Play: The Shape of a Girl || Playwright: Joan McLeod Shoot: Verdun || Model: Jennifer Roberts
BRAIDIE: And there we are. A group of girls – just like me and Adrienne and Jackie and Amber. A group of girls with hair and jeans and jackets. They are not waving, they are drowning . And this group of girls on TV just starts waving, right on cue. Weird I’m thinking. This is highly weird.
And what feels even stranger is that the picture is actually clear for once, from the neck down at least. But their faces are blurry, smudged, almost as though someone has taken an eraser and tried to rub them out.
The Shape of a Girl was first produced by Green Thumb Theatre in Vancouver in 2001.
The creation of The Water Thief has been an adventure in fate.
When we met for the first time we discovered both our families hailed from Cape Breton. We were both writing separate proposals to create a film that uses projection and live performance to come to life. Amy wrote her thesis about landscape and memory in the Maritimes. Sean had a performance about a man who gets swallowed by a whale.
We travelled to Sackville, New Brunswick to make the film portion of the piece as part of a residency at Struts Gallery. This location was not chosen by accident. Amy spends much of her time in this small town on the Fundy. It is a special place renowned for its art and culture and warm hospitality. However, kindness was not the only reason we were drawn to Sackville. In 2008, friends of ours were the first to discover a 50-tonne beached whale at Slack’s Cove in Rockport, a twenty-minute drive from Sackville.
A scientist reporting for the CBC stated: “Sei whales are uncommon in the Bay of Fundy where the mammal beached…The species usually stays away from shorelines, preferring deep offshore waters…This is actually the first on the New Brunswick coast that I’m aware of” (CBC July 15, 2008). Scientists never truly figured out what caused the whale to become injured in the first place, but she died there on the beach of Slack’s Cove.
There were rumours the whale was buried near the Cove. It seems absurd to bury a whale, but scientists were worried the strength of the tides would wash the body ashore. We recruited a friend who lives in Rockport, Bertholet Charron, to help us find the buried whale. We traipsed around the sandy foothills; evidence of clear-cuts mixed with local hiking trails. Bertholet took us to a mound, surprisingly a very whale-shaped mound. It was surprising because it didn’t seem to be buried very far below ground, rather heaped on the earth and then covered hastily. We tried to honour the whale by creating a shrine and clearing the shrubbery for a clear view of the ocean from where she lay.
Immersing ourselves in a place that really did experience the beaching of a whale adds to the magic of the film. The striking landscape of Slack’s Cove, the red sand, the craggy cliffs and crashing waves, adds authenticity and beauty to the piece.
We wanted the piece to speak to the changing landscape of the Maritimes. Little remains of the life our grandparents knew. Returning to the East Coast meant unearthing memory and thinking about what it means to be “from” somewhere. We thought about how we as humans honour our pasts and how landscapes aren’t quite as sentimental.
Rockport and the surrounding area provide the loose backdrop for The Water Thief. Rockport was once a vibrant community in the 19th Century, with a thriving economy dependent on a sandstone and gypsum quarry. The population was much bigger than nearby Sackville. With a fallen economy, the townspeople left. Now the area is only sparsely populated. The buildings that do exist from the turn of the century are falling apart. Many of the original families have left. There are coyotes and black bears and plenty of deer.
Rockport is also a place that is literally disappearing; as the shore erodes and the tide creeps on to land. The shores of the Fundy in New Brunswick have not yet been developed in the same way that they have on the Nova Scotia side, and this precious landscape has not been experienced by many. It is an interesting moment to document an important part of Canadian history.
As we set out to create the film from this skeleton of an idea, the real happenings of Rockport’s history began to create the flesh of our tale. In searching for locations for the interior of Charon’s (our protagonists) house, we came upon a schoolhouse in Rockport that was owned by the De Les Dernier family (trans. Of The Last: very apropos for a story about the last man alive in a dying town!). Jim De Les Dernier was happy to lend us the schoolhouse for shooting, and was also willing to indulge us with tales of his family from this area.
His storytelling led us to his uncle Rupert De Les Dernier, a hermit who lived a simple life without electricity or modern technology well into the 21st century. As Rupert had past away years before we arrived to film, his house was near ruins, and yet full of beautiful and haunting objects and housewares. Rupert’s character had numerous parallels with the life of our protagonist and so we began to draw from Rupert’s life to inform our fable. Rupert’s house also became the exterior of Charon’s house, as Rupert’s objects filled the schoolhouse to create a grounded portrait of our protagonist.
Photo by R.B. Mattatall, no date
It became clear that Bertholet was the actor to portray Charon, the main character of the film. The experience of living in Rockport, of seeing a whale beached in Slack’s Cove, and in having a friendship with Rupert situated Bertholet in the perfect position to tell our fable. Bertholet also shared music with us; his growing up years as a choirboy in Acadian New Brunswick helped give us a soundtrack for the piece. It was also a hair-raising coincidence that Bertholet’s last name was Charron, when we were drawing his character from the mythical Charon, the boatman who journeys spirits across the River Styx, that which divides the world of living from the world of the dead.
Hints and glimmers of this story are found in the final production of The Water Thief. The landscape, the people, the structures, the passing of time and the music. We call it a ghost story because it speaks to those we cannot always see. The bones of the story lying just beneath the surface.
The Water Thief runs August 7th to 15th 2014
186 Cowan Ave. (St. John’s Catholic Cathedral) Tickets Website Facebook Event @waterthieves
For more information or to schedule an interview please contact thewaterthief@gmail.com
ZONG! MEETS GARRISON
AUGUST 10 @ 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Creators : Story by poet/griotte Setaey Adamu Boateng with M. NourbeSe Philip and Audience, Directed by M. NourbeSe Philip
Zong! There is no telling this story; it must be told.
Zong! meets Garrison is at the intersection of memory and forgetting, where the waters of the buried and erased Garrison Creek cross Queen Street and are “straightened” by History. Environmental, participatory and ritualistic, Zong! meets Garrison calls on audience participants and performers to immerse themselves collectively in the amnesia of history to reclaim the river, the noise of memory and the silence of those whose voices were lost.
Bring your voices! Blankets, cushions or chairs also. Wear white if possible.
A packed AGO for the 2010 Toronto Mayoral ArtsVote Debate
Editor’s Note: After reading Eric’s post about politics and cultural investment in Calgary, I asked him if he wanted to expand on those thoughts for this space. As he is currently preparing to come to TO from Calgary to be part of SummerWorks, he thought that might be impossible. I suggested we have a quick online chat. He obliged and the convo is below. mw
Eno?
Hello!
Okay perfect. Why is your name Eno?
I just use this account for Google related products. Just a fake name. Actually it’s our cat’s name. Eno Rushton.
Ha
I thought as a way into the article you’ve written below about artists, politics, and the creative city, we could have a quick Google chat. Lets get into it. There was an article in the Globe last week about the corporatization of culture that was shared around a lot in TO. (When culture goes corporate, Canada’s creativity suffers.) Did it resonate for you too in Calgary?
I woke up and it was the first thing I read. What a way to start the day! My first thought was, “this should have been written here in Calgary and it should have come from our ‘art council’”.
Because of, the emphasis on “economic impact”?
(as a measure of artistic merit)
I think it should have come from our “arts council,”because they are also our local advocacy body. Why don’t they advocate for less corporatization of the arts, instead of their policy, which is for more?
Actually, we don’t have an art council in Calgary in the same way that Toronto or Edmonton has an arts council—though there are similar functionalities across the three. Here in Calgary we have an Arts Development body—Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA). This language is borrowed from Calgary Economic Development. So at the highest levels in Calgary, the language of corporate culture has crept into our arts and culture scene. For instance, CADA doesn’t administer grants, it administers “investments”(Mia and I have received a few of these to be fair!).
This type of vocabulary, of course has forced many organizations and individual artist to also adopt a corporate language structure.
Huh, that’s interesting.
In TO we had a big culture report recently. It was co-chaired by Jim Prentice— who if you believe the pundits is destined to be your next Premier. The name of the report was CREATIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Which would be a great name for an Onion version of a culture report, but less great when you’re living it.
What do you see as ways to push back against this language and co-opting of cultural values?
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Something that resonated with me in the article by Thomas Hodd was when he said, “the country’s cultural creators –the people who speak better than anyone else the language of creative expression –haven’t had time to process the sea-change, let alone challenge it”. In Calgary we just undertook a large arts plan process for the city, now titled “Living a Creative Life”. During this process I think artists and arts workers in Calgary started to see how the corporate structures at play have been implemented over the past decade in the arts in Calgary. In many ways the plan, which is an end of sorts—an end to envisioning the future direction of the arts—is really, I hope, the beginning of a conversation about what needs to be done in regards to the arts in Calgary and nationally.
Hearing different voices during the couple of consultation sessions I attended throughout the arts planning process however, and when speaking with colleagues after the plan was released, was really important. It showed that there are dissenting voices in the city (especially from individuals within organizations that otherwise endorsed CADA’s plan). I think that the first steps to pushing back against the co-opting of cultural values and the corporatization of the arts is to develop a language that we can speak and also to deconstruct the language that is being used on our behalf by funding bodies, boards of directors, other artist, organizations, etc.
I think that a lot of artists and arts organization use the language of creativity (now corporate language, let’s be honest), but are not aware of the implications to the arts long term.
Creative Capital Gains Co-Chairs: (left to right) Jim Prentice, Karen Kain, Robert Foster and special advisors Jeff Melanson and Richard Florida (not shown).
I agree that lots of talking about this is helpful, but there is the danger of co-option there as well. Praxis was an “invited” and public participant in the ‘consultations’ for the CREATIVE CAPITAL GAINS report. When we found out that it contained nothing that us or our colleagues submitted, in fact it had in large part been pre-written, and the ‘consultations’ were just a formality, we pulled the Praxis name from the report.
This is pretty much that happened in Calgary as well. Any dissenting voices that were heard during the public process were not included in the final plan (that said, Calgary’s Poet Laureate at the time, Kris Demeanor wrote an excellent addendum that is worth reading). Instead a pretty banal and homogeneous plan emerged that is well-intentioned and I thank my colleagues for their hard work throughout the process, but an opportunity existed for exciting things to happen that were uniquely Calgary-based. Calgary could have imagined the future of the arts and its role in creating a stronger, more socially just society. Instead we got a carbon copy creative cities document that in the long run will ultimately erode public funding for the arts in favour of creative entrepreneurialism and establish a Calgary that is grounded in unequal access to the city (this is a much longer conversation I’d love to have with my colleagues in Calgary at some point).
What I think is important for people to consider about the creative cities movement is that the “local” elements of it, are basically just global market initiatives being implemented on a local level.
Wow. Yes. Praxis runs a Civil Debates series with The Theatre Centre (who is co-presenting your project, “Council of Community Conveyors”at SummerWorks). Our first debate was on creative cities logic. We could have had 5 more on the same topic.
In your piece below you discuss post-ideological candidates.
What can be done to motivate plausibly successful ideological ones?
I think this is the point of the article: that post-ideology is an ideology. Those candidates that run as neither “left” or “right,” but on good ideas, know they are ideological. They just aren’t partisan. In the article I talk about how artists should look to build coalitions with different groups—teachers, unions, etc. Those who still hold power in our contemporary culture. I think that this is where we need to start.
COUNCIL OF COMMUNITY CONVEYORS
AUGUST 17 @ 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Creators : Created by Eric Moschopedis, Mia Rushton and Sharon Stevens
Presented in partnership with The Theatre Centre.
By bringing together elements of performance, participation, and civic engagement, Council of Community Conveyors seeks to map communities by collecting and passing messages from one neighbour to another. Not unlike census takers (we’ve got clipboards, name tags, and a serious looking form to fill out), members of the Council arrive in a neighbourhood and begin knocking on doors with the intention of registering what one neighbour has to say to the next. The Council invites festival-goers to become temporary members by participating in a two-hour version of this playful but politically engaged project, which attempts to establish dialogue within a community
Welcome to The SummerWorks Edition of #CdnCult Times, which asked three artists who are participating in the festival to contribute through different discourses that are supported by the WordPress medium.
Eric Moschopedis and I had an online chat about politics and culture in Canada, which we imported into the site. M. NourbeSe Philip contributed poetry, which we imported as images to ensure the correct layout. Sean Frey and Amy Siegel communicated a narrative about their piece that is primarily image-based.
The resulting edition is analogous to the way The SummerWorks Festival has also grown. The festival has an increasingly national presence, with projects that challenge traditional concepts surrounding form and content in contemporary performance.
Play: Blacks Don’t Bowl || Playwright: Vadney Haynes Shoot: Pointe St. Charles || Models: Josh Goldberg, Kareem Alleyne
SHERMAN: Ya gotta be careful sometimes with images. Powerful stuff, man. The wrong images in the right eyes and who knows where that could lead.
PINTO: Look at you. Porn-boy talkin’ ’bout censorship.
SHERMAN: I didn’t say anything ’bout censorship. Why are you always putting words in my mouth?
PINTO: So I can hear you say something intelligent.
SHERMAN: I’m just saying you’ve got to be careful, ‘specially when it comes to images of Black people.
PINTO: We don’t need to be protected, thank you very much, even by the likes of that half-Jewish, half-Irish Darwinian experiment called Sherman O’Donnell.
SHERMAN: Bite of my potato bagel?
PINTO: If we keep being afraid of how we’re perceived, then we’ll never get out from under, and nothin’ will change. Thick skin beats small mind any day,
Blacks Don’t Bowl was first produced by Black Theatre Workshop in Montréal in 2006.
It’s mid-summer, which in Canadian Theatre means high season for The Fringe, as festivals roll out across the country. Last weekend, in ‘Has the Fringe circuit been good for Canadian theatre?’, Globe and Mail critic Kelly Nestruck raised some provocative questions about the role of Fringe in the theatrical ecology “Has a three-decade torrent of low-budget shows of varying quality been good for Canadian theatre as a profession – or has it flooded the market”?
For this edition, we asked Executive Directors of both the Montreal and Ottawa Fringe Festivals to write about what it means to curate a festival that is by definition uncuratable. We also asked Rob Salerno, an artist and writer who has toured work to several Fringe festivals across the country, to weigh in on what he sees possibilities and challenges for the Fringe circuit moving forwards. Their answers imply that while Fringe is a singular phenomenon, their success is related to how each is specifically related to the community they serve.
