Victim Impact, which opened at The Cultch's Historic Theatre last night, is Theatre Conspiracy's latest work of documentary theatre. Written by TC's Artistic Producer, Tim Carlson, and directed by Jiv Parasram, it focuses on an elaborate Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Rashida Samji, an Ismaili notary public who became known as The Magic Lady after she convinced hundreds of people, including friends and members of her own family, to invest in a fictitious Okanagan wine company that was seeking to break into the South American and South African markets. Promising returns of up to 30% or more, Samji ended up bilking innocent folks out of their entire life savings.
The case has been wending its way through the courts for years, with Samji's final appeal to the Supreme Court only having recently been rejected. Much of Carlson's script is based on the court transcripts, supplemented by dramatizations of interviews with several of her victims, here represented by an angry chorus of four played by Jenn Griffin, Munish Sharma, Risha Nanda, and Allan Morgan. We are first introduced to this group as backlit silhouettes speaking from behind a series of interlocking screens, an effective visual conceit for telegraphing the need to protect their anonymity as well as the fact that for Samji they were presumably just interchangeable marks. Paradoxically, however, it means that, as characters, the victims of Victim Impact register largely as hazy ciphers for whom it is difficult to muster much empathy. Sure, we do get individual monologues in which we learn some of the heartbreaking personal details behind each of their stories: that Morgan's farmer was tricked out of his retirement savings; that Nanda's graduate student had to give up on her dream of earning her Master's degree, and also watch as her parents withdrew from their community in shame. But in terms of dramatic function, the choral scenes with the victims are mostly expository, telling us what did--or as often as not, what didn't--happen next.
By contrast, I had no problem conjuring sympathy for Samji, who is superbly played by Nimet Kanji, nor for her friend, the financial planner Arvin Patel (Sharma, also excellent) whom Samji dupes into becoming her stoodge, working from his desk at Coast Capital to lure in many of Samji's investors. In part this is because we are given scenes early on in the action in which we witness Samji and Patel, both physically and emotionally vulnerable, themselves being preyed upon. Then, too, Carlson's script works hard to lay bare the many complex ties binding Vancouver's South Asian community that are also at play in this story, with the murky fixer apparently pressuring Samji in turn forcing her to turn the screws against Patel. That in Samji's case the "man from the Congo," along with the whole bounced cheque from England that started her down this path of fraud, are very likely pure fiction only makes more psychologically interesting her need to come clean in her courtroom testimony, which Kanji delivers with a compelling mixture of suspense and relief.
At the same time, the court scenes also showcase a problem with adhering too scrupulously to the principles of verbatim theatre. Specifically, the trope of having Morgan's defence lawyer repeatedly object to the questions put to Samji by Griffin's prosecuting lawyer, each time citing the same article under the Canadian and BC criminal codes, got terribly wearying. But for the additional mix of sound and visuals in this scene courtesy of the projections by Milton Lim and the accompanying aural cues by David Meisha, I would have stopped paying attention altogether. At other times, in seeking to enliven some of the financial minutiae relating to this case, the creators adopt an overtly burlesque style, as with Sharma's soft shoe routine in the historical anecdote about the real Carlo Ponzi, and later when Sharma and Nanda explain how the banks at the heart of this scandal have sought to recover the money embezzled by Samji, only then to claw back a percentage of that in order to cover their own fees. But for me, these scenes actually served to point up all the more the earnestness of the rest of the storytelling.
I don't wish to diminish the very real pain--financial and otherwise--at the heart of this story, nor the investments of the artistic team in telling that story. I'm just not sure that the how of that telling makes for the most absorbing theatre. Indeed, given the format's success in engaging listeners with serial presentations of true crime stories, I wonder if the podcasts (or "fraudcasts") that Carlson and dramaturg Kathleen Flaherty have developed to accompany the show aren't in fact where the real drama of Victim Impact lies.
P
Showing posts with label Theatre Conspiracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theatre Conspiracy. Show all posts
Sunday, June 10, 2018
Friday, February 9, 2018
No Foreigners at The Cultch
No Foreigners is Hong Kong Exile's second major production to open in Vancouver in the past two weeks (I previously reviewed Foxconn Frequency [No. 3] here). The busy and artistically adventurous company continues its multidisciplinary exploration of diasporic Chineseness, this time in collaboration with Toronto-based fu-Gen Theatre's David Yee, who wrote the text. Originally commissioned by Theatre Conspiracy as part of its Migration Path Project, No Foreigners runs under the direction of HKE project lead Milton Lim at The Cultch's Culture Lab until February 17, before traveling to Toronto for a run at the Theatre Centre.
The story concerns an unnamed Asian-Canadian millennial (voiced by Derek Chan) who is neither fully assimilated into mainstream white culture nor conversant with the traditions of his Cantonese mother and grandfather. He discovers just how estranged he is from both parts of himself when he visits that quintessential global export: the Chinese mall. Wishing to browse among the Hermes bags at an upscale boutique called Milan Station, he is denied entry by the ancient storeowner (April Leung), who insists that "No foreigners are allowed!" Affronted by this attack on his cultural identity, and additionally spurred by the news that his grandfather has left him his estate, but only on the condition that he can supply the probate officer the correct codeword, our hero embarks on a three-year occupation of the mall in an effort to become authentically Chinese. His guide and mentor on this journey is the wise-beyond-her-years Sodapop Mah, the fugitive daughter of a bickering couple whose electronics business is all but bust.
All of this provides HKE and writer Yee with ample opportunity to open up the surreal space of the Chinese mall to theatrical exploitation and critical analysis, giving us a portrait of a place where fantasy and superstition intersect--sometimes sweetly, at other times more violently--with commerce and the geopolitics of fashion and pop culture. The anthropologist Marc Augé has described the shopping mall as a "non-place," a transient space of "supermodernity" that holds little cultural or architectural significance for its users, who consequently remain anonymous and indistinguishable within it. What is most compelling about No Foreigners is the suggestion that this is far from the case for Chinese malls of the sort one finds in Richmond or Markham. Instead, we learn that they are vital community gathering places, rich in drama, haunted by history, and deeply connected to the idea of a home away from home.
My problem has to do with how all of this is presented. Performers Derek Chan and April Leung function as a cross between voice actors and Bunraku puppet masters, moving miniature human figures and set pieces in front of a bank of computer screens, the projected images of which we then see transposed via live camera feeds to a larger movie screen (the miniatures are by Natalie Tin Yin Gan, the projections by Lim, working with Remy Siu, who also designed the sound). Our perspective as spectators is at once multiplied and telescoped all at once, and the seamless integration of the technology is on one level a marvel to behold--as, for example, with the fluttering of an eclipse of moths that begins on the smaller bank of computer screens and then migrates to overtake the whole of the larger movie screen. And yet while I appreciate how dispersed and multi-focal viewing in No Foreigners mimics the ways in which seeing has become split and distracted in today's media-saturated environments--of which the shopping mall is paradigmatic--as live theatre this production feels strangely static and emotionally inert. Despite all of the illuminated screens and the images and the translated surtitles being thrown at me, I found myself continuously looking to Chan and Leung, crouched below the computers and platforms of miniatures, speaking almost surreptitiously into their head mics. And it's surely no coincidence that the moment in the production that connects the most with the audience is when Chan--his character having graduated to the ultimate test of his Chineseness--breaks out into a rousing karaoke number, a single spot following him as he makes his way into the audience.
Yee's text is filled with beautiful poetry, and there are so many smart and interesting things going on in No Foreigners. I just wish they could break free a bit more often from the apparatus of their mediatic scaffolding.
P
The story concerns an unnamed Asian-Canadian millennial (voiced by Derek Chan) who is neither fully assimilated into mainstream white culture nor conversant with the traditions of his Cantonese mother and grandfather. He discovers just how estranged he is from both parts of himself when he visits that quintessential global export: the Chinese mall. Wishing to browse among the Hermes bags at an upscale boutique called Milan Station, he is denied entry by the ancient storeowner (April Leung), who insists that "No foreigners are allowed!" Affronted by this attack on his cultural identity, and additionally spurred by the news that his grandfather has left him his estate, but only on the condition that he can supply the probate officer the correct codeword, our hero embarks on a three-year occupation of the mall in an effort to become authentically Chinese. His guide and mentor on this journey is the wise-beyond-her-years Sodapop Mah, the fugitive daughter of a bickering couple whose electronics business is all but bust.
All of this provides HKE and writer Yee with ample opportunity to open up the surreal space of the Chinese mall to theatrical exploitation and critical analysis, giving us a portrait of a place where fantasy and superstition intersect--sometimes sweetly, at other times more violently--with commerce and the geopolitics of fashion and pop culture. The anthropologist Marc Augé has described the shopping mall as a "non-place," a transient space of "supermodernity" that holds little cultural or architectural significance for its users, who consequently remain anonymous and indistinguishable within it. What is most compelling about No Foreigners is the suggestion that this is far from the case for Chinese malls of the sort one finds in Richmond or Markham. Instead, we learn that they are vital community gathering places, rich in drama, haunted by history, and deeply connected to the idea of a home away from home.
My problem has to do with how all of this is presented. Performers Derek Chan and April Leung function as a cross between voice actors and Bunraku puppet masters, moving miniature human figures and set pieces in front of a bank of computer screens, the projected images of which we then see transposed via live camera feeds to a larger movie screen (the miniatures are by Natalie Tin Yin Gan, the projections by Lim, working with Remy Siu, who also designed the sound). Our perspective as spectators is at once multiplied and telescoped all at once, and the seamless integration of the technology is on one level a marvel to behold--as, for example, with the fluttering of an eclipse of moths that begins on the smaller bank of computer screens and then migrates to overtake the whole of the larger movie screen. And yet while I appreciate how dispersed and multi-focal viewing in No Foreigners mimics the ways in which seeing has become split and distracted in today's media-saturated environments--of which the shopping mall is paradigmatic--as live theatre this production feels strangely static and emotionally inert. Despite all of the illuminated screens and the images and the translated surtitles being thrown at me, I found myself continuously looking to Chan and Leung, crouched below the computers and platforms of miniatures, speaking almost surreptitiously into their head mics. And it's surely no coincidence that the moment in the production that connects the most with the audience is when Chan--his character having graduated to the ultimate test of his Chineseness--breaks out into a rousing karaoke number, a single spot following him as he makes his way into the audience.
Yee's text is filled with beautiful poetry, and there are so many smart and interesting things going on in No Foreigners. I just wish they could break free a bit more often from the apparatus of their mediatic scaffolding.
P
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Foreign Radical at the Cultch
Given the choice, would you rather have the freedom to assemble and associate with whomever you please OR the freedom to travel internationally? Such is the final question posed to audience members in Theatre Conspiracy's new show, Foreign Radical, on at the Vancity Culture Lab through next Saturday. But before we answer this question--and answer we must--we are tasked with making a series of other, equally complex and ethically challenging decisions.
Not only do these decisions have very immediate and real consequences for us within the conceptual parameters of the show (including being assembled into different groups based on our choices, or ushered mysteriously into different rooms), but also, we are led to believe, for Hesam (Aryo Khakpour), the alleged radical of the title, and detained under the auspices of a government watch list for being a suspected terrorist. Finally, and perhaps most terrifyingly, because the show is immersive and interactive we must make our split-second decisions not just under the watchful eye of our genial host (Milton Lim), but also in front of each other. It is one thing to respond to a series of ethical prompts anonymously as part of a darkened proscenium audience by typing our answers into a video game console, as with Rimini Protokoll's Best Before, which ran at the Cultch in 2010 in a commission by the PuSh Festival. Theatre Conspiracy Artistic Director and Foreign Radical writer Tim Carlson, who has been very influenced by Rimini's particular brand of locally-inflected participatory theatre (he also worked on their 2011 production of 100% Vancouver), here ramps up the stakes by literally exposing the processes of data collection through which governments and corporations group us into good or bad citizens, good or bad consumers. We are not wont to think about such things when the interface is just us and our computer screen (as is the case as I type these words, with Google blogger no doubt tracking my every key stroke); however, faced with the embodied scrutiny of 15 other pairs of eyes, we may think twice about how we answer questions like whether or not we've viewed pornography in the last 24 hours; whether we regularly change our online passwords; if we've ever lied to security agents at the border.
Add to this the fact that based on our answers to the questions posed by our Host during this central section of the show we are then marshalled into different taped-off quadrants or opposing sides of the room, and one begins to understand how self-consciousness and second guessing based on where and beside whom folks end up standing becomes an added variable in this part of the show. Indeed, twice after a sequence of shufflings of bodies based on a succession of narrower and narrower questions the entire audience is then asked to identify among the assembled participants in one particular quadrant who looks the most paranoid (in our case, Elise) and who the most suspicious (Colin, though for a while it looked like it might be me). Because our ebullient and maximally energetic Host (who is played with an abundance of slick charm by Lim) presents all of this in the manner of a game show, we are somewhat seduced into treating this as all a bit of benign fun. However, things got really serious for me when we were showed four satirical Charlie Hebdo-style cartoons and had to choose one based on whether we found it the most offensive or the most funny. Easy enough if you can keep that choice to yourself. But when you have to not only move to a specific square based on that choice AND raise a colour-coded card identifying whether you found your cartoon funny or offensive, then, necessarily, you start to view your fellow audience members in a different light. It is in this way that Foreign Radical becomes much more than a simple agitprop indictment of surveillance culture and the contemporary security state. Carlson and his collaborators, including director Jeremy Waller (who participated with us as an audience member), strip the operations of ideology down to the level of the body: are you like me or not like me; are you with me or against me; do you share my values or not? Clap for yes; don't clap for no. It's a measure of how quickly this show got under my skin that, with each question posed, I was counting the claps.
Parallel to the audience's self-scrutiny, there is our judgment of Hesam, whose naked body, bent over a steel interrogation table, we encounter immediately upon entering the first room of the performance space (there are four of them in total). Several of us will reencounter him again, this time with his back strapped horizontally over the side of the table, his face upside down, denouncing our presence before him, telling us that, among other things, he would like to vomit in all of our faces. When Khakpour released his long arms from where they have been pinioned underneath the table, I winced, and it is sign of the actor's amazing kinaesthetic presence that even in those scenes where he is not speaking--of which there are several--I nevertheless felt something palpable (dignity, rage, resignation, despair, even a quiet joy) being communicated to me.
This, then, is the central paradox of Foreign Radical. Face to face with a body in pain, a body unlawfully and perhaps unjustly detained, we empathize with the person before us. But abstracted as data mined from different intelligence-gathering sources and the so-called forensic evidence found in his suitcase (plans in Arabic to build a bomb, anti-psychotic medication, boxcutters), we sit in cold judgment of the same body: is he a terrorist or not? The climax of the piece is a debate between audience members on this very topic. I was the spokesperson for the "con" side, and I'm pleased to say that we won the debate. Not that I take much comfort from that. For, if I'd answered the questions leading up to that point differently--or if the questions themselves had been different--I might have ended up on the other side.
The show ends with Hesam/Khakpour (he is both in and out of character at this point), accompanied by our ever-present Host, turning the tables and interrogating, or rather conversing with, two among us. This is done against a dually projected backdrop of a wide open expanse of desert plain and blue horizon. We have arrived at that final question about the freedom of collective assembly vs. the freedom of individual travel. The interrogations finish, the actors leave, and a door is opened. No instruction is given, but we are presented with one last choice. Do we leave one-by-one, or linger with the rest of the group to reflect on what we have just witnessed?
A suitably subtle ending to a very thoughtful show.
P.
Not only do these decisions have very immediate and real consequences for us within the conceptual parameters of the show (including being assembled into different groups based on our choices, or ushered mysteriously into different rooms), but also, we are led to believe, for Hesam (Aryo Khakpour), the alleged radical of the title, and detained under the auspices of a government watch list for being a suspected terrorist. Finally, and perhaps most terrifyingly, because the show is immersive and interactive we must make our split-second decisions not just under the watchful eye of our genial host (Milton Lim), but also in front of each other. It is one thing to respond to a series of ethical prompts anonymously as part of a darkened proscenium audience by typing our answers into a video game console, as with Rimini Protokoll's Best Before, which ran at the Cultch in 2010 in a commission by the PuSh Festival. Theatre Conspiracy Artistic Director and Foreign Radical writer Tim Carlson, who has been very influenced by Rimini's particular brand of locally-inflected participatory theatre (he also worked on their 2011 production of 100% Vancouver), here ramps up the stakes by literally exposing the processes of data collection through which governments and corporations group us into good or bad citizens, good or bad consumers. We are not wont to think about such things when the interface is just us and our computer screen (as is the case as I type these words, with Google blogger no doubt tracking my every key stroke); however, faced with the embodied scrutiny of 15 other pairs of eyes, we may think twice about how we answer questions like whether or not we've viewed pornography in the last 24 hours; whether we regularly change our online passwords; if we've ever lied to security agents at the border.
Add to this the fact that based on our answers to the questions posed by our Host during this central section of the show we are then marshalled into different taped-off quadrants or opposing sides of the room, and one begins to understand how self-consciousness and second guessing based on where and beside whom folks end up standing becomes an added variable in this part of the show. Indeed, twice after a sequence of shufflings of bodies based on a succession of narrower and narrower questions the entire audience is then asked to identify among the assembled participants in one particular quadrant who looks the most paranoid (in our case, Elise) and who the most suspicious (Colin, though for a while it looked like it might be me). Because our ebullient and maximally energetic Host (who is played with an abundance of slick charm by Lim) presents all of this in the manner of a game show, we are somewhat seduced into treating this as all a bit of benign fun. However, things got really serious for me when we were showed four satirical Charlie Hebdo-style cartoons and had to choose one based on whether we found it the most offensive or the most funny. Easy enough if you can keep that choice to yourself. But when you have to not only move to a specific square based on that choice AND raise a colour-coded card identifying whether you found your cartoon funny or offensive, then, necessarily, you start to view your fellow audience members in a different light. It is in this way that Foreign Radical becomes much more than a simple agitprop indictment of surveillance culture and the contemporary security state. Carlson and his collaborators, including director Jeremy Waller (who participated with us as an audience member), strip the operations of ideology down to the level of the body: are you like me or not like me; are you with me or against me; do you share my values or not? Clap for yes; don't clap for no. It's a measure of how quickly this show got under my skin that, with each question posed, I was counting the claps.
Parallel to the audience's self-scrutiny, there is our judgment of Hesam, whose naked body, bent over a steel interrogation table, we encounter immediately upon entering the first room of the performance space (there are four of them in total). Several of us will reencounter him again, this time with his back strapped horizontally over the side of the table, his face upside down, denouncing our presence before him, telling us that, among other things, he would like to vomit in all of our faces. When Khakpour released his long arms from where they have been pinioned underneath the table, I winced, and it is sign of the actor's amazing kinaesthetic presence that even in those scenes where he is not speaking--of which there are several--I nevertheless felt something palpable (dignity, rage, resignation, despair, even a quiet joy) being communicated to me.
This, then, is the central paradox of Foreign Radical. Face to face with a body in pain, a body unlawfully and perhaps unjustly detained, we empathize with the person before us. But abstracted as data mined from different intelligence-gathering sources and the so-called forensic evidence found in his suitcase (plans in Arabic to build a bomb, anti-psychotic medication, boxcutters), we sit in cold judgment of the same body: is he a terrorist or not? The climax of the piece is a debate between audience members on this very topic. I was the spokesperson for the "con" side, and I'm pleased to say that we won the debate. Not that I take much comfort from that. For, if I'd answered the questions leading up to that point differently--or if the questions themselves had been different--I might have ended up on the other side.
The show ends with Hesam/Khakpour (he is both in and out of character at this point), accompanied by our ever-present Host, turning the tables and interrogating, or rather conversing with, two among us. This is done against a dually projected backdrop of a wide open expanse of desert plain and blue horizon. We have arrived at that final question about the freedom of collective assembly vs. the freedom of individual travel. The interrogations finish, the actors leave, and a door is opened. No instruction is given, but we are presented with one last choice. Do we leave one-by-one, or linger with the rest of the group to reflect on what we have just witnessed?
A suitably subtle ending to a very thoughtful show.
P.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Nach, Nach
It is certainly a major coup for local companies GasHeart Theatre and Theatre Conspiracy to have secured the world English-language premiere of Heiner Müller's Macbeth: nach Shakespeare (1971), commissioning a translation from renowned director and Müller collaborator/authority Carl Weber expressly for this production, on at Performance Works till this Sunday. I just wish I liked the results better.
In their program notes, director Quinn Harris and dramturg Jack Paterson go on at length about how Müller, whose famously deconstructive approach to the Bard's work is most iconically represented in Hamletmachine (1977), took on a rewriting of Macbeth in part because he found it one of Shakespeare's least successful plays, wrongly concentrating the appetite for absolute power in one tyrannical couple and failing to account for, or even show, the effects of such power on the subordinate classes. Müller's response, in an otherwise surprisingly faithful adaptation of Shakespeare's story, is to argue that the Macbeths' bloodthirstiness is symptomatic of the institutionalized exercise of power among the network of ruling elites in Scotland, with Duncan and Macduff and even, it is suggested at the very end of the play, a newly crowned Malcolm just as ruthless and violent and Machiavellian in seeking to establish their dominion over all others. Additionally, Müller inserts scenes showing that the people who pay the greatest price in such a system are not potential elite rivals, but rather the rank and file lower class subjects (the grunt soldiers, the servants, the peasants) whom the ruling classes dispatch to carry out their dirty work--or merely dispatch. In so doing, Müller inherited and extended the socially critical theatrical legacy of Brecht in the GDR, asking with pointed historical reference how Soviet-style communist rule in 1971 differed from life in Germany under the Nazis.
But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after Bosnia, after the end of Apartheid, after the Rwandan genocide, after 9/11 and the war on terror and Abu Ghraib, after the Arab Spring: after all the afters, how do you, as Harris asks in her note, make Müller's themes newly relevant "forty years later for an audience in Vancouver"? I certainly agree with this production's creative team that those themes are perhaps more resonant than ever. I just think that in striving to demonstrate this, we are given a mish-mash of cultural references that are more confusing than coherent in their tone.
Indeed, it is the overall tone of this production (or the lack thereof) that I found the most vexing. It veers wildly from reveling in grotesque humour to solemn sermonizing, not just within single scenes, but often individual speeches. I appreciate how this is in itself an appropriate alienation-effect, keeping the audience off guard in terms of how and with whom we should be identifying in the play. But I think the comic and the serious in Harris' staging operate less in a deliberately dialectical and destabilizing theatre of ideas sort of way than in a more inchoate and impressionistic theatre of images sort of way. The abundant use of technology in this production might actually be more of a hindrance than a help, both in terms of the live video streaming (I'm not sure I understood the point of the witches' doll scene) and the pre-recorded episodes.
A case in point in terms of the latter is the scene in which the drunk and lame Porter rouses himself to attend to the knocking of Macduff and Ross. Sarah Afful's on-stage interaction with Evelyn Chew and Courtney Lancaster (who play soldiers, but who also double, along with Afful, as the three witches) is very funny and affecting. But her slow hobble to the stage exit is followed by an even longer video sequence in which we follow on closed-circuit TV her progress along the length of Performance Works' vertical lobby to the main outside entrance to Granville Island. The Porter's reward for letting Macduff and Ross in is having the hand severed from his one remaining arm, but the shock of this gratuitous violence is undercut not just by the distancing effects of the video medium, but because that medium had also previously established the tone of this scene as one of comic play. Thus, when Macduff and Ross "re-enter" the stage and toss a prosthetic hand at the soldiers (who like us have been following the events on screen) it elicits a giggle rather than a gasp.
In fact, this is the case with all of the bodily appendages that get hacked off and prosthetically waved around in this production, and I have to say that I was a bit underwhelmed by what I had expected from earlier reviews to be a stage awash in blood and the detritus of human violence. Bright splotches of red do splatter the stage (and individual actors' bodies) at several strategic moments, but not enough, I would argue, to signal the mise-en-scène of theatrical extremity and horror that I think Harris and her crew are after here. Either go all out like Polanski and flood the stage in rivers of blood (expensive and not easy to clean up, I admit), or else telegraph the shock of the violence in other, more subtle ways. To this end, the single red splotch of colour that found its way onto the otherwise immaculate white blouse of Jennifer Mawhinney's Lady Macbeth during Duncan's murder (likely an accident) was far more visually powerful to me than the various drips and pools that collected over the course of the evening on the stage floor, and which anyway in the end had more of an inadvertently humourous acoustic effect, as in stepping through them the actors' shoes inevitably became sticky, a sound thereafter reproduced whenever they walked on stage.
The uneasy tension between the comic and the serious extends, in my mind, to problems in transitions between scenes, and to an at times indistinguishable doubling of roles. It is perhaps Harris' point to suggest that the witches and the soldiers are more or less of a piece in terms of their powerlessness to predict anything other than what is the normal course of events under a dictatorship. But modulating performances and vocal registers a bit more would at least help audience members distinguish who is who in a given scene, especially when performers rush on and off the stage in such a frenzy.
There is a great deal to admire in this production, not least another fantastic performance by Mawhinney (so amazing in Theatre Conspiracy and Rumble Productions' Blackbird). And everyone involved is to be applauded many times over for realizing that Müller's play had an afterlife in English. I'm just not sure they are yet sure of what--or who--they were after in their staging.
Nach, nach?
P.
Friday, March 20, 2009
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
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
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
PuSh Pull
The PuSh Festival wrapped up this past weekend. In the end, I couldn’t get to the Children’s Choice Awards event on Sunday (chose to bang away at a paper instead, as the writing had finally started to flow). Organizers had invited back the kids from Bridgeview Elementary in Surrey who had participated in last year’s Haircuts by Children by Darren O’Donnell’s Mammalian Diving Reflex (where yours truly was shorn). They were given free reign to check out the shows (though presumably not Ronnie Burkett’s R-rated Billy Twinkle—see below), and this was to be the red carpet moment where they revealed what they liked and disliked. I’m bummed that I had to give it a pass, but here’s my own verdict on the rest of the shows we saw:
1. Transmission of the Invisible: conceived, choreographed, designed, and scored by Toronto-based Peter Chin, of Tribal Crackling Wind, this was a collaboration between dancers from Canada and Cambodia that sought to explore the fusion between modern western and classical Cambodian gesture and movement. I’m not sure I was able to figure out entirely the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural codes at work in the interactions between the two male Cambodian dancers and the two female and one male Canadian dancers, though there were definitely some interesting racial and gender politics operating throughout. As a piece of intercultural performance, I appreciated Chin’s exploration of the difficulties of assimilating and making meaning from different cultural forms, but I also felt, paradoxically, that the accompanying video installation by Cylla von Tiedemann (one of my favourite dance photographers) demanded interpretation, especially as it featured, in my recollection, only the western dancers, presumably on the streets of Phnom Penh. An additional treat was a delightful solo by Chin himself, which preceded the piece—after which he bounded exuberantly up into the audience, and sat with us to watch the main performance.
2. Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy: Ronnie Burkett was back in town with his Theatre of Marionettes, this time offering what surely is his most self-lacerating and nakedly autobiographical puppet play yet. Billy, you see, is himself a puppeteer, working on a cruise ship with his “Stars in Miniature,” which include, most memorably, a saucy burlesque dancer, a roller-skating bear, and a dipsomaniacal off-key amateur opera singer. In the middle of one of the nightly routines he has been performing for years, Billy loses it over an audience member who won’t stop talking. He soon finds himself out of a job and contemplating suicide by hurling himself over the prow of the ship. Enter Sid Diamond, or rather his ghost, in the form of a bunny-eared sock puppet. Sid, it turns out, mentored Billy when he was just starting out, and has always lamented his pupil throwing away his talent on popular cruise ship entertainment rather than developing a more classical repertory such as his own (Sid does puppet Shakespeare, you see, and reacts badly when Billy introduces into his act a parody of The Taming of the Shrew called The Taming of the Moo). Sid’s job is to review Billy’s life for him, reminding him of why he started in the business in the first place, and what he himself has to teach to others. In exchange, Sid gets released from the quasi-limbo state in which he has been caught since his death. As usual with Burkett, the play is filled with bawdy humour, lots of camp asides, and of course delightful set pieces of marionette wizardry, including in this case Burkett manipulating Billy manipulating his own mini-puppets. I have read that Burkett interviewed older puppeteers who in fact worked the cruise ship circuit in the 50s and 60s, and the requiem of the title in part refers to those in-the-process-of-being-lost traditions of both artistic and queer tutelage. One hopes, in this regard, it is not also a requiem for Ronnie himself, and what his daring stagecraft has to teach a theatre public that thinks puppets are only for kids. And yet, after this one does wonder what he’ll do next. Perhaps that sock puppet is one clue of a change in direction?
3. The Invisible: the latest one-woman show from Montreal wunderkind and Lepage collaborator Marie Brassard. Richard and I had seen her piece Jimmy at one of the first PuSh Festivals several years ago, and so were anticipating this event very much. Like Jimmy, it continued Brassard’s explorations with sound, voice manipulation, and lighting effects. However, unlike Jimmy, which was a tight, focused bit of storytelling about the mutability of gender and identity, and which made of the technology of her dramaturgy an intimate dreamscape in which we, in the audience, felt invited to participate (in part via a canny breaking of the fourth wall at a key moment), The Invisible meandered randomly from a discussion of 19th-century spiritualism and the fascination with ectoplasm, to an account of a literary hoax in the southern United States involving an androgynous male prostitute called JT LeRoy, to various excerpts from Marie’s own dreams (the woman must be in analysis). And Marie (who is a tiny little thing) looked lost on Freddy Wood’s cavernous proscenium stage. As Josh Bowman, PuSh’s Fundraising Manager (and a former student), put it to me after the show, the piece was more compelling as a sound installation than as a work of theatre. But even here, Marie was verging on self-indulgence and the voice modulation shtick now feels somewhat gimmicky.
4. Nanay: a testimonial play conceived and co-written by Richard’s colleague Geraldine Pratt, who teaches in the Geography Department at UBC, and whose research has for a long time focused on Filipina nannies who come to Canada through the Live-In Caregiver Program, taking care of other people’s children while separated, often for years at a time, from their own children back in the Philippines. Using interviews with the caregivers, as well as their Canadian employers, and Canadian government officials, Pratt and her collaborators (including co-writer Caleb Johnston and members of the Philippine Women’s Centre of BC) created different theatrical environments in which they staged the stakeholders’ various stories, often in radically different dramaturgical ways. Audience members were given clipboards and a form at the outset, and were invited to write down our thoughts on whose stories we found most compelling, and whether or not we found all sides of the issue presented fairly. Afterwards, there was a talk back session, but we were not able to stay, as the performance went way overtime (we attended the first show), and we had to get to another event. However, I’m not sure what I would have said had I stayed. For there did seem to be a very radical divide in terms of how the nannies’ stories were told (literally up front and personal, as we crowded into a small kitchen space or a cold storage area to listen to compelling narratives of loss, privation and indignity that were presented with a minimum of theatrical ornamentation) and how those of their employers’ were presented (whether as melodrama or as farce, and with a clear sense—via the use of scrims, video projects, and the placement of the audience in tiered rows at a distance from the actors—that these were being staged as entertainment). Verbatim theatre is tricky, but with the right dramaturgy, it can be done well—cf. The Larmaie Project, or DV8 Physical Theatre’s recent To Be Straight With You. Unfortunately, I think Nanay ultimately missed the mark.
5. Assembly: Radix Theatre’s exploration of wholeness and fragmentation via a motivational speaking seminar that goes awry was one of my favourite shows at this year’s festival. Laugh-out loud hilarious and featuring expert and revealing (quite literally) performances from actors and co-creators Katy Harris-McLeod, Andrew Laurenson, Billy Marchenski, and Emelia Symington Fedy. From the mid-1908s era hotel boardroom where the piece begins (in the Granville Island Hotel, a place I’d never before been inside), to the nametags we were invited to wear, to the Madonna headset mics that adorn our “dream team” of speakers, Assembly mercilessly parodies the worst clichés of countless professional seminars and exploratory retreats many of us have had to attend over the years. But when Harris-McLeod starts to refer to different unprintable words for a certain part of her anatomy in order to distinguish the winners from the losers in the rat race of life, you know you’re in strange territory indeed. It only gets stranger, with a rather X-Files-like moment of exhibitionary display leading to a still more surprising—because so quietly moving—conclusion.
6. Live from a Bush of Ghosts: an interesting mixed-media experiment from Theatre Conspiracy about the “fallout” of electronic culture. Inspired by Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial landscapes (see my previous post), Brian Eno and David Byrne’s recording My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s novel of the same name, writer Tim Carlson enlisted the DJing talents of local hip-hop duo No Luck Club, the live video mixing wizardry of Candelario Andrade, and the dancing and acting skills of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, to make connections between First World waste, Third World disposal, and Fourth World retrieval. Some of the digital and electronic effects were amazing, but I’m still struggling to piece together all of the story episodes, some of which worked better than others.
All in all a most satisfying and culturally edifying experience. Kudos to Norman Armour and his staff for PuShing the envelope of performance yet again in Vancouver. Whatever one ultimately thinks of the work, it is never boring.
Many of the performances at PuSh were included as part of the programming for 2010’s Cultural Olympiad, which is currently underway as we approach (tomorrow, I believe) the one year mark for the grand event itself. There’s been a lot of discussion in the arts community about what happens after that. While Armour and others are indeed grateful for the one-off boosts in funding and profile that Cultural Olympiad programming and sponsorship is providing in the lead up to the Winter Games, people are also lamenting a lack of longer-term arts legacy planning as part of the general Olympic mandate. There is evidence that the new administration in City Hall is undergoing its own rethink of its cultural programming structures, perhaps going so far as to create an independent Vancouver Arts Council that gets money from the city, but that also operates on an arms-length basis; but one wishes that Vancouver had hewed more closely in its Olympic preparations to the Turin model, which used the cultural opportunities created by the Games to revitalize its entire arts infrastructure, making the city a leading destination for contemporary art in Italy. The hasty and ill-conceived announcement by Premier Campbell about a new False Creek location for the Vancouver Art Gallery that would be part of a post-Games effort to build an “entertainment” district in the area adjacent BC Place (which would itself get a facelift as a potential home venue for the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team and as a more used destination for touring rock bands) is symptomatic of the short-sighted thinking on these matters. Rather than an “entertainment” destination, the city should be thinking about arts and culture integration, with the VAG, for instance, better suited to the Post Office location on Georgia and Hamilton, across from the Playhouse and Queen E, and in a prime location to make links with other arts and community organizations in the Downtown Eastside. But nobody asked me.
P.
1. Transmission of the Invisible: conceived, choreographed, designed, and scored by Toronto-based Peter Chin, of Tribal Crackling Wind, this was a collaboration between dancers from Canada and Cambodia that sought to explore the fusion between modern western and classical Cambodian gesture and movement. I’m not sure I was able to figure out entirely the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural codes at work in the interactions between the two male Cambodian dancers and the two female and one male Canadian dancers, though there were definitely some interesting racial and gender politics operating throughout. As a piece of intercultural performance, I appreciated Chin’s exploration of the difficulties of assimilating and making meaning from different cultural forms, but I also felt, paradoxically, that the accompanying video installation by Cylla von Tiedemann (one of my favourite dance photographers) demanded interpretation, especially as it featured, in my recollection, only the western dancers, presumably on the streets of Phnom Penh. An additional treat was a delightful solo by Chin himself, which preceded the piece—after which he bounded exuberantly up into the audience, and sat with us to watch the main performance.
2. Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy: Ronnie Burkett was back in town with his Theatre of Marionettes, this time offering what surely is his most self-lacerating and nakedly autobiographical puppet play yet. Billy, you see, is himself a puppeteer, working on a cruise ship with his “Stars in Miniature,” which include, most memorably, a saucy burlesque dancer, a roller-skating bear, and a dipsomaniacal off-key amateur opera singer. In the middle of one of the nightly routines he has been performing for years, Billy loses it over an audience member who won’t stop talking. He soon finds himself out of a job and contemplating suicide by hurling himself over the prow of the ship. Enter Sid Diamond, or rather his ghost, in the form of a bunny-eared sock puppet. Sid, it turns out, mentored Billy when he was just starting out, and has always lamented his pupil throwing away his talent on popular cruise ship entertainment rather than developing a more classical repertory such as his own (Sid does puppet Shakespeare, you see, and reacts badly when Billy introduces into his act a parody of The Taming of the Shrew called The Taming of the Moo). Sid’s job is to review Billy’s life for him, reminding him of why he started in the business in the first place, and what he himself has to teach to others. In exchange, Sid gets released from the quasi-limbo state in which he has been caught since his death. As usual with Burkett, the play is filled with bawdy humour, lots of camp asides, and of course delightful set pieces of marionette wizardry, including in this case Burkett manipulating Billy manipulating his own mini-puppets. I have read that Burkett interviewed older puppeteers who in fact worked the cruise ship circuit in the 50s and 60s, and the requiem of the title in part refers to those in-the-process-of-being-lost traditions of both artistic and queer tutelage. One hopes, in this regard, it is not also a requiem for Ronnie himself, and what his daring stagecraft has to teach a theatre public that thinks puppets are only for kids. And yet, after this one does wonder what he’ll do next. Perhaps that sock puppet is one clue of a change in direction?
3. The Invisible: the latest one-woman show from Montreal wunderkind and Lepage collaborator Marie Brassard. Richard and I had seen her piece Jimmy at one of the first PuSh Festivals several years ago, and so were anticipating this event very much. Like Jimmy, it continued Brassard’s explorations with sound, voice manipulation, and lighting effects. However, unlike Jimmy, which was a tight, focused bit of storytelling about the mutability of gender and identity, and which made of the technology of her dramaturgy an intimate dreamscape in which we, in the audience, felt invited to participate (in part via a canny breaking of the fourth wall at a key moment), The Invisible meandered randomly from a discussion of 19th-century spiritualism and the fascination with ectoplasm, to an account of a literary hoax in the southern United States involving an androgynous male prostitute called JT LeRoy, to various excerpts from Marie’s own dreams (the woman must be in analysis). And Marie (who is a tiny little thing) looked lost on Freddy Wood’s cavernous proscenium stage. As Josh Bowman, PuSh’s Fundraising Manager (and a former student), put it to me after the show, the piece was more compelling as a sound installation than as a work of theatre. But even here, Marie was verging on self-indulgence and the voice modulation shtick now feels somewhat gimmicky.
4. Nanay: a testimonial play conceived and co-written by Richard’s colleague Geraldine Pratt, who teaches in the Geography Department at UBC, and whose research has for a long time focused on Filipina nannies who come to Canada through the Live-In Caregiver Program, taking care of other people’s children while separated, often for years at a time, from their own children back in the Philippines. Using interviews with the caregivers, as well as their Canadian employers, and Canadian government officials, Pratt and her collaborators (including co-writer Caleb Johnston and members of the Philippine Women’s Centre of BC) created different theatrical environments in which they staged the stakeholders’ various stories, often in radically different dramaturgical ways. Audience members were given clipboards and a form at the outset, and were invited to write down our thoughts on whose stories we found most compelling, and whether or not we found all sides of the issue presented fairly. Afterwards, there was a talk back session, but we were not able to stay, as the performance went way overtime (we attended the first show), and we had to get to another event. However, I’m not sure what I would have said had I stayed. For there did seem to be a very radical divide in terms of how the nannies’ stories were told (literally up front and personal, as we crowded into a small kitchen space or a cold storage area to listen to compelling narratives of loss, privation and indignity that were presented with a minimum of theatrical ornamentation) and how those of their employers’ were presented (whether as melodrama or as farce, and with a clear sense—via the use of scrims, video projects, and the placement of the audience in tiered rows at a distance from the actors—that these were being staged as entertainment). Verbatim theatre is tricky, but with the right dramaturgy, it can be done well—cf. The Larmaie Project, or DV8 Physical Theatre’s recent To Be Straight With You. Unfortunately, I think Nanay ultimately missed the mark.
5. Assembly: Radix Theatre’s exploration of wholeness and fragmentation via a motivational speaking seminar that goes awry was one of my favourite shows at this year’s festival. Laugh-out loud hilarious and featuring expert and revealing (quite literally) performances from actors and co-creators Katy Harris-McLeod, Andrew Laurenson, Billy Marchenski, and Emelia Symington Fedy. From the mid-1908s era hotel boardroom where the piece begins (in the Granville Island Hotel, a place I’d never before been inside), to the nametags we were invited to wear, to the Madonna headset mics that adorn our “dream team” of speakers, Assembly mercilessly parodies the worst clichés of countless professional seminars and exploratory retreats many of us have had to attend over the years. But when Harris-McLeod starts to refer to different unprintable words for a certain part of her anatomy in order to distinguish the winners from the losers in the rat race of life, you know you’re in strange territory indeed. It only gets stranger, with a rather X-Files-like moment of exhibitionary display leading to a still more surprising—because so quietly moving—conclusion.
6. Live from a Bush of Ghosts: an interesting mixed-media experiment from Theatre Conspiracy about the “fallout” of electronic culture. Inspired by Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial landscapes (see my previous post), Brian Eno and David Byrne’s recording My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s novel of the same name, writer Tim Carlson enlisted the DJing talents of local hip-hop duo No Luck Club, the live video mixing wizardry of Candelario Andrade, and the dancing and acting skills of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, to make connections between First World waste, Third World disposal, and Fourth World retrieval. Some of the digital and electronic effects were amazing, but I’m still struggling to piece together all of the story episodes, some of which worked better than others.
All in all a most satisfying and culturally edifying experience. Kudos to Norman Armour and his staff for PuShing the envelope of performance yet again in Vancouver. Whatever one ultimately thinks of the work, it is never boring.
Many of the performances at PuSh were included as part of the programming for 2010’s Cultural Olympiad, which is currently underway as we approach (tomorrow, I believe) the one year mark for the grand event itself. There’s been a lot of discussion in the arts community about what happens after that. While Armour and others are indeed grateful for the one-off boosts in funding and profile that Cultural Olympiad programming and sponsorship is providing in the lead up to the Winter Games, people are also lamenting a lack of longer-term arts legacy planning as part of the general Olympic mandate. There is evidence that the new administration in City Hall is undergoing its own rethink of its cultural programming structures, perhaps going so far as to create an independent Vancouver Arts Council that gets money from the city, but that also operates on an arms-length basis; but one wishes that Vancouver had hewed more closely in its Olympic preparations to the Turin model, which used the cultural opportunities created by the Games to revitalize its entire arts infrastructure, making the city a leading destination for contemporary art in Italy. The hasty and ill-conceived announcement by Premier Campbell about a new False Creek location for the Vancouver Art Gallery that would be part of a post-Games effort to build an “entertainment” district in the area adjacent BC Place (which would itself get a facelift as a potential home venue for the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team and as a more used destination for touring rock bands) is symptomatic of the short-sighted thinking on these matters. Rather than an “entertainment” destination, the city should be thinking about arts and culture integration, with the VAG, for instance, better suited to the Post Office location on Georgia and Hamilton, across from the Playhouse and Queen E, and in a prime location to make links with other arts and community organizations in the Downtown Eastside. But nobody asked me.
P.
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