Happy Days at SFU Woodward's

Winnie, in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, is one of those classic female theatre roles--like Medea or Hedda Gabler--that I imagine all great actresses aspire to play. Except that Winnie is no tragic figure, and it would be a mistake to read her predicament--mired up to her waist in sand in Act 1, and then up to her neck in Act 2--as one that induces in her paroxysms of despair and self-pity. Above all what Beckett reveals to us through the mix of metaphysical and delightfully bawdy "prattle" that he gives to Winnie is that she is not just hyper-conscious of both the temporality and the materiality of her situation, but also accepting of them. Indeed, there is a way in which the routine of unpacking her bag, or gauging when to sing her song, or wondering if her companion, Willie, having crawled back into his cave, can nevertheless still hear her, approaches a kind of daily practice of Buddhist enlightenment.

Certainly it was a revelation last night, watching Square Planet's production of the play in Studio T at SFU Woodward's, to witness Penelope Stella, in essaying the role, convey within individual lines the genuinely joyful insights and moments of discovery that Winnie revels in. I could have watched Stella puzzle out the corporate imprint on Winnie's toothbrush all evening. Joining Stella as Willie is Greg Snider, who also designed the ziggurat-like set. Together, under the expert direction of my colleague DD Kugler, these two former faculty members of the School for the Contemporary Arts succeed in conveying just how full and, yes, happy are Winnie's days. Unlike in Waiting for Godot, this is another Beckett play seemingly about nothing where it nevertheless feels like so much happens.

At the very least it says something that after 90 minutes of apparent stasis all I wanted to do was move. No matter Winnie's conclusion about Willie that "mobility is a curse."

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Between Two Rocks at SFU Woodward's

I wanted to give a brief shout out to Between Two Rocks, Robert Leveroos' MFA graduating show in SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, which has one more performance this evening at SFU Woodward's Studio T. If you want to luxuriate in the spinning of theatrical magic, then this is the show for you. In fact, a spinning wheel is a key prop in the performance, as is the wool spun from it. Some of that wool has been woven into a gorgeous curtain of string behind which many mysterious things happen, and out of which lots of additional objects (and the occasional body) emerge.

Taking his inspiration from a Norse folktale, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," Leveroos, while combining text, movement and sound to impressive effect, very much foregrounds scenographic design in this piece, which contains myriad surfaces and textures. This includes a moveable raked plywood "stage" that to begin with is covered in a resplendent golden fabric, and that in one memorable moment near the top of the show appears to ripple and gather and bunch up all on its own, as if some strange creature is burrowing underneath it. It is this attention to the animacy of objects--not least the pliability and sensuousness of the wool that is such a key element of the overall design--that makes this work so unique. Not that human actors, including performer-collaborators Pascal Reiners, Elliot Vaughn, Gordan Havelaar, Linnea Gwiazda and Elysse Cheadle, aren't also important; it's just that those actors' primary function is not necessarily to animate the space by exerting their human will upon it (in the form, say, of traditional dramatic conflict), but rather to respond to how the space, and what else is already inside it, is acting upon them.

This piece is a feast for the senses: from the squeak of the spinning wheel's pedal echoing through the dark to the sound of wet wool being wrung out in a bucket; and from the sight of a smoke-breathing woolly dragon to the strange but compelling spectacle of the performers rolling their heads along the upstage edge of the plywood platform (which, not least because of the overlapping speech that accompanies this scene, I registered as a nod to Beckett's Play). There are so many wonderful moments in this piece that work to reorient our perception. I cannot do justice to them all in this short post. Conveniently, however, Leveroos provides us with a documentary record of his scenographic score on the back of the program.

That program also provides a record of Leveroos's additional collaborations on this piece, including with the Norwegian playwright Maria Tryti Vennerød, from whom Leveroos commissioned a poem that we hear Vennerød reading in voiceover at different moments. Also listed are contributions from fellow SCA students: past and present, graduate and undergraduate. One can of course never go it alone in art and performance (despite what some modernist visual art critics might think). But what I love about the work produced by the students and my faculty colleagues in SCA is that this axiom is always made explicit.

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Nostos at SFU Woodward's

As it's that time of year (end of semester), and I need to budget my time accordingly, this is less a formal review post per se, than an enthusiastic endorsement of the School for the Contemporary Arts' Fall Mainstage Dance show, Nostos, on at the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre at SFU Woodward's through this Saturday. Overseen by my colleague Rob Kitsos, and showcasing the choreography of Peter Bingham, Lesley Telford, Shauna Elton, and Kitsos, the evening is structured around the theme of nostalgia, and also features live musical and spoken word accompaniment by SFU MFA Candidate Barbara Adler and the Pugs and Crows (Meredith Bates, Cole Schmidt, Russell Sholberg, and Ben Brown).

A repertory company of 30+ dancers (including three of my students from FPA 228W, Dance Aesthetics), divided into two overlapping groups, seamlessly segues between each choreographer's individual contributions, which are so well integrated in terms of transitions (no blackouts!) and so complementary in terms of movement vocabulary that it is hard to determine where one section leaves off and another begins. With such a large ensemble, and building on the theme of nostalgia, it's no surprise that canon and retrograde movement features prominently; but what's so pleasurable about the incorporation of these techniques in this program is how they coalesce around simple patterns that accrue depth and emotional intensity by virtue of their repetition within and across each choreographer's work: the sidelong glance backwards, fall to the knees, and swaying lean of Bingham; the inner calf clasp and directional planting of a foot of Telford (a move that slayed me with its beauty); the supported arching of torsos and hands over the crawling backs of partners of Elton; and the rat-a-tat chopping and segmenting and boxing of visual space by so many industrious hands of Kitsos.

Repetition was a theme that came up in Adler's spoken word accompaniment to Telford's section, a riff on the spaces and sensory traces of memory (the taste of chocolate that lingers despite the absence of candy wrappers in purses and pockets) that came back in the evening's finale, which became both a constellation of and elaboration on the movement patterns we had been primed to respond to in each of the preceding sections. But this section also added new patterns and formations, including a group circle that like a collective sigh or exhalation of breath (or, indeed, the bellows of Adler's accordion) expanded and contracted to embrace both the parts and the whole of this remarkable group collaboration.

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Stan Douglas' Circa 1948 and SCA House Party at SFU Woodward's

Yesterday, on my way to the School for the Contemporary Arts' 50th anniversary House Party at SFU Woodward's, I had thought I would hustle down to Granville Island to take in a quick 1 pm Fringe show. Timing is everything at the Fringe, and those precious minutes between the end of one show and the start of another can require major distance and speed calculations on the part of audience members. For me, all I needed to do was get out of the house in a mildly alacritous manner. So far this year my teaching schedule and other beginning-of-semester commitments have wreaked major havoc on my Fringeing. Likewise yesterday. I was ready and able, but Translink wasn't. Knowing I was going to miss the start of Brendan McLeod's Brain by more than 10 minutes, I opted to stay on the bus and head downtown. I walked through the main floor of the new Nordstrom's instead--which provided its own kind of neurological dissonance. Watching what looked liked hundreds of folks waiting to file onto escalators in an American brand-name store that used to be Sears, and before that Eaton's (two Canadian retail giants felled by successive recessions), reminded me--in this globalized age of the metropolitan "non-places"--of the need, in Frederic Jameson's famous take on blandified commodity culture in late capitalism, for place-specific cognitive maps of one's city.

Such is what celebrated Vancouver-based visual artist Stan Douglas attempts to give us in Circa 1948, an app, website and immersive installation project co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada. The installation is up in the Cordova Street concourse of SFU Woodward's as part of the "Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures" festival of immersive arts that SFUW's Cultural Unit has programmed as part of the university's 50th anniversary celebrations. The installation combines computer-generated technology and kinaesthetic navigation to provide participants with a 3D-like, immersive experience of two Vancouver landmarks no longer in existence: the original Hotel Vancouver and Hogan's Alley. A docent with an iPad invites you into a square wooden room. On the floor is what looks like a painted archery target: a solid black inner circle enclosed within a grey one of larger diameter. The black circle is your stop button; walking along the grey one moves you into and through the projections.

I chose to explore the Hotel Vancouver and was plopped into the middle of the ballroom, the interior of which is recreated based on Douglas' meticulous historical research. Frankly, it looked rather empty, and when I went to the edge of the grey circle on each side of the installation walls I wasn't lead through the projected sets of doors or windows into another area of the hotel, as I'd expected; instead, the projections just came to a stop. Eventually, I did make it through one doorway and into an office. Snippets of voice-over reminiscent of the film noir dialogue of Douglas' recent Helen Lawrence informed me that a woman wished to pawn some jewelry. And then the walls went blank. The whole thing lasted less than five minutes and was rather underwhelming in terms of both its interactivity and what, on the display text outside, we are told is Douglas' interest in historically-based diachronic/recombitant storytelling. The docent told me I could come back and explore other rooms in the Hotel Vancouver, as well as multiple views of Hogan's Alley, but I'm pretty sure I won't.

From there, it was inside the SFU Woodward's building for SCA's big celebration of its own past, present and future. The work of alumni, current students and faculty was on display throughout the building: the current MFA Visual Art Graduating Exhibition in the Audain Gallery on the main floor (featuring work by Lucien Durey, Curtis Granhauer, and Jamie Williams); audio and video installations by MFA student Lara Amelie Abadir and my faculty colleague Henry Daniel in Studios D and T on the second floor; and open rehearsals in the fourth floor studios by recent dance and theatre alumni (including Billy Marchenski and Nneka Croal, and the companies Hong Kong Exile, New to Town Collective, Raven Spirit Dance, and Warehaus Dance Collective). At 4 pm, my colleague Ker Wells presented a site-specific performance co-created with graduate students Robert Leveroos and Ashley Aron, and featuring students in his undergraduate playmaking classes; it took place outdoors in the concourse in the pouring rain, and we watched from the second floor World Art Centre patio as two rival groups of students squared off Sharks and Jets style, before being scattered in all directions by a gold lamé and stilt-wearing fairy--played by Kerr himself. Finally, following a reception, music alums Stefan Smulovitz and Bill Clark joined faculty members Martin Gotfrit and Albert St. Albert in improvising a live score to a screening of the animated NFB/Radio-Canada short film The Man Who Planted Trees--which was amazing (the film and the improvised music). There was also a screening of award-winning short films by SCA film alums, but I was already so over-stimulated (and also in need of some dinner) that I ducked out and headed home.

Still, what I saw confirmed to me that, with my official new cross-appointment to SCA, I've definitely found my own institutional place at SFU.

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The Unnatural and Accidental Women at SFU Woodward's

Marie Clements' The Unnatural and Accidental Women premiered at the Firehall Arts Centre in November 2000, two years before the arrest of Robert Pickton in connection with the cases of more than 65 murdered and missing women (many of them Indigenous) from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Clements' play is a haunting and highly theatrical dramatization of the lives of several Indigenous women preyed upon by another real-life serial killer in the DTES, Gilbert Paul Jordon, a barber implicated in the alcohol poisoning deaths of at least ten women between the mid-1960s and 1980s. Clements' title is taken from the coroner's reports on several of these women, which listed their deaths as "unnatural and accidental." Although he eventually served six years from manslaughter, Jordan was never convicted of murder: indeed, a terrible irony is that coinciding with the play's premiere a newspaper article appeared noting that Jordan was living on probation in the Vancouver area.

Fifteen years later, Clements' play is being remounted as the Spring 2015 mainstage show by SFU Contemporary Arts' Theatre Program. This time, there is another, more salutary coincidence of timing to note: the SFU production, which opened at Woodward's on Thursday and runs to March 7, is taking place just as Indigenous, provincial, territorial and federal leaders are gathering in Ottawa for a National Roundtable on Murdered and Missing Women in Canada. More proximately, director Steven Hill is interested in asking what it means to stage a work that explores the social conditions that allow Jordan and Pickton and other men to prey upon Indigenous women with apparent impunity in an institutional setting that abuts the very site of these women's marginalization and victimization.

In answering that question, Hill faced an immediate dilemma: his cast of student actors would be all non-Indigenous. How, then, to do justice to Clements' text without perpetuating additional representational violence upon the lives and memories of Indigenous women in BC and the rest of Canada? In consultation with the playwright (who, after all, gave her blessing to the production) and dramaturge Lindsay Lachance, among others, Hill's solution was in fact to prioritize the authority of the text. In the first act, which is comprised of a series of looping short scenes focusing on the increasing isolation of several women immediately preceding their deaths, company members, having first introduced themselves and the role(s) they will be playing, largely read directly from the text while seated at a long table in the middle of the studio stage (the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre has been reconfigured from its usual proscenium configuration to in-the-round, a point to which I will return). Guest readers--last night UBC First Nations Studies student Matt Ward and actress and singer Renae Morriseau--take turns reciting the stage directions, with some of the described actions and sound and visual effects materializing on the raised platforms encircling the audience and others being left to our imaginations. Hill's point, which he elaborated upon in the talkback that followed the performance, is that when Jordan's victims most lack agency it felt unethical to have the actors inhabit their roles naturalistically. I would add that the Brechtian alienation effect of having the cast narrate rather than play their parts also draws attention to the fact that for most of us in the audience these otherwise invisible women's lives only become meaningful--and knowable--to us through local media's spectucularized interest in the eventfulness of their deaths. This point is reinforced by Clements' call for black and white newspaper-style projections announcing each successive life lost. As Aunt Shadie says at one point in the play, "Being invisible can kill you."

However, in the second act of Clements' play the dead women come together to form a community that provides healing for the violence of their past lives and, as importantly, that helps to forestall Jordan claiming in the present yet another victim: the central character of Rebecca, who is seeking closure around the disappearance of her mother. In these scenes, when the women begin to reclaim in death what they were denied in life (including the physicality and sensuality of their bodies), it felt right to have the actors begin to enact the roles independent of the text (though the stage directions do continue to be read out). Most of that action takes place above and behind the audience, on a square of raised platforms. The only things that take place in the central space in front of us are the reading of the stage directions, the live preparation and cooking of banock, and Morriseau's singing and drumming--the latter activities a reminder that Clements' play ends in a celebratory feast. This "lateralizing" of the otherwise vertical set that Clements calls for in her playscript is a partly necessary concession to the incredible complexity of the playwright's design conception; at the same time, it puts the onus on the audience not to remain passive in our seats. We have to actively turn our heads and twist this way and that and, most especially, listen carefully in order to take in these women's stories.

As Morisseau put it to the audience in the talkback, we cannot remain mere spectators to Clements' play and the events upon which it is based. We must be witnesses. Witnesses have a duty to respond to the story. What are you going to do with the story, Morisseau bluntly asked.

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Fringe 2014: Roller Derby Saved My Soul and Definition of Time

Another splendid weekend to bookend my 2014 Fringe experience. And, again, two very different shows--though, as before, with a connecting thread.

Owing to a late morning start and abundant seawall traffic, I made it to the False Creek Gym just as they were shutting the house for the start of the noon hour show of Roller Derby Saved My Soul. Nancy Kenny's one-woman show is about Amy, a shy 30 year-old who lives in her younger sister June's shadow and harbours fantasies--nurtured by her love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer--of being a superhero. She gets her chance when June invites her to watch one of her roller derby games as a belated birthday present. After the game Amy finds herself in front of the recruitment table, mesmerized by the Glamazon Diana, and in a bewitched fog she suddenly sheds her inhibitions and signs up as "fresh meat."

What follows is a classic tale of heroic redemption. The bookish Amy--who prefers the movies to real life--quickly finds her skating legs (quite literally), blooming into a natural jammer. After the requisite hiccup of adversity and self-doubt, she triumphs by reconciling with her sister, getting the girl she thought out of her league, and--most importantly--saving the day for her team.

If you think this sounds a bit like Ellen Page in Whip It (minus the lesbian sub-plot), you'd be right. However, the stock dramatic arc notwithstanding, Roller Derby Saved My Soul is in no way derivative. This is thanks to two things. First, there is the show's taught writing, which confronts the cliches of genre (and gender) head on, upending them with the comedic one-two punch of timing and surprise--including some of the saltiest language about lady bits I've heard in a long time.

Then there is the performance by Kenny, who is as convincing in conveying the vulnerability of Amy as she is the bombast of June (not to mention the seductiveness of Diana). A naturally charismatic performer, Kenny is a also a gifted physical comedienne. She is clearly an experienced roller derby-er, and yet she is also able to translate kinetically to the audience what it feels like to be the unbalanced newbie trying on her skates for the first time. She's also hilarious as an increasingly inebriated Amy trying to keep up with her teammates (and the audience) in a drinking game to The Police's "Roxanne." Great stuff.

Movement is even more on display in Definition of Time, a quirky but strangely affecting dance-theatre piece that I took in at The Cultch after a pleasant cross-town bike ride. Conceived and choreographed by Iris Lau, the show was devised with the help of a slew of current SFU Contemporary Arts students and recent alums. These include performers Marc Arboleda, Elysse Cheadle, Shannon Lee, Carmine Santavenere, Clara Chow, and composer Elliot Vaughn, whose live score (featuring keyboards, violin, and percussion using everyday found objects) is simply brilliant. The text is by Adam Cowart, which is alternately allegorical and absurdist in its playing with various theoretical and material concepts of time.

Not that there is any real narrative through-line. The piece is more of an amalgam of fragmentary episodes, exploring through different choreographic structures and bits of physical theatre what it seems best to call the spatialization of time, giving it sensory dimension via different bodily encounters. To this end, I wish Lau had trusted herself a bit more in lettering the dancing speak for itself in the piece, rather than embellishing so many of the movement sequences with objects and additional dramaturgical effects. In the partnering, especially, there are often two or three other things going on that clamor for one's attention.

That said, I liked that the piece retained its rough edges. Though too long and overstuffed with too many ideas, there were myriad things to savour throughout.

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Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's

The MFA students at SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts are staging a year-end festival of new work called Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's through this Sunday. Last night I caught a double bill of very intriguing dance pieces.

Stroking the Unknown Dog is a structured improvisation for five dancers and a musician conceived by choreographer Emmalena Fredriksson. Responding to a set of instructions from Fredriksson, to the music (by Alex Mah), to each other, and no doubt to the audience (who sit in the round), the dancers make real-time movement choices of shape, proximity, massing, etc. that, in the words of Fredriksson, reveal "notions of individuality, community and the animals within."

Aril is a collaboration between dancer-choreographer Yves Candau and lighting designer Kyla Gardiner (who was also responsible for the illumination in Stroking the Unknown Dog). Exploring "the interplay between form and function in ... emergent patterns of human locomotion," Candau isolates the drive toward mobility in individual limbs and joints, crafting out of everyday activities like reaching and bending a mesmerizing tapestry of movement. Embroidering and overlaying this tapestry with live lighting projections, Gardiner adds rich visual texture as she alternates her washes of colour from inky pools of blue and black to vibrant splashes of red and wispy swirls of white.

The festival kicked off on Wednesday with a durational five-hour performance installation by Luciana D'Anunciacao called The door is open, please come in. While I could only stay for a brief half hour, it was enough time to take in a gorgeous ritual cleansing sequence involving water, herbs, flower petals and a length of white muslin--into which D'Anunciacao first wrapped and then extricated her body. Additional installation elements included a large looping video projection at one end of the studio (wrapped around the corner of the wall and showcasing D'Anunciacao's trademark play with perspective), a hammock in another corner, ripe mangos laid out on the floor, and an immersive sound score by Alex Mah. The installation was certainly a feast for the senses. I only wished I could have stayed longer.

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The Secret Doctrine at SFU Woodward's

Helena Blavatsky, a nineteenth-century Russian occultist and co-founder (with Henry Olcott) of the Theosophical Society--which sought, in part, to unite philosophy, religion, and science into a single worldview--was a fascinating and controversial figure. Not least for her attempts to deconstruct some of the binaries between East and West, the scientific and the spiritual. An early supporter of Indian independence (and women's liberation), Blavatsky assimilated various aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism into her theosophical thought, peppering her writings with Sanskrit terms and claiming that her teachers and spiritual guides were adepts, or Mahatmas, great souls who resided in Tibet, and with whom she communicated telepathically through sealed letters. She also anticipated later developments in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics when she wrote in her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, that the atom could be split. However, to many Blavatsky was just another hack medium out to trick wealthy patrons into subventing her lifestyle and retinue, and in an 1885 report to the London-based Society for Psychical Research, the Canadian-born, Cambridge-educated scientific researcher Richard Hodgson concluded that Blavatsky's paranormal powers were fake, and that she was a fraud.

The relationship between Hodgson and Blavatsky forms the core of Patricia Gruben's new play, The Secret Doctrine, currently playing at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre until this Saturday as part of the School for the Contemporary Arts' Faculty Series. Based on years of research, and building on Gruben's longstanding interest in Indian cultural history, the project originally began as a film script (Gruben is Associate Professor of Film Studies at SFU). And, indeed, the play retains a cinematic feel, both in terms of its scenic sweep and pacing (the plot moves from London to India and back again in a succession of quick, montage-like episodes) and its scenographic design (courtesy of Robert Gardiner's wonderful set, lighting, and video projections). Then, too, there is the all-star cast assembled by Gruben and her team, including Simon Webb as Olcott, Frank Zotter as Hodgson, Allan Morgan as Blavatsky's student and patron Allan Hume, and Gabrielle Rose as Blavatsky. Cloaked in layers of sweeping velvet (the costumes were designed by Christine Rimmer), and smoking a succession of herbal cigarettes, Rose plays Blavatsky with just the right mix of hauteur and vulnerability, successfully preserving the mystery around the legitimacy of her supposed powers, while also communicating the tedium and toil of constantly having to defend herself against the so-called rationalism of white men.

To this end, the heart of the play rests with Hodgson, whose scientific mind is constantly at war with his feeling heart, and whose fervent pursuit of Blavatsky starts to look a lot like obsession, even love. Gruben emphasizes this by making his "exposure" of Blavatsky deeply equivocal, prompted as much by the jealousy of a rival for Blavatsky's attention as by Hodgson's own betrayed faith. Fitting, then, that the Society for Psychical Research would retract his report some 100 years after it was published. And that Gruben's play ends with him literally seeing the light.

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Sleepless in Vancouver

Around this time of year it is customary for many of us to gather with friends and family at each others homes to share some food, maybe exchange gifts, sing songs, and/or play some goofy party games, and almost certainly raise a glass of holiday cheer. And, just as assuredly, witness at least one spectacular scene of relationship discord or breakdown. If you're looking to steel yourself for the latter event, or simply prefer to experience such things vicariously, I recommend checking out the inspired production of Caryl Churchill's Three More Sleepless Nights that's playing in different neighbourhoods around the city through this Friday.

Churchill's play was first produced in 1980, between Cloud Nine and Top Girls. Unlike these more famous works, Three More does not range boldly across great swathes of history, and contains little of their (at least at the time) radically experimental dramaturgy. Instead, it is a quiet domestic roundelay, sharply and accessibly written, involving two couples whose relationships, in the wee hours of the morning, have reached a crisis point. The innovation of this particular production, by a group of very talented SFU Contemporary Arts students and recent grads, is that the audience gets to witness the proceedings up close and personal, with the play being staged in a different borrowed apartment every evening--one which the actors, like us, are encountering for the first time.

This results in a most intriguing, and theatrically reinforcing, dynamic: that is, the audience's initial timidity and discomfort about following the actors around an unfamiliar space and observing them at their most intimate and vulnerable (ie, semi-clothed and in bed) is played off of the actors' equally improvisatory negotiation of a space that is likewise new to them, but which they must nevertheless move through and, indeed, command as if it were their own. No doubt this places just as much stress on the director (Conor Wylie) and the stage/production manager (Chelsea MacDonald): how to ensure your actors hit, night after night, both the comic and achingly anguished grace notes of Churchill's script while also giving them individual latitude on where--and when--to hit them?; how to find seven different workable spaces in the first place, and then to ensure that the few key props that are needed are where the actors would logically expect to find them? That both these questions are answered in this production is a credit to Wylie and MacDonald, respectively.

After we are all settled in the designated space, after we have been offered wine or beer, and after--most importantly--we have been encouraged to make a donation towards the evening's entertainment, the proceedings begin when Frank (Sean Marshall Jr.) arrives. He's drunk and his wife, Margaret (Tara Gallagher Harris), has been waiting up for him. Recrimination, in this instance, is less about how much he's had to drink at the pub than whether or not he was there with his mistress. Frank doesn't confirm or deny Margaret's suspicions; instead he taunts her by suggesting it's her fault for his infidelity, that her constant nagging, her poor housekeeping, and, perhaps most tellingly, her own ongoing flirtation with a man named Pete at the same pub has essentially driven him into another woman's arms. Marshall and Gallagher Harris, trailing each other back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom, telegraph expertly in their overlapping dialogue, their tightly coiled movements, and especially in the weariness of their barely raised voices the complex mix of hurt and desire and regret of a couple who clearly still love each other, but who can no longer live together. That they find it impossible to move beyond this impasse is made clear at one point when we hear the offstage voice of a child being kept awake by their arguing (well, okay, it was Chelsea, kneeling beside me in the bedroom doorway).

The scene between Frank and Margaret ends when she goes to cool off--literally--in the shower. Two different actors--who until that point had just been fellow members of the audience--then strip to their underwear and hop into the bed just vacated by Frank. We are immediately plunged into the insomniac world of Dawn (Jamie Taylor) and Pete (Dan Borzillo). For the first few minutes it's just the two of them exchanging an occasional foggy grunt, communicating to each other and to us a clearly recurring pattern of sleeplessness. Then Pete starts to recount the plot of the movie Alien (Churchill doing pop culture--who knew?), his childlike delight in its thrills likely doing nothing to calm the panic of his wife, who repeats more than once that she is frightened--of what exactly (her husband? unnamed forces in the world? merely the dark?) we're never sure. Taylor and Borzillo have to act most of this scene lying prone on a bed, and they do a marvelous job physically conveying the void at the heart of their marriage, with Taylor scrunched all the way to the edge of her side of the bed and Borzillo gathering the covers under his armpits like the grown-up kid Pete clearly is. Borzillo gets most of the dialogue and it is a testament to his gifts as an actor that he not only managed to make a movie I have seen many times new to me again, but that he was able to convey through his well-timed pauses and heavy swallows (each of which echoed like a clarion in that tiny room) that he has retreated to the fantasy world of action thrillers in part because his own relationship has become alien to him. Taylor, by contrast, must communicate her distress mostly through gesture, and just by the way she cuts and eats a piece of watermelon we get a clear sense of someone disquieted by even the most routine tasks--including sleeping.

The final scene is between Margaret and Pete, now together following what we surmise is the eventual collapse of their previous relationships. However, Frank and Dawn still haunt their former lovers, and as much time is spent talking about them as about each other. When Pete starts to tell Margaret the plot of Apocalypse Now, we can guess where this new liaison is headed.

All the principals involved in this production are to be applauded for their very fine efforts in staging this play. That I lay awake for much of the night thinking about various aspects of the performances is testament to their excellence. Tonight the cast will be performing in Yaletown, and on Friday the final performance will take place in East Van. I think both nights are technically sold out, but there might be last-minute cancelations or a waiting list. If you're interested, contact Chelsea at threemoresleeplessnights@gmail.com.

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Film Heaven

RIP Videomatica, Vancouver's premiere specialty video store. According to today's Vancouver Sun, the iconic West 4th outlet will soon be shuttering its doors after 28 years in business, a victim of rising internet downloading.

Co-owners Graham Peat and Brian Bosworth are hoping to keep the collection (which includes approximately 30,000 DVDs, 1,000 Blu-ray discs, and 5,000 VHS tapes) together, likely by donating it to a cultural or educational institution. I sure hope so, as Videomatica is still the go-to place for obscure and hard-to-find titles, or for works that have not yet been transferred to DVD. Just last fall, in fact, I borrowed Videomatica's VHS copy of John Greyson's The Law of Enclosures in order to re-watch the film for a paper I was writing.

With local philanthropist Yosef Wosk involved in the talks around the collection, maybe the recipient institution might actually be SFU. That would be fantastic, a major coup for the film program in Contemporary Arts as it settles into its new digs at SFU Woodward's.

Speaking of which: this past Thursday at SFU Woodward's saw the opening night screening of the Contemporary Arts film grads' fourth-year films. It was a long evening--16 short films over 3+ hours--but well worth it, filled with many outstanding moments, including a cameo in one of the strongest films, Lisa Pham's Landing, by the Commercial Drive location of Black Dog Video, which I guess now inevitably inherits Videomatica's mantle.

I can't do justice to all the highlights in the program, which ranged across genres and styles. But I would like to give a special shout out to three films whose creators were instrumental in the making of Objecthood last year, and whose talents--judging by there efforts here--are limitless: Graham and Nelson Talbot's Looking Up; Jessica Han's Bill, Please!; and Sammy Chien's Patterns of Liquid Stars.

You can catch all three films, along with the rest of the program, tonight at SFU Woodward's, starting at 7 pm.

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Iphigenia at SFU Woodward's

The gods and goddesses in Greek mythology have a lot to answer for. First there's that rigged beauty contest between Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite that leads Paris to inadvertently initiate the Trojan War, the absconded Helen being his prize. Then there's all the mischief the immortals get up to in the lead up to the Greeks' attack on Troy. Wouldn't be a fair fight if there weren't some additional casualties and especially familial collateral damage along the way.

And poor Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army, seems to suffer more than most, starting with his fateful decision to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, which, depending on whom you read (Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles), sets off an escalating series of retributive and self-destructive acts by other members of his family: his wife Clytemnestra, his other daughter Electra, and his of course his son, Orestes.

In Euripides' first version of the story, Iphigenia at Aulis, it all starts with Agamemnon's presumption that he's a better hunter than Artemis. In retaliation for this boast, Artemis stills the winds behind the sails of the Greek ships gunning for Troy just as they reach the harbour of Aulis. Agamemnon is told by an oracle that the only way the winds will pick up again is if he sacrifices Iphigenia. He doesn't want to, but his bloodthirsty lieutenant Menelaus is insistent (in one version of the story even intercepting a missive by his boss warning his daughter and family to stay away), and so he sends for his daughter under the pretext that she is to marry Achilles. Problems arise when the none-too-stable mother of the bride gets caught up in planning her daughter's nuptials, arriving with a full-on trousseau, and consulting the young and het-up Achilles about his plans for her daughter. Achilles (who, you will remember from Homer, has his own issues to deal with, not least a more than brotherly affection for his comrade-in-arms, Patroclus) has no idea what she's talking about, and soon Clytemnestra outs her husband's plan and the real argument of the play (and of all Greek drama, really) takes centre-stage: the rights of the individual versus the interests of the state.

In Lois Anderson's staging of John Barton's 1980 translation/adaptation of the play, SFU Contemporary Arts' inaugural student production at Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, that question gets aligned in a very 21st-century way with political and religious extremism. That is, Iphigenia's eventual acquiescence to the will of her General father and her willingness to sacrifice her own life for the greater good of the Greek people (at least as the choice of death in this case is presented to her), it is suggested, starts to look a little like jihadism. In other words, if we connect the dots between Iphi's choice and that famous wooden horse that eventually gets wheeled beyond the gates of Troy, the girl starts to look a little like a suicide bomber.

It's an interesting approach to the material, but unfortunately in this production it mostly stays on the page--i.e., in the Director's Note on the program--rather than getting worked through materially on stage. Fanaticism to a cause is incarnated most forcefully by Menelaus (Troy Kozuki), and there are some wonderful moments of physical choreography (local dancer/choreographer Noam Gagnon advised on movement for the piece) that suggest a bodily short-circuiting of rational debate to a moral and ethical problem. But Iphigenia's own conversion to her father's ideals seems remarkably passive and resigned as portrayed by Anouska Anderson Kirby (the director's daughter). This could have something to do with the fact that this decisive moment in the play occurs on video rather than live, and while I applaud Anderson's overall integration of different media in this production, I question the choice of mediated delivery in this case, if only because in the cavernous space we were in it was difficult to hear what was being said.

Mostly, however, Anderson made terrific and theatrically novel use of the space, starting with Talthybius's (a superb Aryo Khakpour) opening entrance on his bicycle and the dropping of the upstage safety curtain. Special kudos must go to sound composer Elliott Vaughan, who made fantastic use of the space's available ambient sound sources to produce simple yet wonderful effects: moving the curtains along the stage left and right walls to suggest wind; pounding on exposed pipes and chairs and the floor for rolls of thunder, or approaching armies; and, in conjunction with Anderson, showing an intuitive understanding of the Greek chorus and the aural basis of Greek drama more generally through a canny use of recorded voice-over and live call-and-response from different parts of the theatre.

Lighting, costumes, and especially props (the reproduction of the stalled Greek ships was most effective) are also superb. And, in this regard, I was delighted to see that three crew members from The Objecthood of Chairs made material contributions in these areas: Milena Popović, Jordan Boivin, and Lain Kim.

Iphigenia at Aulis runs at SFU Woodward's through to this Saturday. Call 778-782-3514 for tickets.

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Empty Chairs

So, it's been just over a week since Objecthood closed, and I guess I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that it's over.

The post-show melancholy remains, reinforced this past Friday when I was at SFU Woodward's for Contemporary Arts' Open House (continuing today, though without performances; details here) and took a visiting friend to see Studio T, the space in which our piece ran. The lights and set (such as it was) had been struck, of course. But what really got me was that the rather luxurious and plush chairs that had filled the risers for our audiences had been replaced by cheaper folding metal ones.

I saw later that ours had been moved into the bigger Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, which was hosting the mainstage Open House performances that night. Still, it made me feel a little sad.

Not that it wasn't a great run: enthusiastic audiences, performances by Justin and Vic that just got better and better, a crew that faced every challenge with professional aplomb, and, heck, we even made some money. It would have been nice to get a review, but the email responses from friends and colleagues have been so gratifying. And it was great to talk through the process with Don and Rob K last Wednesday in front of Henry Daniel's class, who had all seen the show, and had some really smart responses to it.

One consequence of all this is that I'm completely behind in my own theatre-going. I saw nothing at the Fringe, and have yet to get to The Electric Company's Tear the Curtain. We're going to Park: The Musical at Studio 58 next Friday. I plan to get there early so we can get a good seat.

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Machinal at SFU

Just a quick shout-out re SFU Theatre's current production of Machinal on Burnaby Campus. Directed by Steven Hill (of Leaky Heaven Circus fame), and featuring the BFA acting cohort in the School for the Contemporary Arts, the production is a smart and sexy updating of Sophie Treadwell's 1928 expressionistic play, a Broadway hit based on the real-life sensational murder trial of Ruth Snyder that also features some biting social commentary on both the work of art and the work of gender in the age of mechanical reproduction.

I'm not familiar enough with the playtext to pinpoint what all in this production is intrinsic to the script and what Hill and his wonderfully talented cast and crew have added to it (although it's a safe bet the songs, the choreography, and much of the staging is new). The production's spatial and sonic architecture are perhaps its most complex elements, and there are some wonderful visual and aural coups-de-théâtre throughout. I'm not sure every one of these moments works, but none is completely superfluous, and clearly a great deal of thought has been put into updating the play's themes for our contemporary digital era. The play's courtroom climax (and talk about the use of architecture) is downright operatic, and the whole tightly structured, intermissionless 90 minutes has something of a Gesamtkunstwerk feel about it.

Senior acting student Mercedes Smolders shines in the central role of Young Woman, and Sean Marshall is suitably oily as her oppressive boss and then husband, Mr. Jones. Conor Wylie, as the Young Woman's lover, is also impressive and completely unselfconscious about having to spend most of the play in red bikini underwear. Most of the rest of the cast--who also spend chunks of the play in their undies (did Costume Designer Flo Barrett source these garments, I wonder, or just ask the cast to bring their own?)--is equally brilliant in a variety of roles. However, I must make special mention of two of my ENGL 103 students: Nikki Hockey plays Young Woman 3, Guard 1, and a Pregnant Woman, and has great stage presence throughout; Sadie Henschel plays the Court Reporter, the Jail Singer, and a Pregnant Woman as well. Not only can Sadie work a rolling office chair with nimble dexterity, but she sings beautifully. You go, girls!

The play continues at the Burnaby Campus theatre tonight through Saturday at 8 pm, with an additional Saturday matinee at 2 pm. It's definitely worth the trek up the mountain to take in this ambitious production.

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Dancing the City

Rob Kitsos's Wake, which premiered last night at The Dance Centre, and which runs for two more performances today (at 2 and 8 pm), is exactly the kind of dance theatre I most enjoy. It is a large-scale work for eight dancers (including Kitsos in a dual embodied and virtual role as choreographer/planner and metteur-en-scène) that combines movement, text, video, and live electroacoustic music (by composer Martin Gotfrit) in a wholly integrated and complementary way. Equally appealing to me is that the piece achieves a similar reciprocity in the compositional and aesthetic relationship between individual sequences of choreography (often challengingly abstract, technically complex, and intensely physical) and an overall narrative structure that neither reveals its meaning too willingly nor remains deliberately obscurantist.

Kitsos takes as his point of departure French philosopher Michel de Certeau's essay "Walking the City," in The Practice of Everyday Life, using the "urban 'text'" we all collectively write in our flânerie to explore both the spaces of connection and the distances between various bodies as they inhabit and interact with the built environment. How do you capture and represent what de Certeau calls "the activity of passers-by," when by its very nature that activity is meant to be fleeting, to not linger (passing by), to leave a trace only in its forgetting? Sounds like a perfect metaphor for the documentation of dance itself, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Wake opens with Rob Groeneboer's video capturing Kitsos in the guise of some sort of city planner, atop a downtown building, with various plans and blueprints spread out around him. Coincident with Kitsos's structured improvisation of a movement sequence atop the building on the video, the seven young live dancers (Cort Gerlock, Jane Osborne, Roxoliana Prus, Justin Reist, Olivia Shaffer, Kim Stevenson, and Leigha Wald--all graduates of the BFA Program in Dance at SFU, where Kitsos teaches) get up from the chairs on which they have been sitting along either wing, and take up recumbent positions on the floor. Eventually the dancers "wake" to the city, and one of the delights of the first in-sync movement sequence featuring all seven performers is how the horizontality of their floor work contrasts with the verticality of the office and residential towers captured in the montage of images in Groeneboer's video.

Thereafter, the piece proceeds in terms of a succession of movements choreographed around the dancers' own embodied relationship with the city, with various colour sequences filmed in and around Gastown becoming the basis for a reconfiguration (sometimes willful, at other times willed) of those relationships in solos and duos and trios that are all about negotiating the space between self and other (even if, as de Certeau reminds us, that other is space itself). In this regard, I was especially struck by the complex arm work and hand clasps Kitsos came up with for three of the women in one memorable sequence, finding a way to mimic in bodily gesture the tangled psychic complexity and constantly shifting terrain of friendship itself. Similarly, in a humourous pas de deux for the two men, they argue abstractly in spoken word about the best route from point A to point B as they materially enact proximity and closeness in their mutual physical striving.

In his role as planner/choreographer, Kitsos interrupts these proceedings at various points throughout the piece: via black and white sequences on the video that feature him furrowing his brow, taking notes, and eventually meeting up with someone who may be a developer or a government bureaucrat (a perfectly cast Emily Molnar) in some corporate boardroom; and via various live walk-throughs, during which he surveys and takes more notes on the performance we are witnessing. In this, we see Kitsos trying to flush out patterns, to make sense of various fragments, to render legible both the city's various intersections and the dancers' bodily intertwinings. But the city and the dancers resist easy conscription. When, for example, Kitsos improvises his own solo late in the show (to wonderful accompaniment on electric guitar by Gotfrit), attempting, it seems, to reduce what we have hitherto seen of the other dancers' bodily trajectories to one or two core repeatable phrases, those other dancers studiously avoid him, either remaining planted against either wing wall, or else, in running to the other side, going out of their way to avoid contact with Kitsos and his notebook (a prop he carries with him throughout the piece, and which he dances around during his solo). And, later, when Kitsos attempts to join the other dancers and mimic their movements at the very end, he finds he is unable to fully take part, perhaps not having paid close enough attention after all.

The dancer, like the city walker, does not easily conform to a grid.

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Whither BC

Premier Gordo issued the BC provincial election writ this past Tuesday, and as the first week of campaigning draws to a lackluster close, your humble PPP scribe is herewith issuing his first and only intervention into the political debate about who should form the next government. In fact, my intervention is largely aimed at explaining why, after 17 years in the province, four general elections, and various by-elections, I will be withdrawing my once loyal support from the NDP.

Very simply, it has to do with their promise to revoke the carbon tax instituted by the Liberals this past summer. No matter the relative merits of the NDP’s plan to institute instead a cap and trade system on industry, my position largely has to do with the cynical sop to northern and rural voters that leader Carole James is engaging in with this kind of old-school politicking. That’s the same kind of thinking that has led to the situation we’re currently in with the North American automotive sector. For years, when governments should have been pouring money into electric and alternative fuel cars, to rebuilding cities and expanding public transit, and to retraining workers for the new post-industrial economy, they kept shilling for votes in the easiest way possible: by promising to safeguard obcelesent jobs. Except that now we’re past the point even of obcelesence. I’m no fan of the BC Liberals, who have managed to pick up where the Social Credit Party left off very nicely; however, by whatever route it has come into place, I do support BC’s carbon tax, and I think, with the clock ticking down on meaningful action to combat climate change, it is politically and morally irresponsible for a party and a leader to declare that, if elected, they would repeal any form of pro-environmental legislation. Moreover, at a time when most pundits are saying that Canada needs to get its act together and get on side (quite literally, in terms of our shared border) with the aggressive environmental policies President Obama is championing, to jettison unilaterally the country’s only existing carbon tax just looks plain stupid.

And it’s not just me who is saying this. A host of prominent BC environmentalists, from David Suzuki onwards, has condemned the NDP policy. Just yesterday the doyenne of Clayoquot herself, Tzeporah Berman, sent an open letter to Carole James deploring the move, and withdrawing her support from the party. Like Berman, my own position should by no means be read as an endorsement of the Liberals. In fact, I will be voting Green this election. The Greens support both local carbon taxes and a global cap and trade system on petroleum emissions; as they say, one can have both rather than either or! The Greens have also taken a stronger position than either of the other parties on protecting the Agricultural Land Reserve, and to providing legislative encouragement to local food production and processing. Finally, leader Jane Sterk has made a somewhat provocative and controversial (others have said loony) pledge to replace the RCMP in the province with a new provincial force, and to ban outright the use of tasers. Given what we’ve been hearing at the Braidwood Inquiry looking into the death of Robert Dziekanski these past few months, I’m inclined to support anyone who seeks to muzzle the trigger-happy Mounties with selective memory recall who police our airports.

However, if I want my vote to count at all (even if only in a future election), I guess that means I should also vote Yes to the referendum recommending implementation of a new Single Transferable Voting system. Not sure how I feel about that exactly, and must study the issue a bit more carefully, I think.

One novel thing this time around in terms of the practicalities of casting my vote is that, as I will be away for both election day and all three advance voting days, I shall have to cast my vote by mail, or else visit my local district electoral office and present some credible id. In an election where the outcome is already pretty much a foregone conclusion (it looks like another four years of old “DUI-Paul Kinsella-back slapping-I-just-want-to-wave-that-Olympic-flag” Campbell, I’m afraid), this will likely be my only excitement.

Finally, a clarification regarding a previous post from this month: in the course description I included along with my discussion of ECT's Studies in Motion, I implied that Robert Lepage was coming to town with his latest theatrical creation, The Blue Dragon, this fall. In fact, it will be February 2010, an event that will coincide with the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and that will inaugurate the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at the new SFU Contemporary Arts Woodward's site. This was officially announced this past Wednesday by the President of SFU, Michael Stevenson, and by the Director of the School for the Contemporary Arts, Martin Gotfrit, at a morning press conference/celebration in Gastown to which I was invited. Lots of back-slapping and promises about how SFU's presence at Woodward's is going to help revitalize the area, and about the cultural and community partnerships the University and School are committed to realizing. Let's hope there's follow-through on that. At the very least, judging by the animated 3-D tour we were provided of the new facilities, the venue itself looks impressive.

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