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. 

Happy Burns Night!

Address To a Haggis 

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o' need,
While thro' your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dicht,
An' cut you up wi' ready slicht,
Trenching your gushing entrails bricht,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sicht,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an' strive:
Deil tak the hindmaist! on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve,
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
"Bethankit" hums.

Is there that o're his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi' perfect scunner,
Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him ower his trash,
As feckless as a wither'd rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro' bloody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his wallie nieve a blade,
He'll mak it whistle;
An' legs an' arms, an' heads will sned,
Like taps o' thristle.

Ye Pow'rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o' fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinkin ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer,
Gie her a haggis!

A New World! A World of Robots!
Stop me if you've heard this before: Humanity created a race of superhuman machines to be its servants. They rebelled. They look just like us. There are many copies. And they, um, have a plan. Mostly mindless drones led by a select few who possess free will, intelligence, and passion, they declare an extermination war on humanity - just as humanity is celebrating the cessation of hostilities.

But: they can't reproduce on their own, so they're dependent on their ‘fathers,' humanity, to perpetuate life. They're even starting to develop souls (through the intervention of a stammering scientist driven to inadvertently cause the destruction of the human race because of a woman.) Eventually, they become indistinguishable from humans, developing emotions - fear of death, appreciation of beauty, love - and it looks like they will become humanity's successors, once the last human lives have flickered out.

Hm. This sounds oddly familiar... Oh, right: it's the basic plot of R.U.R.

(Right, and there was that TV series with Tricia Helfer in it, too.)

R.U.R. (Rossom's Universal Robots) is one of the few plays that is probably known by name to more science fiction geeks than any other demographic, simply for the fact that it is the origin of the word ‘robot.' Somewhere in the back of a lot of Asimov fans' minds is the factoid that in Czech, ‘robota' means ‘forced labour,' and that Karel Capek, a Czech playwright "way back then"  - "way back then" being 1921 - coined the word ‘robot' and popularized it to the world.

This particular production of R.U.R. is by Sock'n'Buskin Theatre Company, based at Carleton University, and directed by Don Fex. It's playing last weekend and next, at Kailash Mital Theatre (in Southam Hall, I will add to save you the wandering around Carleton's fairly labyrinthine campus.) I stumbled across it by accident, whether because of sparse advertising on the part of the company or the general flying-under-the-radar of Sock'n'Buskin. This is a shame, really - they should be more visible. Small amateur Ottawa theatre companies tend to fall under the vast shadow of the National Arts Centre and the GCTC. Not fair.

Not that this was a flawless show or anything. But it was fun, and there were far too few people in the audience to return the kind of energy that some of the actors on stage were putting out. Zachary Counsil, in particular, who I last saw taking large, enjoyable, juicy bites out of the part of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, was producing lovely comic turns and flourishes in the first act as Harry Domin, the owner and director of the robot factory, and you wanted to laugh a little louder to let him know it was working, watch a little harder to generate that audience energy return.

I have to admit, while I respect the influence this play has had on speculative fiction (I spotted prefigurations of Blade Runner and the Terminator movies, of Battlestar Galactica, naturally, and Star Trek's technobabble, in particular) - it probably could have been about an hour shorter. I don't know about the conventions of 1920's Czech drama, but after the first act, which was entertaining enough, the script really starts to drag. Maybe in the early stages of speculative fiction people weren't expected to pick up on a point as easily, meaning the playwrights felt they had to have four long, apostrophizing soliloquies on the same subject? I was reminded of the repetition, over and over again in Fritz Lang's contemporary film Metropolis, of the line, "Between the Head and the Hands, must be the Heart!" Okay, okay, Karel, we get the point, people shouldn't have messed with nature and made robots. Can we have the apocalypse now?

We're in the land of didactic stories, so not much makes sense in this script. Helena Glory (in the translation, at least) appears on the island where they make ‘robots;' artificial people created out of some kind of cloning process. She comes with the intention of inciting the robots to rebel against their situation, but within the first act, inexplicably, she marries Harry Domin, the director of the factory. The other five department heads (who were entertainingly characterized by Keith Cressy, Cody Doble, Troy Ireland, Glenn Simmons, and Allan Meltzer) all simultaneously fall in love with her as well. Jump ahead ten years, and add a robot-fuelled world war that Helena has apparently been kept totally ignorant of. For ten years. Just as the men are staring to celebrate the end of the conflict and the return of progress, they discover that the robots have issued an extermination order on mankind. The robots surround the factory. The humans set up an electrified fence and decide to buy their freedom with the formula for creating new robots. Unfortunately, Helena has just burned it in a badly-thought-out attempt to stop the creation of robots and put an end to the war that was already over anyway. After one highly symbolic death - the accountant tries to buy their way out and dies on the electric fence with billions of dollars lying on his chest - the robots attack and kill everyone but the head of construction (they consider him a robot because he works with his hands.) They keep him in the factory and try to force him to come up with the formula, but as he's a bricklayer, his grasp of biochemistry is pretty tenuous. (There are definite shades of Roy Batty from Blade Runner in this scene, and it's possible that the director chose Kayla Meyer, in all her tall, blond, rangy, angry glory, to play Radius, one of the robot commanders, because she would evoke Rutger Hauer. Which she did with aplomb - I was waiting for her to say, "I want more life, fucker.") Finally he discovers that a robot copy of Helena and another robot named Primus appear to have fallen in love. He sends them off (with quotations from Genesis,) and expires on stage (with quotations from the Nunc Dimittis,) clutching a sterile flower.

I would love to know (it's the sort of thing that it would have been great to have in the program) whether this was the original translation done in London in about 1923. It didn't sound as dated as I might have expected. And the actors delivered it quite comfortably, when they didn't have flights of philosophy to contend with: the script is full of speeches which sound as though the playwright has borrowed the character's body for a moment to point out - again, and in flowery language - the moral lesson. Most of them managed as well as they could with this stuff, awkward and formal as it is, and unnatural by most modern standards. Again, maybe it's the style of the play - it is an odd, expressionist play - or maybe it's the problem of translating from Czech.

Counsil, in particular, as Domin, was the best thing about the show - his glee and pompousness and slight unhingedness were, above all, fun, and he's got an expressive style that gives you a look at what the character's thinking. He's also quite good at comic timing. It's unfortunate that he was playing against a Helena (Sophia Sahota) who seemed essentially to be a one-note actor (that note being ‘shrill.') To be fair, Helena seems to be a one-note character, and her part is irritatingly repetitive, but when a British-raised actor can make a British accent sound fake, there's something weird going on. I was also struck by the fact that when Sahota came back, as a robot version of herself, in the final act, her acting was much more natural and easy, making me wonder if it was a direction call that made her so stiff in the previous acts, or if she just wasn't comfortable in the part. It's too bad, because I wanted to see more of Helena's motivations, since we see the story through her eyes for the most part - the men bustle around for most of the play making veiled references to things they refuse to explain to her, leaving both Helena and the audience in the dark.

The sluggishness of the plot was leavened in this production by comedy, which was, for the most part, well done. The other five men - the ‘directors' - were cast as character types - eccentric genius types for the most part - and played well off each other and around each other. Their blocking, particularly in the last siege scene, worked quite well, and they all managed a quick character sketch of their parts in their first scene. In particular, I liked Keith Cressy's stammer and excitability, and Glenn Simmens's transformation from nerdy biochemist to whisky-infused stagger. Troy Ireland, playing Fabry the Texan (who so closely resembled Quincey Morris from Dracula that he could have been lifted whole cloth from one story to the other) may have relied a little too much in hands-on-hips belt-hitching and omnipresent cowboy hat, but was having fun, and was fun to watch, nonetheless. I was a little put off by Amanda Klaman playing "Nana" - she got a few laughs but I thought that occasionally her clowning only managed to distract from the lines other characters were speaking. The character is a little bizarre - maybe she would make more sense in Czech, but all she could be in this interpretation was a comic, rosary-clutching - and, for some reason, British-accented - spouter of doom.

But it's an ambitious script to tackle - stilted and strange, and I get the feeling Czech is difficult to translate naturally into English. It's packed with repetitive lines and implausible speeches, with a lot of unlikely descriptions of events taking place offstage. ("Look, he's gesturing toward us! What's he saying? I think he must be trying to bargain with the robots! Oh, no, he's falling toward the electric fence! The fool!") Practically all the violence takes place in description, although there was one rather unsettling vivisection scene that took place behind a scrim, only partially visible.

And it's also difficult to imagine what the 1920's concept of a ‘robot' would be - what the audience's and actors' assumptions and expectations would be - when we've had nearly ninety years to come up with the Three Laws, droids, Terminators, and Cylons. Sci-fi, at the time, barely existed yet, and was bundled together with metaphor, fantasy, ‘romance' and a host of other developing types of speculative fiction, and yes, it got preachy, and yes, since then we, as the audience, have gotten more accustomed to figuring out what the metaphor's telling us (and less insistent that the strange fiction we're being told have an explicit lesson in the first place.)

So in places, R.U.R. does seem to drag on in uncalled-for soliloquies and overwrought language. But in other places, it still has sparkle, particularly in its comic moments, in the way the men discuss the whole problem of the robot rebellion in ellipsis, around Helena and the audience, leaving us to infer, and in the development of the besieged characters in the factory. And for a science fiction fan like me, it's also a landmark: one of the only, if not the only, science fiction play to actually succeed - as, in its way, it does - as science fiction. Impressive, after 87 years.