Red Machine
Written by Brendan Gall, Michael Rubenfeld, and Erin Shields
Directed by Chris Hanratty, Geoffrey Pounsett, and Christopher Stanton
Presented by The Room
Featuring James Cade, John Gilbert, Paula Jean-Prudat, and Tova Smith
Presented at the Lower Ossington Theatre, 100 Ossington Avenue
Playing:
Sunday July 12th 7:00pm
Notes of brave intentionality rescue this uneven, first performance by hydra-headed theatre company, The Room. The work’s collaborative origins are pushed to the foreground as the monumentally clichéd story of the-writer-alone-in-his-room gets dynamited as if by flaming-haired, cartoon miners. It's pretty slick, but the slickness sometimes masks a lack of substance, and the mashed-up, David Lynch-y text struggles against the strengths of the performers.
I saw this work with a group of friends who all hated it, and while I often sighed in sympathy with them, I was heartened by the moments of honesty in this attempt. At heart this is a simple story about art and the questions one has creating art, told in a way that's both internally resonant and humourously self-effacing. In itself this is nothing new, but the way that the company’s unmistakable commitment to this story gets blocked and obfuscated by the pressures of the cliché itself certainly says something pointed about the way our brains make sense of the things we see. And the plays succeeds in reanimating a conventional style by playing the drama of the story's own limitations.
Red Machine would benefit from a period of serious reflection and sharpening, but it’s good to see The Fringe used not just as a factory farm for stand-up and musicals; it may also be a place to experiment and it’s exciting to watch early ideas take shape. Hopefully, Part One refers to an incomplete process. Red Machine (and the people who watch it) will be rewarded when the creators apply the energy of their craftsmanship to the clarity of conception. Here’s hoping.
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FRINGE TORONTO: Red Machine-Part One, Review by Evan Webber
FRINGE TORONTO: Like Father, Like Son? Sorry, Review by Katherine Sanders
Like Father, Like Son? Sorry.
Written and performed by Chris Gibbs
Presented at Factory Theatre Mainspace, 125 Bathurst Street
Playing:
Friday July 10th 4:00 pm
Saturday July 11 5:45 pm
I have watched Chris Gibbs' career for 10 years now - from his wildly successful street performance duo Hoopal, through sold-out solo shows on the Fringe Festival circuit, to steal-the-show type roles in local hits such as An Inconvenient Musical and as a member of the elite "Carnegie Hall" and "Impromptu Splendour" crowd. I've even seen his recent turn starring in the Indie film Run Robot Run. But never have I seen as much of Chris Gibbs as I did in his latest one-man show, Like Father, Like Son? Sorry.
Gibbs became a father 2 years ago, with the birth of his son Beckett (the name choice is one of the early stand-out jokes in the show). This show is a collection of anecdotes about fatherhood, strung together with the most minimal of props and costumes. Gibbs speeds through stories of his son's caesarean birth, his first efforts at speech and movement, stories you'd expect to hear in a play like this, peppered with bizarre musings from Gibbs' pre-Beckett life. It's a laugh-a-minute romp and Gibbs is a charming performer.
That said, in the performance I saw on Tuesday, Gibbs didn't seem quite as confident and in-control as he's been in the past. He threw some jokes away and sped through some anecdotes so quickly that I missed a few things. It's almost as if he doesn't trust that we'll go along with him on this journey. Often in his solo work he is disguised (however thinly) behind character and comedy. Even though all his characters are basically him, this show is really about HIM. We see him exposed as never before - and I think that's exactly the point. Becoming a father has given him that vulnerability, so talking about it onstage in front of an audience, he can't help but reveal that.
But unlike so many one-man tell-all shows that you see on the Fringe, this one has the weight of Gibbs' experience and craftsmanship behind it. After so many wickedly funny years, he has earned the right to take a few moments to be himself. We'll go along with him because we trust that he's taking us somewhere worthwhile. So it was odd to see him being almost apologetic for taking up our time with such personal material. But the most intimate moments which he zoomed past were what made this show distinct from all his other work, and I would have liked to have seen more of that. If he were to ask me I'd give him the same advice about this show as I would about being a dad: slow down, breath deeply, trust your instincts and it will all turn out fine.
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FRINGE TORONTO: Toys, Review by Katherine Sanders
Toys
Created by Winston Spear
Presented by Dancycle
Featuring Winston Spear, Freddie Rivas, Andrew Chapman
Presented at Factory Theatre Mainspace, 125 Bathurst Street
Playing:
Wednesday July 8th 9:15pm
Friday July 10th 5:45pm
Saturday July 11th 11:30pm
Toys delivers what it promises. Toys. Lots of them. In fact watching this show is a lot like watching kids play - and I mean that in a good way. It is, as the program states, unlike anything you have ever seen (on a stage, anyway).
On entering the theatre, we are first greeted by a robot dog and a remote controlled tank doing a minimalist ballet together. These are the sole occupants of the stage, apart from the set which consists of three large styrofoam icebergs - at least, they look like icebergs to me. Their presence throughout the show suggests a barren cold world, which when combined with the various lighted spaceships and flying movements suggests outer space, perhaps an ice planet far from our own. The lights dim, the tank rolls offstage and the dog is carried away, still barking and flapping his ears. That's the last we'll see of him. There is not much repetition in this show, nor is there any narrative structure to grasp onto. It is more a series of vignettes, all involving manipulation of various objects by a cast of three - Winston Spear (the creator), Freddie Rivas, and Andrew Chapman.
All performers are extremely expressive, with their bodies and faces. Although their interactions with the toys are never explained, the importance with which each movement and object is invested makes the show enjoyable. Their overcommitment to each action (I particularly enjoyed Rivas' careful measuring of the space and the audience), is what keeps this show interesting.
The concept is introduced by bringing the first toy out in its original, battered cardboard box. A model airplane is carefully assembled onstage for us by Spear, who then begins to fly the plane around the stage. His movements fluid, his sock feet gliding along the floor, his facial expression wrapped up in the fate of the plane in his hands, we understand that he is not a person, he is the plane. From that moment on, we are taken on a bizarre journey, with flashing lights, miniature houses, and of course it's all set with precision to thumping house music. The expression through movement of each detail of the music is the main source of comedy, as with Spears' solo work (search for it on youtube).
The most successful work in this show is done with light manipulation, and there's lots of it. I longed for some arc, some through-line to tie it all together, but was nevertheless entertained for most of the 45 minute show. An hour would have been pushing it. See this show if you want a taste of the most weird and gleeful that the Fringe has to offer.
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FRINGE TORONTO: Icarus Redux, Review by Aurora de Pena
Icarus Redux
Written By Sean O'Neill
Directed by Sean O'Neill
Presented by Open Season Theatre
Featuring Jonathan Whittaker and Alex Fiddes
Presented at St. Vladimir's Theatre, 620 Spadina
Playing:
Monday July 6th 3:15pm
Wednesday July 8th 8:00pm
Thursday July 9th 3:30pm
Friday July 10th 11:30pm
Sunday July 12th 12:45pm
Nika, Lauren, Laura, Sarah and I were watching the first instalment of Anne of Green Gables, splayed out on the sofa like exhausted cats. We all had tears in our eyes because of the scene in which Matthew gives Anne the ice-blue dress with exquisitely puffed sleeves and the two share a moment of deep here-to unexperienced father and daughter tenderness.
Every one our age knows this CBC mini-series front to back. It is part of language, and we all have crushes on Gilbert Blythe. Anne of Green Gables is embedded in our collective Canadian consciousness. It makes us all feel good about ourselves.
Nika and I, unable to tear our eyes away from the T.V., found ourselves running to St. Vladimir's Theatre with 5 minutes to spare (partially because I managed to convince her that the venue was definitely, definitely North of Harbord) on our way to Icarus Redux, which, as you might imagine, shares critical plot points with another story that has become embedded in our collective psyche, the story of Icarus, the boy with the waxen wings.
What is it about these myths that continue to fascinate? Icarus in particular is sad, morbid and hopeless. Icarus escapes Crete, the land to which he has been exiled, flying like an eagle on the aforementioned wings of his father's construct. His first taste of freedom makes him giddy, and he flies too close to the sun, which melts the wax that the wings are made of, sending him crashing into the ocean, ineffectively flapping his arms in an attempt to escape drowning.
It seems to suggest that an excess of freedom and lightheartedness will ultimately result in one's untimely and tragic demise. Better to stay captive.
It is not a democratic story.
Sean O'Neill's contemporary retelling gives us an Icarus whose imprisoning Crete is mental illness, and whose waxen wings are a relinquishing of the attempt to cure himself. The arc drifts back and forth between the son's reality and the father's, and at times it's difficult to tell whose world we are experiencing when. In my personal experiences with loving someone who is struggling with what their brain tells them and what everybody else tells them, this seamless drifting is pretty accurate, both for the lover and the lovee.
O'Neill's writing flips between T.S. Elliot style poetic and ferocious realism, which steeps the script in mystery, and Jonathan Whittaker and Alex Feddes as Dedalus and Son interact tenderly, viciously and hopelessly, shifting beat to beat.
I was caught off guard more than once by a hidden joke; what I like about O'Neill's writing, and his direction, is that he's not afraid to make the sad parts funny, even though they can be bitter. It's a survival tactic that we humans have to resort to every now and then, and humour is a key ingredient in any affecting tragedy, as tragedy is in any successful comedy, like Anne of Green Gables.
Though we live in a society that tells us we have control over our fate, and that we have the ability to rise above our circumstances, not all of us are capable. Many of us are still morbid, and many of us are still doomed. O'Neill's Son certainly is. The play starts with him dead, a figment of his father's imagination and, after an exploration of the events leading up to the circumstance, ends with him deader. The son is given a set of burlap and feather Icarus wings in the first half of the play. Designed by Brendon O'Neill, they are a grisly and ominous presence that for tell the fate of the character. Nobody strapped into those things is going to survive.
I have always been a little suspicious of any sort of contemporary "Redux" of a classic story. I have been subjected to too many hip-hoperas in my short life. These things run the risk of appearing more dated than their classical predecessors. O'Neill, however, must have, as his program notes suggested, begun with his own story and found parallels in the myth. He just does so in a way that is real and resonant with today's audiences. Skimming over the fancy parts and going straight to the broken heart of the story.
The reason that Icarus, and other dark tales from the Age of the Heroes have kept reappearing over the millenia has more to do with what we are sure of than what we hope for. We hope that we will find love, we hope that we will find joy, we hope that we will succeed. That's what a story like Anne of Green Gables shows us might be possible. It's possible that you may rise above your bitter circumstances and be loved by all who meet you.
It's possible, but you can't be sure.
The Greeks were much more fatalistic, and I believe, realistic. Even in love stories, like Helen's or Andromeda's, it's no gentle dream; people get raped, see their hometowns destroyed in flames, and are nearly ripped apart by vengeful sea monsters. The one thing they're sure of, beyond a doubt, is that we will cry. We come out of the womb crying and as we leave this world, with it's green trees and dark earth and drowning blue oceans, we leave cryers behind. We die, that's what we know. We knew it then and we know it now.
That is how the classical keeps popping up in the current, and that is what Sean O'Neill illustrates in Icarus Redux.
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FRINGE TORONTO: A Singularity of Being, Review by Chris Dupuis
A Singularity of Being
Written By T.Berto
Directed by Ed Roy
Presented by the Quantum Co-op and Keith Fernandes
Featuring John Blackwood, Soo Garay, Elizabeth Saunders, David Tripp, and Clinton Walker
Presented at the Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, 30 Bridgman Avenue
Playing:
Monday July 6th 8:00pm
Tuesday July 7th 3:00pm
Thursday July 9th 12:00pm
Friday July 10th 8:45pm
Sunday July 12th 5:15pm
A Singularity of Being isn't a show that would normally be my thing. T. Berto's straight ahead narrative drama, loosely based on the life of handicapped physicist extraordinaire Stephen Hawking, follows the life of a cosmologist named Roland (Clinton Walker) from his days as a rebellious undergrad through his career as an accomplished member of his field.
Shortly into the play we learn that Roland is suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS for short. Also knows as Lou Gehrig's Disease, the syndrome is a degenerative neurological disorder which slowly robs its victims of muscle control until they end up paralyzed in a wheelchair and unable to speak. Obviously this takes a toll not just on the person suffering from the disease but those around them and Berto is primarily interested in exploring what happens to the members of Roland's family as his condition degenerates.
Walker is flawless in the lead, bringing the perfect combination of sensitivity and humour to the role. Soo Garay is magical as Sally, Roland's wife who sticks by him through it all, despite the stress his suffering puts on her and joyfully helps him through his daily exercises and tops up his glass of whiskey. Elizabeth Saunders gets great laughs as Roland's stern but loving mother and she and Garay play perfectly together as the two women who have looked after Roland through different stages in his life.
Director Ed Roy has staged the show very simply, with a couple of chairs and hand props, focusing on developing the relationships between the characters rather than a big, flashy production. The press kit says that the company hopes the play will make the leap from the Fringe to a Toronto mainstage, and I'm sure with bigger chunk of change behind the production Roy will flesh it out in his characteristic style.
Though A Singularity of Being is very conventional script (at times even predictable) the combination of the superb cast and Roy's direction make it worth sitting through. The show doesn't challenge anything about the state of contemporary performance, or ask very much of its audience, but it's still a satisfying ninety minutes of theatre.
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Cautionary Tales and Blood-Thirsty Mobs: Bluemouth Inc. remounts How Soon is Now? by Keren Zaiontz
Irondale Theatre, Brooklyn, New York May 1st-9th, 2009 How Soon is Now? cast: Cass Buggé, Stacie Morgain Lewis, Stephen O’Connell, Daniel Pettrow, Lucy Simic, Omar Zubair
How Soon is Now? collaborators (2004-2009)—Associate Artists: Ciara Adams, Cass Buggé, Cameron Davis, Jeff Douglas, Chris Dupuis, Kevin Jaszek, Stacie Morgain-Lewis, Daniel Pettrow, Kevin Rees, Robert Tremblay. Core Artists: Sabrina Reeves, Lucy Simic, Stephen O’Connell, and Richard Windeyer.
A children’s tale can often be deceptive in its simplicity and heavy in its moral dispensations. The aim, usually, is to instruct the child: to communicate lessons about where one should seek to satisfy one’s appetite for porridge; why the gift of a comb or apple is not always a signal of generosity; and why garden gates should be shut before journeying into the woods. In How Soon is Now? the company bluemouth inc., an interdisciplinary, site-specific ensemble (New York City and Toronto-based), takes the genre of the children’s tale and transforms its role so that the tale rather than seek to caution and instruct becomes a vehicle that unsettles and critiques the very story it stages.
The story that bluemouth stages is that of Peter and the Wolf by Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev. However, the ensemble’s rendering bears little resemblance to the modern folk tale and children’s opera that Prokofiev found himself composing in Stalinist Russia. What bluemouth seizes upon is precisely the fraught context that Prokofiev was forced to smooth over through his elegant composition. His was not a commission but an obligation bound by propaganda and trucked as entertainment for “the people.” The independent collectively-created production by bluemouth is not (thank God!) a top-down command imposed by the state but an interrogation of xenophobic state control.
The ensemble’s interrogation draws upon German filmmaker, Fritz Lang's 1931 thriller M. As audiences, we are treated to an adaptation of these two works in a manner that combines characters from both the film and opera and adapts scenes (such as the trial scene) from Lang’s M. The absorption of these texts into a single telling results in the conflation of two characters, the Wolf from Prokofiev’s opera, and the child murderer, Hans Beckert, who occupies the centre of the hysteria in M. (Wolf and Beckert and conflated into a single role performed by Stephen O’Connell.) The lamination of these two characters and artworks onto one another sets the stage for a meditation on the threatening Other. The very presence of the Wolf becomes a moral question for his community who spends much of the play deliberating whether to accept and rehabilitate him or disavow and destroy him. The caption that follows the title How Soon is Now? on both the play programme and company website—“Get the Wolf!”—suggests that the verdict leans toward retribution.
How Soon is Now? is performed in a formerly vacant building adjoining a local Presbyterian church. The high ceiling, stain glass windows, peeling walls, and gothic revival art contributes to an atmosphere in which the distinction between crime and sin is nearly indistinguishable. In How Soon Is Now? the criminal body has a penal soul. This stark metaphysical condition is theatricalized by the Wolf who hangs upside down, Christ-like, in the centre of the site, which has been gutted of stage and seats. Peter (cross-cast as Lucy Simic) holds up a microphone that modulates and distorts his voice and thus denies us access to his story. Previous to this aerial crucifixion, the audience enters the site and witnesses an animated film on the balcony that circles around the main space. The animation, which is projected on a small screen, resembles a child's undisciplined scrawl, and is accompanied by a scratchy recording of a young girl singing in a high register. Following this animation, we witness a grieving mother (Stacie Morgain-Lewis) who looks and sounds as if she has stepped out of M. Standing amidst the audience Morgain-Lewis performs the entirety of her monologue in German as she recounts the atrocity committed by the Wolf. Later, in the role of (song) Bird, she advocates for the destruction of the Wolf. The Bird moralizes in the same high pitch as the young girl that accompanied the animated recording. A pregnant belly visible under her peasant dress, Morgain-Lewis sings, “You’ve never had children…until you’ve lost one.”
When the audience makes its way down to the stripped space below, wood benches and a make-shift jury box comprise the seating as spectators find themselves implicated as witnesses and jurors in a mock trial scene. Like the stripped site, How Soon is Now? is composed of five characters who are themselves stripped of “characterization.” Duck (Cass Buggé), Bird, Wolf, Cat (Daniel Pettrow), and Peter display no scrupulous psychological details about themselves, rather, we come to know them through their blunt ideological positions and where they choose to align themselves within the divisions “us” and “them.” These divisions are not only expressed through the rhetoric of accusation and wordplay but also through film, music, textured soundscapes, and choreography.
The dance piece that greets the audience in the main performance hall is an energetic call-to-arms that bookends the beginning and end of the trial scene. The choreography makes no room for abstraction as each gesture devotes itself to an authoritarian display. High kicks, arms taking the shape of Kalashnikov rifles, and a controlled three-hundred and sixty degree sweep that follows the trace of an unseen target, ends in the ensemble splitting apart—giddily tumbling onto the ground, falling onto their sides—like a monument that can not hold. The melody that accompanies this ode to militarism is a mix of recorded music (which includes a trumpet solo) and a rhythmic drumbeat performed by Omar Zubair (composed by Richard Windeyer). The drumming, which invades the space with the force of a marching band, is as uncompromising as the movement it accompanies. Through its unceasing beat, it reveals that the characters are closer to a cavalry than a community.
What adds to the compelling character of the choreography is that it is performed inches away from its audience. bluemouth is known for its fearless choreography which makes full use of both its sites and its spectators. The duets that take place during the trial scene, for instance, occur in front of, alongside, and behind seated audience members. This movement immerses spectators in the one-on-one combat between the characters—combat, that once again draws upon recognizable movement vocabularies. The duet between the Wolf and the Cat (which ends in his murder) mimics the gestures of a bull fight; and the face-off between Peter and the Wolf occurs through the physical language of the tango. Throughout the duet, Lucy Simic, as Peter, knocks the Wolf to the floor, walks over him, face-down, and sticks her foot in his throat. In both dance numbers there is a desire to master and do damage to the threatening Other through movement. The proximity of these choreographic numbers to the audience is more than simply a novelty of site-specific performance. The physical aggression demonstrated in both duets shows how the hostile treatment of the outsider is not a historically remote circumstance—an experience unique to either Prokofiev’s Russia or Fritz Lang’s inter-war Berlin.
The spectators’ proximity to the stylized display of violence highlights the fact that unless we act upon what we witness then we are complicit in its violence. bluemouth productions strive to highlight the presence of the audience as agents in a performance event. (Their most recent show in Toronto, Dance Marathon, places its audiences at the centre of the event as dance competitors!) While New York audiences were treated to How Soon is Now? for the first time at the Irondale arts facility in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Toronto audiences have had the opportunity to catch two incarnations of the show. The first, originally titled Memory of Bombs, was produced in a boiler room as part of the 2004 Summerworks Festival. The company returned to the show, in co-production with the Theatre Centre in 2007, and performed in a disused sound stage in the west end (the show was later nominated for three Dora awards).
In its American debut, How Soon Is Now? shows itself to be a timely piece in the aftermath of the treatment of 9/11 “enemy combatants” in prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib. After 9/11, we heard accounts of citizens being wrongly imprisoned because of their ethnicity; witnessed images of men in pointed hoods holding “stress positions” and we continued about our daily lives, largely unchanged. State control was framed as “security” and xenophobia as patriotism. By staging and adapting the works of artists who laboured under the glare of fascism, bluemouth shows that the extremity of their circumstances is not as remote as we think. Far from a simple moral dispensation, How Soon Is Now? communicates that, in gouging out the eye of the threatening Other (destroying him) there is no guarantee that we will not, in the process, destroy ourselves.
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Claire Calnan and Adam Lazarus are Talking to Chris Dupuis
The Exchange Rate Collective's Show Appetite was one of my favourite pieces at Summerworks two years ago, so I was happy to see the company was remounting the show this week. I got in touch with creator/performers Claire Calnan and Adam Lazarus to talk about the show.
Appetite plays April 16 through April 26, 2009 at Theatre Passe Muraille
Created by The Exchange Rate Collective and presented by Volcano and Theatre Passe Muraille.
Box Office 416-504-7529
Tickets PWYC - $35 :: Students/Seniors/Arts Workers $20
Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto
passemuraille.on.ca
volcano.ca
Directed by Sarah Sanford, starring Claire Calnan, Adam Lazarus, Linnea Swan. Associate Director: Kate Alton. Designers: Gillian Gallow, Rebecca Picherack, Robert Perrault. SM: Sherry Roher.
Appetite explores human desire as it pertains to food and sex. If you had to choose between the two which one would you pick and why?
CC - Sex seems like the obvious choice, right? But food is really compelling because our relationship to it can contain so many other human desires and emotions (repressed or otherwise). The way we treat it often says a lot about our state: we eat for comfort, substitute chocolate for sex, exercise control by restricting what we consume (fasting, dieting, vegetarian-ing...this is not a word...), we have cravings, stuff ourselves, try to be healthy, treat ourselves, obsess, we are sensitive about our cooking, take joy in feeding our lovers and loved ones, eat to battle depression or anxiety, don't eat because we are depressed or anxious, we find people's eating habits repulsive, we are insatiable...and occasionally we are satisfied. We (in this time and place) have an embarrassing overabundance of food. But most of us don't know where it comes from or how it got here. And there is still hunger. Also, of course, we depend on it to live. So, I guess I would have to say food.
AL - This question is three days in the answering. I just can't pick one and not the other, so I thought I'd share with you some of the thoughts that entered my head over the past days. I kept thinking about this question in terms of my future - where I will be in 30 years. So, at first I picked food. I said to myself that by the time I'm 70 my equipment won't work so good. Therefore, I'll naturally enjoy food more. I'll eat out a lot at delicious restaurants and reminisce about the days my tools filled their sheaths and stood at attention. Yes, I thought. It shall be food!
The next day I saw someone give a lecture on ageism and realized my ideas pertaining to sex and seniors are completely self-fashioned, unfounded and totally ageist.
So then I switched to sex. I thought to myself that I will have great sex all the time and food won't be as important. The more I went down this road, the more I thought about my aging body, disease, allergies, the loss of bone density. I mused that the only food I would be able to consume at 70 would be porridge, prune juice and creamed spinach. My anxiety will have increased the size of my ulcers, ruining my ability to digest solids. I'll become allergic to everything wheat, dairy, and sesame. What's more, my teeth will be gone and my artist wages will not allow me a good pair of dentures.
Oh dear. Ageist again.
I learnt a lot the past three days: I learnt that I can't separate food and sex. I also learnt that ageism is the 3rd most predominant ism after racism and sexism.
How do you see the desire for food and sex being connected?
CC - In the best of times, they can co-exist delightfully. They both can sustain and delight us. They both involve 'ingesting' to a degree. We desire to consume food, people. And if the 'appetite' for one or the other grows too big, each of them has the power to act as a destructive force in our lives.
AL - On any given night, for stallions such as myself, one leads to the other to the other and back to the other. Seriously, each has a quality of the other. The desire for sex is a hunger - I salivate, my body tightens, I swell, I shrink, I get moody, I propel forward to attain. The desire to eat is the same. Both fulfill a basic human need. We tangibly and audibly connect with both. On a good night you look at the aforementioned desire, be it a piece of lamb or a piece of person, and before you touch it you ask "How shall I consume you this evening my little one?" After your desire answers, the dialogue should continue: "How shall we proceed? Good, bad, ugly, funny, surprising, dangerous, necessarily so or necessarily no?" I love this dialogue.
Both of you have worked in several collective/collaborative processes. It seems like more and more of the interesting work being produced these days is coming out of this model. Why do you think that is?
CC - I think it is interesting that you use the word 'interesting'. I often find that I use this word when I feel conflicted about something. But maybe that is just me... Personally, I'm not exclusive about theatre. I like all kinds as long as it has the power to move or inspire or delight me. One of my favourite shows this past year was A Raisin in the Sun, a scripted piece written 50 years ago. There we go. And my experience in what one might call "conventional" theatre continues to teach me a great deal about my creation work. The different processes "feed" each other, one might say (especially if the one was in a play called Appetite...). For some reason, I felt the need for this preface. Of course, I do believe that there is incredibly vibrant and relevant work being produced through collaborative models. There are also a million ways to work within these forms.
So let me talk about a particular show or two that I have worked on. And when I talk about these I will say that perhaps one of the influences on their success or relevancy has something to do with the immediacy of our access to arts, news, information and "entertainment" in the current day. In certain devised processes, when one is lucky, the work is able to address something that lies in the subconscious of the collective. Something that the group is struggling with that has not yet quite risen to the surface, has not yet been fully deconstructed or intellectualized. It can make the work very immediate. I find that exciting.
My experience working in Columbia this past fall helped to illuminate this approach to collaborative work and allowed me to articulate it in a way I had not previously been able to do. The director, Patricia Ariza, who is an influential force in that country and in the international community, has tremendous faith in an improvisational process that encourages work from the guts, churning up ideas that are still being processed, uncovering what the group wants to talk about before they are sure what it is they want to talk about. I did not have the language for this when we began working on Appetite but in retrospect, it is clear to me that this piece, too, was able to access some of that goodness. I think the work is tremendously pertinent given the current state of things. And also very funny. However these two things came to be, I am happy for them.
AL - I love the artist as creator. Three people I have worked with in my life have hardwired this thinking into my creative vernacular - Stephen Johnson, Paul Thompson and Philippe Gaulier are all interested in the artist and how they see the world.
When we put different minds/creators into one room together, what's going to happen? This is where we find new stories, hear new voices and really uncover something exciting. In a collective environment the artist's creativity/creation really gets to be the focus. Under good direction, as with Sarah Sanford, the artists are allowed to offer every part of themselves - mover, singer, tragic actor, comic actor. Not every one of these sides makes it into the final product, but the results will have an energy and ownership unparalleled because every word, gesture, direction and design has been built by one particular group of artists at one particular time in their collective lives.
How do you define the difference between physical theatre, dance, and clown?
CC - I don't. Not because I am not interested or because I have not thought a great deal about these things. But because there are people who know so much more than me who could provide you with incredibly elegant definitions where I would offer you possibly offensively over-simplified statements that tomorrow I might disagree with. I approach the work I do from an instinctual place as a creator, actor, storyteller, mover, human being. I have some training in different forms. And I'm sure that this must come onto the stage with me. I'm sure it can't be helped. Most times I wish I had more training (like when Kate Alton gives me a note five times to change the position of my feet and they-my feet-refuse to listen to her). I am hoping to keep training in all kinds of things until I am so full of it.
AL - These terms are all comprehension and marketing tools. When I started doing
clown work in the city I never actually wore the nose yet everyone said I was a clown. I asked why and they said "You're just so clonwy!" I guess you gotta give the people what they want. So I started calling my work Clown with a capital 'C' and only clowns came to see me work. I thought something fishy was up, so I changed the title of my work to Physical Theatre. Suddenly, far more people were interested in working with me and studying with me. Now I'm in a Dance/Physical Theatre/Clown piece and Robert Lepage is knocking at my door. Just kidding of course. But don't box me in, you know? I'm an artist who works to make interesting pieces of art. Example - Appetite is one really interesting piece of art - one painting that draws from a few different disciplines. Artist first, clown, physical theatre practitioner, dancer later. Save the words for the adverts.
Speaking of clown, there's a huge clown scene in Toronto. What's up with that? Why are you drawn to this form of performance?
CC - When there is so much content out there, so much stimulation that we can find in our own home and often for free we might start to think "Why theatre?" And we might look to the audience, because they are with us in this question and this struggle. They have to be or we don't exist. And we might want to connect with them in this place that we are together. I think that clowns can do this very well. We see their eyes and they know we are there. They acknowledge us. We, the audience, know we are essential. It's good to know that I think. It feels nice. If I watch CSI or don't watch CSI, David Caruso will still churn out the most delightfully terrible one-liners. He will still accent his lines with the placement of his sunglasses on his face. But in clown, my being there might change the tone, might make the show funnier or sadder or, just, well...different. There is something powerful about that in a city where we keep getting closer and closer to each other in a literal sense, but seem to have a harder time actually connecting. Anyhow, I am just an outside observer mostly. I like the clowns. I hang out with them. I like to think I am their kin... like, a distant cousin who they enjoy chatting with at family weddings and funerals. Adam could probably tell you more about the "scene". Adam?
AL - My guess is that clown is so big in Toronto because we have quite a developed tradition of great teachers that have studied it, were affected by it, and then had a desire to pass it on to students. Dean Gilmour, Leah Cherniak, Mike Kennard, John Turner, Karen Hines, Sue Morrison, Ian Wallace and the late Richard Pochinko are some of the masters who worked a lot in the city. These folks introduced a slew of Torontonians to the form and I think that if a student taps into clown, they really tap in. The energy of the good clown is too beautiful for words and we have some beauty in this city for sure.
I'm drawn to clown because I love an audience. I respect their presence in the room with me. I love making them laugh, having them make me laugh, surprising, being surprised, failing and getting back up. With or without nose, the clown's energy to play and discover is such a good tool for a creator to have. Even if you never wear the nose again after your training, you will herein decree the words: "Bad clowns give clown a bad name. Good clowns are alive and connected and beautiful - a miracle!"
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