A Farewell to Armes

After 7 years as part of the 'junction' team, we say farewell to General Manager, Carol Armes. Carol was part of the project to renovate the historic GRAND Theatre and was instrumental in developing Calgary's culturehouse of contemporary live arts. We wish Carol all the best in her future endeavours and continued success.
Her presence will be greatly missed!

Critical Perspective of The Country by Dr. Natalie Meisner

On the surface Martin Crimp’s play seems to plunge us into the most quintessential of middle class dilemmas: the revelation of sexual infidelity in marriage. This narrative arc usually includes the ramping up of jealousy and distrust and ends in a bitter quagmire of smashed dreams, unravelled love, and eroded empathy. While these elements do appear in The Country, both the script itself and Theatre Junction’s production dissect the cliché to reveal far grittier conflicts such as the breakdown of communication and the sheer brutal power of language itself to inflict and precipitate wounds of various kinds.

Crimp’s dialogue is a fast ferocious barrage that, for all its formal beauty, leaves no character (and likely no audience member) with an illusion intact about the inherent goodness of human nature. Richard and Corinne have moved out to the country together to raise their children in pursuit of a pastoral dream of innocence and rebirth and yet each character’s ironic stance toward such dreams foreshadows this impossibility. As the play unfolds their dreams and the dream home the couple live in (built in a restored grainery!) are revealed as a battered and flimsy shelter incapable of withstanding the intrusions of Richard’s mistress Rebecca and dangerous double life.

The spatiality of the house is exploited to underscore the way that Richard attempts to keep the dissonant elements of his world separate. He and Rebecca have an agreement that includes total secrecy and separation that is punctured when he becomes worried about her safety and brings her to his home. The extent to which the separation has been executed is underscored when she asks the children’s names and he replies that they don’t have names. It is unavoidable that Rebecca meets Corrine and Richard’s lies are hauled out into the clear light of day. And yet he still tries to preserve something: Rebecca may not pass through the children’s room. She wishes to have a shower, but to do so she would have to walk through the last bastion of innocence and perhaps stain it with her presence. The desire for purity, cleanliness and innocence here are reminiscent of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (2004).

The association between sleep and innocence is powerfully interrogated. While the young woman is asleep the wife can find empathy for her, but she becomes somehow monstrous upon waking. The children sleep and as long as they are awakened they can remain in the blameless unknowing state of bliss/ignorance. If they are not awakened they cannot hear their father’s story: A story that in no way resembles a bedtime story. If none of us are awakened we need not be troubled by the fate of the young woman. We need not wonder at the harm she might have received at the hands of a man of healing (another layer of irony) as Corrine asks Richard whether he gave Rebecca something to help her sleep, or to make her sleep. It is hard to commit a crime in your sleep although you can be made complicit if you are literally or figuratively sleepwalking.

The ambivalence of Richard’s position is underscored by the economy of gift giving in the play. A delicate, beautiful watch is given to the mistress while the risqué high heels are given to the wife and both gifts, in way are destined to become objects of desire and aggression.

Crimp has created three intensely intelligent characters whose modus operandi is to use the other two as verbal and emotional punching bags. Husband and wife work one another over with verbal jabs and rhetorical low blows that ironically end up showing us not why they should part company, but why they are destined to stay together. We are witness to the perverse delight they find in one another, a delight akin to peeling a scab or sucking a wound. Rebecca, far from being an unwitting victim of the abuse of power at the hands of a pillar of the community, is instead an intelligent iconoclast with her own challenging views about history and her own set of problems may involve but are not fully created by Richard. She is not a device of plot.

In terms of pacing and delivery, links could be made to David Mamet, but Crimp worries less about teasing and pleasing the audience. There is a flying-without-a-safety net or a grasping-in-the-dark-quality to the way that Crimp uses symbolism to expose the workings of power that, for me, has affinities with post-realist Caryl Churchill. Structurally this piece does not adopt the additive “anything goes” approach that some postmodern plays do. Instead it riffs powerfully upon our narrative expectations. A thematic element is introduced and then elaborated upon not through deductive reasoning, but through the logic of the tangent and the peripheral … like great jazz.

This play is not about keeping up appearances and it is not about staying together for the kids, although both of these ideas are present. It is an odd and an unconventional portrait of a marriage that highlights the tangled web of desire, want/need and addiction and scorches (or is scorched by) the life of a young woman with big ideas.

The skilled delivery and complex character work of the Theatre Junction cast is evident throughout. Byrne and Thiriet steer clear of the too easy “cat-fight” tone that could gloss over the very real conflict between the two women and this allows them to lay bare the fascinating inner workings of their characters, while Lawes resists the temptation to turn Richard into either a victim or a monster. The cast use words like weapons, as the cruelty of Crimps text demands, but they also nuance their characters with a multifaceted vulnerability. We somehow never lose sight of the fact that these weapons could blow up in their hands at any moment.

The set design is elegant and sparse, introducing a powerful visual vocabulary that underscores the notions of complicity and framing that are so central this play. This is a must see for those in search of an intellectual and aesthetically challenging theatre experience.

Dr. Natalie Meisner
Department of English, Mount Royal University

CLICK HERE to buy tickets to THE COUNTRY

Critical Perspective of The Country by Michael Thomas Taylor

In this staging of The Country, a series of four dialogues played in a single room, the intimacy of Martin Crimp’s text is zoomed up to loom large over the audience. Julie Fox’s richly austere set has outsized the proscenium – usually absent in Theatre Junction – into a frame that disappears as it engulfs. Within this space, the first scenes play out across rectangles of light running across and up – a set of stairs, a solid wood table extended laterally through the wooden floor – that project axes on which the characters contest duels of “violence, cruelty, and sexual competition,” as we read in Mark Lawes’ concise introduction. The first scene assaulted me with its energy, which exploded inexplicably but relentlessly out of its questions and cross-questions. Mark Lawes is balled and pugnacious, Fiona Byrne desperately deliberate and contained, and it matters little that only one of them draws blood. The tight, delimited space of the theatre has always held a special power to represent the claustrophobia of our domestic worlds and the psychological dystopias we create at home. Crimp is compressing dramatic tradition in reducing and restricting this inner world into a theatre that is absolute because it performs only dialogue, and his text gives no directions to frame this performance beyond the sparse naming of several objects: “A large room, wooden chairs, an old table.” The play could be performed in cinematic close-ups, or on a runway where characters speak past each other, or directly at the audience. But here, in a space simultaneously centered and pushed off kilter with shadows, I found myself dizzied as if its pettiness had suddenly become twenty feet tall.

It was the words that made me most dizzy. Having read the play in the afternoon, I had the sense that they persisted from the text not as ideas or thoughts, but as things. Sharp, lightweight things – like the syringes in Rebecca’s bag. This was at first an effect of Crimp’s dialogues and the clarity with which they were performed. Crimp forces apart the banal weapons and damaging effects of intimate quarrels: the formulaic rejoinders, habitually defensive or aggressive, that come tumbling out of one partner before the other has finished; the duplicity between what is said and what is left unsaid; the swift punches that land square because their angle of attack is oblique. The work centers on these fissures. In Crimp’s most celebrated play, the baffling and post-modern Attempts on Her Life, the title’s heroine exists only in a dismembered state of seventeen identities. The effect of Crimp’s dialogue in this piece, superficially less avant-garde, is similar. The characters are effects of the exchange – flashpoints where words manage to hit their mark and make their violence visible. And when the words do claim a certain weight, when they seem to refer to solid and heavy things outside in the world, or to flesh, they express desires of belonging, of finding some place in the world, in which the voice metamorphoses into the landscape it bespeaks.

This outside is Crimp’s country, which the text imagines to be wet: a glass of water from the kitchen, the sounds of a shower upstairs, or a moist landscape of moss and fell. It is tasteless, pure, absorbing, cleansing. The third character Rebecca, played with corrosive vulnerability by Raphaele Thiriet, embodies the only way in or out. For me, the strength of this performance was to frame this threshold as the violent pivot of the play, and to anchor our view firmly in this frame.

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

CLICK HERE to buy tickets to THE COUNTRY

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.