Shows get chance to develop, at an early stage
In last week’s Wednesday Matinée, Carly Maga wrote about the emphasis on “creative risk” at the 2018 SummerWorks Festival through the festival’s new Lab series, in which companies showcase work in development.
Curious about what it’s like for artists to undertake that risk, I went to see two Lab shows and met the artists behind them.
They’re two very different artistic propositions.
bluemouth inc.’s Café Sarajevo Episode 1 is a complex piece involving multiple layers of narrative and technology. The audience observes the recording of a podcast that jumps off from a famous 1971 televised debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault and folds in 360-degree virtual-reality footage of a trip by bluemouth’s co-artistic directors Stephen O’Connell and Lucy Simic to the Bosnian capital, all in the interest of asking timely questions about whether there are such things as absolute justice and absolute truth.
Birdtown and Swanville’s Hot Cuts is a more traditionally recognizable piece of theatre: a new play written and directed by Aurora Stewart de Pena about behind-the-scenes drama in a 1980s mall hair salon. The show’s temporal setting and esthetic were inspired in part by what de Pena and producer Mark Aikman note as downtown Toronto’s current infatuation with things ‘80s (“people seem to be having a Tears for Fears moment right now,” says the playwright/director).
However distinct their projects, both companies emphasize that getting the work on its feet and talking to audiences afterwards is a principal value of being in the Lab that, in both cases, paid off.
“With audiences you get a sense if things are flowing, how the energy is going forward in terms of the story or the experience. You can make adjustments and change quite a bit,” says blue- mouth’s Simic. In the first weekend of its SummerWorks run, the company focused on content — what were the Café Sarajevo audience members taking away about the material and themes? — and in the second on spectators’ experience of technology.
The company works through nonhierarchical collaborative creation and O’Connell says they consider themselves “more like a band than a theatre company” making work that is “sort of like sets.”
“It’s modular — you can switch the pieces.”
“Something that’s come up with this project specifically is how many layers can people process simultaneously, and how we (want) to craft that journey,” says O’Connell. How to tell stories that integrate so many forms of technology “is really new,” says Mariel Marshall, a bluemouth associate artist and producer who appears in the show. “What are the new rules we are going to teach people? We don’t have the answers, but we are trying to figure it out.”
As they continue to work on Café Sarajevo, says O’Connell, a focus is going to be on spreading out the material: “we consciously tried to squeeze as much as we could into 50 minutes so we could learn as much as we could.” While waiting for confirmation of further funding, Simic says that bluemouth “knows what we’d like to develop” as the piece moves forward.
Birdtown and Swanville’s project was in one of the earliest stages of development of any SummerWorks show; de Pena describes it as “fresh, brand new.” Putting Hot Cuts onstage at this point, says Aikman, added to the “ever-expanding circles of people with whom we’re talking about the work.” “When I begin writing a piece,” explains de Pena, “it’s wild and there are a lot of themes and a lot of characters. This sounds insane but I usually begin by transcribing conversations that I have in my head. There is a sort of quiltwork exercise of understanding how it all fits into a world. And it’s useful at this point to begin having conversations about what the overarching themes of the work are.”
The pair mention a number of friends and colleagues from the theatre scene whom they were happy to see in the Hot Cuts audience. One artistic director engaged with them in conversation afterwards about what she read as the HIV-positive status of a central character, while a critic wrote to them later to say that she identified capitalism as a big theme.
Both were valuable points, agree de Pena and Aikman. With their depiction of 1980s they’re trying to capture “an odd moment of optimism and style,” says de Pena, amidst the darkness of the AIDS crisis and the blossoming of a rampant consumerism that may have been “the tipping point to this crumbling we’re experiencing right now.”
One aspect of the Lab experience that gave Birdtown and Swanville pause was having its work reviewed alongside the more fully produced SummerWorks Presentations series. While SummerWorks’ artistic and managing director Laura Nanni confirms that the Lab companies knew that critics were invited to write about their shows (and requested to bear in mind their work-inprogress status), this information did not flow to all members of the Hot Cuts ensemble. De Pena says that finding out their work had been critically evaluated on a rating scale took some of their actors by surprise and “was kind of demoralizing.”
Had she to do this over, de Pena says she’d resist putting the work up for review: “There’s a sort of finality that feels like the wrong approach for a work in progress,” particularly given that the company had only 150 tickets to sell for the whole run. “We are not necessarily trying to fill seats. What we want is dialogue.”
Nanni says this is a “complicated conversation” and one she intends to expand on following on from SummerWorks, with an interest in exploring the possibility of different forms of written and spoken critical response to productions in upcoming iterations of SummerWorks and its wintertime sibling festival, Progress.
“I see the works as very much a starting point for conversations, and it’s also about community-building,” says Nanni. “I hope that it sparks the opportunity for people to connect sometimes over difference and not just similarity.”