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Creating Blind Love for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

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LeBoldus High School

The moment I knew our play, Blind Love was special was after the first performance at our high school two months before leaving for Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The student/actors are frozen on stage. The lights go to black. But instead of the obligatory end applause – silence. It was brief but felt like forever; sort of like people needed time to recover; to remember where they were. Once the applause ended, everyone just sat.

Our play Blind Love was a devised theatre work created by myself and 12 LeBoldus High School students ostensibly for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Edinburgh Scotland, August 2013. It had all live music with two girls on vocals (one with a ukulele), abstract ensemble movement, two short animated films (created by one of the student performers specifically for the piece), and a small narrative that used the Chinese myth of the Red String of Fate that inexplicably binds certain people together for life. Because we were sailing (ok, flying) across the ocean we decided the string would be our only prop; the physical manifestation of the ties that are created when one person meets another and the attachment is made.  We wove this all together with students’ stories; one of a boy who watches both his grandparents disappear before his eyes with Alzheimers; another who – as a child – lost a close adult friend in a snowmobiling accident. All these stories were “strung” together with a simple narrative of Boy and Girl, who meet each other and – seemingly through no choice of their own – fall in love and are together for life.

Dr. Martin Leboldus is a bursting-at-the-seams high school situated at the south end of the city of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. A school originally built for about 650 students, it now has a population of about 950. It is an increasingly diverse and vibrant Catholic School with an excellent reputation for the arts and drama in particular. It has won the Canadian Improv Games National Championship and has made the finals on several other occasions as well as having been a winner of the regional tournament on many occasions. It has an excellent reputation for writing and devising original works of theatre with its own high school students.

In starting to devise a work for the Fringe we began by playing around with ideas: They journaled, wrote songs and poetry, told stories, practiced the ukulele, moved, danced, did improv games and played with miles and miles of string. What if string represented a beating heart? What if string became an office tower? IPod head-phones? What if – once you saw someone from across the room you wouldn’t be able to let go of the string – ever? Red string became a physical metaphor for being tangled, confused, in fear, lost, forgotten, and of course in love – undeniably, passionately, and irreversibly in love. We blew our string budget in the first week. But that was ok. It was our only budget item.

If I had been a bit surprised by the audience’s response at our high school, I was not prepared for the Edinburgh response. People wept openly; students and adults alike. The audiences would leap to their feet the moment the play was over and many would find us after the performance  to congratulate the students. The students’ stories were front and centre. There was no “acting”. There was no need to play anything other than themselves. And when they spoke, they spoke directly to the audience about their stories. “We know you’re there,” they were saying, “and we need to tell you – and show you – some stuff.” I acted as part-time writer and  dramaturge, full-time director, teacher, counselor, and performance coach. They learned how to avoid cliché in order to dig deeper and came to understand the deeper impact of theatre that is honest, open, and bold.

The Edinburgh Fringe features several other smaller festivals under its auspices. The AHSTF (The American High School Theatre Festival) is one of them. It has two venues that are exclusively their own. 40 high schools from the US and Canada (only about 4 Canadian schools) were part of this year’s festival which takes place over the entire month of August. It is an incredibly well-run (by American theatre professionals), mini-festival where students and teacher-directors stay at the Edinburgh University Campus residences, take tours, (Both in London and the castles in the Scotland country-side), attend a few performances of the other high schools and generally attempt to take as much of the festival in as they can. Each school must sell their show the same way the rest of the Festival shows do: by getting out and pounding the pavement, handing out flyers, doing impromptu performances, talking up their show in lineups, and making sure that other high school students get to come and see their show as well. Each school has 4 performances over 10 days. We are provided with a house technician and a typical “Fringe” amount of time for load in and strike.

Our Leboldus students were blown away by the experience – both the high of performing on the Edinburgh stage and the incredible arts feast that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. What they originally thought was going to be a good opportunity to go shopping became a desperate fight to see as much theatre as they could. They began following me around like puppies: “What’s good Mr. Macdonald? What shows did you see yesterday?” And they became theatre critics:

“It didn’t take me anywhere.”

“Pretty good ensemble work.”

“That company has three different shows here. I have to see every one of them.”

They’re desperate to go back. Maybe one day a few will – as professionals.

Storytelling in the immediate

By

brim full of asha

Closing You Should Have Stayed Home in Ottawa last week had me think a lot about theatre, storytelling, and direction this aspect of the medium is taking in Canada lately.

That storytelling is in fact what theatre does, or should do, is up for debate as University of Toronto Professor Holger Syme noted in his post “Theatre does not tell stories”:

“A character on stage may look back and tell a story — but that character continues to live in the present, in a time that’s defined as “right now” by the very play he or she inhabits (a “right now” that we, as spectators, are allowed to imagine we share, simply because we share an actual “right now” with the actor playing the character). So that, in a large-ish nutshell, is my conceptual beef: theatre can’t tell stories, because stories are always necessarily retrospective. And theatre isn’t about the past. It’s about the present.”

What I have noted recently, is a number of shows that are not performed by ‘characters’, but the actual people who created or are creating the narrative.

You Should Have Stayed Home falls into this category. Tommy Taylor performs a story that occurred to him in the past at G20 Toronto, but it also occurs in the present. Not the present of the given circumstances that audience and performer agree to believe in. It is the current present of the day it is performed. This is explicit through both direct address “This is the T shirt I was wearing at G20”, and also thematically – we experience how G20 Toronto transformed Tommy Taylor into the person we see before us in the present.

Some of my favourite shows of late also employ this approach. Ravi Jain’s Brim Full of Asha has sold out practically every venue in the country it seems. In this piece, which he performs onstage with his mother, we experience the story of how they have negotiated her desire for him to have an arranged marriage. Again, there is no ‘fictional’ present for us to agree upon. Because this is the people who these events happened to, something happens that pulls the present into the present.

 

Two other successful pieces of theatre, both also on the topic of mothers come to mind when thinking about this recent strain of ‘reality theatre’: The Chop Theatre’s How To Disappear Completely, in which Itai Erdal relates a love for his mother and the unique circumstances surrounding his mothers death, has been wildly successful for a piece of indie theatre. The show was recently presented at The Stratford Festival while simultaneously winning the SummerWorks Award for Direction. In this piece Erdal is present not just because he is himself, telling his story – but because as a lighting designer he personally, with a lighting console in hand, controls the lighting of the show. The effect is one that allows the audience to meet Itai and hear his story in the immediate.

The other successful maternal narrative performed by its subjects is mothermothermother, presented at The Rhubarb Festival and upcoming at Push Off. Directed by SpiderWebShow co-creator Sarah Stanley with Natasha Greenblatt, Michael Rubenfeld and his mother perform their family history and relationship on stage. The dynamic of immediacy is increased by having the two subjects of the narrative on stage. The ‘plot’ is one that occurs in the past, but the ‘story’ is what is occurring to the subjects in the moment. When mother and son sing “That’s What Friends Are For” together as they used to in earlier days, as audience members we don’t experience it as a flashback to an earlier time, but as a testament to where they are in their relationship in the immediate present.

 

Winners and Losers, playing currently at Canadian Stage is possibly the most striking and widely seen example of this work. Directed by 2013 Siminovitch Prize Winner Chris Abraham and fresh from a European Tour, the show stars Marcus Youseff (who recently wrote for SpiderWebShow) and James Long (who also directed How to Disappear Completely). Billed as a “staged conversation”, a game of categorizing things and people as ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’ devolves into increasingly personal attacks on one another. It is how this conflict plays out in the present, which gives the piece a unique immediacy each performance

Where this trend originated is not a question that has a singular answer, but a question I asked World Stage Artistic Director Tina Rassmussen during a twitter chat about the upcoming World Stage season offers a clue:

Is it possible that seeing this sort of work be presented from elsewhere has encouraged domestic artists to take up the mantle themselves? Hard to know.

What is certain is that this is a relatively new and successful trope in contemporary Canadian performance, and that it changes the nature and immediacy of storytelling (if we accept that theatre does tell stories). As other media and mediums continue to develop with advances in technology it seems theatre is also doubling down on one thing theatre can only do: A person in a place with other people telling a story about themselves.

#CdnCult Times; Volume 1, Edition 7

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In this edition, things get personal.

With high school students discovering a personal connection with theatre at The Edinburgh Fringe, pieces from across Canada finding a way to personalize narratives, and our Geographic Correspondents finding personal answers to what ‘Leadership’ means to them – the personal immediate nature of theatre is exposed by these pieces.

I suspect this a quality to live performance that will always be accentuated by the fact that it can not be iterated. It allows each performance to be unique and different from any other which facilitates a personal connection to the work in a way that iterated work can not. Just as attending a concert is a more personal experience that throwing on an album (or Songza!), the liveness of live performance allows a more intimate personal connection.

I also suspect this is what has fuelled some of the opposition to web technologies being integrated into performance practice – the worry that digital integration will limit this advantage. Which is a reasonable worry, but it’s also possible theatre is stronger and more wily than that.

Michael Wheeler
Editor-in-Chief: #CdnCult Times

Every 7 years

By

thegrocery

Every 7 years, it seems, an itch presents itself that is either a minor inconvenience or what, in the end, is an insurmountable major hurdle. My last professional itch led to the dissolution of a theatre company, SaBooge, which had been my entire focus through most of my twenties. SaBooge made great theatre and we liked each other while doing it until the very end.

The ensemble was split between 3 cities in 2 different countries and as we all inched closer to the precipice of turning 30, so too did the itch to start families. Our geographic scattering proved a major hurdle. We divvied up the bank account, and most of the gang set about creating their brood.

Not ready for the responsibility beyond keeping a dog alive, I set about starting another theatre company based squarely in one city – Montreal. I’ve been the Artistic Director of Montreal’s SideMart Theatrical Grocery since its conception in the winter of 2006.

SideMart started as an ensemble focused on immersive and site specific work; American Buffalo in the shadowy backstage corners and stairwell of Mainline Theatre, The Dishwashers in the basement of a St. Laurent Wine Bar, and a series of plays in the apartment above Theatre Ste. Catherine, appropriately titled The Apartment Plays.

The success of these productions earned SideMart an invitation to become the inaugural resident company in the Segal Centre for the Performing Arts’ newly minted Studio Theatre. We made the Studio home for 4 years. Highlights of that period include our original musical Haunted Hillbilly and the premiere Morris Panych’s Gordon.

In the last few years our productions of Scientific Americans, Haunted Hillbilly and Trad, have been included in the subscription seasons at the Segal Centre and the Centaur Theatre.

Clearly a successful, not-to-be-taken-for-granted, enviable 7 year arc.

And yet, we itched – individually, for the stimulus of new environs and collectively for that elusive sense of recognition outside of Montreal.

It manifested itself over several months as one by one we lost members of our ranks to destinations west down the 401. First temporarily: a season at the Stratford Festival, or a summer in Toronto – manageable enough obstacles that were expected and, frankly, welcomed. But, as success is wont to do, it fed into itself again and again, until that single season at Stratford had turned into 4 more and that summer in Toronto turned into a couple west end mortgages. This made it very difficult for the centre to hold in Montreal.

Of SideMart’s founding 5, Trent Pardy, fIew the coup first. In 2008 he went to act at the Stratford Festival. In 2009 after significant debate, I followed him, with the intention of staying the season and then bringing him home with me – we had work to do in Montreal. Instead, I stayed for another season. And then another.

Although I came back to Montreal to work in the winters, I had stayed away long enough to begin to question whether Montreal was, in fact, truly home anymore. Opportunities elsewhere were, of course, presenting themselves to the rest of the company as well, and gradually weekends in Toronto, became weeks in Toronto,  became months, became changes of address and OHIP cards.

I woke up late last fall in Montreal wondering where all my friends had gone.

I’d been warned it would happen. That it was inevitable. That the anglophone communities in Montreal were temporary and transient. I’d been based there for 11 years resisting that notion, but that morning when I realized almost my entire posse had packed up for Toronto, I put down my weapon and gave myself a year to make the shift.

I was given opportunity and responsibility in Montreal that I may never been given elsewhere. I recognize that Montreal shaped the artist that I am now. I also recognize the importance of shaking things up, turning them inside out and making sure you still have the reflexes and the hunger to sort it all out.

On November 1, 2013 I took possession of a little storefront in Leslieville at 1362 Queen East. It is my flag on the moon. It is SideMart’s new Theatrical Grocery.

It is an alternately terrifying and thrilling endeavour. It echoes, the floors creak, the streetcars rumble, it desperately needs soundproofing. And proper lights. And chairs. And pipes for the lights. And riser for those chairs…but it’s already perfect. It’s a noisy, little, empty east end box that is ours. It’s never been a theatre, and that makes it all the more appealing. We get to write the entire story.

Soon the space will be filled with artists and friends, new and old, making funny, making music, making art. At a time when the east end of my new city is poised to explode with creativity, I can clearly see the opportunity that I have in hand to play a significant part in it. It reminds me of Montreal a decade ago.

It’s a great feeling to be at a precipice again. It’s an even better feeling to know that, this time, the gang I was with getting to it, is jumping over it with me.

Dec 11-14 at 8pm, come see The Grocery’s first offering, Out of the Woods, featuring Justin Rutledge, Matthew Barber, Amy Rutherford and Andrew Shaver. And while it’s more than likely devoid of any content at the moment, go ahead and bookmark www.thegrocery.ca. 

THE GHOSTS IN THE WINGS: SATIRE AND SUBJECT, AND THE DISAPPEARING DISTANCE BETWEEN THEM

By

IMG_2296

it was supposed to be a parable, a satire, a spoof.

even when brecht wrote his play in 1941, hiding in in finland, the imagery and language he used created a distance between the events he was describing and the events in his play.  hitler didn’t really consort with gangsters, they were just a convenient parallel for the coercion and intimidation he was describing.

but over the last weeks, as we have re-rehearsed our remount of THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI, the parallels seem less and less allegorical. on the one hand, its timeliness makes for a great promotional opportunities—retweeting bob rae’s comparison of the play to the ford saga can only help our ticket sales—but on the other, it has risked shrinking the distance between the satire and its subject, a distance (or strangeness—verfremdung) that brecht’s dramaturgical mechanics rely heavily upon.

when we began rehearsals for this piece, which began as a classroom exercise for the graduating 4th years in york’s conservatory, we started with a discussion.  WHAT IS THIS PLAY DESCRIBING?  nazism, obviously, for starters.  written in a tremendous hurry, hoping to come to america armed with a surefire commercial success, brecht grabbed the gangster-film aesthetic and constructed an architecture of events that directly mirrored hitler’s rise from the failed beer-hall putsch to the annexation of austria.

IMG_2029but in canada in 2013, that wasn’t (for me) reason enough to take on the play.  and knowing what i do about brecht, i’m pretty sure that he would have found that take to be insufficient grounds and subject matter for a remount in north america today; just as redundant as a romeo and juliet set in renaissance verona—historically accurate, but ultimately pointless.

as part of my MFA teaching, i was asked to direct the students in a brecht work.  young as i am, i hadn’t thought of myself much as a teacher, and had never taken on a brecht text, but i have some experience with his techniques, and was thrilled at the prospect of having a massive and enthusiastic cast to take UI on with.

i spent the better part of my training and theatrical upbringing apprenticing under brecht’s granddaughter, from whom i learned just about everything i would call the core of my practice.  i wasn’t all that interested in brecht when i began learning from her—he seemed stodgy, didactic, and most of all, dated—but johanna was unprecious about her relationship to his theories, and eventually convinced me that:

a) his interest in politics extended only so far as politics affected people, and

b) he had a wicked sense of humour.

if i could boil down everything i learned from johanna about brecht into one sentence, it would be: WHAT ARE YOU ANGRY ABOUT?  as i fudged my way through teaching acting, i knew that if there was one thing i wanted to accomplish, it was to bring their own anger, their own passion and politics to bear on the work they do, and to make sure that they knew how to make theatre that described something that pissed them off.

ui on back

so i pressed the cast, who had come in armed with thorough research into nazism and the cast of villains the play described, WHAT IS THIS PLAY DESCRIBING?

hitler

gangsters

guns

cauliflower

1930s chicago

violence

murder

a financial crisis

a government bailout

a corruption scandal

a reactionary wave of populist conservatism

intimidation tactics

a meticulously controlled PR campaign

terrorism

a courtroom that seems more like a circus

a man who consolidates power around himself and rules his deputies with an iron fist

loyalists thrown under the bus on the road to power

fear

lies

lies

lies

we took all the aesthetic answers from the list, and took only the actions and circumstances.  even i was surprised at the exactness of some of the parallels to our current situation.  at the time we crossed off the guns and the gangsters (as seeming to be more aesthetic).

interestingly, in a conversation with johanna about the play, i suggested that my take on the piece was going to focus less on the nazism and more on the contemporary analogues we found for the tactics ui uses to climb to power.  as a german, this was inconceivable to her, and not because she doesn’t know our politics.  harper and ford, she contended, were bullies, maybe, but not nazis, and certainly not murderers.  “whenever you do this play there are the ghosts of 6 million jews walking in the wings,” she said.

we talked a lot about harper and ford and bush and the like in rehearsal, and even experimented with recreating the (in)famous “kitten photo” in one of ui’s image-crafting scenes, with a silver wig and toy kitten.  we even constructed an elaborate narrative for the kitten, given as a gift to the token brechtian whore character and called adolf.  but somehow it felt reductive to the parable, and much to the actors’ chagrin, we cut the pussy (and all the inevitable jokes that came with it).  brecht’s play never explicitly mentions hitler, nor would we do so with harper.  it was not, i determined, a play about a hooker and her pussy.

stephen-harper-kitten ford-foto

fast forward nine months to our rehearsals for a reworking of the piece downtown.  the eruption of the senate scandal and the ford saga and the daily batch of barely-believable revelations had me reconsidering, among many things, whether this might a play about crack, hookers, and pussies.  the gangster setting wasn’t creating the distance it once did. as it turns out, rob ford does consort with gun-toting gangsters.  harper and ford have both tried to appease the public by throwing their enforcers under the bus.  jennifer wise’s excellent translation abandons the blank verse of brecht’s original for the idiomatic language and clichés of gangster films, and i have seen video footage where rob ford is saying lines right out of the play, from his gravy train rhetoric to platitudes like “i got the patience of job but i can only be pushed so far,” right over to the violent threats in one of his more recent youtube hits.

fantastic though its unfortunate timeliness has been for our marketing angle, it’s left us playing a perpetual game of catch-up.  do we retailor our staging to find a way to sneak a crackpipe onstage?  do we redesign ui’s costume as a bloated bigot in a blond buzz cut?  or do we leave it to the audience to see what we see?

in the first incarnation of the piece, i drew one important distinction—while our current leaders may employ many of the same tactics as ui, and by association, hitler, they weren’t murderers.  but the last 9 months have left me doubting even that—what ever happened to anthony smith?  the ghosts of those six million jews will still be wandering the wings, but in our production, maybe the audience will see them joined by the aboriginal women who have died and disappeared while harper’s government continues to refuse policy or support to protect this vulnerable demographic, and the numerous victims of toronto’s gang violence.

 

The Global Amphitheatre

By

antennaFacebook opened the door

I remember the feeling I had when I first went on FB. It was a jolt. My imagination opened a door. I saw it happen, I heard its hinge catching, and I felt the change in the air. Revolution. I entered the FB room, a room that already held the whole of the Internet within its walls. The door was at the front of the Internet! What a big room! A young man’s brilliance was assured because of where he put the door.  February 2004 TheFacebook.com was launched. As I stood at the threshold, I saw that in very short order the Internet, like the land it mirrors, would be entirely colonized. Has this happened? I am not a technophobe nor technophile. I am an early adopter, or I was, as this quality in me may have changed since I was first labelled one. I was on FB. I am not on it now. I miss you FB world. That’s a lie. I sense sometimes that some among you miss me missing it. But only very rarely as the world moves on whether or not I join the march.

I am not on FB because I was not able to make the bridge between online and offline realms work. I am an archivist by nature; I collate data to make sense of the world. Pre-FB I relied on hearsay and gossip to locate me in society. Post FB my synapses could not fire fast enough to distinguish between that which was “secret knowledge”, silently informing my social decision making process, and that which was clearly known, and therefore trumpeting my choices in regular social byplay.

All to say that the social world changed in 2004.

Now, most of us live, and to some degree, love online. Many of us play online, meet online, shop online, bank online, and build identities that may or may not reflect our earth bound selves online. We don’t need to limit ourselves to Second Life because the Internet in post FB time is a second life. Second Life was a cool idea – to be sure – but not a brilliant, essential one like Mark Zuckerberg’s door. A door that opened us into a new conception of a Social Network: A repository for all of our secrets and lies.

Here’s the thing. All of this was happening before Zuckerberg stamped it. Save for the door, it was all lining up anyway. It takes a village and Zuckerberg was just one of our children.  And since then the village has made the Twitter kid and the Instagram kid and perhaps most proudly we have made the Google kid and the Wiki kid and the ever-maligned LinkedIn kid. And all of these kids have been procreating – just like humans – and making things like Snapchat and Grindr and Vine etc.,.

Where is theatre in any of this?

antenna 2Theatre meets in time and space and breath. Nicholas Hytner’s, NTLive knows this. And the idea of live broadcast, first made popular by opera, has revolutionized my sense of what theatre can do. NTLive is not – however –  “live” when I watch it in Canada. But it was “live” for the camera team that captured in “real time” what the audience and the actors were communing about. And the audience and the actors were – in their communion – impacted by the fact of global eyes watching it live in all manner of country. Time is out of joint in this ‘live-ness” but it still imparts aspects of live when I watch it.

Two things in particular: It allows the drama to unfold of in human time and space. Failure can happen at any moment and – indeed – in small ways, likely imperceptible ways, it does with each NTLive broadcast. Secondly, going to the cinema to watch NTLive, in no way diminishes my desire to make work, or see work that could one day be part of a “live” emission. The revolution occurred because “live” art from “far away” is now accessible to me when formerly it was not. This is the revolution. The fact that it is available to me, in Canada, and someone else in Kuala Lumpur, within veritable minutes of one another, is revolutionary. We are – again – sitting in reach of a civilization that can meet in a great global amphitheatre and engage – together  – over matters of global concern.

The SpiderWebShow wants to make some space inside the room.

What I want for the SpiderWebShow, and what we have so far, is still some distance apart. But I do know that I want us to be active participants in this great expansion. What I want is to create a clear image of online theatre, to provide a sense of volume in these rooms, so that you can be inspired to fill these spaces with really great shows. We are now in the process of re-branding our Experiments Page. We are doing this so as to provide a clearer picture of working theatres. Now you will be able to go to the Twitter Theatre or the Sonic Theatre. Soon I hope you will be able to attend the Studio Theatre (a space where you and artists from anywhere in the world can meet together to create work, and then present it to people when they come to the SpiderWebShow.)

What I want is for you to want to come to the show and to stay for another, and then come back to create your own. What I hope is that you will begin to perceive an online complex that connects the far reaches of this country in a click and allows for work to be born, to grow and to show. What I want is for SWS to become the destination, not the drive-through; not a marketing tool for the greatness of theatre, but a celebration, of the enduring fact that theatre is great.

antenna 3I want Canada’s theatre-makers to use the theatres and the other tools at SpiderWebShow to communicate who we are to one another. I want work to get created and presented in our show. In a still unresolved opposition, I see the SpiderWebShow as a place, and as a show. A disconnect remains; yet our show is fuelled by connection. The SpiderWebShow needs creative minds to bridge the gap. We need your ideas, and your shows, and your creative minds to give it the shape that I feel it to have but in real terms does not yet have. It is a grand experiment, and one day soon I hope that this space becomes a place where a sense of the totality of our potential meets. It is lofty – I know – but then again loftiness and digital space seem well-suited to one another I hope this is true

Click here to connect with us.

#CdnCult Times; Volume 1, Edition 6

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What is ‘the new theatre’?

This week’s contributors all wrestle with the challenges and contradictions of creating work that is relevant, reacts to our era, and pushes the medium forwards.

Sidemart’s Andrew Shaver looks to begin his theatre anew – moving his company to Toronto the same year he was named a Montreal “Newsmaker of the Year”, Red Light District’s Ted Witzel looks at how to present Brecht today in a way it responds to our current political context, NAC English Theatre’s Sarah Garton Stanley looks to create new spaces online for theatre to take place here at spiderwebshow.ca.

What motivates these evolutions? At the core of all these articles is a drive for collaboration. Each strives to create the conditions they need to create work with other artists. By creating new structures and modes of presentation, the conditions for a ‘new theatre’, one that has the potential to reveal and inspire can be achieved.

At the very least, regardless of success at these aims, it seems to each this is preferable than more of the same.

Michael Wheeler
Editor-in-Chief: #CdnCult Times

 

Geographic Correspondents: How’s the weather?

By , and

Laakkuluk weather season

Matthew entered the room.

Amy entered the room.

Amy: Hi.

Matthew: Hello!

Laakkuluk entered the room.

Laakkuluk: Hello! You’re back home Matthew – good show?

Matthew: Yes, went well. Folks showed up, so that was nice.

Laakkuluk: How’s the weather? We’re -15C with snow and wind – you guys?

Amy: Very erratic. 17c one day, 5c the next, snowed a little today, hail.

Matthew: Leaves falling, no rain, quite nice. Does that make your work erratic?

Amy: October I’m down and lethargic. But I’m pumped since November!

Laakkuluk: Summer makes my work more erratic – fishing, camping and kids running around. Winter I buckle down to writing better.

Amy: Booking a school show for our company. A new Newfoundland children’s show: The Ogre’s Purse.

Matthew: Winter is for writing and booking shows. Anytime is good for booking shows.

Laakkuluk: Ogre’s Purse! Delightfully frightening! Do you like to scare children?

Amy: Get them excited is what we like!

Matthew: Fun to pop into a school, wind up 500 kids and leave.

Amy: I love to see children with eyes wide and pointing at the marvel!

Laakkuluk: Or their little hands making the movements of the story.

Matthew: My turn to edit this week, so let’s cut to the chase.

Laakkuluk: I thought this was the chase.

Amy: I’m chasing as fast as I can!

How does the winter influence your practice?

Laakkuluk: The effect is meditative – the sunlight so short and shadows so long. I stare at the landscape and have poetic thoughts.

Amy: It’s darker out, days are shorter.

Laakkuluk: My work incorporates the landscape and its changes.

Amy: I never thought about differentiating. I am more thoughtful in winter. I study things more: faces, reactions. In Fall I slow down and am tired, but I get out of it.

Laakkuluk: I’m the same – I need a bit of a lull after summer before I pick up again.

Matthew: Ditto

Amy: Summer is exhausting!

Laakkuluk: Summer is busy with festivals and travelling, when it’s not fishing/camping/chasing kids.

Matthew: SKAM gets site specific in the summer. The work ramps up.

Laakkuluk: You stick close to your home base in the summer?

Matthew: No we often tour. We actually have to focus on creating more for indoors so we have winter projects.

Amy: Work for our company ramps down in summer, but ramps up for me personally.

Matthew: We’ve done outdoor work in winter; you have to keep the audience moving. Short scenes, etc.

Amy: I like the idea of outdoor work in winter… intimate scenes, huddled together, actors and audience.

Laakkuluk: The Summer festival here will soon be taking applications. You should both apply! alianait.ca

Amy: We already sent a proposal, now a reminder.

Laakkuluk: Excellent – I’ll give them a nudge

Matthew: Congrats on your appointment to the board!

Laakkuluk: ha ha – you just looked. Thanks!

Hween2013_8695

Amy: I just had a sealskin poppy sent to me- made by someone in Iqaluit. It’s beautiful.

Matthew: How do I get me one?

Laakkuluk: On Facebook: Iqaluit sell/swap.

Matthew: I miss so much not being on Facebook.

Amy: Have you ever been?

Matthew: No. Well, over my staff’s shoulder to the SKAM page. Or my partner’s to see pictures of my nieces and nephews.

Laakkuluk: Maybe a new winter time activity to pick up…

Matthew: I like my friends live.

Amy: It’s a good way to know what everyone is at, or what they had for dinner!

Matthew: What did you have for dinner last night?

photo 2Amy: Baked ham, baked beans and dairy free scalloped potatoes~

Matthew: My fave! Laakkuluk?

Laakkuluk: Whale skin, seal meat, dried char, frozen caribou and fermented walrus. I was at a feast to celebrate Nunavut’s youngest MLA!

Matthew: Holy moly. Puts my pot roast and veggies to shame.

Amy: That’s something- in winter, we cook indoors more.

Laakkuluk: Both of you had delicious meals too!

Matthew: Lucky us. That’s winter for you- Sunday dinners.

Amy: Whale skin? Is it tough? Like jerky?

Laakkuluk: No – it’s rubbery on the outside, a hide in the middle. You score through the hide and dip it in soya sauce- frozen/fresh. It jumps around when you bbq it because of the fat. People like it with wasabi sauce too.

Matthew: Should have made this column about how food affects practice.

Amy: Was there costume, indigenous dress?

Laakkuluk: No – people wore everyday clothes, including parkas and amauti. Baby-carrying parkas – amauti. Best way to keep a baby warm and safe!

Amy: Beautiful.  I wore one in a fashion show last year by an Iqaluit designer. I must find the photo and the designer’s name and send to you two.

Laakkuluk: You – how does food affect your practice?

Amy: I love to cook. It is part of my creativity. Easier than writing a play! Maybe not as rewarding, but it is for the moment! When you’re starved!

Laakkuluk: I would like to hang out in your kitchen while we cook!

Amy: You bring the whale and char; I’ll have moose pie.

Laakkuluk: Slurp!

Amy: Matthew, what do you cook?

Matthew: Stews and soups and slow cooking. Helps the work simmer too.

Amy: Always good this time of year. Soups, yum.

Laakkuluk: Work, cook, taste, work, taste…

Amy: The winter food feeds our work.

Laakkuluk: Helps us formulate deeper thoughts about our work.

Amy: The roots of our work.

Laakkuluk: The kitchen, the bubbling pots, the dark outside.

Amy: We formulate ideas in winter and they develop and spring forth for summer.

Matthew: What’s for lunch?

Amy: Leftovers. Halibut for supper.

Matthew: Oh right, you’ve eaten lunch.

Laakkuluk: Arugula salad with fennel and feta.

Amy: Yum. It’s 4:11 here now.

Matthew: Is it dark?

Laakkuluk: It’s 2:42 here.

Amy: In 40 minutes or so

Laakkuluk: Getting dark here too.

Matthew: 11:43am here.

Amy: We set our clocks back this weekend.

Laakkuluk: Having spent formative years in Saskatchewan, I find the time changes confusing. One thing with practice in the winter here is that the camaraderie seems more intimate because of the dark and the wind.

Amy: Here too- more isolated, so more intimate.

Laakkuluk: And the difficulty in travelling here – flights get cancelled.

Amy: Same here. Storms come up fast.

Matthew: There is something about coming in from the cold to make work.

Laakkuluk: Your storms come to us after they finish with you Amy.

Matthew: Different feeling than coming in from the sun.

Amy: Yes. Winter is like nesting.

Matthew: By the time they get here those storms are entirely changed.

Amy: A lot happens in the universe and atmosphere between here and there.

Laakkuluk: A good note to end on chums! Looking forward to seeing your pictures!

Amy: Me too. Snuggle up, until next time…

Matthew: Stay warm and well fed.

Amy: No worries there.

Laakkuluk: Take care!

Matthew: O:

Amy left the room.

Matthew: I mean

Laakkuluk:  Until next time!

Laakkuluk left the room.

Matthew left the room.

 

Bringing Up Weenie

By

frank_logoWhat’s in a name?

Everything and nothing.

As the Buddhists have taught us, nothing has inherent meaning. Everything that attaches us to an object, any object, is caused by the narratives and meanings we weave around it.

That said, meanings are often all we have. Therefore, the melee over the recent name change of Vancouver’s queer theatre company was both completely understandable and wholly necessary.

It was, in short, a battle of values, not between good and bad and certainly not between right and wrong, but between two equally legitimate conceptions of the company’s place in the theatre ecology.

It was time to have it out and clear the air.

As many of you know, Vancouver’s queer theatre company used to be called Screaming Weenie Productions (and, as far as our society name goes, it’s still called that). In January of this year the Board approved a motion to change the company’s operating name, and on opening night of our show Unstuck in March, Screaming Weenie officially became the frank theatre company.

The overwhelming majority of people we’ve heard from have lauded the name change, with many saying they disliked our previous moniker, calling it “amateurish,” “juvenile” and “attention-seeking.” The tiny but passionate faction that opposed it say that we’ve divorced ourselves from our own history of playful irreverence, and that the old name was right and proper for a queer theatre company.

As a staunch backer of the name change, I initially wrote the dissenters off as regressive, reactionary, myopic and lacking in foresight. But now that the war-wounds have started to heal, I’m able to concede that their point of view is just as legitimate—and compelling—as mine is.

When Screaming Weenie relocated to Vancouver in 2000—it was founded by Ilena Lee Cramer in Alaska in 1996—it was very much a project-based company that produced shows every two to three years. Back then, most of our shows were collective creations with a funny, decidedly subversive edge, done in non-traditional venues like nightclubs and lounges. The company was founded in a much less queer-friendly time (and, for that matter, a much less queer-friendly locale)—so the name “Screaming Weenie” had an admirably defiant, go-fuck-yerself quality that was probably right and appropriately confrontational for the times.

When Seán Cummings took over the helm of the company in 2008, the company switched to a more text-based, playwright-driven aesthetic; while the content of our work was as explosive and explicit as ever, the venues became more traditional, and, correspondingly, the audiences larger and more mainstream. Furthermore, we quickly morphed from a company doing one show every two years to one—thanks to funders that became more responsive to us than in years past—doing work on a regular, year-long basis. But that wasn’t all: in conjunction with these developments we became almost as much of a social justice organization as we were a theatre company, creating a program arm focused on building bridges across ethnic, sexual, gender and ability differences via theatre arts (All the World’s A Stage) and, more recently, a writing workshop for queer and questioning youth (Telling It Bent).

With the company changing right before our eyes, I and the Board had to ask ourselves: did the brand “Screaming Weenie” still accurately reflect who and what we’d become? Or did medium and message need to be in greater alignment?

The decision was made to rebrand. It was a difficult, emotional discussion, but in the end the Board vote was unanimous, as we managed to convince even those who’d initially been resistant that rebranding was the right thing to do at this point in our life-cycle. We simply needed a name that better encompassed all the program arms we’d developed, everything that we’d become.

Not surprisingly, the company’s founder was not happy about the decision, responding with an email that was nothing less than scathing.

But, as I said, the wounds have started to heal; and I am now able to see that her vision for the company is just as legitimate as mine, and that, were the company still what it was under her leadership, there would be no need for a name-change, as Screaming Weenie would indeed be the right and proper name for it.

But the company’s not what it used to be. It’s evolved into something different.

So why the frank theatre company? Because “frank” connotes honesty, candidness, truth. And, by connecting to the word “weenie,” it still acknowledges and honours our history.

the frank is still the Weenie, but all grown up.

thefranktheatre.com

 

Our Surrealist Online Reality Theatre of Cruelty

By

online_theatre-1024x711

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for productivity.

As each revelation, twist, admission, court document, grainy video, night-vision photo, exclusive interview, radio show and press conference entered the public domain – it became impossible to stay focused on whatever it was you probably should have been doing. People came out of meetings, woke up from naps, came off the subway, left the gym, and surreptitiously checked their smartphones or other digitally connected devices with a new primary drive.

A casual browsing of message and news streams became a focused search for specific information. More often than not, it seemed there would be something new. This new something, more often than not, was crazier, more surreal than anything you would have previously thought possible.

From a macro perspective, the effort was rewarded. And so the search went on: Searching, finding, *Mind Blown*: Repeat.

When people said, “What’s new?” they weren’t making small talk. It was a real question. Embedded in the question was the assumption the person being asked had been online recently and may have salient facts to report. The online world held all the secrets about what had occurred in reality. Things got serious when we found out that even their hackers couldn’t erase these secrets of the web.

Just when the monologuing voices of corporeal reality began to normalize the way we experienced the drama – conventional media was revealed to be insufficiently agile: When more unbelievable yet certainly true events came to bear, they were born online under the misty haze of a blue online banner. Apologies and reassurances resumed rapidly to television reporters who found themselves in the absurd position of explaining that only online could you understand where the narrative had gone in Act IV.

This was somewhat exhilarating – that the online theatre had proved itself to be as fast as light. You could pay for cable, or be engaged with the online theatre and know the latest plot twist first. Ironically, never knowing what would happen next in a form of reality theatre had become the dominant cable genre since Richard Hatch had proved non-scripted Machiavellian maneuvers compelling entertainment. As this reality motif became pre-determined reality, it lost its attraction.

The stage was set for reality theatre 2.0: Honey Boo Boo meets The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Where you really, really have no idea what would happen next. Where anything was possible, where characters were both larger than life and also a part of life. Popular narratives from popular culture were cited to give context without doing justice: The Cessna from Goodfellas, The Wiretaps from The Wire, previous cast members from SNL. But these could only hint at similarities – what drew us back was that this was like nothing we had ever seen before.

Perhaps a Theatre of the Impossible was possible? The false reality that lies like a shroud over our impressions seemed to be fading. What was revealed beneath was cruel to our sensibilities. We had empowered the worst of the worst and they, predictably, had done their worst. The reality of this reality theatre was that it was a reality of our own construction. Like a cop-out issue of Time magazine, the show WAS us, we had created it and we would determine its outcome, staying true to the Web 2.0 maxim that these tools are always interactive.

As the surrealist reality theatre begins to burn down around us, the final plot twist emerges. We are the ones that determine our collective reality and this theatre reflects the reality we have created. There has been no fucking interference Brother.

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