A brief shout-out to Rice & Beans Theatre's current production of Mobilis in Mobili, on now at Pacific Theatre (12th Ave. and Hemlock) through tomorrow evening. The second installment of the company's "Element Series," the one-act play is a loose adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea--by way of Vincenzo Natali's Cube it seemed at certain points to this viewer.

Writer-director Pedro Chamale, working collaboratively with his cast and crew, makes canny use of Pacific's tricky studio space, and also incorporates lots of innovative movement into the piece (the choreography was by CarliAnn Forthun). Condensing the essence of Verne's story to the choice of death versus joining his crew for unlimited underwater adventures that Nemo (Deneh Thompson) presents his three "rescued" captives--Professor Aronnax (Tristan Bacon), his assistant Conseil (Chelsea MacDonald), and the bull-headed Canadian harpoonist Ned Land (Rase Calvert)--the piece manages to construct an interesting metaphysical exploration of the question of choice versus constraint.

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Bar None

At the Dancing on the Edge Festival's Edge Five presentation last night at the Firehall, Richard and I thrilled to the premiere of colleague and Objecthood collaborator Rob Kitsos' newest work. In Barego, Kitsos, together with Ballet BC dancers Leon Feizo-Gas and Alexis Fletcher and SFU Contemporary Arts alum Mark Arboleda, offer a meditation on the bar as a space where individual subjectivity and private desires (you can read the invisible slash mark in the title) come up against the rituals of public spectacle and collective judgment. Against a widescreen rear projection film loop consisting of a largely continuous pan of what I took to be the new Charles Bar at SFU Woodward's, and making strategic spatial use of three white barstools (which I like to think of as an homage by Rob to Objecthood), the four dancers mine (and at times mime) the subtle choreography so often exhibited in drinking establishments: from the way we perch on or fall off our stools to the complex sequence of hand and head movements involved in doing tequila shots; from the purposeful tango of would-be seduction to the elegant ballet of blissful inebriation. In solos, duos, and trios, Rob structures his movement around the twin poles of alienation and sociability, display and concealment that are always operating in the space of the bar: by that I mean that the dancers come together and move apart in patterns that telegraph at once the intoxicating effects of fellow-feeling and the sobering estrangement that comes when that feeling is withheld or not returned (including by the self).

Having worked with Rob, I know he likes to play with stage space, and that he is not afraid to have more than one thing going on at the same time movement-wise. I'm with him on this, as static dancers within a mise-en-scène is something that drives me nuts (and an element of Quiet that I couldn't understand, especially as Zaides' twice-repeated placement of his non-moving dancers downstage right effectively blocked the view of the left side of the house). All of which is to say that I appreciated how Rob played with foreground and background in Barego, including the incorporation of the film. One's attention is constantly being divided in a bar--focused near (on one's drink or potential conquest) and far (the animated conversations at adjacent tables, the sports game being broadcast on the television monitor, and so on)--so the fact that ours was as well during various sequences last night felt appropriate.

Acutely aware that bars are also prime sites of talk, with the confession, the boast, and the seduction all vying for performative supremacy, Rob incorporates audio excerpts from bar scenes in popular films into the work. Indeed, Rob himself offers up a memorable lip synch of a speech by Shelley "The Machine" Levene, the character Jack Lemmon played in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it's a treat to watch Fletcher incarnate the dissolute Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway) from Barbet Schroeder's Barfly (Mickey Rourke's Henry to Dunaway's Wanda in that film: "What do you do?" Dunaway/Wanda: "I drink.").

One of the things that makes Rob's work so compelling to watch is that he not a "pure dance" choreographer; less interested in the technical execution of his movement, than in that movement's integration into a larger interdisciplinary aesthetic (one that often includes film/video, music, props, and big heaps of theatricality), Rob offers multiple avenues of access to the questions he chooses to explore. Movement is always central to this exploration, but it is never abstracted or marked off for its own sake. To this end, it is especially exciting to watch the classically trained Fletcher and Feizo-Gaz, so memorable as the leads in Rob's Long Story Short, his contribution to Ballet BC's Surfacing program at the Dance Centre in 2009, cut loose even further in Barego. The program notes state that the dancers had a hand in the choreography, and at moments last night line and extension definitely came to the fore; but Rob's inimitable choreography (where limbs contract and buckle as much as they straighten) kept everyone (dancers and audience alike) suitably off balance.

My one complaint: I wanted the piece to be longer. This definitely feels to me like a piece that can be expanded into something evening-length, and I do hope that Rob continues to work on it.

Actually, I have a second complaint, and it has to do with the work that precedes Rob's on the Edge Five program: Benjamin Kamino's Nudity.Desire. Over-theorized (Agamben, Deleuze, and Zizek are all cited in the program notes) and under-performed, the work betrayed, for me, the worst excesses of bad performance art. Why it's been paired with Rob's piece I cannot fathom. If you're planning to head to the matinee on Saturday (which I urge you to do), perhaps think about arriving at intermission.

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Loud and Unclear

I didn’t get the chickens. At the end of Arkadi Zaides’ Quiet, which had its second and final performance at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival last night at the Firehall, three of the four male dancers remove what look like cardboard cutouts of chicken heads—each attached to a wooden strut—from the set designed by Tel Aviv graffiti artist Klone. They then proceed to menace the fourth dancer with them, "pecking" at him with the cutouts as he withdraws inside himself, or scurries across the floor.

One is left struggling with how to interpret the image, especially in a piece that up until that point had traded fairly literally (and at times didactically) in the physical representation of conflict, aggression, mistrust, violence, and the sundry “emergency states” (both internal and external) that have come to characterize the co-dependent relationship between Palestinians and Israelis that is at the heart of Zaides’ work. The intensity of movement displayed by the dancers in Quiet came through loud and clear, and was never less than compelling. And yet I can’t say that, overall, I was very moved by the piece.

And I find that just as perplexing as the meaning of the chickens.

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SummerWorks and the Ongoing Conservative Cultural Chill

Anyone who doubted that a Conservative majority under Stephen Harper would be anything other than benign business as usual--particularly where arts and culture are concerned--should take careful stock of the recent announcement that Canadian Heritage has, after five years of providing federal funding for the SummerWorks Festival in Toronto, rejected the Festival's most recent grant request of $47,000, representing a 20% shortfall in the organization's budget just weeks before the 2011 Festival is to open on August 5th.

Folks may recall that SummerWorks was rebuked last year by Herr Harper himself for staging Homegrown, a play that dealt--a little too sympathetically in the eyes of the Prime Minister's Office--with the friendship between playwright Catherine Frid and a member of the Toronto 18. That this year's withdrawal of funding is tied to last year's programming is abundantly clear, and such blatant ideological intervention into cultural content on the part of the government should cause all in this country significant alarm.

As Guy Dixon notes in today's Globe and Mail, the decision also has consequences beyond the chill it sends to other arts and cultural organizations dependent on federal funding. SummerWorks is an important testing ground for new theatrical work in this country, as well as a venue visited by ADs, curators, and cultural programmers at other festivals across the country looking to partner on daring and provocative productions. This could have consequences not just for what audiences get to see in Toronto, but what the rest of us don't get to see.

Then, too, we should listen carefully to what's being telegraphed by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who is quoted at the end of Dixon's piece as stating that ALL cultural groups should be on notice that they cannot necessarily depend on continued public funding from the federal government, no matter their track records in the past. Because, of course, those of us who appreciate and support arts and culture in our society are just a bunch of snobbish elites who don't vote the right way.

Prove Flaherty and the Conservatives wrong, Canada, by writing to the Prime Minister and Heritage Canada protesting their funding decision regarding SummerWorks. And, as importantly, consider donating to the Festival to help them with this year's shortfall. You can do so here.

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Incongruity

We've been talking a lot about the importance of incongruity as a structuring principle of comedy in one of my classes this summer. Here are a few of the political incongruities that gave me a chuckle this past weekend:

1. Just in time for the 42nd edition of New York City's Pride Parade yesterday (at which a chastened Tracy Morgan served as honorary marshall--kidding!), Governor Cuomo signed a bill on Friday making New York the sixth state in the US (plus the District of Columbia) legalizing same-sex marriage. As the lead article in Sunday's New York Times pointed out, "the biggest and most influential donors to the New York campaign were Republicans." But as the paper's former restaurant critic Frank Bruni put it elsewhere in a very personal (and movingly written) op-ed piece--with what I take to be only the slightest whiff of irony--perhaps the greater incongruity is that this is a victory that the LGBT community is celebrating in the first place: "Why such widespread backing, from such surprising quarters? One major reason is that the wish and push to be married cast gay men and lesbians in the most benign, conservative light imaginable, not as enemies of tradition but as aspirants to it. In the quest for integration and validation, saying “I do” to “I do” is much more effective — not to mention more reflective of the way most gay people live — than strutting in leather on a parade float. We’re not trying to undermine the institution of marriage, a task ably handled by the likes of Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and too many other onetime role models to mention. We’re paying it an enormous compliment."

2. Meanwhile, here at home, after nearly a year investigating across party lines allegations of Canadian troops' complicity in detainee torture in Afghanistan, Stephen Harper's government has released thousands more pages of transcripts. Once again, most of the information on those pages is blacked out. Word is that some of it has to do with asbestos being used to build the prisons where the alleged torture took place.

3. In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Mayor Gregor Robertson admitted that he didn't know how many police were on the streets the night of the the Stanley Cup riots, and that Police Chief Jim Chu wouldn't tell him. Apparently last year's release of the same information was a "mistake" and that as Chair of the Police Board, the mayor has no input into operations, only for "police and budget." But wouldn't both of those things--personnel and money--fall into the category of operations in most organizations? At least Robertson agrees with Premier Clark that those responsible for the worst of the mayhem should be duly punished. As the above photo details, they are starting with bad spellers.

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Fire and Ice

The above images confirm why I am not a hockey fan, and why I dreaded the outcome of Wednesday night's final game.

Lots of finger-pointing and hand-wringing about why this happened, who's to blame, and the black eye this is giving to the City's image little over a year after the general euphoria of the Olympics (those initial Black Block riots notwithstanding).

Given what happened in 1994, given the mob mentality stoked and abetted (including by the mayor, the premier, and even my university president) at every level leading up to this series and especially the do-or-die Game 7, and given that a major attraction of the sport is watching players beat the shit out of each other on the ice, why is anyone surprised?

The phrase "Go Canucks Go" has never been a benign and supportive cheer from my perspective; rather, I have always found it to be oppressive in its ubiquity, and tinged with menace.

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Not Completely As I Would Have Liked It

There is much to admire in David Mackay's production of As You Like It at Bard on the Beach, which I caught in preview performance last night along with several members of my Women and Comedy class (we are discussing the play next week). Lois Anderson is a spirited, intensely physical, and very sexual Rosalind, and she is matched in comic timing, vivacity, and stage presence by Luisa Jojic as Celia. These two bosom buddies do not moon coquettishly over the de Boys brothers (Todd Thomson as Orlando and Sebastian Kroon as Oliver), but rather openly display their desire and revel in the frank ribaldry of Shakespeare's language. As such, we are given much lustier portraits of both women than we normally see in productions, their respective sexual ids having been unleashed by the wilds of Arden--a point reinforced especially by the staging of one of the songs requested by Jaques (John Murphy) of Duke Senior's men in Act IV as a fever dream of Celia's.

At the same time, I did chafe a little at what struck me as the resolutely heteronormative channeling of the women's open sexuality. After all, the play is pretty clear in suggesting that Celia and Rosalind, who share a bed in addition to an intensely symbiotic friendship, are same-sex cousins who kiss, and very likely a lot more else besides. When Rosalind falls for Orlando, Celia is openly jealous, and as critics like Julie Crawford have suggested, one way to interpret the speed with which Celia accedes to Oliver's marriage proposal so late in the play (and so soon after first laying eyes on him) is that she sees in a union with Orlando's newly reconciled brother a way to remain close to her own "most true" bosom buddy--Rosalind.

Of course, one of the delicious ironies of As You Like It is that the marital epithalamium is actually forestalled at the end of the play. To be sure, the god Hymen is magically conjured by Rosalind to unite each of the four couples (Rosalind and Orlando; Celia and Oliver; Touchstone and Audrey; Silvius and the truculent Phoebe), but the bonds are actually never pronounced and Duke Senior's concluding couplet announcing their imminence is followed by Rosalind's epilogue, which takes us out of the fictional temporality of traditional comic closure and into the subjunctive temporality of the play's real-world staging ("If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me..."). Spoken by a boy actor who has just finished playing a woman playing a boy playing a woman, both the potential cross-gender and same-sex pathways encapsulated by this phrase are made manifest not just in the radically unstable referent behind the first-person pronoun, but also in the equally ambiguous second person addressee, whose multiple and multi-directional identifications cannot be pinned down.

So what happens if you excise the epilogue altogether, as this Bard production does? For one thing, you necessarily make marriage the de facto end point, both structurally in terms of the play and ideologically in terms of normalizing the free play of gender identifications and sexual desires that up until that point had reigned in Arden. The homoerotic associations that resurface in Rosalind's epilogue, and that link it to her cross-dressing elsewhere in the play, are here jettisoned in favour of an explicit staging of the revelries only hinted at in Duke Senior's final lines.

As disturbing, to me, is the fact that removing the epilogue also imperils if not destroys altogether the complicity established between performers and audience, that we are not only in on the joke (of gender and sexuality, generally, but also of theatrical masquerade more specifically), but that we are enjoying the joke. In a production that has up until this point traded in broad winks at the audience, not least in Ryan Beil's delightful capering, ad libbing, and general breaking of the fourth wall as Touchstone, this seems a curious final choice. And falling back on an excuse of changing theatrical conventions--i.e., that to a contemporary audience a female actor speaking the epilogue as written just wouldn't make sense--betrays an equally grievous failure of imagination in presuming audience members' identifications with both the character of Rosalind and the actor playing her are singular and straightforward.

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