Ann and David Powell, aka Puppetmongers Theatre, have been delighting audiences for nearly 40 years with their extraordinary and innovative puppetry creations, fusing strong storytelling with their quirky sense of humour and technical wizardry. At the forefront of puppetry arts in Canada, the award winning Puppetmongers have created 12 original shows for both young audiences and adults, and have toured extensively in North America, Europe and the Middle East. They are 5 time recipients of Citations of Excellence from the Union Internationale de la Marionette, and winners of both the Award for Excellence and the Presidents Award from the Puppeteers of America. Closer to home, they are 2 time Chalmers Canadian Play award nominees at their productions have received 11 Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations.
For March break, Puppetmongers Theatre presents The Brick Bros. Circus created and performed by Ann Powell and David Powell, March 12th to March 17th.
I ask Ann Powell ten questions: five about herself and five about her work with her brother David.
Puppetmonger Ann Powell
1) Which of your parents do you resemble (what’s your nationality / ethnic background)?
Bits of both really, in looks and habits (both the good and the not so good). The family background is “British”, combining English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, maybe Irish and who knows what else.
2) What is the best thing / worst thing about what you do?
The best is that I get to play for a living. The worst is having to do all the business of Selling what we do to make that living.
3) Who do you like to listen to or watch?
Mostly I enjoy quiet, to be with my own thoughts and ideas. If I do choose music to listen to, I’m likely to choose something from the Renaissance or Baroque periods. When it comes to TV, I’ll watch anything that grabs my attention – a good movie, an interesting documentary on TVO, occasionally a series like 30 Rock…
4) What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?
A more retentive memory would be good.
5) When you’re just relaxing (and not working) what is your favourite thing to do?
I do enjoy baking. And reading. And having the time between sleep and awake to let my mind drift around problems and plans.
5 more questions concerning the upcoming presentation of Brick Bros. Circus.
1) How does performing Brick Bros. Circus challenge you?
It’s up to us to persuade the audience to suspend their disbelief and see ordinary building bricks as the highly trained circus artistes they really are. It’s also a bit of a work-out as the bricks are quite heavy!
2) What do you love about the puppets you’ve created for Brick Bros. Circus and what you’ve written for them?
That we didn’t have to create puppets at all – friends volunteered bricks holding down jobs in their gardens and as doorstops, and auditioning trips to the local building yard keep us stocked with the rest.
The script is tongue-in-cheek circus banter, to invite the audience in on the silliness of the show – for which of course we had to attend a lot of circuses for research.
3) Do you have a favorite moment or section in Brick Bros. Circus?
That’ll partly depend on each audience’s reactions and response: if the audience is particularly enjoying an act, then it’s a lot of fun playing it up for them. I do though quite enjoy the wild brick in its cage…
4) How do you relate to Brick Bros. Circus as a modern brother/sister?
Modern, huh?! Some have said our work looks like we inherited it from our parents, that there’s something of an old fashioned sensibility about it. That said, this show that we built for fun more than 30 years ago is still opening audiences’ eyes to what else puppetry can be.
5) Is there an influence you’d care to name, a particular artist or an ensemble whose work you especially admire?
So many, in my getting-longer-every-year life – where to begin… Felix Mirbt was the first to open our minds to how much more puppets and puppetry can do and be in theatre. Theatre de Cuisine… Velo Theatre… Bruce Schwartz… Steve Hansen… amongst many.
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Puppetmongers Theatre presents The Brick Bros. Circus
created and performed by Ann Powell and David Powell,
March 12 th to March 17th, daily matinees at 2:30 pm.
Puppetmongers’ Studio, 401 Logan Avenue (at Dundas east), Toronto.
For family audiences: Ideal for adults, and children aged 4 and up. Tickets: $12 at the door
EXTRA: Post-show Puppet Making Workshops after weekday matinees
Suitable for children aged 5 – 12, $10 per child.
Info: www.puppetmongers.com or call 416-469-3555
A singing teacher I know tells me that he always gives a speech to his students early on. It’s about the math, the reality of having a career in opera, when there are so many people studying, so few actual jobs.
This is some of the subtext for Opera By Request, William Shookhoff’s Toronto-based project to give the surplus talent opportunities to be heard singing operas in concert with piano. Bill is a wonderful pianist who has already produced fifty operas in five short years, responding to those requests from singers.
Tonight was a kind of fifth anniversary / fiftieth opera celebration, a sparkling reading of Verdi’s Don Carlos. Although Shookhoff has on occasion brought in choral collaborators, on this occasion Verdi’s grandeur was mostly supplied by Shookhoff’s piano, the soloists and our imaginations. Opera By Request’s usual venue of College St United Church felt appropriate considering the religious context for the story, a political struggle in the time of the Spanish Inquisition. It’s not the first time this opera made me breath a sign of relief to be in a predominantly Protestant country with a clear separation between church and state.
Working without chorus I found myself thinking that maybe the quest for textual authenticity that governs operatic fashion worldwide might be a tad misguided in making the Five-Act version (heard tonight) the norm. Minus the chorus which is at best a divertissement in the first scene (aka filler), not an essential piece of action, we watch Carlos the Infante approach Elisabetta, declare his love, and then literally moments later discover that she must marry his father (King Philip II) instead. A relationship that was never consummated and has lasted perhaps 5 minutes isn’t much upon which to build an entire opera. So in other words, maybe the tradition of the four act version that begins with Carlos telling us of his heart-break is the better idea, at least dramaturgically. Sometimes (this time!) the earlier version of a work that is discarded or changed, is left behind for good reasons.
That being said, we heard some wonderful singing tonight from one of the strongest casts Shookhoff has ever assembled, in an opera full of great solos & ensembles.
Tenor Paul Williamson
Paul Williamson was a wonderful Carlos, singing with no sign of fatigue whatsoever in such a huge taxing role. Always Italianate, with a gorgeously shaped line and wonderful musicianship, I hope to have the opportunity to hear him again.
Michelle Minke’s Elisabetta was every bit as musical, her voice often luscious sounding, and at times breath-taking in its beauty.
Monica Zerbe’s Princess Eboli was a great crowd-pleaser in her two big scenes, both vocally & dramatically. Steven Henrikson’s Rodrigo was splendidly sung throughout, including a heart-rending death scene.
The climactic scene between the Robert Milne’s King Philip II & Larry Tozer’s Grand Inquisitor, and their two powerful bass voices, was one of the highlights of the evening.
I didn’t miss the orchestra, as Shookhoff led a wonderfully tight performance.
Opera By Request return April 20th with Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro, and Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress May 5th. Before you know it, they’ll reach 100.
Ann and David Powell, aka Puppetmongers Theatre, have been delighting audiences for nearly 40 years with their extraordinary and innovative puppetry creations, fusing strong storytelling with their quirky sense of humour and technical wizardry. At the forefront of puppetry arts in Canada, the award winning Puppetmongers have created 12 original shows for both young audiences and adults, and have toured extensively in North America, Europe and the Middle East. They are 5 time recipients of Citations of Excellence from the Union Internationale de la Marionette, and winners of both the Award for Excellence and the Presidents Award from the Puppeteers of America. Closer to home, they are 2 time Chalmers Canadian Play award nominees at their productions have received 11 Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations.
For March break, Puppetmongers Theatre presents The Brick Bros. Circus created and performed by Ann Powell and David Powell, March 12 th to March 17th.
I ask David Powell ten questions: five about himself and five about his work with his sister Ann.
Puppetmongers David & Ann Powell
1) Which of your parents do you resemble (what’s your nationality / ethnic background)?
I was always a bit more like mom. The family is from England – though dad has Welsh blood a few generations back, and mom may have Scots a few farther back – but she was born in Sarawak (N. Borneo – then almost a part of the British Empire).
2) What is the best thing / worst thing about what you do?
The best is having fun being creative, the worst is the grind of having to make a living doing it.
3) Who do you like to listen to or watch?
My music interest is mainly Asian: Javanese Gamelan, Persian and Indian classical, Chinese Guqin etc. Watching? Other people at work; image/visual theatre; Cohen Brothers movies etc
4) What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?
That one is simple: natural business skill – requiring no arduous training to get there.
5) When you’re just relaxing (and not working) what is your favourite thing to do?
Daydreaming is pretty good, but I also really enjoy cooking – mainly Mediterranean styles and Indonesian/Malay
5 more questions concerning the upcoming presentation of Brick Bros. Circus.
1) How does performing Brick Bros. Circus challenge you?
The bricks are pretty heavy and have sharp corners – and they sometimes resist what I am attempting to get them to do. One March break we played at the AGO, a Kung-Fu brick ripped my thumb open – the show went on, clenching the cut shut, and I had five stitches in it after we took our bows. And I don’t believe anyone in the audience noticed!
2) What do you love about the puppets you’ve created for Brick Bros. Circus and what you’ve written for them?
They are very easy to acquire – Ann is out buying a small load tonight, as we always have to replace at least one of the Kung-Fu contestants each show (those darned Kung-Fu bricks again!).
3) Do you have a favorite moment or section in Brick Bros. Circus?
I am pretty fond of the whole thing! The contortionist brick is pretty special, as is the Cirque-au-Lait sequence…
4) How do you relate to Brick Bros. Circus as a modern brother/sister?
Not sure how modern a brother I am – been at the sibling job for almost 60 years now… But we started the Brick Bros. Circus in 1978, and with the occasional change in acts and quite a few repairs, it seems to still be very current – electrically so with the right audience! We toured it in Newfoundland last Fall and it was a blast.
5) Is there an influence you’d care to name, a particular artist or an ensemble whose work you especially admire?
Puppeteer & director Felix Mirbt
Puppeteers whose work I have admired and enjoyed would be Felix Mirbt, Le Theatre de Cuisine, Old Trouts, Sandglass, Bruce Schwartz, Julie Taymor, Paul Zaloom etc etc.
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Puppetmongers Theatre presents The Brick Bros. Circus created and performed by Ann Powell and David Powell,
March 12 th to March 17th, daily matinees at 2:30 pm.
Puppetmongers’ Studio, 401 Logan Avenue (at Dundas east), Toronto.
For family audiences: Ideal for adults, and children aged 4 and up. Tickets: $12 at the door
EXTRA: Post-show Puppet Making Workshops after weekday matinees
Suitable for children aged 5 – 12, $10 per child.
Info: www.puppetmongers.com or call 416-469-3555
The Canadian Opera Company will be offering a pair of one act operas in their spring season that have some things in common.
Both works are set in Florence.
Both works are based on literature
Both have a character named “Simone” (they’re men by the way)
They were written roughly a year apart
And while they’re sharing the same bill and will appear on the same stage, that’s maybe as close as they’ll get to one another.
Alexander Zemlinsky
Both Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy (or Eine florentinische Tragödie) have literary antecedents.
Puccini’s comic masterpiece takes a small episode in the thirtieth canto of Inferno as subtext, spinning a story defending someone Dante consigned to one of the deepest places in hell.
The opera Zemlinsky gives us, in contrast, is of the genre Literaturoper: an opera based on literature, namely the play by Oscar Wilde (you can read it here). The libretto is not exactly the same as the play, but Zemlinsky’s setting is essentially faithful, as with other examples of Literaturoper, such as Salome or Pelléas et Mélisande. No one quibbles about the insignificant discrepancies between the play and the opera.
Zemlinsky’s opera is not yet well-known, although this will likely change in the years ahead as it is programmed more and more, and people become acquainted with its late-Romantic glories.
In contrast, Puccini’s opera boasts one of his most famous tunes.
Conducted by Andrew Davis, and directed by soprano-turned-director Catherine Malfitano the COC production of these two operas opens on April 26th. The popular tune I spoke of –“oh mio babbino caro”—will be sung by Canadian soprano Simone Osborne.
I couldn’t help noticing an odd symmetry at the Academy Awards in February 2012.
Two films won equal numbers of awards (Hugo won five, as did The Artist)
Both films concern the early decades of cinema
One film is set in Paris while the other is set in Hollywood
The film with French stars (Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo) is the one set in Hollywood, while the one with English stars (Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jude Law) is set in Paris
Having heard the buzz I saw The Artist a couple of weeks ago: because I wanted to see the film that was likely to win all the awards. I passed up Hugo because the trailer didn’t inspire me, and nobody I knew seemed very interested.
Now, having finally seen Hugo, I confess I am surprised. I don’t understand why Hugo didn’t have more impact. While The Artist was clever, I think it was over-rated. Perhaps Jean Dujardin did deserve his best-actor award, even if his job in this film is complete unlike the task facing the other nominees. I feel disappointed that the Oscar for best original score goes to a film whose composer arguably opts out of the most climactic moment of all: employing a passage from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Vertigo. While we’re at it why didn’t Stanley Kubrick win for best original score, for 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Maybe I am old-fashioned, a sucker for sentimentality, although in that case you might wonder why The Artist didn’t move me more: a film with several moments to tug at the heart-strings. And as an opera fan who loves to cry at absolutely any opera (including operas where nobody else cries), why am i resisting the film? I suppose I felt manipulated, and not in a nice way. Overall I wasn’t especially impressed.
In the next few years I know I will see both films again. I will try to keep an open mind. But I doubt The Artist will ever move me as much as Hugo has already moved me. I believe that it’s common knowledge that Scorsese has an interest in the preservation of old film stock. Does that somehow make Hugo less impressive: knowing that the director was attempting to persuade us that film is precious and irreplaceable? I came into this film knowing his beliefs and still came away a complete convert to his cause. Is there perhaps some resentment that the film is trying to convert its viewers? I don’t understand why Scorsese wasn’t given more credit. It’s not the first time I have been dumbfounded by the Oscars, and I am sure it won’t be the last.
Dark Matters is every bit as mysterious & profound as its portentous title. The work was conceived, directed & choreographed by Crystal Pite, presented by her company Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM (KP are supported by Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain)
Choreographer Crystal Pite
In the intersection between dancers & puppets, between bodies that live and bodies that only seem to live, there is much to contemplate. Although I spent the first few minutes of Dark Matters intrigued by this interface, the longer I sat watching –and contemplating—the more I became convinced that the materials employed by KP were incidental to deep questions that Pite wanted to explore.
Dark Matters is in two roughly equal but contrasting sections. The first is a world inhabited by humans and puppets, while the second is a dance composition; while the vocabularies & dramaturgy are different (e.g., one uses a set, the other a bare stage) they inform one another, as if they were the Old & New Testament, or text and subtext.
I was preoccupied with mechanics for the first part. I think that when puppets are part of a choreographed work by dancers, you get something substantially different from what you get in a work created by puppet-makers. And to answer the question in the headline (What does Dance know of Puppetry?), “a great deal.” At the risk of over-simplifying, I am reminded of the classic distinction made between actors of the English & American schools. Brits allegedly work from the outside in, which for me corresponds to what I see of the talented builders & manipulators such as Puppetmongers. Kidd Pivot, on the other hand, remind me of method actors, the way they seem to move the puppets from the inside out. For example, the Kidd Pivot puppet seems always oriented towards the ground and the law of gravity above all: as if the puppets were themselves bodies that need to move and lift themselves. I couldn’t help noticing, in passing, how much better posture the KP puppets have, even when making a slouch, than I will ever have.
KP gave us humanity, puppetry, and those classic black puppet manipulators we’ve seen before, but never really notice, the ones who place and move puppets. Pite gave us some genuine what-if questions to ponder. Once we’ve accepted the reality of those black manipulators in the life of a puppet, what happens if we consider whether humans also have something comparable. This is nicely underlined by a brief sign we see that first says “this is fake”, and then is re-assembled to say “this is fate”. Where the black figures begin in the neat place we usually assign to them –controlling the puppet—Pite messes with us, problematizing the equation.
Pite probes some deep questions about life with the help of puppets, humans and those creatures in black. In the second section, which is mostly dance, the movement is still largely informed by interactions between humans who move, and who touch one another and themselves, in ways informed by our awareness of our dichotomy between being alive and yet being objects. We are alive yet in some ways we are like puppets, both in our ability to be manipulated, pushed, controlled, and simply in our corporeal reality. And in the touch between bodies and/or objects, wondering if there is any transcendent meaning, Pite offers her answers.
Next up for Canstage: Marivaux's Game of Love & Chance
Speaking of matters of life and death, Matthew Jocelyn has been presiding over a kind of rebirth at Canadian Stage Company since taking over last year. The younger than usual audience tonight is a good sign, and likely what he’s hoping for as he seeks to rebuild his subscriber base through a season that’s wonderfully multi-disciplinary. The CanStage season is now liberally spiced with dance (not just Dark Matters) and music theatre works such as Beckett: Feck It! to go with their spoken word plays such as the Marivaux play Jocelyn will direct in April. Whatever else one might say, I know a buzz when I feel it and hear it.
Dark Matters is inspiring, a piece to energize and excite anyone who’s looking for a stimulating evening in the theatre. Catch it if you can, continuing at the Bluma Appel Theatre until March 3rd.
There are so many things going on in Move(me)ant. The Marat/Sade Occupied that it helps to be a good multi-tasker. Its first public preview Tuesday February 28th gave us much more than a play. This student production at York University in Toronto claims to be “the world’s first interactive play,” combining live performance that we see before us in the flesh, while also glimpsing the same actors captured on camera through one of the social media channels (either on one of the huge screens within the theatre space or on your own personal device). And some occasionally contributed their own content to one of the interactive pathways such as ustream, twitter or facebook.
And that one paragraph isn’t even enough for a descriptive preamble. Adapted from Weiss’s play Marat/Sade (the full title is immense) by student Dan Pelletier, the interactive Marat/Sade Occupied is modernized on two broad fronts:
Pelletier re-frames Weiss’ play around the Occupy Wall Street scenario, complete with tents, cops, and media coverage
The interactive element of social media already mentioned
With such a rich smorgasbord everyone’s show will be substantially different. Some people were clearly immersed in their virtual world, heads down, while others (me for instance) concentrated more on the live experience. And the nature of the online response –including messages from remote viewers– changed the nature of our experience in the theatre. Even so, the big screens at either end often gave an instant replay two to three seconds after the fact of anything happening live on the stage. One didn’t know where to look, in this flood of fascinating images, sounds, songs, dancing figures, and yes, echoes of what we’ve seen so recently in the news.
Aleksandar Lukac
Instructor and director Aleksandar Lukac must be proud. As a teacher of political theatre, what better way to show the students than to turn the stage into a kind of cultural laboratory?
If this is the future of live theatre –not just allowing you to keep your phone on, but allowing you to photograph the show and submit comments or pictures throughout—there’s likely to be a learning curve. For instance I should have realized that a photo of Charlotte Corday as she walked by in front of me would be blurry (fool that I am). With a rowdier crowd the line between performers and audience might have become blurred, whereas this friendly first-night group was very polite, indulging the performers. It’s too early to have any real sense of how this kind of theatre works, except to observe how exciting and new it all felt. And while the behaviours of the audience on this occasion were very much up for grabs –because there are no real rules, at least not yet—conventions develop with usage.
Some of the choices left me wondering why. The Marquis de Sade is a woman, Marat is a strong healthy man, played by Pelletier himself. Was that because Pelletier himself wanted to utter Marat’s lines himself? It was certainly Brechtian to make Marat so strong, even as he complains of his wasting disease. I found myself playing devil’s advocate, wondering how the play might read –modernized or not—with different approaches to the genders of the two leads:
Staying with the usual pair of men in the leads invites comparison with every other production, and so I could see why one might want to change this up
A pair of females? which would be what one might expect in a theatre school setting, normally a place where the talented women outnumber the talented males two or three to one. By changing both genders one at least partially takes gender out of the equation
A female Marat with a male de Sade? To me this might have been optimum, and perplexing, but of course not this time…
There’s so much in this adaptation –both the occupy component and the social media circus—that I think one could present it several times before one exhausted the possibilities. For me the most interesting aspect of the adaptation by far was the ballad opera re-settings of several popular tunes, sung by members of the cast. In particular, a group of four females working as a kind of chorus were the best thing in the show. Maybe it’s just me, but I find shouted slogans –especially those slogans that we’ve heard over and over again—less persuasive than an ironic twist of a familiar song. That the songs were sung well made it that much better. As Lukac mentioned in his recent interview, “Lea Pehar has orchestrated all the original and new tunes with the help of singers Julia Heximer, Katarina Kovacevic, Catherine Garisto and Christina Helvadjian. ” In all versions of Marat/Sade one usually sees a struggle between the rational discourse of the political dialogue vs the irrational elements of the madhouse and the music; but in this adaptation there is such an urgency to the struggle (possibly because it’s contemporary, possibly because it’s so densely layered & complex) that I found solace in the musical interludes, those four women offering the one solid bit of sanity & order we can cling to as everything else goes to hell.
On this occasion –in a preview largely among family and friends—I felt Marat/Sade Occupied had not yet found its real audience. The music was powerful, yet the audience was sitting impassively, rather than clapping along. Partly that may be due to the power of the singing, which was so good that it silenced a crowd who could just as easily have been clapping in time. Perhaps that’s part of the learning curve, getting comfortable, although I suspect that with the right audience, a very different dynamic will likely emerge, where the audience unites with the performance and joins the actors in occupying the space.
Move(me)ant. The Marat/Sade Occupied continues at Theatre Glendon, every night at 7:00 pm until March 3rd or online via the following social media channels:
Richard Wagner figures prominently in the Canadian Opera Company’s plans. Two Wagner operas, not one were announced for the future.
You may have missed any mention of the second opera. The announcement of the 2012-2013 season (a year of world-wide commemoration of the centennial of Wagner’s birth) mentions that the COC will be staging Tristan und Isolde.
But there’s another COC Wagner opera, a co-production.
Film-maker and opera director Francois Girard (click picture for an interesting interview)
This week, the Metropolitan Opera announced that among their new productions, François Girard will direct Wagner’s Parsifal. Their online brochure includes a brief interview with Girard and a glimpse of the design.
But the production will see the light of day long before next season. In fact in less than two weeks, on March 6thOpéra de Lyon will give the premiere. Their website includes the following magic words:
In other words the COC will be the third of the three partners to present the work. I’m excited by this for a number of reasons:
The COC has never co-produced with the Metropolitan Opera before.
Girard is the third high-profile Canadian director to make a recent Met debut (last season’s was Des McAnuff, while Robert Lepage takes on his sixth opera next season, since his debut in November 2008, an extraordinary output by any standard)
Girard will renew his collaboration with Michael Levine, who designed Girard’s COC Siegfried and Oedipus Rex/Symphony of Psalms in the 1990s.
image from Opera de Lyon’s website for Girard’s production of Parsifal (linked to their website)
No, we don’t know what season it’s being presented. We don’t know who will play any of the parts. But I’m still thrilled.
As I remember the elegant simplicity of Girard’s ideas for Siegfried (as you can glimpse in the photo, in this NY Times review), his powerful Stravinsky double-bill from the 1990s, again informed by wonderful simplicity, I get very excited about the upcoming Parsifal. With luck, the Met will make Parsifal one of their high-definition offerings, and we’ll get a peek at Levine’s set. Even if the COC are the third to get the production, we’re in good company.
Former Artistic Director of the National Theater, Belgrade, Aleksandar Lukac has directed close to a hundred professional productions internationally including Yugoslavia, Holland, Canada and Serbia. Lukac has also been an Artistic Director of Theatre Zoran Radmilovich and the independent political theatre, Plexus Boris Pilnjak, which was a catalyst of political controversy in Belgrade in the years prior to the civil war. He has been awarded Best Director at The Festival of Serbian Theatres a record six times. Notable Canadian productions include ARC’s North American premiere of Family Stories-Belgrade, Hong Kong Idea Festival bound Unicorn Horns, Company of Sirens’ Black Magic and a series of productions at Talk Is Free Theatre including Bulgakov’s Moliere (Kiev Festival) and
Milosh Rodic (left), David Dodsley and Dusan Dukic in Talk is Free Theatre Inc.’s dramatization of Molière, adapted and directed by Aleksandar Lukac. Photo by Susan Benoit
Ivan vs. Ivan which has recently returned toured Europe including Moscow, London and several cities in Serbia. Lukac is in a process of completing his PhD in political theater, while he holds two Master degrees in Drama and Directing from U of T and York University respectively. He currently teaches at York University. He has recently also revisited Serbia where the productions of Newcomers, Victor Or the Children In Power, Master and Margarita and the most recent, Brecht’s Drums In the Night, keep garnering media attention, festival invitations, and awards for production, acting and design. At Glendon College he has taught Brecht’s Epic Theater for a number of years.
Next week, Lukac will be opening a new adaptation of Weiss’ Marat/Sade, called Move.(me)ant. The Marat/Sade Occupied, as part of the political theatre course at Glendon College incorporating not only the current politics of Occupy Wall Street, but social media whereby the audience’s comments and Twitter dialogue with the actors will be displayed throughout performances (for urls see below).
Aleksandar Lukac
1) Which of your parents do you resemble (what’s your nationality / ethnic background)?
I think I resemble both of them to a certain degree. The best way to describe my background is Bosnian Serb. Born in Sarajevo to a Serbian/Russian combo. Don’t ask.
2) What is the BEST thing / worst thing about being a director?
The best thing about being a director is to feel that you hold a certain control over the overall creative process. That is also the worst thing, as you have the most responsibility for the result. Of course, for me the first outweighs the second, every time.
In terms of the differences of being a director here and in Europe I think I never really became a director here. I was always a European director “on loan” here. Very long loan. Directors in Europe have or take far more liberty with the text and related materials then is customary here and that really used to put me in weird situations. I don’t think I can successfully change to fit a more conservative approach to theatre, so I stopped trying. I am glad that I have the opportunities that I have to “flex” my European directing muscle when I can (in independent productions, student shows, as well as in Talk Is Free Theatre) but I have really refocused on working back in Europe/Serbia. The theatre there is still extremely vital and I find that I don’t have to muzzle my process in as many ways. It has also brought me several exciting shows in the past few years – including Drums in the Night, and Master and Margarita – both scripts that would be impossible to direct here for many reasons including the economic ones. Large casts, huge sets – relatively obscure or non-commercial plays. Long live state sponsored theatre! While it lasts!!! We should really try that model here – it actually works – providing you agree that art, and theatre specifically, is of any importance for the society.
3) who do you like to watch or read?
I love watching Polanski, Kubrick and Fassbinder. And Will Farrell. I know. Don’t judge – I am being brutally honest.
As for playwrights it is so hard to keep up because there are many coming from different countries, finding very specific voices – changing and reshaping everything theatre. It is great to have access to these materials and even entertain possibilities of production.
4) what ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?
To play music and sing. Write an opera.
5) when you’re just relaxing (and not working) what is your favourite thing to do?
Really? ‘Tis love one must give. And take. But working in theatre is that too.
Five more concerning Move.(me)ant. The Marat/Sade Occupied.
1) How does adapting & directing Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade challenge you?
I answer this question in more detail later. A student of mine has written the adaptation. The crucial moment was when we made the decision to live-stream the production and invite live comments via Twitter, Facebook and Ustream. This decision gave the basis for the adaptation because we incorporate a lot of actual news items and documentary footage into the show. The strategy is carpet bombing of sound and information bites. We are trying to leave as much stuff unfiltered because we don’t even trust our own filters.
2) what do you love about Marat/Sade and this type of theatre?
Well this is a prime example of a highly sophisticated intellectual theatre that also has great entertainment potential. It juxtaposes several concepts of revolution in a brilliant interplay of historical and theatrical contexts. I would almost say that it is too complicated for a contemporary audience’s expectation because it requires some previous knowledge for full enjoyment. However, it also works on multiple levels so you are sure that there will be something for everyone.
The concept of involving the audience across the world via live/stream hinges on the enormous interest and impact the Occupy movement has created. I am hoping that the Twitter, Facebook and Ustream lines will be very busy with comments on the movement itself as well as our take on it. It is really a variation on the many themes that Weiss has already explored in the original text, juxtaposed with the very different and original revolutionary sensibility of Occupy. So, the production of Marat/Sade Occupied really is not concerned with a specific message. It wants to provoke an international mash/up of so many different influences, opinions, representations and misrepresentations (both malicious and not), all triggered by the terrible economic and political situation the world is in.
I think we are facing crunch time in terms of the freedoms of expression and maybe even more importantly, the dispersion of expression, so one should enjoy the fact that we can reach all of the world from a college stage and ask some very important questions. And, possibly, get some answers.
I have two tech wizard students, Andrew Gould behind the live-stream and videos, and Allie Gardiner handling the Twitter, Facebook and Ustream messages, making sure that if there are answers we get to hear them, read them, and share them with the world.
3) Do you have a favourite song or moment in the play?
This is actually a very musical play. We are using some of the original score and a number of contemporary songs with lyrics changed to fit the play. Lea Pehar has orchestrated all the original and new tunes with the help of singers Julia Heximer, Katarina Kovacevic, Catherine Garisto and Christina Helvadjian. At this point my favourite has to be “Because I Got High” – with the lyrics changed to “I was going to Occupy, but I got high, I got high, I got high…”
4) how do you relate to Marat/Sade Occupied as a modern man?
Well, I found that the key to the “modern man” bit is to listen to the younger generations. In fact the original play was adapted (I might say very well) by Dan Pelletier who is a student in the course. The problem with political plays is that if you had been doing them a long time (as I have, albeit in different countries) you risk remaining in a frame that you have built yourself. The times are really changing and the “enemy” has long learned how to incorporate or simply spin all the traditional tools of political theatre. (I call this the “inoculation” of the opposition. The theatre does what it can to stir up the thought process – sometimes even shocks the other side but the absorption of that shock allows the opponent to be stronger the next time) So you have to be always ahead of the game and this show is an attempt to do exactly that. The issues of the original Marat-Sade may not be the issues of our Canadian audience – although they may be much more adequate in some other parts of the world. But the issues of Occupy hit much closer to home (even though there is a firm school of thought out there which argues that this is a very American event with not much to do with us here). Of course I disagree and during the rehearsal process I think I made the discovery that my students share some or a number of concerns raised by the movement. If we manage to engage our audiences both in the theatre and online in a live discussion about all of these issues – I guess I can consider myself a “modern man”. Please note that the actors in the play will see all the comments as they are streamed into the show and will be able to answer them – hopefully providing for a very live, interactive dynamic. So here are our links – I hope your readership can join us at:
Ustream: http://199.66.238.56/user/occupytg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/OccupyTheatreGlendon
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/OccupyTG
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/OccupyTG
5) Is there anyone out there whose approach to Marat/Sade you particularly admire, or who has influenced you?
I love Peter Brook’s version. It is so beautifully theatrical and such a serious analysis of all of the aspects of the play. You rarely today see a play that carries such weight in it.
Move.(me)ant. The Marat/Sade Occupied adapted by Daniel Pelletier from The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, by Peter Weiss
Directed by Aleksandar Lukac
February 28 – March 3.
2275 Bayview Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4N 3M6
Telephone: 416-487-6722
Theatre Box Office: 416-487-6822 www.glendon.yorku.ca/theatre
I just saw Queen of Puddings Music Theatre’s production, in association with Canadian Stage, of Beckett: Feck It! You hear a title like that and you may well wonder what they were thinking, what they were trying to say.
I thought the title was an attempt to humanize a playwright who is if nothing else, challenging. Beckett’s not for everyone, sometimes difficult to decode. As a fan of Queen of Puddings (QoP) my tummy lurched a bit when I heard about this project; so perhaps the title is an attempt to assuage our fears. At first glance B:FI! appears to be a pragmatic hybrid, parts grafted together for no clear reason. And when you cook something in a pot and don’t know what to call your concoction, you may well say “feck it” either in jest or frustration.
Last year QoP gave us Svadba, a song cycle trying to leverage something operatic out of its lovely world. The brilliant pragmatic move was to commission an a capella song cycle. This not only eliminated a colossal expense (the orchestra & the complexities of rehearsal time), but probably shortened the development cycle for the work, which had already seen the light of day in other versions.
This time? QoP gave us four short Beckett plays sandwiched around a song-cycle in German by Andrew Hamilton plus two short trumpet interludes. I was reminded of the Canadian Opera Company‘s production of The Nightingale and Other Tales, an evening cobbled out of several short works by Igor Stravinsky, including instrumental solos (for clarinet in the case of the COC work) & songs. As with the COC evening, these four plays are rarely staged because they can’t fill an evening.
I loved the four Beckett plays, especially Play, which was a bit of a tour de force (did the cast do their own lighting cues? How else could they synchronize: which is to say beautifully). I wonder if I would have liked them so much without the additions made by QoP.
Soprano Shannon Mercer
The songs take it to another level, as if they were the heart-beat or the subconscious underlying the words in the four plays; Hamilton’s logic matches that of Beckett. The emotions in these plays are often arbitrarily split between two personas as if the two were aspects of the same person, divided on the stage. The manic back-and-forth we get in the plays happens in these songs as well, only this time, crazily veering back and forth inside the same performance from one person, namely Shannon Mercer. Her singing was wonderfully tuneful and fastidiously on pitch throughout even as she veered between precision and wildness, containment and explosiveness. Whenever she appeared I felt the work probe deeper than it had during the plays.
As I listened I thought of older practices in music theatre, echoed by QoP. Number opera is nothing if not pragmatic, a segmented discourse allowing one to rehearse different parts separately, and, at least in the old days, to substitute when you didn’t like what was offered. And substitute they did, unfazed by the language barrier.
The relationship between the music and the plays is problematic, to be sure. This is a sandwich, but I wondered which is the bread and which is the meat? For pure intelligibility the plays were easier to digest, like an operatic recitative, whereas the songs were like arias, giving us a more reflective discourse. I am thankful that Toronto audiences have an appetite for ambiguities & challenges, voraciously devouring whatever is set before them.
QoP’s Beckett: Feck It! continues until February 25th at Berkeley St Theatre.
1) How does performing Brick Bros. Circus challenge you?
barczablog 