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What if the walls could speak? House tells the story of a home and the people who have lived there.
Written by Chris Nash, performed by Barbara Budd.
View “I Remapped Canada” on imgur
There’s been a lot going on in the past few days, have you noticed?
Maybe you were celebrating Canada Day, or Independence Day. Maybe you were marching with PM Trudeau in the Pride Parade. Or maybe you were exercising non-violent civil disobedience and sitting-in with the Black Lives Matter protesters. Or maybe you fasting for Ramadan. Or waiting by the phone to hear that loved ones are safe after multiple attacks in Baghdad, Istanbul, or Bangladesh.
I’m sorry, did we just go there? This is a magazine about theatre, after all. Do we need to talk about ISIS attacks?
Yeah. Yeah, we think we do.
People – all people – do things because they believe in things. And yes, yes, we don’t all believe in the same things. And yes, yes, killing is bad. And so is racial profiling and racism. The TYA show in my gym in grade six taught me that ages ago.
So what does this have to do with theatre, again?
From where we’re sitting here at #cdncult, we see our community of theatre makers and supporters working hard to grapple with legacies of colonialism and prejudice. And we are proud of those who are asking the hard questions, and those who are trying – sometimes failing – to answer those questions. And those who embrace the multiplicity of answers and perspectives that make up a healthy and vibrant community.
US President Barack Obama says that the world needs more Canada. Well, we say that the world also needs more Canadian theatre and the many overlapping and interlaced voices it represents.
In this edition, Toronto playwright and actor Andrea Scott reflects on the how African-Canadian voices and stories have emerged within Canadian theatre; Vancouver director Milton Lim calls on us to make room for a diversity of form, as well as experience; and Jillian Keiley, Artistic Director of English Theatre at Canada’s National Arts Centre responds to the recent allegation that Canada doesn’t have a national theatre.
If “more of Canada” means making room for more voices, more ways of doing, more ways of seeing, then yes, the world could use more of Canada. Canada could use more of Canada, too.
2016
I’m writing this on Canada Day as I travel to Shaw in Niagara-on-the-Lake to see Master Harold and the Boys, directed by Philip Akin, and Adventures of a Black Girl in her Search for God, a GBS story adapted by Lisa Codrington. This is the perfect weekend to reflect on the state of Canadian Theatre and how it has evolved. I will attempt to show its ephemeral nature by looking at it from my perspective as a London, Ontario native who started consuming theatre in 1986.
1985-1989
London was a place where I was called nigger and coon on a regular basis; that’s just how it was in the pretty town nicknamed the Forest City. I was used to being excluded but I chalked it up to my being a weird kid. Not a weird black kid, just weird. I collected rocks and read ‘Wuthering’ Heights in the old English. Being perceived as an outsider makes you a perfect candidate for the arts but it wasn’t until high school that I found an outlet for my peculiar desire to ‘live out loud’.
I attended H.B. Beal, a technical school, where I was in the Television & Broadcasting program. CanCon (Canadian Content) was being forced down the throats of radio stations in that 30% of their content had to be Canadian. So, while we, the listening audience, would have preferred to listen to 12 hours of Bad Brains, The Cure, Bruce Springsteen, and The Pogues, the CRTC regulated that 3 of those hours had to be dedicated to Gowan, Kim Mitchell, Maestro Fresh Wes and Skinny Puppy, et al. And while it may have felt like being force fed vegetables I’m happy I got to know the music of Amanda Marshall, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Diamond, and Liberty Silver. Popeye was right: spinach is really good for you.
I became interested in theatre in high school because I had a spare; the curriculum could have used a CRTC-like nudge. My drama teacher taught theatre by making us study ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Les Miserables’. She taught us about auditioning by performing an interpretive dance to ‘Running Up that Hill’ by Kate Bush. Is it any wonder I was ignorant of Canadian Theatre in the 80’s? Andrew Lloyd Webber probably has no idea where London was on a map in spite of its name.
Thank Heavens for Martha Henry, who, as the Artistic Director of The Grand Theatre, programmed ‘A Warm Wind in China’ by Kent Stetson in her first season at the company – a play about AIDS starring a beautiful 38-year-old actor named Philip Akin, I was engaged completely. I had never seen a black man on stage before, nor had I been exposed to homosexual relationships portrayed so matter of fact; the scales fell from my eyes and I saw theatre as an honest portrayal of real life.
I was foolish. I bounded up to my theatre teacher and told him I couldn’t wait to audition for the next season of plays at our high school. “Don’t bother auditioning, Andrea,’ he said, ‘there are no black parts.’ Well, at least he said it out loud. Eventually my school produced ‘The Crucible’ and guess which role I played? No, not Abigail, but nice try.
1991
It wasn’t until I went to the University of Toronto for theatre that I was exposed to Canadian Theatre in the form of Judith Thompson, George F Walker, Paul Thompson, Michelle Tremblay, Linda Griffiths, and James Reaney. You will notice the lack of diversity but, at the time, I did not; I was used to my experiences being invisible.
Shortly after getting my degree, Djanet Sears won four Doras and a Chalmers for ‘Harlem Duet’ in 1997. It had been almost 10 years since I’d seen a strong black character on stage and now there was more than one. Nigel Shawn Williams, Barbara Barnes Hopkins, Dawn Roach, Jeff Jones, and Alison Sealy-Smith gave me hope. I brought my mother to see the play to prove to her that my desire to become an actor was not folly. A few years later we were gifted with ‘Riot’ by Andrew Moodie, which was also awarded a Chalmers. Black lives on stage were becoming a reality. You cannot truly comprehend how important it is to see people who look like you on stage that reflect your experiences authentically.
1997-2002
But like ‘Waiting to Exhale’, which gave all black people hope, Sears and Moodie were a hiccup and there wasn’t a rush of coloured playwrights given the opportunity to fill the creative void. I auditioned for endless slave roles in Black History Month plays as well as mothers weeping for their dead sons on movies of week. It wasn’t creatively interesting or challenging and I decided to become a lawyer. If I wasn’t going to be creativel I might as well make a good salary, I thought. And then “Da Kink in My Hair’ and ‘The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God’ hit Toronto and I re-considered the LSAT.
2002-2010
Amidst the temp jobs, TV guest spots, and great TYA shows at Roseneath and Carousel Players I was given the chance to be in Canadian Stage’s ‘Omnium Gatherum’ where I played a black woman who could not sing a Whitney Houston song (and work with my dream actor, Nigel Shawn Williams) followed by Factory Theatre’s production of ahdri zhina mandiela’s ‘who knew grannie’ where I was allowed to play with Marcel Stewart, Miranda Edwards and Joseph Jomo Pierre. Our last show was on Easter Sunday and I did feel re-born as a creator in Toronto theatre.
2010-2016
6 years later, I am a playwright. I can’t believe there are two plays dominated by black artists at the Shaw Festival. As I sat on a bench outside the Court House Theatre before the show, eyes closed enjoying the sun, I was happy to hear the honeyed voice of Philip Akin approach me, ‘Who’s that brown girl sunning herself on the bench? Hello, Miss. Scott!’ I had come full circle. 28 years later the actor was now a director and the adoring fan is a playwright with her own show opening in four weeks.
For our theatres to change and evolve the people who held the keys to the castle had to step aside and let a new generation of diverse creators make decisions and the results have been glorious. We are lucky to have David Yee, Joseph Jomo Pierre, and Tara Beagan in our midst because they will continue to inspire a new generation to create. To ask, ‘Where is Canadian Theatre Now?’ implies that it is an ever fix’d thing, rather than an amorphous, living entity subject to changeability. Canadian Theatre is us and we cannot be locked into a static identity because to be static is to die.
To quote Maestro Fresh Wes: ‘This is a throw-down, a showdown, hell no, I can’t slow down. …. This aint a game, I’m on a mission.’
Mic drop.
*Can You See Me Yet? – a play by Timothy Findley
I was breastfeeding my three-month old-baby girl when a dear colleague of mine called me up and asked me if I would be interested in co-applying for the job of Artistic Director of the National Arts Centre.
I told my friend quite immediately and without thinking about it: “ absolutely not.” He told me to think about it, and I did. And it seemed then that a lifetime of thinking about it had already gone into that thinking-about-it time.
I had followed the National Arts Centre for years. I was keenly interested in it because I was always interested in what stories and theatre say about a people, about a nation. I had been breastfed myself on Newfoundland nationalism – an unshakeable belief in this place and her people because of the stories I had been told about it. Right out of university, I was hired at the Resource Centre for the Arts in St. John’s – in a position I held for 10 years. The mandate of RCA was and is to promote and cultivate the theatre and culture of Newfoundland and Labrador. It was a fierce and brutal battlefield of a theatre environment because everyone who went through there held that they were now the torchbearers of our secret nation. Almost every theatre company in Newfoundland is dedicated to telling Newfoundland stories. Our island is in a contagion of talking about itself. It fuels our population, makes people who go away want to come back, and people who come to visit stay.
Although I was always a strident Newfoundlander, I am also deeply pro-confederate. I believe in Canada as a nation: in Canada as a nation of nations. I love that we have the system in place to be a country version of the UN, you don’t have to surrender your passport, that you can be an ‘anything-Canadian.’ I love that people live in megacities, by the ocean, and forest, by permafrost and fields. I love that we can’t figure out what our identity is, and it drives me berserk that some of us believe we can be any one thing- the beauty of this place is that we can be anything.
When Peter Hinton launched his inaugural season in 2006, I sent him a letter. I didn’t really know him but I wanted to commend him for programming an all Canadian Season. I was thrilled by it, excited by the caliber of artists he invited, gobsmacked by the variety of theatrical experiences NAC Audiences could expect.
I was really surprised and sad to learn that Peter’s move had turned out to be a brave one indeed and that NAC subscription audiences had dropped like a stone. People had never heard of these artists – they had never been seen on Broadway or the West End.
Peter slowly built his subscription base up again by engaging in Canadian works weighed throughout with more popular international titles. But I saw what that struggle did to his heart as a nation builder and it was that that made me say ‘absolutely not.’
A few weeks later, my friend had to withdraw but the NAC asked if I might take it on myself anyway and I said yes. And I said it with a whole heart because through studying the purpose of the organization and its responsibilities, I came to believe that I could follow the path that Peter had laid and retrace it again with strategies I had learned from him and his predecessor Marti Maraden, from Newfoundland nationalism, from the crackerjack team I was assembling and inheriting, and from my obsessive study of Canadian theatre.
The NAC is a theatre that is dedicated to celebrate and strengthen Canadian voices and our unique way to tell stories. It’s positioning in Ottawa is critical – juxtaposed against French Theatre, and now, wonderfully- the new Indigenous Theatre department. It’s an impossible goal – to make a theatre that attempts to give voice to a Canadian ideal – but the trying is everything.
So, five years later after saying yes, I was pretty surprised (and heart-kicked I admit) to learn from Kate Taylor in her Globe and Mail article of July 24 – that Canada doesn’t actually have a National Theatre.
In her article, she compares the very fine production of the National Theatre of Scotland’s James Plays featured at Luminato this year, to everything that she believes Canada lacks. The reason we can’t have anything nice is because we don’t have the structural set up of the National Theatre of Scotland. Fair enough – we don’t.
The biggest difference is that the National Theatre of Scotland doesn’t have a building, and so can make shows wherever and under whatever circumstances they choose and can balance budget-wise. They can bring shows across the smaller geography of Scotland and tour in whatever kind of venue suits them.
Some of Kate Taylor’s issue also seems to be that the NAC is not based in Toronto. Which I can also sympathize with for sheer population exposure alone, but it ignores the critical vision of the NAC English Theatre being a part of a larger artistic platform that is both French and English, and now Indigenous, and part of a larger vision that folds in the other performing arts in Dance and Music.
But not being in Toronto, and not being completely mobile in our seasons doesn’t mean that we don’t exist.
I wish I had been able to remind Kate Taylor that the NAC English Theatre was one of the founders of and remains the presenting partner of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, which takes productions from all across the country and has produced 14 theatre festivals, half of them outside of Ottawa, serving communities from Whitehorse to St. John’s.
She seemed to know a bit about the Collaborations which is a continuing initiative that invests in new projects by partnering with theatre companies from across the country and then later follows up with those shows with an eye to presenting them on the NAC stage – the idea to make the NAC a showcase theatre for some of this exemplary work.
I wish I could have outlined the rest of the shows in our season, which features an all-Canadian line-up, minus one – which was adapted by a Canadian. It showcases the work of a first generation Canadian of Japanese descent, a first generation Canadian of Caribbean descent. Two of the plays feature actors from the deaf and disabled communities. Two of the plays talk about the very creation of the country we call Canada. One is from a First Nations Playwright – an incredibly good work about residential schools.
Like Kate Taylor, we see the importance of moving our own work across Canada. Our model is not as agile as the National Theatre of Scotland. But we are launching a tour next season – sending back Andy Jones’ wonderful Tartuffe to the east from whence it came. Through our co-productions, the NAC will showcase work in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Calgary this year.
We’ve established a new touring model in partnership with the Stratford Festival that makes touring large-scale works more accessible by allowing communities to hire local actors within a set, costume, concept and choreography of a production. The pilot production, James Reaney’s take on Alice Through the Looking Glass, used completely different casts based in Stratford, Ottawa, Edmonton, Charlottetown, and Winnipeg. Next year we already have plans to ship out another production in this model, in partnership with a new theatre.
I don’t regret for one second saying yes to being the AD at the NAC. The only bad part is saying goodbye to my now almost-five-year-old, sometimes for weeks at a time as I head out to further develop relationships with theatre makers across our giant country and the one place we all have in common, our capital, Ottawa. I am every day excited and invigorated about what the NAC can mean to theatre in this country. I really believe that we are a part of a larger movement that is establishing a Canadian voice, and I believe that we are realizing along with everyone else, that the strength of the Canadian voice is the multiplicity of it.
We may never come close to embracing and showcasing all of the great artists in our country, or serving all of the varieties of audiences. But the trying is everything. It is a job that cannot be completed, like patching together a single Canadian identity. We can’t melt it all together, and curating seasons of all of its disparate wonderful forms, while having audiences recognize the value in that, is the National Arts Centre English Theatre’s fierce and loyal nation-building job.
Socially, politically, and ethically, celebrating diversity is part of the cultural zeitgeist of our time. It is simultaneously tied to our Canadian histories, greater global discourse, and the relevance/permanence of the artistic discipline of theatre in the 21st century.
This past Monday, the Jessie Richardson Awards took place and the development since last year was clear. The juries, the leadership, and the work that was being discussed have all undergone significant shifts following last year’s spark in discussion and advocacy. Yet, I would like to believe that we are not naive: there is still work to do.
The following is an acceptance speech that I delivered at the Jessie Richardson Awards on June 28th, 2016:
” Good evening. First, thank you to the jury for considering me — as someone who makes contemporary/experimental theatre, I greatly appreciate the recognition, both for my artistic practice and that of my peers which I feel, does not often have a place at these award ceremonies.
First, to all of my collaborators: thank you for your brilliance and criticality, I continue to be inspired by you. Over the last year, there has been a large and great discussion about diversity in the theatre.
In these cases, when we speak about diversity, most people deal in the materials of: [1] the politicized human body (casting protocol, having more POC on stage) and [2] content (whose stories we are telling). My hope is that we can move forward also dealing with [3] diversity in form. That our perceptions and our expectations of what theatre can look like, will not have to fit into the Western or European constructs that most of us learned in theatre school and/or the proven model that is selling tickets to the aging subscription audience.
I look forward to seeing and supporting more work that is theatre performance that does not rely on English, theatre that does not depend on the able-bodied performer, theatre that is not filtered through heterosexism, theatre that celebrates the vast cultural histories around us, and ultimately, theatre whose form challenges the very notions of what theatre can look and feel like. I believe in the necessity of carving out new spaces, rather than trying to fit the mould of white, male, mainstream theatre.
I personally don’t believe that the Jessies help in carving out this new space for the marginalized. In fact, I often perceive it as something in the way, something that preserves the existing hierarchy. Though beyond this one award ceremony, I must admit that I do believe in the people, the community, and most especially the next generation of artists. So to the strongly voiced and passionate collective who came together to change the Jessies and by proxy, the theatre community: thank you. Let us transform the theatre.”
In general: yes, we should rethink the structure and makeup of artistic leadership, yes to more open-minded casting decisions, and yes to creating avenues for sharing the narratives, experiences, and spaces of marginalized peoples. Though in a time when ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ are buzzwords that also happen to look great on grant applications, I’d like to highlight the potential danger of white mainstream theatre form masquerading as diverse theatre.
Even if we see more POC telling their stories on stage, if the materials and forms are still of the Western/European hegemony, then we’re stuck with mere substitution and assimilation. Worse still, the very apparatus of the theatre becomes/stays invisible and we condition ourselves to believe that theatre form is synonymous with act structure, always serving a narrative/story/script, dependant on a hierarchy on the creative team, conflict that is predominantly navigated via text, etc.
And this is not to ask that we essentialize marginalized identities and practices, but instead, that we encourage diversity in the theatre as the conduit that disrupts and transforms our fundamental modes of operation.
So what does that look like?
I think it starts with challenging certain assumptions we may have about how theatre ‘works’; if we remove certain notions about what is necessary in the theatre, we can allow other artistic disciplines/apparatuses to find space in the theatre. Perhaps a theatre without conflict, without actors, without the letter ‘e’, without a director — the list goes on. I have no idea what it looks like, but it’s more exciting than the status quo. How will we know when it’s working? I’d like to believe that there will be more fighting about whether or not the work can even be legitimized as a piece of theatre.
In 2012, I wrestled with the non-theatricality of Rabih Mroué’s Pixelated Revolution (1) at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. I couldn’t parse my feelings about his work as a piece of theatre, when all I could perceive was the presentation of a paper with some video support.
It took a long conversation with a friend, before I was hit by the cultural significance of subversive lecture-style theatre; creating a space of covert transgression that could be perceived as problematic by other methods. It was something I rarely think of in the privileged safety and ‘freedom’ of the West. The piece stuck with me for a long time.
The landscape is changing. When we speak about systemic barriers related to diversity, we need to consider the very form of theatre, otherwise, we’re missing the full range of what theatre can be.
I personally hope for the values of destruction and transformation in art: performance that is not simply made through synthesis or mimesis, but deep reformation that comes out of having cut away the foundations we were previously standing on top of.
(1) The Pixelated Revolution is part performance, part non-traditional lecture, examining the use of camera phones in capturing and disseminating first-hand experiences of the Syrian revolution, while exploring the role of social media in sharing and proliferating those images from the front line. http://pushfestival.ca/shows/pixelated-revolution/
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Okay. How my body and is about how I always think about it. Am I good son? How can I tell you if I didn’t like it? How often do I lie? How I was really, really attracted to that statue at the park. How I cried at the parade. How love is love misses the point which is actually more just sex is sex. How can I excuse myself from exhausting conversations? How can I be more easy? How can I break my patterns? How can I have a good time at the barbeque? How listening is hearing something I don’t agree with and not immediately opening my mouth. Can you give up without losing?
Hi, I’m Stewart Legere and this is my second thought. If I have to remember something fast, I will send myself a text. And these are the last number of texts I have sent myself. A Montreal phone number. What appears to be an Oklahoma phone number. Send Sue updated bio. The book of salt. The Salvation army. Bike rack. He can split a nine-dollar bill into 3 parts. Dress from Louisa. This is my star. Water bearers. Slow learners. Bipocalyse. A picture of me eating a popsicle. Text Karen. Sound advice. Never mirror. A picture of Snow White singing with a caption under it saying “this could be you” underneath. Your money is under the mattress. A drifting hunter. A picture of an empty room. A naked picture of myself. Women’s hats through time.
Hi, this is Stewart Legere and here’s my third thought. I have been away from home for 2 months, and last night was the first full night I spent home alone in my apartment. I looked around and these are some things that stood out to me. On a shelf a ceramic urn I took from my grandmother’s house before she died inside there’s 2 dried roses one for me and one I was supposed to give to someone – I forget who. On my fridge a card that says if you can practice even while distracted you are well trained. On my fridge a picture of me drawn by a friend’s kid in it I am holding a glass of wine as big as my head. A piece of origami I bought from a kid at the market she says it was of a dinosaur’s foot, but I honestly don’t see it. The beautiful writing desk, given to me by Tyler before he left for Chicago. A painting of a swing set balancing on the edge of a volcano. I used to have another one in the series of a swing set floating in deep spaceI wonder where that went.
Hi, I’m Stewart Legere and this is my fourth thought.
This morning I woke up thinking about new year’s. I really don’t make resolutions because I am HO, guilt is bullshit and a very poor motivator,
But I do love new years
I love the arbitrary reboot of intention
A few years ago, in a moment of weakness, I broke tradition and resolved this at midnight
This year Don’t take unsolicited advice, parentheses, to heart
Last year I did it again I wrote myself a poem and read it aloud to myself at midnight. It read
“This year, a reminder, you are mostly the inside parts.”
Hi, I’m Stewart Legere and this is my fifth thought.
An example of something I might say to myself or share with someone else so they could say it to themselves… if either of us thought we needed it, and if we thought that it was true.
Hey, sit calmly inside whatever you do. Outside that is chaos but inside that is calm and inside the calm a fucking storm and inside the storm a dead silent pool inside that an awful fire, inside that a whole new sky inside that a brawl…and somewhere inside the inside the inside under a pile of garbage unsuspecting…Just what I always wanted to say, just what I always meant to say, just what I always longed to be.
Hi, I’m Stewart Legere and this is my sixth thought. I have a game with my friends, list funny things to do while crying: Crying while peeling an orange, crying while playing marbles, crying while swimming. Now I am thinking about all the different things that can make you cry: Ending a relationship, death, stubbing your toe, fear and cutting onions, nostalgia, on and on. The first time I can remember seeing my dad cry I was a little kid and my cousin and I were out in the country and we wandered off and got lost in the woods for hours. It was dark. Eventually we found the road, picked a direction and walked back to what we hoped was home. Hours later we heard someone calling our names, and there was my dad, flashlight, searching and crying in the road. It was also the first time I remember hearing him swear. You scared the shit out of me. I am not going to have children and it strikes me that my child getting lost is one thing that will never make me cry.
Hi, I’m Stewart Legere and this is my seventh thought.
There is a tall curved restaurant that sits on top of a hotel in my home town. A few years ago I was walking down the street and it came into view, and I thought…hunh…that’s not a rotating restaurant. I’m 33 years old. As a child I must have learned that rotating restaurants were round and this building is round so I just assumed, and never went back in, to correct the thought. It’s not that I actively thought the restaurant ontop of the hotel was rotating – of course I knew it wasn’t – but the germ of the thought still lived in my brain and it took an active intervention to fix it because I never went in and clarified some young small part of me still held this silly little thought to be true. I wonder how many of those are in there? Probably a lot. Probably many. I’m sure some of them are cute, like that one, and I’m sure many aren’t. Where are the ones that affect the way I feel about people I have never met? What about the ones that collect and collect and influence how I see the world and my place in it? I need to go in there. I need to catch them all. This is probably going to take a while. I should get to work.
hi my name is stewart legere and this is my 8th thought
today i worked in a building from early morning until nightfall
twelve hours
i arrived when the building was full, and didn’t leave until long after it emptied out
so that has me thinking about
life-spans
and i’m reminded of my parents’ marriage
and how flowers open and close
and about fruit flies
dead friends
dead friendships
bad ideas
best before dates
electronics
half lives
epochs
prejudices
fashion
drunkenness
orgasms
romances
how long food stays hot
flights (more specifically the time in between accelerating and taking off)
the time in between eating and feeling full
how long i think about what you say when you tell me how you feel
and now i’m thinking about formulas
how they can describe the birth and death of a problem
and how we long for elegance in their expression
and about sleep
and how it is a fertilizer
you know
life spans
hi i’m stewart legere and this is my 8th thought.
Well…thought 8.1. I cheated today and I have two.
8.1.
what to do?
go dancing, go to shows, see friends, go to things
or get in the car and leave. go camping. visit my mom. find a lake.
this feeling:
when i’m in a city a need to be part of it
compelled to get out, to sit in cafes, show up at events, be an active participant in the fray –
not always central to the action, but a proud and present cog.
conversely, when i’m in the country, or travelling far away from home,
this feeling i could be happily absorbed into the green, or the blue, never to return to civilization
sell it all – metaphorically (i don’t have anything to sell)
what is the word for that feeling? that pull in different directions?
i know on some level, as a queer person, i want to be seen
because i spent an unrefundable portion of my life unseen
but what about that other, seemingly opposite thing? the desire to be absorbed?
the undeniable suspicion i get when walking in a field,
for example, that i could happily keep walking away and never look back?
some days i long to be racing in the race
and some days i want to be the man disappearing down the dusty dirt road
and this is thought 8.2
i’m contemplating my inner voice today
it always says
you’re right
but here’s what i’m thinking:
that can’t be true.
hi i’m stewart legere and this is my 10th thought
i took the sentence
“what would we do without each other”
and put it into an anagram generator
an anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another.
people often interpret the new word or phrase to deepen their understanding of the original.
often these same people believe in god
or astrology
or psychics
or that the moon landing didn’t happen
but not always
so for example you could take the word
morning
and make it
gin, norm.
and then say something like “sounds about right”
or something like that.
anyway i took the sentence
“what would we do without each other”
and put it into an anagram generator
it spit out hundreds and hundreds of new words and phrases
in myriad combinations
and none of them made any sense at all.
today i’m thinking about
tearing things apart
and building things from the pieces
sometimes the new thing is vaguely familiar
like how a baby can look like your great great grandfather
and sometimes it’s just…not
and you have to learn to love it
from scratch
hi i’m stewart legere and this is my 11th, and penultimate, thought
which is really just a memory
about three years ago i was artist in residence at videofag
the – now closed – queer performance space in kensington market, in toronto.
i was sitting alone in the middle of the space
in the middle of the night
at a table, drinking wine
writing
it was valentine’s day.
it was the night ellen page came out
earlier, i had been waiting for a guy to come meet me for a date
but i wasn’t waiting any more
it was clear he wasn’t coming
i remember how quiet it was
and the glow from my computer screen
i remember crying
and feeling very happy to be queer
i remember the wine was dry
i remember looking outside and seeing someone i knew from halifax jumping a fence across the street
and thinking
“we’re 2000 kms away from home, but i’m not going to wave”
it was one of those super rare moments in life where
everything felt clear and everything felt balanced
i felt so alive
i felt so lonely
and so sad
but so happy
very conflicted
very excited
i felt supported
but also abandoned
i was broke
but content
i was worried
i was ready
maybe like what the feeling feels like right before you bungie jump
or when you eat something that’s hot in some places and cold in others
i remember thinking
i can do this
feeling equally brave and like a liar
and, looking back, i was probably basically right
hi i’m stewart legere and this is my 12th and final thought i have a tattoo on my back, in between my shoulder blades.
it’s four words, stacked on top of each other:
believe
behave
behold
become
it’s something a mentor said to me years ago and for whatever particular reason
whatever alchemy they have always had a profound resonance with me for years, before i went onstage, i’d reach my arm awkwardly around my back, touch the tattoo and think to myself
“believe everything you are about to do. behave as though you do. behold the world around you. become the thing you want to become”
it was all very complicated and i can’t be sure it ever worked.
i don’t really do that anymore, because my rituals have changed, i guess
but more and more i find myself thinking about the words in my day to day
like:
“believe people when they tell you about themselves”…
“behave” is now more like “un-behave”
like – notice the moments when i add shit i don’t need, when i say things i don’t mean, when i lie.
“behold” i mostly just repeat and repeat.
“behold behold behold.”
and “become”…remains elusive. probably as it should.
i don’t know.
honestly, the poem is so much better without the explanation.
the poem resonates.
the poem endures.
the poem abides.
the poem is a secret.
the poem is the thing.
i imagine you have one,
right?
maybe just show it to me. don’t explain it.
it’s better that way.
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A father’s obsession with the tragic death of a Toronto teen leads to his son’s public humiliation. Family roles blur when he takes LSD at Ontario Place.
Part of PlayME’s Summer Shorts Series.
Benji Hayward is written by Jennifer McKinley, performed by Raoul Bhaneja.
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The Timekeeper is a dark, quirky comedy about a man who fears he is running about of time.
Part of PlayME’s Summer Shorts series.
Written by Roy Lee Rabideau, performed by Eric Peterson.
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Chris talks with the playwright of Theory, Norman Yeung, about a broad range of topics including diversity and race in theatre, liberalism, censorship and the fine line between the legal and illegal in graffiti art.
Norman Yeung works in theatre, film, and visual arts. His play “Theory” won First Place in the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition in 2015. “Deirdre Dear” premiered at the Neil LaBute New Theater Festival in St. Louis. “Pu-Erh” premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto and was nominated for four Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including Outstanding New Play. “Pu-Erh” was a Herman Voaden finalist in 2009. He was a member of Canadian Stage’s BASH! artist development program, fu-GEN’s Kitchen Playwrights Unit, and Tapestry New Opera’s Composer-Librettist Laboratory. He is featured in the book “Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism” by Xiaoping Li.
In Thomas Piketty’s recent work Capital in the 21st Century, the renowned French economist articulates the inherent process of wealth in a capitalist state being funneled into fewer and fewer hands over time. This is an exponential process as the increasing concentration of wealth (and therefore power) allows those who possess wealth to reconstruct their society in order to maintain and expand these conditions. This results in oligopoly–a state of limited competition–in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers. This is the the modern form of capitalism. Given the significant impact capitalism has on the modern world, not just materially ideologically, it is vital to look how the dynamics of capitalism are reflected in every facet of our world.
We have a theatrical oligopoly in this country. There are a number of large companies that support themselves either through private donations and/or disproportionate amounts of funding from all levels of government. Stratford, Shaw and Soulpepper are three companies with resources beyond the imagination of the majority of theatremakers in this country. Full disclosure, I spent a period of my life on Soulpepper’s payroll and I saw first hand the benefits that their monetary scale has for the artists it employs. It was a very fruitful two years and the income security allowed me to grow as an artist and a person. It is nevertheless worthwhile to consider the effect that institutions of this size have on the broader theatre ecology.
These theatres have specific implicit or explicit bias as to what is interesting, what is worth putting on stage, and how to best convey that. They have, to greater or lesser degrees depending on the day, something like an theatrical aesthetic. This is fine and good: theatres should have aesthetics. However, the amount of influence these large theatres wield means that their aesthetic soon becomes everyone’s aesthetic. You can see evidence of this process at just about any indie theatre in Toronto. The basements and storefronts of this city might be thought of as places of bold experimentation. Instead they’re formally indistinguishable from the 20th century realism of major theatres. This is not a coincidence.
I noted on my first day of Soulpepper the number of artists at the company who had children. These children were often the offspring of two theatre artists. It amazed me that this theatre allowed artists to have children, own homes, take vacations. I’m still impressed by it. This theatre offers the dream of being a professional artist, not a professional server who makes a lot of art. It’s one of the few places in this country that allows access to this kind of dream. This means that many of the artists who want to achieve this dream are going to, consciously or unconsciously, become the actor, the writer, the designer, the director that Soulpepper needs: to become good in the very particular way that those who live this dream are good.
No university or college in this country is free from the anything-for-profit model of neo-liberalism. Post-secondary theatre programs are often fighting for their lives and so must continually prove their relevance to capital or risk having the program axed. One way to demonstrate this is by showing that their graduates land roles at major theatres. In order to ensure this occurs the curriculums will be turned towards producing actors that will be taken by the three S-theatres.
In my time at the Soulpepper I witnessed the students at George Brown College doing substantive amounts of work on Restoration Comedies and Wildean farces–neither of which make up the majority of the work in the Canadian theatre landscape, but both of which do make up a significant amount of the jobs at the Shaw and Stratford. Even though the majority of theatre school graduates will never have the chance to don fake moles and frolic around the stages of Stratford and Shaw or don the mid-century straight, white, male weltenschmerz of a Soulpepper production, the fact they’re all educated with these theatres as their ultimate goal has a significant effect on what students are taught. Moreover, it shapes fundamentally how they learn to think of themselves as artists.
Audiences are not exempt from being shaped into the kinds of audiences that these theatres want them to be. The S theatres, by dint of their scale, have the greatest ability to draw audiences. This draw is a combination of being able to hire well-known and well-respected artists, create shows with high production values, create comfortable and enjoyable performance spaces and to advertise their work so that it may be seen by more than the friends and family of the artists involved. The more audiences are fed on a diet of one theatre’s menu (as delicious and nutritious as that theatre’s fare may be) the more likely that audience will be to consider that menu as the only one. If the only place that an audience can see great actors supported by great production values is in a scant couple of large theatres audiences will begin to believe that the specific aesthetic viewpoint shown there is theatre and anything else is an aberration.
Being “anything else” is especially difficult for traditionally underrepresented groups. Shaw’s 2016 season features eight plays by men and two by women (with one of the two being a Chekhov adaptation). 92% of Stratford’s 2016 season has been written by men. Of Soulpepper’s 14-play January-August season two plays weren’t written by a man (and one of those was written by two women and a man). All three theatres are certainly working to increase the diversity in their cast and creative teams: Soulpepper has recently announced the big and small screen adaptation of Kim’s Convenience by Korean-Canadian playwright Ins Choi. The Shaw festival has gender parity in their directors and several of these directors are people of colour. Stratford went so far as to cast Araya Mengesha as Prince Hal in Breath of Kings their compilation/adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays. Regardless, the problem of representation is built into the foundation of these theatres.
Stratford is focused on a Englishman from the 16th and 17th century. Shaw is focused on their namesake, his contemporaries and plays that occur within his lifetime. Soulpepper’s mandate is perform “modern classics”. Although Soulpepper’s mandate is flexible enough to allow writers like Choi and Suzan Lori-Parks the spiritual centre of the company lives in works like their recent production of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy. These mandates, in the hands of the country’s most powerful companies, keep the artistic resources of some of our best artists tied up in the work of writers who are predominantly men, predominantly white, predominantly dead. This goes beyond the idea of representation of artists on and off stage. These dead white men carry with them values and ideologies of times long past. So long as the narratives and perspectives remain dominant in our theatre they will remain dominant in our culture.
Our theatrical oligopoly exists for the same reason the corporate oligopoly exists: the natural tendency for unchecked power to reinforce and solidify itself until it reaches a point of total, hegemonic dominance. I’ve been hosting a series of conversations with theatre makers in Toronto to discuss capitalism, colonialism and other topics of a political nature. At one of the meetings one of the attendees said, “So… what do we do?”. My answer is the same whether it’s corporate oligopoly or theatrical: agitate, educate, organize.
