Bribery at the Door?!?!

I volunteered at the Capital Slam Semifinals at the Mercury Lounge last night. The place was packed, literally: the doors opened at 6:30, and by 7:30 we couldn't let anyone else in. I wound up working the door for a while, telling the stragglers that they couldn't get in, and no, their friends hadn't bought them tickets that would allow them in, and no, they couldn't just hang out in the staircase to wait, and no, if someone left I couldn't let them in, because I wasn't about to try and do the math, but if they wanted to trade admission bracelets outside with people who were leaving, that would be fine...

Did I mention that this was for a poetry show? I love this town.

When, at the Writers Festival, Anne Simpson exclaimed about the big audience that had turned out for poetry, that was pretty cool. This was sold-out, jam-packed, standing-room only, turning-people-away, scalper's-paradise crowded. The inimitable Jessica Ruano, who was the official door girl (and who I admire greatly, not just because I could only handle the door for the first set before I kind of freaked out about having to tell people to go away whose friends were already inside)... anyway, Jessica said that someone actually tried to bribe her: "If I pay you extra, can I get in?"

This is a new high for Ottawa poetry. Attempted bribery at the door.

And it was good to hear some really interesting new voices from the Capital Poetry Collective. The semifinalists were Poetic Speed, Marcus Jameel, Open Secret, Free Will, Rusty Priske, Bart Cormier, Festrell, Kevin Matthews, Danielle K. L. Gregoire, Nathanael Larochette, Thomas McKinley, and Steve Sauve. Some of these folks are long-standing Ottawa poets, some of them have just started out. In particular I was floored by Poetic Speed, with his second-set poem, an open letter to William Lynch, the purported author of a speech given in 1712 to Viriginian plantation owners on how to keep their slaves in line (okay, so the speech itself is probably a hoax, but Poetic Speed's performance dropped my jaw.) 

A couple of other newcomers that shone: Marcus Jameel, whose voice is just made for performance, and a pretty gutsy performance by Bart Cormier, who wasn't afraid to stand up and be a geek. Stick to it, Bart: the slam scene needs its nerditude, and the occasional welcome infusion of humor and lightness. 

And a word to the wise: Get to the finals (June 7th, hosted by CBC's Alan Neal, of Bandwidth fame) early if you're coming. Don't show up an hour after the show starts and try to tell the door girl that you know Kevin Matthews.

A quick review - And All For Love

I got to go see this show for the matinee last Saturday. Is it still playing? If it is, go.

And All For Love

By Alison Lawrence, Directed by Daryl Cloran, National Arts Centre Studio

And All For Love is a fairly straightforward, elegantly written play set in a theatre company during the Restoration. All the characters are historical - Elizabeth Barry, one of the first great actresses; Winifred Gosnell, who started out as a hired companion for Samuel Pepys's wife and then took to the stage: Samuel Pepys himself; Edward Kynaston, one of the last of the ‘boy actors;' the Earl of Rochester; and Thomas Otway, the failed actor who wrote plays for Barry to act in. The story is essentially about the presumed friendship between Barry and Gosnell, both members of the Duke's Company in the late 17^th century. Gosnell leaves the household of Samuel Pepys for an acting career in Davenant's company, where Elizabeth Barry worked, having been taken in by the manager when her family lost its money. Barry desperately wants to act, but she's terrible. On a bet, the Earl of Rochester decides to pull a Pygmalion with her, and turn her into an actress. Apparently, it worked: she went on to become a star, and eventually a founding shareholder of the company when it went independent.

The play speculates about the motives and relationships of all these characters - were the two women friends? What did it do to their friendship to have one's career take off dramatically while the other faded into obscurity? Why was Gosnell at first so popular, and later so unregarded (the evidence we have for her decline in popularity is taken from Pepys's diary, in which she has a few mentions)? What kind of motives drove actors in a time and place where actors were hardly the glamorized creatures they are now? This is a play about theatre, on some levels, or perhaps an affectionate love letter to acting. It also plays on a lot of the things that make Restoration theatre fascinating and fun - the language and wit of the time in particular, and the changing nature of the stage. The great speculation possible about the first women actors in English theatre, and the reactions of society to them, underlies the story. Women stepping into women's roles gave an additional touch of realism to the theatre, and some of the effects of that on acting styles is touched on in this play as well, as Elizabeth hits just the right balance of artifice and verisimilitude, and Winifred sees her career collapse because of her attempts to enter into the part.

There are transformations for every character. If someone says something in the beginning of the play, it is reversed by the end, in a subtle structure that seems completely natural. Winifred, dressed in silk, assures Elizabeth that of course it doesn't feel real when you're on stage, you're playing a part - but by the end it's Elizabeth desperately trying to get Winifred to act rather than to feel. Elizabeth starts out completely star-struck by the romance of the theatre, and she becomes a master of its heartless business side. Elizabeth and Winifred start out laughing over the way that male actors play women, but Elizabeth turns to a man to teach her how to walk and speak as a stage woman. Winifred's first success is due not so much, it seems, to her talent, as to the novelty of a woman being on stage, while Elizabeth, coming later, has to work at the craft of acting. Winifred's initial practicality about acting becomes an ideological theory of making it ‘real', while Elizabeth's initial wide-eyed innocence turns to hard-nosed business sense. And even the play's heart, Edward, starts by saying "This company is a family," and ends by leaving Winifred to her fate, saying, "I have to look after myself' - although the last scene belies him. It would have to. Leaving Edward unredeemed would have been a terrible way to end the play.

In an inversion of the play's basic plot element, the legalization of women actors, all the men are played by one actor, Michael Spencer-Davis, who does it with a quite virtuosic skill in changing mannerisms, tone, voice, and even apparent height. I caught myself forgetting that they were all the same actor. This quietly breaks the illusion, playing with the idea of fiction, theatre, and reality - in talking about a time when women added a level of believability to theatre, it is the male character who plays with believability by switching roles, sometimes not quite during the scene changes. Edward Kynaston was known in reality for his ability to play both men and women, sometimes playing characters of both sexes in the same production. Here, he is played by a man who also plays Samuel Pepys, Rochester, and Thomas Otway. And he does it in such a way that you catch him changing wigs, and roles, during the scene changes - a bewigged Samuel Pepys will be sitting at a desk as the lights go down, and as they come up, Kynaston is setting the wig he just took off on a stand and rumpling his own short hair. At one point he even is shoved, protesting, out one door as Thomas Otway, and enters at the other side of the stage as Rochester, while Thomas's voice still pleads from behind the closed door. The fact that I forgot how impossible it was for one actor to be in two places says a lot about Spencer-Davis's acting, and about the stage direction that allowed the illusion. (I also loved the set design, which allowed a raised stage to be both the backstage and the boards, and which was also painted and shaped to give the impression of the weirdly distorted perspective of a 17^th-century painting.)

Spencer-Davis was just one actor, though, in a three-person cast that was astonishing and solid. The two women, played by Kelly Macintosh (Winifred) and Helen Taylor (Elizabeth) were equally impressive, playing all the different shades of acting, shifting from comically bad to slightly artificial but passionately voiced on Taylor's part, with Macintosh subtly shading the change in her acting as she begins to believe that acting should be real, and realistic, and stops trying to project or exaggerate (while still managing to project and exaggerate enough to be heard and seen in the real-life theatre.) Meanwhile, they both managed, as Elizabeth and Winifred, to age and go through the development of an extremely complex relationship. 

A few people, in writing the program notes, said that And All For Love is a play about women's relationships and friendships. It looks at how women can love and respect each other even while using and betraying each other, and at the end of the play all the men but the sexually ambiguous Edward have vanished, died or disappeared, leaving the women in the world they have made. It also seems to be about the friendships of the theatre, which are strange and convoluted. Actors are outsiders, and have to form their own communities and alliances in a world that doesn't easily cross over into the rest of society, it seems to say, and the fun of this play is partly that it lets the audience have a sense of the love that drives people to become those outsiders. The tense, fraught, difficult relationship between Winifred and Elizabeth is emblematic of that: a relationship that is forged by the community of the acting company, and that in a way represents it.

Long absences - and announcements!

I know, I'm a bad blog mommy. I'll try and do better.

I do have some good news though... I've got a show coming up!

 

 

 

George Bowering does not sleep.

I stole these from Darren Werschler on the Facebook group "George Bowering could kick your dad's ass" (yes, it really exists, and has upwards of 55 members) and I thought they were funny. They may be heavily borrowed, nay, even taken whole cloth, from the "Chuck Norris" trope, but that just adds a certain je ne sais quoi.

And yes, reports about the Week That Was are forthcoming. In the meanwhile, read of the Greatness. 

Ahem.

"George Bowering owns the greatest Poker Face of all-time. It helped him win the 1983 World Series of Poker despite him holding just a Joker, a Get out of Jail Free Monopoly card, a 2 of clubs, 7 of spades and a green #4 card from the game Uno.

George Bowering does not sleep. He waits.

George Bowering puts the "laughter" in "manslaughter".

If you spell George Bowering wrong on Google it doesn't say, "Did you mean George Bowering?" It simply replies, "Run while you still have the chance."

On a high school math test, George Bowering put down "Violence" as every one of the answers. He got an A+ on the test because George Bowering solves all his problems with Violence.

George Bowering can do a wheelie on a unicycle.

George Bowering died ten years ago, but the Grim Reaper can't get up the courage to tell him.

Superman owns a pair of George Bowering pajamas.

Once a cobra bit George Bowering's leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died."

Thanks Darren, and don't hunt me down for copy-and-pasting them. 

I had to say this about the last installment of the AB Series...
... I love hearing Monty Reid.

Next Week is a Cornucopia of Goodness

I just found out about this play - through, sigh, Facebook - and I have got to blow off whatever prior commitments I might have had to go see  Death of a Chief at the NAC. Native Earth Performing Arts has taken Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and put a little Native on it. Awesome. Its run starts with a pay-what-you-can preview on Monday, February 18th at the NAC, at 8:00. I'm so there.

This is sampled from the announcement I saw: 

"So what is Death of a Chief?
This original adaptation of Julius Caesar uses Shakespeare’s tragedy of authority, ambition and revenge to explore the nature and abuses of cultural and political leadership in First Nations communities today. Featuring an all Native cast, interweaving Shakespeare’s words with singing, drumming, and Aboriginal cultural imagery, Death of a Chief is a provocative and timely exploration of leadership and dissent."

I'm also going to be going to the Oneness Poetry Showcase on Wednesday at the East Africa Restaurant (great food, incidentally.) From 6:30 at 376 Rideau Street - $7 but if you can't afford it that's cool, pay what you can. Yummy East African food, Toronto's Leviathan doing spoken word, Brazilian rhythm from RommeL, live art from Jeneen Frei Njootli, and tunes from Capital Slam's DJ Bryan Parnell. How can you miss that?

The next day, Thursday the 21st, fellow Frederictonian Fred Doucette will be at the Library and Archives doing a reading for the Writers Festival on his experiences in Sarajevo during the horrific Bosnian conflict, and his battles with post traumatic stress disorder on returning. Fred now works as a support worker for PTSD sufferers. That starts at 7:30 - check out the Writers Festival website for details. 

Friday brings you to the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, for the opening night of If Cows Could Fly, which has been brought to Ottawa by Toronto's Artword Theatre. It'll be running through March 9th. Allan Merovitz wrote and stars in this Jewish-Canadian musical, which blends Yiddish songs, country-and-western ballads, as well as Klezmer and Ottawa Valley fiddle tunes to explore the history of a Jewish-Canadian family from the Ottawa valley. 

A klezmer/country musical about Upper Canada? Count me in.  

Also on Friday, and Saturday, at the Bronson Centre, at 7:30, there's a production of The Vagina Monologues, featuring women from the Ottawa community. The production is in celebration of the 10 year anniversary of V-day, a movement to stop violence against women. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door, and on sale at Venus Envy, the Ottawa Women's Credit Union, and Mother Tongue Books, and the proceeds go to the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa.

And if you're not already on overload (I think I am!) on Saturday the 23rd, Irish storyteller Mike Burns will be spinning his tales at Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities. From 7:30 on, he'll be drawing on the culture and folktales of Ireland to mesmerize and transport his audience. Mike's a fabulous storyteller, and I'm really looking forward to this show. Tickets are $20, available at the door, or call Saint Brigid's at 613-244-7373.  

And of course I'm going to be at the Dusty Owl this coming Sunday, the 17th - we'll be featuring Oni the Haitian Sensation this time around! 5:00 at Swizzles, which is at Queen and Kent, under the green awning.

*phew* That's a busy (and very multicultural) week... 

Station identification

My parents tell me, as do quite a few other members of my family/cheering section, that I should actually have my name visible on this site. So, I've changed the Posted By section at the bottom of each entry, and may change the title of the blog.

Hi, guys!

Looking at People

I stopped in this evening at Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities, to check out the Shepherds of Good Hope's 25th anniversary open house. (The Shepherds got their start, back in 1983, in the basement of this 117-year-old Lowertown church.)

I'd seen the announcement on artengine's mailing list that the event would include an exhibit of photos from Tony Fouhse's series USER, (which was shown at La Petite Mort Gallery last November) and poetry by Crazzy Dave, the "Homeless Poet" - who you may have seen in his spot on the George Street side of the downtown Chapters outlet, with his poems written on found cardboard. So I went down to check it out.

The photos were on display up by the wine and cheese in the sanctuary. I was handed a ticket for a glass of wine at the door and invited in. There was a display of local schools that help the Shepherds, posters of their volunteers lined up along the aisle, and a a sculpture/installation on one wall - the Shepherds of Good Hope logo done in soup cans (I hope pictures will be available: I talked to the volunteer who had built it, who said that some had been taken.)

And I got my glass of wine and went to look at the pictures. Fouhse's shots are dark, blue-washed, and artificially posed, but lovely to look at. Characters (because that's what they looked like) were evocatively framed and constructed - a couple with obscured faces sharing a joint, a man with long hair and his face half hidden by steepled hands, an old man with a white beard and thin arms standing shirtless on the pavement. They were really quite gorgeous, if oddly static. And then, as I was getting to the last of the shots, a man asked me, "What do you think of them?"

"They're cool," I said, and he said, "I think they're awful. And I'll tell you why."

All of the pictures were taken at the corner of Murray and Cumberland, around the corner from Saint Brigid's near Centre 454, a homelessness service centre. This man (I found out later his name was Steve) said, "These people are my people. They're my community. And this is not how they look." He was carrying a camera, and brought out a picture he'd taken of one of the subjects in one of Fouhse's photos - a balletic image of a woman apparently lifting another to her feet. The woman being lifted had short spiky hair, and looked lost, confused, or maybe tragic. "She doesn't look like that," Steve told me. "That despair. He had to work with her for a really long time to get that picture." And he showed me the picture he'd taken - a bubbly-looking, sunlit blonde, grinning in close-up and washed in gold. 

"That guy - he's got all kinds of talent," Steve said. "They're really good photos. But they're not pictures of those people. It's the eyes. Those eyes are all wrong. If they were that full of despair, they'd whack themselves." He told me about some of the people in the pictures, about their lives, a little about his own. "There's always hope, though," he said. "There's hope, and he's not showing that."

From Fouhse's own statement, available near the pictures, I get this:

"I'd make mental notes on the vibe and situations I encountered on the corner. Then I'd set up situations that reflected these. I worked to manifest the look and feel I had in mind for these images. I believe that you can approach a truth by creating a fiction. User ... I don't believe in Objectivity. So here I present pictures that reflect my idea of what goes on on the corner of Murray and Cumberland Streets. My idea of photography. My idea of drug addicts and the people that associate with them. They use. I use."

From one of Crazzy Dave's poems, displayed on cardboard scattered around a cot bed, bag, small dresser and bowl set up at the back of the church:

"Why do you look at me like I'm a creature in a zoo?" 

Hm. 

Empire Builders Rocks

(The picture, incidentally, is from the Ottawa Citizen.) 

Yesterday I got to see the preview show of Empire Builders!

I appreciate a play that has me walking out afterwards feeling as though my mind had been emptied out and rearranged: it’s a sign, usually, that the production managed to create a completely different space from the one I inhabit – and to convince me of its logic in such a way that I didn’t need explanations or exposition, and that I needed to readjust to my usual universe for a few minutes once I was released. That’s what Empire Builders (Third Wall Theatre, at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre until February 16^th) did.

Empire Builders is a collaboration between the French and English theatre communities in Ottawa. It is a decidedly challenging play for both audience and actors. And this production, at least, involves some of the best and most original staging I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s Third Wall’s first production in their new home at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, which still has me impressed as a really genuinely Good Place for the arts. It’s in the studio theatre, a black-box-style space which just begs to be used well, and it is in this show.

It’s hard to say what actually happens in this absurdist comedy. But it is funny, and surprising, and thought-provoking, and entertaining, and bizarre. The family in the play – a father and mother, their daughter, and a maid – are driven further and further up a staircase in a house by a mysterious noise. Every time they move up, they lose possessions and the space gets smaller, but the parents insist that everything is fine and refuse to believe that things were ever different. The only one who seems to remember anything is their daughter Zenobia, who is also the only one who will acknowledge the strange creature that is in the space with them and that the others continually kick and slap and beat without admitting its existence. It’s a play about avoiding the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room; it’s also a play about people who would rather live in fantasy than reality, who don’t question their situation, and who collectively forget what it is inconvenient to remember. It rings interestingly true in this era, even though it was written in the late 1950s.

In a black box you have no curtains, and no definite stage. This could be a problem for the staging – or it could be the point.  In this show, the audience is split into two banks of seats, facing each other across the stage space – marked out by a long white floor, hanging window frames that suggest high narrow walls, a vertiginous wall on one side covered in bits of flotsam, jetsam, and furniture nailed to it, and a curtained dormer window at the other side with stairs rising through it into nowhere. As we went in, the actors were already on stage, frozen in a tableau focused on a shrouded mummylike figure holding a music box. The costumes, in all-white costumes with faces painted slightly white and hair dusted white, are your first clue that verisimilitude is not exactly the point here, and the situation the characters are in – driven further and further up the stairs of a shrinking house while attempting to deny that anything at all is wrong – bears that out.

The cluttered stage, full of steamer trunks and baskets and suitcases, means that there’s almost always something you can’t quite see from whatever your position is in the audience, and that adds to the sense of claustrophobia, especially as the space in which the characters can act begins to shrink, eventually sliced down to one trunk at the end of the stage, up against the window. It also allows for some nice bits of blocking, allowing one character to appear (between two blocking trunks) to viciously beat another with a frying pan. (I was sitting on the end, so I could see the actual action, but most of the audience wouldn’t have been able to.) The innovative staging also benefits from some nicely timed, unflashy lighting and sound design, which adds to the mood, the scene, and the humour, without being obtrusive.

The translation must be great. I haven’t read the original French script, but this English version pops, and for a play that’s mostly about words – and about how slippery they are, and how you can use them to hide from reality – and that’s also fifty years old, that’s an achievement. For all that and a translation, that’s even more astonishing. Julian Doucet, as the Father, has a particularly virtuosic part. His comedy depends on timing and delivery, and massive flights of verbal fancy, and he did a marvelous job of it, with only a few stumbles, well surfed over, and understandable when he was the last person left speaking after an hour and a half’s worth of play.

The really outstanding thing about the acting in this show is the physicality of it. The characters go from slow, barely noticeable balletic movements to violence and brutality, to limp doll-like passivity; climb in and out and on top of huge steamer chests; and play to every angle of the room at once, entailing a lot of movement. Not to mention that in an impossible universe, they act believably, as well, which is difficult. You can see implicit motivations and thoughts in these characters as they negotiate their bizarre situation. I also have to be impressed by Riley Stewart, as the Neighbour, who was right behind me and had me convinced for a while there (and you’ll know what I mean when you see the show.) Matt Miwa, as the Schmurtz, the creature that is beaten and ignored and that moves around bringing menace to the stage, was also fascinating – working with no facial features or words, and having only his motions to convey threat, pain, or a sort of lurking presence. When he does remove the wrappings around his face, his expression evokes a whole series of silent-movie inhuman monsters, and his final confrontation with the father has a few of those echoes as well.

In some ways, Empire Builders talks about the world we’re living in now in the same language that dreams might use. It explains nothing. It creates its own world that seems, like the characters’ logic, to make sense only as long as you let it, as long as you go along with the premise that things do in fact make sense. It’s full of wonderful moments of comedy and delight and surreality, but most of all it not only makes you leave the theatre thinking, but it manages in the meanwhile to be eminently watchable. Go see it. You owe it to your eyes.

Ah, publication...

Okay, so it's a little piece. But it's awfully nice to see my name up in electrons (at Linchpin.ca.). And hey, Free Will's new CD (The House of Words) does, in fact, rock the proverbial casbah. Check him out at his Myspace page. He's doing such cool stuff.

Want to listen to more words and human voice sounds? Go see Ritallin at the Dusty Owl at 5:00 on Sunday, and then you've got time to get over to the Mercury Lounge for the AB Series at 8:00, featuring Matthew Timmons and j.s. makkos.