I thought it very appropriate that the rehearsal space for the boxing opera Voice-Box was a children's ballet studio. I could only imagine that between Nutcracker rehearsals, girls in pink gauze may have peered in to see the fierce women of the urbanvessel collective boxing while singing about “slug fests” or doing push-ups. I wish I could have been there when those young individuals were struck by curiosity. I wish I could have asked them what they thought about seeing women box and if it made them feel tough or cool; if they felt taller or stronger, more empowered, or if it made them feel conflicted or confused or even scared. I would want to ask them why they felt the way they did and what they thought contributed to their reactions.
Originally commissioned through the Fresh Ground new works series, Voice-Box is the latest production by the Toronto-based collective being presented this week as part of World Stage at Harbourfront Centre. Singers/composers/improvisers/boxers Vilma Vitols, Neema Bickersteth, Christine Duncan, and Savoy Howe team up with Juliet Palmer, Julia Aplin, Anna Chatterton, Teresa Przybylski, and Kimberly Purtell to create a show which is part boxing match, part opera. The singers move between choreography, voice work, and boxing within a constructed boxing ring rather than a traditional stage. The piece is broken into four rounds and includes fractured narratives and story lines as well as real boxing.
I knew before arriving at the Voice-Box open rehearsal that the idea of gender portrayal is still something many people struggle with and that the show is an attempt to illustrate some layers of this complex notion. I've thought a lot about “toughness” and what it means to be “feminine” or “not feminine” and subsequently what it then means to be “masculine” or otherwise. In a way, I am amazed that we are still surprised by the supposed roles of men and women. Haven't we moved past classifying gender in such a narrow scope? Can't we forget about focusing on how these are women boxers/singers and just enjoy the extremely physical and emotional nature of these two forms together in space? Can't they exist as a group of highly trained individuals who have set out to explore something within the particular frame of this stage/ring?
But as much as I'd like that to be the case, it’s not possible. We can't ignore the fact that these deeply ingrained gender structures still exist or at the very least are transitioning out of an incredibly long-lived past history (which ultimately shadows the notion of contemporary women today). The entire piece is extremely self-aware of the gendered nature of the performers; in a big way, their gender is the point of the piece. The performers have tea parties, flirt, fight in tutus, skip rope, apply make-up black eyes, and perform slow motion boxing choreography. They sing and smile while portraying stereotypical feminine women as well as butch women or any classification in between. The tongue in cheek tone of the piece seems to slip to the side of humour and stylized suggestions of “real” boxing and “real” women.
But there were also moments when dipped into something deeper. I wanted to see the heartbreak and exhaustion of what I can only imagine would occur at a boxing match or training gym. I wanted to hear them sing and feel their (and my) guts vibrating. I wanted to hear their stories and to be held by the performance, drama, and spectacle that I knew these two forms are able to provide. I felt this urge inside of me to see them fight and sing and live while still being seen as “feminine” because I am under the impression that “feminine” or “masculine” are only things we each construct by simply being who we are and existing in the world. We each get to define what gender means for us.
The elemental similarities of spectacle, drama and skill found in the theatre and the sports ring were closer than I anticipated. We as audience members know our place in the theatre; we know our traditional role. We also know our role as a spectator when attending a sports game. I loved the conflict of these two roles (and their consequential social codes) being butted up against each other in Voice-Box. I loved that fight within myself when considering I know how I should behave.
I've heard about Savoy Howe's gym The Toronto News Girls and the incredible Shape Your Life boxing program for victims of abuse that is affiliated with it. I've heard about how this is one of the only women and trans friendly spaces for people to explore boxing and it makes me proud that this place exists in Toronto. It makes me proud that people like her are doing the work they do.
Read more!
Urbanvessel Deconstructs Gender One Punch at a Time in Voice-Box, Review by Cara Spooner
Stitch at Lennox Contemporary
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.