THE HIDDEN CAMERAS will be headlining the music series and performing a two-act performance each night at The Lower Ossington Theatre (100A Ossington) on August 5th and August 6th. The space is quite intimate, and tickets are limited.

Tickets are on sale now at Rotate This, Soundscapes and artsboxoffice.ca / 416.504.7529 DO NOT MISS THIS SHOW

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
-Plato

Imagine a room where between shows you can come and play. A room with toys of all sorts, technological and otherwise where you can try out wacky ideas or watch someone else do it. A place full of “toys” that let your imagination wander for a short or long time.

Designers Beth Kates and Ben Chaisson are trying to do just that by turning the front rehearsal hall of the Lower Ossington Theatre into an interactive installation. The room will be lined with state of the art equipment such as projectors, screens, cameras, headphones, speakers, mixers, microphones, and a large assortment of “conventional” toys (like action figures, Lego, blocks, balls, hula hoops, sand table, etc). Participants will get their hands on the technology and witness first hand the adaptive technologies out there for the performing arts. What you choose to do with them is up to you! Don’t be intimidated, you will have guidance and help in the form of Beth and Ben or one of their associates. Based loosely on Montessori and Waldorf Education techniques of self-guided play, and a long history of goofing off, Beth and Ben hope to allow the participant to explore and create but most importantly to have fun. SummerWorks audience members of all ages are invited at almost any time of the day to come and play. Stay for as long or as short as you like, but come often as the playground will develop throughout the festival and will be quite different day to day. The playground is also a process of discovery for the facilitators who will need your feedback to see what works and what doesn’t.

Along with the interactive side, The Playground has asked the amazing Natasha Greenblatt, Cara Gee and Dan Daley to help with some programmed events. There will be a quiz night, games day, scavenger hunt, dance-class, music-video-making, “video games”, an iPhone app orchestra, and other games that will bring you back to your childhood in a 2010 kind of way.

Beth and Ben also invite performance artists to contact them at theplayground@summerworks.ca if they have an idea they would like to explore with this technology and our guidance. The playground is a place for everyone to play – even serious artist type play!

So, hey! Everyone! Plug and play with B & B! Bring your gadgets, your media, and your tricks to the playground to explore your ideas. Bring in your own “toys” and see what you can do with them with other people and their toys. Expect the unexpected, and most importantly have fun!

“When we come together to play and be we are truly ourselves When we are truly ourselves it is wonderful and when we act collectively in that wonder we do transformative work for our community and our world.”
-Brad Colby

The absence of diversity in theatre is remarkable considering that its promotion seems to form one of the main goals of cultural activity around these parts. Anand Rajaram in Works (issue #2): “Casting a black male as King Lear and setting the play in Djibouti is not diverse… A piece of theatre that claims to be diverse needs to be so in substance, not in artifice.” And instead of helping, institutional grease results in work in which an artist is “a pawn in the exchange” of political correctness. What is anyone to do?

Rajaram: “So yes, I do demand to be treated like an equal. And, yes, I will form my own ‘ghettoized’ theatre company and festival. But it will only exist so long as there is a larger ‘ghettoized’ system of exclusion.” It made me a little sad, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Rajaram’s conclusion till some time later, last fall, when I heard a parable about it as I was sitting, of all places, in the theatre.

Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce is not something I would have imagined relating to diversity at all. Irish father, Dinny, lives in London with his two sons. Every night the three compete for an “acting trophy” – bestowed, and inevitably won, by Dinny himself – while re-enacting the story of their exile in panto style. Apart from trips to the supermarket for props, the three never leave the house. All goes well till helpful young Haylee appears with a forgotten shopping bag, and we learn that young son Sean is starting to doubt his dad’s story… Such a work could easily appear emblematic of the “system of exclusion”, another brick in the ghetto wall. But thankfully things are more complicated.

Try to see this moment of terrible shock when Haylee, who is a young Black woman, confined and coerced into the play by White Father Dinny, having first been made to don housedress and red, Irish-Lass wig, finally has the colour of her skin lightened with the soothing cream Dinny regularly applies to own his bald pate. It’s one of those rare moments of social danger that occasionally appear in theatre. The audience gasps in horror, and then time resumes: Haylee’s face becomes a white negative, Dinny crows, “Much better”, and the reenactment continues at knifepoint; while I begin to understand something about the achievement of diversity in theatre in Toronto.

It’s in that horrified gasp. Of course one could say that Haylee’s whitefacing was affecting because it represented an abhorrant, identity-effacing act of violence, but I think Walsh’s excellent writing was doing more than merely trading on the conditioned ideological responses of the audience; I think that we were gasping in horror because the representation of violence-to-diversity that we were witness to actually made us feel nothing.

This is truly frightening: not that diversity should be insulted, but that it should be challenged as a value – and that’s what The Walworth Farce does. The strength of this challenge is a result of the writer’s trust of form and clear-sightedness of subject. It’s articulated in the character of the violence Haylee suffers, and from the character Haylee herself – who is little more than a plot device. She’s victim of an accident. She just gets caught in the violence that Dinny’s family has suffered, and to which the play-acting of their identity myth is desperate defense. Dinny’s act, of which he’s barely aware, is completely alienated. So what we see in the whitefacing moment isn’t a display of ignorance or racial hatred or delusion – it only refers to these things. Far from a hate-crime, Dinny’s act is the reflexive, survival-instinctual response of any poorer person in any present-day, liberal-democratic society – any person who derives spiritual sustenance from the fiction she must sustain about her lost homeland. What Walsh offers is a rare chance to note the difference. The moment when Dinny slaps his scalp cream onto Haylee’s face is the moment we realize that he and the boys have themselves been wearing whiteface their whole lives. Such are the naked workings of diversity’s production-house, down in the basement of liberal democracy – the violence that is the extended logic of a cosmopolitanism in which diversity is valued more highly than economic equality for persons. This, of course, is the situation in which we live; and this is the position our official culture espouses – in theatre and everywhere else too. This, I think, is what explains the experience Rajaram writes about and his consequent proposal of “ghettoized” cultural seclusion. One might even say that, by the logic of liberal-democratic cultural diversity, that’s exactly the proposal he’s supposed to make.

Diversity without equality is just one of the dismal endpoints of global capitalism. Can the achievement of diversity then be said to be a worthwhile goal in art – or anywhere else? The answer, of course, is no – not without first trying to see what we do not know we are doing, identifying what forces the achievement of diversity serves, and recognizing that diversity is made substantial only in relation to other goals– goals like togetherness.

Theatre that’s capable of this substantiality can’t be about how we’re trained to feel. It has to be about the way we actually feel about our differences. And this can only be discovered when artists work to create forms and situations that keep us doing and seeing truly uncomfortable things – but doing them and seeing them together. I’m writing this as I remember the last act of The Walworth Farce: Haylee’s would-have-been lover, Sean, the only survivor of the family, foregoes his own exit from the desolated, bloodsplattered apartment. Instead, he takes on Haylee’s role: he begins to play her. In other words, he begins to stage his own, contemporary adaptation of The Walworth Farce; blackfacing himself, he founds as it were, his own ghettoized theatre company and festival, and that’s when the play ends.

* Not Stefan nor your SummerWorks lighting plot

Me: Hey Stefan, would you write a profile piece about yourself for the next issue of Propaganda? Like what questions do you always want to answer but never get asked…

Stefan: Questions, questions, questions.... I’ll look to see what was written last year. Right, nothing. I remember now trying desperately to avoid having to do this (write a profile) last year claiming overworked and out of time. Lindy, you got me this time by asking early enough that you knew you would get something out of me this year for the festival. I’m still overworked, and still have no time, but really once the show is up there is much less for me to worry about all of the sudden. Such is the life of the lonely festival production manager. Eight months of the year, the festival inbox is dark and I think to myself its the perfect time to work out how to make this years festival even better. If only the rest of my inboxes were so dark. So questions that need to be answered but are never asked. A selection of the most common ones:

Do I ignore your emails? Well I wouldn’t say that I actively do, more of an oversite that I then ignore until weeks gone by when something triggers my memory (usually another email asking if I got the first one). If I’m persistent enough I can usually drag it on over several email reminders. But actively ignore, nope certainly not.

I’ve got a large set, can you want to store it for me? Ahhh, that age old question of what to do with the size of your set. Some may disregard the suggestion to use stackable items or even that they aren’t the only show in theatre space. Surely the other companies who’ve read up on the tech package won’t mind if I store the front end of a roadster for my Acapella version of “Grease, 40 minutes or less” It’s on wheels, just roll it out of the way... Umm how about we say no on that one. Be considerate and share the space, karma’s a bitch and she’ll bite back. I’ve got scars in places that are better left unmentioned.

So I’ve got matches, this length of rope and a harness, I’m thinking that I’d like to .....? Stop right there. The burlesque festival happens in November, we should talk then. Fire is amazing, it looks great, gives off interesting shadows, smells totally awesome, is irreproducible artificially, why wouldn’t you want to use it. I can’t think of many good reasons not to avoid fire, except that its dangerous. You can plan all you want, but it won’t help when the drape that you forgot was part of the masking wasn’t properly flame retarded and the insurance company is on the phone. Remember its not just the prop that you’re setting fire to, think about what you aren’t setting fire to. Is the costume that the actor is wearing flame proofed? Now you’ve added an undergarment to the costume because most retardants are irritants to the skin. Fire Marshall’s these days do take random walkthroughs of performance spaces. If you’re lucky its just a matter of proving you’ve flame proofed via certification. If you aren’t lucky, you could face many delays and even cancellation of your show.

To be continued....
Maybe.

SummerWorks will be handing out two new awards this year:

1. The Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Vanguard Award for Artistic Innovation and Risk - $750.00
2. The National Theatre School Design Award - $750.00

And stay tuned for the launch of “20 words in 60 seconds”.
Check out our blog everyday starting July 1st to see video previews of the 2010 SummerWorks line-up.