Wear the red dress (or, things I’ve learned on my travels)

Jes-Sica meets again!

After almost a month on the road, I’ve arrived home in Ottawa today: I’m glad to be back to see friends and attend poetry shows. But I know full well that the festival-party time is over, and I have to get cracking on writing a full first-draft of this thesis. I have the resources; now it’s just a matter of smashing it all together in a coherent and poetically academic fashion.

Anyway, I thought I should complete this travel diary with a little sum-up of things that I have realized / discovered / learned on this trip.

• When purchasing tickets for the Skytrain in Vancouver, you should only buy one ticket at a time from the machine: I thought I could buy a whole bunch, and it turns out I could only use them (all eight of them) within the allotted transfer time. Stupid move.
• My laptop-camera bag is one of the smartest purchases I’ve ever made. It made my long walks to the theatres thoroughly tolerable.
• Always hang out in the theatre bar after the show: you are more likely to meet awesome people.
• When in doubt, go to the art gallery. I was pleasantly surprised by Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, which is not only an art gallery, but also a historical, cultural, and mineral museum all rolled into one. I spent a pleasant and peaceful couple of hours gazing at ammolite…
• Part of being a good researcher means listening out for gossip, and then confirming it afterward.
• People can take offense to even the most well-meaning blog entries: take their tirades to heart, but don’t take them too personally.
• Always accept rides from playwrights.
• People with degrees in philosophy make the best puppeteers, and the best poets…
• Make friends with bloggers: they are your best tour guides, discussion sparkers, and friends.
• Don’t try to out-drink an Edmonton girl: you will lose, and get sent home early in a cab.
• Don’t wear a dry-clean-only suit to shows with farm animals in the title.
• The Havana restaurant in Vancouver has a tiny little theatre in the back. If you’re quiet, you can sneak in for a peak without anyone seeing you!
• I’ve grown rather fond of adorable lesbian romantic comedies.
• My allergies to cats and dogs have decreased significantly. Here’s hoping I can go horse riding this summer!
• The best celebrities are the ones who treat you as equals.
• Experimental theatre is best enjoyed when you think of it neither as experimental, nor as theatre (in the conventional sense).
• Wear the red dress.
• Never turn down an invitation to watch two episodes of Frasier while munching on snack food just before midnight.
• Don’t laugh at the airport security guard when she asks you to remove your boots for inspection.
• Keep your laptop clock tuned to Ottawa time: it helps stay in touch with friends.

Visiting with Electric Company Theatre

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my main reasons for visiting Vancouver this month – aside from attending shows at the wonderful PuSh Festival – was to dig through some archives belonging to Electric Company Theatre. Part of my research entails analyzing archival videos of performances over a number of years. My subject of choice is the company’s maiden production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla. The show has changed drastically over the years, and it is my aim to find out why these changes were made and what it says about the process of developing theatre in Canada. Smart stuff like that.

This past October, Electric Company Theatre — joined by Boca Del Lupo, neworld theatre, and Rumble Productions — moved into a brand new space on William Street, near Commercial Drive. Each company has its own office space, and they share a large rehearsal space and lounge area. It is a wonderfully spacious building. In fact, it probably used to be… well, a garment manufacturing industry (i.e. a sweat shop). When the companies first arrived, they saw all these long tables with sewing machines and lamps hanging very low above these instruments. And now it’s a theatre space: I can’t think of a more wonderful transition.

The rent for the space is $6000 a month, split between the four companies. They have had to do a lot of construction to fix the place up, but it’s well on its way to becoming a decent performance space. I wonder, are there any similar (and available) buildings in Ottawa, and would it be useful for a number of companies to join together for a like cause? The benefits, I think, are obvious; and the whole set-up really inspires a sense of community.

Here are some more pictures…

The previous ECT office: much smaller. Photo credit: Nathan Medd.

The new ECT office!

Working on the main space. Photo credit: Nathan Medd

Rehearsing for No Exit. Photo credit: Nathan Medd

Kamp: a show my brother would love

When my brother was much younger, he would make model buildings out of paper and tape. They would be replicas of castles, of palaces (including a phenomenal one of Versailles), and other structures of note. He would also create little figurines to inhabit the space, perhaps imagining how they interacted once upon a time.

I think he would have loved this production of Kamp (from company Hotel Modern, the Netherlands) at the PuSh Festival. Just look at this set:

Kamp

According to a recent article on the show, there are 3500 hand-made clay figurines used in the performance. They are arranged, re-arranged, and animated by three performers; these mute performers are always visible and always present, though not the focus of the piece. The focus is on the buildings and the figurines that are captured by a video camera and displayed in real time on the white screen backdrop. The audience catches glimpses of the gas chambers, the sleeping areas, a nazi drinking party, the hard labour forced upon the prisoners, and one particularly wrenching scene in which a sadistic soldier beats one victim to death with a shovel.

It is difficult for me to understand the sheer magnitude of the Holocaust and its destruction; statistics and numbers mean very little to me, and that is often all we are given in history books. The most striking thing about this visual display was actually seeing these numbers, these statistics come to life: row upon row of figurines, their swollen faces staring out from the screen, the camera slowly and carefully capturing every detail; dozens of figures piled into the showers; dozens of bodies thrown into a pit. It hits you hard.

The performance is only one hour long. But the audience on Thursday evening stay for yet another hour to attend the talk-back. Some audience members had actually been to Auschwitz and said they found this performance much more personal and affecting.

One particularly interesting question was asked: how far can you push an audience? At what point does the horror and destruction become too much to bear? I’m thinking specifically of the scene with the shovel; it almost made me ill. Is this something we should strive for in dramatic theatre, or is it just too much?

Here are a couple more close-up photos:

Kamp

Kamp