Page 43

Social Design for Canadian Theatre in 2014

By
photo (3)
This week, I am teaching my second annual class on Social Design for directors at The National Theatre School.

It’s been over a year since I wrote my original post titled, “What is Social Design”. A lot has happened to online technology and theatre since then.

I began writing this post on the train to teach social design for a week, as a discipline, to directing students at the National Theatre School. It seems a good time to reflect on recent innovations (and devolutions) and take stock of what the deal is with social design at this moment. Hopefully I will write something of this nature each year for as long as I teach the class. I am only going to get older and more naturally out-of-touch with youth-inspired innovation. This seems a good way to force myself be on the ball with current trends and best practices.

In my original post, I lead by defining social design as the following and I think it is still accurate as a definition:

“Social Design: The strategic implementation of social media to deepen or broaden the nature of an artistic project.”

From there I go on to articulate three ways this usually happens:

  1. Social Media Content ABOUT the Work
  2. Social Design That INTEGRATES With The Work and
  3. Social Design that IS The Work.

These ideas still hold up for me as well. At least as a broad lense to understand how social media can be connected to a live performance.

There are a number of trends that were not evident when these categories were defined moving forwards.

There is a growing suspicion that all of this social media integration is not actually all that great for thinking.

Or more accurately, the way the tools have been designed makes integration less-than-desirable in all contexts. Leading social media theorist and NYU Professor Clay Shirky recently banned the use of devices in his class after many years of being open to it. He chalked his eventual conversion to the dark side up to two factors:

1) Popular Social Media Tools like Twitter, FB, Gmail Instagram, are professionally designed to distract.

2) “Screens generate distraction in a manner akin to second-hand smoke.” Not only do devices distract the user, they also distract other people near the device-user.

It seems significant that this critique comes from Shirky, who once argued in a 2009 Ted Talk that Twitter and FB would be key tools to circumventing repressive regimes. Sober thought about where these things are going is not leading to enthusiasm from some of the industry’s top enthusiasts.

There is a thirst for something new and better than the tools that are available at a mainstream level.

This is not so much new, as a desire that is becoming more intense. Three years ago, I taught a social media and performance education program for teens. The only thing this cohort could agree on was that none wanted to be on Facebook, but that each felt they HAD to be in order to be relevant/informed in the social order. This sentiment is growing mostly because of the intense changes being brought to these tools motivated by the drive to monetize. That Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm has significantly displeased users has not dissuaded from Twitter musing publicly about doing the same.

The disparity between what is popular/useful/desirable and what is most profitable is causing a lot of tension a newly interactive sphere that hasn’t really figured out how to meet the needs of the new stakeholders in media as it becomes social: The users. Montreal-based Cllbr’s Francis Gossellin sums it up in a recent post about the implications on start-up social network Ello:

“Social media can be profound, and useful, and productive. The unfortunate downside is that it is owned and controlled by unscrupulous new masters, who, while certainly making everything in their power to “do no evil”, are actually eating away at our confidence in our collective ability to communicate, organize and fix the problems at hand. ”

 

Despite these reservations Social Design will become an increasingly necessary and relevant tool to theatre-makers.

This is mostly to do with innovation and the age of intended audience. This was drummed into me during a conversation with Gabrielle Madé of the newly relaunched CMF Trends site. She pointed me to this article, in Variety that reports amongst US teens YouTube Stars are more popular and recognizable than Hollywood Stars. Ever heard of Smosh, PewDiePie or Hyan Higga? No? That’s probably because you’re old. These guys are huge, bigger than Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lawrence to the cohort that will be in their 20s and potentially buying theatre tickets in he next decade. What influences new audiences comes not from mainstream media, but the self-publishing/broadcasting world of the internet.

Beyond the popularity of these tools some artists are also becoming more sophisticated at integrating them into the work. The 2014 HATCH series at Harbourfront (curated by Praxis Theatre) saw a number of compelling experiments with social design from Rob Kempson’s #Legacy which effectively integrated livetweeting into the performance, to Faster Than Night that used social tools to give the audience an element of control over the direction of the narrative, to Melissa D’Agostino’s Broadfish, which mined the internet for some of its most important content.

Most recently, I attended the The Sixth Man Collective’s Monday Nights at The Theatre Centre, which encouraged the use of social devices throughout. I found this kept me engaged in an interactive piece that pitted my basketball team against three others. Even when we lost, it gave me a way to celebrate, by documenting the loss on Instagram. Theatre may be ephemeral, but our experience can now live on forever. This means something new for live performance, the next year will probably be figuring out what that means.

Happy Birthday SpiderWebShow

By

4390737616_d310ffd5cd_z

SpiderWebShow is one year old and looks like a whole new kid. You can check it out here. The dawn of our second year has arrived.

What is this ‘show’ anyway? It is just site after all. Or a fancy blog – or is it? We think not. Why? Simple, there’s nothing else like us in Canada. SpiderWebShow is the only nationally-driven, performance-based website of its kind in this country. This is true, and it is very cool too, because it is still so young. It is such a baby! But it is already a theatrical space where performance minds can connect and create. We hope you will use it in this way. We sincerely hope you do…and that’s it.

Makes for a short article, besides we are all busy, right?

But wait a minute… a few pieces of how and why this all came to be.

Life is not a highway nor is it authentic. Rather it moves like a web and unfolds like a show. There is connectivity to be found among isolated incidents and there are countless ways to play out any of our individual scenes – be they real or imagined this is the 21st Century after all.

So, how do we talk about this in our theatre?

In the 20th Century Erving Goffman wrote a ground-breaking book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It was a sociological treatise that used the specifics of theatre to parse out the performative elements of everyday life. It went on to suggest that we are the creators of our own social characters; that by the choice of mask and costume and through the timing of our entrances and exits, we can control how we are seen in the world.

When I look back I know that SpiderWebShow was born of a hunch. I had a sense that there might be a way to gather and collate the disparate strands and to allow meaning to form as a result. I had a feeling that we might be able to tell a story in a new way and to allow that story the space to have ever changing narratives.

I wanted to move forward and backwards through the story and to look to its left and its right. Ultimately I hoped we would be able to expose all the story making elements. Since its inception Co-Creator Michael Wheeler and I struggled to find a form for sentiment. Making an online ‘show’ is one sweet challenge.

After first conceiving of the ‘show’ we went on to join forces with our digital dramaturg, Graham F Scott. After an inaugural volume, Adrienne Wong of Neworld Theatre came aboard as our Associate Artist and to head the experimental wing of the ‘show’. After a first year of performing for almost 10,000 visitors, not bad I say, we are expanding anew:

We are so happy to welcome our newest Associate Artist, Laurel Green from ATP and our first Associate Digital Dramaturg Simon Bloom of Outside The March. Not only this, but today marks the beginning of a new look, new features, and it comes with a dedication to making our sight as accessible to as many people as possible. I am also stoked to point your eye to Lindsay Anne Black’s new logo design for our show.

In 2007, Brian Quirt gave a keynote address to the PACT conference. In this speech he brought forward the idea of dramaturg as leader and first responder to the 21st century:

“Guy Cools writes that he believes that the 19th century was the century of the actor, and that the 20th century was the century of the director, the ‘guru’ director. And that the 21st century will be “the era of collective process guided (as opposed to directed) by the dramaturg”. He believes that the dramaturg has become the avant-garde,… ”

These are shifting sands time and The SpiderWebShow, conceived dramaturgically, is looking to keep with it.

Over the course of a year this constantly devising ‘show’, has become a production. The ‘show’ has moved from the amorphous and hidden, to the present and uncertain, to the performance that we are today. I want t close by doubling back to performativity: Our costumes are different, our masks are less full, and our next entrance comes with some really cute baby steps and a celebration of being one.

Digital Dramaturgy

By and

A google chat at the end of the work day between Graham F. Scott (SWS Digital Dramaturg) and Laurel Green (Artistic Associate).

SWS Shot Final
Early cocktail napkin sketch of SpiderWebShow by Sarah Garton Stanley.

When Graham first started working with SpiderWebShow he created a proposal to become the site’s ‘digital dramaturg’. It’s fascinating and got him the gig – you can read it here: gfscott.com/sws

Laurel: Hold on…I’m trying figure out how to download a script I’m reading to the hard drive on my Kobo. That to me is Digital Dramaturgy.

Graham: Haha.

Laurel: Ok, here now. Hi. Graham, I’m a dramaturg at ATP where I work with playwrights as they develop their new scripts, read plays for future programming, and I’m the sorta ‘resident contextualizer’ for the plays in our season. I’m curious about your use of the word dramaturg in terms of your work for SWS, and I’d love to hear more about your practice.

Graham F: It made sense to me because the original goal of the SWS was to build a “National Theatre” that made sense for the Internet age. Reading the original proposal, I felt that it was going to be actually very difficult to separate the project’s artistic goals from their technical realization. Which is why I kind of asserted myself a bit more and said that not only was I going to write some code, but I had to have some sort of advisory role, helping the creators see the technical limits, but also the technical possibilities.

Laurel: Which makes sense that in a dramaturgical role you would function as a technical facilitator, editor and writer. When I’m working on a script I have to keep the audience’s understanding and experience front of mind.  Also, I’m thinking about how content informs the shape and style of the piece.

Graham F: Yeah! And for me I think it’s also about maintaining a little critical distance during the creative process, and posing questions that might help clarify what’s going on for the creators who are so deeply embedded in it. Like: “Here’s what I’m seeing and hearing. Is that what you intended?”

Laurel: I think that critical distance is totally key to working as a dramaturg. So, can you share some anecdotes about what it’s been like to work on SWS thus far?

Graham F: Sure. It has involved a lot of Google Hangouts, because we’re all seldom in the same city. So a lot of highly-pixellated streams of Sarah beaming in from Saskatoon or St. John’s or Vancouver or wherever she is that day. We had early arguments about how to translate the name into the design….because the name was meant to evoke the web of theatrical creators across the country who were collaborating on it. If you literally drew the lines on a map it would be this crazy spider’s web.

Laurel: Ah, yes.

Graham F: It’s a metaphor—and a perfectly good one! I was dead-set against actually using an image of a spider, however. Very early on, there were a bunch of visual things we decided we could never, ever use for this project:

no spiders

no red curtains about to be raised

no laughing/crying drama masks

no Matrix-y computer code

Much of that was just to try and inoculate ourselves against kitsch and cliche.

But also: I thought it was important that we get closer, visually and conceptually, to where contemporary “net art” is right now…or I should say, where it was last year. (It moves pretty fast)

Laurel: It does move fast. I think that’s part of the anxiety over how to design one’s space online…

Graham: Exactly. And “space” was a word we actually haggled over a whole lot. Because: I argued that the idea of “space” was wrong for an online venture.

Laurel: Interesting. Why?

Graham: The whole idea of the internet as a “space” seemed, to me, a bit creaky in 2013. Like when someone says “information superhighway” or “cyberspace” — it’s this hangover from the ’90s, when all of the imagery related to computers and the internet is explicitly spatial: think cyberpunk classics like Lawnmower Man or Hackers or The Matrix. When in reality, the internet is a bunch of people sitting at their desks or waiting for the bus playing with their phone or whatever.

Laurel: So it’s more fluid?

Graham F: Perhaps less fluid! I thought it was important to discard some of those romantic metaphors about the web. The experience of the web today is largely textual. It’s your Facebook newsfeed, your Twitter stream.

Laurel: Right. So, not a big ‘space’ full of ‘fluid’?

Graham F: That resistance to spatial metaphors is what drove the design — trying to flatten it and make it (relatively) straightforward.

Laurel: How does the site produce online performances?

Graham F: I built a website where we could showcase what people were doing. And that performance has taken all sorts of forms. One of the successes of SWS is that it’s done stuff that I think gets beyond the most obvious adaptation of theatre to the internet, which is video. I’d cite Adrienne’s audio postcards, and Mat’s photo tableaux series. In both cases it definitely feels like there’s a “performance” going on, but it’s not “turn camera on, act scene, turn camera off”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Laurel: Nor is it “turn on, watch something, and turn off” for the audience.

Graham F: Yes! I hadn’t even thought of that, but it’s true for the audience as well. I seldom scrutinize photos as closely as I do Mat’s in that series, which I think is testimony to the power of the concept theatrically. It’s got that riveting quality that the best live theatre does.

Laurel: Absolutely.

Graham F: I think mobile is actually where we have the most work to do in future, in terms of trying to find performance possibilities and adhering to the principles of Responsive Design — meaning that the site displays differently, and displays well, whether you’re looking at it on a big screen or a little one. So we’ve done some stuff with audio, with images, with video on YouTube. But what’s a performance on Instagram? On Snapchat? On Yo? And people are doing all that stuff already: it must be said. I don’t think we’re late to the party, by any means, but a lot of these mediums already have emergent aesthetics, stars, fandoms.

Laurel: What do you think about SWS adding livestreaming to capture and share events happening across the country?

Graham F: Livestreaming is going to be important, but I think a big part of livestreaming it at the time is also archiving it for the future. Like, most people who watch the video don’t do it while it’s actually happening; they watch when they can, which is usually later. The important part is being there to capture events that would otherwise be quite ephemeral: panel talks are so in danger of that.

Laurel: Another dramaturgical revelation is the ability to collaborate across distance using google hangouts, trello, etc. Working on SWS there’s a behind-the-scenes experiment with making art via technology that is ongoing also.

By the way, I managed to solve my Kobo issue only about five minutes ago…

Graham F: You were multitasking.

Laurel: Weeellll, I was telling myself that I would just try ‘one last thing’ after letting it sit.

Graham F: It’s amazing how often that one last try does it.

Making things easy is super-hard.

Laurel: That is a good dramaturgical motto.

#CdnCult Times; Volume 4, Edition 1

By

The first edition of this volume, brings together a number of concepts we have been exploring since our launch one year ago that can all be understood under the rubric of Social Design.

Social Design: The strategic implementation of social media to deepen or broaden the nature of an artistic project.

Sarah Garton Stanley celebrates this important anniversary with an exploration of what we hope to achieve with this site, where we started, where we are now, and exciting news about who has joined the project. One of those people is Alberta Theatre Projects’ Laurel Green, who interviews Graham F Scott about his role over the past year-and-a-half as Digital Dramaturg for SpiderWebShow. My contribution to the edition concentrates on what social design means this year, which will probably mean something different next year, as tools morph and humans adjust their behaviours accordingly.

Social Design: The strategic implementation of social media to deepen or broaden the nature of an artistic project.

Michael Wheeler
Editor-in-Chief: #CdnCult Times

SpiderWebTalkShow – Values in Performance

By

Lawrence & Holloman

By

Play: Lawrence & Holloman || Playwright: Morris Panych
Shoot: Parc Mackenzie-King|| Models: David Paluch, Keith Waterfield

HOLLOMAN and LAWRENCE with brown bag lunches

LAWRENCE: White bread and baloney?

HOLLOMAN: Maybe.

LAWRENCE: Not maybe. You are a white bread and baloney type of guy. I mean — Holloman. Look at you. Have you ever thought of doing anything unpredictable? Ever?

HOLLOMAN: You mean — like… mustard?

LAWRENCE: With your life, Holloman. Your life.

Lawrence & Holloman was first presented at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1998.

SpiderWebTalkShow with Haley McGee

By

The Order of Senator

By
senate
How does the Prime Minister decide who should sit here?

Last winter, I wrote an article that as I wrote it, I couldn’t decide if I was serious or not. “A Creative Approach To Senate Reform” proposed a new method of selecting members of The Senate of Canada. The article was a response to a particular set of stars that had aligned in Ottawa, as each of the major parties proposed a different reform to the Senate as public disdain for the institution peaked during revelations about the Duffy/Wright affair.

The NDP preferred outright abolition, an objective crystallized by the party’s Roll Up The Red Carpet campaign. The ruling Conservatives preferred an elected Senate with term limits and had requested further clarification on how to go about this from The Supreme Court of Canada. The Liberals preferred a plan that involved a ‘non-partisan’ selection process similar to the Order of Canada.

My proposal, which I couldn’t decide if I was serious about at the time, was instead of copying the Order of Canada Council selection process, it should be actual Members of the Order who became Senators, paired with Governor General’s Arts Award Winners. This would allow The Senate to serve a new purpose in our democracy, and I hoped could aid our evolution from Constitutional Monarchy to Republic:

“The Senate itself will be transformed into a multi-purpose venue that will allow intense exploration and presentation of these issues as well as access for Canadians. The single biggest tourist attraction in Ottawa, it will act as a theatre, museum, concert hall, studio, digital laboratory, and workspace. An open-source intellectual crucible, The Senate will forge great and unprecedented responses to the issues elected Parliamentarians in The House of Commons will be drafting legislation to face.”

To prove this was possible, I drew a fat line between The Senate and the already-directly-funded-by-Parliament National Arts Centre on a map and suggested building a tunnel so they could help.

Seven months later, the conditions for Senate Reform couldn’t seem to have less momentum than when I first wrote about it. The absence of criminal charges against ex-PMO Chief of Staff Nigel Wright in conjunction with a Supreme Court ruling that poured cold water on the proposals put forward by the parties, has led to little attention to the issue by media and politicians.

And yet this issue is not going away. Criminal proceedings against Senator Mike Duffy begin simultaneously with the resumption of Parliament in the fall, which will bring increased media focus attracted by theatrics that only Ol’ Duff can provide. This seems likely to make Senate Reform a key issue in an election year, except this time none of the parties have a credible position on the issue.

The NDP’s position of abolition was completely sunk by The Supreme Court ruling, as it is a measure that would require unanimity from each of the Provinces of Canada, a state-of-being reserved exclusively for international hockey matches. The Conservative position of an elected Senate is also toast. The court ruled consent of seven Provinces, containing over 50% of Canadians (7/50) would be required to enact such a change. The Harper Government has already indicated that this means for them the issue is now dead.

Whether this 7/50 formula would also be required to enact the Liberal plan of a parallel Order of Canada appointment process is a murky calculation, revolving around whether such a process would change the “fundamental nature” of an appointed Senate. If yes, then a Constitutional Amendment using the 7/50 principal would be required.  A huge factor in whether or not this change would be interpreted as “fundamental” is whether or not other Prime Ministers would also be obliged to use the same process to appoint Senators in the future.

In short, having an advisory committee to pick Senators may not trigger a round of constitutional talks, but institutionalizing one could.

3_Order_of_Canada_grades
Should having one of these qualify you for The Senate?

Which has me back to my original, wasn’t sure if I was serious about it, but now I really am, proposal for Senate reform. If The PM were to announce that he or she would now be selecting from Members of The Order of Canada exclusively to fill vacancies in the Senate, it could accomplish the goals of the Liberal proposal for reform first suggested by Greg Sorbara in The Toronto Star.

The Order of Canada already exists, so it could not be seen as creating any new mechanisms that would compel a future PM to use the same process in selecting Senators. In fact, nothing about it SHOULD change. This would validate all candidates as having been proposed by an impartial panel that seeks the best and brightest Canadians. One finds it hard to imagine candidates like Patrick Brazzeau coming to the attention of The Order of Canada, which could go a long way towards rehabilitating the institution in the mind of he public.

So there you have it. I am not an expert in Constitutional matters, heck I never even wrote the LSATs, but it seems to this layperson that he has stumbled upon a Constitutional sweet-spot. That place where meaningful change can take place without long drawn out talks that bring out the existential worst in us as we question the very nature of our own Confederation.

This reform could be instituted immediately by the Prime Minister of a minority or majority government. It requires no one’s approval. It will rehabilitate the credibility of the institution and prove that whatever party engages in it is serious and successful on the file.

The Order of Senator is one new PM from becoming a reality, so future PM do me a favour and seriously consider the NAC/GG Winner connection (and tunnel!) from my original article if you run with this. I know it seems crazy at first, but creatives can help you come up with many solutions you may not have thought of on your own.

 

Let’s get a real subjective conversation going

By

audience

As a director and producer, I have to read reviews of my shows. I would rather be boiled in a vat of Kelly Nestruck’s bike-ride-to-Montreal sweat.

They’re important and, having come from a one-reviewer town, I know that the more reviewers there are about the same piece, the better. We know logically and absolutely that a reviewer’s response to a show is subjective – it MUST be. I don’t know if many reviewers understand that really. Many reviewers use a lot of absolute praise and insult: This is unbearable, this is wonderful, this is excruciating, this is hyperbolic. And those are just examples of the absolute. What about the examples of the subjective:  Here, let’s pick from my own latest reviews for example “a non-stop riot” -Toronto Star; “not funny” -The National Post. Same show, same day.

Many teachers will tell you that the best way for your student to hear what is wrong is to cushion it in what is right. I’m told that this is called a criticism sandwich. Positive buttery toasty bread, Negative bologna and sauerkraut, Positive buttery toasty bread.  We can take in the bologna because we are not only thinking about how stupid the bologna-dispensing critic is. I don’t think this makes artists immature. I think it makes them human, and you know, if artists lose their sensitivity and their capacity to feel, humanely and humanly, then we have lost something even more critical than good criticism.

Because it’s the same as subjecting myself to a root canal (or the above boiling), when I read reviews of a show I’m proud of, I create a criticism sandwich for myself by reading all of the reviews at the same time. My most recent experience reading a stack of reviews for Alice Through the Looking-Glass at Stratford went a little bit like this: good, good, not bad, bad, outstanding, harsh, forgiving, excellent, bad, cruel, good, bad, bad, good, good, good, not too bad and toasty good. I took notes on what worked, what certain people had trouble with, conflicting opinions on what communicated and what didn’t. Suddenly I can hear what the detractors are saying. It’s easy to say what a cynic this guy is and how stupid this guy is and what a smarty pants this blogger is. I’m not above admitting that it hurts to read that my offering qualified as “theatrical roadkill” to my new local paper, the Ottawa Citizen – thanks new neighbours! Reading them all at once gives me the capacity to hear what people are having trouble with: out of isolation, individual reviews are simply part of a larger sandwich – some good, some bad, all in the end, edible and helpful.

In programming for a national stage at the NAC, reviews are an incredibly important tool.  A programmer can’t be at all shows all the time, but learning about what is happening across the country is a massive part of understanding Canadian work and what Canadian Theatre artists are making right now. Reviews that can’t and don’t discuss the intention of the piece, the response of the audience (though this sometimes is also strangely subjective) and the artistic and community context, are useless to me.  I also must read reviews recognizing the subjective; that maybe the reviewer who loved the show has long been a champion of the under-produced writer, or the one that hated it was tired and had just seen something too similar. I must recognize that in myself as well – and make room to re-watch or re-consider shows that didn’t appeal on first viewing when everyone I trust is on fire for it. There is no real checklist for ‘good theatre.’ The only thing that is certain is that reviewers, audiences and programmers view the work subjectively.

I regularly read the national reviewers (and I use “national” loosely because truly, neither the Globe nor the National Post actually represent the national scene) and I regularly find opposing perspectives about productions.  It’s exciting.  It would be so wonderful to read, all together, vast and varied opinion from a large community of local Canadian reviewers– the blog reviewers from Prince George as well as the best known reviewers from Toronto and Montreal. Having four or five perspectives on a single show is really the only way we can begin to garner a larger understanding of how a piece is heard.    It also is useful after I’ve seen the show myself.  It helps cube my own comprehension and helps me understand my own reaction.   I have often requested video recordings of a work that I couldn’t attend because I was so taken by the positive response by a wide variety of reviewers – Or the wildly negative review of a reviewer whom I consider not very perceptive. It’s helpful. Reviewers and reviews can, at their best, advance the art by promoting the finest of works, measuring a response, and helping us understand the context and import of a piece within a given community.  You are important.

So I have a request: that is for bloggers, professional reviewers and student reviewers to hashtag their reviews with #cdncult #review. This way all subscribers to the SpiderWebShow – a good central hub for theatre practitioners – can read reviews for shows that are happening all over the country.  We don’t always know where to seek out reviews from the wider community, but this can help us collect them and read them. We can learn about each other, and importantly the variety of subjective opinion about what is going on in the country. Otherwise it is left to the producers and let’s face it, the smart producer is not exactly going to promote a ½ star review on twitter.

Directors and colleagues who fear the review – I do recommend the binge review reading.  And if you’re a reviewer, or want to simply express your response to a production – please hashtag it.  Let’s get a collection and a real subjective conversation going, for work from right across Canada.  #cdncult #review

 

 

 

Huge

By
CofW Group Photo2
Cast and crew and creative team behind of City of Wine Festival at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2009. Photo: John Lauener

Theatres in Canada like small ideas.

Those can be potent, of course, and Nightswimming doesn’t shy away from a small powerful idea; they are absolutely worth embracing and pursuing. But the big idea, and even more the huge idea, has the potential power to galvanize a community of individuals, artists and spectators alike, in ways that even the most beautiful perfect small idea never can. They are fundamentally different.

Here’s a huge idea and how we got there.

In 1997, Nightswimming commissioned playwright Ned Dickens to write a ‘prequel’ called Jocasta to his version of Oedipus, famously produced in 1994 by Die in Debt under the Gardiner Expressway, directed by Sarah Stanley in a stunning production created by a team of more than 50 artists.

A year later we commissioned a ‘sequel’ to that Oedipus called Creon, exploring the impact of Antigone’s actions on the citizens of Thebes. By 2000, we had a trilogy of plays; that was the big idea, and we struggled to find ways to continue the development of the project. So we partnered with the University of Alberta, York University and Humber College and then with a major classical festival to work on the plays.

We found the resources, over time, a long time, to commission Ned, hold workshops, set up student productions, do public readings. We believed in Ned, that he needed to write these large scale, large cast plays even if they seemed beyond our ability to develop, let alone produce. And that he must do so. And then, as Ned wrote, he began to conceive of the full seven-play cycle called City of Wine.

City of Wine tells the story of the Greek city of Thebes – best known as the home of Oedipus. Beginning with the founding of Thebes by Cadmus and Harmonia, and ending in the city’s demise seven generations later on the battlefield of Troy, the cycle is a smart, sexy, and visceral commentary on leadership and civic life told through the lens of a community’s evolution. Seven plays with a total of 96 roles: that’s an even bigger idea.

The work, not surprisingly, was slow. Then we realized that in order to make this big project happen, we had to make it huge. When we talked about it as a big project, people felt it was impossible; when we talked about it as a huge enterprise, potential partners saw opportunities to participate in something remarkable. Huge became key to moving Ned’s vision toward completion, so we made huge our mantra.

Nightswimming assembled a partnership with theatre training programs across the country, from Memorial in Newfoundland to Studio 58 and Simon Fraser in BC. Over the course of three years, seven schools participated in the development and workshopping of the seven plays. In the third year, the schools each produced one of the seven plays in their school seasons with directors including Craig Hall, Eda Holmes, Jillian Keiley, DD Kugler and Sarah Stanley. Ned and I and producer Naomi Campbell, traveled to the schools to lead workshops and bring the 160-plus student actors, designers and other artists into this epic world. But even that wasn’t enough. Dramaturgically, we realized that it would be necessary for us to see all the school productions together.

The goal of all this was to design a machine, a structure, to finish the plays and test them on stage… for isn’t the point of any and all play development processes to give birth to the show? And also that it would be a shame to not bring all the productions together so that everyone – students, faculty and the public – could see the cycle in its entirety. That is when big became truly huge. The City of Wine Festival took place in May 2009, bringing together almost 200 artists for two complete runs of the cycle at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. Its hugeness made it possible.

A community came together to make these plays; the size of the community and the scale of the vision were key to our collective ability to make this happen. There’s more: Ned has now incorporated lessons gleaned from those productions into new drafts of all seven scripts, a process that took more than two years. Playwright and translator Michel Ouellette was commissioned and worked with translation dramaturg Maureen Labonté to create a French translation of Harmonia.

_MG_8903
SFU Contemporary Arts production of Harmonia. Photo: John Lauener

Throughout all of this, Nightswimming’s commitment to faith and patience was central to our ability to attract partners and convince them that the huge idea could work. We had faith that Ned’s storytelling would find thrilling new ways to explore these elemental characters; that the seven schools would secure the resources to participate in this unprecedented national partnership; that Nightswimming would be able to leverage the scale of the project to attract funding far beyond what we had ever previously required in order to develop a new work.

Is City of Wine now too big to ever be produced in Canada? The hugeness that attracted partners during the creation and development process is now a huge hurdle. The large casts required for these plays, one of the very aspects that demands that a community be created to bring them to life, are now a huge challenge. One of the frustrations of our love of the small idea is that big plays that investigate the dynamics of communities are beyond the means of most theatres, and as a result we aren’t tackling some of the big issues that communities face as a whole.

Another truth we collided with is that big projects can more easily attract support, funding and partners during the development/creation process and/or if they involve an educational component. Everyone likes to be in on the creation portion, and education is often fundable from other sources.

Any producing scenario for seven plays demands a lot of actors (even an ensemble approach would require at least 24 or more) and a very long rehearsal period, yet  we believe that community is still the way forward: a community of producers working in partnership to achieve something none of them could working alone.

The greatest challenge to such a partnership is a willingness to truly risk a collaboration that demands that multiple partners put their own interests lower than that of a collaboration that, for example, asks seven theatres to each produce one of the plays and asks each to seek resources to make the scale of the project manageable for all.

It may come down to money in the end, and a theatrical world that can only afford small ideas, but I truly believe that community is the solution to bringing a big idea to fruition.

Brian Quirt is Artistic Director of Nightswimming and Director of the Banff Playwrights Colony. Follow Nightswimming on Twitter and Facebook.

1...424344...59Page 43 of 59
SpiderWebShow.ca is the first live-to-digital performance hybrid company in Canada. We are obsessed with cultural change.
© 2018 SpiderWebShow