Long Division: Second Closing

Today's matinee is the last performance of this remount of Long Division. It would be wonderful to have a second week of shows, but I am grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit the work at all. The play is definitely stronger as a result, the actors have made new discoveries in the text and with their characters, and the work--especially Lauchlin's set and Lesley's choreography--looks great in the Annex space. Immense thanks to Richard Wolfe for making all of this happen.

Later this evening, after our strike, the cast and crew will come over to our place to celebrate. In the meantime, I thought I would share a response to the play by my friend Ziyian Kwan. I have enjoyed writing about Ziyian's work in this space over the years and it is a treat for me to receive her sensitive response to my own creative efforts.

P

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Dear Peter,

Rodney and I attended Long Division last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I thought it would be a fun exercise to do as you do and write about the experience the morning after. And to limit the writing to within 500 words, in a tone inspired by yours. Herewith:

On the day I saw Long Division, playwright Peter Dickinson’s partner Richard visited my husband’s bookshop, The Paperhound, to purchase a precious pamphlet. Later that evening, upon arriving at the Annex Theatre, I ran into David Kaye, an actor I haven’t seen for years, who lives in my building of 18 units. Then as I found my seat in the theatre, I realized that Jimmy Tait, whom I hadn’t seen since attending a showing of Misunderstood, was beside me. Hugs were exchanged.

All this to ask, what are the odds of running into people who are on the periphery of our lives – in places where we share common interests, in remote cities yet untraveled, or in our dreams? Are these collisions accident or fate? I think of times when the course of my life was changed as a direct result of such chance meetings.

Long Division invited me to consider the gravity and levity of encounters with people. I found myself wishing to remember exact lines that were pithy analogies of math and human exchange. The text, which was delivered by a fine cast of actors, was recognizably Peter Dickinson’s: the sing-song syntax and dry lyricism of precise words that captured potent questions about life. Throughout, the clever use of phrases such as “in addition” to describe events.

Whereas much of the play was a silky cocoon of existential inquiry, the story revealed a tragedy. This tension worked, yet I occasionally wished for a less emphatic treatment of human drama. But then, I know nothing about theatre….

I do know a little about dance and found choreographer Lesley Telford’s work bang on. Without being illustrative or literal, the actors moved through space to navigate circumstances in time. The dance, though abstract, seemed natural, and added texture to characters and scenes. And, the movement was styling!

I also liked the projection of mathematical formulas on a backdrop of Pythagorean 3D triangles. Coming from dance, where projections are often used but usually ignored, I appreciated that the actors actually looked at the projections to confirm that, indeed, complex equations attend the sum total of life’s many variables.

My favorite of the play’s many equations and corresponding metaphors was this: the empty set is a subset of every set.

Like many people, I often feel like the outcast quality in a mass quantity of digits that belong. But Long Division helps me with this affliction, suggesting that the nothingness of my empty set is part of a greater equation: humanity.  

This morning I woke up and thought about my life as an artist and realized that if nothing else, I have at my side and within me, the exponential prowess of zero.

Thank you for the beautiful work, Peter.

With love,

Ziyian

Long Division x 2

Since Tuesday I've been hanging out at Playwright's Theatre Centre along with the original cast and crew of Long Division as we prepare for a "refreshed remount" of the Pi Theatre show at the Annex on Seymour Street beginning next Wednesday. It is such a gift to be given the opportunity to revisit the work with this talented team. With a bit of distance from the first production at the Gateway in November, and in dialogue with director Richard Wolfe, I had made some cuts and tweaks to the script, which was distributed to everyone in March. In rehearsals we've been making some further adjustments, with a focus especially on smoothing out and making more organic the transitions between the choral scenes and individual characters' monologues.

Choreographer Lesley Telford, who is busy with her own show at The Dance Centre (on through this evening), popped into the studio yesterday to help adjust a couple of the movement sequences. The changes were exactly what was needed and it was fantastic to see not just how on board the actors were with the new material, but also how quickly they were able to absorb it into their bodies. When we started this second go-round on Tuesday I think everyone was a bit trepidatious about how much of the original movement score they'd remembered. But with the aid of video documentation and each other's kinetic memories, and with a lot of counted repetitions, the sequences came back incredibly quickly to the actors, and watching them yesterday during our first complete run through you would have thought they'd been doing this continuously since November rather than having had a hiatus of four months.

Generally we're trying to loosen things up with both the movement and the text, and to give the actors permission to play a bit more. Our costume designer, Connie Hosie, commented after yesterday afternoon's run-through that our efforts seemed to be working. Notwithstanding some dropped lines and a couple of starts and stops with respect to new movement and blocking, she said the piece was noticeably tighter and that all the actors were more clearly at home in their characters. That's great to hear, as we only have two more days of rehearsal before we go into tech. Getting into the actual Annex space will also be exciting, as we have a lot more room than we did at the Gateway's Studio B.

Tickets for the show can be purchased here. I probably won't be blogging again about the process until after we open. In the meantime, here's a selfie I took the other day in front of one of the bus shelter posters advertising the play around the city. Linda Quibell, who plays Grace, commented yesterday that the image is a bit CSI-y. That's perhaps not a bad analogy given the mystery that has to be unravelled in the play.

P.

Music for a Thousand Autumns at the Orpheum Annex

Last night the Turning Point Ensemble opened its tenth anniversary season at the Orpheum Annex. It was my first time at this newish theatre, built--along with the Vancouver Symphony School of Music's Pyatt Hall--as one of the cultural amenities attached to the high-rise tower that went up where the old Vancouver Place cinemas used to be. Located on the second floor, with street signage that is negligible, the space can be hard to find. However, at approximately 150 seats, with a perimeter balcony around which you could squeeze about 30 more if needed, it's a nice, intimate size. And its warm, wood-panelled interior is well-suited to the acoustics of a chamber ensemble.

While devoted to the musical repertoire of the early-twentieth century onward, as TPE Artistic Director Owen Underhill noted in his opening remarks, the ensemble has always had a special mandate to commission new work. To that end, last night's all-Canadian program featured two world premieres, as well as a work newly revised especially for TPE. First up, however, was the great Alexina Louie's Music for a Thousand Autumns, one of her first commissions after returning from studies in the US in 1983. An additional special treat of this program is that all of the composers are present in Vancouver and so we got to hear from each of them in advance of the performance of their work. Among other things, Louie told us that the piece was an attempt to reconcile her Western musical training with her Chinese heritage (she grew up in Vancouver). Thus, in the interplay between the percussion, the strings and the wind instruments of this piece--especially in its second movement--we hear a beautiful take on the ancient Chinese instrument known as the chin (a sort of fretless zither). The third movement also builds to a wonderful, crashing piano cadenza, which Jane Hayes played with marvellous energy and sparkling colour.

In his remarks, Anthony Tan told us that his music is an exploration of sound on a purely sensory level. He is not interested in social or cultural influences, or having his music "represent" anything. Rather, as in the case of the piece we heard last night, On the Sensations of Tone #1 (jointly commissioned by TPE and the Ensemble contemporaine de Montréal), he is trying to foreground the physical experience of timbre. This means that Hayes plucks the strings of the piano and clacks the side of it with her nails as much as she plays the keys; that the flautist (Brenda Fedoruk) and clarinetist (Erin Fung) get up every now and then to have impromptu quasi-tuning sessions with Hayes; and that they, together with violinist Mary Sokol-Brown and cellist Ariel Barnes, all work noise-makers underneath their shoes at various points in the piece. It was certainly a most visceral experience of sound, and one that--for all its strange dissonance--was not without its tonal pleasures.

Linda Catlin Smith's Gold Leaf was created for the Glenn Gould School's New Music Ensemble in 2010. In it she was trying to think through the process of composing for a chamber orchestra, in which each of the instruments has a distinct personality, while also needing to come together to create harmonic colour. She likens the process, in her program notes, to a painter's palette, with in her case the percussion adding an outer layer of shimmer, as in the gold leaf of a painting by Klimt.

Percussionist Jonathan Bernard is certainly given a workout in this program, especially in the final two pieces. Vancouver-based Dorothy Chang's Three Windows was created in 2011, inspired by the views over the Strait of Georgia from her UBC condo (where she teaches in the Faculty of Music). The first movement is based on the motion of clouds, the second on the swirling flight of an eagle, and the third on the sights and sounds of human construction on the UBC campus. Hence the swelling scherzo-like cacophony of "metal on wood" that Bernard is charged with leading at the end of this work. Something very much approximating a drum solo for Bernard also concludes the world premiere of Louie's A Curious Passerby at Fu's Funeral, which the composer informed us started from the premise that she knew TPE's members "could play really fast." The piece was certainly played at full throttle by all concerned and was a most energetic way to concluded the evening.

TPE goes on the road with this program in the coming weeks: to Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. Then it is back to Vancouver for another world premiere: the chamber opera air india [redacted], on at SFU Woodward's from November 6-11, and not to be missed.

P.