This project, as with many of my projects, went without a name for a long time. I knew that we were going to explore the nature of legacy—the nature of leaving things behind. But I also knew that we were going to explore how the legacy of the internet (and Twitter in particular) is connected to that overall understanding of legacy. Or even if it is. I knew that these incredible women would be tweeting. But I hadn’t yet picked a title, and I’m still not sure that #legacy is the right one. However, given the universal nature of the “hashtag” as a symbol of the Twitter age, I figured #legacy wasn’t too far off.
Unfortunately/fortunately, but not surprisingly, many people on Twitter have used that very hashtag for a multiplicity of reasons. And as always, the internet both surprises and scares me. Once we settled on that name, I decided to spend time searching that hashtag to see what the world was projecting as a legacy versus what we were talking about. And inspired by Melissa’s post about the joys of the urban dictionary, I’ve decided to categorize those findings here.
Sports
A group who exemplified a culture of hard work and dedication that will drive this program moving forward #legacypic.twitter.com/N5FuDcEI4I
Apparently the whole of the internet is convinced that every sports achievement (or failure) is a legacy left. I mean, I can understand that people like sports (I may not be one of those people, but I get it in theory). I can also understand the bonds made in a team, the shared experience of struggle and work that can define a time in a person’s life. I can especially understand the concept of sports as a legacy when related to pride in a favourite team, or an athlete who has passed away, or a national event (like the Olympics), or the awards that go along with sporting events at every level of play. In fact, I have no problem with sports being a #legacy all over the internet. I just wonder why the arts aren’t more often hashtagged in the same way. Surely there are people who like to attend the arts (not as many as sports, but still some). Surely a shared experience of a team is reflected in all of the performing arts (even a solo show requires others to make it happen). We have pride for the work of certain artists or companies, artists who have passed away, national scale arts events, and even awards. But we’re not hashtagging those as a legacy. It makes me wonder how that public opinion might change.
The next most common posts tagged this way are related to war or Nationalism in some way. I think that’s more what I expected to find. Legacy is a big term, one that makes people think on a grand scale. And that usually means that they’re thinking about something that has happened over a long time period or a large area. So these ones make sense to me (not that sports didn’t… it just surprised me). The sadder part is the ones that come close to promoting war, or promoting violence in some way. It’s always a tricky line between supporting a country’s troops while not necessarily supporting the violent action that goes with them. Elegies
The hashtag search also yields a number of posts about the deceased. This is where I see the closest connections to the piece that we’re developing. The co-creators (Joan, Judith, and Donna) have returned to memories of those passed again and again in our discussions. We’ve talked about when we feel most connected to our parents, our grandparents, their precious heirlooms, etc. The people in our lives who have passed away leave a legacy, regardless of their actions or words. They leave a legacy simply in their absence. I can’t think of a smaller, more private thing to post in the public sphere. So I guess there are times when legacy isn’t all that grand or large.
Then there are the posts from hippies and hippy organizations about finding your inner light and leaving your proudest legacy. These provide endless entertainment, and web spirals where you end up watching a great number of videos about family that will make you cry. I don’t recommend the spiral. But I do recommend checking out the services offered by some of these organizations. The fact that they have workable financial models and the arts struggle daily to survive would be comical if it weren’t also a little depressing.
And there are the occasional posts about the arts. Mostly from me or my collaborators or someone connected to this project. So maybe the arts community should begin hashtagging themselves with #legacy, if only to begin to build a public consciousness around the impact that art can have on a community. It might begin to change the way that people value the arts more broadly, because it might make us look less like the nerd in the corner and more like the jock with the most yearbook signatures. Or it might just change the way my tweet deck feed looks. Because it is only Twitter.
Maybe I just need to be more careful about choosing my show titles.
#legacy tickets are now on sale here, and the facebook event is up. Share, Like, Tweet, etc.
study for The Ballad of ______ B, rectified readymade (screen grab), 2013.
by Francisco Fernando Granados
Last week, I began to talk about the move towards narrative in my work in relationship to two strategies: spacing and redistribution. Today’s post focuses on redistribution. The strategy is a response to the conceptual concerns of The Ballad of _____ B. The performance deals with the circulation of stories of migration in the context of Canada in the early 21st century. The story in this case comes from an appropriated text that tells my teenage refugee story re-imagined as a vocabulary lesson; a random, wonderful, and disturbing find. The move towards narrative is, then, a move towards autobiography, and for me, reluctant move. How to do the necessary work of reclaiming and presenting (rather than simply re-presenting) this narrative now that time has taken place and I am an adult, a Canadian, and an artist?
An attempt to embody ______ B in a simple, autobiographical theatrical staging would be disingenuous. I am aware and critical of the ways in which refugee stories become instruments for the legitimization of political claims on both sides of the immigration debate. Conservative rhetoric here in Canada mobilizes the term of ‘bogus refugees’ to justify an overhaul of Canadian immigration law that in practical terms amounts to a closing of national borders to people in need of protection.
But how can the bodies of the people who make a claim for protection prove that they are ‘true’ refugees? There is a demand for the voice of the refugee to be clear and coherent, a demand to narrate the self only as a sign to be clearly read, to have their voice, and indeed their body serve as evidence to justify their claim. Failure to make oneself readable in a unified manner, and in the clearest of terms, often results in accusations of being ‘bogus.’ refugees may be quoted against themselves in an attempt to point to inconsistencies in their stories.
Think of the controversy over Rigoberta Menchu’s memoir. No nice multicultural storytelling here. Perhaps I am reluctant to narrative because I have seen it be used as a weapon. There is no room for the kind of abstraction associated with the aesthetic experience of memory in a refugee hearing. There is no room to think of the figure of the refugee outside of their displacement and their need for protection. These demands contain the speech of the refugee figure in the realm of prose. Here, echoes of Audre Lorde should remind us that poetry is not a luxury.
The ‘scenes’ in The Ballad of _____ B will be scored through a series of found texts that deal in one way or another with narratives of displacement. The text from the vocabulary lesson will be reworked through the form of the ballad. The sentences will be broken up from their paragraph form into eight- and six- syllable lines that alternate in an ABCB shape. Other scenes will have other strategies. I think of this as a move to re-distribute the texts from their prosaic and evidentiary role into something else, something that allows for the possibility of abstraction.
I also want to experiment with the redistribution of the embodiment of the character, from the singular to the collective, giving _____ B many bodies and many voices. I invited fellow artists Manolo Lugo and Maryam Taghavi to perform the work with me.
Golboo Amani & Manolo Lugo, Covergirl (2012).
Manolo Lugo is a Mexican born Toronto-based artist and educator working in performance, video, photography, and installation. His work speaks to the conditions of migrancy, precarity and queerness in advanced capitalism societies. He has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in venues including the University of Toronto’s Art Centre, TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art (Mexico City), LIVE Biennial of Performance Art (Vancouver), Visualeyez Performance Art Festival (Edmonton). He received a BFA from Emily Carr University and recently completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto this year. He has worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto as well as a sessional faculty in the Visual Studies Department of the same University.
Maryam Taghavi performing at hub14, Toronto 2014
Maryam Taghavi is an Iranian-Canadian artist with a BFA from Emily Carr University and has since her graduation in 2008, worked as an artist and artist assistant. Performance has been central to her practice, nevertheless she employs photography, drawing, and installation in the research and production of her work as well. The body is the site of her investigation and production. She has participated in a number of exhibitions in Canada, Iran, and Mexico and currently serves on the board of FADO performance art and FUSE magazine. In 2014 Maryam Taghavi and Zoya Honarmand launched jä be jä, an online residency project that facilitates an ongoing dialogue between artists from Iran and artists from Canada.
Next week, I will write about how the idea of redistribution will extend to the audience through online interaction.
Hello again! And welcome back to BroadFish Blogging.
As I often do, I am creating a show that parallels the events in my life. So I’m writing a story about a woman who plans a wedding before finding her groom and I’m in the midst of planning my very own wedding*
*Don’t worry – I have the groom. 🙂
Here’s the thing: I was always a bit of a Judgemental Judy around weddings.
A lot of the marriages I witnessed growing up were not happy and seemed to involve sacrifice as opposed to compromise, which led to a great deal of resentment in both husband and wife.
I worked as a cater waiter for large events, and witnessed horrible things like full plates of food being thrown away, and mean shouting matches on wedding days between warring family members.
I was also raised as an Italian Catholic – so marriage was wrapped up in patriarchal ideas about ownership, property and old-fashioned gender roles. And that’s not my jam.
As a gal who was determined to have a career and a life of adventure, I made the assumption that marriage wouldn’t be a part of my future. And I was totally okay with that.
So it was pretty easy to be cynical about people and their weddings.
And then I met my fiancé, Matt, online on OKCupid. Online dating. It works. Who knew?
As we grew to love one another deeply, I realized that I had found in him a partner that not only supported my career ambitions and my desire for a life of creativity and art, but also one who was pursuing the very same goals and whose presence in my life elevated it and made it fuller, and brighter.
And it caught me completely off guard, because I 100% wanted to marry this glorious human being. I wanted to live the rest of my days with him in my corner and at my side. No question. Surprise! I’m going to get married!
So we started to plan a wedding. And it seriously made me examine everything in my life: my relationship to the cosmos, my feelings around money, and my identification as a feminist. Yep. There it is. The F word. Still with me?
I absolutely consider myself a feminist. A proud feminist. And I’m proud to be marrying a feminist. My fiancé Matt is an advocate for human rights, and equality. It’s great.
When we started to plan our wedding, I went through a very interesting internal struggle. The judgemental part of me wanted to slough off the giddy joy I’d feel when we’d plan the littlest detail. I didn’t want to tell most of my friends that we had an engagement shoot, even though I had a blast doing one. And I felt embarrassed sometimes when I talked about my plans with certain people who didn’t see me as a ‘bride’ or ‘someone who bought into all of that’.
Matt and I in the engagement shoot I’ve been slightly embarrassed to discuss. But no more! Photograph by the fabulous Gillian Williamson at Ikonica
The truth: I was really happy planning a celebration that would solidify my wondrous partnership.
So why all this shame? A few reasons, I think.
I do a lot of satire and comedy, and I’m a university educated artist, mentor and an advocate for women’s rights. Because of this, I somehow felt that I should downplay my girlish excitement. That it was foolish. I feared I had become some sort of Bridezilla-esque beast infected with the frivolity of fairy tales.
And then I read several articles full of judgement, like this one and it made me really angry:
Now let me say this: the wedding industry is full of all kinds of cons. Short cons. Long cons. Hideous, tulle-covered cons. But buying a beautiful dress for your wedding day doesn’t mean you’ve ‘bought in’ to something. Necessarily. And people are welcome to spend as much money on a wedding day as they’d like. Who the fuck is anyone else to criticize? But they do. A lot.
And my biggest beef with that article I posted above is that despite the author’s efforts to make the post a criticism of the industry, or an indictment of reality television (which I can totally go along with), she inevitably makes it about forcing her own judgments around how much money is too much money to spend, or that weddings in general are distractions from other pursuits for women. I think this is a slippery slope. Is there truth in some of what she says? Sure. Is there also an absurd amount of judgment around women’s personal choices? You bet.
Aren’t we supposed to support one another’s personal choices? Or, if not support, not completely invalidate one another’s personal choices?
Yes weddings can be steeped in old-fashioned ideas and gender roles. And yes, it can be damaging if women only see themselves within the context of relationships to the men in their lives. And there is still, most definitely, far more emphasis on being a ‘princess’ than being any other kind of woman. But isn’t denigrating women for wanting traditionally labeled ‘feminine’ experiences just as damaging? There’s challenging the patriarchy, and then there’s creating a new stifling system where we as women dismiss our own gender through rigidity and criticism. Can we be feminists and want poofy dresses? I think we can.
When I was growing up, feminism was about equality. At least for me. It was about choices. Birth control, abortion rights, equal pay – it was about being in charge of my own choices, and wanting the same thing for other women. Other people. Period.
I know it’s more nuanced than that. Patriarchy, privilege, power systems. I know.
But at the base of it all: could we avoid perpetuating the idea that you’re either an intellectual or you’re a princess? Could we be more than that? Could we be queens and rule over our own bodies, our own minds and our own choices? And honour other queens, whether they get married or don’t, have babies or don’t, wear dresses or don’t? Can we be critical and still be able to celebrate? Still love beautiful things? Still like the idea of being someone’s wife?
Seriously:
I think there should be more women in political power, that we MUST protect pro-choice laws, and that the key to a more progressive world lies in the liberation of women from outmoded ideals/systems, AND I also absolutely love planning my wedding with Matt. I am both of these. At the same time. Plus a whole bunch of other things. BAM.
What I’m witnessing is that as I allow room for love, joy, femininity, and companionship in my life I am able to allow room for others to experience these things in the way they see fit. And that is heartening.
Good morning Internet! I’m Rob—the director and co-creator of #legacy at HATCH this year. #legacy is a performance project that features three women over 65, all of whom are new to Twitter, and all of whom don’t identify as artists. I love working in community and educational settings, and this project provides me with an opportunity to put that work into a professional arts context. I am truly fortunate to have their trust, and the trust and support of the HATCH/Harbourfront Centre team.
When I developed the project idea for #legacy, I think I thought it would be easy. Not “easy” in a this-will-happen-without-crisis kind of way but more of a this-can’t-possibly-fail-artistically kind of way. I suppose that’s pretentious of me. In my opinion, one should always enter an artistic project with a little bit of fear. A little bit of concern that it won’t go well, or it will all fall apart. That kind of fear is healthy—it makes you work harder and makes you more accountable to yourself. But I didn’t have that kind of fear this time around. What I had was confidence: seniors-on-Twitter-while-talking-about-legacy confidence. And surely that couldn’t fail.
It hasn’t.
But my idea that it will be easy is long gone. You see, all three of my co-creators and performers have joined Twitter and all three have a pretty good idea of how to use it (though I did do a bit of a “refresher” course today). You should follow them. Joan is @Joan_Belford2, Donna is @mccroq and Judith is @judith_dove. They’re smart, and willing to learn more about how to be effective Tweeters. So that part is working.
All three of them have written beautiful, poignant, hilarious and heartfelt reflections on the very nature of legacy, and what it has meant to them. And what it might mean to them in the future. They are sharing so much of themselves, and so much of their wisdom. It’s incredibly raw source material.
And I’ve begun crafting it into a sort-of script, alongside the help of my dear friend and dramaturg Samantha Serles. Beth Kates has started to shape the visual landscape of the piece—a virtual bounty of technological riches.
But despite all of that positivity, it’s not “easy”. I think it can’t be. Not even in the everyone-gets-along-so-well-that-collaboration-is-the-best kind of way (even though that’s true). Easy isn’t what this project requires. There’s a version of it that could be done in that way, sure, but what we’ve begun doing instead is asking hard questions, delving deep, understanding more about ourselves, about the way that art is made, and likely making some mistakes. I know all of this sounds a lot like navel-gazing, and that it really represents my meanderings about the artistic process, but it’s also true. This version of the project results in pauses in the conversation, the occasional tear, the incredible risk of writing something down that might not make you feel good.
This is the first of a number of blog posts about this project—and among the first of many about this year’s HATCH 2014 season. You should come to all of the work, because it represents some fascinating artistic explorations. But you should also come because nothing that you’ll see is easy. And I think that’s probably a good thing.
P.S. You can follow me on Twitter too–@rob_kempson.
It looks like he’s wearing a bike lock on his head.
A protruding horizontal rectangle shadows the actor’s face—it’s attached to him by a black headband. The tiny camera is suspended just inches in front of his nose. A cable comes out of the contraption leading somewhere behind the curtains…
Centre stage, a huge animated head is projected, a donkey whose lips are moving in time with the man’s, whose head turns when his does—a big 3D cartoon puppet. It’s March 2013, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is getting a high-tech treatment over at York University, and poor Bottom has been turned into an ass for real this time.
Langdale is a RADA-trained actor with more than 33 television and film credits to his name, including the interactive movieHeavy Rain and the series Bitten, currently airing on Space. He’s also a performance capture specialist and business developer for Dynamixyz, the company that provided the hardware and software for this live-animated glowing blue donkey adventure.
Humphrey has a master’s degree in theatre directing and another in digital media, and has had an interest in experimental storytelling since writing for Global’s “instant drama” Train 48 and producing one of the earliest web-based alternate reality games to promote Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic.
Together, they think motion capture technology, and the real-time animation it makes possible, belong on the stage. Their new work, Faster than Night, is one of four projects chosen for HATCH, Harbourfront Centre’s annual performing arts residency programme. Facial capture is a big part of the work.
Pascal Langdale (photo by Vanessa Shaver)
But this technology is unusual in live theatre, so let’s decode our description from the beginning, the man with the bike lock on his head.
It’s actually a head-mounted camera from Dynamixyz, a contraption made up of a helmet, a miniature video camera, an illumination strip (visible or infrared light), and a 9V battery. The camera tracks facial movements, sending video data at up to 120 frames per second to a computer backstage, either wirelessly or by USB cable.
The information then meets a suite of software called Performer, which takes the data and breaks it down into points of movement. The software re-targets it onto a pre-existing animated face, already programmed to the actor’s range of motion and expression.
Facial capture used to require painted dots on the actor’s face, but this system is markerless. Dynamixz’s camera is sensitive enough to read a person’s wrinkles, even their blushes. Each filmed pixel acts as a marker on the actor’s skin and as it is tracked, the system creates a collection of interconnecting motion, a sense of realistic physicality. The actor opens his mouth, the animated face opens its mouth.
It turns a 3D computer model face into a marionette, controlled by the movements of the live actor’s face.
Motion-capture has, for a long time, been the domain of videogames and Hollywood blockbusters. Other versions of the technology exist, and not just to work with the human face, but with the whole body. It’s helped game developers (and biomechanical researchers) model human movement with incredible realism: How does the rest of my body react when I move my leg? How does breathing affect my shoulders? In the long run, many large game companies find it cheaper to invest in mocap technology and wire up a couple of actors than to hire crews of animators to model and labor over every possibility the game offers.
All this means that you don’t have to look too far before you find some animators who are opposed to the whole thing, who want animation to just be animation, period. But Langdale contests that: “It’s not a helpful position. We need animators to make motion capture in the first place, to create the models for the initial program and every time we make a new character. It’s not the end of animation.” It’s just a different branch, and besides, how else would animators and animation end up in live theatre?
Sitting around a kitchen table, Langdale and Humphrey are working on the script for Faster than Night. The sci-fi narrative hinges on a moral dilemma set on a spaceship in the far future, but the question they’re currently discussing is a bit more down-to-earth: Where will their 3D model astronaut be looking when he answers a question live-tweeted by a member of the audience? Should he make eye contact? Or should he maintain the fourth wall?
Motion capture technology onstage is exciting, a futuristic version of mask work and puppetry, but with its own risks and rewards. Like traditional puppets, it can’t keep still without looking a little bit dead, and to turn away from the audience risks losing the effect, just as with any mask.
In some ways, this technology is a thespian’s dream, a chance to literally become someone or something else, to totally transform into a role. But the head-mounted camera is an unfamiliar piece of paraphernalia to have on the body – it can be distracting both for the actor, and for an audience. If we’re meant to watch only the projected animation, where does the man in the headcam go? If he’s on-stage, how do we write in his funny hat? Or maybe instead, as the Wizard of Oz suggests, we should “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
Pascal Langdale as Caleb Smith in Faster than Night (photo by Vanessa Shaver, 3D model by Dionisios Mousses/SIRT Centre)
And breakthrough tech doesn’t come risk-free. No, this is live theatre at its height. In movies and games, there’s a chance to edit the footage, to make it perfect. But during a live show any number of things can go wrong, from lighting mishaps, to headcam battery death, to a range of motion the system hasn’t been calibrated for…
But that’s show business, right? Even in the 21st century.
study for The Ballad of _____ B (2013). Performance for the camera. Photograph by Manolo Lugo.
by Francisco Fernando Granados
The The Ballad of _____ B is site specific performance for the stage that will be presented as part of HATCH 2014 at the Harbourfront Centre Studio Theatre on April 26th. The piece brings into focus a 2-year-long exploration of the ways in which migrant bodies, particularly refugees, are compelled to tell their stories. The idea for the piece came after a friend of mine who teaches ESL brought to my attention a passage from a vocabulary lesson found in the ‘Canadian Mosaic’ unit of a workbook for one of the classes they were teaching.
I was ‘Student B’ 11 years ago. The text was lifted word by word, without my knowledge or consent, from a 2003 article in the Vancouver Sun titled Climbing Mount Canada. In the aftermath of 9-11, at a time when most headlines about racialized newcomer youth focused on crime and school dropout rates, the article interviewed four immigrant and refugee teenagers, myself included, about our volunteer work for a publicly funded community peer support program in the Greater Vancouver area.
It was a standard story that set up the brutal experiences that had brought us to this country as the background for a celebratory tale of multicultural Canadian benevolence. The appropriated textbook version of the article included the stories of two other youth: Student A and Student C. One of them, Student C, is still a very close friend of mine.
For The Ballad of _____ B, I am only working with my narrative. I have left my peers’ names and stories out of the project as a matter of respect, but in terms of providing some context for the piece, it is important to mention that the three of us were part of a larger movement in BC in the early 2000’s that sought to give visibility to issues of racial discrimination, barriers to education, and the early stages of the harsh immigration policies that continue to affect the lives of immigrant and refugee young people in this country today.
Attempting to reflect critically on these issues as our stories began to be represented in the media led us to want to be more that just interview subjects. A group of us began to work with newcomer settlement agencies like the Immigrant Services Society of BC to create models of engagement for other young people like us that provided a similar opportunity to legitimize their skills and aspire to become something beyond the stereotypes commonly associated with racialized first generation migrants.
These collective efforts over the past 12 years have lead to a wide range of community projects including Redefining Canadian, a participatory actionresearch project lead by filmmaker and scholar Joah Lui, where migrant youth learned to make videos and documentaries; the NuYu Popular Theatre Project, which offers free theatrical training based on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed methodology; and the Make It Count campaign, a BC-wide appeal to the provincial government to recognize and accredit migrant students’ language learning towards their high school graduation credits.
I was actively involved in these community efforts first as a participant, then as a coordinator and administrator until around 2009. By then, I was BFA student, had become a Canadian citizen, and felt exhausted and frustrated with the politics of both not-for-profit organizations and community activism. I also became aware of the importance of making space in leadership positions within these movements for the generation of young people who came after early 2000’s batch I belonged to. I decided to focus on finishing my art education and became a professional artist.
My work as a visual artist, primarily in performance, had up until this project rejected narrative structures; this is perhaps due to my disappointment with the ways in which migrant narratives are often de-contextualized and appropriated by governments, non-profit groups, and activists that seek to represent those whose voices cannot be listened to within the current structures of the political economy. But the surprise of the encounter with my own story in the form of a language lesson, reaching from the past, compelled me to engage with narrative as a form.
After a couple of years of holding on to the text without knowing exactly what to do with it, I realized that engaging with narrative required two aesthetic moves: spacing and redistribution. As a man in my late 20’s, making a living as a sessional instructor in an art school in Toronto, it was hard for me to identify with the figure of the student. I am relatively young, but I am a teacher these days. My primary training in drawing has left me with a voracious curiosity for linear structures. In reclaiming this particular narrative, I wanted to create spaces within the text that would allow for something to happen. Line became the instrument of spacing. Thus Student B became _____ B.
The second move was re-distribution. I will write about this next week.
“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.”
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