Remembering EKS

In a blog about performance and politics, it seems important to pause this week to remember the passing of pioneering literary critic and queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died after a long battle with breast cancer on Easter Sunday. She was 58. After many years teaching at Duke University (where she supervised a generation of the best and brightest new scholars, including my colleague Carolyn Lesjak), for the past decade she had been Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (where she also served as an important mentor to two of my former students, Joanna Mansbridge and Jes Battis). A full obituary was printed in the New York Times on Tuesday.

Sedgwick’s scholarship, especially her work on queer performativity (see her essay on Henry James in the inaugural issue of GLQ, as well as the volume of essays she edited with Andrew Parker, Performativity and Performance, and her last book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity), has been a touchstone throughout my own career. Indeed, in the chapter on the performance and politics of same-sex marriage in the forthcoming book from whence this blog takes its name, I have yet again had occasion to return to Sedgwick’s famous tarrying with J.L. Austin’s 1962 text How to Do Things with Words--and especially his discussion therein of the exemplary “I do” utterances normally exchanged at weddings. In that foundational essay on Henry James’ queer performativity (part of a critical dialogue with Judith Butler in the same issue of GLQ), Sedgwick redirects attention to the queer possibilities, and infelicities, implicit in Austin’s theorization of speech acts, long abjured as fundamentally flawed since the publication of Jacques Derrida’s “Signature, event, context.” To be sure, the recourse to Austin is somewhat grudging and decidedly instrumentalist (especially in the case of Butler, who appears to have turned to Austin, largely by way of Derrida, in an effort to clear up what she claims were misunderstandings and misapplications of the theory of gender performativity she outlined in her highly influential Gender Trouble). Nevertheless, both Sedgwick and Butler single out the “centrality of the marriage ceremony in … Austin’s examples of performativity” in order to suggest that “heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring about what they name,” and to ask “what happens to the performative when its purpose is precisely to undo the presumptive force of the heterosexual ceremonial?” (Butler, “Critically Queer,” p. 17). Answering this question, for each theorist, means first “undoing” the naturalness, stability, agency, and authoritative presence of Austin’s speaking subject, the “I” who names, and focusing instead on the discursive conditions, and conventions, that name that “I,” as, for example, heterosexual or homosexual, married or unmarried, ashamed or melancholy. Indeed, it is precisely by recuperating for analysis and discussion those specifically “unhappy” conditions Austin enumerates as contributing to a given utterance’s failure to do the thing it says it will do--a violation of accepted convention or procedure, the involvement of an inappropriate person or persons, the possession of an insincere thought or feeling--that Sedgwick and Butler construct their affective and melancholic theories of sexual and gender identity as political and performative projects of disavowal, of ever fully or freely saying what one means or doing what one says. As Sedgwick remarks, so many of the references to marriage Austin invokes “are offered as examples of the different ways things can go wrong with performative utterances” that his book perhaps warrants a different title altogether: “I Do - Not!” (Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity,” p. 3).

This points, in turn, as Sedgwick has elsewhere noted, to the witness role within spaces and contexts of performative utterance generally, and the spatial context of the wedding ceremony more specifically. In her more recent work on performativity, Sedgwick has outlined a theory of “periperformative utterances.” This refers to utterances that are not in themselves explicitly performative in the referentially indicative and active sense described by Austin (i.e., they do what they say), but that “cluster around,” comment on, respond to, or even negate explicitly performative utterances (e.g., “I do not”). In elaborating this distinction, Sedgwick returns to the marriage ceremony “as a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world” demanding consensus from the community of compulsory witnesses it recruits to ratify “the legitimacy of its privilege”: “Like the most conventional definition of a play, marriage is constituted as a spectacle that denies its audience the ability either to look away from it or equally to intervene in it” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p.72). And yet, precisely by reminding us of the theatricality of the wedding ceremony, and by attempting to effect something of a rapprochement between linguistic and dramaturgical theories of performance, Sedgwick demonstrates that it is possible to disrupt and decentre the authority and direction of the performative event itself, whether by changing the terms of its reference, the space of its enunciation, or the response of its addressees.

In writing about such matters for the book, I was taken back to my excitement as a graduate student in immersing myself in the then still relatively new discipline of queer theory, and how, in particular, it was being applied to literary studies. Influenced by deconstruction, and following the model outlined by Sedgwick in her foundational Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), scores of young queer literary critics in the 1990s (myself included—see the book based on my dissertation, Here is Queer) mostly sought to uncover or tease out the veiled operations of homoerotic/homosexual desire in a body of largely canonical literature, often simultaneously seeking to demonstrate how those veiled operations helped to prop up other normalizing institutions, including (as again in my analysis) the nation. More recently, however, there has been an “affective turn” in queer literary studies. Many critics are now using, among other things, the generative aspects of emotional identification not to demystify the power structures that work either to constrain or enable the successful resolution of individual sexual object choice within a given text, but rather to find new, perhaps as yet unnamed, objects and choices and desires that emerge from the feelings (including negative feelings) incited within and transmitted between the groups or subcultures reading that text. Needless to say, it was Sedgwick herself who inaugurated this turn, with her work on Silvan Tomkins (see Shame and Her Sisters, coedited with my colleague at UBC, Adam Frank), and with her call (in, for example, the introduction to Novel Gazing [1997]) for more “reparative” reading practices among queer literary critics. It is only fitting, then, that in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), an award-winning text written as both a response and homage to Sedgwick, Sharon Marcus labels her method of analyzing companionate female relationships in novels by Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte “just reading,” attending to the overt surface details of plot and character rather than the covert ideologies governing narrative closure. To allude to Sedgwick’s most famous book, it would seem that queer literary and cultural criticism can finally dispense with the closet altogether.

At her death Sedgwick was working on a study of Proust, for whom she had long held an abiding affection, and whose work she had dealt with so perceptively in the opening sections of Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Coincidentally, I am reading Proust right now. It was one of my sabbatical goals to finally make it all the way through La recherche, and I'm currently on Volume 10 of 12, with the Baron de Charlus about to suffer a horrible social humiliation at the hands of the Verdurins, and Marcel worried and vexed about the exact nature of Albertine’s relationship with Vinteuil’s daughter and her “friend.” Inversion everywhere he looks! I shall read the final volumes thinking of Eve, and her wonderful, generous, and pioneering work.

P.

Theatre and Film, or, E-Motion

It’s the end of a long week, during which I’ve been rather consumed by various other writing projects. But I did want to post something here—in haste, alas—to urge local readers of this blog (are there any?) to attend Electric Company Theatre’s special presentation of Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, at the Vancouver Playhouse until the 18th of this month. The play was a hit in 2006, as part of a co-production between ECT, the PuSh Festival, and Theatre at UBC. It’s since been completely retooled, featuring a revised script by Kevin Kerr, direction by Kim Collier, choreography by Crystal Pite, and scenography by Robert Gardiner. Andrew Wheeler stars as Muybridge, and the always wonderful and eminently watchable Jonathon Young, a co-founder, along with Kerr and Collier, of ECT, appears in a variety of key roles, including Muybridge’s colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, the painter Thomas Eakins, and the man who cuckolds and is eventually killed by Muybridge, Henry Larkyns.

This last detail gives you a sense of the structure of the play, which weaves the story of Muybridge’s pioneering photographic investigations into animal locomotion—which began, at the behest of industrialist and California Governor Leland Stanford, as a way of settling a bet about whether all four hooves of a racehorse ever come off the ground at the same time (they do), and which eventually resulted in him completing an exhaustive catalogue of animal (including human) movement at U Penn—with the scandal of his earlier personal life in San Francisco that he is trying to leave behind. There he met and married the much younger, and previously divorced, Flora, whose subsequent affair with Larkyns (and, it’s suggested, Muybridge’s discovery that the son he thought his—the magnificently named Florado Helios—is actually his rival’s), prompted Muybridge to shoot and kill him. At the ensuing trial, Muybridge entered a plea of insanity, though in the end the jury acquitted him, labeling his crime justifiable homicide. However, Muybridge remained haunted by Flora (who died shortly thereafter) for the rest of his life, as well as by his decision to place Florado in an orphanage. The biography certainly contains a wealth of dramatic material, but at points in this production (which could be streamlined and faster-paced in sections) it felt that, as both psychological motivation and dramaturgical counterpoint, it overwhelmed the scenes of Muybridge’s photographic experiments that comprise the other half of the play.

This is where all of the collaborators in the piece are really allowed to take imaginative flight, with the process by which Muybridge used multiple cameras to “stop time” and “instantly” capture a range of movements—as well as how he “stage managed” the subjects who made those movements—wonderfully evoked in Pite’s movement sequences and especially Gardiner’s stunning projections and lighting decisions (I’m assuming Gardiner was in charge of these decisions, as no separate lighting designer is listed in the program). Here we have not just photography, but early cinema, come to life on the stage. (There’s a magnificent scene, for example, in which Muybridge demonstrates his invention of the zoopraxiscope, an early device for projecting “motion” pictures that predates the invention of celluloid film, to his young assistant, Blanche. It lasts but a flash, but it takes your breath away.) And we have it come to life in a way that reveals the beauty of all human and animal forms, the nudity that was an essential component of Muybridge’s published plates of male and female locomotion here rendered in a way that is the exact opposite of gratuitous. It is, rather, completely warranted.





Still, a part of me wished that Muybridge’s influence on the development of the new medium of film had been emphasized a bit more in the play. Not to detract in any way from the amazing theatricality and visuality of the piece as it currently exists. Rather, I say this for purely selfish reasons. I will be teaching a course in the fall that will deal partly with the relationship between film and theatre (including the use of film and video in contemporary theatre), and have programmed Studies in Motion as part of the syllabus. Not having seen the play, I had perhaps “projected” a bit too much of my own thinking in connection with the course’s various topics onto the play. That said, I still intend to teach the play, and hope that I can coax some of its creators into the classroom to discuss its development. Here, for those who might be interested, is the course description as I’ve currently conceived it:

Filmed Theatre, Theatre and Film, Film in Theatre

Since its invention, film has had a special relationship to theatre. The historical, theoretical, performative, and technological dimensions of that relationship are the subjects of this course. First, we will look at early international cinema, noting the extent to which it borrowed from theatre not only in terms of narrative content, but also in terms of aesthetic form, incorporating proscenium framing, pictorialist staging, and vaudeville attractions into its mise-en-scène. We will also discuss how advances in film technology (including the mobile camera, rear-screen projection, montage editing, and the introduction of sound) gradually altered the aesthetic and ideological relationship between film and theatre. We will then apply these preliminary findings, as well as readings by critics and artists like André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, Tom Gunning, Stanley Kauffmann, and Susan Sontag, to two cross-media case studies: a discussion of Samuel Beckett’s sole contribution to the cinema, Film (1966), starring Buster Keaton, alongside his contemporaneous theatrical short, Play, in a filmed version directed by Anthony Minghella; and a review of the historical trade between Broadway and Hollywood via the genre of the musical. Sticking momentarily with this narrower national focus, we will next examine the stage-to-screen collaborations and stage-versus-screen excoriations and exculpations of three giants of theatre and film in 1950s America: Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller. Closely analyzing A Streetcar Named Desire, The Crucible, and On the Waterfront, we will raise questions of authorship/auteurship, liveness and mediation, spectatorship and audience formation; we will also discuss style’s connection to politics via the new Muscovite acting “method” exported from New York to LA by Marlon Brando, and the taint of communism that inevitably followed. Finally, we will conclude by investigating how different avant-garde and experimental theatre companies such as The Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, and Vancouver’s own Electric Company Theatre have increasingly sought to incorporate film, video, and new media technologies into their dramaturgy. This will coincide with the local staging of a new work by one of the masters of this kind of intermediality, Robert Lepage.

And here is a promotional clip for Studies in Motion. Walk, run, or ride to the Playhouse to see it.

P.

Cellular

Yesterday Richard and I hiked it out to Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre for the Arts to see Move: the company’s presentation of The Cell, a new full-length work that was being presented as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival (which has been going on since the beginning of this month—although I’m embarrassed to say that this is the first event we’ve managed to get to). Move is presided over by Josh Beamish, the 21-year-old wunderkid of the Vancouver dance scene, who in addition to creating and touring his own work has collaborated extensively with other young local choreographers and dancers, including Simone Orlando and Amber Funk Barton. That collaborative impulse is in fact the raison d’être of The Cell, for which Beamish has solicited contributions from six co-choreographers (joining Orlando and Barton are Heather Dotto, Alison Denham, Crystal Wills, and Rachel Poirier), each of whom collaborates with Beamish on one of the piece’s seven movements (a solo created by Beamish with dancer Lara Barclay is credited as the seventh collaboration).

Some of those movements are more successful than others. Exploring the idea of physical confinement and containment, and drawing imagistic inspiration from the campy 2000 Jennifer Lopez sci-fi flick of the same name, The Cell begins with Beamish and Dotto’s exploration of dance mitosis. Two same-sex couples (one female, one male) appear in alternating soft spots, their extreme bodily attachment and small, shared gestures (a raised hand that is met, weight that is distributed equally front to back, steps made so as to minimize the risks of separation) gradually giving way to the inevitable and painful splitting of each pair. A promising beginning, to be sure, with composer Kristopher Fulton’s appropriately symbiotic soundscape contributing to the overall effect (although a technical glitch right at the start with the tape resulted in an unscheduled blackout while the problem was fixed and the dancers began again from the top). However, I was frustrated by the lighting design for this sequence. If you’re going to divide the spectator’s attention on stage, then at least do so in a way that compels us to make an informed choice as to where to look. Spots alternated between each couple, but when the lights were down on one this didn’t mean they stopped dancing. This made one strain to see what was going on with the unlit couple when, logically, one should have been paying attention to what was happening with the lit couple. I get that this gets at nucleic processes themselves being invisible to the naked eye, but it was nevertheless too much of a tease for those of us who were hungry to see the no doubt complex bits of co-dependent dance that were actually being performed in semi-darkness.

I remained mostly under-nourished through the next two movements, as Beamish and Denham’s collaboration took the form of a dance film shot and edited by David Raymond, and as Beamish and Poirier’s collaboration, while having the virtue of filling the stage with live, moving bodies, felt to me to be overly burdened with theatrical busyness (flared condom-like costumes, a pair of shared boots, and a suspension cable that bore aloft dancer Tiffany Tregarthen). It took Barton, living up as always to her middle name, to jolt the audience with some pure dance adrenaline by choreographing with Beamish a go-go-style ensemble sequence around and upon the Shadbolt Studio Theatre’s rafters that had audience members literally twisting in our seats. I enjoyed as well the precision of Beamish and Wills’ collaboration, which included a spectacular pas de deux (at once aerial and grounded) that made better use of that suspension cable, as well as a coffin-like white box. Beamish’s solo for Barclay likewise allowed us to revel at length in some virtuosic displays of technique, Barclay’s tall, lithe frame well suited to the various extensions and floor work Beamish tasked her with executing.

But it was the final collaboration, between Beamish and Orlando, that really took my breath away. Featuring the entire company (minus the younger apprentice performers who were employed in some of the other movements), and choreographed around a square of white light whose borders the dancers would variously broach, this sequence brought us back to the themes of separation and attachment, and also served as a something of a self-reflexive comment on the whole collaborative process behind the creation of The Cell. We are each other’s mitochondria, the enzymes that fuel creative metabolism. But we still have small compartments within ourselves that are not as porous, places where we utterly and completely alone.

P.

Whatever Lola Wants

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.

Gregor's First 100 Days

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

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

The Homelessness Crisis

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

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

The Olympic Village

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

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

Public Safety

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

Managing Your Money

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

Greening Your City

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

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

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

P.

Singing Songs of Sixpence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P

Antony at the Vogue

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

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

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

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

P.