Artful Art Song at SFU

Last night, amid the ongoing line-up of spring arts showcases featuring the work of our super-talented Contemporary Arts students at SFU Woodward's, it was the musicians' turn to shine.

As Professor David McIntyre (doing double duty as conductor for the evening) announced before the concert, at SFU the music program is focused exclusively on composition. There is no performance-training component. Instead, senior composition students benefit each year from collaborating with a stellar line-up of local guest artists, who are invited to interpret and offer feedback on the students' work. Additionally, students hone their skills by composing to a rotating set of instruments and forms, depending on who is teaching the course. This year the focus was on the art song tradition, with students invited to set existing text to music for piano (guest artist Tina Chang), viola (guest artist Marcus Takizawa), soprano voice (guest artist Heather Pawsey) and mezzo-soprano voice (guest artist Melanie Adams).

Six songs and one opera scene were presented and, with one exception, I was consistently amazed not just by the depth and intelligence of the compositions themselves, but also by the startlingly original choices in text. (The one exception, in this regard, was the rather cliched use of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as the text for Chris Lachowski's otherwise charming score.) Highlights included Maren Lisac's dramatic call and response setting of Shane Rhodes' found poem "as may have been grunted" (comprised of words taken from the transcript of Treaty 5 negotiated in 1875 between Queen Victoria and the First Nations of Northern Manitoba); JJ Hartmann's thematic explorations of temporal phrasing and duration in relation to Elee Gardiner's "Backstich," a poem about sewing; Clinton Ackerman's wise and witty staging of two arias based on a scene from Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets in which Joanne (Pawsey) asks Rhonda (Adams) to help her commit suicide like Ophelia (demonstrating, in the process, that Thompson is perhaps our most operatic of playwrights and that Lion in the Streets, her masterwork, is perhaps ripe for just such an adaptation); and Lee Cannon-Brown's gracefully spare and simple score for Robert Creeley's "Intervals," a poem that is itself about "identity singing."

Scott Jeffrey chose Canadian poet (and Globe and Mail reviewer) Fraser Sutherland's "In the Provinces" as the basis for his song, and in the dissonant play of the viola with the cascading harmonics of the piano brilliantly captured the mix of wit, irony, and social critique at work in the poem. Alex Mah, graduating this year, worked with Contemporary Arts film professor and award-winning poet Colin Browne, setting "Swan" (from Browne's recently published collection The Properties) in a way that not only evoked 1960s experiments in sound poetry, but that also highlighted the contemporary art song's debt to minimalism.

That specific artistic debt is something Alex and Scott have been educating me on in their final essays for my FPA 319W course ("Critical Writing in the Arts"), which, respectively, are on on the indie classical music label/collective Bedroom Community and its most famous art song composer, Nico Muhly. Both Alex and Scott write as crisply as they compose, and I wish them and all their colleagues much success in their future careers.

P.

Judith Thompson Turns Up the Volume on Iraq

Interesting—and chilling—to note how, in the eight years since 9/11, the ongoing “war on terror” has steadily moved from front-line news to Orwellian background noise, sometimes louder (as when another roadside bomb explodes), but mostly a mid-range hum. As in 1984, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have simply been absorbed as part of the daily fabric of our lives, their “urgency” and “priority” having long since been supplanted by more pressing (and proximate) concerns—most recently, the economy. Most Canadians, I bet, would be hard pressed to come up with the current figure of our combat casualties in Kandahar (118 at last count, the most recent being Major Michelle Mendes’ apparent suicide).

As Barack Obama prepares to implement his plan for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Judith Thompson brilliantly reminds us in her most recent play, Palace of the End (shortlisted for the 2008 Governor-General’s Award for Drama and winner of the 2007 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), of the sedimented layers of history, ethnic and religious conflict, national self-interest and personal exculpation, that accrued between the first Gulf War and the invasion of 2003. The play, which is running at the Performing Arts Lodge on Cardero Street until Sunday in a Touchstone, Felix Culpa, and Horseshoes and Hand Grenades co-production, is structured as three monologues that move backwards in time, and that are delivered by fictionalized versions of three real-life “casualties” (albeit in very different senses) of the Iraqi conflict, people whom we might now consider “bit players” in the larger scheme of things, more collateral damage, but that for a moment at any rate were the very real face of war’s grievous atrocities, and multiple victims. Though they are not explicitly named as such, the monologues are spoken in turn by stand-ins for Private Lynndie England (Alexa Divine), the most public fall-person for the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (she of the smiling, thumbs-up pose standing over the pile of naked Iraqi prisoners); David Kelley (Russell Roberts), the British weapons inspector who amid the publicity surrounding the leaking by the media of his report finding no evidence of WMDs in Iraq, and the suggestions of a government cover-up, committed suicide; and Nehrjas al-Saffarh (a terrific Laara Sadiq), a Communist dissident in Iraq, who along with members of her family, was tortured and killed by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Regime in the lead-up to the First Gulf War.

Thompson is careful not to make too-simple political and personal connections between the three characters and their stories (though each does remain on stage during the others’ monologues), nor to sit in judgment of one or over-empathize with another. Rather, in imagining inner lives for three individuals who have been, to borrow from one astute commentator on the play, abstracted as “documentary ciphers” in the larger narrative of the Iraq War, Thompson is challenging us in the audience to make those difficult connections, to ask why we should care about these individuals and what they have lost, to turn up the volume a little on Iraq.

I am reminded, in this regard, of a recent article by Laura Levin that I read on Thompson’s “environmental aesthetic” (in Theatre Research in Canada 24.1-2 [2003]). Levin notes that in the heightened, or poetic, naturalism of Thompson’s best-known plays—Sled, I Am Yours, The Crackwalker, Lion in the Streets—a hyper-localism, or over-saturation, of place-based detail creates a porousness between the bodies of her characters and their external worlds (be they natural, commercial, or social). This “spatial dependency,” as Levin calls it, in turn opens up, by reversing figure and ground, the possibility for a radical ethics of contingent connection, in which individuals do not exist separately from or in “antagonistic relation” to each other, but rather as “sensuously linked to the bodies of [their] neighbours.” Structurally and formally, Palace of the End is something of a departure from Thompson’s earlier work. However, in that key detail of keeping each monologuist on stage throughout the play, and in her characteristically rich embroiderings of place in those monologues (even places as notoriously dark as those of Abu Ghraib and the torture “palace” of Saddam that gives the play its title), Thompson likewise shows us the ethical claims that Iraq—no matter how physically or politically distant it may seem—continues to make upon us.

P.