11/6/2018 6 Comments localiteI live in a small city that is more or less half way between Toronto and Stratford. Once in a while the earth might crumble on the deep edge of Shaw’s footprint here too.
Two of our fewer-than-five professionally producing theatre companies have work in Toronto this season. MTSpace, who has been touring more and more as they grow, just brought their highly aesthetic Amal back from the RUTAS Festival while Paradise tours in the Middle East. GreenLight Arts are wrapping up their show Will You Be My Friend at TPM in Toronto this week. They will have a co-pro with Tarragon later this season as well. Our individual talent leaves the city fairly often too. After building KW Poetry Slam, co-producing a queer film festival, and performing and teaching like crazy for years, Janice Lee is a pertinent example of artists making an exodus. Countless others have given home less of a chance than Janice did. And I’ll be honest: coming back here to raise a family after my MFA was not the best career-move I could have made. There’s a long and divisive saga to tell in the Region’s road bumps, failures, and nearsightedness in it’s attempts to retain a progressive cultural sector. And a lot of local frustration, I think, on every side of that conversation. Today, our audiences are small, our criticism is rare or nonexistent (though trying!), and our venues are chronically overbooked or prohibitively expensive. But situated as we are, so close to Canada’s largest classical theatre companies, I think that audiences and artists alike want to see a certain production value represented in the work that happens here. Here is a message to my local peers: I don’t care if the curtains are red or if the lobby is carpeted or if you can fly elaborate backdrops into a tower. I care about artful urgent storytelling. Put it in a rusty tin can and I’ll be happy if the play and performances are capable of making that tin can feel important. Our proverbial godparents would agree: Shakespeare did not write for venues like The Festival Theatre or The Barbican (quite the opposite, importantly). Peter Brook gave the MTSpace their namesake when he told the world all they need is an empty space, and my own practice is more and more concerned with Jerzy Grotowski’s importance of the actor … Of course, I’ll eat my words as the play I’m writing right now is turning out to be quite “big.” But rather than trying to fix our community why not fix my play? I’m saying all this after reading an article about audience etiquette which piqued my recent thinking about creating art that is capable of fitting into a given container—rather than the other way around. After producing a play inside a bar, I was just turned down an overly-ambitious application to the Chalmers Fellowship so that I could develop a kind of theatre which gives space for the audience to drink and sing and pick their noses. Unwrap those noisy candies, fart, and chat. (My proposal was impossibly big so I’ll adjust and re-apply later.) My little collective is named after a bonsai tree: something which, in nature, grows to the size of it’s container. Theatre artists work hard for their audiences and not the other way around. Everything, however, still needs a little seed and soil … As we struggle to find an empty space for cultural development here in Kitchener-Waterloo, I’ll argue the following to the grave: the container itself is not enough nuance to say anything that hasn’t been said. Immersive or site-responsive theatre, like post-dramatic theatre, has been around since Cro-Magnon started telling each other stories. It is just another vessel like those that Broadway and The West End have to offer. They’re all only any good according to how you use them—not that you use them. Last spring GreenLight Arts produced my play, Touch, inside an artificially enclosed storage space behind a start-up inside a previously abandoned post office. It wasn’t easy for the audience to have to stare at each other as they sat about eight feet across in the round. But, importantly, Matt White’s careful direction built that element into the theatricality and meaning of the storytelling. To me, that intentional and artful use of limited means is perfect. The question is -the problem- how do we grow? Where do we go from there? I don’t love losing our best talent to bigger promises in bigger communities. But change is percolating. And Kitchener-Waterloo is growing. Fast. Both in terms of population and gentrification. Whether this change is progressive or regressive, artistically speaking, we have to create our city's own work. Of course, trying to be creative with a lack of accessible performance spaces, we will eventually be forced to repeat the same kind of theatre again and again. (I mean, the same could be said of Stratford, Toronto, and Broadway ... ) So! As our city grows, what do they want to see? What does our audience want to come to? How do our politicians want to be represented? The ultimate point here: this city has forced us into the dexterity to really give them whatever will best utilize the resources available. What do you want? What do you want? More of the same? As for us artists, let's please not forget that, whatever the answer, we're sufficiently skilled to make it magnificent.
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