Monday, September 24, 2007
Happy.
Physicality inspires a deeper connection to a well-known tragedy
PAULA CITRON
September 24, 2007
Rating: ****
Theatre Rusticle's April 14, 1912 is a work of sheer brilliance. This year is the 95th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and artistic director Allyson McMackon has been inspired to rework this magnificent show which first appeared at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1998. The beautiful and poignant images that sweep across the stage, created in collaboration with her excellent cast, fire the imagination and stay with us long after the curtain has rung down.
The company's signature is the fusion of movement with text to create original theatre pieces of poetic realism. The words ring with truth, but the movement takes them to an altered space that bypasses the brain to touch the heart and the soul.
The actors' very bodies are conduits to a deeper understanding of the mere meaning of the words. The physicality provides living subtext where we see the conscious and the subconscious side by side.
McMackon's point of departure is the ship's two radio operators, Second Marconi Officer Harold Bride (actor Patrick Conner) who survived the catastrophe, and the senior Jack Phillips (actor/dancer Matthew Romantini) who did not. The third character is the ship herself (dancer Lucy Rupert).
Together they take us back to that dreadful night in the North Atlantic through a series of dreamlike sequences that collectively place both the courage and the folly of humankind into stark relief.
Designer Lindsay Anne Black has draped the stage in sheets of clear plastic to create a frozen world. In the middle of the cyclorama, or back wall, there is the ominous shape of the iceberg itself. Michelle Ramsay's evocative lighting plays off Black's set in beautiful shifts of colour that match the many moods as the evening of April 14 unfolds, expressed through the messages that the Marconi officers send out, from the frivolous to the desperate.
Black's costume for Rupert is inspired. On one hand, she looks like a ghoul, her haunted eyes rimmed with kohl, but there is a sense of glamour about her, just like the RMS Titanic that she represents. Her dress is in tatters, but in the leather front with its ribbed sides, we see the faded glory of the ship's black and red motif, while the long, sea green train is her proud wake. The men are in uniform and lifejackets.
McMackon's style is to touch on incidents, and then bring them back later, with each repeat adding another layer of depth. Thus Phillips' circling hand standing for his Marconi transmission of CQD, and later the new emergency call SOS, becomes more agitated with each coming, until his whole body literally transforms itself into the distress message itself as he jumps up and down with his shuddering hands above his head evoking the very radio signal.
The cleverly chosen soundtrack music collage is also an important Theatre Rusticle feature. From the social dances of the day, a potpourri of dizzying waltzes and ragtime, to sombre pieces of reflection, to the popular song La Mer, McMackon gives the audience a powerful cinematic experience filled with emotional resonance. The vocal "tut, tut, tut" of the officers, emulating the tapping of their wireless key is particularly touching.
At one point the two men, in a bizarre display of black humour, burst out in the rousing campfire song It Was Sad When The Great Ship Went Down. The most poignant musical moment, however, is the hymn Nearer My God To Thee.
Bride tries to tell the truth, singing the hymn Autumn which is really what the band played as the ship sunk, but the other two out-sing him, and the myth wins out.
The text is a compendium of excerpts from Bride's testimony at the official inquiry, the names of famous passengers, factual information about the ship, actual wireless messages, news reports, and descriptions of unidentified bodies, integrated with created text of poetic beauty. The ship's description of herself sinking beneath the waves is haunting, matched later by the distorted, broken body and rippling fingers that Rupert uses for the Titanic's death throes.
The cast is superb. Conner's remarkable performance as the traumatized Bride anchors the show, always trying to bring things back to reality. This allows Romantini's ethereal Phillips to riff off into the fantasy world. He is responsible for much of the humour in the show. The long-legged, graceful Rupert is the restless spirit of the ship, whether dancing a giddy waltz in the grand ballroom, or proudly breaking the waves in pursuit of her transatlantic speed record, or broken beneath the sea.
April 14, 1912 is everything theatre should be. It takes us on a compelling journey that is as emotional as it is thought-provoking.
Theatre Rusticle's April 14, 1912 continues at Harbourfront's Studio Theatre until Sept. 29. For tickets call 416-973-4000.
PAULA CITRON
September 24, 2007
Rating: ****
Theatre Rusticle's April 14, 1912 is a work of sheer brilliance. This year is the 95th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and artistic director Allyson McMackon has been inspired to rework this magnificent show which first appeared at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1998. The beautiful and poignant images that sweep across the stage, created in collaboration with her excellent cast, fire the imagination and stay with us long after the curtain has rung down.
The company's signature is the fusion of movement with text to create original theatre pieces of poetic realism. The words ring with truth, but the movement takes them to an altered space that bypasses the brain to touch the heart and the soul.
The actors' very bodies are conduits to a deeper understanding of the mere meaning of the words. The physicality provides living subtext where we see the conscious and the subconscious side by side.
McMackon's point of departure is the ship's two radio operators, Second Marconi Officer Harold Bride (actor Patrick Conner) who survived the catastrophe, and the senior Jack Phillips (actor/dancer Matthew Romantini) who did not. The third character is the ship herself (dancer Lucy Rupert).
Together they take us back to that dreadful night in the North Atlantic through a series of dreamlike sequences that collectively place both the courage and the folly of humankind into stark relief.
Designer Lindsay Anne Black has draped the stage in sheets of clear plastic to create a frozen world. In the middle of the cyclorama, or back wall, there is the ominous shape of the iceberg itself. Michelle Ramsay's evocative lighting plays off Black's set in beautiful shifts of colour that match the many moods as the evening of April 14 unfolds, expressed through the messages that the Marconi officers send out, from the frivolous to the desperate.
Black's costume for Rupert is inspired. On one hand, she looks like a ghoul, her haunted eyes rimmed with kohl, but there is a sense of glamour about her, just like the RMS Titanic that she represents. Her dress is in tatters, but in the leather front with its ribbed sides, we see the faded glory of the ship's black and red motif, while the long, sea green train is her proud wake. The men are in uniform and lifejackets.
McMackon's style is to touch on incidents, and then bring them back later, with each repeat adding another layer of depth. Thus Phillips' circling hand standing for his Marconi transmission of CQD, and later the new emergency call SOS, becomes more agitated with each coming, until his whole body literally transforms itself into the distress message itself as he jumps up and down with his shuddering hands above his head evoking the very radio signal.
The cleverly chosen soundtrack music collage is also an important Theatre Rusticle feature. From the social dances of the day, a potpourri of dizzying waltzes and ragtime, to sombre pieces of reflection, to the popular song La Mer, McMackon gives the audience a powerful cinematic experience filled with emotional resonance. The vocal "tut, tut, tut" of the officers, emulating the tapping of their wireless key is particularly touching.
At one point the two men, in a bizarre display of black humour, burst out in the rousing campfire song It Was Sad When The Great Ship Went Down. The most poignant musical moment, however, is the hymn Nearer My God To Thee.
Bride tries to tell the truth, singing the hymn Autumn which is really what the band played as the ship sunk, but the other two out-sing him, and the myth wins out.
The text is a compendium of excerpts from Bride's testimony at the official inquiry, the names of famous passengers, factual information about the ship, actual wireless messages, news reports, and descriptions of unidentified bodies, integrated with created text of poetic beauty. The ship's description of herself sinking beneath the waves is haunting, matched later by the distorted, broken body and rippling fingers that Rupert uses for the Titanic's death throes.
The cast is superb. Conner's remarkable performance as the traumatized Bride anchors the show, always trying to bring things back to reality. This allows Romantini's ethereal Phillips to riff off into the fantasy world. He is responsible for much of the humour in the show. The long-legged, graceful Rupert is the restless spirit of the ship, whether dancing a giddy waltz in the grand ballroom, or proudly breaking the waves in pursuit of her transatlantic speed record, or broken beneath the sea.
April 14, 1912 is everything theatre should be. It takes us on a compelling journey that is as emotional as it is thought-provoking.
Theatre Rusticle's April 14, 1912 continues at Harbourfront's Studio Theatre until Sept. 29. For tickets call 416-973-4000.
Sad.
PARIS (Reuters) - Marcel Marceau, the world's best-known mime artist who for decades moved audiences across the globe without uttering a single word, has died aged 84.
The Frenchman's extensive tours and appearances on camera brought his silent art to people around the world. His comic and tragic sketches appealed on a universal level, with each audience interpreting his performance in its own way.
"Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities," he once said. "If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline."
On stage, he charmed with his deft silent movements, a white-faced figure with a striped jersey and battered top hat.
Off stage, with the costume and the pancake makeup removed, Marceau was a slim, agile man whose eloquent description and explanation complemented his mute mastery of mime.
In mime, Marceau said, gestures express the essence of the soul's most secret aspiration. "To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea."
He created the figure of Bip, the melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat, 60 years ago this year.
"The mime artist Marceau will forever be the character of Bip," Prime Minister Francois Fillon said in a statement confirming the performer's death.
"He became one of the best-known French artists in the world. His students and the showbusiness world will miss him."
The exact cause of his death was not immediately known.
Marceau traced his ancestry back through Hollywood silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dell'Arte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylized gestures of Chinese opera and Japan's Noh plays.
RESISTANCE
Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923. He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher. When World War Two came, his father was taken hostage and later killed by the invading Nazis and in 1944 Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance.
He later joined the French Army and served with occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war.
He began to study acting in 1946 under Charles Dullin and the great mime teacher Etienne Decroux, who also taught Jean-Louis Barrault.
It was in Marcel Carne's famous 1947 film starring Barrault, "Les Enfants du Paradis," that Marceau, who played Arlequin, first became known as a mime artist.
He formed his own mime company in 1948, and the troupe was soon touring other European countries, presenting mime dramas. The company failed financially in 1959, but was revived as a school, the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame, in 1984.
A veteran of dozens of films, one of his best remembered roles was a speaking cameo in "Silent Movie," made by American director Mel Brooks.
For Marceau, mime had a philosophical and political level.
One of his most famous sketches was "The Cage," in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape.
In Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, he recalled that audiences understood it as an allegory about capitalism. After the invasion, they saw in it an image of themselves under Russian domination.
"I am a progressive, a man who deals for peace, and who has struggled for enlightenment in the world. I am not just an entertainer," he said.
"I want to be a man who will represent as an active witness my time, and who wants to say, without words, my feelings about the world."
The Frenchman's extensive tours and appearances on camera brought his silent art to people around the world. His comic and tragic sketches appealed on a universal level, with each audience interpreting his performance in its own way.
"Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities," he once said. "If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline."
On stage, he charmed with his deft silent movements, a white-faced figure with a striped jersey and battered top hat.
Off stage, with the costume and the pancake makeup removed, Marceau was a slim, agile man whose eloquent description and explanation complemented his mute mastery of mime.
In mime, Marceau said, gestures express the essence of the soul's most secret aspiration. "To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea."
He created the figure of Bip, the melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat, 60 years ago this year.
"The mime artist Marceau will forever be the character of Bip," Prime Minister Francois Fillon said in a statement confirming the performer's death.
"He became one of the best-known French artists in the world. His students and the showbusiness world will miss him."
The exact cause of his death was not immediately known.
Marceau traced his ancestry back through Hollywood silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dell'Arte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylized gestures of Chinese opera and Japan's Noh plays.
RESISTANCE
Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923. He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher. When World War Two came, his father was taken hostage and later killed by the invading Nazis and in 1944 Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance.
He later joined the French Army and served with occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war.
He began to study acting in 1946 under Charles Dullin and the great mime teacher Etienne Decroux, who also taught Jean-Louis Barrault.
It was in Marcel Carne's famous 1947 film starring Barrault, "Les Enfants du Paradis," that Marceau, who played Arlequin, first became known as a mime artist.
He formed his own mime company in 1948, and the troupe was soon touring other European countries, presenting mime dramas. The company failed financially in 1959, but was revived as a school, the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame, in 1984.
A veteran of dozens of films, one of his best remembered roles was a speaking cameo in "Silent Movie," made by American director Mel Brooks.
For Marceau, mime had a philosophical and political level.
One of his most famous sketches was "The Cage," in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape.
In Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, he recalled that audiences understood it as an allegory about capitalism. After the invasion, they saw in it an image of themselves under Russian domination.
"I am a progressive, a man who deals for peace, and who has struggled for enlightenment in the world. I am not just an entertainer," he said.
"I want to be a man who will represent as an active witness my time, and who wants to say, without words, my feelings about the world."
Friday, June 08, 2007
What the Hell Have You Been Doing?!?!?
Being a blogless asshole!
Okay, so since 30 March.....
1. I started seeing my therapist again. Phone sessions from Vancouver. Helpful. No longer feeling like removing life from my body.
2. I moved to Victoria for a month to do a show out there with an interdisciplinary opera company, and realised that I can, in fact, handle large tracts of text. I also made friends with a fantastic theatre artist from Vancouver (we were roommates), and met some wonderful west coasty people. That city has an air of repressed sexual tension that is a little disconcerting though.
3. I moved back to Vancouver and got a job with another dance company that may have way more work that I'd originally thought, with possible touring opportunities!
4. I did a photoshoot with Yukiko Onley, who is one of the best portrait photographers in the country.
5. I met a boy, and after one date, booked a flight to Prague with him.
6. Continued to date said boy.
7. Sublet my place (lost the tenant, then found another one)
8. Moved into my father's basement (!) at the beginning of June, so as to be in town for a workshop, which fell through, and was rescheduled during my Prague trip, making my relocation unnecessary.
9. Secured work with a dancer in town who I think is utterly fantastic.
10. Got nominated for four Dora Mavor Moore awards for the inaugural show of my theatre company.
.....that's all I got.....
Okay, so since 30 March.....
1. I started seeing my therapist again. Phone sessions from Vancouver. Helpful. No longer feeling like removing life from my body.
2. I moved to Victoria for a month to do a show out there with an interdisciplinary opera company, and realised that I can, in fact, handle large tracts of text. I also made friends with a fantastic theatre artist from Vancouver (we were roommates), and met some wonderful west coasty people. That city has an air of repressed sexual tension that is a little disconcerting though.
3. I moved back to Vancouver and got a job with another dance company that may have way more work that I'd originally thought, with possible touring opportunities!
4. I did a photoshoot with Yukiko Onley, who is one of the best portrait photographers in the country.
5. I met a boy, and after one date, booked a flight to Prague with him.
6. Continued to date said boy.
7. Sublet my place (lost the tenant, then found another one)
8. Moved into my father's basement (!) at the beginning of June, so as to be in town for a workshop, which fell through, and was rescheduled during my Prague trip, making my relocation unnecessary.
9. Secured work with a dancer in town who I think is utterly fantastic.
10. Got nominated for four Dora Mavor Moore awards for the inaugural show of my theatre company.
.....that's all I got.....
Friday, March 30, 2007
Hey, that's ME!!!
Abandonment issues can show up in relationships:
(1) You need excessive reassurance that the other person is not leaving.
(2) You greatly fear being set loose or rejected.
(3) You choose folks who are unstable or not there: out of work, substance abusers, commitment phobes, criminals, workaholics, gamblers, people who live in other cities,the highly ambivalent, chronically depressed, mentally ill
You feel tense, lonely, and uneasy when your partner is away even briefly.
(1) You need excessive reassurance that the other person is not leaving.
(2) You greatly fear being set loose or rejected.
(3) You choose folks who are unstable or not there: out of work, substance abusers, commitment phobes, criminals, workaholics, gamblers, people who live in other cities,the highly ambivalent, chronically depressed, mentally ill
You feel tense, lonely, and uneasy when your partner is away even briefly.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Tired
I'm tired of being tired. So much effort for so little result.
you sound like a very very passionate man, and whomever gets to keep you in
their heart is a very lucky man, happy sunday to you as well.
that's a message from someone who doesn't know me. too bad that anyone who gets to know me finds me insufferable. i'm finding myself pretty insufferable right now too.
you sound like a very very passionate man, and whomever gets to keep you in
their heart is a very lucky man, happy sunday to you as well.
that's a message from someone who doesn't know me. too bad that anyone who gets to know me finds me insufferable. i'm finding myself pretty insufferable right now too.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Uh.....
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I'm feeling suicidal. I had all sorts of fantasies last night of ways of just ending it. I spent a bunch of time staring at a serrated knife that I'd used to cut open a dragon fruit. Also, a bottle of ibuprofen that I just bought was pretty attractive.
Doug was a pussy and didn't come to the performance, and I'm really tired. Like, just exhausted by the prospect of hoping for romantic love in my life. However, I'm concerned by the fact that this leads to me thinking of making like a Christmas tree or spraying blood all over my leaky kitchen or going all grey and doughy in my bathtub or becoming severely anti-inflamed via a bottle of Advil.
I should maybe talk with someone. Or maybe seriously think of mood stabilising drugs.
Geh.
Doug was a pussy and didn't come to the performance, and I'm really tired. Like, just exhausted by the prospect of hoping for romantic love in my life. However, I'm concerned by the fact that this leads to me thinking of making like a Christmas tree or spraying blood all over my leaky kitchen or going all grey and doughy in my bathtub or becoming severely anti-inflamed via a bottle of Advil.
I should maybe talk with someone. Or maybe seriously think of mood stabilising drugs.
Geh.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Faaaaaaaaalllliiiiiinnnnnng!
I'm falling for that man.
We went out for dinner last night after a bit of kerfuffle (mostly inside my own mind, and I later found out, inside his). He thanked me for my patience with him, and told me that he's fearful and finds himself thinking that he feels nothing for me when we're apart, but then sees me and wants to nibble on my ears and that our connection is very strong. And that I would be fine to take to the mayor's house. He says that in most cases, he would have run in the other direction by now. He mentioned some of this baggage. I feel....that it's really worth it. He's very wonderful. It's also nice to know that I'm not the only one who is terrified.
It's curious that I keep falling for charming boys who really like me but are terrified of relationships. Grant. Sasan. Jay. Now this feller. What's that about?
We went out for dinner last night after a bit of kerfuffle (mostly inside my own mind, and I later found out, inside his). He thanked me for my patience with him, and told me that he's fearful and finds himself thinking that he feels nothing for me when we're apart, but then sees me and wants to nibble on my ears and that our connection is very strong. And that I would be fine to take to the mayor's house. He says that in most cases, he would have run in the other direction by now. He mentioned some of this baggage. I feel....that it's really worth it. He's very wonderful. It's also nice to know that I'm not the only one who is terrified.
It's curious that I keep falling for charming boys who really like me but are terrified of relationships. Grant. Sasan. Jay. Now this feller. What's that about?
Sunday, February 25, 2007
I Want To Go To New York
From New York Magazine
Questions for Sunhwa Chung, Artistic Director Ko-Ryo Dance Theater, NYC
Does being a dancer affect your fashion choices?
Yes, definitely. We’re struggling all the time, but in a good way. There is a passion in transforming your body, and when you wear clothes, you need the freedom to express the passion.
How do you create a new dance?
Everything is inspired by my daily life. Maybe later I will make a dance about how I met you guys on the street today. That could be quite inspiring. The photographer was asking me to do very elegant movements, and I was really depressed before the picture, but afterward I thought, This was dance therapy!
Questions for Sunhwa Chung, Artistic Director Ko-Ryo Dance Theater, NYC
Does being a dancer affect your fashion choices?
Yes, definitely. We’re struggling all the time, but in a good way. There is a passion in transforming your body, and when you wear clothes, you need the freedom to express the passion.
How do you create a new dance?
Everything is inspired by my daily life. Maybe later I will make a dance about how I met you guys on the street today. That could be quite inspiring. The photographer was asking me to do very elegant movements, and I was really depressed before the picture, but afterward I thought, This was dance therapy!
