To Justin: As a British person with a French name, do you find that Canadians have expectations of you? Do you meet those expectations?
Here in Canada people often expect me to be able to speak french because of my name – an expectation i never maintain past “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Justin Sage-Passant……parlez vous anglais?”
In England the expectation is that I’m really posh and went to a private school. An expectation i’ve never met. The whole reason I have the name I have is all due to the murky past of my Grandmother and the stubbornness of my Father to not get along with his step dad.
To Chris: As a British person with a British name, do you find that Canadians have expectations of you? Do you meet those expectations?
People assume that I will care about football, or “soccer”, as I believe it’s called, that I will be pro-royal family, and that I will not be able to light a fire or do any kind of practical work. They also assume that I know about theatre, grammar and history.
To Justin: ‘Quite Frankly’ is the story of a man whose life is a constant struggle to overcome people’s low opinions about him. I have a high opinion of you. Am I wrong?
My ego is so in need of positive affirmation that i would never say that someone is wrong when they tell me they have a high opinion of me. However struggling to overcome others low opinion of me is an experience i have lived and breathed for many years. Perhaps it is my relentless efforts in the face of the cold hard truth that you have a high opinion of?
To Chris: In a fight who would win – Chris Gibbs the street performer or Chris Gibbs the one man stage show performer?
Chris Gibbs the street performer was fitter, but Chris Gibbs the one man stage show performer is older and wilier. Plus Chris Gibbs the one man stage performer could use technical tricks to disorientate his opponent, like turning the lights off or locking the theatre doors. However, Chris Gibbs the street performer is more likely to have a sock full of coins, so he’d win.
To Justin: You worked in a four man group, then a three-man – then two, and now you do one-man shows. What’s next?
We (the original four founders of Screwed & Clued) always said that we would reform to tour our first fringe show from 1998 (Shooting Up Shakespeare) across the Canadian fringe circuit again – but this time on motorbikes with sidecars. However, four young, single lads are now four thirty somethings with, collectively, four small children, 3 partners, one dog and two cats. Perhaps we should do a stage version of the Adams Family?
To Chris: I’ve heard someone comment that your show at Next Stage is your most personal one. Does this mean we get to see the real Chris Gibbs on stage?
It’s as close to it as any show I’ve ever done, except when I was playing David Suzuki in An Inconvenient Musical. That was the real me.
To Justin: What advice would you give to a British actor wanting to get work in Toronto; someone who has a history of performing one-man shows in the fringe festivals but is as yet not constantly employed in high-paying work that he doesn’t have to write himself. If there was anyone like that?
This sounds like an incredibly unlikely scenario. Should such a person exist my advice would be to create moments in their self written shows that showcase all their abilities to the Toronto-theatre-community – like being able to do back flips……or doing a convincing Canadian accent.
To Chris: As a British born comedian who now resides in Canada I would value your opinion on…Who’s funnier – Shakespeare or Shatner?
Aaaaah, the eternal question. But based on the mistaken assumption that they are two different people. Let’s be honest, TJ Hooker was obviously based on Richard the Third. He just put the hump on the front.
To Both: Is one actually the loneliest number?
J: Yes – although I’ve heard it said that in theatre less is often more.
C: Yes. Especially if that one is in the audience.
To Both: I say Fringe Festival. You say…
J: Try it…you might like it. I did.
C: More!
Chris Gibbs is the writer and director of Like Father Like Son? Sorry.
Justin Sage-Passant is the writer and performer of Quite Frankly.
Both shows are currently playing at The Next Stage Festival, currently running at The Factory Theatre. Click the picture below to learn all about the festival, showtimes, and all other relevant info.
Welcome to Praxis Theatre’s “Open Source Theatre Project”, that will lead you through our development process for Section 98 from January, through to our workshop presentation at HATCH in March, and onto the next phase of development after that. True to the spirit of all things “Open Source”, we want to show you our material as it is created, and we want to hear back from you. What are we missing? What haven’t we thought of? Is there a youtube video or a CBC archive that you think would be really helpful? Here, you will find the “source code” of Section 98.
I have been charged with the responsibility of preparing and maintaining these posts, and I’m hoping that you’ll use this site to engage and interact with us in our exploration of some very complicated and layered issues. I started working with Praxis in 2009 during the development of the first iteration of this project for the Toronto Fringe Festival, called Tim Buck 2 and it has been incredible working with a group of peers to create theatrical materials out of court transcripts, newspaper articles, history textbooks, and thin air. I want to share that process with you.
The HATCH development stage of Praxis Theatre’s Section 98 addresses the complex history of civil rights in Canada by exploring unionists and socialists in the 1930s, the FLQ and the October Crisis in the 1970s, as well reserving a portion of the production to consider contemporary events that relate to civil rights in Canada.
To aid in this creation process, our dramaturg Alex Fallis has been leading us through a process that began with a mapping exercise. For each major topic we began to plot out the related subtopics that would require further research, and that were of particular interest to us. Laying out the individual eras visually made it immediately apparent, what we didn’t know.
Starting with the era of the Progressive Arts Club in the 1930s, we established the various issues that we felt were important to consider:
Politics
Law enforcement
Aesthetics
Place of theatre in society
The relationship between individual rights and public safety
Characters, etc.
Then item by item we asked ourselves, “what don’t we know?”
The topic of aesthetics brought up the question, “why, in 2009, do we hate Agitprop?”. Politics raised questions of the public perception of government tactics of the time, and so on.
From there we moved on to our 2nd era, the FLQ in the 1970s. We were interested in looking at:
War Measures Act
Politics
Characters
FLQ Manifesto
Quebec culture and artists
The general consensus amongst our anglo and bilingual creative team was that we were widely ignorant of anything more that the bare facts and events surrounding this era.. Luckily Alex has been encouraging us to warmly embrace the concept of “how ignorant are we?” when tackling these big topics. So here are some of the things we decided we need to know more about:
What alternatives did the government have to the War Measures Act?
What is a nation?
What was the economic condition of Quebec?
What was the attitude of the rest of the country at that time?
How did the RCMP determine who to arrest?
What is a political prisoner?
From there, we set the two maps side by side to look for the issues and/or questions that connected them… similar questions/character types/the role of the Prime Minister, etc. Then it was a matter of picking out the elements that interested us to research and present at the next research session in a presentation that was interactive and/or performative in some way.
As a bit of group research, we also got together recently for a movie night. Pizza, beer, brownies, and a copy of Les Ordres, a 1974 Cinema Verite piece that won Michel Brault a Best Director prize at Cannes, and tells the story of the incarcerated civilians while the War Measures Act was in place during the October Crisis.
Near the end of the film as prisoners are being released, one of them shouts out “next time there’ll be a trial in the streets!”. So I’ve been thinking, given this situation, and people like Omar Khadr sitting in Guantanamo Bay for 7 years from the age of 15, at what point do systems or Governments create the very movements they are trying to suppress?
Obsidian Theatre received Holiday Greetings from Heritage Minister James Moore, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and a guy who better not be The Minister of Spelling.
Over on The Next Stage you can find the final round in the Theatrosperical State of the Nation these two websites have been engaged in at the end of 2009. Last chance for any and everyone to leave a comment, question, opinion, or just straight up hyperbole in response.
At the end of today the whole conversation will be scooped up and sent off to the people at Summerworks (with some editing) as an article for Works magazine. When else are you going to have a chance to leave a comment in digital-land with the chance it will be reprinted and distributed in a classy paper physical form?
You can read Round 1here, Round 2here, and Round 2.5: a Kris Joseph Intermezzohere.
Africa Trilogy assistant director Deanna Downes has been ruminating on the project from her secret lair in Philadelphia.
Africa Trilogy Set for a Smooth Landing in The States?
by Deanna Downes
David Mamet’s new play Race is playing on Broadway. A New York Times review calls it “a play that examines the self-consciousness that descends on American white people when they talk about, or to, black people.”
Fela, a play about the revolutionary creator of Afro-pop, Fela Kuti, is also on Broadway. When talking about his production of Fela, director Bill T. Jones says Fela’s life brings about, “questions like creativity, transgression, rebellion, sensuality, history, race, power.”
It would appear, the theatrical runways are being paved for a smooth landing of this multi-national but Canadian birthed trilogy about Africa and the West.
We are super-happy about this and really appreciate everyone who participates with the company digitally and in reality.
Thank you in particular to these people:
Graham F. Scott, for coordinating and designing thegreat integration, when our website and blog were integrated into a single place on the interweb at praxistheatre.com.
All of the contributors to praxistheatre.com in 2009:
Gideon Arthurs, Tara Beagan, Maev Beatty, Augusto Boal, Mark Brownell, Deanna Downes, Emily Farrell, David Ferry, Brendan Gall, Joel Grinke, Chris Hanratty, Christine Horne, Daniel Karasik, Ravi Jain, Richard Lee, Hayley Lewis, Bridget MacIntosh, Ian Mackenzie, Ross Manson, James Murray, Leora Morris, Tony Nappo, Simon Ogden, Simon Rice, Aislinn Rose, Michael Rubenfeld, Sarah Sanford, Adam Seelig, Samantha Serles, Rupal Shah, Caroline Sniatynski, Vinetta Strombergs, David Tompa and Aaron Willis.
Celebrity Theatre creator Greta Papageorgiu and features writer Lindsay Schwietz, for producing regular engaging content in addition to their demanding schedules as arts professionals.
Ian Mackenzie, for having the idea that we should use our website to engage with our community, and for creating an online culture around the company that put us in a position to succeed in the blogosphere in 2009.
Everyone who took the time to vote for praxistheatre.com
Praxis Theatre Board of Directors and Donors. Resources can make art, and arts-based websites, better.
People and organizations that are kicking our ass in terms of achieving praxis through the confluence of ideas and internet. These inspirations include Mike Daisey, Naomi Klein, The Yes Men, Beautiful City, Avaaz, and Vote for Environment. There are a lot of folks setting the bar high out there by achieving concrete results though their internet-ing.
When Rina Fratticelli’s report came out in 1982 revealing the amount of women in power positions in Canadian theatre to be shockingly low, the gender inequality issue was exposed. Yet, twenty-seven years later the PACT Equity in Canadian Theatre report on gender shows that very little has changed. In PACT theatres in the 2008-2009 season, women accounted for 29% of the artistic directors, 36% of the working directors and 29% of the produced playwrights. Primarily men are still running theatre companies across Canada. And the larger the theatre company, the less women in artistic leadership positions.
This is true despite the fact that there are more women in theatre schools and more women in audiences. According to the same report, almost 60% of the theatre-going audience in Canada is thought to be female and women account for 68% of student enrolment in the performing arts, communication and technologies fields. Yet, these percentages don’t match the employment opportunities for women.
Why is this happening? Why has very little changed in over twenty years? And what is being done about it? Are we going to be looking at these same statistics twenty years from now?
Kelly Thornton is Artistic Director of Nightwood Theatre, and co-head of the national advisory committee of Equity in Canadian Theatre: The Women’s Initiative, a group of activists whose aim is to formally investigate the status of women in Canadian theatre and develop plans to change existing barriers. She believes the lack of females is not something done on purpose, but created through subconscious choices by the male artistic directors that run 71% of the theatres in Canada.
“I don’t think they’re actually saying ‘we’ve got to keep women out’ – I just think there is a gender bias to the way we program seasons. I always use the analogy of a man and a woman walk into a bookstore. The two will both buy a novel and they will come out with totally different novels. And it’s based on their gender. Think of a male and a female AD – they’re gravitating towards stories that speak to them. And often that has to do with gender.”
Thornton stresses this is not an attack on men, or male AD’s. It’s about subconscious choices. “Who better to direct Bob’s play than Bill. It’s the domino effect.” Yet, when the primary ticket buyer is female, why is this not questioned more often? Why do women just accept watching male stories, directed by men, as the norm?
Many of these issues were discussed last month as 150 female directors from across Canada came to Toronto to take part in the week-long Directors Summit at the 4×4 Festival, sponsored by Nightwood Theatre. A mix of established and emerging directors participated in master classes, workshops, panel discussions, and seminars. With the statistics on the lack of gender balance being released this year, an event such as this is not only an opportunity for networking of female directors and theatre workers, but also a step towards solidarity in the face of these shocking numbers.
Nightwood Theatre's Directors Summit included a Marketplace for emerging directors to meet face-to-face and network with established professionals.
One of the main events of the summit was the Marketplace, where emerging female directors and artistic directors from across the country met in a speed-dating atmosphere. It allowed emerging directors to meet face-to-face and network with established professionals. This also ties in with The Canadian Women Directors Catalogue: a comprehensive list of Canadian Women Directors, an initiative by Nightwood Theatre currently in development, which will be sent out to theatres across Canada. The artistic directors who receive this catalogue will now have faces to put to names. Thornton hopes the experience will really get artistic directors “thinking about how to actually tangibly effect change by being conscious when they’re programming”.
Perhaps this is the key, as Thornton suggests, to effecting change: “This is a conscious-raising effort on my part. This is just about staying awake to the issues. When you’re making your season choices, always look at your roster… and try to include the other half of the planet. Have the grace to acknowledge the track record hasn’t been good in the past and pay more attention to it in the future….The culture will balance itself if we all just admit there is an issue and then tangibly take it on in our own way. Think globally, act locally. Do one thing per season that slightly changes the way you work,” says Thornton.
This is not only happening in Canada. In June of this year, Sphinx Theatre Company in Great Britain held the conference on gender Vamps, Vixens and Feminists: The Elephant in the Room. Among discussions of gender equality, were statistics from a 2006 Women in Theatre Survey, revealing that only 17% of playwrights produced in Britain were female, and only 23% of productions were directed by women.
In America, there has also been a lack of female directors and playwrights. In April of this year, Emily Glassberg Sands submitted to Princeton University a report entitled: Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender: An Integrated Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater. This report examined gender bias against female playwrights in the United States. Sands showed through experiments that, among other very interesting results, artistic directors believe that a script written by a female pen-name will make less money and be of lower quality than the same script with a male name as the playwright. Sands also mentions in her report that on Broadway in the 2008/09 season only 12.6% of the plays produced were written by women.
Would it actually affect the economic prospects of the play if it’s written or directed by a woman, telling female stories? In her opening remarks at the Kick Start Reception of the Directors Summit, Shaw Festival Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell spoke of her experience: “I did this, I got a whole bunch of female directors in and I dug up all the female playwrights from that time period, and I just want to let you know that the sky didn’t fall, that the audiences didn’t go away, that nobody actually knew the difference. The success was still the same.”
If we are all conscious of what choices we make as theatre practitioners, and if we are all aware of these inequalities, the small changes will become big changes. As Mary Vingoe, inaugural Artistic Director of the Magnetic North Festival, said while facilitating a panel on Women Directing in Canadian Theatre, “hopefully in ten years we won’t have to be having this same discussion.”
Guest Post by Simon Ogden of Vancouver’s The Next Stage – second in a series…
Greetings, my fellow Canadians (and theatre fans around the world), my name is Simon and I’m a blogging advocate. Which basically means I’m enamored with the potential power of internet self-publication as a business tool. I’ve been using it to much success in the past few years, and so I’m officially convinced of both its practicality and potency. Mike asked me if I would care to elaborate here (and over on my own blog), and having just publicly declared myself a blogging advocate, I had really no choice. We’re going to ping-pong a conversation about the Canadian theatrosphere spurred by Michael Rubenfeld over at Summerworks between us for a while, and see where it goes. We would be delighted if you would join the conversation, if you do your comments may be published in the hard-copy compilation in Works magazine. And we hope you do.
thenextstage
Thanks M-Dub (if no one calls you that they should, it’s dope. S.O. just sounds like a shrug). It’s a topic that I have a peculiar amount of verve about, so this should be a good conversation. And hopefully an inspiring one.
“While the digital revolution hasn’t changed theatre much…”
Four years ago I made a prediction that the rise of the blogosphere would radically change theatre in Canada. Change it in the way practitioners thought about the way they produce work, in the way resources were shared and in the dramatic expansion of the audience base. At this point I’m prepared to say that I wasn’t altogether wrong in this prediction, but I would certainly excise the word “radically” from that sentence. The internet is proving to be a tough monster to wrangle for our particular discipline, the growth of the Canadian theatrosphere so far has proven to be relatively slow. That is, relative to tech-centric arts communities; photographers and digital artists have a surfeit of chatter to engage with on line.
It’s essential here at the outset that we define what we mean by ‘the theatrosphere’, and what exactly it means when it uses the term ‘theatre blogging’. There are a lot of active theatre blogs that aren’t really part of the theatrosphere, these are self-contained sites – usually company blogs – that post solely on their own business. These are marketing sites, and have little or no interaction with the rest of the industry online. The theatrosphere uses social media for two distinct agendas – and yes, sometimes those agendas get muddied – to market our work, and to engage in dynamic, real-time conversation with our fellows. If you’re not connecting across borders, you’re not part of the conversation. This, in a nutshell, is the great hope of the core concept of theatre blogging: to create an inter-connected, self-supported, crowd-sourcing resource hub that anyone can plug into.
To put it another way, the theatrosphere is a big ol’ cocktail party that’s always running. It’s a klatch full of a crazy array of personalities, from brash and irritating to gentle and wise. But always highly opinionated, and therein lies its true promise. I hear young theatre artists constantly complaining about how cliquey an industry independent theatre is, about how tough it is to break into ‘the scene’. What they’re talking about is information sharing; where does your audience come from, what is it about your process that works for you, how do you get to know the critics? Etc, etc. I don’t believe that we’re cliquey at all, actually, we’re an art form that does its work in little groups in little dark rooms that require a certain bond of trust to get the most from the process itself. We’re not snobby, we’re just busy. And we’d all like to meet regularly to socialize and network, but who has the time? Making the time to make connections is the next stage in the evolution of the indie theatre industry, and the internet offers the most economic solution to time-manage our networking and marketing efforts.
And yet we still lack a true National connectivity. Or even a regional one. I have amazing connections in my niche across the country (not even counting the inspiration and assistance I get from theatre bloggers in the US – which has a busier if not a more comprehensive blog community – and the rest of the world), but the actual amount of theatre practitioners walking into this cocktail party is shockingly small. Engagement is so easy to measure on the blogosphere, because the platforms themselves tell you when someone is talking to you or about you. There is still only a handful of engaged theatre bloggers across the entire country. I know of exactly zero East of the Rockies until you hit Toronto, then a couple in Ottawa and…that’s pretty much it. Where are the theatre bloggers, Canada? Edmonton? Winnipeg? What’s up?
As for the question of comics marketing themselves on social media better than theatre, well, maybe. But it’s kind of apples and oranges, stand-up comedy is YouTube friendly, it fulfils it’s core objective – to make you laugh – on the computer almost as much as it does live. But theatre’s objectives – to make you feel, connect, respond viscerally – just don’t translate that well to 2D. Televised theatre looks like crap, unless it’s shot well and then it suffers the iniquity of being mutated into a different medium. On top of that, the public at large understands stand-up, it’s something they already want, while they still mostly think of us as tight-wearing, Elizabethan-blathering bores. So we have to get mighty creative with how we sell ourselves on the web. It’s happening, there are some wonderful explorations in digital marketing going on in our corner of art, but it is truly in its infancy. To grow it’s going to need a movement. We have to find some way of selling the power of blogging to the world of theatre, to create a true National presence. To brand independent theatre as a mighty, united force to be reckoned with. And then the people will come.
MK
Simon, I certainly agree with what you say in terms of comedy being a much friendlier video medium. I haven’t figured out any way to create a video to promote a play reading festival so if someone has ideas I’d love to listen.
I know for me that I’m a lot less engaged in blogs, even my own, because of needing more time away from the computer and from Twitter. Twitter’s much less time consuming way of receiving and conveying information. I’m not sure if that says something about me or if that’s a trend in general. The more growth there is, the more overwhelmed I feel by it all.
I’m curious to see where this experiment between the two of you leads. I’m one of those lucky people who have met both of you and have a ton of respect for how the two of you manage to stay engaged in the blogosphere on top of all the other things you do.
thenextstage
Twitter’s really got you, eh? I totally get it, there’s been a real waning of the blogoshpere since twitter tipped. And that’s probably a good thing, full posts tend to be fewer and farther between, but the quality has escalated.
Another tick in the win column for twitter.
There actually were a ton of theatre co’s here that had never blogged that jumped on twitter, it’s my sincere hope that it proves a gateway to full blogging. Because I’d really love to hear about their work from the artist’s perspective.
“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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