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Renderrabbits 03 – “Live” at The High Performance Rodeo

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Hello again! Since my last post I’ve finished Round 2 of this project: the installation version of Renderrabbits at the 2016 High Performance Rodeo. Yeehaw!

Everything went very well, I am happy to say. It was a lot of work to crank it out but the process and installation went smoothly.

(One exception: I broke my glasses on New Years’ Eve when I slipped on some ice and went face first into a street light so the last week of drawing was spent squinting through an old crap pair with my face really close to my computer screen. And I may have had a concussion??? [Probably not.] Did bang my head up though, oops.)

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FINISHING IT UP

So December 2015 was spent drawing portraits of Michael Green, the late founder of the High Performance Rodeo and One Yellow Rabbit. Since he was a huge figure in our community before his passing I felt he needed a more significant presence in the film. I find it takes me about 2 weeks to do a sequence from start to finish, more or less. I am getting faster at this, but the clips I select are getting longer and more complicated so that cancels out the gains I make in efficiency. So if I only have enough time to do 2 more clips and tie everything together, 2 weeks per clip and another week for additional animation and post-production, what two clips do I make?

I decided to make 2 sequences of him: one from an interview he did shortly before he passed away, and one of him doing his infamous performance piece, “The Whaler.” Michael did this wild little performance as sort of a suitcase piece he could ‘whip out’ for parties, festivals, or cabarets. It was notorious. He performed it entirely nude except for a pair of yellow rubber gloves. In it Michael intermittently recites a stanza from a poem he wrote titled “The Whaler,” does a dance, then dunks his head into a bucket full of water, bellowing “I AM THE WHALER!!!” And repeat. It’s fantastic.

If you want to know more about Michael Green’s “The Whaler,” my buds and fellow SpiderWebShow contributors at the Deep Field Podcast spent the Rodeo creating an audio piece exploring the stories surrounding it. Listen to it here, it’s great! They got our mayor Naheed Nenshi on there too, which is pretty rad.

Going through the Rabbit’s archives I found a really decent video recording of a performance of it on VHS tape. This piece is infamous, like I said, but part of that means that more people have heard about “The Whaler” than have seen it. Festival goers and fans of the Rabbits will be talking about it, it always comes up whenever people start talking about Michael. Theatre is such an ephemeral thing. This notorious piece exists in our memories and our stories, but we will never see another performance. Maybe though animating a version of it from an old recording, I can make it tangible again. For a short time, anyway. Preserve an impression of Michael’s energy into a series of drawings that reanimate him in our minds when flashed at our eyeballs at 24 drawings per second. (I animate at 12fps, but stretch it out “on 2’s” so 1 drawing is shown twice. Same difference.)

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This was a long clip though – the whole piece is over 5 minutes long, which is very short for a theatre piece but a LOT to rotoscope. I found a great section near the end of the performance that was about 26 seconds long, his final dance, bucket dip, and holler. This was an older recording, but not that old. Michael was in good shape. He has a pretty sturdy physique and immense control over his movements. I know he did yoga every day. His body was his instrument. Analyzing the piece and sketching out his movements, I noticed that all his motions were very precise.

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The biggest challenge of this piece was dealing with all the blurs and smears in his movements. A “smear” is when you elongate a drawing between two end points to imply a fast motion. The VHS rip I was working from had a lot of blurry images, some from fast motions – essentially smears directly encoded in the tape – and just fuzzy out-of-focus or poorly lit sections. I had to “make up” quite a lot, and sometimes when I couldn’t make out where, say, Michael’s foot was, I would either guess or just leave it out. The video blurs a lot frame by frame, so I tried to emulate that by making the lines inconsistent on those frames to match – dashed lines instead of a solid line.

For this one he whirls his arms around 3 times – each whirl I have to draw his fingers “smearing” implying fast motion for 4 circular motions. Then his hands have to come into focus. His hands blur but his body stays in focus. The way I arrange the lines, in sequence, determine our perceptions of how “fast” his arms are moving. Too many smears in sequence and it doesn’t read as moving fast.

The bucket was hard to find on the video until basically he has his head dunked into it. The original camera footage zooms and follows him around the stage a bit, and the bucket is blocked by the audience half the other time, so I just made it magically appear when it needed to instead of spending another week tracking and drawing in detail this fucking bucket. Kinda lazy, but whatever. Pick your battles when you’re doing all this yourself.

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Something I am playing around with is how to portray dialogue visually, without a soundtrack. The other clip I animated before “The Whaler” clip, from his interview, had Michael talking throughout. For this one I wanted to imply that he is bellowing, and I did a lip sync to match his bellows phonetically in time. I’m not 100% on this yet. It’s effective but I think it can be refined.

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Finally, the transitions between everything! Tie it all together! I decided against looping the portraits individually. Instead each animation segment transitions to another one, and it’s the whole film in installation that loops. I had a technical problem: the portraits of Denise, Andy and Blake were drawn on paper, and the ones of Rico and Michael were done digitally. I didn’t want (and wasn’t really set up) to do more paper drawings to finish up, so I faked it in photoshop. You can kind of notice the difference between them – the pencil drawings were done in light pencil, and the digital pencil is heavier.

I wanted to turn the Rabbits into, well, rabbits. It’s something I had been thinking about for a while but I hadn’t had a chance to do it yet. So the transitions to get from one paper animation to another was to have each Rabbit’s head morph into a rabbit that looked like them. White-tailed jackrabbits, in particular. They are the kind of rabbit we have running around in the backyards and parks in Calgary. I see them at fortuitous times. Every time I start working on this project some of these jackrabbits start appearing everywhere I go. I had one big guy living in my backyard for a while. These wild, agile, and fast rabbits have thrived in the heart of our city. Seemed appropriate for these Rabbits. Not a flop-eared among them.

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To be honest, these transitions were super fun to make. I didn’t have a lot of time to make them elaborate, but after tracing for so long it was nice to have to make it up myself. Denise morphs into Andy, Andy into Blake, Blake turns into a rabbit and gets smeared off screen, Rico smears on screen, then off again, and Michael appears from nowhere.

So I finished it up, with some time to spare, enough to even (gasp) sleep the night before putting it up! Burned it onto a looping BluRay, grabbed a player from Quickdraw Animation, and went down to the Laycraft Lounge at Arts Commons to install the finished piece!

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THE INSTALLATION

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The piece played on a TV hung on the wall, on loop, every night from January 07 – 30 2016 in the festival bar. It was hung between two Chris Cran pieces, which is super duper cool. The bar is a high-traffic area most nights, so I didn’t want to hang any drawings because the frames could get broken. See how high everything is hung, like above shoulder level? I included the credits in the piece for 6 seconds at the start, so I decided to not make a plaque.

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ProTip: never use DVDs with an HDTV for installation work. DVDs are 720p resolution at most, and it will look all pixelly and bad if you put it on a 1080p screen. I work at 1920×1080 at a minimum. In 5 years we are gonna have 5k displays as a standard. DVDs are dead. I want it to look like how I drew it, not down-sampled or re-rendered to fit onto a low-res DVD. I wasn’t able to play the looping .mov file off a USB or media player (my preferred option), so I burned a BluRay, set it up so all the bar techs had to do was turn on the player and it would auto-play and cleanly loop forever. It can be a little bit of a pain to burn a BluRay, but the resolution and clarity is worth it. Fortunately Quickdraw has the capacities to do that.

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The bar can get pretty busy!

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People did check it out. It’s a casual thing, an installation not a screening. It’s about 1 minute and 40 seconds long. People can talk to their friends and glance at it from time to time, or sit and watch it all in one go with no commitment. It was fun to sneak into the bar after a show and watch people watching it. As my face isn’t in the piece, no one really knew who I was (other than my friends).

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The Rodeo had a David Bowie tribute dance party the night I came by with a camera to document the installation. Also that night there was a piece called “Dance Aerobics” happening where the audience had to come in outrageous costume and movement gear. Between the Bowie party and the Aerobics crowd there was quite a lot of people at the bar in colourful clothes that night. Made for some great pictures!

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Last night I took the thing down. The Rodeo is over for another year! I feel incredibly grateful for the opportunity. I am playing around in this weird middle area between performance and video; this installation leans more heavily towards video. I think Renderrabbits is a performance, “live” in a sense even if it is pre-recorded; it is my hand, my drawings that are performing, and the only way to perceive that performance is through the mechanisms of video and film. Animations only really exist when they are being watched – just like theatre. They never “existed” in the first place. This version of the film is a one-month only performance, the film will change and grow in subsequent shows.

I will be locking it down into a film-film this spring. I have a couple other segments I want to include – I want to have 2 portraits of each rabbit, so I want to do another portrait of Denise, Andy, and Blake, and another one of Rico if I can find some decent footage to use. I kind of want to include more archival footage, but: I have a time limit. I got some production support from the National Film Board of Canada to work with Kenna Burima as a sound designer – but I have to get it finished by May! So I gotta get choosy again about what to spend my limited drawing time on…

Anyway, that’s it for this post! Next time I’ll talk about turning it into a film proper, and working with Kenna to develop the music. Thank you for reading!

Season 2 Episode 2: You Are Here Too – Recalling the Whaler

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S2E2

If you’ve ever seen Michael Green do ‘The Whaler,’ you have every naked detail etched in your mind. It was wild theatre at its hilarious best — wet, nude, and undeniable.

During the 30th Annual High Performance Rodeo – Calgary’s International Festival of the Arts – The DFP Team were Listeners in Residence, recording on location, gathering your tall tales of Michael Green’s ‘The Whaler’. We borrowed your voices and built a chorus. A cacophony. A sea shanty.

At a Listening Party of this episode, held on January 29th 2016, we celebrated YOUR remembrances, YOUR belly laughs, and YOUR voices shouting out “I AM THE WHALER!” one or two – or a hundred – times more.

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Featuring the voices of: Allan Baekland, Allison Lynch, Andrew Mosker, Ann Connors, Annie Wilson, Anton de Groot, Blake Brooker, Brad Walker, Chris Cran, Col Cseke, Deanna Jones,  Denise Clarke, Eric Ollivier, Grant Burns, Jason Markusoff, Jennica Greinke, Johnny Dunn, Ken Cameron, Kevin Jesuino, Kris Demeanor, Laurel Green, Michael Green, Maya Green, Michelle Kennedy, Mayor Naheed Nenshi, Natasha Sayer, Natasha Pedros, Nick Diochnos, Nico Brennan, Oliver Armstrong, Peter Moller, Rachel Blomfield, Rita Bozi, Sarah Troicuk, Simon Mallett, Susan Falkner, Tee Crane, Troy Emery Twigg, Ty Semaka, Tyler Longmire, Vicki Stroich, and the crowd at the Laycraft Lounge on January 29th.

 

With music by: Richard McDowell, Alex Fitch, Jason Shaw, Jon Luc Hefferman, Poddington Bear, Sun Brah. All music sourced from the Free Music Archive, except for the music by Richard McDowell: sourced from the One Yellow Rabbit Archives.

Potluck Protocols

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Still leading the way. #oldskoolmadenew. Photo by @ravensboogie via Instagram.

I think if we’re honest, we all consider diversity through a lens of “gain” and “loss”. How those might potentially be inverted depends on which side of privilege you habitually occupy. For those of us having these conversations on a regular basis, we are more than ready to see a collective shift in terms of what we are doing after all this talk. I’ve been reconsidering how we might activate a more expansive understanding of words like “diversity,” “inclusion,” “exclusion,” “accountability” if we created communally derived protocols[1] to guide the way.

One possible answer I offer: a Potluck Protocol Agreement.

All companies/producing collectives are invited to sign a protocol agreement that outlines a manageable and measurable list of values and actions – best practices, if you will. Signatories will commit to fulfilling this agreement throughout the 2017 season.

“But how,” you ask? How about collectively.

The Potluck Protocols will be collectively built through smaller meeting-potlucks as represented by the various ‘communities’ in Vancouver. Individuals will break bread together, dismantling what ‘we’ve always done’ into protocols that best meet the needs of their member-community.

Companies, collectives, and individuals, especially those with aspirations to foster diversity and inclusivity, would be responsible to make themselves present at some point in the process. Further mechanisms can be collectively designed to compile, propose, and fine-tune the Potluck Protocols. Venued-companies will offer their spaces for potluck-meetings as a goodwill gesture towards accessibility.

The as-a-whole theatre community will gather at the end of the 2017 season for a full day or two. Artistic directors/collective representatives will present their findings: the gains and losses of an enlivened diverse theatre practice. Based on these findings, adjustments to the Protocols will be made by those in attendance/proxied.

The benefit to meeting yearly is the ability to be responsive. It means we try, (dammit, Jim). And from our attempts, we learn. This diminishes the weighted fear of failing; it relieves companies from the pressure of needing to have the perfect solution and doing it all right the first time. As Andrea Loewen, Board President of the Jessie Richardson Awards Society said, “We won’t know what works until we try things out, after all.”

Each company/ collective will be given the opportunity to decline further involvement with the Potluck Protocol Agreement or commit to another year. This ensures some meaningful degree of transparency for the community at large.

Why potluck? If nothing else, we are building ‘community’ and where there is community, there is always—always—good food. Food on a table brings people together. And ceremony transcends difference.

Ultimately, I’m asking that protocols be collectively defined and in this, become a means to challenge the structures of privilege and normativity. After all, ‘diversity’ as its been enacted is often just enriching what we already do with what we can access, while ‘inclusion’ maintains a power structure of the us-versus-them: “I will include you.” Seen this way, it’s imperative that diversity and inclusion become more than a numbers game where we do things like hire more different looking people.

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Empathy map appropriated by a medicine wheel (and some of its teachings). Content created with the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards Society board of directors. Photo by Lisa C Ravensbergen.

Dylan Robinson, Stó:lō scholar and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts, gives a great example of this, framed around new protocols for listening:

“‘Xwelitem’ is the Halq’emeylem word Stó:lō people use to say ‘non-Indigenous person’ (or ‘Xwenitem’ in Squamish, Muqeuam, Tsleil-Waututh communities). As I understand it, these words came into use because, when settlers first arrived in our territory, they were starving. They were starving literally, for food, but starving also for gold. This hunger for resources has not abated with time, indeed it has only grown – a hunger for the resources of our land: the rocks, the trees, the water, the land itself. Each has been thirsted after, each has been consumed.

How are you listening right now? What are you listening for? Is your listening ‘hungry’?

How, might we define (demand) new protocols of engagement: listening, viewing, witnessing, that are not hungry and driven by the desire to consume knowledge and Indigenous content? Ways that are not starving?

The Potluck Protocols “could be a great way to bring clarity without reductionism,” says Jay Dodge of Boca del Lupo. Yet, despite these kinds of affirmations and pockets of ‘diversity discussions’ happening around town, fear continues to grow, shrouded with confusion or anger. The fear seems to lie in losing what has been gained. It also lies in never gaining what we have lost. It seems people fear practicing power, inverse to how one might be used to.

The very nature of reciprocity and protocol as I’m offering it, is not utopian; more, it is that it offers empowerment, birthed of self-determination, internalized through community-led accountability. We gain opportunity for all sides of privilege and all the diverse pockets of intersectionality to be welcomed, validated, seen and heard. Allies must also be acknowledged. As for those who say they’re allies but won’t do simple-complex things like call their peers on their theatrical privilege… the generous side of me asks: can these protocols challenge and empower them to do that more and better?

Even in this ‘age of reconciliation,’ I don’t know if we will become a community of allies; I really don’t know if we’re ready. It has always been so easy to confuse reconciliation with assimilation. I still witness how ownership and entitlement gets confused for artistic integrity and guilt for accountability. Though it frames these initial thoughts, we need something other than “loss” and “gain” to view our work. I do believe we are capable of nurturing a collective consciousness and communal awareness that very simply and clearly halts talking that isn’t doing. I believe we must offer ourselves more.

And, hivemind: go.

[1] I propose “protocol” in acknowledgement of Vancouver’s unceded Coast Salish land we practice our art upon and the existing system of governance that has sustained them from time immemorial and still guides the three nations. Each nation enacts their distinct sovereignty even as they share unifying protocols (lineage, values, principles, language, codes of conduct, acknowledgements, etc.) that also embody specific spiritual beliefs. These protocols are foundational and the reciprocal respect and enactment of these protocols ensures a measurable system of accountability.

Miigwetch – Thanks to the following for the initial Facebook (and on-going) discussion: Margo Kane, Dylan Robinson, Lucia Frangione, David Bloom, Jessica Schneider, Heidi Taylor, Nicola Harwood, Jay Dodge, Diane Roberts, Tasha Faye Evans, Crystal Verge, Carmen Aguirre, Brander Raven, Jan Derbyshire, Andrea Loewen, Mona Stillwell, Christina Wells Campbell, Lisa Voth, Daniel Martin, Ron Reed, Hilary Strang, Kevin Loring, Jeremy Waller, Susanna Uchatius, Omari Newton, Leanna Brodie, Stephen Drover, Lisa Bunting, Olivia C. Davies, Sandra Currie, Jules Koostachin, Jacob Zimmer, Adrienne Wong, David Geary, Carol Sawyer, Anitra Donald, Michele Volansky, Michael Wheeler, Marianne Anderson, Amy Baskin, Jenn Griffin, Shandra Spears Bombay, Brendan Patrick McClarty, Lib Spry, Donna Spencer.

– Edited 26/01/16 9:19 EST to include additional names to Lisa’s acknowledgements. —AW

How to Get Over White Girl Guilt and Do Your Fucking Job

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The Richmond Gateway Theatre’s Pacific Festival poster, 2014.

This needs to be said before we can get into it: I am a white woman of immense artistic privilege.

For 10 years, I have worked in large regional theatres as an artistic programmer, dramaturg, and publicist. I select stories for the stage, shape those stories, and craft the communications strategies of those stories selected for those stages. Just writing that sentence gives me White Girl Guilt; a neurosis that stems from my hyper-awareness of the limited access to that power. I’m tempted to reinforce why I earned those jobs, but I won’t because that’s the exact reaction that prevents us from doing the work.

Theatre’s fundamental purpose is to share stories that connect us. Artist to artist, artist to audience, human to human. So shouldn’t it be the responsibility of arts makers, producers, and advocates to ensure all human stories and sensibilities are included in our practice? Of course it should, but we often fail at this because our fears and egos get in the way. And while it’s vital to hire more non-caucasian arts producers in our theatres, I would argue that us White Girls (who occupy the majority of arts administration jobs) can make great changes right now by getting over our privilege guilt and doing our fucking jobs.

Here are the ways I’ve seen, felt, and dealt with my own White Girl Guilt and made stronger, more inclusive artistic choices with my colleagues that reflect the perspectives and needs of all our artists.

When Otherness Isn’t Funny: A Christmas Story, The Musical – Arts Club Theatre Company

The comedy of characters’ perceived racial difference is delicate. Minimize the sentiment and it’s not funny. Go heavy-handed and it’s offensive. So when director Valerie Easton staged the restaurant scene in the Arts Club’s 2015 production of this super-campy musical, we went full throttle: the Asian waiter had a fu manchu and thick accent that seemed to suit the scale of the zany show.

Then we got a letter from a subscriber and artist who carefully deconstructed that scene’s meaning and impact on her. The private letter was then publicly shared on Facebook, where it was liked by more than 80 people within hours, with a fast-growing comments feed rallying behind the letter’s sentiments. I emailed my marketing, artistic, and senior leadership team at 10pm with the subject line: URGENT.

By 9am the next day, Artistic Managing Director Bill Millerd was already on it. He read the letter, called Valerie, and requested that I withhold our public response until they decided what to do with the scene. After reconsidering the artistic choices based on the subscriber’s feedback, Bill wrote to the patron, acknowledged that these choices could cause offense, noted the changes made (fu manchu cut, accent flattened), and thanked them for their input on the work. I also asked the patron to close the loop on social media by sharing the update, which she gladly did, and the comments feed celebrated her for being a catalyst of change.

Rewind to me watching dress rehearsal, where I wondered if the scene was offensive. Knowing our creative team meant no harm, I assumed the bold choices weren’t landing, comically (“Surely the scene’s intention is ironic, they just need time to play with it”). I also doubted my role in the production (“You’re the publicist; you’re not on the artistic team, so don’t overstep your bounds”). I was also very new to the job and didn’t want to overstep any boundaries (“You’ve only been here a month. Don’t offend people with your pokey questions”).

My own White Girl-ness of maintaining my place and not raising doubts held me back from doing my fucking job. Because when I read the subscriber’s complaint letter, I had intense artistic shame, thinking, “I could have prevented this.” Rather than partnering with my AD in a moment of doubt, I wound up partnering with him on a crisis of perception (which is much worse). Huge lesson learned.

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The cast of A Christmas Story, The Musical. Photo by David Cooper.

The Politics of Bilingualism in New Canadian Programming – Gateway Theatre

In 2014, Gateway Theatre Artistic Director Jovanni Sy implemented his new vision for the organization: the Gateway Pacific Theatre Festival would present Hong Kong plays performed in Cantonese with English surtitles. While Kelly Nestruck asked his Globe and Mail readers the immense artistic question, “Has Jovanni Sy solved the biggest problem facing Canada’s theatre establishment – what to do about shrinking (white) audiences in a growing (multicoloured) Canada?”, Jovanni and I were hung up on the nitty gritty practical follow-up conundrum: “how do you get this potential audience into the Gateway without alienating the established audience?”

The shows were surtitled, so the problem wasn’t accessibility of understanding the work. The challenges were with the surrounding communications strategies and the politics of bilingual signage. A hot topic in Richmond, particularly at that time, due to a silent divide between the Caucasian and Asian communities. Jovanni wanted to close the gap, so we needed to wield our words in inclusive ways. Since the festival is primarily for a Cantonese-speaking audience and accessible to those who speak English, the communications materials needed to reflect that relationship to access.

Decision: copy written primarily in Cantonese with English translations. With Cantonese-speakers being the primary demographic, the communications team also reached out to Cantonese-speaking vendors, community partners, and media; heeding their advice on effective methods of communication and connection; and learning what motivates that community. In short: we served that demographic by putting them first.

Initially, it made me uncomfortable. Richmond was a city where I already felt like the Other and the festival reinforced that my Caucasian cultural perspective and language would not come first at the theatre where I worked. How often does that happen in Canadian regional theatres? Never. How awesome that it finally did.

I became aware that People Like Me (white) were no longer the central demographic driving artistic decisions. That flip in power was humbling, and necessary, because for the first time I was able to see the People Like Me were not white, they were ALL theatre lovers who simply wanted to connect with a show that brought them a little closer to their truth.

Strategies vs. Solutions – Speaking Up in all Rooms

If you are an arts marketer on a job interview, you will inevitably be asked how you plan to reach diverse audiences, which is great. It means the leadership team is keen to make change. How brave you are about addressing the magnitude of change necessary is entirely up to you.

When I was recently asked this question, I replied, “I wouldn’t simply program one ‘diverse’ story a season, participate in the community outreach, and pretend like we’ve solved the problem.” This statement simultaneously raised eyebrows and guffaws of approval; the room was delightfully surprised that I had placed blame not just the marketing teams as a demographic-seeking tactic, but demonstrated that it was an entire organization’s responsibility to uphold diversity.

If you’re thinking I said this confidently, you’re wrong. I honestly believed I ran my mouth and blew my chance. I left the interview stewing over the successful strategies I’ve used in the past; all examples I could have cited to get the gig. But then my gut kicked in and said that wasn’t the truth, because the tactics are only temporary solutions (sell the show) and don’t address the problem (how theatre can be more inclusive).

So how about we commit to real change instead of reinforcing perceived notions of success? What if we make a ruckus in any room, even those where you have no guarantee of work? I’m proud to say that being a voice for bigger change not only got me a job at that organization, it gave me a chance to do the good work on the ground floor in some of the greatest rooms in Canadian theatre.

There are, of course, broader diversity debates worth discussing. Systemic racism, the politics of access to power, or generational perspectives and divides. But those conversations are too theoretical and unchangeable until we do the real work: look each other in the eye, deal with our fears, and make more inclusive decisions in the day to day.

Because if the Whitest Girl in Canadian theatre can get over herself and do her fucking job, so can you.

How I Decided To Speak

By
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January Town Hall Meeting at PL 1422 in Vancouver, BC.

I have been feeling like I need to puke for the last month, ever since Carmen Aguirre, Alexandra Lainfiesta and I first decided to write our letter to the Vancouver producers of The Motherfucker with the Hat, challenging their casting choices.

It was the first time that I had ever spoken up publicly… on anything really.

I don’t like to be the heavy. When it comes to these issues I always feel like I’m swimming behind a boat hoping to catch up with those who are far better spoken than I on these subjects, those who’ve been active in these conversations for years, or who’ve already written so eloquently on the topics of race and representation.

I don’t consider myself the most intellectually nimble person out there. In fact, I am intimidated by those who are. I act on instinct, without planning my every step. But my gut was telling me it was time to speak up.

Recently, I had begun to reexamine my own heritage as a first generation Latino Canadian. I was looking around at who was making work in which I saw myself reflected. I didn’t see much. So I began to make my own.

I began reaching out to fellow Latino artists and researching the history of my ancestors. All this led to finally feeling as though I had earned the right to call myself a Latino. So when the issue surrounding the casting of The Motherfucker with the Hat presented itself I felt it was time to stand my ground and add my voice to the fray.

Which brings me to the town hall held on January 11th, 2016, and to a room full of people I respected, admired, and others I had never met before. We planned the event so quickly that I was afraid that it would only be a handful of folks talking in circles. But it wasn’t. Over 130 people came and more streamed the event online. We came together ready to listen to each other. I was amazed by the theatre community that I’m honoured to be a part of.

Since I had already used my voice to help gather people there, I wanted to take Carmen Aguirre’s opening words to heart and let those who had not spoken yet have a chance. So after taking the first few minutes to explain to the crowd why Carmen, Alexandra Lainfiesta, and myself had written the letter, I actively stepped back from the conversation. I listened.

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Manuela Sosa in Mis Papás, produced by rice and beans theatre. Photo by Dan Borzillo.

I’m not going to lie, it took a lot of tongue biting to not jump in and, ultimately, I had to speak up again when someone said that, “it was just a group of friends wanting to do a play.” As if it isn’t as important for a group of actors to consider representation in casting, or that the ethics are different for them than for organizations like the Arts Club.

Maybe it is. Had the Arts Club not held open auditions for In the Heights, I hope our community would have spoken out, organized as we had around The Motherfucker, and taken the Arts Club to task. Maybe now we will be ready to do so or maybe it won’t ever be necessary again. If only.

At the end of the night I was left feeling a little blah, partly from just how tired I was from keeping my emotions in check, but also from how slow the conversation seems to move.

I can see how much effort it is going to take to keep the momentum going. How sometimes I’m going to feel guilty because there will be times that I will just want to do my art and not be an activist or advocate.

I didn’t do all this so that I could dedicate myself to seeking out all the places that Latinos are wronged. I spoke up as a Latino because no one else was and I was able to find others who felt the same.

Ultimately, I’m glad that I helped write the letter, that the event happened, and that we are talking about all of this in the open, not behind closed doors.

Maybe it seems like we here in Vancouver are airing our dirty laundry for the rest of Canada to see. First with the Letter to Jessies (whose board president and members attended the town hall event) demanding equality on our award stage. Then with a letter to the Arts Club about the portrayal of an insensitive Asian stereotype. You might be saying, “Just what is going on in Vancouver?!”

I know for myself there is already some fallout. A friend told me that, for ethical reasons, they can no longer work with me. That sucks. I may have lost a friend because I chose to speak up. But had it not been for the courage of the authors who wrote letters to the Jessies, to the Arts Club, or the openness of the participants at the public discussions that followed, I may never have had the courage to find my own voice.

Hopefully, we will build from these discussions and actually instill some lasting and meaningful change.

#CdnCult Times; Volume 6, Edition 7: VANCOUVER REPRESENT

By and

Your house has a smell.

Not a good smell or a bad smell. Just a smell. You probably don’t notice the smell because you live there. You’re used to it.

Whiteness as a social construct is like the smell of your house. We don’t really notice it because we’re used to it as the default.

Every so often, a situation arises that raises awareness of the sets of assumptions and conventions in place based on the assumed default of Whiteness. Google #OscarsSoWhite, “Black Hermione”, or “Mother Courage/Tonya Pinkins.”

Over the past 18 months, several situations have arisen that challenge Vancouver’s theatre community to examine assumptions around race and representation onstage: the ReaCT open letter to the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards Society addressing under-representation of artists of colour among the Jessie board, juries, nominees and award-winners; a letter to Arts Club Theatre decrying the representation of a Chinese character in their production of A Christmas Story: the Musical; and, most recently, actions (1, 2) by the Latino community challenging the casting of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Motherfucker with the Hat.

Each instance pushed Vancouver’s theatre community to re-examine values and expectations, current practices and possible alternatives, and what shared principles – if any – the community has the right to hold itself accountable for.

In this edition of #cdncult, we’ve collected three perspectives on Vancouver’s on-going discussion. Pedro Chamale writes about the tensions between finding his voice as an artist and advocate. Amy Lynn Strilchuk unpacks some White Girl guilt and discusses how entire organizations can promote change. And Lisa C. Ravensbergen poses a possible process to communally develop shared values and best practices around race, representation and cultural production.

This edition is not as a definitive portrait of the Vancouver theatre community’s struggles with “diversity”, but rather a snapshot of a community in flux that is, most importantly, willing to consider change.

Time to open the windows and let some fresh air into the house.

Season 2 Episode 1.5: Renderrabbits

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We heard some great stories in the first half of our recording sessions at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary where we are Listeners in Residence.  We thought we’d share little something, just to whet your appetites. Enjoy this short preview episode with an interview we did with animator Tyler Klein Longmire about watching old VHS tapes and drawing The Whaler for his animated short film Renderrabbits. Check out more of the story behind Renderrabbits in the SWS Gallery. 

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The Deep Field Podcast are Listeners in Residence at the One Yellow Rabbit High Performance Rodeo with You Are Here Too – Recalling The Whaler

January 15 & 16, 22 & 23 – 9:45pm – midnight, Listening Party January 29 @ 9:45pm (Laycraft Lounge, FREE)

If you’ve ever seen Michael Green do The Whaler,  you have every naked detail etched in your mind. It was wild theatre at its hilarious best — wet, nude, and undeniable.

During the Rodeo on Friday and Saturday nights, The Deep Field Podcast team will be looking for you with tape rolling, to record your tall tales of Michael Green’s The Whaler . Share what The Whaler means to you, and celebrate what you remember.

As the High Performance Rodeo’s official Listeners in Residence, we will borrow your voices to build a chorus. A cacophony. A sea shanty.

If you never caught the spectacle, you can find out all about it on January 29 (Listening Party). Join us for a Listening Party where we compose YOUR remembrances, YOUR belly laughs, and YOUR voices shouting out “I AM THE WHALER!” one or two – or a hundred – times more.

 

VancouverPlays Explained

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Vancouver theatre critics at the Jessie Awards 2014. Featuring Mark Leiren-Young, Jo Ledingham, Colin Thomas, and Jerry Wasserman.

I had been a professional stage actor and UBC English professor for more than a decade when I started reviewing Vancouver theatre for CBC Radio in the mid-1980s, first as a stringer for the national program State of the Arts, then for 17 years as a regular weekly critic for CBC Vancouver’s The Afternoon Show. In 2004, when the show permanently eliminated my theatre slot, as well as book reviews, in favour of a sex column and pop music, I decided to create a website, www.vancouverplays.com, to review local theatre and dance. At that time there was hardly any online arts coverage in Vancouver.

Once my site was up and running I also pitched myself to The Province, the local tabloid that had stopped reviewing theatre in the mid-1990s. Luckily for me, Province subscribers had been complaining about the lack of local arts and entertainment coverage so I was hired as the paper’s freelance theatre critic. With many policy changes and turnovers of editors, my Province gig lasted on and off until 2015. Meanwhile, I continued to teach, act, and run Vancouverplays.com, now solely devoted to theatre. (A few years ago I dropped dance coverage because no dance companies were buying my ads.) Currently in its twelfth year, the site has logged over 1.2 million visitors and archived more than 600 reviews, 95% of them written by me.

Linda Malloy, my wonderful designer and webmistress (as we both jokingly call her), posts the material I send her. I do everything else: edit all the text I receive from publicists, update and refresh the site weekly, write a weekly editorial for the home page, solicit the advertising, do the billing. I also write nearly all the reviews. Since I have been traveling for extended periods during the past few years, I have given over some reviewing to another local journalist. In an attempt to instill some ethnic diversity in the all-white Vancouver theatre critics’ community, I have also recently begun assigning reviews to two UBC Theatre grad students, one First Nations, the other Asian-Canadian. But I feel most comfortable when I can take full credit or blame for whatever appears on the site.

I consider myself a public intellectual and would describe my style of theatre criticism as informed populism. My approach to reviewing has not changed very much whether live on air for radio, in print for a newspaper, or online for my own site. I’ve always chosen the shows I want to review, and I’ve been unusually fortunate, I’m sure, in never having any of my reviews censored or rejected on radio or in print. I had to stick to a format (five or six minutes on air, 600-800 words for the paper), but except for one editor at The Province, no one ever so much as trimmed a review of mine. I told the next editor I wouldn’t write for the paper anymore if they cut my words, and he agreed not to. I was also somehow able to get away with reprinting all my Province reviews on Vancouverplays.com without formal permission from Postmedia. Luck? Chutzpah? I don’t know. The only real difference in reviewing for my own website is that I can write as much as I want and use words I couldn’t use on CBC or in the paper.

VancouverPlays Hompage
Homepage of VancouverPlays.com

Today, Vancouver has many theatre bloggers and online reviewers, but mine is likely the only website fully supported by paid ads from local theatre companies. I don’t feel that this has put me in a serious conflict of interest. It’s no different than reviewing for a newspaper that carries even more expensive theatre ads. Besides, I’m already in conflict in so many other ways—reviewing friends, former students, actors I’ve acted with, directors who have directed me and might, I hope, again.

I studiously avoid cheap shots, but when a show sucks, I say so. Yet none of my advertisers has ever pressured me to write puff pieces or pull my punches. I’m a huge fan of theatre, a booster of the local theatrical economy, and I tend generally to be a positive guy. I think my reviews reflect all that. I would hope that the financial support I get from theatre companies has everything to do with my knowledge and experience of theatre, my reputation for integrity and good writing, the quality of my site, and the numbers of would-be ticket buyers who visit it.

As for the future, Linda will redesign the website this year to get us better Google results, higher placement on the page when someone searches “Vancouver theatre.” Otherwise, it’s steady as she goes. I’ve avoided Twitter because of the extra time it involves, though I’m likely to suffer for that as social media continues to replace mainstream media as people’s primary source of cultural information. The steady demise of newspapers and other opportunities for informed theatre criticism to reach a wide general audience is an unfortunate reality of our times.

No one is going to make a living blogging theatre reviews. But critics will continue to be a crucial element of the cultural ecology. The Calgary Herald’s Stephen Hunt calls us “the honeybees of Canadian culture. We pollinate it.” Since there seems to be no shortage of people who want their critical voices heard, it’s important that we find ways for those voices to be as educated, aware and diverse as possible, and for the pollination to be efficient, effective and widespread. In the most recent issue of Critically Speaking, the newsletter of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association, Hunt proposes “a Canada Council for Critics.” 1% of the Council’s budget, or about $2 million a year, he suggests, “could fund over 100 digital critics across the country, so that they could have a deeper sense of professionalism, and also a longer-term commitment to learning and receiving training for their craft. A whole lot of Canadian artists would get critiqued as a result.” 

Good theatre criticism is hard, important work, and those who do it deserve to be recompensed for their labour. In our brave new world where writers, filmmakers, musicians and other cultural workers are struggling to figure out how to make the online world profitable for them, I count myself extremely fortunate to be able to generate some revenue doing one of the things I love most. Though the profit I derive from my website divided by the number of hours I put into it works out to less than minimum wage, it keeps this bee a-buzzing.

 

Criticism and Community

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2015 TTCAs

I think it’s important to begin this article by acknowledging my own hypocrisy.

In writing this piece that had its genesis in my incredulity that the Toronto Theatre Critics’ Awards (TTCAs) continue to have an all-male jury five years after being founded, I have managed (with co-editor Adrienne Wong) to pull together three articles by white guys from across Canada to form this edition. This is something that rarely happens on #cdncult, to go 3/3 like that. I think it speaks to the structural bias that exists within theatre criticism itself.

Back in November, critic Kelly Nestruck published an article in The Globe and Mail that took umbrage with Ross Petty’s approach to casting his pantos “in 2015”. Petty commented, “I cannot hire somebody of a different colour just to satisfy a portion of the audience that feels they are not being represented, I need to hire the most talented people that there are.” Nestruck’s article took him to task on this casting philosophy in what is probably the least-glowing preview article I can recall. (The last line is “Boo, Mr. Petty. Boo.”)

So I wrote to Kelly Nestruck and said, “Great article, I totally agree this sort of answer is unacceptable – but how is this different than the all-male TTCAs?” In return I received a suggestion to send a list of questions for the ‘Critics Circle’ (as they prefer to be understood – not as a jury), that could be shared with the group as the informal nature meant there was no one spokesperson.

The responses I received from Nestruck, NOW’s Glenn Sumi and Torontoist & Globe and Mail’s Martin Morrow left me confused about where to go with this line of questioning. Each agreed the composition was problematic – all cited structural issues that were challenging reform. At the risk of being reductive I can summarize the dilemma as:

The Circle is drawn from ‘professional’ theatre critics – currently defined as those holding the ‘head’ critic position at each of the outlets that still manage to cover theatre and print on paper + Torontoist. Because the media is made up mostly of guys, so is the circle. As of late, non-head critics have been able to give input (for example Carly Maga at The Toronto Star), but even if membership were to be officially expanded to this cohort, would secondary critics have seen enough shows to be qualified to determine what was best each year?

All of this indicates to me that the TTCAs are in a tight spot. Despite the genuine hope for change to come from membership, change SEEMS to be controlled by the hiring practices of a media industry struggling just as much as theatre to achieve gender equity. But to do nothing is to continue our annual ritual of tweets and blog posts challenging the merit of a series of awards determined exclusively through the male gaze. They are probably one winner who ‘can’t even’ away from having an award turned down.

It seems to me the hope is The Star will hire a woman to replace head critic Richard Ouzounian to increase the critical perspective. Sure, maybe – but I hope even if that happens they use this moment as an opportunity to broaden, or perhaps deepen, the principals of The Circle. In Kelly Nestruck’s official response he gave three principles that to his mind underpinned the awards so far:

“To create more of a theatre awards season in the city; to increase the visibility of professional theatre criticism and theatre critics here; to have a party where critics and the theatre community could come together.”

I can get behind the first two for the most part, but I hope the individuals who compose the Critics Circle engage in an interrogation of the third and what it means.

If the intention of the Critics Circle is to “come together” with the theatre community, well, you should take note of how the community works. We’ve created systems to determine merit within the theatre community, be it an award or a grant, and in any case, an all-male decision-making body is pretty much out of the question. There is probably an actual rule about it at the arts councils and Google search “Jessie Awards” “diversity” if you don’t believe me about the other stuff.

While I recognize a critic’s circle is distinct from an arts jury, I’m not sure the semantics are relevant to what the word community means at its core. The word implies a shared sense of values and principals that define what the community is. And while it has been a while since my sociology minor, I do recall that part of defining who is part of the community is determining those who demonstrate a commitment to shared values. Those who do not are “other” and not part of the community. There is always an “other” – the community defines itself in part by what it is not.

So there is an opportunity here regardless of whom The Toronto Star’s new theatre critic is. It’s one where our critics, who will continue to play an essential role in the ecology, could also become part of the community. They can do it by demonstrating a commitment to our shared values. This can’t be done simply by welcoming a female member courtesy of someone else’s hiring decision. But this can be done by proactively addressing gender inequity within the Critic Circle’s composition. When critics and artists come together for a party this summer, will it be as “other” and community or as a community?

Our critics are constrained by the same structural bias that led us at #cdncult, without even noticing it until it was too late – to curate this all-male issue. It’s not easy. All of us get it wrong sometimes – think about how deeply difficult a time this has been for the theatre community and equity issues. It takes active resistance to reshape these practices and I don’t know the answer exactly. I do know that passive acceptance of others’ decisions is not the path forward, and efforts to effect change is what the rest of the community is up to these days.

Artistic Director Writes to Critics – You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!

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The Boy in the Moon by Emil Sher at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. Photo by Andrew Alexander.

In a curious reversal of the Old-Man-Yells-at-Internet trope, I am increasingly aware of the internet yelling at me. The digital age, it yells, is upon us, and everything that you have ever believed about theatre is going to change or die. Given my experience with the internet to date, I take its shrieking with a grain of salt. Most recently, the internet was yelling at me about the dearth not only of legitimate theatre critics, but of any critics at all.

Whether we liked them or loathed them, the established critics in the mainstream media could once be relied upon to cover our work in a predictable pattern that aligned with our own marketing and production schedules. But as media moguls continue to slash operating budgets, the old framework has disappeared and we now face an amorphous inventory of neophyte bloggers, established critics, veteran bloggers, academics, retired critics, Twerds, Facebookers, cub reporters and Daniel Karasik.

I see such a varied response to our work as an opportunity rather than a disadvantage. The more prepared we are to embrace a multitudinous response to theatre, the more likely we are to build a collective understanding of excellence versus mediocrity. (As an artist I have been responsible for works at both ends of the spectrum, and trust me: nobody is immune to the latter.) It is easy, however, when looking at the range of skills in the inventory of critics, to focus on the negative aspects. With the rise of the self-anointed theatre critic, we have also seen an unsettling increase in uninformed and ill-informed criticism. Or have we?

When the regional newspapers still covered theatre, the reviewing was often pawned off on junior reporters who were also responsible for minor sports, social events and news from the service clubs. This was certainly my experience when I was Artistic Director of the rural Blyth Festival for ten years. The local papers covered the hell out of the shows – but the reporters had no idea how to write a review. After complaining about this for a few years, I decided instead to look at my role in the equation. I was desperate for the coverage, but I had done nothing to help address the gap between community reportage and professional theatre review.

So, we hired a critic from Toronto to spend a weekend conducting a workshop for local writers. The first exercise was to assess the reporters’ working knowledge of theatre, wherein we were alarmed to discover that none of them had an accurate sense of the director’s role. Most were operating under the assumption that the Stage Manager was responsible for blocking the show and that the designers showed up to do the actors’ makeup or maybe paint the set. Nobody had heard of a maquette. By the end of the workshop we had made measureable, if slender, headway and it was apparent in subsequent reviews of our work. No longer were actors lauded for their choice of costumes, nor were directors praised for the lighting designs. It was a baby step, but a step nonetheless.

best bros
The Best Brothers by Daniel MacIvor at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. Photo by Andrew Alexander.

With the rise of the blogger, a different challenge has emerged. Not tied to deadlines of any sort, the volunteer blogger critic may have a lot to offer, but little incentive to maintain the traditional relationship of theatre and reviewer. In Ottawa I have noticed an almost comic inconsistency among the bloggers in terms of attendance and timeliness of the reviews. Recognizing that they are not seeing the situation from our point of view, I wrote a policy document of sorts and sent it to the theatre critics on the Great Canadian Theatre Company’s (GCTC) media list.

Clarity being the essential ingredient, the piece promotes an understanding of our mutual responsibilities and expectations. That is really all it contains – a list of GCTC’s responsibilities (ie: timely information, access to artists for interviews, production photos, access to the script, tickets to opening night, etc) and our corresponding list of expectations (ie: the critic will attend on opening night or within three days of opening, the review will be posted in a timely manner, etc.). As an added incentive, we have made three spots available for embedded criticism, allowing three critics to attend several hours of rehearsal at various stages (ie: table reading, blocking rehearsal, technical rehearsal). So far, this has all received positive feedback.

If it seems simplistic, it is deliberately so. There is a deficiency in the current relationship and I cannot solve it in a vacuum. For example, it serves no purpose to complain to my peers when a blogger requests comp tickets to a preview, because the blogger is not privy to that conversation. As much as I like to maintain flexibility in our relationships with stakeholders of all stripes, I believe that the only way to address the deficiencies in our relationship with the myriad critics is to state our case in bold and clear terms. To whit: both parties need an incentive to co-operate. I will gladly provide tickets to reviewers, but only as long as they acknowledge the value of the relationship.

This deliberate simplicity is a first step towards deeper engagement – an engagement that will only reach its potential if I begin by laying out clear expectations, accompanied by meaningful incentives for a new brand of critic. Access to a rehearsal, for example, is a counter-intuitive exercise, but it creates enormous potential for the critic to gain insight. As theatre itself shifts to embrace an immersive approach, why shouldn’t our traditional relationships take the same step?

If all goes according to plan, the critics who cover my work will invest more deeply in the process. In my wildest dreams, they will avail themselves of our resources to a greater degree by reading scripts in advance, conducting interviews with designers and stage managers, rather than always defaulting to the actors and directors. Critique will extend beyond observation and delve into rigorous critical thinking that will, in turn, challenge me to improve my practice. If, by engaging my critics, I am able to elevate my own game, then the inevitable hurdles along the way will be worth it.

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