Canada
Tim Cornwell takes a tour of a showcase that celebrates - and also critiques - the Federation’s 150th anniversary
This being Edinburgh in August, there’s a lonely figure in a pigtail, drumming and chanting loudly to the sunset in the New Town garden below my rented room. Alfred Villeneuve, it turns out, is a French-polish-algonquin Canadian artist, drumming out his frustration over 30 oil paintings being stuck in customs at Glasgow Airport the day before his Edinburgh exhibition was due to open at the Scottish Arts Club.
“It was beseeching,” he says. “Being able to drum released a lot of what’s inside, making the connection to the greater part of nature and God, not to fix anything, but to give me the strength whatever happens along the way.” By the morning, it appeared, a solution was close, involving a missing VAT number.
Villeneuve’s exhibition is called Tanakiwin: Home and Native Land. Tanakiwin is the Algonquin word for homeland; “home and native land” comes from the Canadian national anthem, mixing the lexicon of coloniser and colonised. “In the anthem people say this is our home and native land, and of course native people have an issue with that,” he said. But he’s firmly not in the business of “victimisation”; his colourful landscapes are informed by modernist Canadian painters and Western art traditions.
Villeneuve is in Edinburgh independently, but across town an even more comprehensively Canadian operation is under way. At King’s Hall, the renovated church that Summerhall has added to its operation, the energeticcanadianproducermichaelrubenfeld is co-ordinating six productions as the Canada Hub – a showcase “celebrating the best of new Canadian theatre, under one roof ”. It is backed by the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the country’s £128 million fund for Canada 150, celebrating the 150th birthday of Canadian Federation.
Rubenfeld and his performers hope the shared space will mean shows are supportive and reduce the shared stress of getting reviews, press, audiences.
King’s Hall was also firmly on the map last year with Counting Sheep, the talk of the 2016 Fringe. It used Ukrainian choral song, archive news footage and interactive theatre to thrust the audience into the violent Maidan protests in Kiev. It was produced by Rubenfeld, out of Toronto – home to a large Ukrainian émigré community.
Rubenfeld has gone for cutting-edge topics by leading writers, actors and companies tried and tested by Canadian tours and past visits to the Fringe. Siri is a one-woman show on artificial intelligence, through the relationship between one human and her iphone. Foreign Radical, already a strong seller, is an interactive take on terrorism politics in the year of the “Muslim Ban”, where a small audience are segregated by questions that categorise them, from how many people slept seven hours the previous night to who might be building a bomb in their suitcase.
The other topic Rubenfeld has chosen to tackle head on, however, is what it means to have a national showcase, this year marking 150 years since the moment when the British colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were united in a single Dominion.
“It’s an anniversary and a celebration of 150 years of official governmental ownership,” Rubenfeld says, “over a country that often has been built on the back of colonialism at the expense of almost total annihilation of