I had a really high fever when I saw Double Double Land Land at Gallery TPW. I almost didn't go, even though the venue is a pebble's throw from my front door. I was going to stay home and watch Dynasty, which I have been watching in such a marathon style that I had a dream about Krystle Carrington (Beautiful, extraordinary hair, and a good person deep down inside) last night.
However, I'm pleased to report that I was able to leave the very exciting world of fictional Denver's fictional early 80s oil boom long enough to drag myself the required 1/2 block to the performance space, passing a conservative looking wedding reception at neighbouring X-Space on the way in.
The gallery was packed, and cast member Nika Mistruzzi had warned me not to sit in the front unless I wanted to be hit with set pieces. I didn't. I saw my friends Allison and Sarah, and they had a seat close to them. They were both wearing rainbow striped shirts. I had on a black dress and grey shoes.
I am really glad I saw this play. Really glad. Multi- disciplinary artist Jon McCurley's latest collaborative effort is a huge success; Laura McCoy's plush, kaleidoscope set, consisting of large, primary coloured geometric shapes, is kept on the move by the crew, who run it back and forth across the stage. Nikki Woolsey's cartoon costumes, which include a giant, soft ATM and a yellow traffic arrow, and McCurley's sharp writing, reminiscent of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth or Harry Nilsson's The Point, make this worthy of the very best fevered hallucination.
Double Double Land is a city where everything is terrible; its motto is "A Bad Place to Be, A nice Place to Leave". The citizens know it's terrible and so does the Town's mayor (played hopelessly well by Lauren Bride). A representative from the illustrious next town over Tuba City (Amy Lam, superior in a sweater onesie) comes to the town with suggestions of improvement. Double Double Land's Minister of Tourism builds an attraction based on the town's horrible reputation: a giant spring that launches you right out of town.
The cast was strong and confident. All gave grounded, shameless performances while happily yelling at/ tossing props and set pieces to an engaged and excitable audience.
McCurley does nothing to hide the artifice that is necessary in making a play. The costumes are obviously costumes, and not meant to represent a character's natural attire. This is exemplified by Nika Mistruzzi's giant fabric nose (Mistruzzi plays the role of Mrs. Nose), which occasionally falls off as she yells "My nose is so big! My nose is so big!" which, as is true as much of the play, would have seemed at home in McCurley's inky series of comics.
The soundscape, by musician Matt Smith (Nifty, Awesome) includes an occasional infant's squall or other uninvited sound. Rather than lulling me into the world of the play, it drew me out, and made me look for the cat I heard or the glass that broke. It was a bit uncomfortable, and it worked perfectly.
As Lauren Bride, the Mayor of Double Double Land, delivers her final impassioned monologue decreeing all kinds of amazing new things for Double Double Land, I heard a the sound of glass shattering (not in the soundscape), shouts and whoops coming from the front of the gallery. Franco from the Theatre Centre, who had warned us to expect noise from next door as there was a reception, got up to see what was wrong. The door guy got up and followed.
"As if they didn't lock the door, that's so stupid…" I thought, watching Bride try to retain her concentration through the last bit of her speech. Suddenly I was looking at the entire wedding party from next door. On the stage. Bride, groom, mom, dad and several well wishers throwing confetti and drinking champagne, and they were looking at me, and we, the entire audience, were looking at them in stunned silence. Bride (Lauren), shocked, turned to stare. Dave Clarke, still in costume came from backstage, looking angry and confrontational, Glen Macaulay, also still in costume, came from backstage looking alarmed.
I tapped Allison on the shoulder. "Is this really happening?"
"I think so." She said.
The wedding party, who must have felt as though they were in a fish tank, seemed surprised that nobody in the audience wanted to share in their celebration of love. They were unceremoniously usherered out by the Door Guy. The cast, looking a bit defeated, shuffled off. Set Designer Laura McCoy and Crew member Wes Allen came out with large brooms and swept away the broken glass, confetti and other debris left by the invading wedding party. The show was over.
"What just happened?" Allison asked me.
"I'm not really sure." I said.
"I think it was a set up." Said Sarah.
"Nooooooooo!" I said.
"Seriously?" Asked Allison.
"Yeah, I mean, who has their wedding a X-Space on a Tuesday night in January?"
That hadn't even occurred to me.
"Yeah, look," Sarah continued. "There they are." And she pointed to the wedding party, laughing and talking with Jon and the rest of the cast. It was part of the show. I couldn't believe that guy! The most believable part of the whole show had been staged.
"I've gotta go," I said, remembering that I was still sick. "I'm going to watch Dynasty."
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Double Double Land Land, Allison, Sarah and I By Aurora Stewart de Peña
D.A. Hoskins is Talking to Chris Dupuis
I sat down with Toronto-based choreographer and visual D.A. Hoskins to talk about his new work Portrait opening at the Theatre Centre this week. Go see it!
PORTRAIT
Presented by the Dietrich Group
Choreography by D. A. Hoskins
Featuring Danielle Baskerville and Robert Kingsbury
Video by Nico Stagias
Sound/Music by Gilles Goyette
Lighting by Simon Rossiter
Presented at the Theatre Centre
January 8-11, Thursday though Saturday 7 and 9pm, Sunday 2:30pm
Tickets $18-22, Sun PWYC
Call the Arts Box Office 416-504-7529 or visit www.artsboxoffice.ca
I understand that the project has evolved fairly substantially from its inception to what it now is. Can you talk about where you started, where you ended up, and how you got there?
Initially the piece was to be an investigation of the individual personalities of the two dancers (Danielle Baskerville and Robert Kingsbury). I brought Nico Stagias (Video Artist) and Gilles Goyette (Composer) as collaborators to the process intending to explore them in the same way. That whole idea just basically died. We started in that direction and I found it wasn't working to my liking. It was all sitting in a place that was too directed, too specific, and too heavy handed. At the same time, the perspective was very vague, which is something I find typical of Contemporary Dance and something that I try to avoid in my own work.
I find a lot of choreographers create work that's very open ended and they want to leave things up to the audience to interpret. This work eludes to a certain intellectualism that I feel like just isn't there. To me the idiom has to be very personal in order to reach people.
This piece has reached a point where it's still heavy in the subject matter, but I also feel like there's a great clarity to it as well and a specific point of view. Essentially it's a self portrait of me.
The idea of self portrait is something that artists often explore at the very start of their practice. I'm curious to know how and why at this point in your career you've decided to take that on.
The self portrait element has always been an integral part of my work. I have always used the idiom as a way to search for meaning for me. In some ways I'm still a young Roman Catholic boy and my work is often liturgical in a manner. It has a lot of symbolism that ends up being reiterated to me as a means of reeducating myself.
The way that you talk about contemporary dance hints that you feel like you're working outside the form.
I've become very discouraged in the idiom. When I first stepped into dance as a young gay guy I saw a dance show that had a play and sensuality to it that was the true opposite of my personal history and how I grew up. But then when I was studying it I started to feel like the entire education in the arts was about conformity. In that way I've been very discouraged by the idiom. I feel like it's pretty repressed.
Do you think that's contemporary dance in Toronto or do you feel like that's contemporary dance in the world?
I think unfortunately Toronto is a bit behind the times and lives in that sort of Sally Anne School of Dance world. I feel like my generation of artists is kind of stuck. I look at companies with great spaces, lots of rehearsal time, and huge budgets and I feel like the work they're producing is just unacceptable.
Are there any artists in Toronto who you think are doing interesting work?
I think Sasha Ivonochko is really interesting. I think Kate Alton is extremely interesting. Claudia Moore too.
What about artists outside Toronto?
I really like Deborah Dunn. David Ferguson is doing great things as well. A large majority of the work I see alludes to being what it's not. It acts like it has content but it doesn't.
What would you like to see happen to dance in Toronto?
I'd like to see a renaissance in the arts. The reason I started the Dietrich Group is because I wanted to interact with other artists and have an ongoing exchange. The dancers are included in the work and have as much of a voice as I do.
Can you talk a bit about the Dietrich Group and what you do?
The Dietrich Group is a collective that I started around the idea of bringing artists together to create interdisciplinary works. We feed off each other. Eventually I'm hoping that the dancers involved in the work will start taking on other positions in the process. I'm hoping it will be an ever evolving entity with new people coming in all the time.
In my research about you I noticed that you're always referred to as "choreographer and visual artist" as opposed to just "choreographer". Can you tell me a bit about your practice as a visual artist?
I self proclaim myself as a visual artist as a response to being in the dance idiom. With the way people assess and talk about visual art there's a serious critical discussion about the work that I feel is absent from dance. Even the people who are supposed to be critics don't take a very critical approach to the work.
I want to come back to this in a moment but let's take a sidetrack for a bit. When I started Time and Space part of the objective was to address the lack of critical writing about the performing arts. We talk about critics all the time, but we don't really have critics. We have reviewers, which is not the same thing.
Last year when we did Art Fag at Buddies, there was a critic who wrote a piece about me where I was referred to the "grumpy old man of modern dance". I find that kind of label really frustrating. I'm certainly vocal about the state of my medium. I question the choices that people are making and why certain work is getting funding that I feel is undeserving, but to call me that just sort of discounts everything I'm saying. When we sent out the original press releases for Portrait, we invited all the critics to write previews, but said we didn't want reviews. Eventually we caved and now all the critics coming. Someone said to me that it's my responsibility to be part of the arena and to have my work judged and written about like everyone else.
I didn't train as a journalist and I worked for a number of years as a professional artist before I started to do arts writing. I was really surprised when I got into the business to find the lack of responsibility that arts journalists are trained and encouraged to feel towards the people they are writing about. The artist isn't paying you. The editor is paying you. I straddle both worlds so I'm starting to get it more, but there's something that still feels so backward about that to me. I've had many occasions where I've been frustrated by editors pulling things from stories I've written about the artist's process and things that have been cut from the work because they feel like the public just wants to know what the work looks like.
I think it's a Canadian disease. When you go down to New York the way the work is talked about is so much more informative. How are we going to grow if we don't start educating people on a broader level?
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The Messiah, under the unconventional Conductorship of Ashiq Aziz by Aurora de Pena
The Knox College chapel is packed. There are actually no seats available 5 minutes before the start of Classical Music Consort’s Messiah. I have to sit in a single plush chair graciously dragged to the back of the church by the door man. People who arrived after I did seemed to have no problems standing.
This was the quietest place that I have ever been, from my solitary spot in the improvised back row, I could hear somebody in the front shift in their seat and take a Kleenex out of their purse.
The Knox College Chapel, built in 1858, is 100 and years younger than the music that echoed off its grey stone walls on Friday night. It is Classical Music Consort’s goal, under the direction of Ashiq Aziz, to give the listener an idea of what Handel’s original Messiah might have sounded like when it premiered in April of 1742. They employ era specific instruments and remain faithful to every Baroque vocal ornament, but there is something undeniably modern about the way these people approach the music that they love. The ensemble, though not entirely informal, is relaxed. Conductor Aziz is athletic and alert, the singers are confidently connected to the music’s text, and the members of the orchestra smile at each other throughout.
This is a simple, clean production. The soloists stand and deliver clear and fresh interpretations of the libretto. Particularly interesting is alto Susanne Hawkins, whose warm and expressive voice draws attention to the intensity of the text. The story, which we all know by heart, can’t help but be touched by the secular world we all live in today. It’s almost deleivered in the third person, which makes The Messiah a really interesting choice for this group.
This very human, very 21rst century atmosphere is prevalent throughout the chapel; people of all ages are completely engaged. The woman sitting directly in front of me (I wish she was my Grandma—seriously) is pushing a cool 80 in a primary coloured Christmas blazer. She knows every inch of the music, and conducts from the back. Beside her are a couple of 25 year olds with bangs who hold hands for the whole three hours. The simplicity of the production lets the composition shine. So many complications in the music, all of the vocal and instrumental gymnastics, become abstract when stripped of their showiness. This is what Classical Music Consort will become recognized for, this dedication to the actual value of the music. There is no attempt to explain why or justify the relevance of playing the music of 300 years ago, and that’s fine, in the hands of this ensemble, it stands on it’s own.
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In case we needed another reason to unite the left...
The Harper Conservatives are already prepping for the next election. This article from CBC pretty much says it all. If we don't want to end up living in the United States of Canada we're going to have to come together to fight the great blue wave. Read more!
Yes We Can by Chris Dupuis
Last week the citizens of our great neighbour to the south elected the first African American ever to their highest political office, as well as solidifying control of their left leaning political party over the entire government. Watching the election results roll in on TV from a bar on Queen West I was taken, not just by the level of emotion on screen, but also in the bar I was standing in. It's true that Barack Obama does have that inspirational aura about him that we in Canada haven't had floating around one of our national leaders since Trudeau. Still, one has to wonder, why we were so much more excited about this election than the one we had in our own country just a few short weeks earlier.
Of course seeing a person of colour elected to the top slot in the world's most powerful country can provide a slight glimmer of hope to all those around the world who have felt marginalized for who they are. And though it's good to know that not just rich white men can be president of the United States (since as of November 4th, 2008 Rich Black Men can also fill the same role) I don't think that was the thing getting people so excited either. After years of tyranny under the rule of the Bush administration the American people finally managed to elect a government that will hopefully be responsive to the needs of all of its citizens, not just for the exceedingly rich. And the tears of joy shed all over left wing strong holds of Canada that night were a tribute to the dream that we share of returning our own government to the way we think it should be run.
During the last election in Canada there were a bevy of union groups, arts advocates, and environmental organizations that actively campaigned against Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party. For the average person on the street in our great liberal bastion of Toronto it seemed unthinkable that old blue eyes could possibly get anyone in his party elected yet alone form a majority government. Yet when the ballots were counted he came in with 143 seats, 16 more than he had the last time, but still 11 shy of that majority he wants. With another election likely two years or less in our future, Harper has precious little time to cultivate that support he needs, but that's actually okay for him. He doesn't need to do that much to get his majority because all us left wingers are just going to hand it to him if we don't get our shit together.
Perhaps the single greatest problem facing advocates of left leaning political policy in Canada is the fact that of our five federal parties, four of them (the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens, and the Bloc) are on the left, while only one (the Conservatives) are on the right. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if we on the left are going to split our vote between four different parties we don't have a hope in hell of electing anything other than a Conservative government. We got lucky this time in the fact that Stephen Harper managed to secure only a minority, but rest assured he's going to keep trying for that golden apple of a majority. And when he finally gets it (and he will if we don't stop him) all of us artists, enviromentalists, advocates for women and minorities, anti-poverty activists, gun control advocates, and anyone else who else on the left, are fucked. Period.
In the last election the conservatives took in just under 38% of the popular vote, meaning that almost 62% of us did not want to see them in power. Why are they the governing party then? Because we on the left made the decision to split our vote between four different parties, only three of whom that ended up with seats in the house. Now I'm certainly not calling for a return to a two party system, but we need to seriously rethink how we're doing things if we want to avoid disaster. We have a lesson that we need to learn and the people who we need to learn it from are the top brass in the recently defeated Republican Party of America. What could we possibly take away from a bunch of gun toting, gay hating, anti-abortion, oil tycoon bigots you might ask? Well, for one, they like to work together.
The success of the right in the US (up until now anyway) has happened in large part because those on the right have unified their agendas. The Evangelical Christians are big supporters of the gun lobby and are fond of teaching their children that global warming is a liberal construction. Oil companies donate to anti-gay and pro-life organizations in an attempt to make themselves appear more "family friendly". And the poor in America, who have without a doubt suffered the most under the Bush agenda, have consistently voted Republican because that party claims to support the Christian values they espouse. It seems a bit ludicrous that these disparate groups whose agendas should be in opposition to each other (Pro-Lifers are FOR guns?!) have managed to come together and maintain a conservative hold on their government for the last eight years, but they did it and so can we.
We need to start looking outside our own communities to build a stronger support for the left wing political agenda. I'm sad to say I don't have a magic formula for how to do this, but I will say that we have to start talking among our different groups to figure out a plan. Artists need to start talking to environmentalists. And anti-poverty activists. And women's rights advocates. We in Toronto need to start talking to the rest of Ontario and we in Ontario must start talking to Quebec, which is great a stronghold of left wing support. There has long been a rift between rich English Ontario and poor French Quebec, but we have to start healing those wounds if we don't want to be forced to bow together to the will of the great oil rich west. If Ontario and Quebec alone had a national party that represented both of them we could have a sufficient number of seats to maintain control of the House of Commons.
For most of its history Canada has had a progressive government in power, so we can assume that sooner or later (perhaps when Justin Trudeau becomes the leader of the Libs?) that things will return to the good old days of Liberal Majority. In the meantime however, we must continue to fight against the Harper Conservatives and the leaders of our left wing parties must start working together. It's probably worth taking a moment here to remember that it was Jack Layton who brought down the Paul Martin Liberals by making a deal with the devil (aka Harper) and who owns a lot of personal responsibility for the situation we're in now. I'm pretty sure Jack isn't reading this, but in the off chance that he is I will beg him "Please do not sell out your comrades on the left again for the sake of personal gain and vanity!" Layton will have to learn to play nice with Gilles Duceppe and whoever takes over the leadership of the Liberals after the convention next spring. And I think I might just get over my current hate-on for him if he'd be willing to somehow bring Elizabeth May into the fold.
We on the left have some big questions before us at this moment in history. Can our community groups unite their agendas and stop vote splitting among left leaning parties? Can our politicians start working together to prevent the Conservative minority from ruling like a majority? Can we return our country to the great place we always believed that it was? In the words of the African American president of the United States of America: Yes We Can.
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The Life of an Ordinary Artist/Person by Katherine Sanders
Summer is over. Winter is on the way. There is yet another conservative minority government in power. Once again, people whom I did not vote for are running the country, although it’s not quite as bad as it could have been. I have just been rejected for yet another grant. If I’m lucky in the future there will still be grants to apply for. But right now I have to look for work. I have a pile of laundry to do. I have to clean my apartment.
I am one of those ordinary people who practice art. The kind Stephen Harper believes doesn’t exist. I am even from Alberta, originally. I grew up in Calgary, where all the theatres are named after oil companies. Culture is booming in Calgary right now, thanks not to the government but to the enormously rich oil companies. As more and more people move to the city to work in the oil & gas industry, the sponsorship departments of these companies ensure that there will be something for their employees to do. They also want to offset their bad reputations as planet destroyers and land rapers. So they give money to theatres, symphonies, dance companies, galleries, even individual artists. They help fund projects that would never happen if they relied solely on government support. They have funded the cultural revolution in Alberta.
Now, I am one of the biggest detractors of Alberta oil companies. And yet here I am praising them for the contributions they have made to culture in my former hometown. This is because, unlike Stephen Harper’s conservatives, they recognize that people can’t live without art. Compared to the elected leaders of this country, the oil companies are a godsend to the arts. This is bad.
But I am still an artist. I am an ordinary person, and my life gets more and more ordinary with every grant rejection. Every time I try unsuccessfully to get funding from the government to create my work, my life becomes a little bit more banal. I didn’t get the grant - now it’s time to look for catering work. I didn’t get that endowment - now I have to find a temp job. So I spend my time looking for ways to survive, rather than spending my time making this country a more interesting place to live. I can’t stop being an artist just because no-one will give me money to do it.
So what now? For me? Well, I have to go to the laundromat. While my clothes are spinning, maybe I can jot down a few ideas for my next project. Then I’ll go home and look on “workinculture.com” for a while, see if I can find something vaguely related to my passion, something that will pay me actual money. Then I’ll call my catering company and see if there are any gigs coming up. Then maybe I can squeeze in a bit of writing before bedtime. This is the life of the ordinary artist.
Katherine Sanders is a Toronto based actor and writer.
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External Storage by Evan Webber
Before ‘what now?’, another question: what is going on now? A couple of days ago, the federal finance minister announced with mock-sadness that Ontario is officially ‘a have-not province’. Moments later, in a press conference with the provincial finance minister, reporters asked for his comments not on the impact, but on the symbolism of his federal counterpart’s statements. Maybe this could be called out-sourcing: the reporters (or more accurately, their editors) could once have been relied upon for such comments on symbolism, which is to say, potential conceptual impact; now these comments are the very subject of the inquiry. Is this the news? (I am not even talking about the U.S. election.)
There is a principle at work here and my guess is that it has to do with the fact that there is now more digital space than mental space, meaning that there is officially more information than there are human minds to hold it. One side-effect is that in this terrain, the ‘news’ is not the appearance of new subjects – which are beyond count already, and so, a poor investment – but the appearance of new modifiers: the massively unpredictable tectonics in the unlimited continents of information. The “have-not province” story is one of its cruder manifestations, but it reflects what, to me, is a serious problem about mental space, and overcrowding, and the selection of ideas and language, and history, and survival.
Because I am a human who wants to survive, and I want other humans to survive, and I think that this mutual survival requires some cultural survival too, I think the study of information tectonics is vitally important, but I wonder if the reporters are going about it wrong by emphasizing understanding over being. To be in space, particularly a potentially infinite, virtual space, one needs an equivalent kind of time. If I look for this time-making in performance, it’s not because it’s more common there than in other places, but because I think the possibility for direct transmission is greater when I’m with others; also, a room or a field of people listening and watching is an efficient distribution network for home-made time. A relaxed and disciplined body doing something real, with precision, can transmit this virtual time – for a moment. People seen to be engaged with the work of being themselves alone can actually accomplish this – even if just for a moment. That moment however, is all we need, if we can get access to it, if it can be retrieved. So I want to have access to that time – I want it to be available to myself and everyone else. I think this is why I find myself increasingly looking for, and engaging with, and thinking about stories, and particularly the kind of stories that are bigger on the inside than on the outside. Because these stories are memorable, they’re good containers for experience. They resist infinity.
In other words, it’s possible that the sense of time that comes from being relaxed enough, oneself enough, might be made more available (as memory) if it’s located in language, if it’s wrapped in a story. Which is about as new and revolutionary as breathing, but also, maybe, given the world, as necessary.
Evan Webber is a Toronto-based writer, performer, and producer.
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