Doubt is good -not just the play, but the concept. But the play proves the concept, and vice-versa. Doubt matters. It’s important. Some would say it’s vital.
The play is currently being presented by the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto. My video interview, in which I chat with director Marti Maraden and star Seana McKenna, is now up.
I’ve been thinking a lot about communication lately -the ways we use it (or don’t use it) and the importance it has to some of us, particularly those in the arts. Communication is what every artist attempts through a chosen medium. Whether it’s dance, film, music, writing or acting, every creative act is an attempt to communicate something to someone else. Within that chosen form of communication is a myriad of ideas and influences, not all of them original -some are sifted through the rough grains of hard-won experience, others are left unfiltered for consideration and conversation. When it comes to presenting a work of art, who can really say what is wholly original?
The question becomes all the more cloudy in the world of words, where research and source material often become intimately intertwined with the writer’s own opinions, approach, and sometimes, life work. History is fraught with examples of works that, while considered utter genius, are suspect in their originality at least, and acts of plagiarism at worst. Think of playwrights like Shakespeare, whose works were frequently based on other (popular) tales floating around, or the Bible, a collection of tales written and re-written through the centuries to suit the age and ruling classes.
Anton Piatigorsky tackles the huge questions swirling around authorship, originality, voice and its relationship to identity, and what makes art … well, art, in his play Eternal Hydra, now on in Toronto at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. This Crow’s Theatre production brings together the same acting/directing team from last spring, when the work was workshopped before an audience for a week. Originally starting out life as a one-act play at Stratford’s Studio Theatre, the work has been greatly expanded and explores larger notions of historical detail, authenticity, and what it means to really “create.” He uses the image of the mythical hydra -the scary monster Hercules fought with the multiple heads -as a metaphor for the writing process itself. Just when characters -and audience, in fact -think they’ve figured out what links writer Gordias Carbuncle’s work to past sources, another connection presents itself that renders theories incomplete. Throw in notions around race, gender, and religion, and you have one hell of a heady night of theatre.
That doesn’t mean Eternal Hydra is cold, however. It’s heady, but it’s also full of heart. Cast members Karen Robinson, Liisa Repo-Martell, Sam Malkin, and David Ferry, as the self-hating maybe-genius Gordias, all give fully-fleshed out performances that make you feel something beyond intellectual wonder. Piatigorsky’s piece is Stoppard-esque, no question, but it’s also fascinating for its mix of the epic and the intimate; the scenes between Robinson, as impoverished black writer Selma Thomas, or Repo-Martell, as the smitten researcher Vivian Ezra, and Ferry’s Carbuncle, are moving, enlightening, disturbing and challenging. Throw in some evocative lighting, where characters frequently move in and out of shadow, as well as multiple plotlines, where characters fall through time, and frequently blur lines between eras and realities, and Piatigorsky’s work is suddenly about a whole lot more than historical appropriation. It’s about life, art, and yes, communication -how we do it, and more importantly, why we do it.
Artists get communication: we’re just not sure if what we’ve produced is actually ours at the end of the day, or simply another screaming head. I mean really, there’s so many of those around already, competing for our attention, demanding time, energy resources, or sometimes, just perhaps, whispering something incredible.
Yesterday I was out all day doing video shoots for upcoming theatrical productions in Toronto. One of the interviews revolved around a soon-to-open Soulpepper production of Joe Orton’s satirical play Loot.
What I’ve always found so interesting about Orton is the way his work has aged since he wrote it; some of his lines are still as stinging and nasty as ever, while other stuff -dialogue, ideas, concepts -really aren’t so shocking in the twenty-first century. In a contemporary sense, Orton’s play, which features two burglars who try to hide a corpse (among other farcical elements), doesn’t seem all that surprising or shocking. Indignities to a human body? Whatever. Some might be outraged, but it doesn’t last. Go to any number of weird news sites; they’re not hard to find. Some of the stories might be kind of icky (for instance, anything involving corpses tends to provoke a sour face) but the ease with which to find such oddities has made our collective sense of outrage over such a thing much less pronounced.
Still, there is something to director Jim Warren‘s comment that Orton was “an anarchist” -and it wasn’t just the fact Orton and partner Kenneth Halliwell had a predilection for defacing library books. Orton may have been writing in an England that was brutally classist and deeply homophobic, but in this age of smugness about our perceived permissiveness and laissez-faire-anything-goes attitudes, there’s a real smack of hypocrisy and meanness. Carry Orton’s ideas through on sexuality, and apply them to, say, older people (“Grandparents have sex lives? Eww! Disgusting! Gross!“), and you still find the same boring close-mindedness as existed in 1960s England. Viewed this way, Orton is more fresh, daring, and possibly anarchist than ever.
There’s something really, really cool about Madonna unabashedly dancing with herself, telling her man (in her head, through her hips), “Seriously dude, this isn’t on.” It has resonance for me, and I would imagine, for many women.
And I think Michelle Obama is absolutely correct. I hope we get a Canadian politician in power making the same statement soon.
“That is my very favourite Canadian play.”
These words were spoken by a friend Friday night as we came out of I, Claudia, Kristen Thomson‘s one-woman tour-de-force, now on at the Young Centre in Toronto.
The work is a mix of mask, mime, comedy, tragedy, and Thomson’s biography. It concerns the experience of one Claudia, who is, she tells us, “twelve-and-three-quarters” and struggling with her parents’ divorce. She hides in her school’s basement, where she makes up a fantastical world of her own devising, sharing her worries, torments, and passing thoughts with us (not to mention her ill-fated science project). Thomson plays Claudia with a big-cheeked mask, red beret, and uniform kilt; her body language is awkward and gawky, but she imbues Claudia with a bright, shining light of hope and playfulness. Thomson also takes on the roles of the school’s “Bolgonian” caretaker, Claudia’s paternal grandfather, and Tina, Claudia’s new stepmom. Each is given their own unique masque -the grandfather’s, long and wizened, the stepmom’s tight and over-make-up’d. Again, Thomson fully inhabits each of the characters physically, giving each their own unique life.
Developed with Chris Abraham of the lauded Crow’s Theatre and first performed in 2001, the work is breathtaking in its emotional scope and creative presentation. With a small gesture -a turn of the head, a shrug of the shoulder -Thomson suggests a world of hurt, loss, and yes, hope within the lives of the characters she portrays. We’re never in doubt about the fact that Thomson is taking us on a purposely-theatrical journey, changing between scenes and bopping to musical interludes, showing the funny, strange, sad lives of a diverse group of people and the common threads of humanity that bind them. The intimate, twisted relationships between children and parents are deftly, delicately explored, with great care and grace. You get the feeling when Thomson’s janitor refers to a son who lives in the United States, then quickly adds, “we won’t talk about that…” that there’s a mountain of hurt there that doesn’t require explanation.
Since the work is based on real events in Thomson’s past, I was curious to see how Claudia might represent her own hurt little girl within; it’s a personal theme I found myself relating to, on several deep levels, more than once through the evening. As a child of divorce myself, the feelings of abandonment, rage, loss, and confusion were easily recognizable. To publicly share one’s hurt over such events is incredible; to translate that into a piece of theatre, and in so doing, allow for a possible healing, is miraculous.
I, Claudia might just be my own favourite Canadian work too.
Thanks to Twitter, I came across a wonderful op-ed piece in the Amherst Bulletin about the importance of arts funding. There’s certainly been no shortage of wonderful news relating to the arts this week: the appointment of Rocco Landesman to head up the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House arts evening, and even, if you can believe, the Seattle Opera advertising their position for a young person to see and report on the Wagner Ring cycle they’ll be producing in August.
But then there’s the bad news: in Canada, several important arts institutions are facing funding shortfalls. With the wonderful chaos of June approaching (Luminato, NXNE, the Toronto Jazz Festival, Pride), the issue of cultural relevance is that much more pungent. There’s also the depressing fact that Canada’s art galleries and museums are falling apart , meaning that many younger people -as well as visitors from overseas or across the border -may never be able to see the incredible cultural legacy of this country.
Would any of this happen if there was a real balance of arts and academia in childhood? I was lucky to have been educated in the arts outside of school; going to operas, symphonies, museums and galleries was plus normale for me growing up. But not every kid was blessed with an arts-loving mother. And so, it falls to schools to often provide what kids can’t or don’t get at home. That usually includes everything from proper nutrition to social interaction to basic manners.
What irks me is that whenever schools are facing funding shortfalls, the first thing to go is always, inevitably, arts programs. Yup! They’re frilly! Arrgh. I used to make a face and wonder why physical education wasn’t cut instead (spoken by a true non-athlete), but I realized, in starting to appreciate the cultural place sport has in society, and the benefits of movement, that phys-ed has every right to be taken as seriously as arts-ed. And vice-versa.
To quote Mindy Domb, in the Amherst Bulletin:
Art and music teach our children how to think critically, take risks, make and correct mistakes, “fail,” and recoup. They give our children a frame of reference for understanding not only our world, but also offer an appreciation and understanding of the different perspectives, approaches and ways of communicating each of us brings to the human endeavor… Cutting physical education while the public health community urges additional opportunities for physical activity for children seems regressive and backwards. Physical education might look like an easy mark, a target that can be tapped for funding without ill effects. This, however, dismisses the needs of our kids to be active and to learn from play. It also ignores the call of the public health community to provide more physical education for young children, not less.
These times we’re in seem like the perfect opportunity to start making investments, not pulling away in fear. The investment in a lifetime of good health and positive relationships seems like a good one.
Related: If you haven’t read Christopher Knight’s take on Landesman’s appointment to the National Endowment for the arts, you really should. It’s excellent.
Jenny Holzer is at the Whitney. But only until May 31st. Eeek.
Little did I realize, all those years ago as a teenager I was witnessing a wonderous marriage between high art and pop culture courtesy of Jenny Holzer and a little tour called ZOO-TV. There I stood, pie-eyed and mute and entirely overwhelmed, as thunderous drums and crashing guitar lines rumbled through my consciousness, and my eyes attempted to absorb messages like CONTRADICTION IS BALANCE and EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG and ART IS MANIPULATION and (still my favourite) TASTE IS THE ENEMY OF ART. I don’t recall if it was by accident or design that I discovered Holzer’s work that very year, but it was then I started keeping journals of my own observed Truisms -a strange kind of poetic observation that was, depending on my mood, one-part snide to two-parts smirk, or some combination therein.
Years later, I wasn’t a bit surprised when Holzer’s work was chosen to be displayed at the site of the World Trade Center. Looking over the exhibition now on, she seems more relevant than ever.
That’s it. I need to go to New York. Soon.
The Museum of Modern Art is one of my very-favourite places in the world. You can wander there for hours, and every corner has something that turns your thinking upside down, and makes you look at the world, and your place in it, in a whole new, refreshing light. It currently has two exhibits I want to see.
First, The Pictures Generation, featuring the work of Cindy Sherman, among others. Sherman’s a big favourite of mine. So irreverent, funny, and unabashedly female.
Second, Tangled Alphabets. I love writing. I love art. I love art about writing. I’ve been staring at Mira Schendel‘s work all week now and her beautiful collection of letters are spelling out something like: C-o-m-e h-e-r-e. N-O-W.
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