Adrienne and Jacob talk with Annabel Soutar, playwright and Artistic Director of Porte Parole. The conversation ranges from an introduction to Annabel, her work and influences; the responsibilities related to involving real-life individuals as sources, subjects or performers within theatrical productions.
With LEAR we have tried, as a collaborating company, to tell the story of King Lear. This intention characterizes the difference between the first workshop we did at Hatch in 2011, and how the work has evolved since then, through the presentation at World Stage 2013, and most recently at Magnetic North 2014.
In the first workshop we executed a series of performance events that were in some ways non-dramatic, non-narrative reflections on the source material. The evolution of the work has been towards executing performance events that were narrative and dramatic, and in which there are a set of circumstances that evolve for the characters that are unexpected. This change in the direction of the work caused some of the tension in our process.
Philip and Clare have struggled to make a play together. The reasons for this tension can be partially explained by the challenges inherent to collaborating across generations; the challenges of collaborating when one person is dealing with the process of letting go of power, and the other person is trying to establish power. The ways in which they are able to serve one another in the collaboration can get lost in the neurotic response to the circumstances.
With the growing intention to offer a narrative as opposed to present an exposé on the source material, Clare and Philip continued to find themselves in conflict. Clare was reluctant to engage with the source material in a way that would require her to embody King Lear’s experience. She described finding the uncanny resemblance of the character’s circumstances to her own circumstances disturbing. She worried that speaking his words, in the context of a process where she was being confronted with her own decline as an actor and as a creator, she would go mad the way King Lear goes mad. So, she favoured the performance events that awarded a bit of distance from the story, both for the actors and the audience.
Philip, on the other hand, felt she was capable of a great performance. He felt in order to achieve this performance Clare required a narrative context in which to speak the words of the play. In pursuit of the show he had in mind, he was willing to qualify his understanding of the anxieties Clare had expressed.
In pursuit of this narrative container, Philip and Rose began to advocate within the company for a particular conceit. Similar to executing a performance of any more conventional play, we had to imagine there are circumstances that unfold that are “unexpected”. The performers/characters have to imagine they don’t know what is going to happen next. Each performer/character might have an idea about how things should proceed or how they want them to proceed, but they must imagine that at a certain point, things don’t go their way.
The clearest anchor point, as the meta-narrative was explored, was to remain faithful to ‘the geography’ of the characters in the play King Lear. The characters have certain responsibilities to enter and exit, to win and to lose, and we, as a company, hit those marks. As with any conventional play, we did this in the face of what are the limits of a particular process, but also the limits of the theatre: we have in fact rehearsed something, and that we know what is going to happen. The particular challenge of this piece was that we were highlighting, and in some ways embracing, most aspects of the artifice involved in making and presenting theatre. At the extreme other end, in a naturalistic production, the theatre makers will try to wallpaper over the things we felt were our most valuable narrative tools. We presented these mechanisms for an audience to see as part of the action of the play, as well as a part of the setting and circumstances of the play.
This work was made navigating the tension between making intuitive choices and conscious choices. This remained true even when a commitment was made to evolving the narrative experience of the piece. We understood that although this choice felt like a revision of a way of working (Hatch, 2011), we still didn’t entirely understand how this new direction of the work would be manifest. It involved carving out creative space in which we could proceed intuitively, sometimes at the expense of some aspects of what was initially a more collaborative workshop process.
However, everybody continued to contribute their own ideas to the piece. We are all still holding a corner of the blanket, and there are different ways for us to be responsible for that holding. Perhaps uniquely, no one person feels they have ownership over the design and content of LEAR, it feels like a quilt. Nobody likes everything in the play, but that’s a sign of there having been, at different moments and in different ways, space for everybody.
The Magnetic North Festival took place in Halifax and Dartmouth from June 19-29 this year. Every second year the festival takes place in Ottawa, while it takes over a different town or city in Canada on odd years. This model affords the festival the ability to be ‘national’ in a unique way, representing the capital and bringing a physical a presence to different Canadian communities, while presenting work from across the country.
As we strive to run a website with a national perspective, it seemed natural to have an edition that focused on ‘Mag North’. Amanda Campbell writes on what the festival was like for someone who lives there, while Philip McKee and Rose Plotek open up the process that brought their show LEAR to the festival. Meanwhile, Charles Ketchabaw gives us a taste of what Fixtpoint is up to as they move across the country with their Tale of a Town ‘storymobile’.
We came into Wolfville, Nova Scotia unexpected. We called the Mayor’s office and plant ourselves downtown on the Main St. in our storymobile. Shortly there after a man in a blaze orange safety jacket comes from the parking lot of a Shoppers across the street.
Him: “I heard your looking for stories…”
Us: Yes .. about this street.
Him: “Well you should talk with Laurence Smith he’s got keys to half the buildings on this here strip. He comes by at 10, 12 and 2 o’clock everyday and parks right over there in the lot.”
Us: Great
When I got into an old pickup with a guy who was 80+ in overalls I expected to learn about the way life used to be on Main Street Wolfville, NS. I did not expect to learn about Jack Sherriff a legendary theatre maker and educator located in downtown Wolfville. When we included this in our recent play for Magnetic North more than one person within the industry came up afterwards and commented on the influence Jack had on their lives.
Laurence Smith is a beautiful old man with a big heart and a voice I am so happy to have captured for preservation. I’m sure Jack was as well.
Charlie Rhindress, Artistic Producer of Eastern Front Theatre and Brenda Leadlay Executive Director of Magnetic North.
It has been invigorating and soul-filling for me, as both a theatre writer and theatre artist, to have the Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Halifax for the past ten days. I have seen productions that have been provocative and fascinating and challenging, and many have spawned passionate conversations and debates that have spilled out into the theatre lobbies and the Festival Bar at the Atlantica Hotel. For a city and a theatre community that I think sometimes feels isolated from the Canadian Theatre Community as a whole, having an influx of theatre makers from all corners of the country here and being encouraged to meet and mingle is something that I wish could happen in Halifax more often.
For the visiting artists they were treated to mostly unseasonably gorgeous weather in Halifax and enthusiastic and often sold-out crowds. The Compass Points and Industry Programming kept a keen group of artists making the most of every workshop, Keynote speech and Networking opportunity and I found their presence and their energy to be infectious. As with most things, I think the people who benefited the most from the Magnetic North Theatre Festival being in Halifax were the people who chose to involve themselves in as many of the opportunities the Festival provided as they could.
For the first time in its history Magnetic North partnered with a local company in Halifax, Eastern Front Theatre and its annual Stages Festival, melding the two festivals together. At first I thought this was a great idea, mostly because the Halifax Theatre Community, to generalize, often has a reluctance to patronize theatre that comes “from away.” Yet, in my experience almost all the people from the Halifax Theatre Community that I saw attending both the Magnetic North shows and the Stages shows, engaging with the Festival on Social Media and hanging out at the Atlantica afterwards were people involved in some aspect of the Festival or close friends with someone affiliated with the show. This is a common challenge that Halifax faces and it’s frustrating to see an opportunity for uniting theatre artists from disparate cities not attracting many of those who would greatly benefit from it.
One of the challenges facing Halifax-based artists was the timing of Magnetic North. The Eastern Front Stages Festival is usually in May. Because there are almost no opportunities for professional theatre in Halifax in the summer beyond Shakespeare By the Sea, the majority of Halifax’s actors disperse into smaller, rural towns in the rest of Nova Scotia that have theatres with summer seasons, hunkering down there until just before the Atlantic Fringe Festival begins in September. As Francine Deschepper, a performer in 2b Theatre’s When It Rains and Keelin Jack, a performer in The National Elevator Project, proved it wasn’t impossible for those working elsewhere to come into Halifax to both perform and attend Magnetic North Shows, but it required a fair bit of planning, maneuvering and likely exhaustion as well. Both Deschepper and Jack are performing in Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge in Wolfville’s Valley Summer Theatre, which opens July 4. Wolfville is only an hour away from Halifax, but there isn’t a convenient and economic public transportation option like in larger cities, which often leaves artists (who often don’t own cars) stranded in their summer theatre towns for the entire season.
Another challenge of uniting Magnetic North with the Stages Festival is that their mandates, although both committed to fostering new Canadian work, have one significant difference. The Magnetic North Theatre Festival exists to showcase “the best” of Canadian Theatre from across the country. The Stages Festival exists to showcase Atlantic Canadian Theatre at different stages of development. This means that the shows that Magnetic North brought to the Festival were usually indicative of the theatre company who created it. Most of the shows had been developed in other Festivals and/or had runs in other theatres before coming to Halifax. The caliber of theatre here was uniformly highly polished, so as to fit the mandate of “The best of Canadian Theatre.”
For the Stages Festival, which is as much interested in process as product, most of its offerings for Magnetic North were World Premieres. This was extremely exciting as well, as it meant that we were able to see the beautiful Mermaid Theatre’s Stella, Queen of Snow before they toured it around the World and also the brand new Daniel MacIvor and Daniel Brooks collaboration Who Killed Spalding Gray, presumably before they take it on tour across the country. Yet, for a local theatre company that isn’t as well known and doesn’t get to take their work out of Halifax as often, Zuppa Theatre’s show in Magnetic North Pop Up Love Party was, in keeping with Stages’ mandate, very early in their process. They are working towards premiering this show in March, 2015, so this incarnation was very much a launching point for them. It was a fun and theatrical evening to attend and it can be very interesting to connect to a piece of theatre at this stage in the process, especially with a company who devise their work collaboratively. Yet, since Pop Up Love Party was not indicative of Zuppa’s more polished shows, such as their incredible Uncle Oscar’s Experiment, I wondered if it was the ideal choice to put forth as an introduction to the company for an audience of visiting theatre makers.
I loved how Theatre Yes’ The National Elevator Project featured playwrights from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, because I feel like Atlantic Canadian Theatre is often marginalized, but that also there is not a strong enough connection between the theatre makers in these four provinces. Ideally it would have been lovely to have representation from theatre companies in New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and elsewhere in Nova Scotia, like Cape Breton, for example. Ultimately, I think that it is our responsibility as Atlantic Canadian Theatre Artists to be a little less insular and to work together to further forge and foster relationships with one another and to help the theatre thrive and to be recognized as thriving not only in Halifax, but into the rest of the Maritimes as well. This is one way that Eastern Front Theatre’s presence is essential in Halifax, and I think, not often valued nearly enough.
It has been interesting experiencing the Festival both as an individual theatre writer and someone who is passionate about the Canadian Theatre and as a Haligonian who is passionate about Atlantic Canadian Work. For me, it has further highlighted some challenges faced by the artists who live here that are not just unique to Magnetic North. Yet, it has also cemented my belief that one of the best things that we can do, as those who love Canadian Theatre, is to find ways to come together and to make our sprawling country and its artists feel a little less isolated from one another. The more we learn about each other and from each other the better our theatre will be.
Jacob and Adrienne chat with Theatre Centre AD Franco Boni about city planning, navigating civic bureaucracy, engagement with community, how theatre touring practices could be affected by efforts to conserve oil, the value of going away and coming back, what the buildings are for, leadership, how theatre artists can participate in wider community discussions.
DJs combining with visuals at The Cultural Olympiad, Vancouver 2010
In the late winter of 2010 two life-altering things happened to me:
I received my first smartphone.
I received my first ever grant from the Canada Council, which led me to travel across the country studying how different theatres and productions approached the process known as ‘tech’ – when a show moves from the rehearsal room to the theatre. In possession of a digital camera wherever I went for the first time, I took a lot of pictures. Many of which were behind the scenes shots of tech processes.
Below are images from a 5 month period I spent mostly in tech from February-June 2010.
Tear The Curtain Filming – The Arts Club Vancouver
Tear The Curtain Filming – The Arts Club, Vancouver
Tear The Curtain Filming – The Arts Club, Vancouver
Courageous – The Rice Theatre @ The Citadel, Edmonton
Courageous – The Rice Theatre @ The Citadel, Edmonton
Courageous – The Rice Theatre @ The Citadel, Edmonton
Betrayal – Theatre Calgary, Calgary
Betrayal – Theatre Calgary, Calgary
Betrayal – Theatre Calgary, Calgary
If We Were Birds – Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
If We Were Birds – Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
Africa Trilogy, Volcano presented by Luminato, Toronto
The Wrecking Ball at The Theatre Centre, Toronto
Tear The Curtain Filming – The Arts Club Vancouver
