Tasha Faye Evans in 2nd Story Blood Alley by The Only Animal. Photo by George Roberts.
We may be fucked as a species.
I think I’ve had this feeling since I was 10, when I first became aware of myself as living in a larger world. It was 1978 in the United States. Times were not great. Vietnam aftermath. Ted Bundy, Hillside Strangler, Love Canal… energy crisis. There was a terrible winter storm that killed 100 people in my region. Cold War. Nuclear shelter drills in school. My parents had divorced a year before. Shit was fucked up.
But I had a way out. In 1980 I was cast as Master Bates (thanks C. Dickens) in the high school’s “Oliver!”. I was in 7th grade. I grabbed onto those high school actors and that chosen world under hot lights and pancake makeup. I could run away and join the circus and still live with Mom. And then… during a senior year internship at the local Equity theatre (stage carp., worst ever, built a sawhorse) I gave one of the actors a ride to his rented room. Something about that actor, the loneliness he carried like the cold smoke clinging to his coat. I wasn’t sure anymore. I had done a little canvassing for the nuclear freeze. I saw the news. Dropped acid. Maybe my work in the world wasn’t about being a traveling actor in rented rooms.
So. A long and twisty road through college back towards acting and restaurant work and San Francisco and nonprofit development assistant work (processing donations mostly) and dance-theatre and Viewpoints and Traveling Jewish Theatre to Kendra Fanconi and Vancouver and The Only Animal. Making site-specific plays, sometimes called immersive. Big, visual, lyrical stuff. Always engaged with place.
As a site-specific theatre company, we’ve made shows in a lot of different places. We often work with elemental stuff: trees, sand, ice and snow, lots of water interactions here on the west coast of British Columbia. Here is where we started a family. We moved to a small town, we planted a garden. And then the rain stopped, for months. Our community water ran low. The fires sent ash over our town and Vancouver too. This climate shit suddenly got real. Close to home. That’s embarrassing to admit, so late to the party. So, ‘climate’ is our tag for all of that.
Billy Marchenski and Matt Palmer in Sea of Sand by The Only Animal.
So the perennial question: what is my work in the world now? I’m a father of two boys. I have to think of the future, their future. What could be and what might not be at all. Fish. Big trees. Fresh water…you know, everything that makes life possible. It’s almost unthinkable, incomprehensible. I have to do something, and theatre is my way of doing.
This puts me in the awkward position of placing a goal on my artistic practice beyond ‘make good art.’ Awkward because art itself is not advocacy. To me, it becomes some other thing when the message is overt, the intention to persuade. Good art doesn’t tell people how to think or feel. It can invite us to think and feel for ourselves, into the darker corners, and past what we believe is possible. Like death, climate change is one of those big subjects that art can help us make emotional sense of, linking it to our own lives in a meaningful way.
It seems we can play a role as artists. What’s that role? That’s what I am asking myself these days, and our participants in Generation Hot. This partnership with Vancouver Fringe invites 10 artists ages 17-24 to respond creatively to the climate moment by building a short performance. With my fellow mentors mia susan amir and Chris Ross, we’ll all be finding our own way in this new territory, a varied bunch of fellow travelers. There’s comfort just in that.
We are working with Generation Hot because they will live their entire adult lives dealing with the impacts of climate change. We hope that we can create a better map of this shifting world through this process. Wading through the research. Sensing the tug of the personal, the strange. Asking questions like:
What stories are necessary now?
What experiences do we need to share?
What visions might frack the impossible and release hope?
We may be fucked. That’s the dangerous thought. It can lead to bad places. But thoughts are not facts. They do shape our world, so we must watch them carefully and encourage what serves us to flourish. We can choose to grapple with the new reality with curiosity, courage, compassion, and imagination. On our better days. There’s nothing like an existential threat to really pull things into focus, eh? Climate change may be our opportunity to re-enchant the world. Come together. Listen to indigenous voices. Question everything. Find beautiful solutions. Here’s one place to start looking for inspiration:
The receptacle army at Playwright’s Theatre Centre in Vancouver.
While at school in Singapore in the late 80’s, I was part of a team that hand-sorted paper waste from 1300 students every two weeks. Seeing a toolshed full of paper being diverted from the landfill changed my perspective on what’s reasonable to use, and what we should be throwing away. Later in Toronto, I was part of the environmental survey team for our university residence, advocating for a change to non-toxic cleaning systems long before the boutique lines of green-washed products hit the shelves. I’ve taken the approach: change what’s in reach, and share the experience to create a wider impact.
It’s been 2 ½ years since PTC moved into its current site, and created a theatre centre out of an abandoned pork roastery in Vancouver’s Chinatown. We’ve tried to implement green policies through our transition to this space, and in every day operations. We couldn’t afford a lot of high-end eco-products, so we have taken the “reduce and reuse” principles of the three R’s to heart. We furnished our hub with free finds from Craigslist and other facilities, and got lots of donations of rugs, plants, and chairs. (And sweaters, because it was cold that first winter before we had insulation.)
We’re always balancing a desire for a high level of hygiene with low environmental impact and limited operating capacity.
Reduce
No paper towels in the kitchen. Use a towel or a dish cloth.
LED light bulbs (warmest possible light). So far, we’ve replaced 2 bulbs after 2 ½ years. We do have some incandescent lamps, particularly for building users who react to LED lighting.
The waste management system is in the kitchen. We have minimal garbage receptacles elsewhere, because there isn’t space for compost everywhere, and people won’t separate their waste if the receptacles aren’t beside each other. It also makes people a bit more mindful about how much they throw away.
Cleaning the composter at PTC.
We have portable coffee cups to take to the café downstairs if you forget one. If we go on coffee runs, we bring mugs for everyone.
We have a Bodum for onsite coffee making. No paper, no plastic, compost the grounds.
We have a set of wine glasses, coffee mugs and a full set of dishes for daily use and parties. If disposables are used, they have to be compostable or recyclable.
Someone keeps stealing our forks. We need more…
Cleaning: hot water and vinegar. Hypoallergenic unscented dish and hand soap. No chemical
cleaning, to reduce irritants for those with chemical sensitivities, and be mindful of what’s going into the water supply.
No chemical air fresheners. Fan plus essential oil eucalyptus spray (note this can be an irritant for some; we are investigating an unscented option to keep washrooms odor-free).
Copying: we read digitally for script submissions, and use google or dropbox to share with outside readers. When we’re working dramaturgically, we often need to print for reading in places where we don’t bring our computers, and to save on eyestrain. Our printer is defaulted to duplex.
Digital storage has a carbon cost. We just reviewed our file archiving policy and system to reduce the footprint of our digital filing system. We name files and sort them so working files can be deleted annually.
Reuse
We have a big collection of hand towels, dish cloths, and tea towels, and I take the laundry home weekly to sanitize (hot wash with vinegar).
Our one-sided script paper is repackaged into notepads (glued across the top, backed with cardboard, sliced to 5 ½ x 8 ½). These notepads are only used by staff onsite to reduce risk of copyright infringement through unlicensed distribution of playwrights’ materials. Cost per paper-box (5000 sheets) is about $70, equivalent to ? yellow lined notepads. We do this 2 x per year.
Recycle
PTC studio, post-renovation.
Electronics and lightbulbs: Facility manager collects and returns.
Compost: I bike the compost bucket home 1-2 x/week to go into municipal compost, which is not available from our office. We are considering moving to commercial pickup, which would allow us to compost paper towels as well, but at the moment we’re throwing out the bathroom paper towels. When we review the recycling contract, we’ll examine composting versus reusable linen roll in the bathroom. Our main compost challenge is convincing people that “compostable” coffee cups are not actually accepted in the municipal composting system. Instead…
Coffee cups: They’re now recyclable through the beverage container recycling system municipally. We have a separate bin for coffee cups, which took a couple of months to train people to use. Lids go in the mixed-container recycling. I stomp the cups (the sign to crush them has limited impact), and ride the bag home every two weeks or so in time for recycling pick up.
Mixed paper/cardboard.
Hard plastics/glass/metal.
We don’t have soft plastic or styrofoam recycling right now, but are advocating with our recycling provider to add this service. And just trying to convince people not to bring Styrofoam containers here, that stuff is nasty and melts into your food.
We put out one medium garbage bag a week, unless there are actors in rehearsal or a party. Foil lined bags, plastic wrappers, and non-recyclable take out containers are our main garbage sources. (And the occasional science project from the fridge that I am afraid to open to compost.)
So, our waste management system depends right now on the fact I live a 5 minute bike ride from the theatre, and am happy to cart something home 2 x per week. When I am off-site, the staff divvy up the washing/composting duties (the cups we just stockpile till I return).
Playwright’s Theatre Centre
We’re dealing with an ever-changing system of waste-management (or resource management) in Vancouver, so I commit to staying up to date, taking an educational approach, and being willing to get my hands dirty. We include waste management system information in every rental and rehearsal orientation, and we try to make it personal, with humourous and graphic descriptions of Kathleen and me rescuing compostables from the garbage.
I’ve had rehearsal participants thank me for clarifying what can be recycled and sharing the joys of composting. A few building users bring their compost to work, and I’m happy to redirect it for them rather than have it end up in the land fill. We’re currently researching new waste management companies to cost out a zero waste solution that involves less staff time, but the experience of dealing with all of the details of waste management has changed my habits for the better.
My 17 year-old self was just gaining knowledge about climate change when I started to roll up my sleeves and start sorting and reducing waste. The climate is changing, and the impacts are already being felt. Connecting ourselves to that change through our daily behaviours will hopefully prime us to act in the political and social spheres – to sort through the detritus and push for real environmental change.
Of the many analogies serving to unpack the massive challenge that is Climate Change, The Zombie Apocalypse and The Mid-Life Smoker are two of the most poignant.
The Zombie Apocalypse theory poses that the huge surge in movies and TV shows featuring relentless pursuit by the undead are a proxy narrative for the conversation around Climate Change we are unwilling to have in the West. Unable to address the particulars of what a three degree Celsius increase in temperature would mean for humanity, and thus unable to consider what a 1/2 billion people with homes would be under water would be like, we turn to science fiction and horror to satiate that part of our brains that won’t be shut down.
The Mid-Life Smoker theory is an analogy for our unwillingness to make the behavioural changes required to stabilize global temperatures in a manner that will prevent something approximating The Zombie Apocalypse. A two-degree increase by 2100 is what the experts are calling for. Pre-Paris, we are nowhere on track for that. We are smoking a pack a day, and how long we can continue, before gradually we give our selves Zombie Cancer is an unknown. The odds increase the longer we keep smoking. We know it’s bad for us, but we just can’t stop.
The articles in this edition seek to connect artistic practice in the theatre to climate change in tangible ways. Heidi Taylor provides arts organizations (well, any organization really) with a blueprint to make their operations more sustainable, Amelia Sargisson unpacks howPorte Parole’s The Watershed mirrors and engages with our national conversation surrounding carbon pollution and the environment, and Eric Rhys Miller connects with a younger generation of Vancouver Fringe artists to engage with Climate Change.
Here’s to a successful Paris Climate Conference with new ambitious targets that will leave humanity with hope the future won’t dissolve into a horror film.
Adrienne Wong & Michael Wheeler
Co-Editors: #CdnCult V6E4
The Last 15 Seconds chronicles the suicide attacks on Amman Jordan on Nov 9, 2005.
I cannot help but ask myself often these days: Is theatre relevant in the times of ISIS, global warming, and the current refugee crisis?
I wonder as I drive myself to work every morning if the energy I am spending on raising funds for, creating, and administering ‘art,’ would be better spent on saving people’s lives, feeding and sheltering the children and helping refugees escape and settle in safer places (like Canada).
MT Space – the theatre company I work for – has recently completed with great success a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo titled: Together We Make IMPACT. The campaign that launched a few days before the opening of IMPACT, MT Space’s biennial international theatre festival, and lasted for forty-eight days closing on October 31st, had its goal set at $20,000 to support the programming and the activities of the festival. With the hard work of our passionate and dedicated team of staff, board, artists and volunteers, the campaign managed to reach and exceed its goal. We raised just over $23,000 – the amount needed to sponsor a refugee family of 3 to come to Canada.
Throughout the duration of the campaign, I had to work day after day on composing and sending letters and emails asking my friends, colleagues, MT Space patrons and the wider community to contribute to our cause. This time, asking for money was particularly more difficult than ever before. I personally felt a lot of unease, and struggled when writing such letters. This feeling prompted me sometimes to start my messages to some people as follows: “Dear friend, I know you are probably spending most of your donation budget these days on supporting Syrian refugees, but I am writing today to ask for your support for our new campaign…”
Does this even make sense?!!
Earlier in February, I posted to my status on Facebook the following sentence: “In the times of ISIS, theatre fades into the unnecessary backgrounds.” Very few people liked what I said, and another few commented with words of encouragement and support. They said things like: “That’s what they want. Don’t let them win;” “True theatre becomes even more vital;” “We need you to keep bringing the stories out. We will become numb if we don’t have theatre in our lives and then, they win;” “Theatre is most important at times like this.”
Is theatre most important in times like this? Is it really?
Majdi reflecting on the day’s news with the cast of The Last 15 Seconds before a performance
Back in 2011, I received a call from the local Reception House. The Reception House Waterloo Region is a temporary home for government-assisted refugees. Refugee families arrive there and stay until permanent accommodation becomes available to them. The call was about Dakhel Faraj, a theatre artist who escaped Iraq after two of his children, Ehab (16) and Karam (8), were killed by American soldiers along with his father, his daughter-in-law and other members of his extended family. Faraj himself was shot multiple times in his legs.
When I received the call, Faraj had just arrived in Kitchener with the remaining members of his family. I immediately drove to meet him. He told me that as a theatre artist living in a refugee camp in Syria waiting for his turn to be admitted by a refugee-accepting country, he was connected to other local theatre artists in Damascus. There, someone told him about a theatre group located in a Canadian city named Kitchener. He was told that the group recently presented a play about a suicide bomber at the Qabani Theatre in Damascus, and that they had Arab artists amongst them.
This was of course MT Space’s 2010 tour of our production The Last 15 Seconds where we performed in Amman, Damascus and Beirut. When his turn came and Dakhel was asked if there is any particular city in Canada he prefers to go to, he immediately answered: Kitchener!
While writing this article today, I received another phone call from a local agency that works on refugee applications and sponsorships. They told me about a Syrian theatre artist who is currently living in Egypt. He escaped Syria and is seeking refuge in Canada. I was asked if MT Space will be able to help in providing sponsorship to bring him to Kitchener. Yes, we could do that!
I guess theatre could be relevant in response to global crises after all. It could be relevant once we start looking at our organizations as community support agencies in the first place; once we start seeing that our primary function is making community and art is the result; once we understand that art is only valuable when it is done in the service of people and not the other way around.
This way of thinking allows me and my team to open up to different practices than the ones traditionally expected of us as a theatre company. It gives me the motivation to invent programs and methods of creation and dissemination that organically respond to, and acknowledge the political, social and humanitarian contexts within which we exist. In the times of ISIS, global warming and the current refugee crisis, I cannot simply wake up every morning and go to work to make theatre. I have to wake up in the morning and resist.
This piece was grown (knowingly or unknowingly) in concert/as a result of conversations with Daniel Tesghay, Dima Alansari, T. Geronimo Johnson, TC Tolbert.
I am on a flight from Seattle to Vancouver. It is day becoming night. An orange line of light cuts through the sky, bleeding into the emerging darkness, chasing the sun as it descends over the Pacific Northwest.
This is site-specific.
I overhear the mother in the seat behind me say to her child, who cannot be more than 3, “I love you. I want the best for you.” Her voice breaks with tenderness, and though I cannot see her face, I know there is salty water in her eyes.
I think about mothers crossing borders, with and without their children, with and without documents, or vehicles that will assure them safe passage, with and without the promise that they will arrive.
***
I was asked to write about the “theatre community’s” response to the “refugee crisis.”
I want to talk about the ethics of what it is to be a storyteller in this historic moment.
***
I am the daughter of a family of Jewish refugees on my mother’s side who crossed the sea from Poland to New York on an ocean liner in the 1940s.
I am not a refugee, I only know what it is to live with the hauntings of attempted genocide, and geographic displacement as they echoed through my family.
So I am looking for what I can/not perceive.
***
On the topic of perception I am writing this in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, which is to say in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Beirut. But there are other names too: Baghdad, Aleppo, Occupied Palestine, it goes on; and now Garissa Unversity, but only 7 months later, and only by association, not by it’s own merit.
By now many of us are talking about the way in which some bodies, and cities, are deemed grievable, while violence visited on other bodies, and in other cities is viewed as innate, inevitable. As Omid Safi writes in, Where Does it Hurt, O City of Light, “Our selective outrage mask[s] a two-tiered model of human life, and outright racism.”
What does this enable?
***
But I was asked to write about the “theatre community’s” response to the “refugee crisis.”
I want to encourage a troubling of the frames. Let’s take the “crisis” in “refugee crisis” for example. The “refugee crisis” as it is recognized now only became a crisis in the public mind, which is to say the “Western” public mind, when it became increasingly visible within Europe. In the meantime millions of people have been displaced internally, or to neighbouring countries in the cases of Syria, Iraq, Eritrea, Egypt – the list goes on – as an extension of the ongoing impacts of the West’s protracted War Of Terror, since 2001.
Petitions in the wake of the Paris attacks circulating on social media demand, “We can not afford to import terrorists to Canada Our Policy on admitting refugees should be: security first, then compassion.”
Widen the frame, just marginally, and we view Canada’s military involvement.
Shift the frame just to the right, or the left, and the governmental agencies funding the arts extend from the same body funding the military.
Those of us writing and creating (funded or not), in Canada, are already doing so in the context of the “refugee crisis;” we are already responding, whether or not that thought has yet entered our perception.
Chris Abani asks in Ethics and Narrative: the Human and Other, “What if compassion, true compassion, requires the choice to be open to seeing the world as it really is, or as it can be?” It’s a question those of us creating in this time could all serve to ask.
***
In 2008, as the Artist In Residence at Neworld Theatre, I wrote TheMap to Zochrot, an interdisciplinary work documenting my return as an Israeli-born Jew of Sephardic and Ashkenazi descent to Israel/Occupied Palestine, the place of my birth, for the first time as an adult, post Israel’s second war on Lebanon. Eventually I came to view just how narrowly I had drawn the characters that populated the work, both of my family whose Zionism I opposed, and the Palestinian activists who confronted the daily realities of life under military occupation. Even there, I have reduced them.
I was too fearful to really see the inconsistencies of my politics, the ways in which the choices I made (and continue to make now, for example in holding Israeli citizenship) revealed my complicity, what that said about the nature of my longing, the state of my heart.
Flattened characters protect us.
Very easily that reduction becomes a fetish of difference.
A human is not simply their condition, but what is revealed in our art is our capacity to understand that, and to yield to that knowing about ourselves, first.
I am asking this of all of us: How do we hold ourselves to account, to the emotional truths beneath our rhetoric and behaviour?
***
Because even art based in good research that has not investigated its emotional truth cannot redeem us.
Because our ability to research well is based on the questions we know, and are willing to ask.
Vancouver-based organizer and writer Daniel Tesghay pointed out to me that the majority of the 3,000 people who have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year are Eritrean, not Syrian as the media has suggested.
***
I live and work on the unceded and occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh.
So the question is: What happens to a story told out of its context, and by this I mean, its relationship and responsibilities to other stories?
The condition is not separate from the making.
Stories do begin somewhere, even if it is over and over again.
***
The night before my flight from Seattle to Vancouver, I sit with two colleagues talking about art and impact. One reminds us that when we do not complete a course of antibiotics the result is the mutation of the bacteria causing the infection in the first place. The bacteria become resistant. The infection doesn’t heal, or the scar makes the skin impermeable to the air, and then nothing can enter or exit, nothing can change.
This is the risk we take when we tell stories, but we are not sure why we are telling them; irrelevant of proximity. Through the unexamined story-act, we can sometimes enable the thing we most desire to call into question.
***
Don’t misunderstand, I’m not advocating an abandonment of imagination. I’m advocating a bigger, scarier form of imagination, the kind that brings us closer to ourselves – the precursor of seeing things as they really are. Because while the condition of being a human on earth is a condition we share with any other human that currently resides on earth, and while the spectrum of emotions we can experience are limited, the specificity of our experiences are not, even as they are generated through the same structures.
The differing impacts rendered to us under those same structures, are the direct result of the ways in which our humanity is differently elevated, differently grieved.
This is why we urgently need better more honest stories.
***
The question is this: Who gets to tell stories? What stories enter public consciousness, and when, and by what/whose design, and through the vehicle of whose representation, and to what end? Who receives the material or professional benefits of stories when they are told? And because after all, this is about “us,” the “theatre community,” let’s look here.
The recent public letter, #REALCanadianTheatre, addressed to the President and Board of the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards Society (to which I and more than 150 other theatre-makers were signatory) visiblized the following:
“With few exceptions, these awards historically and continuously represent the best of Vancouver’s white theatre-makers.” The letter goes on to state, that, “the recognition of artists of-colour has been limited to the portrayal of characters who do not stray from a “place” of low status, who do not provoke nor implicate audiences into thinking about the ongoing impact of discrimination in the here and now. […] We believe these stories reinforce a myth that we live in a post-racial society, and do little to challenge some audiences’ preconceived notions.”
Our ability as a “community” to respond to the “refugee crisis” is configured by “our ability” to look inwards. To make legible the conditions within which we are already creating?
But I mean beautifully. Again, I’m not advocating we abandon our art.
There are questions too however about when we show up; about what the work of artists is in shifting narratives not just in the venues we are accustomed to, or comfortable in, but using our skill in narrative in the public domain, perhaps even strategically. Do we wait for austerity measures to slam down onto us before we respond? Here I think of BC, 2012.
***
Aylan Kurdi, the three year-old Syrian boy who drowned as his family sought to escape – even as they embodied – the “refugee crisis” brought the attention of the world to the “crisis” itself, by virtue of a frame being trained on his lifeless form, though he was much more than his dying.
His story, which is his life, should challenge us to examine just what we can do as artists in “response” to the “crisis,” which is to say to do just what we hope others might do in witness of/response to our work:
Look/listen
Be drawn in, and as a result, knowingly or not
Invest in the loss of a perception, to
Ask questions, that
Facilitates a depended encounter with the truths of who we are, and what the world “is”, and then
Be changed in some way that cannot be anticipated, but is urgent and necessary, and
Which contributes to a broadened understanding of our impact and/or capacity to enact choice/agency differently, because a part of the world is newly visible, and newly connected to the skin of our foreheads, and the palms of our hands
NOTES:
“We”/”Our” is used as a very shifty identifier in this piece. Call yourself in/out as you feel called.
This is work in re-vision as such there are necessarily gaps/errors in analysis, etc.
In my June #cdncult article I asked: could the Toronto theatre community support one Syrian refuge family? Is there a more specific role we can play to create space for newcomers in our creative communities?
In the months that followed my last post regarding sponsoring a Syrian refugee family we have seen major changes both good and bad.
The bad: Hundreds of thousands of refugees continue to pour out of not only Syria but also Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of Africa as conflicts in those areas continue unabated. Russia has now entered an already complicated Syrian conflict in a large intervention which may have also resulted in the targeting of Metrojet 9268 over Sinai. The ISIS attack on Paris has stoked both security fears and an inevitable (perhaps intentional) refugee backlash across the Western world. Germany is a final destination for many refuges and they have committed to settling near 800,000 over the next few years. This is a huge commitment by comparison to many nations, including our own. In some cases up to 10,000 people A DAY are trying to cross into Europe. Borders are being closed and the journeys to freedom become more desperate.
The good: Our newly elected government has made a commitment to bring 25,000 Syrian refuges to Canada by the end of December. Debate currently centres around a timetable for resettlement but it appears the government and citizens of Canada will rise to the challenge. The organization Lifeline Syria, has over 250 private groups that have committed to sponsoring a family and many more organizations and individuals are mobilized.
Many groups of artists have responded to this issue in Toronto in a number of different ways. I was approached by an artist who wanted to donate towards a sponsorship group as they were unable to sponsor themselves due to heavy work commitments. Another artist approached my family to see if we would consider joining their sponsorship group. Like-minded groups are popping up all over the country and fundraisers of all kinds have been announced and presented.
In speaking with a few people involved in sponsorship, it is a complicated process that involves not only a large financial commitment but also serious legal obligations. It is amazing to see people uniting by neighbourhood, workplace, religious or community group to sponsor these families. With the arrival of 25,000 people in the next few months there will be no doubt countless ways to help, from donating money, to cooking a meal, opening up our homes or sorting through winter clothes we can part with.
Moving forward, I think a step artists can take is to find out if we can connect with fellow artists who are refugees. As the child of two immigrants I know from my own family story, and the stories of so many others, that refugee and immigrant artists must often abandon their disciplines when they arrive in a new country. There is no avenue for them to make an income in their discipline and the main priority is ‘food on the table’.
Now that we as a nation are rising to the refugee challenge, and indeed many are participating in process from our artistic communities, is there a way that we could open the door to refugee artists to participate in our professional community?
Our next challenge by extension is to find a more inclusive approach to our art. Is it possible that we could create theatre, music, dance and visual art that could include refugee artists at the ground level? International collaboration is not new to the Canadian arts scene and we may now have more of those available to us now than a generation ago. Could we actively recruit and seek out fellow artists from this specific community after they have landed on our shores? Could we create pieces with the flexibility to include another language, culture, world-view, training, instruments and traditions?
As we all seek to break new boundaries and innovate with our work, the individuals or organizations that seize upon this would not only ‘help’ a fellow artist, but also have the chance to part of something revolutionary in Canadian “A”rt. Work that is alive, inclusive, original – who knows what that could become?
Creating a means by which we could reach out to the resettlement organizations and try to build a professional and folk artist database from the incoming group would be one way to do it. Building a small outreach organization, or finding a spot inside an existing one to allow interested refugees to find out more about how the Canadian system operates and what opportunities might be available to them, could be next. If we open the door now it may serve us well down the line instead of waiting a generation or more to include new artists in our creative process.
Feel free to leave comments here and look to this space again for updates on initiatives like this one.
Nothing is easier than talking to people who are like you, about things you both agree on. Easy peasy. It’s the differences that make things difficult. More difference leads to more difficulty.
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you are like me and work in the arts generally, and maybe the theatre specifically. We probably have different tastes in theatre, enjoy different plays, prefer different formats. But can we agree that art can serve a purpose in the quotidien and is not inherently external to everyday life?
It’s probably the hang-over from 8 years of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government that makes me feel like I have to justify the usefulness of my chosen profession: theatre. Art. It’s definitely that same hang-over that leads me to asses our work on a spectrum of “usefulness” to begin with. Whatever happened to art for art’s sake?
Enter PM Justin Trudeau and his government’s promises to restore funding to the arts, to double the allocation to the Canada Council for the Arts, and to accept 25,000 refugees by December 2015.
Whoa. What?
That’s a lot of people. And chances are, that many people making new homes across the country, and the networks that are being established to support them, mean your and my everyday life could very well mean encountering and engaging with individuals who are refugees or their sponsors.
So what does that mean for us, as artists?
In the June edition of #cdncult, Raoul Baneja proposed that the Toronto theatre community collectively sponsor a refugee family. This kind of banding together is happening in cities across Canada. So in this issue, Baneja proposes a specific way that Canadian artists can welcome and support those refugee who might also be artists.
MT Space Artistic Direct Majdi Bou-Matar takes this challenge a step further. While coordinating and meeting with recent arrivals, Bou-Matar poses the key question many of us are asking: at a time of great need, are the efforts and resources we are pouring into art-making well placed?
Lastly, writer and community organizer mia amir writes about the ethics of working with refugees and their stories. Whose stories are told? What is our responsibility to fact, authenticity and ownership?
Finally, if you find yourself moved to help refugee families settling in Canada, but don’t know how, below are some places to start. This list is by no means exhaustive, so send us any updates and we’ll add them.
If you’re interested in learning more about Canadian immigration policy, check out:
Hey everybody! I’m working on an animated film about the One Yellow Rabbit performance ensemble called “Renderrabbits”. It’s a series of animated portraits of the Rabbits I am creating using a method called “rotoscoping”. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:
Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films.[1][2] Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope. Although this device was eventually replaced by computers, the process is still referred to as rotoscoping. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping
In December of 2014 I shot some intimate screen tests of Denise Clarke, Andy Curtis, and Blake Brooker to use as rotoscope material to work with, and I have been going thru the Rabbits’ archives to find shots from their 30+ year history to animate as well. Additionally I have been pulling home movies, YouTube videos, and found footage to get material to create portraits of the late Richard McDowell and Michael Green – I was not able to film my own tests of these artists before they passed away. RIP, dudes. You are certainly missed.
The film is going to premiere as a visual-only installation at the 2016 High Performance Rodeo. In the spring of 2016 I will be working with Calgary artist and musician Kenna Burima to add a soundtrack and turn it into a final film that I hope to send to film festivals around the world. The National Film Board is supporting the project through its Filmmaker Assistance Program. The project was originally started as an exhibition in the Calgary Arts Commons’ Lightbox Studio in January and February 2015.
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This past week I have been experimenting with a purely digital method of rotoscoping. The animations I made previously for this project were all done directly on paper using a complicated method of projecting still frames onto an animation table in the studio. Tbh I am more comfortable working on my hackintosh at home – I draw faster using a tablet and having an undo button is much more convenient than a dirty eraser smudging up my pages.
There are many dedicated animation programs to use for this work – Toon Boom, TVPaint, Manga Studio, etc. – but I am most comfortable using Photoshop (I know all the keyboard shortcuts already). I created my previous film Renderfriends in Photoshop using a very laborious method, but I have recently been learning to use the Animation/Timeline features to make the process much easier. Video layers, bruh! Plus, the custom brushes you can use in Photoshop blows the other programs out of the water – the quality of line is much more organic, and it’s remarkably easy to simulate natural media, such as watercolors or pencils, without worrying about how the vector algorithms the other programs use will render your drawings.
So this past week I have been working on a digital test of Richard McDowell, from his wedding video to Zadie, to see how the Photoshop animation method would turn out.
Step 01: The Original Video
(Note: this is a .GIF, the actual video isn’t this low-res)
I go through the videos and find a 3-10 second clip I want to animate. I look for a clip that shows the “essence” of the Rabbit, preferably them in a candid situation, looking directly at the camera, with some sort of gesture or expression. I then convert the clip in After Effects to the right resolution and frame-rate with which to animate.
Step 02: Rotoscope, 1st pass
Next I import the processed footage into Photoshop and trace the whole video, frame-by-frame, somewhat loosely, to get the quality of the motion and expression. I’m not being that careful about consistency on the 1st pass – look at the hands and arm, how it wiggles around! The inconsistent line-weight! This source video isn’t great quality, there is a lot of camera shake and blurs. I have to decide if I want to roll with it, or interpret the frames to make it clearer. This round I embraced the blurs and camera shake to see what it would look like when played back. What does a camera blur look like when rendered in rough pencil? Sort of like this. That first smear is rough, the end one is way better.
I am finding with this method, there isn’t a 1:1 relationship between the original video and the animation. I have to tweak or massage expressions/movements/etc to make it “read”; each animation requires a certain amount of interpretation on my part. PLUS (and this is a biggie) the frame-rates of the original videos are usually all over the place before I convert them (20fps, 29.95 fps, 23.95 fps converted to 12fps or 24fps), so sometimes there are dropped frames which make the animation look a bit stilted or jerky if I don’t smooth it out.
I’ll watch the loop and look for things to fix in the 2nd pass. Usually the 2nd half of the loop is stronger than the 1st just because I get used to drawing the subject by then, and my hands have warmed up, so going back to the 1st half and cleaning up is necessary anyway.
Step 03: Fix up the animation, 2nd pass
Notice this one doesn’t sync up with the other two? That’s because I added some frames at the beginning to make the first smear a bit smoother. It’s about a 1/3 of a second longer than the original.
So for this pass I clean up any inconsistencies (redraw the hands and arm), fix expressions, completely redraw sloppy frames, redraw the intro smear to make it read more as an animation independent of the source video. Any secondary drawings or animation I draw on the 2nd pass – add the hair, make the liquid in the shotglass more dynamic. I also added some colour on this pass just to see what it would look like.
The thing I love about doing this in Photoshop is that I can work with layers. So I can use the first pass, add a “fix” layer on top of it, and selectively erase stuff and add the new drawings on top without having to completely redraw each frame. Or I can add a “color” layer to add the yellow, or add pencil shading, or just work on the liquid in the shotglass, etc. and if I don’t like it I can just turn that layer off, or erase it and start again without deleting the rest of the drawing on that frame.
Here’s a shot of what it looks like working in Photoshop:
Anyway, back to it! I’ll be posting more process shots over the next couple months. Thanks for reading!
In the spirit of an online magazine that aspires to be National in scope and participation, this edition reaches east to consider the artists and theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Unsurprisingly, each of these articles responds in a different way to the economic reality of being a theatre-maker in Halifax. As Karen Gross notes in her article, there are exactly five theatre companies on operating funding in the city. Many are willing to do lots with little.
Dustin Harvey considers a more entrepreneurial approach to the arts and the promise and pitfalls this holds. Gordon White explores how he ended up in Halifax, and why he has chosen to stay, despite declining economic impetus. Karen Gross expands on the opportunities and challenges particular to audience outreach.
Welcome to SpiderWebShow and #CdnCult Halifax. We have resisted marine references thus far, but happy to have you aboard.
