‘To this day it proves difficult to disassociate my first experiences in town with the look in the eyes of the woman with the murderous boyfriend’
Last week marked the conclusion of the 29th High Performance Rodeo, the One Yellow Rabbit Performance Company’s annual theatre festival in Calgary. I was flown to the city partly to speak at the latest Walrus Talks event and partly to perform during HPR. They were two odd gigs in an odd city, but it’s what I’ve come to expect. Ever since I’ve been travelling, Calgary has proven to be among the most complex places in Canada: a conservative foothold made up in American (well, Texan) blush while wearing a frightwig of cultural expression, and defined as much by its progressive mayor as the faceless multi-corps that tower above the city centre. That, and some of the most interesting artists I’ve known.
Arriving in Calgary for the first time in 1987 was to wander at the terrifying frontier of a city that didn’t know how to deal with its contradictions. The first time I ever performed in Calgary was at a war-zone bar called the National in Inglewood (long since gentrified and latte’d into the “Nash”). Walking across the burnt carpet and toward the bent, half-wrecked stage, a woman approached one of my bandmates and told him not to go into the washroom because her boyfriend was waiting there to kill him. Our visit to Calgary had come after the joys of Winnipeg and the friendly Prairieness of Regina/Saskatoon, so the grimness of the National was hard to stomach. To this day it proves difficult to disassociate my first experiences in town with the look in the eyes of the woman with the murderous boyfriend.
When we weren’t surviving shows in Inglewood, we were seeing amazing bands in amazing clubs. At the Uptown Cinema, we hatched a plan where, after our last song, we would disappear from the stage and run around to the front entrance, letting ourselves into the lobby and onto a little stand rigged with a kit and amps. When the crowd emerged from the hall, we played our encore, and if the ploy would have been lost on other music lovers, it wasn’t lost on Calgarians. They’ve always been among the most elastic-minded fans.
If Toronto and Vancouver boast about their reputations as centres for contemporary theatre, neither have One Yellow Rabbit. I probably would have never been interested in theatre had I not come across its performers. They demystified the idea of the stage; what it could be used to say or do. Still savagely independent after three decades, the Rabbits are exceedingly normal and engaging in what has always been a distant and difficult world.
My gig for HPR was attended by all kinds of people. I sang terrible things about Stephen Harper, but people applauded and cut me slack. The next day I was part of the Walrus lineup. The night was great, but the thing I’ll remember most was transgender instructor Viviane Namaste’s talk. Under the soft lights of the Jack Singer auditorium, 1,100 mostly white Albertans — many of them men — listened to Namaste talk about murdered prostitutes and the genocide of the patriarchy. She ended her talk on the steps of the stage with a few words about violence. And then, wild applause from Cowtown.