Image courtesy Swallow-a-Bicycled Theatre

This High Performance Rodeo, I made it to one non-Lunchbox (Lunchbox is my employer – I’m their marketing manager) rodeo event today! It was Swallow-a-Bicycle’s Death of the Freak Show, which is part of their Site Specific Spectacular series. It was in the EPCOR Centre, and the show was basically split around the building. It consisted of sort of skits throughout the building, and the audience was variably part of the conceit as an audience, and not. This is going to get formal though.

Firstly, some non-formal impressions. Overall, I was entertained, and the story was engaging, even though I felt a bit confrontational with the story to begin with. I find I do feel confrontational with theatre that I am very up close to at first, maybe because I’m physically a part of the story, so if there’s a confrontational situation going on, I feel like I am ‘against’ the characters. And since storytelling normally involves a confrontation, that is basically always a problem. I saw Freak Show last year, the sex-themed one, which was probably not a good choice, it ended up being really awkward. And I feel awkward often enough that it’s not a transgressive theatre experience. This year was not primarily sex-themed which decreased the awkward factor a lot.

On to my formal comments. My main thought about the show was that the fourth wall was still totally there. I think the easiest, broadest comparison to the format of Death of the Freak Show is that it follows the format of a haunted house. And like a haunted house, sometimes you are there, there’s an audience acknowledged in the scene, and sometimes not; you’re able to observe, but like a normal play, there is no audience in the context of the story. This presented a real problem for me because it made it still very much a theatre-audience experience. I never was able to either be myself within the context of the play, or be a real part of the play, or not be really, really aware the theatre is happening. Basically, the fourth wall was really still there, even when actors were directly interacting with you, which happened maybe once. And apparently, when the fourth wall is six inches from you, it is really, really obvious.

I was comparing this experience to performance art, which I think could be a really useful reference point. The nice thing about performance art is you aren’t sandwiched in several realities you have to keep track of. In the site specific spectacular, there’s the reality in which you are you, the reality of the show when you aren’t there, and the reality of the show when you are there as an audience, in which you take on several roles (freak show attendee and medical student, for example). I found that pretty distracting, because instead of making the theatre part of life, it just collapsed the distance. Since in performance art, your role is an artgoer seeing some performance art, you still have all of your personal assumptions to be transgressed, but there’s no cognitive dissonance between the artist, who is playing a specific role but is still themselves, and you, who are essentially doing the same thing. I would be really interested to see site-specific, interactive theatre where it’s more integrated into your actual reality and you don’t have this odd separation from people. Where the roles the actors are playing are more integrated with who they are and where everyone is. I think it would be a lot easier to get lost in it.

And that’s really the key thing I found. I could not get lost in it. I can get lost in performance art, and I can get lost in conventional theatre, and I am sure it would be possible for me to get lost in interactive / site-specific /  theatre that is closer to a story that really blurs the boundaries between life and art and gets you in it, but the experience at the site-specific-spectacular then becomes weirdly confrontational.

Sean Caulfield and Royden Mills. Source: The New Gallery

Full disclosure: I’m on the board of The New Gallery

Separation Point opened a little while ago at The New Gallery. It’s the work of Sean Caulfied and Royden Mills, and builds on previous work they’ve collarated on before, some of which was shown in the Perceptions of Promise exhibition at the Glenbow last year.

I really like art along this line, which is dealing with scientific topics – or rather, scientific epistemology, so I liked seeing the work at the Glenbow and I’m glad to see this work as well (different works but they’re in the same vein). The works are Caulfied’s arcane biological drawings of fictional flora and fauna, and Mills’ arcane sculptures that become the lab equipment used to study the drawings. I like the contrast between the delicacy of the drawings and the potentially brutal quality of the sculpture –  it’s the sort of lab equipment where you might be scared about what it could do to you.

I do find it interesting that the equipment is studying the drawings – the drawings aren’t the result of scientific inquiry, they are the subject of it, as if they are the animals and plants they depict.

Check the show out!

The sessions I attended were: Keynote by Ben Cameron, 500 000+ Budget Roundtable, the afternoon plenary session, the “Arts Marketing Collab-lab”, a panel discussion on talking about the value of art, and closing remarks. And I made a stop at the We Should Know Each Other lounge at the Legion. Which was awesome cause I have never been to the legion before.

One of the things that I got out of it was that it was a way for CADA to ask us what we need them to do that’s not.give us more money, and based on the roundtable in the morning and the Arts Marketing Collab-Lab. I think those things could be very helpful, because CADA, I think, could help arts orgs in the city work together much more effectively. They have our contact information and the “in” to get us to help each other that I think cold calls between us – or germinating conversations. AND Just recently I did get an email from CADA setting up an Arts Marketing Network meeting – so if you’re in arts marketing, make sure you come. There’s also an Artist Netowork meeting which I hope I can make it too.

I think things like this are potentially great for building community, and possibly bypassing any cliqueyness in the various communities, but it’s really important that we as a community give it a fair shake.

Jasmine Antonick of Beakerhead

I am really excited for Beakerhead. I love projects that bring arts and science together; in the past few years I’ve become more and more interested in science as another way (like the arts) to have my mind blown. Now I just need a project! Engineers, let me know if you have room for an artist.

Arts Factory and King Edward School

Reid Henry from CADA and Stephen Schroeder from Calgary Arts Factory spoke on the King Edward School project and Arts Factory. Both are projects to create more arts space, both exhibition, workspace and workshops. I am very excited because there’s such a lack of workshop space in Calgary, and I really miss having a shop. I’m also excited about the opportunity for skill-sharing between arts disciplines in Calgary and the idea of a materials bank in the Arts Factory.

Dr Paul Fedak

I love learning about totally on the edge medicine. It’s so fascinating! I hear about a lot of this sort of thing (including HeLa) via the amazing Radiolab, which if you don’t listen to, do.  I had seen Anthony Atala’s TEDMED 2009 talk on the subject of regenerative medicine, and it’s just absolutely mindboggling, so it was realy exciting to see a Calgarian talk about the work he’d doing in the feel.

All in all a really good PechaKucha.

Ghost River Theatre’s Reverie was all that it promised to be in the first act. The music was amazing throughout; I’d totally get the album. And the style of the production worked well with the minimal storytelling during the first act. The concept was fully explored and there was the right amount of exposition. You knew what was going on but you weren’t having your hand held. it really brought the seriousness of what’s gone down in the middle east home; it made it something that could happen here and was very poignant given the recent election and how that made me, at least, feel. The special projection equipment totally shone in how they used it to create effects like an elevator ride and a night out drinking in the city. I also loved the way it was totally obvious that the show was set in a contemporary Canadian city but you were left to decide which one. The acting was great, particularly by

Unfortunately, the second act didn’t come together as successfully. It felt like a lot if exposition rather than exploration of the ideas. The structure of what did happen in the second act, story-wise, was kind of confusing. However, I’m so not a fan of dystopian fiction of almost any kind (I had to read Brave New World in University and almost gouged out my eyes in frustration), so I am pretty biased.

The technical awesomeness – a huge part of the choreography was how everything worked with video projections on moving screens – was absolutely mindblowing and wonderfully integrated into the show. And the music was absolute fabulous. I hope you caught Reverie!

USB Acorn by Laura Moore. Photo credit LauraMoore.ca.

Today I went to an artist talk by Laura Moore at Stride about her show, Kernel Memory. It features marble acorns (and a pine cone) that have been scaled up massively and have male USB ports on their caps (and the top of the pinecone).

It was an interesting artist talk. She started by discussing a previous work where she carved marble electrical components - capacitors, resistors – and set them in the floor on rebar wires. She had them in groups of a few, and said that it was really interesting how people only would look at sets that were of like 3 — they wouldn’t “join” a pair. For me this was one of the most interesting works because I love the idea of relating to those electrical components as “beings”.

She also showed other works where she had carved marble versions of phones and other electronics, I think mostly real size. Then she started thinking about nature and technology and if an acorn had a USB stick, what would it plug into. Acorns (and seeds, and eggs) really are the “usb sticks” of the natural world … holding programs encoded in DNA.

She also had drawings that were made by the process of creating the work. I guess the idea that the oak trees that would grow is a creative process and wanting to record the creative process that made these acorns might be an interpretation for that … personally I didn’t need them. They weren’t unclear, but I didn’t think they added a vital dimension to the works which stand on their own.

Gladwell talked about what sounds like the premise of a new book to me — he spoke on expert failure, so when you think you know more about a situation than you really do and you ingnore additioanal info that goes against what you were expecting and therefore make really, really bad decisions. The examples he gave were Fighting Joe Hooker, a general for Lincoln in the Civil War, and the bankers who were putting all of the money into the mortgage market prior to the economic meltdown.

One of the best things about the talk for me was the question portion. Something I’ve been repeating to everyone since I heard the talk was a comment about possible solutions, which was that the war in Iraq wouldn’t have happened if the US had Question Period. That was so great to hear, and Gladwell is an absolutely wonderful storyteller.

One other thing he talked about was Blink, and some learning he did about structuring his argument. He said initially he was going to give a story where snap decisions were very useful (the story about the kouros) and move through his argument to an example of snap decisions going horribly wrong, to question their validity at the end (the story about the police shooting). But he said people read the beginning and made up their minds that snap decisions were great. He was apparently mortified when one of the CEOs of a bank that went under had gotten all of his staff to read it.

And just for fun, here’s a short little clip from Gladwell on income inequality. He’s such a great storyteller!

Photo Credit: Catalyst Theatre

So a in February I got to see Catalyst Theatre’s Nevermore at Vertigo. Again I’m late actually posting about it, but since the show’s been touring for a while and I hope will continue to do so … I am OK with that! (If you go to the Catalyst site, check out the promo video in the right hand column).

I can’t even talk about it without babbling about how great it was. The show is if Nightmare Before Christmas were live and about Poe. That is really all that needs to be said. I went alone, but I have a particular friend who I so wish lived in Calgary because I think she would’ve freaked out about it.

The only quibble I have is  that there were some choices with how it was acted that were sort of … grating … particularly some high pitched noises, but I get where they were going with it.

Nevermore has been touring for a while. Seems like they’re done now, but it’s amazing so if you haven’t seen it, definitely put a change monitor on the Catalyst page so you know when it’ll be playing in your area!

I went to: Swallow-a-Bicycle’s Freak Show (Thurs Jan 6), Compagnie Drift’s Soundmachine (Thurs Jan 20) and Theatrelabor’s Absurdesque (Sun Jan 30). I really wanted to see Catalyst Theatre’s Nevermore (which is of course still possible — and happened and I’ll post about it) and Snowblower, which I missed because it was cold that week and I’d frozen myself easrlier that week for DemoCamp and didn’t want to do it again.

I liked that Freak Show was both performance art and theatre at the same time. In some ways the tone wasn’t completely my bag … sometimes I found it sort of silly-sexual and I go in for absurd more than silly. But it was a really interesting format and I loved the use of the bowels of the EPCOR Centre for the tour. The first skit-tableau we saw was a “tribulations of pregnancy’ skit and I thought that was really entertaining. I also liked the Alice In Wonderland monologue (love Alice In Wonderland). I was there alone but with a group of friends I think it would be really hilarious and would love to see more theatre in this format.

Photo: Compagnie Drift / High Performance Rodeo

I was really glad I got to see Soundmachine. I thought the idea of “hearing the unhearable” but sometimes I thought the sounds weren’t … investigating the meaning of what they might be hearing? You know? So that became hard to get out of it and it was sort of whimsical experimentation with sound instead of hearing the unhearable. It was still really fun though, and the singing techniques and live sound mixing with recorded instrumentals were quite interesting. I also loved the singing and wished I understood the French. Another reason I may have not been as impressed by the connections between the sounds and the “unhearable” is that I had recently been listening to a Radiolab episode mentioning that people had recorded what sounds the electrical activity in mice brains make. Which really is sort of hearing the normally unhearable, and is awfully hard to follow with made up sounds.

Last Sunday I went to Absurdesque, by Theatrelabor.  I like shows like this that are hard to follow, though I haven’t seen a lot of classic absurd theatre. I think one of my favourite sections of Absurdesque was when one of the actors got on the table and was reciting what sounds like something from a theatre textbook on absurd theatre. It’s always interesting as you’re watching absurd theatre to navigate between how your life is absurd and then back to life being not absurd, really. It’s absurd but only to a certain extent. And so I think I find it … poignant, but also absurd and funny in and of itself.

I did end up getting to see Nevermore! I loved it and am planning to post about it later today.

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with Clive Robertson’s Then + Then  Again at The New Gallery. The show is a retrospective of Robertson’s work in artist-run culture, much of it in Calgary, and it’s presented through foam-core mounted info-blocks and recorded materials. Documentation. Of course I wasn’t in Calgary’s art scene for any of the actual events, so for me it’s hard to take in as an art show. I can’t read all the panels or watch/listen to all the work.

It’s not that I don’t accept documentation as art, but I think this exhibition is presented more on the side of documentation than documentation-as-art. You really do need to read all of the text to know what’s going on. It’s a self-history more than documentation of a process or performance-based work.

That said, I think I have found the way to enjoy the exhibition: go to the talks. I went to an opening night talk where Robertson spoke, and the talk tonight with Sandra Vida. As someone who is very badly versed in Calgary’s ARC history, it’s been a wonderful crash course that you can’t get from the exhibition itself because the exhibition doesn’t have the side stories or the evident rivalries. At the talks, usually there were one or two people in attendance who were also part of Calgary’s ARC culture when it was nascent, and the back-and-forth and extra tidbits were amazing. That’s what you really need to see and what really can get you energized about ARC culture in Calgary and making sure it keeps happening (not that there’s danger of the ARCs here falling off the planet) and what makes one want to be involved up to your eyeballs. Must get on that.

[The video is a trailer from when the exhibition was mounted in 2007 at several galleries in eastern Canada]