Whatever Lola Wants

Just back from a noon show at The Dance Centre: excerpts from Lola MacLaughlin’s Provincial Essays (2007). Given McLaughlin’s passing earlier this month after a brave battle with ovarian cancer, the place was understandably packed, with many well-known members of the local dance community in attendance.

MacLaughlin was an important force in Vancouver dance. She was the first graduate of the dance program at my university; a co-founder of EDAM Studios in 1982, which pioneered contact improv in this city; and, from 1989, founder and artistic director of her own company, Lola Dance.

According to critic Kaija Pepper, who led a talkback session between the dancers, rehearsal director Susan Elliott, and the audience after today’s performance (and who also wrote a moving obituary of Lola in the Globe and Mail), Lola’s choreography was rooted in a profound attachment to place (one of her best known works is 1998’s Four Solos/Four Cities), and to place in British Columbia in particular. This is certainly evident in Provincial Essays, which unfolds as a series of kinesthetic inquiries into the dialectical relationship between nature and culture, landscape (in the broadest sense of that word) and the built environment, the pastoral and the sublime. In the abbreviated 45-minute version of the work we saw today (which was also minus one of the five dancers and various bits of tech), we are introduced to signature gestures that will be repeated as part of the dancers’ larger repertoire throughout the piece as performer Ron Stewart informs us of their genesis in Lola’s menagerie of movement—an elephant walking, a bird hopping, a flower blooming—and of Lola’s initial desire to have a real waterfall as a backdrop to the women dancers’ display of the gestures. We are asked, instead, to imagine the waterfall, and when it fact one eventually appears as part of the video projections used throughout the piece, it is of course too real, its representational magnificence threatening to overwhelm and obliterate the sight of the dancers rehearsing what are after all some fairly pedestrian steps. It is precisely these kind of witty philosophical juxtapositions—along with the equally sublime work of an immensely talented group of dancers—that makes Provincial Essays such a pleasure to watch. When, for example, this catalogue of “natural” gestures we have been introduced to at the top of the piece later reappears in an urban techno sequence featuring all of the dancers in full machinic assemblage, and with a paved streetscape as video projection, we understand that there can be no nature outside of culture.

Provincial Essays also features complex and demanding solos for each of the dancers, and it was interesting to hear, in the talkback session, Ziyian Kwan and Alison Denham talk about Lola’s method of working one-on-one with each of her dancers, improvising movements with them, carefully naming and noting down each of these movements, asking the dancers to memorize them, and then building a solo around them: retaining those that seem to work, adapting others, and jettisoning what doesn’t fit. In Kwan’s case, Lola apparently asked her to begin by imagining she was dancing inside a box, and this worked so well that in the full, performance version of the piece, an actual box appears on stage. In Alison’s case, she noted that she was not the first dancer to perform her role, and that the challenge for her was to learn a solo that had been created on and for another dancer’s body.

Provincial Essays recently toured to Toronto, playing at Harbourfront on March 6th, the very day Lola died. It will be remounted this October in Vancouver at the Cultch. I urge readers of this blog who will be in the area to attend. In the meantime, a celebration of Lola’s life will take place at The Dance Centre on Monday, April 6th, at 4:30 pm. 

Finally, tomorrow is World Theatre Day. Go see some live performance!

P.

Gregor's First 100 Days

Well, he may not have scored a sit-down with Jay Leno, but Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson did at least reach the 100-day mark before Obama. Here's the update he and his Vision Vancouver team put out yesterday on their progress so far:

"We have just passed the 100-day mark since being sworn in to City Hall. These first few months have been as challenging as they’ve been productive. Despite the hurdles thrown at us, we’ve demonstrated that a Mayor and Council who are prepared to show leadership can get things done. Today, I would like to give you a brief report on what we’ve accomplished since taking office in December.

The Homelessness Crisis

Since taking power, Vision has hit the ground running. On our first day in office, we created the Homeless Emergency Action Team. After one week, we were able to secure funding from the Province and the Streetohome Foundation for five new emergency shelters. Over the last 100 days, these shelters have provided a safe and secure place to sleep for up to 500 people a night. Earlier this month, I was also pleased to announce that we’ve secured funding from the provincial government to keep the shelters open for another three months.

Both the VPD and the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association can attest to the positive impact the HEAT shelters have had on reducing mental health calls, aggressive panhandling, and street disorder. The HEAT shelters are working.

The Olympic Village

Dealing with the Olympic Village mess left by the previous NPA administration has been one of the toughest problems we’ve faced. Nevertheless, I’m proud to say that your Vision team has risen to the challenge. As promised, we held an open, public council meeting to reveal the financial situation of the Olympic Village. We were up front with the people of Vancouver about the amount of financial risk the city was exposed to. We hired KPMG to provide an external review of the Olympic Village finances.

Thanks to the quick work of the Provincial Government and the Official Opposition, the City was granted the tools necessary to borrow money to finish the project. The new financing deal we’ve negotiated will save the City roughly $90 million in interest payments. We’re now working hard to make sure the Olympic Village stays on track and is done on time.

Public Safety

Vancouver, as Police Chief Jim Chu said earlier this month, is in the midst of a brutal gang war. The brazen nature of the recent gang shootings and the complete disregard for human life are unacceptable. Gangs do not care about municipal boundaries and we need a strong regional response to deal with them. Chief Chu and I met with the Prime Minister several weeks ago, and we made the case for more police officers throughout Metro Vancouver. Our city is doing its share in terms of funding our police. To fight gangs across the region, we need other municipalities to do the same.

Managing Your Money

The recent economic downturn has put a major strain on the City’s finances. As a Council, we’ve already taken bold steps to cut costs. Since December, we’ve cut $42 million from the City’s budget while maintaining services. We cancelled the expansion of the controversial Downtown Ambassadors program and implemented a hiring freeze. We’re working hard to keep taxes down in the next City budget.

Greening Your City

Vision has pledged to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world. To do this, we’ve reached out to ‘green’ business and sustainability leaders and formed the Greenest City Action Team (GCAT).Whether it’s expanding car-free days or community gardens, we’re making progress, with more to come. GCAT will be working to tackle climate change, increase sustainable transportation, and create green jobs in the weeks ahead."

I'm more or less in agreement with most of this; I just wish we could get past the partisan finger-pointing at the previous administration. Don't get me wrong, I'm the first to lay much of the blame for the Athletes Village mess at the feet of the NPA and former City Manager Judy Rogers (whose severance package topped $570,000 according to yesterday's Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail). But Robertson has inherited the fallout, and so he should just get on as best as possible in dealing with it.

On the Olympics front, I have just been approached by a group of colleagues in Urban Studies at SFU to join their group studying the outcomes of the Games on Vancouver. Very exciting, indeed, and I shall be sure to share some of our discussions with readers of this Blog.

P.

Singing Songs of Sixpence

Yesterday Richard and I trekked to the Cultch’s new studio space extension on Victoria Drive, the Vancity Culture Lab as the venue has been so dubbed by those in charge of marrying corporate donations to creative ferment, and the first phase of the Cultch’s ongoing expansion to be opened to the public. We were there to see the Rumble Productions/Theatre Conspiracy co-production of David Harrower’s Blackbird. The play is a two-hander about a 59-year old man, Ray, who works as some sort of floor manager in a pharmaceutical plant in an unnamed part of England, and Una, a young woman in her late 20s, who has tracked Ray down at his place of work. Ray, or Peter as he now seems to be called, is clearly not happy to see Una, and has escorted her into the plant’s garbage-strewn cafeteria at the top of the play in order that their conversation not be overheard or interrupted by his co-workers. The entire 90-minute play takes place in this sterile, brightly lit industrial space (for which the Culture Lab is ideally suited), and apart from a few brief moments when the lights are accidentally turned out by departing co-workers, and a final interruption that at once rescues and condemns him, Ray is unable to escape the intensity of Una’s emotional and verbal assault. Very quickly we learn why Ray is so nervous; he and Una have had a previous sexual relationship, one that began when Una was twelve.

But Harrower’s play is far from a clichéd revenge drama. Una’s motives for tracking Ray down are complex, and far from clear, even to herself. She accuses Ray of ruining her life, of destroying her relationship with her family, of subjecting her to years of finger-pointing and gossip from neighbours in the small town where their relationship began, and where she has continued to live. But she also admits that she felt drawn to Ray from the moment he first talked to her at a backyard barbecue hosted by her parents, that she still loves him, and that her anger at him stems as much from his apparent final abandonment of her in a hotel room in Newcastle as from the sexual liberties he earlier took with her there.

Ray himself is not your stereotypical predatory pedophile. Indeed, Harrower is at pains to present him as equally sympathetic a character, a man who is as surprised as he is horrified to discover he has fallen in love with a child, who has paid dearly for that discovery (six years in jail, to be exact), who has striven to rebuild his life as honestly as possible (including revealing to his new wife his prior conviction on morals and molestation charges), and who now sees that life unraveling before his eyes as Una’s return awakens the shame, fear, and, yes, lingering desire he thought he had long ago buried.

Taughtly written, the play alternates between sharp, staccato duologues and quieter, more lyrical monologues as the accusatory force and suspicious search for motives on the part of each character gradually gives way to earnest attempts on both their parts to find a form of closure for their relationship. This culminates in two moving speeches about the void in their respective lives that resulted from Ray’s fateful decision to step out for a cigarette prior to what was to have been their absconding together from Newcastle for Amsterdam. What Una has ever since imagined to be her desertion Ray clarifies was in fact his momentary failure of nerve, one long enough to allow the authorities to catch up with them, and to plunge them both into a nightmare denouement from which they have yet to emerge. Under the assured direction of Norman Armour, and with the aid of a haunting piano score deployed by sound designer Candelario Andrade at the moments of Una and Ray’s most naked revelation (I recognized the piece being played, but haven’t had time as yet to research it properly), performers Jennifer Mawhinney and Russell Roberts deliver precise and compelling portraits of two individuals caught in a cycle of mutual dependency that goes far beyond sexual obsession.

As with Paula Vogel’s equally riveting and disturbing portrait of Uncle Peck in How I Learned to Drive, Harrower does not fully exculpate Ray by the end of Blackbird. But neither does the play make him into some grotesque monster beyond redemption or comprehension. Both plays ask very difficult and morally ambiguous questions that are of course impossible even to entertain in popular media representations of the evil pedophile. Is it possible to draw a line between consent and abuse in any way other than the juridical? In inter-generational relationships should adult guilt and childhood innocence automatically be presumed? Is sexual maturity in fact an historically, socially, and personally fluid process? And whom exactly are we protecting in holding on so resolutely to the category of child in a culture that over-sexualizes children to such an extent as ours?

These questions are foregrounded even more starkly by Harrower through the introduction, late in the play, of Ray’s stepdaughter, of whose existence we, along with Una, had thus far been unaware. Having arrived, along with her mother, to pick Ray up from work, she bursts through the lunchroom door with her soccer ball, and sends Una scrambling to a corner to hide. However, when the soccer ball gets away from her, the girl discovers Una’s presence. Eventually she is sent away, leaving a shocked Una to confront, on behalf of the audience, Ray about whether or not he has tried anything with his ward. He denies ever considering the possibility, indeed curses Una for even suggesting it, and quickly runs out of the room in search of his wife. Una is left destroyed on the floor, at which point—whether within the real-time of the play proper, or as a purely symbolic concluding tableau, it remains unclear—the step-daughter returns with her soccer ball. She freezes in place, smiling beatifically off into the distance. Una looks at her in horror. We look at Una looking at her in horror. Blackout. Silence. Stunned applause.

This is actually the second production of Blackbird that I’ve seen, having caught its acclaimed West End transfer in London in the spring of 2006, following the play’s premiere at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival. I mention this not because I’m an original cast or first night diva, but because the London production (directed by Peter Stein, and starring Jodhi May and Roger Allam) featured a different ending. Following Ray’s stepdaughter’s abrupt and shocking entrance, and Ray’s subsequent exit, there is no return by the little girl. Instead, the blackout is followed by a door slamming, the sound of heels on concrete, the squeal of a car’s tires. After this, the lights come back up; the industrial lunchroom has been replaced by a car park, and Una is chasing after Ray’s blue Toyota (presumably his wife and stepdaughter arrived in a separate vehicle). Una succeeds in stopping the car, tugs Ray from it, and they struggle for a few minutes on the pavement, before collapsing onto one another in a cathartic heap. Final blackout.

I haven’t read the published playtext, but I suspect the coda to the London production was unscripted and improvised by Stein. I’m not sure which I prefer. Armour’s ending, while perhaps more faithful to the text, does seem to sway the moral balance somewhat against Ray—at least to judge by the reaction of the women sitting in front of us, with whom we had a brief conversation in the lobby upon exiting. Stein’s version, while a bit melodramatic and smacking, after 90 minutes of intensely dramatic verbal jousting, a bit too much of technical staginess, does have the virtue of leaving us with the image of Una and Ray together in a kind of mutual misery, both unable to “fly off into the light of the dark black night,” as Paul McCartney’s own song of sixpence puts it.

Either way, the play is a tasty theatrical dish to set before any audience.

P

Antony at the Vogue

This past Friday le tout SFU was out in force at the Vogue Theatre to catch Antony and the Johnsons for the only Vancouver date on their current tour. Richard and I were meeting our friends (and my colleagues) Chris and Carolyn, and we were all under the mistaken impression that it was reserved rather than festival seating. When we arrived the line-up was already snaking around the corner, and we passed no less than six of my former students while making our way to the end of it--including Matt, who was the very first in line, and consequently snagged prime front row seats. As it happened, another former student, Sean, whom we encountered a little further along in the line-up, ended up saving us four seats in the second row. An amazingly generous and selfless act on his part, which we subsequently rewarded by abandoning said seats for the balcony, as there was a massive fan blowing cold air directly above us. Sorry Sean!

In the end, our seats were just fine. Antony himself was in full voice, the band was tight, and the between song patter as loopily strange and sweet and wise as only Antony--with his unique and fragile take on the world--can make it. Highlights of the evening included Antony making violinist Maxim Mostad blush while serenading him by way of introduction; guitarist and violinist Rob Moose's hep and jazzy socks; rockin' versions of "For Today I Am a Boy" and "Fistful of Love"; an even more stylin' cover of Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love"; and a delightfully wacky and surreal back and forth with the audience about disappearing salmon, rivers of milk, and environmental depredation that preceded a final encore of "Twilight." I include video excerpts of these last three for those of you who couldn't be there on Friday:

Antony told us at one point, during a long disquisition on cities, sustainability, and social engineering in the context of mega-projects like the Olympics (which involved an amazing analogy to beehives), that he was developing a special fondness for Vancouver. I took this to be a reference to his last visit to the city, which was as a special invited guest to the TransSomaTechnics conference organized by Susan Stryker at SFU Harbour Centre this past May. Generous person that she is, Susan arranged for me to interview Antony in front of the assembled conference participants, and then to introduce a command solo performance that he gave us on the grand piano that had been wheeled onto the stage of the lecture hall. It was an amazing experience, and memories of it made last Friday's concert all the more special.

Regarding my last post on Batsheva, Peter Birnie had an interesting column in yesterday's Vancouver Sun on the counter-productiveness of cultural boycotts.

P.

Going Gaga for Batsheva

This past Saturday Richard and I were back at the Vancouver Playhouse, in the exact same row we sat for Relâche. This time, however, we were there to see Tel Aviv’s Batsheva Dance Company perform Deca Dance, a program of reconstructed excerpts from works created by Artistic Director Ohad Naharin between 1990 and 2008.

Batsheva, founded in 1964 by Martha Graham and the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild (from whom the company takes its name), is routinely cited as one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary dance companies in the world. And Naharin, who combines a sensuous musicality with a desire, above all, to communicate through his art the pleasure and joy in movement, has become one of the world’s most sought-after choreographers. He is also famous for inventing, and making a staple of Batsheva’s daily training method, GAGA, a movement release technique aimed at maximizing effort and the experience of the moment, and minimizing the stakes in what that effort and experience looks like or results in (hence the lack of mirrors in Batsheva’s rehearsal studios). GAGA classes are now taught regularly to non-dancers in Tel Aviv, and have been similarly exported around the world. Although the word is apparently meaningless, a nonsense expression invented by members of the company to describe Naharin’s improvisational and associative movement language, I have discovered that it also refers to an Israeli folk version of dodge ball that is frequently played at Jewish summer camps around the world.

Certainly Naharin draws inspiration from Israeli folk dancing traditions (he grew up on a kibbutz, where group dancing was a regular and cherished activity), and one of the most amazing things for me on Saturday was to see how he corralled his large ensemble of 24 dancers into precisely executed chain reaction movements through music. This was particularly true in the opening piece, which began with the dancers, dressed in the black suits and wide-brimmed hats of Hassidim, slumped in chairs arranged in a semi-circle across the stage. As the anthemic folk song playing on the sound system gained in force, the dancers flung themselves up off their chairs one by one from stage left to stage right, crashing briefly to the floor before bouncing back up to do some amazing sitting choreography on their chairs, and finally leaping to their feat to join in the song’s chorus. Except to this accumulative group movement Naharin also included some telling variations: one dancer on the end who would or could not pull himself up off the floor; another who at a certain moment broke the chain by leaping up onto his chair. It was a rousing way to begin, and had me completely captivated and enthralled from the get-go. The following link contains a sample of this piece, along with other excerpts from the mixed program, not all of which were performed in Vancouver.

Actually, most of the audience was mesmerized even before the official performance had begun. This was because our performance of Deca Dance included a bonus curtain-raiser solo by one of the male members of the ensemble, who improvised various steps and interacted charmingly with various members of the audience as the house was filling up and people were finding their seats. For him it might have just been an exhibitionary version of his normal backstage warm-up, but for us it was a delightful introduction to Batsheva’s movement vocabulary.

And to their penchant for audience interaction! For midway through one of the dances on the program (I am unable to refer to the excerpts by name, for while their titles are provided in the program, an asterisk also tells us that they do not appear in the order in which they are listed), members of the company suddenly jump down from the stage and each pick out a partner from the audience. What follows is a ten-minute feast of dance abandon, in which the lucky audience members are seamlessly incorporated into the work on stage, at once improvising singly to the tango movements of their respective Batsheva partners and then coming together as a group in a chorus line of random steps and shimmies. All those chosen willingly and gamely participated—especially one brave and talented woman who was rewarded with an extra slow dance with her male partner after the others had left the stage—and the joy they expressed in moving on stage was completely unself-conscious and totally infectious.

Mixed in with the overt theatricality of the larger ensemble pieces, there were also sparer works—most created for the women in the company—that emphasized more textured movement and repeated compositional forms and sequencing. This was especially true in a duet choreographed to an unusual arrangement of Ravel’s Bolero, as well as in a longer excerpt danced to some interesting post-feminist spoken word poetry.

All in all a most enjoyable evening—although one not without its share of mild controversy. As a leading cultural export from Israel, Batsheva’s current tour of North America has been targeted by protesters angry over Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza and calling for a boycott of anything related to the country until there is an end to a further expansion of settlements and a lasting two-state solution with Palestinians is reached. Similar protests had been called for in Vancouver, an idea that divided many in the dance community, and prompting many to anticipate some angry exchanges at the entrance to the Playhouse during Batsheva’s dates here. In the end, no protesters were in sight on the Saturday.

Which I was glad to see. Boycotting arts and cultural groups, often the most financially vulnerable and the most critically political organizations in any country or regime, does little to advance a cause. At least not in the way, say, as targeting Shell for its investments in Apartheid South Africa. Were we to stop reading Nadine Gordimer or listening to Miriam Makeba during the same era? My life would be greatly impoverished, politically and culturally, if I couldn’t watch the films of Eytan Fox, who has made some of the most affecting cinema on the Israeli/Palestinian situation, often complicating questions of religion and ethnicity with added issues of sexuality.

In fact, as with the work of Fox, I would argue that the active promotion and dissemination of art can actually do more to engage people politically than any mass boycott of cultural products or industries. Certainly in the wake of the most recent Israeli elections, in which the hawkish Netanyahu may have formed a temporary—and tenuous—coalition of convenience with the ultra-right Lieberman but in which he likewise needs the active support of Livni to survive (especially given the new government in the US), Batsheva’s visit gave me much to think about in terms of the history of the embattled Middle East and what might be done to secure its more peaceful future.

Kudos, then, to Dance House, Vancouver’s newest contemporary dance production series, for bringing this amazing company to the city for the first time (and to the Chutzpah Festival and the 2010 Cultural Olympiad for partnering with them). And to making such splendid use of the Playhouse as a dance venue. I look forward to visiting again in April to see Hubbard Street Dance.

P.

Of Rest and Revivals

Obamamania hits Canada, as the US President and his security detail descend on Ottawa today for his first foreign visit since taking office in January. A shame that Prime Minister Harper has nixed an address to Parliament, but no doubt he fears being upstaged. Kudos to the CBC and news anchor Peter Mansbridge, then, for getting Obama to sit down for a television interview in Washington in advance of his visit earlier this week. At least questions relating to Alberta's oil sands and Canada's combat mission in Afghanistan were put out on the table in an open and frank manner. Which is more than will likely happen at any press conferences or photo ops to emerge from today's whirlwind tour and meetings. However, of note to this blog's abiding interest in issues of performance and place, apparently Obama, upon reaching Parliament Hill this morning, first commented on its Gothic architecture, and the contrast between DC's Neoclassical/Beaux Arts style. Richard wondered aloud just last evening whether Obama would register the difference and make any connections re contrasting national temperaments and histories. Sure enough, he did. Smart man. I hope he's getting some rest.

This past week, we attended two wonderful performance revivals. First up was Turning Point music ensemble's remount of Erik Satie's 1924 Dadaist Gesamskunstwerke, Relâche, which featured original music by the composer, sets and dramaturgy by Francis Picabia, a ballet by choreographer Jean Börlin, and a cinematic entr'acte by filmmaker René Clair (featuring appearances by Satie, Picabia, Duchamps, and Man Ray). The original apparently thrilled and scandalized Parisian audiences in equal measure. This remount was the brainchild of my SFU Contemporary Arts colleague, Owen Underhill, who together with his Artistic Co-Director at Turning Point, Jeremy Berkman, enlisted the talents of local artist Greg Snider (also from SFU), choreographer Simone Orlando, dancers Tiffany Tregarthen, Edmond Kilpatrick, Heather Dotto, Scott Augustine, Josh Beamish, Mackenzie Green-Dusterbeck, and David Raymond, soprano Phoebe MacRae, and actor Patti Allen, to reintroduce Satie's music and Clair's film to a new generation. It was a truly delightful spectacle, a feast for all the senses, and a reminder that, as with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring nine years earlier, the European modernists still have something to teach us about artistic interdisciplinarity and avant-gardism.

Then this past Tuesday it was to the Stanley Theatre to see the Arts Club's revival of Somerset Maugham's 1926 comedy of marital infidelity, The Constant Wife. An updating of William Wycherley via George Bernard Shaw, the play is Maugham's smart and sassy proto-feminist take on love, marriage, and sexual economics. Constance Middleton (Nicole Underhay) appears blissfully devoted to her husband of 15 years, Dr. John Middleton (Ted Cole), and apparently equally ignorant of the fact that he has been carrying on an affair with her best friend, the blonde bubble-headed Marie-Louise Durham (Celine Stubel), for quite some time. This news is presented to us at the top of the play, by Constance's vexed sister Martha (Moya O'Connell), who is determined that Constance should know the truth and divorce John immediately. However, Martha and Constance's dowager mother, Mrs. Culver (Bridget O'Sullivan), is equally determined that Martha keep her mouth shut and not upset the status quo, arguing that men are congenitally unfaithful and that where was the harm in that so long as John continued to provide for Constance the life to which she has become accustomed. Finally, Constance's widowed friend Barbara Fawcett (Katey Wright), a self-employed interior designer with a booming business, has also heard the news of the affair, and has come to offer Constance a job, seeing financial independence as a bulwark against the possible dissolution of her marriage. 

What nobody knows is that Constance is actually aware of John's affair and perfectly content to let it continue without anyone's interference. This becomes clear when Marie Louise's husband, Mortimer (Mark Burgess), enters in Act Two to accuse John of adultery with his wife, having found his cigarette case under her pillow. Constance, however, claims the case to be her own, having long ago confiscated it from her husband and mistakenly left it in the Durhams' bedroom after a day of shopping and trying on clothes with Marie Louise. Mortimer eventually accepts this explanation, but the rest are left to wonder why Constance would lie for her husband, and why she is herself not beside herself with fury knowing she has been betrayed by her best friend.

This, then, is where Maugham elevates his elegant comedy of manners to razor sharp commentary that remains as contemporary today as when it was first staged in the 1920s (with Ethel Barrymore playing the lead). For Constance proceeds to outline a theory of love, affection, and desire that is as inconstant and mutable as marriage's institutional and economic structures are reliably gendered and hierarchized. In short, Constance is herself no longer "in love" with John; but she is fond of him, and very conscious of the fact that he provides a comfortable home and lifestyle for her, and so why should she not fully buy into the pretense of bourgeois respectability that she signed up for in the first place? Maugham is not content to leave things there, and complicates this situation even further by introducing an old suitor of Constance's, Bernard Kersal (Mike Wasko), into this mix. He is still madly in love with her, and she appreciates the attention, and so having decided to take Barbara up on her offer of joining her design firm, in Act Three proceeds to buy her way out of her marriage--at least temporarily--and go on a vacation to Italy with Bernard in order to test her own response to his ardor. She announces her plan to John, who is of course apoplectic with rage, but who nevertheless accedes to her artful and witty quid pro quo logic about sexual economics: having paid her own debt to John for his long-term financial support by returning to him a portion of her own earnings from Barbara's design business, she now feels she can, like him, take out a temporary mortgage on monogamous marriage and enjoy a break with Bernard.

As I said, the play continues to have all sorts of contemporary relevance, not least in the context of same-sex marriage. Indeed, given that Maugham's own serial infidelity toward his wife Syrie (herself a designer, and the model for Constance) mostly took the form of affairs with other men, the layers of meaning are very rich indeed. This production is smart and sexy, crisply directed (by Morris Panych) and acted (Underhay is a real gem), and gorgeously designed (Ken MacDonald's all-white art deco set is the perfect homage to Syrie, who was famous for introducing the look in the 1920s, and Nancy Bryant's costumes cut the perfect silhouette on all the actors, especially the women). The show runs until this Sunday--I urge all in the area to attend.

One final bit of sad news I just learned is that local actor and playwright Lorena Gale has metastatic stomach cancer. There will be a benefit performance in her honour at the Firehall this Monday, February 23rd at 7 pm, featuring staged readings from her plays Je me souviens, Angélique, and The Darwinist. Our thoughts are with you, Lorena.

P.

$1 Billion

That’s the total estimated costs for Olympics-related security in 2010, as finally confirmed by the federal government today. Organizers had originally budgeted one-fifth that amount. I guess this helps pay for all the helicopters that have been buzzing overhead in Vancouver during the past week as part of various “training exercises.” Nothing like going into full lockdown mode so we can all safely watch men and women hurl themselves down mountains or slap a little black disc across the ice. And so what if that means residents and business owners in the line of fire, as it were, have to put their lives and jobs on hold for two weeks or more as perimeter fencing is erected around their homes and stores? It’s all in the spirit of fun and cross-cultural bonding.

It’s exactly one year from today that the whole spectacle begins, and as you can tell I’m starting to get worked up. There are all sorts of celebratory events taking place across the city today, including a torchlight ski extravaganza on Grouse Mountain. I recommend, instead, hauling ass to the counter-torchlight parade being organized by the Olympic Resistance Network at Victory Square at 6 pm: details at www.no2010.com. This follows upon the 2nd Annual Poverty Olympics, which took place in the DTES on Monday. And a talk by Helen Lenskyj, a noted critic of the Olympics industry, on Tuesday (thanks, Myka, for the notice); I quote Lenskyj in my book, but alas I couldn’t go to her talk as I was at another event (see below).

In related news, Gary Mason reveals in today’s Globe that the city seems to have worked out a financing deal with a consortium of Canadian banks that will allow them to borrow approximately $800 million at a reduced interest rate of only 3% in order to pay back Fortress Investment and see that the troubled Athletes Village gets finished on time. This is good news, and while taxpayers are by no means in the clear yet, the situation is looking a lot better than it was several weeks ago. Kudos to Mayor Gregor for his quiet but intense negotiating on this one.

And kudos to City Council for also voting to cancel a plan to extend additional funding to the Downtown Ambassadors Program (DAP). A human rights complaint against Genesis Security, the private firm that staffs the program, and the Downtown Business Improvement Association, which will continue to pay for it in its current jurisdictional mandate, has recently gone forward at the BC Human Rights Tribunal. It alleges that the DAP’s coordinated intimidation of the street homeless population in the Downtown Eastside essentially amounts to a violation of the right to public assembly, and that in targeting some of the most marginalized populations in the city (Aboriginal people, the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill) is fundamentally discriminatory. (Lenskyj has noted that our DAP is directly modeled on a similar “hospitality force” put in place in Atlanta in advance of the 1996 Summer Olympics.) My friend Jamie, who actually covertly trained with Genesis as part of an art project he is working on relating to the DAP, gave a deposition as part of the complaint, and is keeping me informed about its progress. 

In the last post I reported on the rethink at City Hall about cultural programming and funding, and the possibility that we might get an independent Arts Council. Apparently opinion is divided on this issue, both among councillors and arts administrators: check out this item from The Georgia Straight. This is an issue I also will keep tracking. The same item in the GS also reports that attendance at this year’s PuSh Festival exceeded 24,000 and that Club PuSh, in particular, was a roaring success. Hurrah!

On Tuesday Alana and I went to see battery opera’s site-specific piece Lives Were Around Me. We were part of an intimate audience of three that assembled at the Alibi Room at 8 pm (we arrived earlier for a dinner, which was discounted by 10%, a nice surprise). After signing a liability waiver, we began following battery opera’s dapperly dressed David McIntosh east on Alexander Street. McIntosh was a charming, if cryptic, guide (“You can’t believe everything you hear” was the one line he kept repeating); he led us to the Firehall, on Cordova, where we were eventually met by Adrienne Wong (we would also later encounter Paul Ternes), who was more talkative, although no more understandable. This was because the text of the walking tour we were taking of the Downtown Eastside was freely adapted from James Kelman’s Translated Accounts, an abstruse, Kafkaesque novel made up of monologues detailing instances of surveillance, arrest, detention, and torture carried out in an unnamed police state. The effect was deliberately disorienting, forcing us to reexamine a part of the city that has historically been overdetermined with meaning, not to mention over-policed by various state apparatuses invested in the interpretation of that meaning. However, I think in the end the text dominated too much, and that the piece was perhaps overconceptualized dramaturgically, to the point where external intrusions—that is, the very space and community where the event was taking place—seemed to flummox our guide. 

This was most evident at the bar we entered midway through the piece. Like any bar in that part of town, it was filled with a larger-than-life cast of characters, and while a table had been reserved at the back for us (complete with a complimentary beer each) we were sharing the space with Bobby and his friend. We soon learned both just been released from jail and were interested in making conversation, and perhaps more (Bobby seemed to take a particular fancy to yours truly, displaying his tattoos, and offering up multiple hugs). But our guide, while polite with Bobby and tolerant of his interruptions to a point, kept telling him that she had to keep to her schedule, and consequently kept drawing us back to the tale she was telling. In other words, despite the piece being all about looking at/for/through evidence (we later had a tour of the Vancouver Police Museum, next to the Firehall, which was more than a little creepy), the material lives occupying the site in which the performance was taking place seemed ancillary to the abstract representation of various extreme scenarios of livability. To be sure, the juxtaposition of textual site and cited text necessarily prompted me to import other spaces as dramatic referents, some of which made me feel more, some less, vulnerable; none of which gave me any clearer sense of my bearings. But, overall, the performance seemed more interested in exploring the internal psychic excavation of various spatial archives (broadly and very sketchily defined) than it was in precipitating an external bodily encounter with the full repertoire of this particular place’s experiences (on the “archive” and the “repertoire,” see Diana Taylor). Nevertheless, in terms of the latter, the neighbourhood—and Bobby (who resurfaced, magically, at the end of the tour) especially—did not disappoint. Lives were around us. We, too, had an audience. All we had to do was look.

P.