories in the air.

This October, Léda joins the cast of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web at Alberta Theatre Projects in the title role of Charlotte the Spider. She’ll use aerial silks as her character’s primary apparatus in this story of unlikely friendship, where having a big vocabulary can save the day. Charlotte’s Web runs November 21 – December 31, 2017.

 

Thought Residency: Dylan On

By

My last thought:

“If you can picture yourself doing anything else, don’t go into theatre.”

I think this is such a damaging thing to say to our young people. It instills this nagging worry that maybe we don’t love our art enough, and maybe we don’t belong here.

So, I just want to say – To other young people who are just starting their careers: We do belong here, and all we have to focus on is if theatre is loving us back enough in return.

Thank you.

Choosing the Internet as a performance space might be risky – especially for political performance, and specifically for audiences. We know that it is so easy to be tracked, identified, and surveilled online. So what is the artist’s responsibility to their audiences?

For example, what servers do they have to connect to to view your performance, and do those servers keep logs? What country are those servers located in, and what could the consequences be if the public or a government found out that a specific individual viewed your performance?


You are watching a performance. How are you feeling, in general? Are you enjoying yourself?

I was thinking about that today – how I might not actually use that word. I’m readying, I’m calming, I’m focusing myself. I’m opening myself. But I don’t know that that’s enjoyment…

So go see a performance tonight. You might not enjoy yourself either.

I’m not a big fan of being called “diverse” – It’s just not a great word for individuals. Diversity as a concept can really only be applied to groups. And there’s some weird, mixed-race existential anxiety that it whips up in me.

So the next time you’re about to say the words “diverse artists”, just think for a second: Am I just trying to say “not-white artists”? If so, there might be some value in just saying what you mean.

Today I’m thinking about how arts workers are people first.

I recently had a chance to sit down with a few early-career artists and administrators from across the country, and mainly what we talked about was the uncertainty of the future that we face. For some of us, it was looking six months down the line and not knowing what would happen to us after our artistic associate position ends. And for all of us, we were thinking about: How do we sustain ourselves on the meagre salaries that maybe only the luckiest among us might be able to secure by the end of our careers?

I’m stuck on the idea of spectatorship in online performance. I’m really struck by the link I feel between my body and my identity vs. disembodiment and anonymity.

I’m trying to figure out what ethics or politics come into play when I see you, but you don’t see me – when you’re playing to an anonymous audience.

I’m listening to a real-time audio stream of the sound a tree makes falling in the forest. If you hear it too, did we share anything?

I heard that at every moment, bacteria are just leaping off of our bodies and into the environment. I think I’ve got a little piece of everyone I’ve ever sat beside in a theatre.

I ordered lunch through an app. I don’t usually order lunch, but today I did.

I walked into the restaurant and I saw a bag with my name on it so I grabbed it. I said a quick thank you, but too quiet and to no one in particular so no one looked up. Then I left.

Today I’m thinking about the ways the Internet makes my body invisible in the real world in the name of efficiency, and how in my brain there’s many reasons why I should be concerned about this. But in how I feel, I guess I don’t really mind.

Did you watch the Tonys?

Today’s thought is about the art we love and what happens, or how it feels, when we stop loving it.

These days I sit through a musical the same way I think Kevin Spacey does – with a polite smile that doesn’t reach my eyes.

Hey, it’s Dylan again. Thought #4 is about sharing, artistic labour, and money.

I’ll be among the first to advocate for more openness, more sharing of artistic works, the ability to build upon them… I think that if art is a public good it should be freely available.

However, I have to wonder if sharing freely in this way undervalues – devalues artistic labour in an industry that already has problems being undervalued socially and with actual dollars.

 


Hey, it’s Dylan with Thought #3.

As scrappy as theatres can be, we use a lot of technology, and most of it is proprietary. Other people build it, and theatres pay to use it.

I’ve been dreaming of a world where theatres will have the money to hire technical people to be on staff to collectively build and maintain the tools we need as an industry, and make them freely available for anyone’s use. So, that’s the idea – Let’s do it! I don’t know where we find the money, but let’s open source theatre technology.

 

Hey, it’s Dylan and this is my second thought.

Today I’m thinking about Semantic Versioning, so for example, the process that governs our move from version 1 to version 2. In software, this is a huge shift introducing backwards-incompatible changes that mean you can’t use that software in the same way.

We can re-invent Romeo & Juliet into version 2 and demand a fundamentally different engagement with that work, but the important question is: How do we get to version 3 from there, and how far can we go?

 

Hi, my name is Dylan On.

Today I’m thinking about artistic and cultural institutions and their subjectivity. Namely – do they have one?

Can institutions exist in a real way where they can bear responsibility, or do individuals like me simply speak them into existence?

I guess what I’m wrestling with is:

When institutions fail…does the buck stop with me?

Long Form Math

By
Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg

Making dances with talking, and plays with moving does not actually feel like hybridization to me. It feels perfectly natural, even though I don’t see a lot of other creators working this way. My mentors Denise Clarke (One Yellow Rabbit) and the late Nigel Charnock (co-founder of DV8 Physical Theatre) have been talking and dancing for decades.

I get a lot of questions about how I work and what I make. People ask; Is it dance? Is it theatre? Is it comedy? Is it drama? Why do you have to talk? Why do you have to move so much? Why are you so weird? I never understood that I had to pick a team and stick to it.

What follows are four arguments to answer these questions.

Background:

I’ve always been like this. I made jokes in ballet class. I put a little Juliet soliloquy in the recital at The Royal Winnipeg Ballet Summer school. I choreographed my monologues in theatre school and narrated my choreography assignments in university. I like dance without talking when other people do it and theatre without much movement (although theatre could use physical literacy in general – just saying). But when I think I move and when I move I talk.

Argument #1:

When most people think about dance, they think of athleticism and form (eg: the ballet, and So You Think You Can Dance). But I don’t think about bodies and dance that way.

All movement is dance to me.

I try to meet the people I work with, professional dancers or otherwise, where they are. Including myself and my questions. When I work with other artists there’s a lot of talking a lot of asking them to improvise, a lot of “what’s your favourite song let’s dance to it” so they can find their own impulses.

It’s about finding our emotional connection to our movement.

Argument #2:

Stories seem to live deep in my body and I can only get to them by moving.

I don’t go away and sit and write. It all happens in the room (the studio) where I’m working, from improvisation, from what is interesting to me in that moment. I dance to songs I like and try to find what (sometimes who) is happening in my body. I talk to myself about the shit that’s on my mind – the irritating “other” moms at my kid’s school (who wears gold stilettos to pick up their kid?) for example.

I’m always relating everything I’m doing back to whatever the questions are that keep coming up, about whatever I’m obsessing about at the time (eg. Why do we all love crime drama? What is faith? Why do 40+ women feel invisible? Why can’t I remember the word for I can’t remember?). With, How To Be (my most recent ensemble piece/play/show), I’d been noticing how we all seem to ask in one way or another, how should I be? How should I speak? How much should I weigh? What should I wear? You know questions and listicles of answers that come up on our FaceBook feeds.

We all tell innumerable tales about ourselves and our experiences through our movements, gestures, postures, and physical rhythms and that’s also how I find words and characters and story.

“How To Be” The Cultch, Vancouver, 2017.  Created (choreographed, written) by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg. Performers: Justine A. Chambers and Kim Stevenson. Photo by Wendy D.

Argument #3:

I trust that what I’m doing, that the way I’m working, is in service of story and character, and the body in “dance” or movement of any kind will say what it needs to say, with or without words.

Our bodies betray our words. We might say, “I feel great,” but our chest is collapsed and our fists are held tight. I believe the body is the loudest subtext we can have. Dance for me takes over when words fail to uncover what needs to be communicated or when what’s being said is messy and not straight ahead. Or words take over when the movement needs to be contextualized through language.

Most of my training and the messages from funders etc told me I had to choose: words or movement, theatre or dance. Words, and in my work often comedic words, open the doors with familiar meaning and references to the language of the body that we instinctually know but have been convinced by our body-phobic culture that we don’t know. I want to invite other people in, and the easiest invitation, for some to understand seems to be words.

“How To Be” Cultch, Vancouver, 2017. Performers pictured: Kate Franklin, background Marcus Youssef. Photo by Wendy D.

Argument #4:

Even after being swept away by it all and saying how much they have enjoyed my work, I encounter audience members or other theatre artists unfamiliar with dance, or abstraction of any kind, who want to know what the dance means. I usually just ask them what they think it means, or better yet what they saw and how it made them feel. It doesn’t take long for a person to realize that they usually assign their own meaning to the movement.

I usually just ask them what they think it means, or better yet what they saw and how it made them feel. It doesn’t take long for a person to realize that they usually assign their own meaning to the movement.

We are such a language-centric culture that I think we are afraid of anything that defies words to make sense of things. We are uncomfortable with questions that do not have concise answers, or that have mutable answers. We are even more uncomfortable with questions that we will never have an answer to and this is where the body is a truer experience of what we little humans are grappling with.

The body is never certain, it is moving and changing all the time, inside and out, it never lands in “this is it, here it is”. Maybe it moves from “I know this” to “I know this” but it can’t stop to explain.

We suffer when we try to make the body stay put to make sense of it all. You can’t publish the body of work that is dance, you can talk about it like I’m trying to do now but writing it down isn’t it. Maybe this is why dance is sometimes not taken as seriously and is filed under “ephemeral”, “feminine”, “decoration”, or “experimental”.

Conclusion:

We build from what we are in that moment in time, in that body in space. I’d like to tell you that I think a lot about the idea of the “specialized”, the “hybrid”, the “virtuosic” when I’m thinking of performance and my work in particular. I’d like to tell you that I grapple a lot with the questions: Is it dance? Is it theatre? Or that I argue every day that all movement is dance and every organization of forms moving in space is choreography.

But mostly I just go into a room five or six days a week for a few hours and start from improvising and moving around with questions in my head and dance to songs I like and try to find out what’s happening in my body and if it has anything to say. My body always has something to say and my mind usually has something smart to contribute.

If not I do long hand math to recalibrate – it’s true I do.

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