I have a feeling this is in large part due to a kick-ass review the piece got in the Toronto Star. Though it was likely to the production's benefit in terms of ticket sales, I have to say I'm a bit surprised that the Star sent John Terauds (who normally covers classical music) to review the piece as opposed to a theatre or performance critic. In his less stellar review of the show in The Globe and Mail, theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck says that calling your company an interdisciplinary collective can be confusing for newspaper editors, as they don't know whether to send theatre, dance, music, or art critics to review your work. If this is actually true, then these editors need to catch up on the last thirty years of performance in Canada. Interdisciplinary work has been around for a while now, and if we're going to have any sort of effective critical discourse about it, we need writers who actually understand and have followed the development of this art form through it's history. Though I take issue with how they chose to open the piece, I have to give credit to the creative team including director Ruth Madoc-Jones for the ending. After their final song, the performers exit the space leaving us, the audience, to sit for what felt like several minutes before returning for the bow. Giving us this time, not just to digest what we’ve seen, but also to force us to actually look at each other as people who have just shared in an experience together was one of the best moments I’ve had in the theatre in a long time. Recognizing that even though I hardly knew anyone when I got there, that having shared this experience of performance together has forever connected us as human beings reminded me what theatre is really all about.
Waiting in the lobby for the start of Anna Chatterton and Juliet Palmer's piece Stitch on Saturday night, I couldn't stop thinking "Holy Shit! I don't know anybody here!" Usually when I'm attending performance events in this city, 80% of the audience is composed of friends, acquaintances, former lovers, and past collaborators. However the sold out crowd assembled at the Lennox Contemporary gallery contained exactly three people whom I'd crossed paths with in the past.
Besides giving me an opportunity to note the obvious lack of my artistic contemporaries, waiting for the show to start was a great opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversations of people in the lobby, who would normally get their culture at the Four Seasons Centre or Roy Thompson Hall. I often hear people berate "The Blue Rinse Set" who see work in less experimental venues as somehow unworthy of receiving or incapable of understanding our downtown- experimental-art snob creations, but I think these audiences are often underestimated. They may not always know immediately how to respond to a piece of work like this if they haven't seen anything like it before, but (especially with a set up like this, where the audience is constantly confronted by each other) it's fascinating to watch people as they process the experience of the performance.
Perhaps as a response to this audience, the creators of the project decided to employ the standard "House to Half, House Out, Blackout, Lights Up" cuing sequence that is almost always employed to signal the start in conventional theatre. After the lights come back up the three performers enter the space, and begin the show with a beautiful choral piece, accompanied by the sounds of cloth they are ripping as they sing.
Having worked in both stage management and Front of House, I'm convinced that this lighting sequence is employed, not because it somehow primes the audience to receive the artistic spectacle they are about to witness, but because it gets everybody to sit down and shut up at the start of the show, thereby making the jobs of SM/FOH's easier. I wouldn't normally make such an issue of the of lighting cues used to open a show, but in this case I felt a bit let down. I would have loved to have the piece begin more organically, with the performers simply entering at the appointed time, rather than using the technical elements to subdue us the audience, into being ready to receive the piece.
After the first number the performers move into the back space of the gallery and the audience (after a moment of confusion) follows them and sits in a single row of fifty chairs arranged in a circle. I have to give big props here to designers Sarah Armstrong and Kimberly Purtell (Set/Costumes and Lighting respectively) who have created such a gorgeous environment it could easily be viewed as an installation on its own without the performers. Armstrong dresses the three women in costumes from three different time periods and also uses sewing machines and chairs from the same time periods. I think the choice of having each woman seated at a different machine than the one corresponding to their time period (i.e. the woman in the most contemporary clothes is using the oldest, foot-powered machine) was likely intended to suggest that they are in similar positions then and now in their respective sweatshops of employment, however my experience was one of confusion about the choice, rather than giving me a greater understanding of the commonalities of their situations.
The three women sing and sew together, blending Palmer's beautifully crafted music with Chatterton's signature pun-heavy word play, as they give us glimpses of their individual threads. A few of the people I talked to who saw the piece complained about the lack of a cohesive story among the three, but this didn't bother me at all. Just being in the beautifully designed space letting the sound wash over me was enough. I do feel from a design perspective it was really a missed opportunity to have the women mime their work, rather than actually sewing real cloth. It would have been beautiful to watch reams of fabric pile up on the floor as the show progressed and if it’s ever performed again I hope they would consider adding this as an element.
Stitch at Lennox Contemporary
Istvan Kantor's Transmission Machine
I didn't really think much about sex when I was watching his piece. Instead, I kept thinking back to the panel on Digital Media at the Culture Congress. Not so much because Kantor uses video as a major part of his work, but because I think his piece answered some questions (albeit indirectly) that the panel didn't about how the presence of digital media in everyday life has prompted changes in the creation and dissemination of performance. Lest I be accused of slagging him, I should say I think Kantor is pretty fucking smart for doing this. Coming from the field of performance art, he understands something that theatre artists are just beginning to wrap their heads around; that an artist's work must exist digitally, if they want it to have a life outside that particular run. I have no doubt that when he publishes the photos on his website some of them will be quite arresting and will more than likely than to future performance opportunities for him. The highlight of the show was when he whipped out a child-sized pink keyboard to play us a song during a technical malfunction, while the crew got the DVD's in order. I really wish this had been planned (à la Marie Brassard in Jimmy) but according to my sources on the inside it was entirely unexpected. Being able to laugh at both himself and the occasional technical glitches in his work gave us a glimpse of the real human being that exists behind the mask we know as Istvan Kantor. For all the seriousness of the issues he was discussing, and even though he started the piece by telling us that art is worth dying for, his recognition, however unintentional, that ultimately art is just art was the piece's saving grace.
If you've never heard of Annabel Chong before, you're just not up to date on your pornographic pop-culture. The famed wank-flick actress shot to stardom in 1995 when she set the world record for the largest gang bang ever recorded on film--having sex 251 times with 70 different men in the space of ten hours. She once said in an interview that sex was good enough it was worth dying for and Istvan Kantor starts his piece Transmission Machine which opened at The Theatre Centre on Thursday night, by quoting Chong, and equating sex with art; if sex is worth dying for then art is worth dying for.
The biggest change I've observed in performance with the advent of digital media is that now artists need to have a website and DVD's of their work to send out to presenters. It's clear watching Kantor perform, that he's an artist who truly understands this. During the performance, I counted no less than three videographers and two photographers who spent the entire piece documenting everything he was doing. As I was watching him smash things, hang upside down, spray fake blood, and set shit on fire, I kept thinking "Wow! There are gonna be some great photos from this!" and in moments I felt like this was actually the ultimate objective of the performance.
Perhaps as a result of his extensive web-presence (just try Googling him) Kantor is one of those artists whose reputation truly precedes him. When my date for the evening found out what performance I was going to be taking him to he said "Istvan Kantor? I've heard about him. Fuck that! I'm gonna go see the puppet show instead." For someone who's never actually seen any of an artist's work to have that strong a reaction to it is telling. Both Kantor's politics and his aesthetic have the potential to rile people, though I feel like it's the people who are least likely to be riled (myself included) who were actual in attendance that evening.
As a starving artist searching for a new apartment, I certainly have an appreciation of how hard it can be to find affordable housing in this city. A quick glance around the audience told me I was surrounded by my contemporaries who no doubt have had similar experiences when trying to find accommodations. I understand what Kantor was trying to say by comparing the gentrification in parts of Toronto with the genocide perpetrated in Nazi Germany (though I don't necessarily agree) however I felt in the case of this performance he was truly (to invoke a perhaps, appropriately clichéd phrase) preaching to the converted. Though I understand the value in reiterating our politics to us, lest we forget the importance of our struggle, I also walked out of the performance believing nothing different than when I went in.
Digital Presence Discusssion at The Theatre Centre
I attended a panel discussion on Monday this week at The Theatre Centre called Digital Presence which was intended to be a discussion reflecting on how the presence of digitized media in everyday life and other artistic disciplines has prompted changes in theatre creation and the dissemination of performance. Ironically (depending on how you look at it) the panel ended up starting late as the presenters were having some problems with their technology, namely getting some of the video to play, as well as connecting with one of the panel speakers, who was coming to us live by phone from Scotland. As it turned out, this all worked out perfectly for me since my flight coming into town earlier in the day was delayed, and I got to the theatre an hour late.
The panel included Michelle Kasprzak, Stephen O'Connell, Kristen Marting, Rob Kershaw, Kate Magruder and Ian Mackenzie as moderator. Unfortunately, the format of the discussion was not ideal. Rather than engage in discussion with each other and the audience, the speakers essentially presented their resumes, along with some of their thoughts about the use of digital media in performance. There wasn't much conversation; just a lot of talking.
Things opened up a bit when the audience got involved in the discussion. When speaking about using video in performance, it often comes up that this type of work, frequently just doesn't "work". Jacob Zimmer, who was in the audience, referred to Wolfgang Schivelbusch's book Disenchanted Night where the author talks about the advent of gas lighting, and how it took a two centuries for theatre artists to effectively integrate artificial light into their work. Zimmer suggested that digital media may be the same way; essentially, we just haven't had it at our disposal long enough to actually use it effectively in our work.
The way that a lot of theatre artists are (unsuccessfully) using video in their work today, reminds me of how artists were trying to integrate "movement" into their work in the 90's. One of the things that differentiates true interdisciplinary work from theatre with dance and video crammed in, is an understanding of how the different elements work to communicate with the audience in different ways, as well as a knowledge of which way works best. When I was working with bluemouth inc. we would have this discussion all the time; if you have text, movement, and video, that are all saying the same thing at the same time, decide which one works to communicate best in that moment and then cut what's extraneous.
Part of the challenge is that, for the most part, theatre is still primarily a text driven medium. A project usually starts with a play that's been written, and then directors, actors, and designers interpret it. Usually the play itself (assuming it's worthy of being produced) has all the information the audience needs to understand it, so when the other artists involved start duplicating things the playwright has already said, whether it's by adding movement or design elements, it's overkill.
During the discussion, Stephen O'Connell of bluemouth inc. referenced Public Recording's project /Dance/Songs/, presented last year at the Theatre Centre, as an example of a piece which integrated video very successfully into performance. Choreographer Ame Henderson's approach to using video is almost nonchalant; video cameras and projectors are present in the space and are used when it would be beneficial to get a close up of a performer's face, the same way that lighting designers will use lights to draw our focus to a particular thing on stage.
The one issue I really wish had been addressed on the panel, that never came up, is the effect that living in a digital media/internet/YouTube saturated world actually has on our audiences, and how theatre artists may need to modify their work, to accommodate this. Perhaps a good starting point for future discussions?
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