Critical Perspective of STO Union's 7 Important Things by Michael Thomas Taylor

7 Important Things is a life-story anchored not by what we see, but what we hear. Despite the theatrical framework – scenes of improvisation and role-playing, switching between flash back and talk show, and the symbolic, even archetypical or fetishistic dimensions of its props and staging – the work closely hews to an utterly traditional form of narrative. A single voice chronologically remembers his own life-story, and this life-story becomes a metonym for a generation. Of course, he is prompted and parried, conceived and introduced by another voice that never settles on any single role, but this variety is in fact structured by a very simple principle: it enables him to speak. George’s voice seeks out gestures of authenticity poised between confession, interview, and therapy, and the generic irony of his story is the reason why it resonates with the audience – with our memories of the past and with the everyday realities of our working lives. But it also risks cliché. One wonders about the vitality of a tortured dance across prison-like shadows of a bar code. More fundamentally, the piece represents a deeply conservative impulse: the tragic failure of romantic rebellion and imagination that becomes here the failure of dramatic theatre.

The piece is deeply aware and distrustful of the power of theatrical illusion and seduction, and of course of modern forms of marketing and propaganda. And as an inheritance from Brecht, it also shows us something about the dangers of theatrical absorption – the kind of theatre that draws its audience into the happenings on stage and makes them forget the world for a time. Whether as ritual or escapist entertainment, this kind of theatre risks the destructive and alienating effects of a drug, as self-oblivion becomes self-abandon and the loss of all social responsibility. The piece insists instead on deliberate slowness and reflection, on wry wit, and on the power of therapeutically staged memories that contain these images and this absorption within clearly visible theatrical boundaries and conventions – a four-minute timer, a mask, commands from the director. Perhaps this is an appropriate form to represent the bourgeois origins of the belief that the freedom of self-creation and utopian community would follow from the rejection of authority and convention. But the piece also seems haunted by our age of media spectacle, in which reality TV turns authenticity into the crassest kind of performance. What are we to make of the pictures from George’s past? They elicit a phantasmagoric connection with the soul of a man whom we will never know except as a piece of theatre, and the piece itself never offers us a framework for understanding these documentary interventions as more than evocations of nostalgia. But even the impulse to insist on authenticity as itself a kind of theatre can be timid and uncertain. For me, the final revelation to the audience – a plea to see something, a living presence, denied the reality of what we had just experienced on stage. It also shifted the locus of authentic truth from the performance itself to the director as the ideal spectator. If only we could she what she sees. This is another deeply conservative gesture, and I wonder if it betrays a lack of trust in my imagination. I take Nadia Ross at her word that “each of us has a story to tell, and once we tell it, we fade into silence.” But what I missed was a work that more radically confronts, even suffers, this deficit. Instead, the tragic scheme of the story and the simple redemption it offered left me with an uncomfortable feeling of pity.

Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de

Critical Perspective of STO Union's 7 Important Things by Dr. Natalie Meisner

STO Union fittingly anchors an exploration of the politics of counterculture in the personal story of one man in 7 Important Things. We witness the hopes and dreams of a young George Acheson as he walks away from a life that he sees as drudgery; as he grows his hair, joins the hippie movement and refuses the life in the army that would make his father proud. He had hopes for peace, free love and the creation of “a whole new kind of person” that could possibly emerge out of the web of interconnected countercultural movements of the 1960’s. These hopes are dashed when the hippies sell out to the free market and so George becomes a punk anarchist rather than a duped and branded consumer.

The troupe uses a number of techniques to gently tease the meaning out of the quotidian and to revisit aspects of George’s spent (or misspent?) life. Role playing, flashbacks, and interviewing techniques reminiscent of qualitative research are all deployed at various points in the piece. The audience is acknowledged; made part of the process of meaning making without pandering to us and without poking us just for the satisfaction of seeing us wince. Due to the sophisticated viewing filters of contemporary theatre audiences, this is no mean feat. Ross changes from the role of moderator to that of provocateur to that of various key characters from George’s past with ease. Sections of focused interview and pointed questions about politics and culture are juxtaposed with the replaying of highly personal moments of George’s past.

There is an assumed “we” posed to the audience, which at various points in the performance is skilfully called into question. Do “we” share George’s valuation of work as a way of life as soul destroying? There are certainly some chuckles of recognition in the audience when he describes the mind-numbing environment of muzak and cubicles that marked his foray into the workforce in the mid seventies. And yet we are also called upon to interrogate our ideas about work. Can it bring delight as well as reward? Are there other models than the “necessary evil” with which we can animate our places of work? Doesn’t anyone offer a living wage for something that might fall under the category of a labour of love? If not, then what is wrong with us?

The vague spiritual quest that is mentioned becomes somehow substituted for the many legitimate political demands of the 1960’s protest movements and this feels like something of a shell game. But then again, this very shell game is likely a nod to the way that narcotics were problematically woven into the fabric of the legendary decade of protest. Drugs seemed to offer enlightenment, freedom and rebellion and yet they ultimately sapped the strength of otherwise talented and capable people. They dulled the capabilities and contributed to the conformity of otherwise iconoclastic, and legitimately pissed off young people.

As George lost his way, so did the youth movement of the 1960’s. This is one of the theories posed by 7 Importan Things. And yet, if one listens carefully to the heartbeat of the peace there is something else. Just as we now enjoy a greater degree of freedom, citizenship and equality as a result of the gains made by various threads of the 1960’s counterculture movements, so too has George benefitted from his unorthodox school of hard knocks.

Things seem to come ironically full circle when George finds himself at age 50 cutting hair in a small town and yet the act no longer holds the significance it once did. Now he seems to find his place in society through the offering of a small comfort. He tells us that people feel a bit better about themselves when they leave his chair and perhaps in this simple act he seems to have arrived at his answer; his offering to a world that he’s never, until now, felt part of.

Dr. Natalie Meisner
Department of English, Mount Royal University

7 IMPORTANT THINGS
by STO Union
Oct 14-17/09 4 Shows Only!

7 IMPORTANT QUOTES from 7 IMPORTANT THINGS

1. "The boys didn't believe that the commies were going to take over the world."

2. "Your dollar is your best friend."

3. "The guy who looked normal wasn't trusted."

4. "I loved walking through a crowd of office workers on their lunch break wearing my Sergeant Pepper's jacket and my hair down to my waist."

5. "You cut your hair in '73 because long hair didn't mean anything anymore."

6. "On Friday, they say: 'T.G.I.F.'- That breaks my heart."

7. "TO EACH HIS OWN."

Fluid Festival 2009 at Theatre Junction GRAND

FLUID MOVEMENT ARTS FESTIVAL, October 19 – 25
Select Shows at Theatre Junction GRAND

Physical. Fun. Fierce. Fluid. Calgary’s only festival merging outstanding contemporary dance and physical performance by local, national and international artists.

Hofesh Shechter - a dance sensation from the UK – is an international headliner.
A performance of truly extraordinary beauty and profundity – Probably the most important new dance work to be created in Britain since the millennium." - The Observer (UK)
And a Canadian company also making international headliners - Montréal Danse – with choreographer Sarah Chase create a series of stunning stories with icy imagery.

Chase’s special blend of narrative biography and movement permeate the dancers. Known for their fresh audacious approach to contemporary dance, Montréal Danse performs accessible and exhilarating work.
Our outstanding international, national and local performers astound with their unique imaginations and confound with their emotive physicality. And share their expertise through artists talks and workshops.

Critical Perspective of Compagnie Marie Chouinard's Orpheus and Eurydice by Natalie Meisner

Orpheus and Eurydice contains many of the trademark Chouinard elements:
otherworldly simmering sexuality, gravity defying lifts and leaps, utterly committed physicality, and costuming that highlights the conflicted and conflicting forces that meet at the site of the human body. Chouinard’s choreography is provocative and demanding. It causes us to rethink the limits, not only of the performer’s body, but of the human body. What is our own body, after all? A package, a possession, a prosthesis, an object, or a point of contact with the outside world?

The piece evokes both the devastation of tragedy and the bawdy roots of comedy. This is especially noticeable in the hilarious, sensual, and oddly touching segment where the dancers wear (or are worn by) their oversized phalluses which seem to almost pull them across the stage cavorting and sliding singly and in pairs. In keeping with its point of departure, the work evokes the roots of comedy with the Satyr: a high spirited companion of Pan/Bacchus, part human and part bestial who, in Greek mythology, roams the woodlands in search of erotic adventure.

There is an interesting physical/spiritual dialectic at play here about the nature of erotic connection. The electric joy visible in the dancer’s physical choreography and facial expressions seem to celebrate multitudinous copulation while the use of minimalist staccato music and robotic gesture underline the mechanical and even the dance macabre aspect of sexual acts.

The summary of Orpheus and Eurydice on the overhead screen seemed beside the point and risked reduction and packaging of the myth rather than enlarging upon it. Both the placement of a dancer in the audience and the device of pulling the words out of the dancer’s bodies seemed overused and conventional methods of enlarging upon the distinguished tradition (Artaud, Handke , Sarah Cane, Carolee Schneemann, etc. ) of audience confrontation. While Orpheus and Eurydice might lack some of the bite of her earlier work, this piece is worth the experience, especially for those who haven’t yet confronted the heady mix of dance, performance art , high fashion, musical experimentation and spectacle that we have come to expect from the reigning queen of the avant-garde.

Dr. Natalie Meisner
Department of English, Mount Royal College

Orpheus and Eurydice article from All The Best Things Magazine

Tuesday was the opening at Theatre Junction GRAND. Orpheus and Eurydice takes both the performers and the audience on a wild journey of the senses. From the opening moment to the final piece, there is something going on stage that is felt and experienced, a visceral experience for both the performers and the audience. The communication progressed into a dialogue, each reaction by the audience created a stronger connection that built into the crescendo of the final scene.

There was a feeling in the room like a spell was cast on the audience. When I occasionally took my attention off the performers and onto the audience, I saw a collective group mesmerized, and glued to their chairs. There was no movement. It was as if each and everyone’s senses were being so fully absorbed that their bodies were rendered motionless.

Earlier on Tuesday I had a chance to speak with three of the lead dancers Lucie, Dorotea and James and these are some of their thoughts on Marie’s work for them. There is a deep exploration through Marie’s work a lot of possibilities, layers and pockets that allow you to go deeper and deeper, accessing subconscious states. Marie’s inspiration changes every time, continually blossoming throughout the whole creation of the piece its completion and even after. If she was a painter she would sneak into a gallery that held one of her finished paintings every night adding another brush stroke, continually adding a new element. Past works, even pieces that are 10 years old are still being modified as no piece is ever fully finished.

Marie is focused on the dancer’s body, and is in tune with movements that are pleasurable to the senses and body that the dancers can have fun with. This creates a comfort and openness, and allows for change and new creation each performance. She has really found a way to find joy and out of her work, an amazing edge without being a tortured artist. It is seen as a process by all involved in the creation. Dancers have a great trust and love for her connection with the dance, dancers and the audience.

I personally love when I see something that makes me want to connect with others and discuss what I have witnessed because there is so much to share, whether it is joy, sadness, anger or any other emotion. After the show a packed room awaited full of people sharing their thoughts and insights. The woman I shared the evening with was full of observations and questions, and so was everyone else who visited our table. The place was buzzing with excitement. If you are looking for a feast of the senses that entices and offers a new way of experiencing and seeing the world this is for you. Calgary is blessed that Marie Chouinard’s work continually shows at this beautiful venue. Performances like this will be talked about for a long time.

Ari Hershberg, All The Best Things Magazine

Critical Perspective of Compagnie Marie Chouinard's Orpheus and Eurydice by Michael Thomas Taylor

What we got in last night’s performance of Orpheus and Eurydice was eros on stage: as in last year’s revival of Chouinard’s Rite of Spring, the company explores the primordial drives and energies of myth as the foundation of modern theatre. But this new theme is more deliberately artistic: Orpheus marks not only one of the most essential myths of poetic creation and loss but also, with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), the birth of opera. It is telling that this opera was rediscovered and performed in 1905, as part of the same explosion of artistic energy that produced the avant-garde primitivism of Rite of Spring. The smashing of the classical forms that had come to define the rituals of European theatre went hand in hand with the canonization of Orpheus as the figure through which theatre imagines its origins.

Yet in re-telling this story Chouinard loses Orpheus much the way Orpheus loses Eurydice when he looks back. The piece leaves it open as to whether the singer looks back out of fear, audacity, or sheer desire; and at one point it makes us, the audience, into Orpheus, rendering Eurydice—her loss and the lament it provokes—an object of our desires, too. Mouths become one enduring sign for this loss and the pain of this lament: mouths gaping open, making ghoulish and senseless sounds; offering entryways and exits for ingestion and reanimation and for passage to the sexual organs, and exposing the dancers’ bodies to the torture of being pulled inside out. These openings cut a void through the center of the piece’s highly stylized vocabulary of carnivalesque and ecstatic gestures and movements, and above all, through the dancers’ faces, which display an amazing gamut of extreme expressions. The effect is both fierce and silly, and what appears bestial and demonic can turn quickly into vaudeville or magicians’ tricks. This is a work that knows it has put a myth on stage, and that all stages have barkers, however high or serious the art. For Chouinard, the Orphic myth thereby becomes a prism to articulate the desires set free when modern dance ritualizes and formalizes essential, everyday movements of the body, and to register the displacement and spectacle—the shared experience of the body—that result when these movements become theatre.

Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de