Earlier this year I wrapped up my Metcalf Internship studying Artistic Direction from the incredible team at The Theatre Centre. One of the many many things that drew my focus throughout the internship was a series of essays from Metcalf fellow, David Maggs. His most recent essay, Making Things Better Anyway, had me shouting “yes, YES” back at my screen as I read.
Are we ready to put audiences, rather than artists, at the centre of our practices, processes, and curation? And, if so, what does that mean? I resoundingly agree with David that we are overdue for a cosmic shift in how we make and develop art and performance. But I want to be extra careful about (re)defining the terms as we go. Centering the audience does not have to mean diluting nuanced expression with populist entertainment. Though I don’t think David would suggest such a thing, it would be too easy to misinterpret the diction of such a statement. Especially as our “post”-pandemic ecology makes audience development a humongous practical focus of producing. But what if plain entertainment were used as a vessel for social good? Look, I don’t hate joy. But David’s essay talks about the gap between what (political) art is doing and what it could be doing. Our artist-involvement in the climate crisis (or any crisis) tends to be about messaging, trying to fill a knowledge gap that doesn’t really exist, rather than about action. Every time we try to raise awareness we are forgetting that cultural events are activities and that it is action, itself, that is needed. But we seem unable to bridge the culture-making gap, the gap of (in)activity that we are falling into, without reconsidering how we make art, not merely why we make it. I grew up in a radically Catholic household. When conservatively stressed by the better good of the secular world, in that house, in that childhood, we prayed. We also prayed for people who needed help. This is a phenomenon called "spiritual bypassing." Rather than pursuing functional action, we meditated in community with focused and repetitive thoughts. I need to re-read Ranciere’s Emancipated Spectator. In Canada, we tend to train and reward actors as artists of emotion, playwrights as artists of dramatic action, and directors as artists of image. All of these tendencies, no matter how brilliantly holstered, continue to situate the audience as passive NPCs. Their participation is only circumstantial and hardly even necessary but for the benefit of the artist. Yuck. As long as our process of theatremaking relies on the creative skillsets listed above, used to highlight but not act upon the complex struggles of our present time, we are asking our audience to be subjugated to us. We are presuming to be better than our audiences. Every mettled theatre artist knows we are never—ever—better than our audiences. And don’t get me wrong, I know that we want nothing more than to love and honour audiences. We’re in agreement about that. But, unless love is an open, vulnerable, two-way street, it ain’t a healthy relationship, baby! I’ve pontificated on it before. Despite my criticisms, we absolutely have been recognizing symptoms of this and been desperately tripping over ourselves to innovate the form. Theatre has been trying to lead the just culture wars of identity politics and pointedly benefitting any use of digital and emerging technologies. But all that has merely adjusted the trappings of making art, not the essence of it. Spiritual bypassing is not merely short of its goals because of its inactive uselessness, but also problematic to a community because it encourages silo'd thinking and causes the nuanced complexity of understanding multiple approaches to a "problem" to become much more difficult for someone to see. When we literally repeat ourselves to ourselves, when we voice litanies to pursue good, we train our brain to focus and not to question or explore. I'm worried that, despite the very best of intentions, theatre is also becoming too narrow. Not only too narrow in its pursuit to necessarily uplift good things, but absolutely failing to explore how best to uplift those things. And how doing that today is different than it was yesterday or will be tomorrow. I may have been failing to finish some creative projects and certainly failing to impress people at pitch-meetings because I am trying to fight against the narrow expertise of my training and not see theatre as an artform of emotions or dramatic action or beautiful images, but trying to see theatre as an artform that occurs within the experience of the audience. It isn’t even on stage. The stage is just a tool. The play occurs literally inside the audience’s psyches, bodies, communities, etcetera. Consider Tim Crouch whose work has asked audience volunteers to (help) tell the story. Consider Darren O’Donnel who art-ified social interaction. Add Brecht to the mix, who asked us to put contemporary political metaphor before emotion. What if these were all taken together and, together, taken one step further? I think I’m writing this blog after David’s essay from a desire to move out of theory and into praxis, out of spiritual bypassing and into our muscles. And, hell, I’m going to fail at my own demands (but if it weren’t a process rather than a destination, it wouldn’t be so worth pursuing). If you’re in Toronto, maybe consider going to The Theatre Centre tonight to see work.text. I’m unable to make it to the show so you’ll have to tell me about it. The piece uses playful, voluntary audience action to build and enact a unique performance that becomes critical of the capitalist vice of a workday. I love poetry and emotions and action and images as much as anyone (I even put Karl Paulnack's beautiful argument for it right in the middle of my linktree) but work.text seems to me the much more interesting and affecting future of relevant theatre-making. I had time to write this because I’m sick. So I might not make it to much of the MTSpace's Impact Festival here in Kitchener right now either. But hopefully I’ll see you there before the end of it and you can tell me how wrong I am. Ha! A final articulation. We’ll never develop how unless we can articulate why. If you want to make art for your own benefit—fine, please do! If you want to make art for the benefit of others—don’t tell them about the climate crisis (or any crisis), ratify their expertise on the climate crisis and provide opportunity for activity and metaphor to become movement and action. And, if you can, include plenty of joy. That's it. If that makes you nervous, I ask, do you trust your audiences? If you don't, should they trust you? Maybe you've got half the equation down. But, like I said, love is best as a two way street. And if the pundits are otherwise critical, invoke the scientific method. Okay, that’s my soap-box for the day. Memento mori, my loves!
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9/1/2022 0 Comments On Teaching in the ArtsI started assisting dance teachers in my early teens.
I started teaching drama workshops in my late teens. I started teaching creative writing in just the last five years or so. I've lead regular weekly classes in all three of these disciplines, with returning students, for roughly twenty years. Though my current "bread-and-butter" is working with teenagers, I've taught artists from as young as 3 up to people in their late 60's. As I take a brief hiatus from teaching this season, I'm looking back and collecting some causes for satisfaction. There are lots of different styles of teaching so not everything will necessarily jive with you. But, in no particular order, here is a mad list of items for success in the studio. Maybe these tidbits of experience will help students and teachers alike to arrive at those golden moments we all live for. Teachers: Tell them your plans. They don’t have to understand the long game but knowing that you have one will help when they get bored, frustrated, or impatient with an exercise or with a peer, etc. Know that you probably won’t see your students’ best work: build curriculum that aims to collaborate with the future. Demistify everything! Our hero’s are only people. No one needs a pedestal. Be as pragmatic as possible 100% of the time. Overpreparing for the studio time can be just as fatal as underpreparing. Know your content. Remain nimble. A culture of progressive collaboration will serve everyone better in the long run than a culture of competition. No one has to lose if no one has to win. We're here to learn and grow. Young people, especially, may bring a lot of their daemons, growth, insecurities, confusion, etc. to their creative practice. You have responsibilities. Schedule at LEAST two minutes at the beginning and end of each class to make sure everyone is okay. Ensuring everyone's emotional safety doesn’t have to look like an AA meeting. It could be almost any ritual, a stretch or a breathing exercise or a joke. But don't be afraid to check-in if it feels germane, too. And know what to do if someone says they're struggling. When people say "you set the tone" it won't feel like it if your students want to challenge you. But you do. And they will. Challenging you is a way of engaging with you. If they're wrong about something, it's your job to tell them. But challenging authority will do them good in the future, it's your job to support some of that too. Absolutely no one needs to be "broken down" in order to be an artist. Nor does a classroom need to be competitive to build success. Such notions are draconic and anachronistic. Having a "safe space" does not mean forcing people to go to difficult territory. It may mean showing them how they are capable of approaching difficult territory. Be soft if they do. And still reward them with your attention if they choose not to. One’s body, not psyche, is the safest route to one’s feelings. Breathe towards the feelings and breathe away from them. Breath is everything. Wait to use your brain till after. Talking to parents & caregivers is unpaid labour but a crucial part of teaching. Even a brief chat about the weather can tell you so much! I've had English-fluent students from homes with no English at all, parents who expect to see their teen headlining broadway next week, parents who expect their 9-year-old children to be corporate lawyers, and parents who use their child's dead-name. Having information like this will help you see your students more thoroughly, help you find their own unique goals, to motivate them, affirm, and manage their expectations. If someone asks for regular private lessons, try to say no! No, no, no. One-on-one can be incredible, especially for technique, but it is not a substitute for a peer group. We will always grow better if we can grow with a group. It doesn't mean anyone ever has to be extraverted but we can all surely benefit from a context and a mirror. (And maybe they can pay less money but you can make more when it’s a group class rather than private). Be capable of what you’re asking of them. You don’t have to be good at it (you don’t have to be good at anything) but you have to know what it feels like in your body in order to lead it well. When it’s going really well, the class will adopt the unique little eccentricities you’re unconsciously giving them. Expose them to other artists and arts teachers to dilute this. Other voices, even a YouTube video, can open unimagined possibilities. If you can get the beginner students to witness the intermediate or advanced students, and vice versa, my golly, do! Often students get much better at the thing than they realize. Your words won’t convince them of this as much as (eventually) taking away their safety blanket. This could mean maybe taking their script away, separating them from their favourite peer, speeding up the music, etc. If you get the timing right—and you will—it’s a hugely rewarding day for everyone. Context is craft. If you have room to offer it, a ^little^ history of the form gives artists somewhere to go to and somewhere to expand from. There is no such thing as perfect. (+) Trying is succeeding. (=) Exploring the edge of one's comfort zone is an A+ every time. In this environment, polish is less important than development. Never ever tell beginners that what they’re doing is "hard." You can say it challenged others or just tell them it’s awesome. Your language shapes their approach to the work. Hot take and I'll stand by it: your students are more important than you. Yes they are. Unpack that? Start from the truth that this is their time and their vulnerability. Your time is paid for, your vulnerability is guided by your leadership. They have autonomy but they don't have the power you do. Put them first. Eat well. Have decently balanced blood sugar levels. This is a biggie. Finally: Laugh. Laugh as much as possible. And if you can’t laugh today because the your blood is too heavy, just be human about it, let them see small mistakes, ask them questions. Just never forget that we're doing this because we love this. And your students should love this too. Laugh a lot. Really. I wrote this somewhat self-indulgent fan letter a couple days ago. I never do this and certainly hadn't planned on sharing it. But I was emboldened by Julia Lederer's op-ed in Intermission Mag today. I'm not sure if it helps or hinders to receive her reminder that I'm not alone here. But at least it reminds me that it's okay to share these feelings publicly. After all, sharing feelings publicly is basically what I do, right? You can listen to Julia's hit play, "With Love and a Major Organ," right here. And do so quick because it's only up until the end of this weekend. * * * * * Dear Regina Spektor. I know every word of every song in your album, Far. I listened to the album enough that my wife, who turned me on to your music, got tired of me suggesting it. Then I got tired of it too for a while. No offence. I’m a Canadian playwright. Which means that I’ve forever doomed to never quite achieve what other people call “success.” Worse still, I’m a Canadian playwright at the end of 2021. I’m not entirely sure what that means but suffice to know that my own field isn’t presently interested in my profession. No one is reading scripts. As a matter of fact—I imagine the following is clearly paralleled in your field—a major Canadian theatre that is famous for taking important creative risks recently asked all creatives to sign off their rights and likeness indefinitely just to make a short project-pitch to them. I’ve heard horror stories about the music industry being much worse in this manner but, as the backlash washes gently off this company, I can see theatre heading in the same predatory direction as music. If it’s not already there, that is. What can I say? I’m still writing prolifically and I’d like to see my work in front of an audience, of course. I’m writing this to you from a parking lot on my way home from a meeting with a powerful gatekeeper to the Canadian theatre world. Just turned off the car after your song, Genius Next Door closed its last chord. It’s not safe to drive and cry at the same time. I realize that makes me sound like I think I’m a genius. Just the opposite. I make up stories and there’s almost no such thing as a truly original story. In fact, when I write in that successful-yet-stuffy way that most people think of playwrights writing, I get tremendously bored with myself. I’m interested in finding ways to toy with the live presence of the audience woven into the (probably not original) story. I’m more interested in the guerilla-surprising mysticism that happens when people who are forced to sit in the same room are suddenly breathing in unison. I think you’re probably much better at this than I am. The first time I heard Laughing With I was still deeply religious. Everyone thought I would love the song because I loved God. But the song challenged me and felt blasphemous to my ears. Did I actually think that God would do me favors if I “prayed the right way”? Yes, I think I did think that. Obviously, despite everything, I’d still not spent enough time talking to God. Or, at least, not attempting to listen with any nuance. How could you be so far ahead of me in just one song? You later sing, “he stumbled into faith and thought, God, this is all there is” and, over the subsequent years of my spiritual journey, that little concise lyric seemed to clean all the cobwebbed gum off of my sticky insecurities. Now I participate in the age-old tradition of seeking mysticism in art. And I find it. We work in ancient traditions, after all. Also, I don’t find it. My partner and I watched the first few minutes of Diana the Musical on Netflix before turning it off, aghast that such a lazily-made piece of musical storytelling was somehow already destined for Broadway. The night before we watched Tick Tick Boom only to be disappointed that an homage to an artist is never quite as good as that artist’s own work. I don’t know, maybe by virtue of being a New Yorker, you get more from that last one than I do. Fair enough. But considering how detailed and playful your songwriting is in contrast to these I’m still scoffing at the injustice of it. I think neither one of us may ever have a Broadway play. Meh. The meeting I just left lasted two hours. We talked about deeply personal things as well as the general theatre ecology before getting to the new scripts I was pitching. A warm and cozy brunch. I usually have a hard time finding ease when talking to the perceived giants of my field. But my comfort with this particular person might have to do with the fact that neither of us originated from the old-money security that produces most of the world’s theatre. And their small kindnesses around the work make me feel like, yes, despite everything, I do have a place in the artistic tapestry of our culture. When this person retires, however, I won’t have the same kind of relaxed brunch with their likely upper-echelon successor. They gently reminded me that there is currently no room for new plays here or there or anywhere. This news, however, came with a promise to read my script (even two or three scripts if I wanted to send more—which I will). But to what end? Of course, I can produce my own work but, as I said, I have a family. Pounding the pavement for peanuts at fringe festivals is a different kind of labour for those of us with a sliver of poverty trauma. It also means I can only write up to the ends of my capacity to produce, rather than to the ends of my passion for the art form. So, Regina, where am I going to go look for God now? You haven’t produced an album-length project since 2016. And I guess, this letter is simply to say, if you found the courage to cut through the bullshit of the music industry to bleed a little slice of your soul and, once again, spread it into our speakers, I’d be grateful. I appreciate that your last album didn’t continue the upward commercial momentum of Far and others. But if that matters then we stop taking risks, we stop being creative. That’s not a dig, more of a wish. I love your creative risks. Your first album was self-produced. And it merited your journey to writing television theme songs and achieving other such success-signals of your field. Maybe I’m writing to you for your hutzpah as much as your artistry. I try to roll up my sleeves as far as they’ll go. I’m developing a production of a friend’s script, I’m lobbying for a local venue, I’m sending opportunities to local actors. I do think all that is part of the work—though its slow going and I lose sight of what might be holding things back or pushing them forward. Maybe the core of my problem is my own impatience. But I’ve been taking this vocation seriously since I was 10. And, as I incessantly write, I feel that the work is surely getting better. So of course, I’m impatient. If they play Human of the Year at my funeral, that would be okay with me. Just as long as everyone understands, the song would be chosen for them, not for me. We do what we do for the people who are alive right now. I don’t think I’d be making theatre if I weren’t so desperately in love with everyone. Too few living people express it as thoroughly as you. And as this car is “beeping out a song just in your honor,” like Tick Tick Boom, it’s just not as good as the original. Here’s to the importance of creatives alive today. Some, true originals. It’s an uphill battle where no one has a road map. But please, send a new album. I’ll celebrate it more than the charts—no matter what they say. When it lifts me up more than your competitive industry might lift you, that’s part of the mysticism too. Isn't it? And—just--I could really use it right now. “This is why we fight.” Love, Ciarán Hey, incidentally, if anyone knows where fan mail gets directed ... or if you can use your 6 degrees of separation to get the above read by its addressee, that might be kind of nice for everyone? Peace! 4/26/2021 2 Comments Why It's DifferentHey, remember last summer when Tiger King got us through all the fresh hot anxiety of the first wave? It was good! Seemed like every minute of screen time advanced the story in the most ludicrous but believable way. The characters behaved more unpredictably than in fiction. And yet, still arrived at the most-inevitable ending. The whole thing was as mad and messy as poetic. It provided the catharsis we needed.
Leading up to Tiger King (and somewhat since) my field scrambled like mad to “save the people (or the medium?)” with fresh storytelling and performance. The Social Distancing Festival was created to platform canceled performance and the National Arts Centre started to toss funding at the quickest performers to apply for it. As ceaselessness provided momentum to fine-tune and streamline these efforts, political administration followed the trend: it seems to me as though arts funding in Canada hasn’t been this good since Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister. No? And why not? Society is addicted to stories. I mean, Hollywood is one of the richest industries on the continent. I have been devoting my life to telling stories (and story-ing myself with the idea that doing so must be something like noble?). What is a story anyway? When proposing my present collaboration with the Registry Theatre, I cited an idea from children’s psychology, that storytelling can help people exorcise trauma. The act of seeing a fictional character through change, perhaps turmoil, and into new maturity, has a healing effect on our psyches. I’m no longer talking about catharsis (though that’s still welcome). Within the context of Storytelling Therapy reality is socially constructed. This means that there is freedom to see multiple realities of the same event(s) through multiple constructions. One of these constructions might be your trauma. Right now, the world is experiencing trauma. If this is the case, then story is capable of seeing your trauma through a character arch. Consideer Campbell’s Hero’s Journey through the specific lens of a post-traumatic lifecycle: reluctance to act, supernatural aid, various thresholds, innermost cave, overcoming desire and authority, always moving and never sitting still, all the way through to a denouement of mastering both the Before and After with new freedom to live in peace. It shouldn’t be a great surprise that our psychological needs are the fabric of our most universal traditions. The structure allows trauma to be perceived through various and complex angles but always leads to a healthier completion. I’m not an expert here but I’ve been made to understand that this is a low-risk form of therapy because fiction is considered mostly harmless. I think this is one of the reasons we like cartoon violence. I think it’s one of the reasons we keep rewarding dark and difficult theatre. We know from the best storytellers, through catharsis or not, that facing the worst of ourselves can be extremely beautiful. But lately, when I open my laptop to participate in the art form that's obsessed me most my life, it leaves me feeling dull and hungry. I still like TV as much as anyone. I adore good cinema. Why don’t I like digital theatre so much? Whether theatre is actually theatre when it’s on a screen is just semantics. Still, though. Thou shalt not judge one on the virtues of the other. You’ve been told that, when viewing a live theatrical performance, the audience’s heartbeats will actually sync-up. Live theatre can unify an audience in the most elementally physiological way. There is another warm body in control of the narrative carrying and encouraging us through its joys and turmoils. I don’t think there is anything more vital than a good actor’s breath and presence in reciprocity with an audience’s. It’s the same in traditional therapy: there is another person whose body language, breath, and presence make all the difference in the world to whether or not it's working. But only in relation to your own living physiology. In an interview with Expect Theatre’s PlayMe podcast after their production of his very dark play, Huff, Cliff Cardinal says, “You have to be there for the audience … If you do a bad show couples start arguing on the way out, people get into fights … If you do a bad show, everybody’s in danger.” By the craft of the best actors and directors, theatre has a unique capacity to go deeper and further into harder and harder territory, because it carries you gently through it the whole way. I’ve been watching Fargo on Netflix lately … and it’s really good. Close-range shotgun pellets toss fresh human brains across the room in almost every episode. Wait, what? TV and cinema are visual mediums on a cold flat screen. And I’m crazy about the mad irony when Joe Exotic fetches his black leather jacket with the medic symbol on it then announces the catastrophe to the unsuspecting gift shop BEFORE going to help Kelci Saffery who just had his arm torn off by a tiger. Beautiful storytelling, just beautiful. So how come film and television can take us through such horrific things without a warm actor’s breath in charge of the pace? In this realm, images are in charge of the pace. And the pace on a flat screen is often a lot slower than it feels, even when the images are going by a mile a minute. That is because, in film and television, the viewer is in charge of their own emotional journey. Establishing scenes, short transition shots, the prolifically-filmed slow pans masked by a good soundtrack, etc., are all spaces for the viewer to process the story on their own. Or, for some shows, they’re spaces for the viewer to subconsciously process their day, despite the story. I venture that film and television are a little closer to meditation and theatre closer to collaboration. Quote me on that. Neither is better than the other, but certainly different. This is also part of the reason that—particularly as theatre has been getting shorter over the last century and TV episodes getting longer over the last decade—we have come to expect more story packed into a play than into an episode of Fargo, say. I don’t feel that theatre made for a digital screen is failing me because it isn’t good. Some of it is magnificent. But a lot of digital theatre is doing its very best work without access to its very best vessel: the audience. Then why did I enjoy watching Hamilton on Disney+ so much? Or what little I caught from National Theatre Live? Or even this archival smartphone video of my own budgetless scrap of theatre? These were performed for a live audience and filming was secondary to that. More importantly, the audiences’ presence can be felt in the performers. When Prairie Theatre Exchange produced Katharsis and when CBC platformed Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures, there was no audience. But these worked for me because every directorial choice, particularly in the former, was made to acknowledge that problem. And, while packing character-narrative tightly like theatre tends to, these were short enough not to risk exhausting us with their density. But when the same thoughtful director who gave us Katharsis did Post Democracy, an impeccably tight script from one of the most celebrated playwrights in the country and delivered through tremendously complex performances, I daresay I felt a little bit robbed of something. Times I’ve participated in this grand-pivot it was certainly nice to move through the beats of a play with actors in rehearsal. A real gift. But the moment the audience left our zoom screens and all of us were alone in our disparate rooms, it became clear too-little was gained by all the efforts. That feeling was echoed in the curtain call of Post Democracy when the four tremendous actors bowed to a silent room, donned their face masks, and exited in different directions. I was invested enough in their work to feel the loss in that moment. Crucially: without their artful presence to help move me through that loss. That moment a punctuating symbol of missing it throughout. So what are performance-makers to do in the meantime? We've been trying to develop new audience-expertise in two dimensions. We have to eat and pay rent. But when we eventually enter herd-immunity, what will become of the investments we’ve made being beginners at different skill-sets? Will we still reap the benefits of this temporarily increase in arts funding? If so, what about the funding’s long insistence on producing digital work? There has been an endless chorus about supporting the artists through this moment in history. And, yes, I do believe we are crucial. One fear I have is that it may be feast now and famine after. But much more importantly, in the meantime, we haven’t supported our audiences in the ways we know best. Navigating all this has caused many of us to put the artists’ needs before the audiences’. Both naturally and accidentally. It’s a shame. And I hope it’s a lesson we never forget. I hope we have both the love and the resources to make up for such a sin. Because, truly, all of us want nothing more than to hold you on our breath, to carry you through the universal challenges of being ourselves, and to physically share the deeply unique beauties that lie on the other side of that communion. Until then, I don’t think there is a right answer other than to continue being a beginner at something only adjacent to the traditions and training most of us have. But we absolutely must find ways to put our audiences before ourselves in whatever future we are moving towards. If not, we're here for the wrong reasons. As Cliff Cardinal says, we can put people in danger. Taco Tuesday at a tiny pub on Front Street, 2019. I’m sitting with three beautiful strangers who are also participating in the Director’s Lab in Toronto. The show starts in 25 minutes and our pints are still half-full. We shave off hot-button topics between mouthfuls of the cheapest things on menu. Indulging in the fear and tension of testing each other, we’re excited for the company. The clock is ticking and we’re ravenous in the dance of getting-to-know. We tip the waitress as much as we can—not nearly enough—and tumble into the street, a light and raucous chorus with the city spinning its approval around. Our bags rattle as we run into the theatre lobby at the exquisitely last second.
The usher asks us to remove our backpacks and we suddenly notice thin beads of taco-fueled joy dampening our skin. We’re sent down a short bending hallway, unceremoniously vast and industrial, leading to a heavy door that matches. On the other side is one of the biggest rooms I have walked into in a long time. There is a romantic pathway of candles that hug the wall from the door and lead through the darkness to a miss-matched array of furniture under a high tent of fairy lights. We’re suddenly moving slow and can hear our own hearts. The silent crowd picks a place to sit, a stool or ottoman, a park bench or pouffe, and faces each other in a grand staggered circle. About a month from this moment Ronnie Burkett will be inducted into the Order of Canada for his work in puppetry. I’d never heard of him. He arrives formidably dressed in a great hooded habit, facelessly reciting something about love, elevated and melancholic. It feels like it could be from Milton or the Torah. But, admittedly, I’m still tasting my taco from the moment earlier and feel a bit too dazed to catch up. Once the thickness settles—of my belly and the performance, quickly, simultaneously—we’re allowed into Ronnie’s eyes and the intimacy of his more living-room voice. He invites us to form a line across the performance space. “This is the most important walk you will go on today,” he says, “and the most important walk of my life.” The procession is suddenly scary-exciting. At the end of our short procession is a great open chest: one handmade puppet each. He has instructed us how to animate these particular hand puppets. There are different ways of doing it but, with your index finger in the head and your thumb and pinky extended into the hands, when you hold your puppet up its very bones sign to the world, “I love you.” Each with their own unique head, face, and personality, our puppets can nod and bow, they can dance, they can shake hands with other puppets, and they can hug. We’re invited to indulge in their dexterities. My puppet hugs another and I feel the bones of my I-love-you hand wrap around a stranger’s. It is more intimate than I had felt in a long time. My puppet is old and sad. His thin jaw gently slacked and his eyebrows droop down at either side. Others’ are older and younger; the room fills with twice as many genders and identities as it had when we first sat down. A sea of their pale clothes and little heads fill my eye-line across the space like hundreds of eager sentinels fixated on Ronnie and his puppets, performing the story. As the show goes on I realize I’m not watching it at all, my puppet is. What’s more, that by engaging in the show through the eyes and ears of my ever-attentive puppet, I’m able to enjoy it more ruthlessly, less judgmentally, with a sudden and strange kinship to the puppets that are performing and to all the tiny spectators around. Am I performing—in this moment—is my puppet performing? It begins as a ridiculous and nearly gross show. Cartoonish carnies selfishly manipulating for their own jollies. I look at my puppet and his slack-jaw that was so endearing a moment ago signifies the willing soma of a selfish sexual indulgence. This sudden grossness is made all the more meaningful by having unified myself with the puppet so thoroughly the moment before. Or is this closer to the truth: am I looking into a mirror of sorts and it’s me who loves the lewdness of these crude characters? Between the puppet and I, who is a projection onto whom? And, through this performance, what am I discovering about myself? The show won’t allow me to indulge in these thoughts for long. New characters are introduced, held up by strings that are delicate and beautiful. Their smallness creates intimacy. Their faces and postures communicate decades. The poetry of their dialogue makes me feel precious again. This whiplashing rollercoaster of a play fictionally portrays the danger of a world where reading and writing are illegal. In order to love each other across great distances the illiterate create and send forbidden messages through a gentle gatekeeper, made mystic by her inaccessibility, elevated alone on a cake-like throne. The storytelling is messy and vast, precious and unpretentious. And we, the audience, are constantly asked to take part. We are invited to control the performance’s soundtrack, taking turns to haphazardly place vinyl on an amplified turntable (keeping us down-to-earth with its pops and cracks). We carry our puppets across the room to surround the sensitive tenderness of one tiny scene only to find that our chairs are taken by other members of the audience. We circle the story, as it progresses, in a quiet game of musical chairs. We are touched, willingly and kindly, in a perfect respite far away from earlier scenes’ vulgarity. We are challenged to speak out and interrupt a climactic injustice near the end of the play. And then we feel complicit when we do not. We are invited to speak and we are indulgent in silences. I am my puppet. Absolutely. And I imagine Ronnie would agree, he is his. Through the story’s range out of bawdy clownishness, to poetic elevation, and slow startling intimacy, to a punctuation of guilt and violence, we hold ourselves up to each other, constantly: I love you. And, through the story, containing all the glorious mess that love entails. 10am the next day, the thirty-or-so artists participating in this year’s Director’s Lab circle our chairs in a rehearsal studio at the Tarragon Theatre. We start our day with a broader continuation of the previous night’s dinnertime chats. Already exhausted by the burning questions brought to each other but thrilled to keep soldiering them through. How do we build accountability into our rehearsals? How integral is immersion to an audience’s experience and what counts as immersive? Holy shit, you mounted that spectacle with only one week of rehearsal? Well done! Then Ronnie Burkett arrives for his Q & A and we applaud the perfectly sleepless aging gay as he crosses to his chair. His simple human charm is a big part of the success of his performance. And he brings it with him, sans-puppets, today. We learn how he works: monk-like, waking up in the wee hours for years at a time to build his puppets by hand. While building, he develops a sense of the performances they’ll inhabit—the feel, the topics, who the puppets may be, how they’ll weave together—long before anything is rehearsed or written. Then, once the characters are built he’ll rehearse the new production in, what seems to me, a frightfully short period. True to many world traditions of puppetry, he is generous with information. It is custom to pass it down through practitioners and maintain a philosophy of openness. He keeps a library of literally thousands of books on the subject, lending freely to younger artists. While tools are tools and materials mere materials, the incredible preciousness of his process is clear by the alighting youthfulness that animates him. Free from the bustle of Toronto sunshine, the early hours provide a sense of unification with the traditions he invokes. His deceased mentors have the silence and the darkness to be welcomed there … there is room for these ghosts to appeal to the larger history: the millions who have traded poverty for their vocation; noble histories of past performers risking death to secretly entertain under Nazi occupation; the accessibility of object-driven and mask-theatre holding the mantle of performance art during historic austerities; the universality of puppetry in nurseries and classrooms across the world; the younger artists Ronnie supports and inspires right now … can all gently wash around a room when it is four o’clock in the morning. This is where the work begins in puppet-building. To him, a puppet is a shape of an idea in motion, witnessed. Like any wonderful idea, a puppet is both complex and simple. A puppet takes time. I find myself entertaining the morbid thought of who will inherit this sacred studio when he dies. He talks about audience integration. There is elbowroom within his performances for the needs of the moment. He aims to meet the audience where they are at. “In jazz, a musician must honour the text but play wildly with the melody.” One of his pre-show rituals is to spy on us. This gives him a sense of where he can go with the evening’s performance. Who he can rely on to help take the night where it needs to go and who might need help along the way. He has the quietly charismatic trappings and sensitivities to ask the audience to only do authentic things. Authentic—but highly specific. And they always do. “There are plays,” he gripes conspiratorially, “called immersive but what really happens is the action gets interrupted so you can follow a young actor somewhere and then you have to watch the play while sitting on the floor of a barber shop or something. That’s not immersive. That’s just watching actors from a dusty floor.” In his show, we aren’t immersed by the space so much as we are by the shape of the storytelling itself. Ronnie is only sixty-two years young but fifty years into his vocation. At this stage, he tells us, he is only now achieving the things he is searching for in an audience-performer relationship. He insists that puppetry is high art that works best when it is low art. But still kisses the floor before working in a new venue. This is impossibly communicated in his performance. That skill to unlock a certain connection with the audience, truly integrating them with a high-level of hidden and nuanced subtlety, he says, is only sincerely arriving, fifty years in to the job. In the next breath, “I’m going to have surgery on my hand.” Years of this work have taken their toll on his body. The moment of achieving these quieter successes takes it away. “I maybe have 22 more good years if I take care. I’ll keep working until the last second. It’s going to hurt.” Then, as if we all agree, he says “it should hurt.” It’s 1 o’clock in the morning again.
What I love about visual art that literature can’t do is how the viewers’ experience of it may exist outside of time. You can peripherally process a shape on one part of the canvass while looking at a shape on a different part of the canvass and, as your synapses connect the two, have already moved your attention to a third area without thinking about it. You don’t move your eyes across canvassed oil pigments the same way you do across a line of written text. I used to think, perhaps from the romanticism of knowing little about its mechanics, that music was the most affecting art form for its capacity to surpass logic and language and jump straight to emotions. But, if art, the same can be said of scent. Music is too similar to poetry, literature and theatre in this respect, it only occurs in time. I wrote a poem inspired by Rousseau’s The Dream in which I tried to emulate its freedom from a linear viewer experience. One of the things I love most about that painting is how it can surprise you: you don’t know what you have already been processing until you have looked at it more closely. In this way, certainly, the viewer’s experience of it exists in time as well. However, by the repetition of similar shapes scattered across the canvass, Rousseau draws you in to the arrival of recognition by allowing your brain to process the images before you are aware of them. Layered within that process, the painting’s invitation to the viewer to be aware of separate elements to interchangeably different degrees all at once, is much closer to how people think than language is. Most of the time, we don’t think linearly. My thought process is typically shaped more like a shadowed map than a sentence. If a composer or a writer used Rousseau's technique to attempt to make their audiences’ experience nonlinear in this way, it would have the opposite effect. Callbacks and repetition, in these mediums, serve to help us build a maturing relationship with the content and therefore remind us of time’s passing. In my poem from the painting, I attempted to try this by separating stanzas from right to left as well as from top to bottom—a device in contemporary poetry which I usually despise for its tendency to dilute, to me, the writer’s experience of the impulse of the poem. I wanted to make it ambiguous as to where a recitation of the poem should begin the stanza on the right in the middle of the stanza on the left or after it. Or if the two stanzas should be recited in tandem, their lines leapfrogging and interchanging. Had I been more ambitious, stanzas on the right would contain more detail or story but I didn’t want to confound the reader with extraneous details—or myself for that matter. Without a correct answer about how the stanzas are to be arranged I attempted, and failed, to make this poem like the painting that it praises. Or like a painting, in general. I also paid homage to the painting’s use of repetition. However, with an effort to banish the experience of time passing I compacted the repetition, placing words immediately next to themselves rather than calling back to them from a distance, attempting to stall time rather than highlight it. Ultimately, perhaps because I learned poetry from within conservative literary traditions, I felt the need to build towards this structure and then to denouement from it, supporting it with—pun intended—a frame. But, alas, doing so ensures that any whole experience of the poem occurs in a linear beginning-to-end like music and stories must. I haven’t slept well enough lately to presently pull from a properly exhaustive catalogue but to my knowledge there are few popular works of art, outside of painting, that occur in the audiences’ experience in the nonlinear way that thoughts do. Samuel Beckett certainly attempted it throughout his career. His short plays, Not I, Rockaby, and Footfalls come to mind. But in order to approach that experience the pieces had to be brief in content. Being brief, of course, they lose the full potential of their hypnotism. I think this is particularly true to a present-day audience that has already been touched by these works even prior to seeing them. By having a second character in Not I however, a tall vague human figure shrugging its shoulders in the distance, Samuel Beckett might have succeeded. The existence of that figure has a rationality but its conjecture in context with the rest of the piece in performance is not rational: it’s emotional. Like dreams, like music. The beauty of this is that the figure is neither dramatic, like most western theatre, nor literary. It succeeds, perhaps, because it is visual. To call you back through time for a quick simile: it’s like Rousseau’s canvass. Unfortunately, that figure is completely omitted from most contemporary productions of the play. The opening sequence to Apocalypse Now comes close as well. But again, that’s a visual use of a visual medium. Sarah Kane wrote dramatically active performance text. Fight me, she did. But in an interview with Dan Rebellato she famously demonstrated a way of toying with structure which separates plot from story through fragmentation. Just as theatre itself—because time itself—cannot be experienced as a whole but as a moment, Sarah Kane’s representation of a self arrives fragmented, lacking a whole, and therefore separated from its own story. In writing, she achieved this in her in-yer-face play, 4:48 Psychosis. Lacking in Kane’s trauma, I hope that my poem is a little more palatable to the sensitive spirit. I’ve only ever seen a student production of 4:48 Psychosis so I may not have been exposed to its broader traditions of staging. But I’d posit that, for the first while, the audience will be fighting the text to arrive at a linear experience of it while Sarah Kane insists them away from such traditional notions. How would you relieve the audience of such unnecessary labour in a traditional theatre staging? You would have to Artoud it: surround the audience with it on all sides, make it impossible to search for a beginning-middle-end right off the top so that the audience can live inside the character’s experience of herself, fragmented. Like thoughts. My poem, obviously, is completely incapable of immersing the audience because a poem is two-damn-dimensional. Visual art, however, manages it all the time. Or, as the case may be, manages it outside of time. Not always well. But you don’t have to do things well to achieve them. I’ve only just sent my poem to a literary magazine to receive the very first in its official litany of rejections. So, no, you can’t read it yet. Thanks for your curiosity though. I have the tremendous privilege of harbouring new original work that has yet to see an official audience. I have the even greater privilege of trust and support from other artists along the route of creating it. I am grateful.
There are Title Pages below (not even all my works-in-progress). Clicking any of these pages will lead you to a new tab containing an introduction and a short excerpt of that piece. For your personal roulette, one of these contains a video from an archival performance of an early draft, another contains the whole entire dang'd script, some are possibly "finished," and others are many many drafts away from that ... but which ones will they be?? I'm not terribly interested in reconfiguring unproduced plays into digital art as so many others are doing at the moment. However, as the pandemic has shut theatres and caused devestating lay-offs to literary managers the whole world-wide, as artistic leadership is undergoing a major shift from coast to coast, as I have been sometimes able to choose family life over "important" career moves ... I suddenly feel the brazen freedom to share. I hope you enjoy these brief excerpts from my not-yet-premiered plays. 4/1/2020 1 Comment I wrote this tiny poem just before COVID-19's world sincerely entered our psyche.Wondering About Children Placed in Factories in Other Places, Meditating on our Human Need to Busy our Hands, and Doting on How the Former Kills and Latter Creates Growth Growth Growth
12/16/2019 1 Comment Artist Yes ChallengeUpon receiving the Metcalf Performing Arts Prize, creator-performer Sunny Drake decided to gift some of his earnings to two artists he admires as a way of building a "yes" in a vocational practice that is filled with so much "no." To my knowledge, these artists made no requests of his money and, it seems to me, his unsolicited shout of endorsement is as meaningful as any much-needed funds. He then encouraged other artists to do the same. Because I live and work regionally I am constantly hungry for the creativity, community, and recognition of other artists. I was therefore extremely moved by Sunny's example. There is a bit of purity to the work that can happen in regional environments when the artist's best source of inspiration is often their own life. Here is a place where we have something very real to share and, most ironically, fewer people to share it with. We don't always feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves when the inverse is usually true. Recognizing each other for this is vital. The only prerequisites I fashioned when deciding who to reward by passing on the "yes challenge" is that the artists, while Canadian, not be primarily tethered to the Toronto theatre scene and that they not be very recently recognized by more formal awards. Despite the narrowness of those stipulations, however, I find myself wishing to support more than two people. I've also been thinking about G.B. Shaw a lot since my master's degree. He wrote these big juggernaut plays, published theory to match his practice, supported his community by writing reviews, and helped spearhead the existence of the National Theatre in London. Naturally, we can't all be Shaw, but more and more I find myself thinking that selfless administration and community development are vital elements to an artistic vocation. Perhaps that is partially why I was so inspired by the Artist Yes Challenge. Unfortunately, I don't have the financial support of the Metcalf Foundation (at least not right now 😛). And part of the point here is that the life of an artist is often close to poverty. So, rather than spending my family's precious income on these artists I admire, I'm gifting them each with a book I've loved from my own private library. Without further ado, here are the four artists I wish to honour today: I met Bó Bárdos when I was at my most-emerging. We were both hired to work with InterArts Matrix where, in my first proper acting gig, I felt like a tiny mute fish wagging between multiple modes of expression. Bó was profoundly welcoming, giving me the confidence I needed to rise to the project. This is true to her personality at all times: if a room requires just a little more love and joy, invite Bó. Naturally that personality does her worlds of good on stage as well. I think Bó is primarily a musician but her appetite to work inter-disciplinarily usually has me thinking of her as an actor. On her website she speaks to art as being a "sacred responsibility." I cannot overstate how strongly I feel about this. There is a great selflessness in approaching the work through this lens which can be clearly felt by those privileged to engage and participate in it. I mostly only see Bó these days if I pop into the MTSpace Theatre's office where she's been known to scrape away at a keyboard in administrative support of the company. It is already meaningful for our small/growing region to retain a talent the great size of her's without her also giving back to it by daylighting for one of our few local theatre companies. For the Artist Yes Challenge I am gifting Bó my copy of issue 7 of Canthius Literary Magazine. I bought it on a wonderful day. Perhaps, in a way, I chose this because I don't know her as well as others I'm "yes-ing" right now. But because the magazine's ethos focuses on contemporary identity politics, because the work therein is so beautifully accessible, because this particular issue celebrates community so well, ... to me, it is all about discoveries. There is nothing quite like a welcoming horizon. I've been close with Janice Lee for over ten years which means I've been privileged to watch her grow in her art and her voice. Since the very beginning she has been a constant mentor and champion to other musicians, artists, actors, and poets. Janice's work is multifaceted and difficult to peg down. She speaks of herself as a "folk artist" meaning that her work is "of the people." She is ruthless in her ability to be simultaneously whimsical and bitingly political. In both cases, intentionally accessible. I've watched her slowly and fearlessly claim her Korean heritage before growing audiences as she matured out of the cultural-whiteness of her once regional environment. A profound, inspiring, and certainly difficult journey. A constantly prolific performer and creator, it strikes me that Janice often puts more energy into raising the floor for other marginalized creatives. When serving as the City of Kitchener's Artist in Residence she used the opportunity to point away from herself and highlight some of the best parts of the community. She helped originate and build the MTSpace's Young Company, cofounded my region's queer film festival, Rainbow Reels, taught poetry and performing arts who-knows-how-many-times in rural First Nation communities, she leads workshops on anti-racism and micro-aggressions for BIPOC youth, and is presently on tour with accessible ticket prices. She is prolific as a creator as well as a leader. And she has bolstered each step of the way with staggering investment. The thought she has put into her work, and to living her politics with sincerity, is too rare. She speaks the truth, she is constantly learning, she deserves the best. I am giving Janice my copy of Mouthpiece by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava. As a highly performative political text, Mouthpiece is a close sibling to Janice's creative work. It both guards and celebrates femininity, never loses complexity in those themes, and plays with an extremely heightened aesthetic without ever breaking into obscurity. Like so many others, Nathaniel Voll is an under-utilized talent in our region. He is an actor, writer, and arts educator. Like mine, his creative career-trajectory is gently slowed by focusing on fatherhood. The few times that GreenLight Arts has shoved Nathaniel and I in the same room, however (me behind a laptop, him on a bare floor), I've felt supported with the confidence that my writing will be well-honoured and my flubs well-ironed. He provides a great ease in working through the shortcomings and errors that development rehearsals unearth. As the most-emerging artist of the four I'm "yes-ing" I've seen great maturity from Nathaniel when these roles are reversed. As a writer, he responds to critique and suggestion with respect and ... sometimes a lot of new pages! Nathaniel went from a leadership role at KW Youth Theatre to being GreenLight Arts' Education Manager and then to working with Theatre of the Beat as a Restorative Justice Facilitator. There he leads drama education, new play development, and production with the incarcerated population at the Grand Valley Institution for Women. With the help of some deeply-giving and incredible others, Nathaniel helped benchmark the first-ever collective-creation developed between a professional theatre and incarcerated women in Canada. What a task! I'm giving Nathaniel my copy of Out of Line by Tanis MacDonald. This book is about finding hope, community, and direction as an artist who sometimes feels isolated by living and working regionally. Because the book celebrates our region, specifically, it provides a welcome touchstone to say yes, I see you! It is peppered with anecdotes to make us better teachers and a sense of access to the Canadian literary scene. I don't know Liz Whitbread terribly well. When I first moved back to Canada after my MFA I was searching for voices on the subject of the Canadian theatre ecology. Hers stood from the crowd. So I was naturally charmed and even a little intimidated when our collaborator Kendra Jones cast her in the development-workshop of my play. Of all the magnificent actors in that ensemble, Liz was the most dramaturgically forthright in a way that I very much appreciated. After the labour of her feedback in development, it was a joy to watch her fall in and out of character with her entire breath and body, with playfulness and subtlety. At this time she had just been working as Communications and Administrative Coordinator at the Theatre Centre. As an administrator, Liz has helped to elevate the Toronto Fringe Festival, Seven Siblings, and Lost & Gone. But she left Toronto to continue making opportunities for others in Winnipeg where she is now the Assistant Artistic Director of Sarasvati Productions. There she is championing women's voices in a very real way. She also now assists programming and touring new work with a necessary contemporary political edge. Her devotion to maintaining and developing a strong instrument for craft is clear and enviable. But her career trajectory shows a devotion to supporting and uplifting the deserving artists around her with careful and creative leadership. I'm grateful that Canadian theatre has her.
I'm giving Little One by Hannah Moscovitch to Liz. For its darkness and it's humanity, this is a wildly formidable play. To honour Liz's skill as an actor, this play provides two great roles with a tremendous and understated poetry to them. While this particular play doesn't need Sarasvati productions, it speaks directly to their mandate in a way that raises expectations of everything around it. I believe Liz will help raise great plays like this one in her career as a leader. 6/4/2019 1 Comment PreperationI am so tremendously privileged—and just as excited—to be participating in Director's Lab North next week. The application package was a series of simple questions. Here is my response to one of them. I'm failing myself as someone who likes to think of himself as a maker of political theatre. But we must be critical in identifying what our work accomplishes and what our goals and our mandates really mean. I think also that to be either political or an artist means to never be satisfied. Well, shit.
In this time of seismic change around the world, is it our responsibility as theatre artists to promote change and if so, how? Yes and no. I’m sure I share the thought with most other contemporary practitioners that theatre, being so much work for so little money, should only be done if it is for something significantly bigger than ourselves. Of course, by the same equation, perhaps the less altruistic perspective is the only one that doesn’t shed artists away into poverty, day jobs, or other obscurities. We need accessible art who’s only goal is to be fun or moving or beautiful so that more people can share a language and cultural investment with more challenging, aesthetically progressive, and political work. However, across that spectrum, I have nearly zero room for narrative arguments that set out to support their communities’ existing perspectives. If we’re not always promoting change—okay. But we should never promote stasis. Theatre is alive and so should we be. This is how I dance around the question because, ultimately, what does it mean to promote change and how do we even know we’re doing it? I think theatre is a weaker catalyst for movement than we tell ourselves it is. That being said, emotional narratives told through connection create empathy. And, over a softer longer time, empathy is the only thing that really matters. 5/23/2019 4 Comments Land AcknowledgementThere is no land-acknowledgement I know how to make that will generate sincere justice. I grew up in Elora, Ontario. I never tell people that without suffixing: it’s a wonderful place to grow up. The Grand and Irvine rivers join in a publically-accessible, tree-lined limestone gorge up to 22 meters deep. It’s steeped in carefully celebrated history and, when you’re a lonely hiking homeschooler, deeply swarming in lore. The rivers meet where, every local knows, a young Native woman jumped to her doom after learning her darling white boy was killed fighting against the American frontier in 1812. This is more of a Victorian melodrama than recorded history. Sometime in the two centuries between then and now, her picturesque deathbed served the small industrializing settlement as a garbage dump. In my undergrad at the University of Waterloo, close to the banks of the Grand, I was privileged to take a dramaturgy course in tandem with a divisive land-claim dispute further downstream in Caledonia Ontario. My class underwent research and production dramaturgy for the development of a new play about the land-claim. We visited the disputed territory, wedged like a doorstop between the Oshwekan Mohawk Reserve and the developed town of Caledonia. We spoke with the Elders protecting the land, a postage-stamp of strangely flattened farm fields paved and scraped with cul-de-sacs and unlit streetlamps that frame the empty promise of large-scale residential development, now dried by wind. They were generous to teach us all kinds of things. About the land, the river, the Haldimand tract, and even simply their cultures and individual identities. The event and the education we received are both richer than can be stated here. I think the scholarly writing on our exploration and performance is still forthcoming. The Haldimand Tract runs 6 miles (roughly 10 kilometers) on either side of the Grand River. It was assigned to the Six Nations by the Crown in October 1784 as thanks for participating in the American War of Independence, a recompense for territory lost south of the Canadian border. It is Native Land and there is a paper trail to prove legal ownership. The creaky brick house I grew up in was built by the first manufacturer of the disk plow. His factory, now romantic ruins, ran on a hydroelectric dam which stands on the Grand River a few hundred meters from my childhood front yard. My siblings and I spent many hours roleplaying stories and catching crayfish in the dam’s century-old chute. Only a few minutes downstream begins the gorge and a little further down begins the provincial park where you can enjoy the majestic beauty of the Grand River for $48 a campsite. Of course, the locals know their way into the park and we took to inheriting the river by our skinned knees, fights, smells, sexual awakenings, and everything in between. It felt entirely ours. The play that my dramaturgy class eventually rehearsed and performed was written by Gill Garrett, using multiple sources. I shared a role that represented the woman living across the road from the land claim dispute. Her home was surrounded by old anger sparked, a flaming road-block, militarized police officers, white supremacists bussed in from other cities, young Native men tearing through her property on ATVs … she couldn’t exit her driveway without entering what was sometimes made to look like a war zone (though it was quite welcoming when we saw it). Under the din of an angry family-member imploring her to choose a certain side in the dispute, she defiantly baked a pie. She walked her fresh baking down the driveway to the incendiary street. A gift to the First Nation Land Defenders. Neighbors make neighbors pies. Performing her tiny story every night I cried. What moved me playing this part was, perhaps, a culmination of the whole complex event and a selfish route to understanding it. But I was also, of course, so in love with her ability to preserve a sense of personhood with a simple gesture of companionship. It was lost on me at the time that her gesture came in the form of a very old, endlessly celebrated, particular pastry so commonly attributed to settler culture. The irony now strikes as both ugly and beautiful. I’ve often heard of First Nations’ relationship to the land as religious and sacramental. A rhetoric that imperfectly stumbles through settler’s language to explain something that cannot be totally understood. Two summers into parenthood, my wife and I went on a little road trip. Sitting behind the wheel I trusted her navigation, having no idea where the road was winding us. I don’t drive much and had never been through this part of Ontario before so I sincerely didn’t know where we were. But when we crossed the Grand River I could feel it in my gut. It was as if all the water in my blood pressed against my skin to reach through the car and return to the river. This was my river. Wasn’t it? My physiological recognition of and longing for the river forced new questions we should all be asking: how do those feel who have been torn from it? Or torn from another territory, given this one, and watched it become excavated and developed in the proceeding generations? If this river is so much of who I am, who are they? The Oshwekan Mohawk Reserve we visited when learning about the Caledonia land-claim dispute spans a maximum of 6 miles, 10 kilometers, from only one side of the Grand River. It is hardly any bigger stretching north to south along the one bank. The Mohawk Nation there aren’t originally native to Ontario. They were displaced out of New York State after the War of Independence. Some were refugeed to the Canadian border at the time but, why the Crown chose the Grand River, exactly, is beyond me. Before then the river was Iroquois territory. And before then it was Attawandaron. I don’t understand the history as well as I’d like to but I think it’s worth noting that the First Nations’ effort supporting the British in the American war was led by a Mohawk, Joseph Brant, who had already devoted a great deal of his life to fighting British and colonial claims to Native land in New York State. Today the Six Nations of the Grand River are the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora. I think it is worth noting that, as I understand it, some of these communities once supported their local ecology by only living in one place for about 60 years at a time. They moved their cities and villages once or twice a generation to allow for nature and woodland to recolonize the space they took up. And so, the settler notion of parceling land for permanent ownership was --still is-- absurd. Some of the Haldimand tract was purchased from the displaced Joseph Brant by settlers, taking ownership and founding what has become places like the City of Kitchener. But, of course, it was the purchaser’s assumption that Brant could speak for all six of these nations. To me, our responsibility to this land exceeds it’s acknowledgement. And the historic narrative of it’s “original caretakers” is too complex for a soundbite to contain. I think part of any land acknowledgement, as we’ve been giving them, should contain the knowledge that settlers will never meet the First Nations where we left them. Despite my blood’s tug to the river, we will never fully understand. The Dish With One Spoon Treaty, already used elsewhere, was a late addition to most of the Haldimand tract in 1792. Taking this already ceded territory into a treaty which recognizes both First Nations and Settlers as caretakers was excused by an unapparent mapping error when offering the Haldimand Tract to Brant and the Six Nations. An act of colonialism. The Dish With One Spoon Treaty represents a partnership wherein all parties who share a land respectfully conserve it for each other under self-governance. That is to say, the local Six Nations and the settlers are supposed to govern themselves beside each other but independently. With only one spoon between us--we are supposed to share. Notwithstanding the late placement of the treaty onto the Haldimand Tract by settlers, we can acknowledge that the existence of the treaty itself is an act of generosity from the original caretakers. As for the conservation part of the treaty, I’m not convinced we’re doing our part. As my whole body can tell you, driving across the Grand River on a little road trip, the importance of this tract and the treatise surrounding it, cannot be overstated. A middle-aged white woman came to see our play. She claimed to be practicing Native Spirituality but, unsurprisingly, didn’t seem to arrive with any of the First Nations people in our audience. When I told her that my Catholic guilt caused me great struggles as the experience taught me more horrible truths about our relationship to the First Nations she became angry. She wanted me, as a Catholic, to deliver the children back home from their residential schools. Give the generations of deceased back to their own communities. How could anyone do that? How can anyone repair that damage? I wept in a stranger’s arms. She did not. Is that what justice looks like? When we make our land acknowledgements before the plays we produce, what exactly are we offering and accomplishing? We know that we lack the language to fathom what the land actually means. Besides, what does “acknowledgement” progress? What do my tears? Her anger? The children are still gone. The river is developed. The two-row wampum pictured above, in part, represents the Dish With One Spoon Treaty. It is a picture of a river (the Grand River, sometimes perhaps). The two purple lines represent Natives and Settlers travelling separately on that river. The first white row represents peace. The middle row represents friendship. The last white row represents eternity. Among these, the two travelers never intersect. We do not disturb each other. We do not understand each other. We share the same river. I co-produced a few evenings of original theatre in Kitchener last winter. The inevitable discussion about our land acknowledgement evolved into a long conversation between myself and one of my collaborators. We asked ourselves these questions. It means one thing if our land acknowledgement awards us with a feeling of absolution from settler guilt. But it is an entirely other thing if our acknowledgement complicitly gives that feeling to our audience. Because it comes from us, that too is a form of colonization. Making white noise out of the land acknowledgement might be better hoped for than the neoliberalism of supposing absolution from it. What do we owe the people who’s languages have been taken away? Who have been stripped from their lands and rivers for multiple generations? Whose children have died in residential schools? The very least we can fathom, after colonial insistence on it here, is a return to the two-row wampum and the Dish with One Spoon. The tiny size of the Oshwekan Reserve at Caledonia, pressed into a small puzzle-piece of the Haldimand Tract, tells us that we have not been honoring these treatises and relationships. For me, as a settler, the only tool I have to appreciate how land is tied to identity is through my own. Which is why I rattle-on about it above. In these ways, however, it is also not my own. This is a problem we have forced ourselves into having. And we surely will for generations. Unless losing our own homes and our own place in these treatises, unless becoming uprooted like the Mohawk Nation was, the only way to honour them, argues my collaborator around last winter's show, is to have two equally powerful figureheads leading our country in collaboration and opposition: a Prime Minister and a Native Leader. Side by side, equal in power, equal in representation. Imperfect but progressive. It represents the promises we made when we forced the Dish with One Spoon onto the already ceded Haldimand Tract. It represents collaborative conservation and self-governance from sea to sea. And the inconvenience it suggests pales in comparison to the history that demands it. Until then, our land acknowledgements are nothing. Until then, and even after, we cannot be free of our colonialism. A timeline:
UPDATE: This was written and posted before the Final Report on our National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Much more important reading than my blog. You can access it HERE. Please do. 3/4/2019 1 Comment Theatre ReligionMy first memory of theatre is practicing it. The three youngest of my big Irish family homeschooled with other giant families in our region. We were tied together outside the school system by a priority for religion in our formative years. I would have been under ten years old and my group varied within five years of that—which is a wide range for that age. We created plays for our parents to see. There was never a playwright, rarely a director, and if there was, they always decentralized their authority for the benefit of the ensemble. In some sense, we were scared of each other. But also, not at all. True to the risks I run in my professional life now, eager to impress each other more than anyone else, everyone had a strong creative input and our audiences were always smaller than our ensemble.
We were magnificently contemporary. It was the mid to late ‘90’s and we waffled between cartoonish imitation, dead-pan humor, imagined set designs of baroque scale, and thought of plot as something completely separate from character. There was a series of skits which married humour to the sacred by presenting arbitrary improvisation games to the lives of the saints as a costume pageant. There was a morality play—we’d never heard of the morality plays—about the neutral good of peanut butter and the chaotic evil of Jack’s bean-stalk-giant. We found as much joy in comedic theatre sports as we did in representing the sanctified deceased for God. We dressed up as saints for Hallowe’en too, usually in a bathrobe, and took turns telling their stories. Sometimes this necessitated the kind of full character development that I ask my students to undertake in their acting classes today. What are the symbols associated with your character? What do they want? How are you like them? How are you not like them? What intercession can they bring to heaven on our behalf? It was a party. When I learned, years later, that medieval European theatre was partially reborn in Catholic Churches I was tremendously gratified. My earliest memory of being unmistakably in someone else’s audience was Camelot at the Stratford Festival. My family and I loomed over the whole amphitheater from the cheap seats. I wouldn’t have known at the time that this was an unusually huge space belonging to an unusually well-supported festival. It had the social prowess of a hockey game and the timid poignancy of church. I remember feeling the sense of arrested electricity that followed the Act-One closing number. And I remember having the wherewithal to wonder how a bunch of singing grown-ups were mechanically capable of providing that feeling to a whole audience at once. I like to take this as a sign that I was destined to be a theatremaker: interested in deconstructing how a moment of artifice becomes real so that I could understand and build it myself. Or maybe that curiosity can be attributed to the fact that I was surrounded by 2000 upper-class white people making every effort to keep the sweat of their joy from tarnishing their Sunday best. If theatre sets out to celebrate complex feelings, that would be the one Catholic Mass and the Stratford Festival excel at to magnificent measure. Don’t show it. Unless, of course, you’re trying to impress the neighboring pew. At that time in my life, there was good spirituality and bad spirituality. Just as there was good theatre and bad. Good spirituality involved the unfinishable pursuit of purity through the prescribed path of the Catholic Church. And, credit due, it is a carefully crafted path. The Catholic route to heaven is laid out with convenient simplicity while demanding enough from it’s pilgrims to wrinkle your skin. Just like all the best things in life, to be sure. It is good catechism to say that, regarding virtue and sin, to try is to succeed and to not try is to fail. Whether, in this case, art imitates life or the other way around, I can’t be sure. Either way, it’s not the language Catholics usually use around good and evil. The Commandments and the Beatitudes lead our understanding of what is good and what is not-good. There is a staggering amount of theology on Love. And, one of the Church's best-kept secrets, the seven pillars of Catholic Social Teaching: dignity of the human person; call to family, community, and participation; responsibility to uphold human rights; option for the poor and vulnerable (I take that crude and othering rhetoric right out of the catechism); the dignity of work; solidarity of justice towards peace; stewardship of God’s creation. On the whole I’d suggest that we’re failing triumphantly. To say that a very specific group of actions are intrinsically good or not-good, ignores the actual details of morality. I know that, if you care to dig for them, Catholicism has answers. But we don’t dig for them. Our leaders and teachers don’t. For example, if life is sanctified and holy but theft is evil, then what is stealing for the purpose of survival? I simplify. And yet, this is the language we use. However much better the actual theology might be, the language that provides Catholic theology to Catholics constructs how we go about practicing faith. It is for this reason that almost every Church I’ve entered is mostly comprised of happy middle-class white people. It is easier for the privileged to be not-bad than it is to actively pursue good. Stay with me here. The Commandments are a list of don’ts. The Beatitudes are presented as states-of-being. Since these are preferred to the Pillars of Social Teaching, compared to theatre, it would seem Catholic morality doesn’t care about action and pursuit and movement at all. I had an excellent performance pedagogue in my undergrad who would remind us to keep breathing through our exercises. “As soon as you stop breathing, you’re dead,” she would say. To try is to succeed and to not-try is to fail. As for Catholic morality, it doesn’t seem to be breathing This isn’t a criticism of Catholicism itself. It’s a criticism of how it is practiced. And we knew that full well. Which is a big part of why we started homeschooling. We knew that it wasn't enough to be--we wanted to do. Along the way we staged a backyard production of Sophocles’ Antigone. This wasn’t one of our pageants. It was directed by a homeschooling mom who had studied drama. The author was esteemed by a loftily traditional translation that, if we weren’t homeschooling around it, would have been beyond our years to understand. We were attracted to this particular text because it maintained and defended our worldview. We were interested in the integration of church and state and felt strongly that a failure to elevate a mystical morality through public policy would, as Creon’s Seer warns in the play, invoke “furies from death and heaven.” To be absolutely clear, whatever you grow up knowing is ordinary to you. This very-real threat of daemons didn’t feel scary or cruel. It was just the structure of reality. Having a place in that reality provided an amazing source of purpose and therefore often even comfort. We bolstered our rehearsal of Antigone with a year-long unit on Ancient Greece. Our homeschooling curriculum was incredible. It brought us to study architecture, geography, civics, art, language, technology, and literature. We read an age-appropriate translation of The Odyssey. We built models of Ancient Greek weapons and buildings, topographical maps, we employed historical battle strategy in our hockey games. We philosophized on the meaning and shortcomings of democracy. We made incredibly intimate and personal self-portraits from techniques of ancient art. All in the pursuit of producing a play that would conserve our world-view. I think this was my grade six or seven, I can’t be sure. For production, we built masks and cytons (which are not togas) and our parents erected a ten-foot set, imitating the architecture we had gotten to know so well. We went to a nearby community production of a more modern translation of Antigone then dissected it enthusiastically and ruthlessly. The intensity of examination we brought to our production gave theatre it’s importance. Putting on a play was an expression that demanded as much attention, even self-sacrifice, as religion. Everyone’s work was entirely answerable to everyone else. And, in order to do it like the pros, we had to know everything! These are the building blocks of all noble pursuits. Even if the goal is ugly, it’s endeavor demands magnificent triumph—secret and broadcast—through imperfect practice and into realization. The route to heaven is difficult and familiar across disciplines. Rehearsals included our own input on how the chorus choreographed their movement. One choice invoked a tearfully impassioned disagreement between my brother and I. I wanted us to cross our arms and unfold them on the line “beloved brothers.” He wanted us to open our arms and then fold them on the same line. Such drama. Art and religion are magnificently more precise than their reputation suggests. In both cases, the more insignificant a difference there is, the more important it becomes. This is why I gripe. What got us through the gnashing of teeth was the humble disposition demanded by our religion. In this case, my beloved brother’s more than mine. Somehow, the director who agreed to work on this did not share the dogmatic zeal that drew us to the text. After the show my parents hosted a dinner party for the families involved. Two rooms away us kids continued to imagine and imitate early historic conquests until hearing the gradual growth of raised voices from the dining room. We knew full well that the adults of our homeschool group adored each other so the heat of the argument was arresting. Our director was completely on her own: two glasses of wine into a sea of well-intentioned Christian-conservatism. And she wasn’t gifted with the Christ-required humility to breathe and nod her way out of an argument. Judging by the size of it reaching our ears, we became disappointed to assume that our fearless director might have been, evil of evils: in favor of abortion, perhaps! Or maybe she “believed in” euthanasia. Or, God help her eternal soul, what if she wasn’t perfectly heteronormative? Mixing the admiration we had for our director with the realization that the world is so wide, I must have aged a year in those moments. For the better, I think. That was the last time she worked with us. Much later, I ventured to bring it up with the dad who had taught us Homer that year. Apparently they had busied their dinner party with praises for her work on our production. Of course, to suggest that some art is good, even great, means that other art is not. The dining room wasn’t arguing hot-button topics of political morality at all. I’m told she couldn’t reconcile the notion that some art is better than others. How could you compare one creative expression to another? I’m told she was stalwart: by virtue of something being art, it is immune to any arbitration in it’s quality. There is a reason acting is called acting. It is not standing still. And always breathe, if you stop breathing … If that account of dinner is true then it seems to me that our non-Catholic theatre director was more aptly fit for the job than anyone realized at the time. We must define our goals, criticize them, actively dig for the traditional routes to those goals, and then have the wherewithal to appraise successes that might not be consistent with the original goals. Indeed, one of us was more correct than the other regarding what we should do with our arms while saying “beloved brother” (me, obviously, ha!). Some art is better than others. Some religion too. We had to actively move through the motions to understand it though. Not stand still. The struggle between my beloved brother and I is all part of it. There’s a lot I miss about attending Church. Stasis isn’t one of them. I’ve always hated walking into a room full of people who, by my attendance, are free to assume they understand me, my politics, my morality, my spirituality with it’s false lack of struggles. Theatre, on the other hand, provides the same ancient tradition, the dignity to humanity, participation in community, the responsibility to human rights, the “option” for the vulnerable, work, solidarity of peace and justice, stewardship of our space … or does it? Ultimately, as far as I’m concerned, good theatre is tougher to define than good morality or even good spirituality. Despite the ancient history, theatre isn’t a plowed field of scholarship the way religion is. Because it is active and breathing, theatre is still figuring itself out. And, because it is still figuring itself out, it is closer to attaining some better approximation of those seven pillars of social teaching. It breathes. It acts. It lives. It tries. It fails. It fails better. Which is, perhaps, the true reason I have grown to prefer it. Religion isn’t doing these things. It could, perhaps. Could it? 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. 5/29/2018 1 Comment It was the bomb ...I had been thinking about opening night of Stratford’s Season with The Tempest for weeks or more. I was desperately excited to share a giant room with people I admire and then catch up with a few dozen well-dressed friends and acquaintances.
As we approached the Festival Theatre I naively thought that the crowd of bejeweled culture junkies filling the street was some kind of red carpet to-do. There was a pipe band tattooing across the grass, after all. But a friend found us to tell there was a bomb threat and that the show had been canceled. I think of (Canadian) theatre as such a small and tightly-niche industry that it immediately felt absurd that the Stratford Festival’s season opening was important enough to be stopped by a bomb threat. I’d go so far as to say that the general mood among the nearly 2000 displaced theatregoers was more amusement at the absurdity than fear or despair. At least from my vantage point. I’m sorry to disappoint the radical who called it in but, Canadian theatremakers are all so damn busy that I think many were secretly thrilled to have a night off. Since I’d shined my shoes and clipped on some cufflinks for the night-out, since the weather was so miraculously heavy and light, since half of your favorite people in the country were less than a block away, what could one do but find a patio and pour a few dollars into the local economy? Unfortunately, I didn’t get to witness it but I’m sure you heard tale of Martha Henry carrying the Prospero staff out of the theatre with her and then gracing her community with a speech from the play at the bar. Or of a group of students reading the play out-loud to each other in lieu of the performance. During this little gift, I’m absolutely certain, the administrative heads of the festival were hard at work finding themselves—so to speak. From ticket refunds and transfers, unfulfilled catering, unfulfilled private donors, a closed Box Office on what may be it’s busiest night of the year, … I imagine the financial toll of the bomb threat might have scratched into seven figures for the festival. I held fast to two other playwrights I’m honoured to adore and we found our own quiet table and (like everyone else in a way) set to work. Not at writing, obviously, but at discussing, fixing, inspiring, and helping. The mortar around the bricks of the craft. It keeps me standing and I’m so grateful. There were a lot of people I was looking forward to seeing after the show. People I certainly would have seen. People I think of often but rarely ever see. People I want to smile, and hug, and share great news with. But, notwithstanding the loss of the performance itself, I probably had a much better night. A simpler night—but a necessary night. Making theatre can be so disparaging. We constantly challenge ourselves to be vulnerable and then put the fruits of it in the way of many forms of rejection. But last night proved the inevitable: if you take a community that professionally moguls an expressive life from the ruins of their passion, and blow them with the most spectacular rejection, they’ll find a way to celebrate it. I am, sincerely, sorry to report this to whoever called in the bomb. I’m sure they had their reasons. But thank you. We know what we're made of. But you gave us the reminder. We're made of a deep-seeded and relentless love. For the work and for each other. Thank you. In the meantime, as the Stratford Festival’s creativity is challenged to recuperate, now is the time for you to buy a season subscription to your favorite theatre. They’re all doing their wild hard work for you. It’s all for you. |
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