Page 9

Québec Performing Arts – Edition Context

By
Cirque Alphonse

This week we are turning our attention to the province of Québec.

What do you think of when you first hear “Québec” or “Québecois”? French? Battle of the Plains of Abraham? Tourtière? The Habs (or Canadiens)? Céline Dion? Québec’s cultural identity is often essentialized into large generalizations about the population.

For example, Québec is known for Cirque du Soleil. The circus scene in Québec, however, is much, much more diverse that this one company. Both Montréal and Québec City are homes to circus schools that attract students from all over the world. There are dozens of circus companies that exist in – or at least have their roots in – the province. Québec circus is also exported and produced all over the world.

But what do we know about circus from an academic standpoint? How do we study it or teach it? More broadly, how do we teach the performing arts, a field – or the point of contact of many fields – that is fundamentally immersive and embodied? Performing arts involves the study of creation and the creative process, narrative and dramaturgy, critical theory, and cultural studies. It’s never just one thing. So why are institutions sticking performing arts classes into the one-size-fits-all model? Is there another way of going about it?

In July 2017, Professor Patrick Leroux of Concordia University set out to do just that: launch the first ever field school in performing arts (first ever at Concordia that is). The ten-day intensive course on Québec Performing Arts brought together artists, practitioners, and scholars from all over the world to discuss Québec dramaturgies and in particular contemporary circus in Québec.

Over the next two weeks, CdnTimes will publish articles that will introduce our readers to the contemporary circus scene in Québec, as well as the challenges and possibilities that present themselves specifically in producing work connected to Québec history and Québec culture. The articles focus on performances and shows witnessed during the 2017 Montréal Complètement Cirque Festival, which takes over the city once a year for two weeks during the month of July.

This week we will hear from Professor Leroux on the inspiration behind and the development of the course, and perhaps get some insight into how we can think differently about teaching the performing arts. Next week, we will see articles written by some of the students from our course, some of whom are circus practitioners themselves, providing us with a unique inside-outside view into the world of Québec circus and the study of Québec performing arts.

Thought Residency: Adam Lazarus

By

Since number one I have thought about the ending.

Fleetingly, but it was in there.

I thought about quoting someone.

I had about 6 jokes.

I had an earnest observation.

I had a story I’d been saving.

I re-examined themes of literacy, energy, love, empathy and vulnerability.

I had a list.

There was a line about going from A to B. I thought it was very clever.

I thought I should talk about my family, my wife, my kids, my life.

I thought I should talk about my theatre and artistry.

I thought I should talk about opportunity and being grateful for this one.

Tonight, I think about never knowing how to end, not wanting to end, and so not ending.

À la prochaine.

 

I’m nearing the end of my east coast vacation and I find myself thinking about dictums of yore.

They say everything in moderation. I say, sounds controlled and boring.

I think excess gets a bad rep. Case in point, tonight over an open fire, I helped myself to 6 double marshmallow, double chocolate, perfectly roasted S’mores. I could have stopped at 2, or 3, or 4, or 5. But why would I do that? To adhere to the Gods of restraint?

My face was gooey, my stomach was aching and I wanted more. I could have more so I had s’more.

Tomorrow I’m going to a natural mud slide near the Bay of Fundy and yes I am going to frolic. Happy as a pig in mud. Now there’s a dictum!

In the quieter moments, I do wonder how my cholesterol is doing?

 

 We have a duty to hold our friends, neighbours and ourselves accountable for offending.

Currently, I’m revisiting an old play of mine from the early 2000’s.  As memory serves, it had a great central character, a strong narrative and audiences loved the play.

But, reading it in 2017, the show is not good. Some jokes don’t land, and some jokes are blatantly Islamophobic.

My intentions at the time were political. I was speaking to a mistreatment of women in the Middle East!

Whatever the political intention then, today, I sound ignorant and paranoid. Who really cares about intention? Fact is, my content is bad and is grossly offensive.

Accountability.

And so for my part, my play should see the inside of a garbage bin and for the country’s part, it is time to remove from federal buildings across Canada the name: Sir John A. MacDonald.

 

Currently, I am at the top of Cape Breton Island. I have no cell service and the closest Wi-Fi spot is 10kms away.

Welcome back to 1995.

I love it. I have no longing to connect. I don’t care what anyone has done or said or blown up or threatened. It’s been a quick adjustment.

Removing myself from my life (out of the city, no kids, just my wife and I and nature) I once again think the following: We are tiny. We are fluid. We can change quickly. We can adapt. Sleep is a top priority. We’re two third’s water, we should protect it. We are made to move and climb and pull and push and jump. We are always looking to connect and share.

No one was lying about any of it.

 

Three days ago I did an 18 km mud challenge/obstacle course/ski hill climb and descent which ended in running through live wires. I got electrocuted twice, it really hurt, I thought I was crazy, but laughed so hard for having completed an 18 km mud challenge/obstacle course/ski hill climb and descent.

I did it! Holy catfish! I did it! And of course I did. Being an artist, this feeling is familiar.

We did it! Can you believe we made this thing? We said we would do it and we did it.

Unbeknownst to me, in athletics there’s a thing called DOMS – delayed onset muscle soreness. It is the physical equivalent to the emotional crash I feel after every show ends it’s run.

I like DOMS. It’s in the body, fueled with adrenaline and cries out for rest, treatment, love, massages. Proof of life.

 


There’s a passage in Adam Gopnik’s From Paris to the Moon where he talks about chicken.  When I lived in Paris, I recreated his experience of – In the morning, selecting and ordering a chicken.  Mid-day, checking in on that chicken as it started to roast. Late afternoon picking it up and brining it home to dine.

This delayed gratification was easy in France. At home, not so easy.

So tomorrow, I’m going to buy a delicious baked good in the morning, let it sit on my counter all day, and eat it in the late afternoon.

I will be okay to only look at the piece of cake.

I will remember that it is not a matter of restraint, but rather it is the joy of anticipation.

Even if the cake’s not all that great. The wait was everything.

 


I remember pennies being thrown at me.  Pick ‘em up Jew boy. 

I remember a teacher telling us, in shame, that her grandfather prided himself on his ashtray made of Jew bones.

I remember weeping at Yad Vashem – every time I’ve been.

I remember feeling at home as a socialist in Israel – every time I’ve been.

When I was five, I rememer I was at school playing in the sandbox and this boy told me he was glad Hitler killed all the Jews.  I shoved his head into the sand and held it there until a teacher pulled me off. We were both suspended.

I remember learning to remember.

 


In early November 2016, I went to a psychic healer. I remember ranting about time and my lack of it. The healer challenged me to split time in half: As many times as I wanted. Stretch it out. If you want, a day can be an eternity.

Remember when you could do that as a child?

Mid-August 2017, here I am at the just-past-halfway point in my thought residency, and I’m thinking about time again. Trying to slow it down. Feeling like I’m on the other side of things in life.

What do I want to devote the next 3 to 5 to 35 years of my life doing? How can I spend more time with my family, my friends, myself?

How can I find time to split time?

 


Today, I’m a worried husband, father, friend, Jew, artist, human, and I’m thinking about the monster.

My monster is filled with hate and vengeance. He’s mean.

He’s not obviously violent. Doesn’t throw punches or light fires.

Instead, my monster is devious and finds subversively violent ways to ruin lives, destroy families, and end friendships.

My monster works to make people feel bad. Make them suffer, mentally.

The monster is not positive, but he lives with me

 

Today my Uber driver did up my window and put on the air conditioning without asking.

I felt like my kids must feel.

In school, my acrobatics teacher would give us a rest and then say: ‘and every good moment ends’.

From early childhood I’ve been conditioned to accept fun and joy being given, and then taken away with little to no warning. “Shut off the TV now. Bath time’s over. Play time’s over. Five minutes and we’re going home.”

I’ve been in training for submission.

What a difficult thing to master.

 


Today I don’t want to work but I’m going to.

Today my body is asking for a break. I’m sweaty. I’m drowsy. My eyes are burning. My mind wants a break. I want to shower, putz around my house and then maybe take a bath. I want to feel bad for myself.

I was told that it’s probably the weather.

Today I feel bad for feeling bad for myself. I’m lazy. I should suck it up, take a pill, go for a walk, get back to work.

And so, I do.

Oh the disgrace of sadness! The weakness of fear.

 

Examination can be the great killer of experience.

But I will try.

I don’t know why I make or say or do at least 15% of my life.

This part of myself doesn’t ask why. Doesn’t analyse – my instincts, actions, emotions, desires, or how I can be bull-headed, grumpy, and flippant.

It is this 15% of myself that is in constant chaos, that keeps me curious and questioning everything.

It is my friend who invites failure and says that change is possible.

 

J’adore la langue française, et je ne parle pas très bien le français parce que mon grammer est terrible, mais je comprends plus.

My French is terrible but I pretend that I’m very good at speaking it.

When I’m in a French speaking place, I try to watch and listen. I talk to myself, out loud, a lot. I plan a few key phrases and then I engage as though I understand and when I don’t I ask: Qu’est-ce que c’est le mot (insert a French word they just said) en anglais?

It sometimes works.

It sometimes doesn’t.

Et, c’est tout.

 

At 27, some friends and I took a trip and drove the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island. A number of times I got stuck behind cars moving way too slowly, and every time, it stressed me out. Only me. Then at some point my friend Vlad – a circus artist from Los Angeles – set me right when he said: ‘Hey now. Where are you going?’

I am quick to impatience, I bore easily and I can be unforgiving while I’m waiting for progress in other people.

I’m consistently checking that.

 

I’m thinking a lot about literacy lately:

One – I read the final 300 pages of Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life, through a steady stream of tears and thought: at this rate, I will die having read only 100 books in my adult life.  That is tragic and unacceptable.

Two – I turned 40, and started training for a 15-mile obstacle course race. This kind of work is very new to me and very difficult. But I’m doing it.

Three – Every time I change. Every time. I feel embarrassment and regret

Reflections on Relaxed Performances

By
Postures when seated and relaxed. Originally published in Popular Science Monthly, vol. 42, 1892/3. PD-23

Theatres often presume an able-bodied audience member capable of following the spatial and social scripts for movement within most professional venues. But maybe you are someone who cannot sit in dark spaces. Or feel uncomfortable when people stare at your involuntary tics. Maybe sudden noises upset you and crowds are disorienting.

Relaxed Performances (sometimes called “sensory-friendly performances”) have emerged in theatres across the U.K., U.S., and Canada in response to these predicaments. These shows are open to everyone, but they are specially adapted for those who might find the normal conditions of a theatre prohibitive. As yet, there is no systematic set of changes or program of certification to qualify a performance as relaxed. Instead, there is something like an à la carte menu from which companies can build a relaxed show. Every iteration offers an opportunity to fine-tune and try out new methods.

I encountered relaxed performances when I started at the Sudbury Theatre Centre (STC) last fall.STC programmed its first relaxed performances for the 2016-2017 season, committing to one performance for each of the mainstage productions.* Modifications in its relaxed shows included: keeping the house lights dim and doors open throughout the performance, creating “chill-out” zones outside of the auditorium, and reducing the intensity of loud or sudden technical effects. We also extended curtain speeches to include a synopsis and to allow actors to introduce their characters. This was especially important for our holiday show, It’s A Wonderful Life. 

Photo of Sudbury Theatre Centre's production of "It's A Wonderful Life" by Robert Provencher. Actors from left to right: Richard Alan Campbell, Robbie O'Neill, Jessica Vandenberg, Mark Crawford, Richard Barlow, and Kelly Penner
Photo of Sudbury Theatre Centre’s production of “It’s A Wonderful Life” by Robert Provencher. Actors from left to right: Richard Alan Campbell, Robbie O’Neill, Jessica Vandenberg, Mark Crawford, Richard Barlow, and Kelly Penner.

It’s a Wonderful Life adapted the Frank Capra movie as a live radio broadcast set in the 1940s. Scenes jumped between the station and others that sprung to life from the “listener’s” imagination. Actors played multiple characters, sometimes performing quick costume changes on stage for comedic effect. All this might have been confusing for an average viewer, but even more so for patrons with certain cognitive conditions. The curtain speech also previewed a moment in the play where one character violently shakes another. The idea was to demonstrate that the situation remained safe despite looking otherwise. At the end of the performance, patrons also had a chance to meet the cast in the lobby.

STC had intended to, but did not, produce visual stories as tools to help patrons familiarize themselves with the building in advance of their visit. Visual stories offer a kind of tour, pairing photos with short descriptors and moving in order from the patron’s entrance to their exit. For instance, you could start with a photo like this welcoming them to the building:

Sudbury Theatre Centre Building, Photo by Haritha Popuri
Sudbury Theatre Centre. Photo by Haritha Popuri

followed by one of Box Office explaining how they get their tickets:

Sudbury Theatre Centre Box Office. Photo by Haritha Popuri
Sudbury Theatre Centre Box Office. Photo by Haritha Popuri

Recently, I presented on STC’s experience with relaxed performances at a conference. Thank you to the dramaturgs whose thoughtful contributions have helped shape this piece. One concern I raised was how relaxed performances can attend to the specificity of disability and the experience of individuals living with them, while also aiming to be broadly inclusive. Is the model too generic to actually serve its purpose? A first step might be consulting with local organizations that are more directly involved with the demographic one hopes to attract. This was another oversight on STC’s part. Had we worked more closely with these services, we might have developed relaxed strategies better suited to our local community. If in a larger city, another idea would be to borrow from Inside Out Theatre’s Good Host Program. The Good Host facilitates accessible performances beyond relaxed ones (e.g., ASL interpretation, audio-described, etc.) in venues across the Calgary. By coordinating with other companies and producing a calendar of events well in advance, the program offers more choice to potential patrons and greater scheduling flexibility.

Another concern of mine: what about the aesthetic possibilities of relaxed performances? The literature often stresses that, apart from minor tweaks, the performance itself remains immune to the relaxing process, thus protecting artistic integrity. But there is room to consider things differently.

‘Extra-Live’ is a term that has been pitched in lieu of ‘relaxed’ in some U.K. circles. As journalist Natasha Tripney writes: “…[‘Extra-live’ is] not just a semantic alternative to the word ‘relaxed’ but more of a provocation, something that invites theatremakers and audiences to question ideas of traditional theatre etiquette and create as open a space as possible….” Instead of instructing actors to politely ignore any unexpected movements or noises from the audience, what if they incorporated it into the performance to some degree? Acknowledging the shared space between performer and spectator can be exciting, perhaps revelatory. It honours theatre as an intersubjective encounter, a potentially unsettling event.

Finally, what better than the audience of a relaxed performance to point out that no two people experience any event the same way. If we take this plurality of experiences as a premise, then how can we better support artistic creation to reflect it? When discussing accessibility in the arts, it’s important to include artistic as well as audience development. On that note, I’d like to recognize the work that the Playwrights’ Theatre Centre is doing with ACK Lab, which could be said to “relax” the creation process itself, helping artists with lived experiences of disability to produce their work.

Much has been said of theatre as a space to challenge conventional beliefs and foster human connection. But the physical space and normal operations within can be coercive and exclusionary. Relaxed performances may shift the paradigm closer to theatre’s ideal. The practice continues to develop, with signs that attention is now turning to its artistic possibilities. As for STC, we will continue to provoke, to rewrite the script, acknowledging and amending the blindspots in our place of seeing.

*Edited September 27, 2017. The article previously stated that STC was the first company in Canada to commit to one relaxed performance for each of its mainstage productions. However, Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto has programmed relaxed performances for each production for the past two seasons. –AW

First There Is A Mountain: Reflections On The Republic Of Inclusion

By
A photo of a blurry maple leaf taken at the Republic of Inclusion by Brad Rothbart.
Photo by Brad Rothbart.

A man with Cerebral Palsy flies to a foreign country to be part of an inclusion conference. There’s a joke there somewhere, and it was on me.

You see, my entire life I’ve been fighting for disabled folks like me. I think we should be found everywhere – the existence of people with visible physical disabilities should be undeniable. To quote the disability rallying cry, “Nothing about us without us!” That’s the story of me I tell to myself. That’s the person I like to think I am. So, as someone invited to the Republic of Inclusion, the end of a cycle about Deaf, Disabled, and Mad Arts, I should be home, right? These are my peeps.

So why am I standing with my hand on the doorknob of the Shenkman Arts Centre, freaking out? Why do I want to run away? As I began to analyze my reaction I realized two things: 1. The person we say we are, the person we want to be, and the person we actually are are often three different people. 2. I had been programmed by years of societal conditioning to avoid other disabled people.

Here’s the big disability secret: If you can pass for non-disabled, you do it. If you can find others who can pass, they become your community. If you see folks who cannot possibly pass in the mainstream culture, you run like hell in the other direction, for fear of being found out by association. This idea is so inculcated in my being, so fundamental to my existence, that is hard to realize, much less speak about. It is, to quote David Foster Wallace in This Is Water, my default setting.

I was busy deconstructing my experience in real time because Laurel Green of SpiderWebShow (a group I’ve admired for a while) asked me to write this article. I was at The Republic of Inclusion because Sarah Garton Stanley had invited me almost a year earlier. When Sarah first mentioned it to me I didn’t give it much thought, as it felt a bit like “we should have coffee sometime” – one of those well-meaning things people say that have no chance of ever coming true.

One day, while feeling sorry for myself, I decided to drop Sarah an email to see if any of this was real – and, lo and behold, it was! I was absolutely thrilled and couldn’t wait to get there, until I was actually on my way. I was so actively avoiding what I was about to do that while waiting to pass through customs at Pearson Airport in Toronto I helped not one, not two, but three foreign grandmothers who were being held for questioning   connect with their worried grandchildren.

As I got closer to Ottawa, my brain started making “do not engage” flashcards and shoving them in front of my eyes.

FLASH: You are middle-class. What if they aren’t, and you say something offensive? DO NOT ENGAGE!

FLASH: You are horribly over-educated. What if  you seem pretentious? DO NOT ENGAGE!

FLASH: You are American and they are Canadian. In this Age of Trump, you can’t be too careful. DO NOT ENGAGE!

FLASH: They have been together for 10 days and you are only coming in for the last three. What if you act too chummy? DO NOT ENGAGE!

As the coup de grace, the arrogant part of the brain piped up with FLASH: You are a journalist (as if I’d just been hired by the Citizen, or the Globe and Mail) and cannot risk losing your objectivity. DO NOT ENGAGE!

Photo of the ceiling taken by Brad Rothbart at the Republic of Inclusion.
Photo by Brad Rothbart.

When I finally walked in the room, what I saw was truly remarkable. There were folks of all ages, sizes, shapes, and skin colours. Folks in wheelchairs, some with attendants and some not. There were ambulatory folks was with prostheses, folks with low vision and/or hearing, and even an artist with Tourette’s syndrome. The vast majority of these artists were in deep and passionate conversations with each other. Now, I’ve hung out in some freaky scenes, and this was the equal of any of them.

In the whack-a-mole that is my brain, the fear of inferiority suddenly popped up. These folks looked pretty serious. Could I hang? Was I good enough? Was my existence at this the event the exact moment that Canada became cooler than the USA? You already have poutine and Justin Trudeau – was I the American third strike?  My brain was now running down possible scenarios that would allow me to feel better about myself. As I looked around I saw a subset of better-dressed folks. Officials, perhaps? Management? Funders?  New plan: I’ll worry about the article later. Now I’ll network. I’m good at networking. I can do this. Goal: Pass out as many fancy business cards as possible. Stretch goal: Return to the US with a job. Go!

After schmoozing for a bit, I looked up to see a performance starting. The brain was split on this new development – half of it wanted the piece to be brilliant so I could say I’d spent time with genius artists, while the other half wanted it to be awful so I could feel better about myself. It was Erin Ball, and she was fantastic.

Erin is a circus artist who lost both of her feet while on a walk at night. Her feet got wet early in the walk, she sat down for a while, and when she tried to get up, she couldn’t feel them. Erin fell unconscious and 6 days later she was found. Ms. Ball gave an aerial silk performance on two 10-meter-high silks. Her act was literally breathtaking, as she removed both prosthetic feet while 5 meters in the air, and did the second half of her routine footless. Seeing experimental performance, the type of work I began my career with, I relaxed. Of course, the work was good and thoughtful. Canadian artists take their time to develop these things. After all, this is a country that venerates curling, said the brain.

That night there was a party at the “Inclusion Lounge.” It was one of the first things I noticed on the schedule, and I was dreading it. The image in my head I couldn’t shake was one of apple juice, graham crackers, and Anne Murray on the stereo. I have rarely been so wrong. These folks knew how to throw down. Not only was there a DJ / mixmaster working in the turntables, not only was the music so loud you could barely hear yourself think (just like in any good club) but there was an impressive array of snacks and drinks.

The next day was devoted primarily to panels, which allowed Mr. Thinky Judgypants to once again come to the fore. Was the subject matter interesting? Were the panelists well-spoken? Was the discourse as nuanced and high-level as that my fancy graduate school?  The answers, respectively, were often, usually, and sometimes.

Afterwards, there was another party, even more Dionysian than the night before. However, I went home to my hotel room feeling more alone than ever. Now I was with a very cool group of artists who I barely knew and wasn’t going to get to know, as the next day was our last together. If I had blown my chance to be part of the group, at the very least I needed to fully arrive before I had to leave, and I had no clue how that would manifest itself.

Photo of chairs, some with people in them, taken by Brad Rothbart.
Photo by Brad Rothbart.

That final morning had been presented as a chance to give feedback regarding one’s experience of the panels, and the overall event. It wasn’t. Instead, we were given the chance to revision the room, to find our own way to be most comfortable in that space. There were many objects one could use to attempt this task, but my eye immediately settled on a large sheepskin. After I acquired it and placed it in the section of the room that felt best to me, a man who I had never seen before and whose name I never learned, asked if he could share my sheepskin.

Once we both laid down, and without my requesting it yet with my grudging permission, he began the most extraordinary guided meditation, asking me not only what I saw and encouraging me to examine what I saw more closely but, as importantly, asking me what it meant. Something profound inside of me shattered. For the first time in 40 years, I felt free. Free from my own expectations for myself. Free from the expectations of others. Able to be at peace with who I was in that moment. After three days of emotional journeying, I had finally arrived. I was home now and I instinctively knew I would carry that home everywhere I went.

Photo of a maple leaf coming into focus taken at the Republic of Inclusion by Brad Rothbart.
Photo by Brad Rothbart.

First There Is A Mountain

 

announcinG foldA: festival of live digital Arts

By

Last week on Twitter, SpiderWebShow announced the first installment of foldA, a a nation-wide festival of live digital art.

The first foldA will unfold across the country, with a physical base at the recently built “Isabel” in Kingston, ON (Haudensosaunee and Anishinaabe Territory). Digital tools, such as CdnStudio, will network performances together.

A key collaborator is Brendan Healy, formerly of Buddies in Bad Times and recently appointed Artistic Director for the city of Brampton, ON.

Featuring commissioned works exploring both live body and online performance, the festival may be experienced in Kingston at The Isabel, at a local hub, or from home.


The National Arts Centre English Theatre is also a partner.

The inaugural foldA will take place June 20-22, 2018.

For more information, or to get involved, contact SpiderWebShow artistic director Michael Wheeler, michael@spiderwebshow.ca or send a tweet to @spiderwebshow. To support the foldA Festival and other initiatives, you can subscribe to SpiderWebShow.

In The Flesh: arguments for digital performance

By
If VR is good enough for the International Space Station, is it good enough for the theatre? (Credit: NASA)

“Know your audience” is the old adage, warning writers of all stripes to consider who will be eventually reading – experiencing – what you are making. The directive also applies to theatre makers.

I have to assume that at least some of the theatre goers out there are consuming culture in the same way that I do: sometimes live, but often mediated by a screen (or three). And to be clear, when I talk about “culture” I’m including that vintage Spanish dance video on Facebook under the same umbrella as the opera Riel at the National Arts Centre. While some might designate one a higher or more refined art form, to me they are the same: cultural products of this time that we live in, now. Someone chose to mount Riel, just like someone went through the effort of uploading that video and posting it online – where thousands of people have since shared it. Including me.

Screen capture of a vintage Spanish music video. One man in gold lameé jumpsuit sings, four men link arms to throw a third into the air with his arms outstretched like a bird, three women in sparkly gowns dance in unison.
Vintage Georgie Dann video for Una Paloma Blanca.

I feel my brain is changing, and I’m not the only one. I can barely stand to be with my family without modelling terrible smartphone etiquette to my children. I check my notifications while writing, pretty much every time I don’t know what to write next. But I have to think that if audiences are consuming cultural experiences through their computers, surely there are some among us theatre-makers who are curious about the intersection of live performance and the digital. It makes sense to start creating theatre and performance experiences for those spaces.

“Wait,” you say, “What spaces?”

Yes, yes in the past we’ve agreed that theatre happens when the performers and the audience are in the same physical space. But with post-dramatic and relational aesthetics breaking down our assumptions about the definition of performer, isn’t it time to challenge our notions around space? And while we’re at it, let’s breakdown some of our ideas about what constitutes attendance or participation in that space.

Consider the definition of “mind” proposed by Dan Siegle, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, and 40 assorted scientists including neuroscientists, physicists, sociologists and anthropologists 20 years ago. Rather than being sites of brain activity, our minds are “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within us and around us [emphases mine].” In this model, the mind can contract to contain one person (if you’re alone) or expand to include many (if you are with others). More on that HERE.

As a “process regulating energy and information flow within us and around us” the mind becomes a shared territory wherever people are connected by eye contact, proximity, or video link. Arguably, we can share some kind of experience with others who may be geographically distant from us by simply extending our intentions towards each other. Presence “in” the space can mean a physical insertion of a body in the location, but “presence” could also be understood as a viewer’s conscious attention to what is happening there.

Pokemon Go Dragon on a dock at a lake in wilderness
Pokemon Go melds digital and corporeal realities.

So if audiences are increasingly literate and savvy in the digital realm, and digital space has the potential to collapse distance (or grow connection) beyond a single geographic room, then why aren’t we all lined up like kids waiting for the new playground to open?

Digital performance is not a replacement for live performance. But conventional theatre (you know, the kind that happens in theatres) could stand to gain from the experiment. Creating work on new platforms spurs invention and ingenuity among artists who excel in the existing forms. Painting was fine until photography showed up, forcing artists to interrogate the nature of representation itself. And now, time-limited, image-based platforms like Instagram and SnapChat, force us to reflect on intentionality, authenticity and engagement.

This is as good a place as any to confess to my bias towards experimental work. I don’t mourn what once was, instead I celebrate what it could be.

Stanley Waterman suggests festivals temporarily transform everyday places into environments that support the creation and dissemination of culture. What happens when the everyday place hosting the festival is a digital space? Does a digital festival have the potential to transform digital space? Is everyday a festival?

In a way, it already is. Being online is a bit like wandering through a flea market, but one that is customized to your tastes. Want to find an old Cyndi Lauper CD? We can do that. Watch all of her videos? Done. Figure out what her real relationship was to WWE Wrestlemania. No problem. And I haven’t even dipped into the rabbit holes that are Tumblr and reddit.

Four figures gathered around a microphone. Cyndi Lauper speaks into the microphone as the other three individuals look at the camera, somewhat surprised.
Cyndi Lauper fires back at Fabulous Moolah.

I think it’s the placement of the self at the centre of the experience that is leading audiences away from the darkened room and towards the event or spectacle. We want to feel necessary to what is going on. We want to be dazzled from the inside of something. We want to feel closer. Closer to the performers, to the action, to each other.

Creating for digital performance has the potential to transform how we as users engage with digital space. Testing the limits, possibilities, and boundaries of the place where the physical and the digital intersect gives us a form-equals-content platform to explore contemporary questions about distance and proximity, consciousness and the mind, the nature of connection, the nature of solitude, and our dangerous confidence that technology-based solutions will save the world. We stand to become more aware that the digital is a space, of sorts, and that our participation in its flow has repercussions for us physically (see my changing brain, above), socially, and spiritually.

Because sometimes it’s necessary to unplug and turn away from the relentless deluge of information. I did just that the other night. Barred from competing for bandwidth I was left to do the dishes with no web-based entertainment. No Netflix, no Spotify, no This American Life, no CBC.ca. I packed up the radio a year ago. It was just me, the dishes, and the uneasy quiet of a house after two kids have gone to bed.

And wouldn’t you know it, I had an idea for a show. A show that can be experienced the way that we live life now: through multiple devices and mediums at the same time – including our good, old fashioned eyes, ears, and skin. A show that is played as much as viewed. A show that can be accessed from afar, but that also speaks to the value of being here and now, in the flesh.

CANADALAND Guide To Canada – a show that points to new live performance models

By
View from back of the balcony on Opening Night at The Hot Docs Cinema.

I did some math in my head as I counted the audience in roughly-full 700-seat Hot Docs cinema (still known in my head as The Bloor) for Canadaland Guide to Canada, World Tour of Canada. The last show I directed, Caryl Churchill’s Objections to Sex and Violence, played to about 80% houses in a 2-week run at a 50-seat venue. More people were going to see this piece on its first performance than the entire run of the Churchill.

Huh.

As we started rehearsals I was struck immediately by the intermediality of the performance we were creating:

The material was coming from where?  The book, Canadaland Guide to Canada.

What is Canadaland? It’s a series of podcasts.

Where would our work be viewed? At film festivals and music venues across Canada.

What were we making? We aspired to create a one-hour piece of theatre.  

What was the purpose of this theatrical World Tour of Canada? To sell copies of the book.

So you get back to the book eventually – but you travel through a few media to get there. This was a bit of an anomalous approach to both creation and producing live performance and I loved it for that right away.

 

 

On the producing side, Jesse brought in Frank and Oak as blatant paid content. They sponsored the tour, provided wardrobe and even had a section of the show about Frank and Oak that segued out of Jesse’s family roots in the Montreal garment district. It honestly didn’t fuck up the show, I think because it was on brand as the same ads the audience would have experienced while consuming Canadaland in podcast form. The novelty of experiencing unabashed paid content, in the form it existed legitimately elsewhere, made it almost normal.

On my end, I was not contracted as a director with a set fee. I was more like a consultant with a daily rate. Each day of me cost X number of dollars and we could pro-rate assuming an eight-hour day. This became the first revenue SpiderWebShow has generated working with online-based content creators on how to create live events with their material, and it’s another possibility I’m really excited about as we build the business model.

Final performance of the tour at The Mansion in Kingston, ON.

The night I saw the final show of the tour in Kingston, I congratulated Jesse on completing a National tour of a self-funded and created live performance piece. He was less-excited because he had just committed to one more, secret, invite-only performance for media-types in New York City (okay fine Brooklyn). The goal was to make a play for book sales in a market ten times our own. Which is when I had to give Jesse the bad news: In that case, we should probably take the show back into rehearsal.

There were two things that could be accomplished by re-looking at the show, knowing it would soon be playing to an audience that would experience it in the context of NYC cultural consumption. One, there was the simple benefit of the knowledge gained from a tour. The bits that worked, the bits that didn’t, and the bits that need a little something different. Jesse knew these better than me, but I had a good sense too from watching the first and last show of the tour. It was just about implementing them and adjusting the cues. The other reason was a dramaturgical one related to the meaning of the show.

When you come to hear a guy do a show about Canada for an hour, you want to leave having a sense of what he thinks about Canada. This was a question addressed in the opening and closing monologues, but it seemed it wasn’t coming through. So we worked it quite a bit and what we discovered was a clear narrative about pride in Canada, because of our collective disdain for celebrating it. *Nationalism as pride in the absence of it.* Armed with this refined version and a clear super-objective (maybe super-argument, or even super-contradiction), Jesse took off for NYC a week ahead of Soulpepper, but with no supportive tweets from the Prime Minister. The book now has a much higher rating on Amazon, so we’re claiming success.

 

The experience has me enthused about doing more of this work with SpiderWebShow. Not just myself, but a number of the members of our national organisation are talented in many of the ways that could be useful realising digital work on stage. As an online live performance company, our work can go both ways – we can work to integrate live performance with online technologies – but we can also work with online content to create live performances.

This isn’t a new idea – to stage works from the internet – but there are new opportunities in terms of a performing arts business model. The digitisation of culture has made almost everything online free, which is a big challenge to generating revenue.  Live performance that happens in physical space can still be monetized at the gate as flesh and blood human beings pass through checkpoints to access content. Some creators on the internet are going to add live in-person performances to their repertoire, and many already do. There are no successful bands that do not tour.

This is what I came back to at a sold out Hot Docs Theatre in Toronto contemplating the attendance of this work versus independently-produced Caryl Churchill. What Canadaland has, that most of us do not, is access to tens of thousands of minds. As online content becomes the dominant cultural force, popular players have the ability to drive an audience to the next wave of live performance. How can we work with them?  I think if you are not running a subscriber based theatre, online creators might be your best chance at finding an audience where you can look around a full large theatre and not know anyone who came to see your show.

Thought Residency: Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen

By

We are generation gaps filling in what wasn’t passed down: “This Time will be better.” And with each “no more” and “this way now,” our communion of sound morphs into action. We send our defiance out into tiny circles that make up our world through the work of loving, forgiving, and art-making—all without knowing if or how it may land. In the gap of our isolation, we seek its antithesis: connection.

 

I’m on the road heading East. It’s bittersweet; I love the West but I’m also seeing people with bone structures and shades of skin that look more and more like me; it’s a homecoming. It’s another way of Knowing to move over land where ancestors made love, birthed, and died. Knowing is a migration, an arrival, a Mystery. It’s also a shedding… of the skin of the interloper and of the lie that Home doesn’t exist in shades of red.

 

A White-presenting man recently asked me if I knew who I was after he heard that I’m of mixed ancestry. This settler then told me who I was as an Indigenous woman (which is one of my favourite things, by the way). He was reassured that I already know who I am and more: he seemed to feel… affirmed.

It’s one thing to (re)claim something that’s been taken away by Another; it’s a completely different thing if that same Something’s been usurped by another part of one’s Self.

 

We’re quite small inside our potential. It’s humbling to be human, to be awake with no guarantees, armed only with stories we tell ourselves. Some of us dare to tell new stories. These few who speak what was once unfathomable, scootch closer to the latest version of the True(th). New stories defy what was; they inspirit Promise. To enact unfamiliar truths rings a bell; it harkens a new day.

 

When I picture decolonization, I see my father & uncles returning from their traplines. They’d burst in with a kind of joy that I now know was their childhood—before they were scooped up and the layers of their Darkness settled in. Remembering those dripping rabbit pelts, I know how it feels: we are all Food for someone’s heartbeat. We walk the veins of our bloodlines to where we were first snared and when our memories get caught in our teeth? We speak anyway.

 


When I listen to the echoes of the world… mostly, I hear lineage. I feel what’s been forgotten when I hold a tree close. For those of us born blurred between lines of colour and culture, we are its leaves dancing in the wind. We’re the chorus of a song our ancestors prayed—their story rooted somehow in us. Our bodies are our inheritance. A legacy of survival breathes through us. We are why our ancestors had Hope.

 

I met a stranger and discovered that we are deeply familiar to one another. Neither of us understand it but we both implicitly trust it—this Knowing. How little of the world I truly understand, Time being but one of many layers to my wanton ignorance. I wonder how close are we to an Other Life? To intimate knowledge of another? Are we always on the cusp of discovering that we are more than we think we are… were… can be?

 

I am tired. My heart is a little bent in places and I still don’t know what it means to have a Calling. I go to the river and I hold a stone in my hand. This smooth, ancient bone shard reminds me that I am soft and new and a visitor here. This is the way the land speaks—tender even when it burns. Ceremony is its poetry… each stanza an offer, waiting for something deeper than thought to notice, hoping its Call will wake us up.

 

We Anishinaabe think of knowledge as Teachings. We wait for our teachers to arrive. The purpose of all knowledge is to pass it on and those who are, are only Knowledge Keepers for a time.

My son’s arrival was lodged in me for years, but I only recognized that the feeling-he-had-been was gone long after he was born. I didn’t know he was coming. I didn’t know how much I needed his knowledge. He’s teaching me to be a Keeper and in this space, I’m learning to create.

 

There’s very little elegance when creating something from nothing. It’s gangly work to let go of expectation—to endure the growing pains of acceptance and the insufferable lack of clarity that sucks the marrow of your joy. It’s not until an exquisitely lucid moment of connection surprises you and what was a problem, a resentment, or a looming fiasco suddenly becomes a rite of passage.

 


I’ve been trained to hold the space—to fulfill my responsibilities by caring for community. But the older I get, the more I seem to fail at holding the space in a Good Way. And with each failure, I think I may be learning that the space is holding me and my failure… and my actual responsibility is to simply carry my fear, not wield it.

 

Today has been a study in humility. I am collaborating on a new piece, and I was reminded that to be inside my own questions is to be exceptionally open to other peoples’ answers.

Everything is about reorienting ourselves to the Thing (with a capital T) that we’ve lost, which is…the Land. And collaboration is a recall of sorts of what we live without, and how we fill it with what we hope might be more.

Learning this land resonates

By
Canadian Native Flag by Curtis Wilson.
About the flag

My wife and kids love Canada Day. My kids are the colour of Canada, all Red and White. Literally. My wife grew up in Kanata. Her family has settler roots in the Ottawa Valley. My little Indians have red hair. Blue eyes. And status cards. Well, they will… once I send the paperwork away.

For me, it’s more complicated. I’m Nlakap’amux. Indigenous.

How are Indigenous people supposed to celebrate the birth of Canada? Most of what we call British Columbia is still un-ceded indigenous territory. Our people were never extinguished, conquered and our lands were never surrendered. That means Canada doesn’t even own it. It’s occupied territory.

My hometown is in the heart of un-ceded Nlakap’amux territory, in the province we now call British Columbia. The village I am from was called tlKumtcheen for over 10,000 years. In 1858, it was renamed after Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton the popular British novelist, poet and occultist famous for quotes like: “It was a dark and stormy night…” and “The pen is mightier than the sword”. This last one is ironic on many levels, but the shared history between Canada and the First Nations adds another layer.

In 1858, my people, the Nlakap’amux, led an uprising against an American invasion of Gold Seekers who had flooded into the Fraser Canyon in search of the shiny, soft, yellow stones. For several months that summer we were attacked and we counter-attacked hordes of bloodthirsty Americans fresh from the brutal, genocidal Indian wars in the States. We fought and eventually pushed them out of the Fraser Canyon that summer.

The Nlakap’amux signed a peace accord with one of the militias invading our territory. A few weeks later James Douglas, the British Governor of Vancouver Island; having no army or jurisdiction on the mainland at all, took advantage of our rebuttal against the invading Americans. Hoping to discourage the Americans from annexing the territory, Douglas floated into the Fraser Canyon with a dozen Royal Engineers and declared all the mainland to be a crown colony of England.

There were no treaties and there was no discussion with the 198 distinct First Nations who had lived and thrived there. He then went about renaming important settlements in the region after familiar British icons. Like Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The Canyon War was over, but the real war against our people had just begun.

In the following century, our populations were decimated. Disease wiped out entire villages. There are mass graves all along the Fraser Canyon, some just off the side of the Trans-Canada Highway. Forgotten by all except the Nlakap’amux Tribal Council genealogy department where my job as a student was to document them in case someone wanted to build a rest area on top of them. Successive gold rushes farther inland meant that the world ran through our territory repeatedly, renaming and reshaping it as they passed. Alcohol and the disasters that follow in its wake were introduced and to this day remain a continuing threat to our people.

We were resettled to smaller, inadequate, and in many cases arbitrary, reserves. Then we were forbidden to leave them without permission. We were told to be farmers, which we became. But when we started out-competing the white farmers, we were forbidden from selling our goods outside of the reserves. So, our farms went under. We were forbidden from selling salmon which for centuries had been our primary trade good.

We were told our children needed to be educated to live in this new reality and that we had to send our kids to Indian Residential Schools to learn. There we were taught by the priests that we were inferior to whites, that our language was the Devil’s tongue, our culture the Devil’s way, all the while the real devils preyed upon on our children in the night.

It is no wonder that the Nlakap’amux word for white person ShA-ma means White Devil. From our shared history, you can see why.

When I think of Canada 150 I think of the Indigenous soldiers who fought in every war this country was involved in, only to return home to social and legislative discrimination. I think of the Indigenous children who grow up in a hopeless world and form suicide pacts to find a common bond in despair. I think of the unending rage and hatred towards our people spouted on social media and the comments sections of news sites. The legislated inequities that are forced upon us by successive governments. And I think of the continued erosion of the natural world that we all depend upon for survival.

The truth is I want to celebrate Canada. I want to be able to join in and say, “hey, you know what? It’s not so bad. All that history stuff doesn’t matter. It happened a long time ago. It’s all good now, right?”

Except it isn’t. It’s still happening. Today. Right now. In your hometown. My hometown.

I suppose we can celebrate our continued existence. Our resiliency. Our resistance against the government and corporate forces bent on environmental degradation. Our ability to find the humour in the darkest of moments. Our ingenuity. Our passion. Our love. For Mother Earth. For Turtle Island. For each other.

I think of the kind words of my wise friend Terry Aleck, one of the first people to bring charges against the church and the government for the abuses he suffered in the Residential School system. “Everything is a healing journey. We’re all just learning together.”

My grandmother, who was a British War Bride (and the source of my children’s red locks), was recognized as an honorary elder of the N’lakap’amux people. Every year for the Remembrance Day pow wow she would proudly lead the Grand Entry in her Air Force uniform. She was honoured to do it, and the Nlakap’amux people were proud of her. Everyone called her Grandma Love because that was how she addressed everyone. “Hello love.” And you knew she was talking to you.

When my Great Aunt Rita Haugen, our family’s matriarch, met my daughter for the first time, she looked into her sparkling blue eyes and admired her red curly hair. She said to me, “Oh she’s my sister’s baby! Grandma Love would be so proud!”

That’s the Canada I want to celebrate. The one that places us side by side, honours one another, our contributions, our sacrifices, our shared history, our families, unflinching, with respect for all.

We’re all just learning. There is still a lot of history to unpack, a lot of tragedy ongoing, a lot of healing to be done. We’re all just learning to be partners and allies, in the chorus of this land…

Zeitgeist or Die -Part I

By
A woman sits in a plaza, leaning over a journal and ipad as she writes.
Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

ZEITGEIST OR DIE

I want to say it was “serendipitous” but something about that word choice feels sleazy.

We, a group of creators – actor, actor, actor, playwright, director, assistant director– got together to work on an embryonic first draft, the same day, the Globe & Mail published “UNFOUNDED: an investigation on how police handle sexual assault cases.”

Our play, Behaviour, was about a certain species of sexual violence that sidles by, frequently eluding the capital “R” designation. So, not the kind you’d structure an SVU episode around, and certainly not the type that the Globe & Mail was reporting on. We were concerned with the more quotidian, run-of-the-mill violations. Ours was the stuff of groping friends and friends-of-friends, handsy bosses and mentors, lecherous cousins and uncles.

“Intimate partner violence.”

“Workplace harassment.”

“Molestation.”

But while the cases profiled in “Unfounded” weren’t really the subject of our work, it did seem to bestow an air of relevance? As Toronto theatre people – and maybe artists writ large— some stamp of zeitgeist-proximate material is all but irresistible. So we noted the coincidence, and read the article with piqued consideration.

Two figures lie on the ground, and two stand, facing the wall, hunched.
Workshop participants.

II.

work·shop

ˈwərkˌSHäp/

verb

gerund or present participle: workshopping

We began with the appropriate gusto. Introductions, table read, discussion, another table read, floor rolling, walking on a grid, walking on a grid lan-guid-ly, walking on a grid and stopping, walking on a grid but also pointing, walking on a grid but now you can stop or point or, I kid you not, swizzle.

It’s too easy to make fun of process! Believe me, depths of feeling are contained in the verb to swizzle. I took them in and tried to, with stick figures, capture the evocative body-shape-contortion-imagery for potential reenactments later. While doing this, I turned myself into a human thesaurus. The director would nod at me for new synonyms to spark inspiration: now ACUTELY, now LANGUIDLY, now IRATE, now BLASÉ!

The thing with ‘workshopping,’ and for that matter regular rehearsing, and maybe any kind of mushy creation process, is an indeterminate amount of the stuff you do, you just do it. The Nike maxim really does hold. You have to go for the “it” with optimism that somehow the tangential comments, the weird off-topic convos, the rolling on the floor and braying and bleating, the twitching and writhing – that all this, will somehow “inform the work.”

It’s too easy to lampoon actors and I sometimes succumb to the easy laugh myself when telling my friends with 9to5s what I did that day. But the best work does happen after the floor thrashing. And even I, non-performer that I am, have a better brain after forced sun salutes. 

Four actors stand in a cluster in the middle of a blackbox theatre, with their arms extended wide.
Actors generating material.

III.

YES! AND?!

Beyond finding the physical vocabulary and emotional landscape of our play, there were certain moments hitherto unwritten that we wanted the actors to explore. I’ve been cornered by enough improv bros at enough parties to know that “Yes and” is not only an incredible comedy directive, but also a creed to live by. Even so, there’s something exasperating about watching polished actors one-up with one-liners. Yes and builds a scene with a galloping propulsion that can eschew certain sidesteps, fumbling, stillness.

YES! we wanted the actors to generate material. AND! we wanted them to do so without being overly conscious of “generating material.” How do you unburden performers from the pressure to perform while observing their actions assiduously? Moreover, the working title was BEHAVIOUR. With our interest largely being in the non-verbal variety. The unconscious shrugs, and tics, and gesticulations, what happens when the words have stopped. How could we encourage the actors to just “be.”

“They’re not SCENES or SKETCHES, they’re ÉTUDES” the director announced. A technique he’d learned while studying at the Moscow Art Theatre. If I was skeptical that a fussy French designation would alter how actors related to each other, joke’s on me. The shift was subtle but potent; there was an immediate adjustment, even just in how the actors held themselves. Somehow they were alright with letting lines drop, allowing things to be boring and in their boringness, in their lack of zings and emotional swells, preternaturally absorbing. The playwright beat notes on her laptop frantically, while the actors “behaved.”

IV.

THEATRE ≠ THERAPY

There’s a lot of contemporizing statements we use when talking about new work. You have to take observational risks to offer something actually useful, but to stray too far from the familiar is dicey. So too when talking about rape – especially for men, especially cis-straight men, two of which were at our table. But when a group of women get started, sometimes it’s hard to stop. In my role as pseudo-stage manager I was supposed to act as a kind of timekeeper. I sucked at this job. I had a strong reticence about trying to push things along. I wanted to share my not-quite-pertinent-but-of-course-tangentially-related violations. Some aspect of that would surely shed light on the piece in some way?!?!

How do you marshal this kind of personal history, trauma, lived-experience into theatre? How do you ignore it? Lots of people are at pains to point out that theatre IS NOT, CAN NOT, be “therapy.” Calling a play “therapy on stage” is worse than calling it sitcom-y. It’s an accusation of unforgivable indulgence; a designation to make pathos humiliating.

TBC Next Week: Stay tuned for Part 2 

 

 

1...8910...56Page 9 of 56
SpiderWebShow.ca is the first live-to-digital performance hybrid company in Canada. We are obsessed with cultural change.
© 2018 SpiderWebShow