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Why Not Co-ops?

By
If theatres are anti-capitalist they Should become co-ops? Photo by charles roderick is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

To save the world from what Avi Lewis describes as “capitalist planetary suicide”, theatre companies should become co-ops. Theatre is not charity. It is work. In its abstract form, of course it’s art, but in economic terms, it is the product of labour, valued by the communities who consume it, and produced by a class of (in my opinion) undervalued and exploited workers. Our labour generates an enormous amount of wealth within secondary and tertiary economies, and we don’t see a penny of that profit. What’s more, most of the workers who make art are shades of anti-capitalist at this point in history, so why are theatres captive of a business model that support a capitalist economy when other options exist?

As we all know from the moment we turn 18 and decide we’re going to open our own theatre company to produce that awesome Fringe play that will make us famous, every theatre in Canada is forced to choose between two economic models: for or not for profit. While the NFP model releases us from a mandate geared exclusively to the benefit of corporate shareholders, it comes with many strings attached, the most insidious being that we are trapped inside a constant cycle of having to prove that our work provides justifiable benefits to society. In a constant drive for increased donors, government funding and foundation grants, we have no choice but to market our work within the paradigm of Christian charity.

The work of fundraising detracts from, and contorts our art making. The unspoken deception at the heart of this, is that we’re successful as fundraisers not when we’ve demonstrated our worth to society, but when we’ve demonstrated our worth to wealthy patrons, who, in spite of being bewilderingly oblivious to it, are deeply complicit and dependent on the corporate capitalist paradigm that is generating the inequality that our plays decry.

We are earnest in our desires to change the hearts and minds of our neighbours through storytelling. I, in no way abuse that work when I say the tax break a private developer will get from donating to a large NFP Theatre will be used to evict low-income families far faster than our plays about those evicted street kids will create the kind of political will necessary to expropriate the developers. Moreover, the taxes that corporation doesn’t pay would otherwise be used to house low-income people (perhaps in housing co-ops!).  This is the math that keeps charities humming along while the world burns ever faster.

Tommy Douglas standing under a CCF billboard shortly after his election. Photo from Saskatchewan Archives Board.

Good news, fellow socialist thespians! Co-ops have existed as one of the most sustainable and socially responsible economic models since industrialization. Every business can become a member and/or worker co-op. Co-ops are owned by the people who benefit from them. Internal democracy is a core principal. Workers seize control over the product of their labour (Hi Marx!), and no one (not even the bank) turns a profit that goes into offshore accounts, third mansions or pipeline expansions.

Some artistic production companies have adopted this model in Canada, including visual art, radio and filmmaking co-ops. I believe theatres can too! I believe that the communities we genuinely want to support and influence can become members of these co-ops. As well, I think if we force our professional associations and unions to take on this task, we can convince the granters, beginning with Canada Council for the Arts, to give us grants along with NFP theatres. CRA would also have to acknowledge us, although in many ways the tax laws that apply to co-ops may be more appropriate for artists than the tax laws that govern charities.

It bears saying again: Theatre is not charity.

Another exciting lure is that the federal government invests in co-op startups, and co-operative banks are more than happy to give loans to other co-ops. They do so not because co-ops are charitable, but because they have proven their fiscal worth to society many times over hundreds of years. Co-ops are far better at withstanding recessions and stock collapses, and the wealth they generate benefits local economies and is quickly seen again by governments. It’s taxed. We call it: “The solidarity economy”.

My friend, the brilliant, anti-capitalist writer and activist, Dru Oja Jay, writes that “co-ops represent billions of dollars that have been effectively taken from profits for banks and handed to people, often some of the most disadvantaged.” He goes on to describe that they pay their workers a bit more, they use sustainable, ethically sourced materials and labour from other co-ops and they pay below market rent, subsidized by the funders. They invest what could otherwise be spent on fundraising in the product they create or the workers they support.

Once robust co-ops (banks, housing co-ops, agro/food co-ops… Basically every industry seems to have co-ops except Canadian theatres) start to turn profit, which they do remarkably quickly, they have the option to reinvest their surplus in other co-op enterprises that benefit society. I see theatres pitching themselves here in order to secure more startup capital directly from other industries. Which is what NFPs do, of course. They just call it charity.  Some arts producing co-ops sell a second tier of membership to the people in neighbourhoods they work in. The entire community then becomes a partial owner, and is given a democratic voice in the operations of a theatre. How wondrous and beautiful is that dream? 

Co-ops fundamentally threaten and disturb capitalist imperatives, where charity does not. Charity, at its best, treats the symptoms and victims of capitalism with unsustainable compassion.  Due to the Christian origin of charity, which values handouts as a means to become closer to God and to demonstrate virtue, it must exist outside the economy in order to be exceptional. 

Cartoon by Mr. Fish. https://www.clowncrack.com/about/.

To quote Dru again: “The main line of accountability in a lot of non-profits is from their upper-level staff and board to their funders. Decision making is formally conducted by the aforementioned leadership, but these folks have to keep funders’ priorities in mind all the time. Cooperative structures and business models, by contrast, tend to align the creation of value with the needs of members, and gives those members the power to make decisions. A worker co-op gives decision making power to the workers, and a housing co-op gives power to the people who pay the rent.”

For co-ops, social justice is intrinsic to the business model, not a justification for fundraising. The co-op is built on the value of the work itself. If we believe our work is inherently mutually beneficial to workers and people alike, then why not co-ops?  If the communities we claim to serve are members of our co-op would we have to constantly prove that we are serving their needs or would their literal ownership of the company take care of that? 

My last, and admittedly strategic, pitch for why theatres should be co-ops, is because it would bust the narrative that we are people who write stories about justice and give us a way to become that justice. The co-op movement mutually supports all kinds of social justice solidarity movements. These theatres would gain us immediate membership in national and global anti-capitalist movement building, simply by adopting a different, more sustainable business model. Artists would have opportunities to learn so much just by showing up. In short, this is how theatres can be part of the revolution.  

Wait a minute, are we the bad guys?

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Made in Canada. Photo by kris krüg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As a Canadian who lives in the UK, whenever I confirm that my accent is not American, a bit of friendly banter ensues.  People love Canada. I’m not used to be being ashamed of my country in an international context. This year, that’s changed.

For a week this September, the London Theatre Consortium, consisting of the Young Vic, the Royal Court, Battersea Arts Centre, the Donmar and the Almeida, each sent a different artist to Hawkwood College for a week long seminar on Climate Change.  Over the course of this very intense week, we were exposed to a series of speakers who explained the urgency of what’s happening to the planet, and how good human beings have become at pretending it isn’t happening.

I recognised myself in this pretending. I primarily went to the lab not because I saw myself as an environmentally motivated artist, but because I was invited to go by the Royal Court.  I spent the first two days desperately trying to hold the information at arm’s length – to see it as an artistic catalyst as opposed to a vortex we’re all slowly falling into. I feared that if I really accepted what I was learning into my heart and mind, I would… I don’t know…

Need to change everything?  

Never sleep again?  

I wouldn’t have necessarily predicted that I would become repulsed by the country that I called home.  

Much of what we learned on the lab you’ve likely heard before.  

The Paris Climate Summit was largely a failure – too little too late – made worse by the fact that most of the countries who desperately need to “stick to the plan” are not meeting their targets, not to mention Donald Trump’s recent withdrawal.  

Ocean levels are rising, we’re on an express route to the global temperature going up by more than 2 degrees in the next two decades, which will make the planet as we know it largely unimaginable.  

Climate Change is an intersectional issue, tied up with racism, sexism, colonialism, human rights, refugees, and global inequity.  

Changing faces of the arctic. Photo by Ian Mackenzie is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

What shook me to my core, however, was the irrefutable realisation around just how much of this Canada is disproportionately responsible for.

Most of the worst climate offenders in the world are rich nations in the North.  Because of some sick cosmic justice (also known as science) – the North is where the impact of these actions will take longest to manifest. Meanwhile, emissions from Northern countries threaten to eradicate smaller, poorer countries along the equator within the next ten years.  Countries who are not really putting carbon emissions into the atmosphere because their economies are small and developing will disappear because of the actions of larger, richer nations, like ours.

Think of the world as one big apartment building.  

The people in the penthouse throw massive parties every night.  The people in the rest of the building don’t – they eat in. Yet somehow the mess from the penthouse only ever appears in the smaller, quieter apartments, even though their tenants don’t attend the parties.  Their apartments are filling up with the penthouse’s junk, and when the penthouse revellers do pass by that mess, they find themselves thinking, “There’s no way that the consequences of my actions are going to another part of the building.”  

Nations are constructs, not finite places.  The world as one planet, as one finite place that billions of human beings inhabit together, is a fact.  The middle of the planet is paying the price for the actions of the top of the planet. The penthouse is trashing the entire building, and Canada is one of three countries partying hardest, loudest and longest.

On the penultimate day of the lab, a human rights lawyer named Polly Higgins spoke with us.  She told us about a road trip she’d taken with a first nations friend of hers in Western Canada this summer where her friend described the Wendigo to Polly – a mythical Algonquin monster that is greedy and eats everything in sight, until eventually it consumes itself.  She warned Polly that in Western Canada they would travel through “the belly of the Wendigo.”

Canada is the 9th highest contributor to carbon emissions in the world.  And per capita, we are the third highest contributor.

I’m just going to let that sink in for a moment.  

There are 195 countries in the world.  

We are 3rd per capita, 9th overall.  That’s very high. It’s higher overall than Saudi Arabia.  It’s higher than the United Kingdom. It’s higher than Brazil, who are destroying the Amazon.  While Amanda Zimm proudly declared that we ought to “Recycle, Reduce and Reuse” on the 90s show Ready or Not, our country was actively destroying the rest of the world, selling most of its environmentally minded citizens on distractions rooted in individualism like composting and recycling programmes.

Melting ice. Photo by Eric Wüstenhagen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Canada’s climate damage does not stop with Carbon Emissions.  If you haven’t looked into what fracking actually is (fracturing deep rock formations) and the numerous instances where it poisoned groundwater and vulnerable communities, created earthquakes and a host of other unfixable problems if it goes wrong, not only in Canada but throughout the world, you should.  That’s without mentioning the oil sands, or the arctic, or our government celebrating the opportunity to do business with Brazil’s new president when he logs the Amazon, or how our judicial system coludes with big businesses all over the world to protect them from having to face up to the consequences of ecocide.  

(To give just one example, in April of this year an Ontario court proudly overturned a case that Ecuadorian villagers spent decades fighting against Chevron.  This was for environmental damage that caused widespread cancer in their community.)

It’s no coincidence that Canada’s Wendigo targets areas populated by Indigenous people for most of its climate atrocities.  Many conservative voters see these populations’ eye witness accounts of the damage as an “Indigenous issue” – unfixable because of the country’s unpayable colonial debt that those particular voters have no interest in attempting to address.  Those voters, unempathetic as they are, do need to know – This is both an Indigenous issue and the entire world’s issue. Our government has spent decades propping up our economy on big industries that will make their grandchildren’s lives unimaginable.  

(Recently my 9 year old nephew asked me what Climate Change was.  When I explained it, he started to cry. I told him hopeful things.  Things that felt a lot like lies. I have to try to make the things I told him true.  And I can’t try to make them true, until I ask that we all really start pointing our fingers in the right direction.)

I’m darkly reminded of a Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch, set in the second world war, where they look at each other’s uniforms and notice they both have a skull and crossbones on their hats, then look at each other incredulously and say, “Wait a minute, are we the bad guys?”

It’s time to face facts.  As far as the climate goes, we have been the bad guys for decades.  So what can we do?

As theatre makers we can tell people.  We can do our research, look into it, tell people we know, ask them to look into it, and as citizens and artists, make work and action and waves that hold our governments accountable for what’s really happening, while there’s still time.  

I may be ashamed of my country, but I have faith in its people.

 

Thought Residency: Susanna Fournier

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Just when you thought nothing else could happen your creative team and you decide to radically alter the production and your cat keeps you up til 5am with sudden health failure. I started this month thinking about risk, and I return to it now. My creative team and I, less than a week before opening, are shifting to a new gesture. Radically strange, totally unknown. All I know is it feels imperative. The production is asserting itself to us. We listen or we don’t. We are choosing to listen. We are going on the ride. We are going into the dark. My cat is at home and hanging on. I might not sleep again til January, my body feels numb, my heart feels open and I am shockingly alive. The key is risk.

 

This week feels like the calm before the storm. Quiet but intense. I’m having a hard time getting things done. I’m pacing, disorganized, unable to focus, feel on high alert, bitten all my nails. It took me about 3 hours to get dressed today. I have the strong desire to flee. Brendan Healy recently talked to me about a Vincent Miller book, “A Crisis of Presence” I haven’t read it yet, the title is enough for me right now. Fight of flight. I do both. When it feels really hard to be present, when my fear is very very very high, I know the fight is with myself – to stay. Stay in this moment, don’t disassociate, don’t flee, don’t look away. We open next week.

 

Unpopular tension. I will fight for labour reform in the arts making sector. It’s an important fight that will benefit a lot of people. But I’m not sure it will change the culture of labour we live in. And I’m pretty sure it won’t change me. I started out with certain privileges, and then continued to make some pretty hard life choices and large sacrifices– that support my ability to funnel additional time, energy, and probably a lot of my sanity, into my work practice. Given the culture we live in, and the sheer nature of time on deck, I receive more benefits and opportunities because of this. So, labour reform will benefit many, but I’m not sure it will level the playing field. Is that what people think it will do?

 

Content Warning: Pessimism. Whereas yesterday I was trying to task myself with the meditation “What if where I am is what I need?” today I feel like if one more person brings up the idea of structuring a work/life balance I’m gonna punch them in the face because ultimately our arts sector, and the whole–really all the sectors–exist within neo-liberalism which has already completely destroyed and eroded the idea that the human being could be for anything other than just the extraction of pure labour.

 

Challenging myself to remember Deborah Hay, I challenge everyone to remember Deborah Hay, this morning, and always, with the question (ask yourself, as she would ask you – perhaps) “What if where I am, is what I need?” What if where I am, is what I need? What if where I am, is what I need.

 


I’m currently pan frying eggs because to be an independent artist means multi-tasking every minute of the day, or at least it does for me, and I’m thinking of the old proverb …when the student is ready the teacher arrives. When I think about the massive, total upheaval just about every aspect of my life is going through right now: personal risk, artistic risk, family upheaval, sense of self, emotional stability – all that pretty up in the air I think about how right now my two greatest teachers are fear and faith.

 

When was the last time you saw a dangerous piece of art? ted witzel, a long-time collaborator of mine, was asked this yesterday and then he asked me. It’s pretty rare in my experience. I want processes of making art to be safe but I don’t want art to be “safe”. A lot of people have called my work triggering. I write about power and its abuses, so this comes with the territory. I write towards reclamation. Part of healing is confronting the wound. I try to make artistic containers where we can be braver together. Safe art doesn’t ask me to confront anything – it doesn’t invite me to remember how brave I can be. And bravery, like hope, is something – I think – we have to practice.

 

Capacity. What is it, where do you find it, and how much do you have? What do you do when you need more? What do you do when you blow out the gas tank? What’s the connection between capacity and forgiveness? Capacity and sustainability? Capacity and self awareness? Capacity and threshold? Capacity and adrenaline? I’ve lived most of my life (and all of my career) over capacity. I know my reasons, I’m curious about yours. What’s the cost? The reward? Is it “worth” it? What are you looking for? How will you know when you’ve “found” it?

 

I’m thinking about how one way or another pain must find a way to express. I just spent 7 and a half hours in a psychiatric emergency ward with someone I love very much who is currently experiencing psychosis. His pain …forced its way to the surface. He needed to go somewhere where he could scream and rant in order to birth this pain, and I realize that’s why I make theatre.

 

I’m thinking about feeling feelings. I became displaced this summer — I lost my home & most of my possessions over a 3 month period of …well…hell. I haven’t had time to feel the feelings that come with this – grief and rage – the way I normally would…by writing.  Looking back, I think I became a writer because I didn’t know how to feel my feelings and writing created a space where I could experience them in the imagined bodies of others. But then again I come from WASPS – we feel safer experiencing our feelings as long as someone else is feeling them for us.

 

I’m currently rehearsing a text I began 8 years ago after marathon watching dog training shows. What struck me was that the people needed more training that the dogs. Anxious people, anxious dogs. Inactive people, hyper-active dogs. I watched the owner’s discomfort when told they’d need to assert themselves and create a social hierarchy so the dogs know who is in charge. Dogs don’t want democracy – it makes them panic, get depressed, or become violent. Whereas people seem to feel this way with or without democracy.

 

Like many people, most of my life I wanted to believe I was taking risks without having to experience any of the pretty horrifying emotions that come with actual risk. I was a full blown perfectionist til I was 29 and perfectionism doesn’t allow for risk because it doesn’t allow for failure. Like mass culture, I was all about the rhetoric of risk, but not the practice. Lately there’s a lot of counter rhetoric around permitting failure – and I wonder how much, like risk, we talk about this while furiously making sure it never happens to us.

 

There was a textile work on the ceiling of the drama room at my highschool that showed a group of people encircling the words “THE KEY IS RISK”. I remember staring at that wanting to be really good at taking risks – especially if they were KEY — but not really knowing what that meant or if I was. Right now I’m currently taking the biggest artistic and personal risks of my life – and what I’m thinking about is not that motto but the circle of people surrounding it. The more I risk the more I need people around me willing to risk holding space for risk.  

YYC in Flux

By
Emiko Muraki presenting findings on the future of YYC’s Theatre Sector.

It’s been a turbulent year for Calgary theatre—and that’s being generous.

From 2017-2018, the Calgary arts community has been beset by funding cutbacks in private donations and public grants, sudden radical shifts brought about by the #MeToo movement, losses in arts journalism including the decision by PostMedia to cease publication of Swerve Magazine, and stunning social media frenzies around Alberta Theatre Projects and Theatre Junction Grand.

Operating in these challenges, arts organizations are grasping for ways to change, but before they truly begin that work, there has to be a foundational work to build upon. Mark Hopkins and Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre (SAB) decided to start the conversation by hosting “Theatre in Flux: a forum about our future”.

Hopkins referred to the current economic and social environment in his intro on September 9, when representatives from Calgary’s theatre companies gathered in the Vertigo Studio to hear from panelists and presenters on where their community might be headed.

The arts are going through growing pains, with new voices calling for greater representation for people of colour on stage and off, along with subscription models becoming a possible thing of the past. In the shadow of a rapidly evolving global geo-political reality (largely tilted towards the rise of alt-right fascism), theatres are also searching their souls for how to tackle sensitive topics and issues. Do artists charge headlong into controversy, like the cast of Hamilton reading Mike Pence a personal message? Or, like Robert LePage, do they simply shrug off the criticisms of politically active audience members and critics, seeking new audiences that agree with the messages they want on stage?

As Hopkins aptly observed early on in the event, “Frankly, we’re not going to get to everything… I’m hoping this is going to be the first—or not even the first—one in a continuity of ongoing conversations.”

This is without doubt the only fair lens to apply to SAB’s Theatre in Flux event; a first or one of many in a series of gatherings that perhaps can help the performing arts world understand where it is, where it came from, and where it might need to go. Indeed, the scheduled agenda was just that: a series of conversations and conversation starters, with panelists and presenters. In many cases, these segments did have the impression of being very “raw,” like the first steps in a recipe, but with only some mild clues as to what is being cooked up.

Valerie Planche, Duval Lang, and Sharon Pollock provide context for the flux.

Take, for instance, Emiko Muraki, until recently employed at the Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA), who presented the early findings of a recent questionnaire—one of the first of its kind conducted in the community—on equity and diversity reporting in the arts. As she intimated at the beginning of her presentation, Muraki cautioned that the findings were not altogether surprising, not yet refined by thorough analysis, and did not include arts workers outside of theatre, and of those theatre companies only those organizations funded by Calgary Arts Development were represented. Reporting was voluntary, not mandatory, and relied on organizations either completing the survey on behalf of all of their employees, or asking employees to complete and submit the survey themselves.

What’s important, however, is that this questionnaire was undertaken at all. While the data paints an at-best incomplete and flawed snapshot of the Calgary arts community, it nevertheless shows that across every breakdown, Calgary’s theatres do not employ a significant number of people of colour.

Studies like this are vital to the future actions of arts organizations. The foundational importance of CADA’s study is validating voices that say more representation is needed. It is all well and good for organizations to pay lip service to the progressive attitudes of inclusion with token roles for people of colour on or offstage, but it is far more important to nail down both how to address the issue and why it is important. This, then, would be how the conversation should proceed from this particular “first,” to a place of responding to the now-validated concerns of artists of colour.

“Firsts” has a double meaning for the panelists who made up the next segment of the evening, “Theatre in Context,” featuring Valerie Planche, Duval Lang, and Sharon Pollock. Together these three artists represented some of Calgary’s first generation of professional theatre makers. Calgary, and many other Canadian cities, have a comparatively short history of professional performing arts when weighed against the lengthy histories of America, Europe, and Asia. In Calgary’s case the professional companies trace their origins back only 50-60 years years, depending on how far into the amateur side of societies you go. This panel is, in fact, an opportunity: to have a conversation bridging the current generation’s concerns with the concerns of those artists who are now well-established or even are retiring. Another first.

For the second group of panelists, Jenna Rodgers, Justin Many Fingers, and Stafford Arima, “first” is a term for pioneering in their respective fields. Arima is Theatre Calgary’s first person of colour to hold the Artistic Director’s seat. Many Fingers is the youngest artistic leader in Making Treaty 7’s history. And Rodgers and her company Chromatic Theatre are currently tracking YYC Theatre Stats, a first for accountability and reporting in the city’s makeup (going beyond the depth of CADA’s groundwork). As was aptly observed by Rodgers during the panel, simply putting together a panel entirely composed of people of colour is something of a rarity. Hearing the perspectives of people directly involved in topics of representation isn’t just useful, it’s absolutely necessary.

Jenna Rodgers, Justin Many Fingers, and Stafford Arima speak to representation in the YYC Theatre Sector.

So the question, then, is this: from “first conversation” where do you go next?

A two-hour discussion trying to cover all of these issues is only ever going to scratch surface. Yet fundamentally, one cannot address a problem without first identifying which problems exist. Hopkins is right that this forum is “part of a continuity,” though in this case the ongoing continuity would be to take the broad situation and focus in on the specific. From firsts, there must be action. From the greater picture, there must be small, intimate details.

For SAB’s event, these details came at the end, in a series of slides read out by Hopkins. “Pay living wages.” “Offer feedback. Receive feedback.” “Have a workplace harassment policy.” These items blazed by in under 10 minutes, compared to the lengthy, 30+ minute panel discussions. Unfortunately, the brevity of this final presentation undercut its importance: that from conversation we must pivot to action.

Perhaps it’s impatient to expect said action to come quickly. That may, in fact, be the forum’s greatest achievement: creating hunger for more conversation, more action, and more firsts.

Thought Residency: Jacob Wren

By

Day 14

(Malmö)

Yesterday I was worrying I needed praise from an audience in order to keep me going. But today I think there might be another way of looking at it: that maybe the work we’re doing is useful and valuable to at least a few people, and therefore the situation is not so much about me, but mainly about them. It feels presumptuous for me to assume this, and also like there’s no real way for me to know. I can listen to what people tell me about the work but, for some reason, in the end, I feel there might be no way for me to know.

 

Day 13

(Malmö)

So this past weekend we premiered our new show. And the audience reaction was very, very positive. People said it inspired them to think about their own work, to keep going with their own work when they were thinking of quitting. I was surprised how positive the audience was about it. And it makes me wonder if that kind of praise is the main thing that keeps me going. And if there’s anything wrong with that.

 

Day 12

(Malmö)

As I get older I’m pretty sure I’m becoming more isolated, more socially isolated. Which is strange because, in a way what I really want from art, what I need for it to be meaningful, has a lot to do with interconnectedness, in culture, in society, in life, with feeling we’re all connected or that everything is connected. In a way what I’m looking for is the opposite of being isolated. And still somehow I’m going in the wrong direction.

 

Day 11

(Malmö)

So when I travel the jet lag often triggers my insomnia. And last night I was lying awake and I had something almost like an epiphany about what I’ve been trying to say here. And it was so simple and stupid, in a way I almost find it embarrassing, but it was something like: what I have to do is focus on why I’m making the work, and what makes it meaningful for me, and stop worrying about how many people are going to see it and what they’re going to think. 

Day 10

(Malmö)

So now I’m in Malmö, Sweden. We arrived here today. I’m completely jetlagged, completely exhausted. We premier a new show on Friday, a show we’ve been working on for two years. And… it’s very strange… I’m still making shows. All I do is question it, but at the same time I’m doing it anyway.

 

Day 9

(Montreal)

And then there’s this song title I remember from being a teenager. It’s a song by Deja Voodoo and the song was called: How Can I Miss You If You Don’t Go Away. And I’ve been doing project after project, one after another, for the past thirty years. Always projects on the go. Yeah and if I stop I wonder… I guess I fear that no one will miss me at all. Maybe that’s what it’s about.

 

Day 8

(Montreal)

I feel the kind of regrets I’ve been talking about here, suggest that I think I should have made more progress, that I think there was something to get. And yet I keep telling myself, I don’t think there’s anything to get. I don’t think money or success or praise were going to make me any happier. But still, I want to find some positive way to keep on being an artist. Something that feels more generous. Something where I’m not actually trying to move forward.

 

Day 7

(Montreal)

A few years ago I wrote a story called Past, Present, Future, Etc. And I sometimes think about that “etcetera.” As in, I mean, what comes after the future? I feel this might be one kind of solution: a different way of thinking about time. Thinking about time without progress, without growth. There’s nowhere to get to, and therefore there’s nothing to leave behind.

 

Day 6

(Montreal)

“I took some time off in my forties to try to get better at what I do.” Why am I so obsessed with this quote, why do I find it so hard to imagine myself taking time off, trying to get better? Why can’t I even imagine what better is? Maybe the thing I imagine most is quitting art to become an activist. That seems what we really need today: less artists, more activists. But I don’t think I can do it.

 

Day 5

(Montreal)

I often say that all my work is about the relationship between art and politics. But now that I’m looking back, that I’m really looking back at what I’ve done, I actually wonder if it’s more about how little art can do in the face of overwhelming political problems. And that also makes me realize how much I want art to do, how much desire I have for art to change things.

 

Day 4

(Montreal)

Of course, while I’m worried about being “washed up,” the rest of the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. I mean we all know the list: fascism, environmental degradation, the continuing violence of patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, so much more. And when I say I’m feeling “washed up,” I mean, I also mean I feel like I’m in mourning for my life. But I wonder: am I in mourning for my life or am I actually in mourning for the world?

 

Day 3

(Montreal)

And then there was another quote, it was apparently something Dr. Dre said to Eminem – I guess I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about Hip Hop, I don’t know if that’s okay – but apparently what Dr. Dre said to Eminem is: “You have to work really hard to get it, and they you have to work even harder to maintain it.” And I’ve been thinking a lot about this, I mean, is that really what I want to do? Am I really interested in trying to maintain something?

 

Day 2

(Montreal)

There was a quote I heard about a year ago. It’s a quote from the Hip Hop producer NO I.D. But actually he’s quoting Quincy Jones. And the quote is: “I took some time off in my forties to try to get better at what I do.” And I really tried to imagine what that would be like, if I were to take some time off in my forties to try to get better at what I do. I mean, I can’t even imagine it. What would that feel like?

 

Day 1

(Montreal)

So lately what I’ve been feeling, ah, is quite “washed up.” And I don’t talk about it very much, I feel a lot of shame around this feeling, I feel perhaps feeling “washed up” is a kind of privilege. And also, I mean, no one really wants to hear about it. But… I thought maybe if I only talk about it for thirty seconds every day, I mean, you can talk about anything for thirty seconds a day. So I thought I would try that.

Search Terms

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This is the ninth and final in a series of articles capturing the planned conversations and discussions at the inaugural Festival of Live Digital Art (foldA), in Kingston ON, June 19-June 21, 2018. Adrienne Wong wraps up the series. 

B.Rich gives us the words to wrap up foldA 2018. Photo by Naseem Loloie.

I don’t bookmark sites on the internet anymore. I don’t need the title of the article you read, nor do I need you to email me the link to that video you mentioned just now. Just tell me the search terms and I’ll find it myself in seconds.

In case you missed foldA, this page, right here, is your round-up of reportage from the inaugural festival, held this past June 2018 at the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts in Kingston Ontario.

Dr. Shelley Katz of the Symphonova with live instruments and a digital orchestra. Photo by Naseem Loloie.

You can catch a taste of the conversations that happened by dialing up HowlRounds’ livestreams here and here, but sometimes it’s useful to hear about what your friends and colleagues saw and thought.

  • Inclusive design researcher Colin Clark discusses how co-design and how sticking to “the way we do things around here” stifles true innovation and change.
  • Madison Lymer asks if disruption is possible given how the current pace of change resists settling into a status quo after hearing Andrew D’Cruz and Donna-Michelle St Bernard talk about disruption.
  • The aesthetics and opportunities of translating a podcast into a book into a live performance are considered by Signy Lynch in her article about Jesse Brown’s Canadaland live show, directed by SWS Performance’s AD Michael Wheeler.
  • Bluemouth Inc AD Stephen O’Connell confronts his discomfort with the digital and how our bodies are expanding with the use of technologies.
  • Patrick Blenkarn interrogates how reality and theatre intersect and what it means to him to “resist the algorithm”.
  • PlayME Theatre’s Chris Tolley unpacks what it means to be an early adopter of new technologies and if a theatre with no actors is going too far.
  • Milton Lim (mentioned in Chris Tolley’s article, above) unpacks some of the implications of combining the art and digital tech worlds, zeroing in on the limitations of the not-for-profit structures to support innovation and offering some possible solutions.
  • And then there are the people who run the shows. Rose Plotek asks how the front line technicians and performers are supported in the use of new technologies and what this says about the way work is made.

These articles not only form a record of who was there and what they talked about in these structured conversations, but they also seek to capture what thinking those discussions prompted in some of our colleagues and friends.

Adrienne Wong moderates a conversation with Podcast People (L-R) Chris Tolley, Falen Johnson, Leah Simone-Bowen, and Michael Kruse. Photo by Naseem Loloie.

Moreover, they serve as enticingly incomplete evidence of the beginning of something new and special: a festival dedicated to experimentation and liveness; to URL and IRL; to holding space for artists who are wrestling with what it means to be alive now, when information and connection are so easily acquired.

Internet technologies are inextricably intertwined with our everyday lives. The mechanisms to share high quality audio visual information are becoming easier to use and cheaper to acquire. This will inevitably change how we engage with event, liveness, and gatherings.

This past Saturday afternoon I attended the workshop presentation of a new musical livestreamed from Toronto. Earlier the same day, I attended my spouse’s convocation ceremony livestreamed from Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The keynote speaker, Fernando Reimers, Ed.D., spoke to how internet technologies have changed the way people gain knowledge and skills, and that it was of critical importance that the school engage with this change.

The same is true for those of us in the art and business of live performance. The internet is a powerful web of information connecting us – literally – by our fingertips.

foldA is about understanding how we as performance makers are are contending with these facts.

The internet is my living room. The internet is my water cooler. The internet is my library. The internet is my shopping mall. The internet is my movie theatre.

The theatre is my theatre.

Taking Care: Down to the Very Last Pixel

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This is the eighth in a series of articles capturing the planned conversations and discussions at the inaugural Festival of Live Digital Art (foldA), in Kingston ON, June 19-June 21, 2018. Rose Plotek writes about a moderated conversation between Mikaela Davies, Elissa Horscroft, and Keira Loughran that was presented in the Screening Room of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performance Arts titled “Live from Stratford”. 

Mikaela Davies and Elissa Horscroft in conversation with Keira Loughran at foldA from the Stratford Festival. Photo by Michael Wheeler.

I was asked to write about A Conversation Live From Stratford: Behind the scenes of Robert Lepage’s Coriolanus. This was a conversation between Elissa Horscroft (technical director), Mikaela Davies (assistant director), and Keira Loughran (associate producer for The Forum and Laboratory at the Stratford Festival), and was live streamed direct from the Stratford Festival to the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing arts, home of foldA.

The focus of the conversation was on the digital technologies used in the production. The digital tools used in the show are innovative in the interaction and integration of automation, video and lighting together. Though this kind of work is being done on other productions at the Stratford Festival, (this season primarily in The Rocky Horror Show), the extent of its use on this production is much more detailed, and there is simply a lot more of it. In order for the production to be fully realized the integration of these elements had to be fine-tuned until the relationship was seamless. Down to the very last pixel.

In this conversation Elissa Horscroft, technical director for the show, noted that Lepage has been clear about the fact that none of the digital technologies used in the show are new; it’s the way they are being used that is innovative. Horscroft notes that we are seeing these tools used more impactfully as we get better at using them, and as the technologies themselves continue to be developed.

The system used in this production is called VYV and was purchased by the Stratford Festival for this production through grant support. It’s a system that facilitates the integration of all the technical elements of the show (projection, automation, light).

Hoscroft notes that it’s been a very steep learning curve for the Festival’s production and creative team working with this system. VYV is entirely open, which means a lot can be done with it, but you need to know how. For the festival team the subtleties of the system were difficult to master.

Mikaela Davies and Elissa Horscroft in conversation from the Stratford Festival. Photo by Michael Wheeler.

Mikaela Davies, assistant director on the production, spoke about how the production flirts with antiquity while being firmly set in 2018. She described the digital tools as contributing to the dramaturgy of the piece. The use of technology allows the production to change location in an instant. The intention is to activate public and private space, facilitated through projection, to elevate the story, taking what is already in Shakespeare’s text but adding more dramatic tension. In this way, the technology aims to make the production culturally relevant to us in 2018. The contemporary locations, accomplished through projection, make it resonant for our world, which for Lepage is important when dealing with the classical canon.

Davies notes that Coriolanus uses cinematic tools to tell the story: the projection screens are used to create fades, cuts, etc., all tools that come from the cinema and keep the action moving at a rapid pace.

My main thought while listening to this conversation was about the people involved. How is the festival taking care of its production and creative teams, who have to learn and integrate these new tools without burning out, since the learning needs to happen as part of the production process?

Though the festival did workshop the piece over a number of years to accommodate for this shift in production model, is the institution making sure that they are taking care of their people? What can the institution do to train and educate a larger group of people so they can support each other when more and more productions are going to be integrating these new tools?  

Andre Sills with members of the company of Coriolanus at the Stratford Festival. Photo provided by the Stratford Festival.

I also can’t help thinking about Lepage, his productions of SLĀV and Kanata, and about the cultural appropriation and insensitivity that his work and he himself frequently exemplify. He is relentlessly unable to admit the slightest flaw in his own conduct or sensibility. Instead he releases fatuous statements posing as historical accuracy and timeless truths, arguments used by authoritarians since the dawn of time.

In these cases, Lepage seems to demonstrate no care for the communities he is representing on stage. He is deaf to criticism. The startling announcement that the production of Kanata will go ahead makes me wonder how much care is being given to the experience of the artists working on the production in view of the storm of controversy in which they will be immersed.

Since when has artistic freedom come before human empathy?

It seems that this form of auteur theatre making, that works so hard to make works “relevant”, is perhaps now itself becoming problematic. In a climate where collaboration and humane work conditions are increasingly valued, can the authorial vision of Robert Lepage, his way of working, fit within a new ethic around work?

Brass Tacks: Between Logistics and Possibility

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This is the seventh in a series of articles capturing the planned conversations and discussions at the inaugural Festival of Live Digital Art (foldA), in Kingston ON, June 19-June 21, 2018. Milton Lim writes about a moderated conversation between Amy Chartrand, Jonathan Stanley, and Clayton Baraniuk that was presented in the Henry Preston Courtney and Lillian Courtney Lounge of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performance Arts titled “Brass Tacks”. 

Adrienne Wong talking Brass Tacks of Digital Experimentation with Amy Chartrand, Jonathan Stanley, and Clayton Baraniuk (R-L). Photo by Naseem Loloie.

Date June 21, 2018 Time 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Location Conversation @ The Isabel

Brass Tacks: Speaking to logistics and possibilities in live performance, using digital media/communications.

On the morning of June 21st, we gathered beside a glass wall overlooking sunny Lake Ontario in the Henry Preston Courtney and Lillian Courtney Lounge at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Arts. Moderated by SpiderWebShow’s Adrienne Wong, Conversation #3 of the inaugural Festival of Live Digital Art consisted of three speakers: Amy Chartrand, a concept writer from the Montreal multimedia studio, Moment Factory; Jonathan Stanley from Audioconexus, a Kingston tourism company; and Clayton Baraniuk, a producer and trained relaxed performance consultant. Their profiles:

Moment Factory employs over 300 artists, programmers, coders, architects, and designers to create layers of video projection, sound, and lighting that together constitute immersive and often interactive arts and entertainment spaces. When they’re not in the studio for research and development, this company leverages the abilities of many artists to create large-scale works/events to bring people together. Their work is situated in stadiums, concerts, retail stores, casinos/resorts, and public parks.

Audioconexus provides robust multilingual and multimedia experiences for boats, trolleys, trains, and trams as a way to bridge linguistic and cultural barriers. Their work primarily involves using GPS triggered information in mapping audio theatre to physical objects/places/experiences to address the global shifts in international travel. Jonathan and his company are committed to extensive one-on-one research with clients, tailoring consumer content to site-specific experience.

Clayton Baraniuk’s portfolio as a relaxed performance consultant includes Canada’s National Arts Centre, Vancouver’s Electric Company, and foldA as the Access Coordinator. His work involves making works more accessible by utilizing technology and resources to support the variety of ways in which we receive/output information. For foldA, Clayton sent early footage of performances to an audio describer in Toronto, then used teleconferencing in addition to audio assisted listening technology that was already installed in the Isabel Bader Centre to remove the barriers of time and money for sending interpreters.

Photo by Rain7kid is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

The conversation between the panelists consisted of familiar topics such as the bi-directionality of art dictating the use of technology and vice-versa, inquiries to Clayton as to what point accessibility and inclusivity is woven into the creation process, and questions from Jonathan as to how we use technology to reach larger audiences/communities.

As the conversation continued, I kept considering the composition of the panel members in front of us and how their distinct access to resources and levels of funding can radically change what might constitute their ‘brass tacks’ or the ‘essentials’  necessary for digital experimentation.

Side note: I’ve been thinking about how the coupling of arts funding and not-for-profit models have come to contextualize the work of artists as community-engaged culture makers. Furthermore, as a by-product of relying on precarious forms of capital (ie grants and foundations), communities of artists then operate in a paradigm of scarcity, even when they participate in the research or experimentation around digital technology, a sector that is increasingly profit driven. I felt like I was seeing some of this disconnect in front of me and in the room.

As we approached the question portion, similar concerns arose from independent artists in the audience regarding accessibility to expensive new technologies and the necessary digital literacy that is required to utilize them. I definitely wasn’t the only one thinking along these lines.

An excerpt from Moment Factory’s website, on ‘experiential marketing’:

“Modern marketing is all about relationships and emotion – keeping people engaged, building loyalty, and reinforcing distinctive brand identity. … From fun, unexpected stunts to jaw-dropping immersive shows, we take consumer experiences to a whole new level.”

Moment Factory’s language is distinctly set in business and marketing vocab, though it’s notable that this increased articulation around the commodification of experience and affect has permeated both arts and entertainment sectors.

Photo by rawpixel is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

As for­-profit enterprises continue to be far more lucrative avenues for digital experimentation, I am witnessing peers—technologists and media artists who are altering their practices in order to exist in and across for-profit and not-for-profit sectors or they abandon the arts industry entirely. This further distances the arts community’s access to necessary knowledge and resources which produces an integral opportunity then, to reconsider the framework within which arts funding is distributed and how we relate to these models of working. This brings up three main considerations for me:

  1. That we meaningfully bridge the perceptual divide between arts vs entertainment organizations so as to access resources and open channels of knowledge exchange (eg. theatre performance + video game companies and the exploration of participatory mechanics and immersive narrative).
  2. That we directly address the inflexibilities of the not-for-profit model in performing arts contexts that places limitations on the allocation of resources towards research and development with hardware, and on purchasing/holding the necessary capital assets for tech innovation. And to a certain extent, I even mean challenging the very notion of the arts as ‘not-for-profit’.
  3. That we look within our arts community to designers and media artists who already work with new technologies, thereby widening the institutional scope of what skills we have access to in order to facilitate skilling-up opportunities.

Certainly a lot of the above is already being attempted through various channels such as Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Strategy Fund and the events here at foldA, including the endeavours of these three panelists/organizations. But institutions take a long time to change. In the coming years, I suspect that we’ll still be faced with the continuous growth of the economic divide, but we’ll have some new toys, and more reliable and affordable consumer technology. And if we’re lucky we’ll have in place some efficient strategies of pooling resources and provisions for equitable access to digital tools across our communities.

Yes, I am a beta-slut

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This is the fifth in a series of articles capturing the planned conversations and discussions at the inaugural Festival of Live Digital Art (foldA), in Kingston ON, June 19-June 21, 2018. Chris Tolley writes about a conversation between Milton Lim, Beth Kates, and Rose Plotek that was presented in the Green Room of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performance Arts titled “Digital Dramaturgy”. 

Maddie Bautista stuck in the glitch in The Revolutions (SpiderWebShow). Photo by Camila Diaz-Varela.

I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Digitalorder.

Most nights I strap my Thync, a neurostimulator to my head in a quest for mind and memory enhancement. When I slouch, my UpRight sensor sends a jolt to my lower spine prompting me to stand tall. Each morning my Omron scans and tracks seven body metrics, from my resting metabolic rate to my visceral fat count.  I even have a backyard weather station that updates to the Cloud. And we all know that’s bullshit.

Yes, I am a beta-slut.

Yet, if I was to be completely honest and ask myself, do any of these cutting-edge / experimental / wallet emptying digital innovations truly make me a better person in any measurable way whatsoever – well – I don’t think I’d like the answer.

And I know, this soul-crushing question doesn’t stop there. There are many ways this part of my life, and accompanying existential anxiety, overlap with my artistic practice.

Having incorporated, or in some cases admittedly squeezed, digital elements into every theatre production I’ve created since 1998, I often find myself wondering, is this really serving the narrative?

Writing in 2006 for the London Observer, John Heilpern laid out his pecking order of culture: “I don’t go to Oprah Winfrey for the truth. I go to the theater instead. That fragile, fantastic thing we call the theater has always seemed to me to be the last place on earth where our stories can be truthfully told.”

Heilpern’s understanding of the relationship between art and truth is worth noting as he is the author of the seminal book, Conference of the Birds – The Story of Peter Brook in Africa. In this book, he recounts the epic journey Peter Brook took across the Sahara desert in search of a new form of theatre, one that explores honesty in art.

So, if we agree that honesty, or more accurately, authenticity, is the ultimate quest in our artistic practice, what we need to ask is, does technology bring our work any closer to the truth in ways text or movement can’t, or is it nothing more than a DIY weather station spinning in the wind?

Does digital innovation bring us closer to truth in performance? Photo by geralt is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

I was thinking about this as I entered the Green Room at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston for the inaugural FoldA Festival’s Digital Dramaturgy seminar. This impressive room, boasting 20-foot tall floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Ontario, was home to the hour-long debate about technology and how it can best serve theatre.

There at the front of the room was Milton Lim, one of our country’s most intriguing directors/designers. While most of us are exploring what we think are innovative practices like projection on live actors, this digital maverick is experimenting with doing away with actors altogether.

His piece okay.odd is a technological mashup; an experiment in gaming mechanism, textual frequency and automation. By completely replacing actors altogether, Milton pushes the boundaries of what we can even consider live performance. Is okay.odd a video installation, performance art, or the next wave of digital theatre? Can it even be considered theatre if there are no live actors gracing the stage?

And really, do any of these categories even matter anymore?

I met up with Milton later in the day. He was preparing to meet a Queen’s professor who had developed a holographic protocol for transmitting images digitally, basically a 3D Skype. Milton was going to connect with the professor to see what potential applications there could be for the performing arts.

I was both spellbound and, I have to admit, a little wary by this thought. Clearly, we are moving rapidly towards a world where the word ‘live’ in ‘live performing arts’ is by definition changing. Augmented reality, virtual performers and reactive sets are all moving us closer to a digitized, otherworldly experience. Otherworldly, yes. But authentic?

Anita Rochon’s Pathetic Fallacy uses green screens to connect Anita (in Vancouver) with a performer (in Kingston) at foldA 2018. Photo by Naseem Loloie.

A vigorous debate about this very question broke out at the digital dramaturgical seminar. The conversation took on a heightened level when panellist, Rose Plotek, Associate Director of the directing program at the National Theatre School mentioned that all directing students were required to work projection into their final productions.

The merits of this are obvious; if an artist is to experiment with, and possibly fail in such a complex medium, an educational environment is the safest place to do so.

Yet, an obvious counter to this argument and one raised by several at the seminar is whether forcing projection into every new work contributes to the gratuitous use of video, something we are seeing increasingly in the arts today. Does, say, a flowing river spanning the length of a scrim truly support the narrative, or is it nothing more than a cheap device littering the stage?

Of course, one can turn this argument in on itself, and this is probably the thinking behind NTS’s program. Perhaps muscling video into every production forces students to think about, and discover, the delicate balance facing all digital designers; the balance between technology truly serving theatre, and the inverse – where the production is nothing more than a slave to the technology.

As discussed in other panels over the three days at FoldA, the impact digital distribution has had on bringing our sector together is undeniable. When working in a country as geographically vast as Canada the ability to share work, via green screen enhanced two-way transmission, podcasting, and other technological innovations, can only bring our work closer to each other.  But as the lively debate at the dramaturgical seminar demonstrated, the benefits of the artistic applications of digital are far more complex, and potentially perilous. The possibilities of failure are acute.

Kevin Matthew Wong (in Kingston) performing with Vanessa and Lindsay Beze Gray (in Toronto) in The Chemical Valley Project at foldA. Photo by Naseem Loloie.

I left the workshop mulling over the delicate balance between Heilpern’s quest for truth and authenticity in art, and digital innovation. Do these technologies help us make better art, or are we merely getting caught up in a collective obsessive-compulsive digitalorder – an uncontrollable impulse to play with the latest and greatest beta release?

As the panel made clear, we are working in uncharted, artistic territory, and no one knows where this fine line truly lies. Yes, there is always risk when working on the cusp of innovation. However, the risk of inaction may be even greater.

And, ultimately, is the value really in the answer to this question, or much like the art we aspire to, is the true value in the very act of asking the question in the first place?

Thought Residency: Liam Zarrillo

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Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my final thought ah for the month of September.

September, which is objectively the hardest month of the year. Or maybe it just is to me um…

But I’ve spent most of this month actually feeling really afraid. A lot. But fear is just the other side of excitement, right? They are like two sides of the same coin.

Someone pretty smart told me that.

I’m still processing it all ah but I think that the process is to be trusted. So.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening.

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my eleventh thought. Which is also my second last thought of this residency.

And I’m feeling some kind of self-imposed pressure to offer some sort of profound thought, to be thinking something big.

Um, but mostly, all I’m thinking about this morning is how much I hate to be rushed. And so, in the spirit of that, I’m not gonna rush it.

Today I’m going to slow down, drink water and take time.

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my tenth thought.

So tonight I’m just thinking about family and traditions and rituals. And, I guess, the things that we carry with us. That families carry with them from where they’ve come from to where they are now.

And how special it is that, ah, something like a tradition or a ritual can bring people together from all different parts of the world or parts of the country. And how lucky I am to get to engage in that with my own family.

Um, we have our rituals, we have our things and… it’s kind of like the way my dad tells the same story over and over, um, it doesn’t matter how many times you hear it or how many times we engage in these traditions, ah… you’re still able to derive the same amount of joy.

And I think that’s, um, something pretty special.

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my ninth thought.

Ah, so tonight I am thinking about packing. And my own process of packing and how is has become this very purposeful or intentional system of overpacking. Um, gratuitously so. Ahh, more is more, as they say, but I do wonder when it escalated to this point. Um, when it became so… obnoxious.

And I do wonder if there really is or what is the most efficient way to pack. For any kind of trip.

And if efficient and effective are really the same thing?

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my eighth thought.

Today I’m just thinking that it’s okay to do too much. And it’s okay to care too much.  And it’s okay to, uh, think too much.

Better too much, than not at all, I think.

And let’s just value things when they’re upon us, so we don’t regret it when they aren’t.

And I think that was, like, four thoughts so, you’re welcome

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my seventh thought.

This morning I was confronted with the very unexpected reminder of just how difficult and complicated my body can be. And I carried the weight of that for most of the day. But, I was also reminded by one of my favorite people in the world that, um, I actually have the right to set my own boundaries and that I don’t owe anyone an explanation, um, for how my body is or the way that it is.

And I think it’s really important to remember that.

And I think that it would be really nice actually if we spent a lot less time talking about bodies, and a lot more time talking about… anything else.

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my sixth thought.

I’m in Winnipeg tonight, my hometown, and I am staring out the window, and it is raining and I’m just wondering… how do I put this… uh-um, I am wondering, um, how worth it is to know what someone else is thinking?

And how honest are we when we share what we are thinking?

What do we know, really know, versus what do we admit?

And what spaces let us be the most honest with those thoughts?

I’d say that I really have that chance here but tonight it seems I’m doing more speculating than truth-telling.

But at least this week had a bit of a theme.

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my fifth thought.

So, kind of tangential to yesterday’s speculations on the truth… um, I’ve had a bit of a weird day today.

Ah, I’ve spent most of today feeling like, ah, a total imposter.

And its something that happens to me from time to time, more often than I’d like to admit.

Where I feel like an imposter in several of the different spaces, ah, that sort of make up my life.

Ah, I fear and worry that I’m not artistic enough or creative enough or, um, queer enough or trans enough or political enough…

And I find myself, y’know, looking around and wanting to ask the question: what am I doing here?

 


Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my fourth thought.

So, often when I tell folks what it is I do I’m met with the response: “Ah, that’s so awesome! You get to spend your time playing pretend! That must be so fun.”

And… yeah! I tell stories, I have SO much fun doing it. Um, but when I think about it… I think, actually, my favorite thing about theatre is that it offers an opportunity to tell the truth.

To take the most challenging, and the most difficult, the most uncomfortable, but the most honest things we encounter and share them with whoever’s willing to listen.

 

Hey, it’s Liam, and this is my third thought.

I met a new student today and when I asked him what his name was in the presence of his grandma and ah another teacher, he got really flustered and seemed super torn about what to say, and so I just asked him, “Okay, well what do you like to be called?” And the way that his face just, y’know, lit up, and it was so clear how much appreciated such a simple question, um, I found it to be ah both really beautiful and really tragic at the same time.

Y’know, as trans people we are always often, often always just so accommodating to so many people and it just has me wondering: who’s it really for and what does it even accomplish?

 

Hey, this is Liam, and this is my second thought.

It’s the first day back for teachers today and I was having a chat with a new colleague about, just, beginnings of things and anticipation and what other words there might be for that…

Kind of like that sick, twisted, nervous feeling when you’re, y’know, about to talk to a stranger. You go up to them and then what happens when you don’t get the nerve.

I had a professor back in theatre school who would refer to it, that feeling, as Sylvester the Cat about got pop his way through the fence. Making his way through that hole in the fence.

And then just hoping that you find what you are looking for on the other side.

 

Hey, it’s Liam and this is my first thought.

Uhh it is the last day of summer. And I spent it laying on the beach, my favorite beach in the world, with one of the best people I know and it was ah really sunny and really nice and warm and uhh I tried to drink a beer but I mostly just ah just laid there and was just wondering and I guess worrying ahh about what’s to come. Because it has been a minute. Umm and I think, uh I think that summertime is what saved me. That and I just keep thinking about when my Auntie Joy told me about when Hektor said “It is a good thing to give way to the night time.” Which I think is right. I think… transitions are hard.

 

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