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“After the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations, we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”
Peter Brook — The Empty Space
121 Comments
How bizarre
Is this genre of theatre called lecture theatre?
Maggie is awesome on camera
Can I enjoy the show from here?
Describe in two words please
I would love to see a show about jim watts’awesome things. You can call it Watt a Gal!
I’m wishing I hadn’t been so tired so that I could have seen this play out. Can’t wait to see what you guys write about it.
Sometimes I forget Canada is a bilingual country
I like that i live in a bilingual country
I’m interested in more context around this scene (soldiers panel).
what{s going on
civil rights on stage and online? whose rights? civil?
We have received 2 photos/videos during the show, but I can’t seem to post them from the PC suite to the blog. Anyone have any advice on how to do this?
Thanks,
Laura
Sometimes Omar voice is hard to undrstand… Pace?
Boring
This is going well so far from the booth.
October 1970! ROTFLQ!
I’m pretty sure Wikipedia has an AWESOME October Crisis/FLQ timeline. That is the extent of my knowledge before we started working on this show!
FLQ-I know someone was put in a trunk of a car
making me curious….
So great hearing what other audience members have to say. Exciting!
The recent prorogueing(?) Has conveniently pushed this whole thing out of the public eye. Its all of our duty to ask the government why they lied.
Hi Sara in Ottawa and MK, and anyone else joining us from outside of the theatre! Glad to have you joining us, and I’ll ask for a 2 word description at the next check in.
1 result for: Praxis
prax·is [prak-sis]
–noun, plural prax·is·es, or custom.
3. a set of examples for practice.
[Origin: 1575–85; < Mo do, fare + -sis -sis]
Colvin said there was a strong possibility that Afghans turned over to Afghan forces were tortured, by Canadian legal standards – big difference from “all detainees were tortured”. His testimony was taken out of context.
do all of these topics make sense together? are you guys buying it?
Hey all – is there a way to stream the show right now? Thanks.
Good music and sounds
Ya lost me.
I believe the previous comment about being lost was sent when we went into the Eight Men Speak rehearsal?
Hi Meredith, unfortunately we’re not streaming this time around, but it’s definitely something we’re considering for the next iteration. Thanks for all the comments everyone, this will really help us in our development process going forward.
Trudeau brought Quebec and the rest of the country into the twentieth century. He brought us one step closer to getting rid of the monarchy. And he also gave us the charter
1 result for: Mimeograph
mim·e·o·graph [mim-ee-uh-graf, -grahf]
–noun
1. a printing machine with an ink-fed drum, around which a cut waxed stencil is placed and which rotates as successive sheets of paper are fed into it.
2. a copy made from a mimeograph.
–verb (used with object)
3. to duplicate (something) by means of a mimeograph.
[Origin: formerly a trademark]
I know someone who was arrested and jailed in october 1970 because he was carrying a book on nationalism. Now this is a great free country.
Why do we imaging that in theatre before, they yelled all the time?
I hope the show is going well. Tell mike he’s too short for the nba.
It’s too bad such passion among the working class has degenerated into unions driven by self entitlement.
That was good. The interactive part is fun
Re enacting is less fun, less useful maybe, then the re imagining
I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the information – less data and more drama
The Air India chapter was moving..
yawn
Great monologue. It gets you invested in the human side. Where’s it from?
Great air India monologue. It humanizes a very difficult part in Canadian history
i don’t get why FLQ stuff relates to debates today, a stretch
That’s true. I wonder how modern francophone separitists feel about the FLQ crisis. Did you speak to any?
unions = self entitlement is bogus. some truth to it, but the unions suck arguments are usually some kind of crap to justify workers not having rights. what’s wrong with entitlement anyhow?
1/2 why does it have to be problematic for an anglo to represent francos? its because of the political nature of canada that an anglo
Greetings from the booth! This show has a lot of cues and buttons to push. Also, we can see cell phone lights from here. It’s interesting to watch people interact: when they do, when they don’t…
2/2 is able to learn french in school.
Can you elaborate on the intention behind using omar, dramaturgically speaking.
Break down in projection and live woman speaking, increases as talking continues. Seems problematic
I guess the FLQ and the jihadists share a certain… mania? Is that the point?
Omar sections seem extraneous and of questionable purpose.
Umm a bit confused??
Oh. I see.
The thing about “Khadr” is that he’s obviously someone familiar with Michael personally – all the height references make that clear. So I think it cowardly of him to snipe anonymously under his assumed alias.
Yuck. Omar Khadr. Not a fan.
The Omar Khadr segments are my favourite so far. It is jarring to hear the flippant hateful and sexist comments of an online blogger being broadcast in front of an audience.
Some minimal imagery might have helped the soundscape
Did not get th blank stage with audio segment
I think the “Omar” guy is actually pretty funny. I read that stuff online.
That would definitely send me around the bend- torture by sound!
This could become terrifying. How far are you willing to go?
Centre the camera
I heard they also used Rage Against the Machine as torture. I keep thinking about the symbolism of that.
to respond to the person who is happy about living in a bilingual country… I would say that we don’t live in a bilingual country at all. At least not
This afghan detainee issue is not exciting. In the grand scheme of things, this brouhaha was pretty insignificant
a French/English country. That’s why Quebec s so protectionist and regressive about French language rights.
Torture never works. The person being tortured will just tell you whatever you want to hear so you stop torturing them. Not a good way to get intelligence.
I think it’s great that three women are playing the generals in this scene.
music I listened to as a teenager is now considered torture. My poor parents.
I’d like to see the verbatim stuff distilled and rewritten to make something… dramatic. or theatrical, rather.
Nothing quite says the 70′s than white shag
And Quebec’s population is plummeting because they don’t like immigrants that don’t speak french.
What is the source of the dialogue in these FLQ scenes?
does torture really not work? leftists always say that, but i don’t necessarily buy the argument. i wouldn’t support torture, but i think there are better reasons for arguing against it aside from “it does not work”. what’s the evidence here?
The Harper Government also said that the detainee issue was not interesting… that Canadians were not interested. I don’t think that’s a good enough reason not to get serious about looking into the issue as much as possible. Aislinn
How many times did they have to waterboard K.S.M.? Over 200? That might be a sign that it doesn’t work. When the CIA is saying there are better ways….
I do wish we could all read the text messages coming in. But that’s the problem of paying way too much for streaming messages, right?
The US is not alone in “enhanced interrogation,” it’s a global trend and a response to terrorism.
Not sure if I understand how the “open source” activity *surrounding* the show is related to the performance itself.
Maybe Laura SHOULD wear a uniform next time for her questioning.
Lose the distortion on Omar’s voice
What were some of the questions you asked? I wish you told us a couple because I can’t read the screen that far away
Why is there so much sympathy for Omar khadr? He’s stuck in a beach resort with his friends. What more could you ask for?
Why didn’t you actually try to detain people? Asking me if i read poetry and if i vote is very charming and canadian. But i don’t think it’s what you’re after.
now I want a cigarette
can the next praxis show allow us all to smoke instead of text?
I thought I was watching a play. But apparently I’m just watching agitprop.
Is that a herbal smoke? Use a real one!
Please stay tuned to this spot over the course of the next few days for further discussion stemming from your comments here tonight. Now it’s time for the live Q&A!
Post questions, or keep the texts coming if you have any questions.
Re: use real cigarettes, we would if we could but it is against the policy of most if not all theatres. Theatres are indoor public spaces and there is a law against smoking indoors. The only way to be able to have a cigarette on stage is for it to be herbal.
I heart Jim Watts.
He’s not feeding your baby!
I wish I had a director like that all the time.
Good scene. Love the director.
Is that what you’ve been doing all week? Yowza!
Is this actual transcripts?
Hey actors, is it fucking you up that all these people look distracted because they’re texting as you ‘perform’?
With the re imagining I certainly didn’t mean more “acting” I mean more trying to imagine what those plays wanted to do, what the desire was, and wondering / approaching how to achieve that now.
Not getting the argument re the documents…
Thus bureacratic committee thing is painfully boring
Meaning I didn’t catch the significance of that document used as an example.
If be nice to have rolues to the texts somehow as well so if there are questions about clarification the answers come back to me via text during the show
“Omar” really turned out to be a lynchpin of the show. I wonder if he attended…
did Michael coif his hair just for this?
So the Olympics pretty much ended up getting cut out of the show completely, huh?
I agree with the last comment in the talkback, that I lost the throughline, or connection between the stories. I also found the Omar sections confusing. It feels like I missed the link because I hadn’t been following the web discussion before I got here tonight.
I enjoyed the scenes from each plot however it assumed a base of knowledge. I think by developing each scene with a more immersive context it would engage the viewer into the perspectives at that time in history. Or the other route would be to make it more about the headlines and discussion. The play seems to sit in the middle somewhere.
re: actors using real cigarettes.
I’d like to cast a vote saying that I did not at all wish the actor to really smoke a cigarette. Especially in a performance of this nature, my ‘suspension of disbelief’ muscle is already activated. No need to endanger the actors health in order for the smoking to be believable. I already know it’s theatre.
Some post-show thoughts:
I must agree that many scenes need a little more context to get into them. I found the actor/character interviews quite an engaging way to achieve this. Might have been fun to have each actor do one (with variations). Live camera work reinforces the ‘filtering’ of communication – nice. Must agree that the historical theatrical re-inactment scenes need a bit more authenticity (and by that I mean also pushing the overt theatricality of them to give them both more depth and more artifice).
The panel segments are long only because the context isn’t quite there (for someone who hasn’t been following the headlines). I enjoyed the juxtaposition of live ‘improv’ and candid speak with verbatim and more theatrical bits.
I must also admit that if texting is supposed to be part of the show, it needs to actually be part of the show (i.e. more SM commentary or visibility of the texts as well as designated times for texting so we don’t feel we’re missing out and perhaps even changes in performances/content as a result of the texts)
I would also enjoy date captions for certain scenes.
Very random thought about the ‘directing’ scene: Wouldn’t Eatons be a more accurate reference than Sears?
And what was that transition scene with red light and loud music supposed to do?
Q&A after this kind of show seems to be essential – and very engaging.
A way to tie the stories together may be helpful for the end. Perhaps more performers speaking directly to the audience? You may also want to present the entire team at the beginning to set up the ground rules informally.
All the best with the further incarnations of this show.
this show was boring, self indulgent and put the cart before the horse where media’s concerned. you used the idea of a workshop as an excuse for not making any coherent artistic choices: loose transitions, unpolished readings of boring material, actors unsure of entrances and exits. why were there references to mike wheeler’s physicality at least twice during the show although the audience never sees him? are we all supposed to know what he looks like? or care? who is this random blogger going by the name omar khadr who isn’t omar khadr? how does he enhance our understanding of anything? why were there such long, boring, juvenile lulls in the presentation of media? ie: freezing on one shocking photograph for minutes at a time while we listen to VO? repeatedly? the use of filming the 2 women as they button up/ button down, tie up/ tie down their hair was provocative without purpose. the one girl with the annoying voice in english, nevermind her ‘immersion Parisian french’ SHOULD feel bad about playing a quebecois. her nasality was insulting. this show lacked vision, choice, art, drama, entertainment, movement. it was staccato, incoherent and painful to sit through. i really thought praxis was capable of more than mounting a bad research paper on a stage. is this what happens when theatre people start wanting to drive traffic to their website instead of the theatre? too bad. the scene between BQAG (bad quebecois accent girl) and the dude in the corduroy with those one note, dim the lights transitions to show the progress of time was so amateur, it was like the lights came up and BQAG was still getting into place for the next 5 seconds.
constructive criticisms include: tighten cues, memorize lines even though it’s a workshop, get rid of mike wheeler’s VOs, get rid of the multi media until it serves a purpose, pick a purpose and state it, pick one of your many narratives and go with it, stop romanticizing political and legal arenas and realize how boring that kind of verbatim is to most theatre goers, get rid of BQAG and hire a francophone, overestimate our exposure to and the speed of current media and underestimate our ability to draw coherent conclusions from your personal political interests. have some confidence that one of you could write something coherent and original and put it on a stage. it seems like most of the audience during the Q&A and on this page here are being generous and guarded so not to hurt anyone’s feelings. i imagine the rehearsal process would’ve been much the same? get rid of being nice and do something with some backbone.
Hi all.
Wow. I think the largest number of comments I have ever replied to at one time before was four….
Sincere thanks to everyone who came and participated in our experiment/presentation yesterday. It created a lot of valuable feedback and the audience was very generous in going along with our instructions and participating with open and honest minds.
Continue to feel free to leave your thoughts here and Aislinn and I will respond with some conclusions in a new post once we figure out what they are!
Thanks again to Harbourfront Centre and everyone who attended.
I want to respond to some of the stuff in the last comment right here because, well, I’m here right now.
Hi Anonymous,
I’d like to say first of all that the fact that you were compelled to leave that kind of honest, if brutal, feedback here the day after seeing our work-in-progress presentation makes the workshop a kind of success already in my mind. We are quite focused on curating a relationship with our audience that extends beyond opening night and extends into the entire, often three year, process of creating a piece of theatre. So hearing your thoughts is welcomed and may, in some small way, influence our process.
The answer to many of your questions is this:
We wanted to try a number of things and see how they would work with an audience. I had considered that many of them may be boring at times or unfocused in their intent, but the only way to really know how something works is to try it.
That’s what workshops are for.
We have some pretty clear ideas about what worked and what didn’t and some of your feedback reinforces those conclusions, but not all of it. That makes sense though as you divided your feedback into “constructive” and what I can only assume you would characterize as, unconstructive, feedback.
Where I agree with you most is my dislike of the parts where I ended up being a character in the show. This was a result of me wanting to A: Not edit the text I used from the comments on this website in any way, and B: the need for a director to interview the actors. So somehow, unintentionally, I ended up in the presentation. It should be easy enough to fix.
Where I disagree with you most are your criticisms that don’t consider what is possible in a 6-day residency in a theatre: “Memorize lines even though it’s a workshop” is really close to “find a way to freeze the space-time continuum”. Likewise, your comments about dialect work don’t resonate. It’s not what we were working on in this time around in this exceptionally short period of time. Ditto for transitions and entrances. If that shit is sloppy on opening night, slaughter us for it sure, but that’s not where we are or what we are working on.
Anyways, in our workshop post-mortem post I’ll go more into detail about what signposts I used as a director to gauge success or failure. Thanks for taking the time to send your thoughts.
Michael
i didn’t realize the actors had only spent 6 days on this since its first incarnation at the fringe. i find it scary that you needed to stage some of that stuff to confirm that it was boring, didn’t work, etc. it’s disappointing that you let the ball drop under the guise of curating a relationship with your audience. hold yourselves and us to a higher standard. we all know your company is capable of it.
Hey anonymous, I really liked the last thing you did in the real world, it was so thought out, and the way you stood behind it publicly was so great. I mean, no one takes a stand like that, especially when they can be held personally accountable. To say that stuff in the face of someone – so brave and exposed. It was really strong and yet vulnerable.
Praxis- the problem really is the trolls. There are, as you know from my comments, aspects that worked more and that worked less for me. I do think in various workshop phases that looking deeply into one tactic rather than trying to get everything in can be useful, and it felt like a large part of last night was about the texting – and honestly I’d rather figure out how to get an audience to shout out loud. Anonymous snide commenting isn’t worth the time to read. Getting us to a point where we will stand up, in person – visible, for our beliefs is much more interesting and much more about the live event to me. The Globe and Mail comment boards are already filled with instant feedback. Let trolls live under that bridge – we don’t need them.
also – (and this may not be surprising from me) I like the combination of reading and learned text – i think it’s a clear way of dealing with the difference between new material and set parts of show going forward. It’s also a way of discerning between verbatim and playwrighten .
and the moment of worry from the actress (sorry, program not in hand) about questions of appropriation, are at the heart of interest for me in the FLQ section – that material seems so treacherous that it’s important to acknowledge that from the inside. Much of what interests me is why you all, as a group, are drawn to that material (that being said, I can do with less “I found out this neat thing while researching…” – just cut those lines, I’ve been guilty of them myself, and things are just better when they’re gone.)
but all of this we can talk about over beer.
Part of the truth of Open Source is that “code” is kind of meritocracy that is hard in theatre. The Linux kernel change either works, or it crashes. And there is a critical mass of people very good at (basically) math who look over everything and so can check for quality in a pretty clear way. In theatre of course this is harder, since there is little way in a short comment to establish whether or not I’m someone you think has something to say that you want to consider. If I start commenting on Linux, no one is going to listen, for very good reasons (I don’t know much about code.) So, how, in this world of aesthetic and political difference, can you tell, in annonymous or unknown comments, who to listen too – who shares any values.
It’s funny that I feel like the old guy defending curation and quality, but I think it’s the only site of resistance left to us. (wherein quality does not equal line learned and transitions smoothed)
anyways, wine is good
sleep is good and I’ve got a zombie movie to watch
jz
wow, I can really shut down a conversation, eh?
Heh heh heh. I don’t think it was you dude. Unfortunately i think freeform feedback has polarized at this point in the thread. It’s hard to look at this and not be like, “Am I gonna unwittingly enter some kind of flame war?” Anyways you have sleep, wine AND zombie movies so so you’re set either way.
Sleep, yes. Wine, yes. Not necessarily in that order. Zombie movie, absolutely not. Honestly, I think I’d rather go to the dentist, and that’s saying a lot… Anyway, once Michael and I can put our non-zombified brains together we’ll be continuing this discussion in a new post, so I hope to see you there Jacob.
As promised, here’s where we’re continuing the conversation:
http://praxistheatre.com/2010/04/section-98-%E2%80%93-open-source-entry-11-%E2%80%93-hatch-feedback/
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[...] interactive, invite the audience to communicate with their PDA during the performance type of stuff Praxis was experimenting with in March at Harbourfront Centre. The consensus opinion seemed to be that imposing tweets on pre-existing scripts was a recipe for [...]