if . . .

Rain & alchemy. On the seventh day it rained all day. All day the water washed the collective mind we inhabit. A chair & a mirror were assembled & the space creaked a little more open as a blind, bowl & sheet shone. Simple utilitarian items that together make living less harsh. The day before we had traced a path to Choisy-le-Roi where hung from an enormous ivy entwined tree two aluminum sculptured pieces by Louise Bourgeois . At first they resembled beehives but on closer examination were two bodies wrapped around each other. Or were they mouths being gagged? Named " The Welcome " they identified the newly married, especially emigrants from all around the world: "... are you welcome. Or are you foreigners we want to get rid of? " The streets were relatively empty and plums fell from sidewalk trees. In the evening a huge embrace from Robert Bresson's nephew followed by beer & cheese and talk ranging from renowned French geog...

Summer afternoon by the Siene. Once you've seen Cezanne apples you can't look at apples the same way again. Really? She tells me she doesn't have a plan. There is worry on her face and she jokingly corrects herself. When you walk the streets of an old world city do you feel the ghosts of history oppressing the space within? Why do we want to capture ourselves in the picture of Notre Dame? A child plays the Play Me I'm Yours piano in Hopital Hotel Dieu as we seek solace from the unknowable. Bandages and silent corridors of people murmuring in black provide relief. But when the sky opens on the Pont au Change bridge the Seine flows through the radiance of the panorama of the city with it's golden domes and white stone walls and the talk on the spirit of place, how objects or closed spaces contain the past, dissolves. How deep is the Siene? Pass the backside where you dare not walk at night trying to identify the year of the blue doored building, its splen...

Viewing Monet's Nymphéas series at the The Musée de l'Orangerie , In the Tuileries gardens, Paris is a deep meditation of a sustained practice on the presence of light ... ... the Water Lilies panels change moment by moment under the natural light filtering in through the daylight sky ... the serene movement of the eight curved walls (Morning, The Clouds, Green Reflections, Morning with Willows & four others) within the two white elliptical rooms is broken only by the awkward jerky humans walking through the Gallery ... an education of the eye ... Look to where the light reflects. Look with peripheral vision. Move slowly & enter the color. Be still & breathe with every movement. Adjust the gaze & release. When you are empty smile. :: Note :: ... we immerse ourselves for two hours bathing in the "decompression space" ...

... The Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf Conference  yielded two open parts to their program. A play & poetry reading: Angel in the House by Eureka at Greystone Theatre presented by the University of Saskatchewan Drama Department & poet Louise Halfe/Skydancer  reading at the Mendel Art Gallery ... ... what I love about conferences, though I was not a participant, is the research aura that surrounds these events ... a celebration of research ... both events ultimately revealed treasures of knowledge ...  ... just some simple notes afterwards ... ... who was Bloomsbury? Eureka? ... the play was partly " an exploration of the gender and sexual politics of Bloomsbury, her intellectual/artistic circle ... Bloomsbury's interdisciplinary nature ... Woolf's friends, family members, and colleagues suggest how a combination of academic work, artistic production, and political analysis can articulate itself through public engagement." ... " a ...

Workshop Impulse concluded .  Awkwardly first described as Towards Action (from impulse through association to elements of inaction) the ten day sessions ultimately examined the practice and vocabulary of Joe Chaikin and the creative actor. "I felt a terrific longing for a kind of ensemble," Mr. Chaikin told author William Goldman, for the book, "The Season." "I wanted to play with actors, actors who felt a sensitivity for one another... In order to come to a vocabulary, we had to teach each other: we had no ambitions other than to meet and play around... " ( Playbill ) The days submerged into seven investigations: space, place, territory, emblem, sphere & zone, occupation & inhabit.  The individual body & voice training exercises moved subtly into acts of mapping and connection forming constellations. Words flowed from reflective actors lips: spontaneity, silence, source, partner, community, ether and beacon. Fra...

Workshop: Towards Action  (from Impulse through association to elements of inaction) Participants: Stefan, Kristen, Jared & Andrew Monday, May 21 - Friday June 1 @ The Temple 7 - 9 pm. Day 1:  Space:  Introduce Centering, The Plastiques, Cat and Voice              fundamentals of breath, chant & body connection. Vigil. (Stefan, Kristen, Jared & Andrew) Day 2:  Place: Centering multiple times with movement together. Floor work.             Establishing place & enter with exchange. (Stefan, Kristen, Jared & Andrew) Day 3: Territory: Searching connection/ contact. Weight & Balance.              The inner dance & the solo. Dancingness. Silence. (Stefan, Kristen, Jared & Andrew) Day 4: Emblem:  Entering the space one at a time.  Breath and Vibration ...

Plato said the human soul is composed of reason, will and desire.  Throughout all my experiences in theatre-making it has been the ensemble which is the backbone of the process & paradoxically the most neglected and unrecognized aspect of  the "work".   In my mid-twenties in Vienna, as a member of AMoK, Zbigniew Cynkutis , founding member of the now legendary Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre , chastised us in broken english, "You don't know your places. Listen to each other. Acknowledge each others role within the group and you will be more creatively strong."  These thoughts surfaced reflecting on the latest incarnation of Skit Skit   following their seventh show Skit Skit Unplugged . They are a sketch comedy ensemble working together now for four years and for this show were five: 1. Big, brash, bold & egocentric, 2. Lively, fun, relaxed & selfless, 3. Studied, sharp, smart & driven, 4. Intense, fall guy, outsider & ...

It has become a part of a way of looking at playing the play. Developed over the years & seems time now to open and share. SoulWork: An Associology experiment on the play Grass Tomb by Oh Tae-sok . A Drama 119 class experience at "The Temple" (studio in Saskatoon) conducted by Raymon Montalbetti with music AeRan Jeong. Text Actors encounter a play. Read the playwrights text. Follow stage directions. Research the setting, the time & the place. Prepare to build a character. Create a role. Listen to the vision of their co-workers. Uncover emotional landscapes. Imagine a life. All this is known. It is the skin and bones, the tissue and muscles, the senses and thoughts and the heart and breath of a play and playing. What about the soul. I mean the soul of the play. Everything unknown beyond the play boundries. If a play has a soul how ... Peter Brook writes in the Empty Space : "In the theatre 'if' is an experiment." SoulWork is a noe...

The end of term brings final presentations.  A Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program ( SUNTEP ) group chose to play with the tool blacklight . They told a story of the creation of the medicine wheel. Mixing a natural animal soundscape with Electric Powwow  The Creator: 4 Medicines   a piece of disarming simplicity emerged to reveal untold depth. There was no narration just movement, sound & image. They affectionately called the music "dubstep powwow". The presentation ended with members of the class making a medicine wheel which glowed in the blacklight as seen in the photo. Within the written documentation was a deeply personal statement. Shared with permission. "A personal account that I had with a Sacred Eagle was last August.  Last August my 18-year-old cousin was traveling from Saskatoon to North Battleford when a tire blew. They did a 180 and landed in a ditch. My cousin got out of his vehicle and noticed there was an Eagle sitting...

This past winter term I conducted nine two hour sessions, once a week, with a highly creative, enthusiastic & energetic group of twelve Grade Three to Grade Six youth. Each session we explored materials and/or form: traditional (meaning rooted in the oral ways) storytelling, shadow plays, puppets, masks & fabric, hoop dancing, ribbons, creating a scene and playmaking. For our last session we returned to the source. I invited each to bring a story. It is a sign of the times that the youngest brought her self composed story on an iPod. The most intriguing "story" was scratched on a six inch diameter round clay circle wrapped in tinfoil displaying the story through pictograph. She called it a badge . (The shape was similiar to the picture though her scratching was not a natural representation. This was an art/social studies school project. Kudos to her teacher!) I was reminded of ancient Babylonia and the story of Gilgamish told in cuneiform. It shared the story...

There are rare times in the world of theatre when one feels honored to be present at a performance. Where a profound shared experience is being carved into living memory and at the same time a deeply personal response shutters through the body articulating, "I am here bearing witness to an important event."   The Native Earth Performing Arts production Almighty Voice and His Wife by Daniel David Moses at the Backstage Arts Centre in Saskatoon , Friday evening Jan. 27, was such a moment.  Peter Brook wrote in The Empty Space:  Repetition, representation, assistance. These words sum up the three elements, each of which is needed for the event to come to life. But the essence is still lacking, because any three words are static, any formula is inevitably an attempt to capture a truth for all time. Truth in the theatre is always on the move. And so the truth of what I felt, what I experienced, what so deeply touched the core of what it means to be human is o...

There once was a woman who spent a long time backstage. She had no reason for doing this, other than she was weary, and sadly she was  even more weary backstage, which is dark and consists mainly of scenic flats and props made to look real but are illusions.  One day she noticed a spotlight in the corner and decided to plug it in.  A beam of gold light shot across the stage. A group of actors flinched and shielded their eyes, a director shouted, a stage manager came running and stage hands appeared as if from nowhere thrashing about in the dark as if a fire alarm had sounded and they were seeking the exit. All stopped in front of the light. Dust particles danced in the beam and a moth wildly fluttered trapped eventually exploding nearing the heat of the light. Someone pulled the plug and backstage returned to its weary dark illusions. She thought about crying or maybe screaming but was too weary and besides she found herself onstage only no one could see her...

"After Stanislavsky, acting was changed; after Meyerhold, directing; after Brecht, playwriting. But after Grotowski?" - Richard Schechner Life is acting. Do we understand that ? Do we want to understand that . But what, in us, questions life is acting? What disputes that , despite everything? That we think thought is life. The most important thing is that our experiences reveal we are acting all the time. That when we feel we do not act we do not live. That we want nothing more than to live. We act. But we do not know that we act. We do not live. But we do not know that we do not live. Actors train to act. Actors keep the life of wanting to act. Of wanting to be in the living action. But how do we act? And why do we care about acting? Somehow, we have a real relationship to questions on acting, of living. Somehow, those questions mean something to all of us. We do not know what acting means.We experience not acting but the impossibili...

There once was an actor who was different from all other actors. Unlike them, there wasn't a consciousness of acting. The character thing-in-itself was as unknowable on stage as it was unknowable in the phenomenal world. The moment other actors entered the contours of a character it was as though they would test a possession and leave the limits of empirical knowing. Then when they exited they would return to a state of self consciousness as though they were who they lived to occupy. But this particular actor had no awareness of a playing self-possession, no awareness of a living presence, of exiting and entering and Instead would play each and every moment in a single life occupying stream. So for a long time when entering the character everything would simply move in a stronger current, and then, in what seemed like the next moment, would return to a slower flow with little idea of what had happened other than this intense sense of dispossession and unknowing because o...

North of Sleep At night,  my body is a compass swinging to every direction: past borderlands,  the ruins of unknown,  empty streets  en route  to elsewhere, slipping into rooms  where bearings  jolt me to a  wakefulness of frigid air and dormant train tracks  wait to halt traffic  twice a day. By morning,  I approach nausea, relentless calls  to speak some truth, a light with no shadow  but a heaviness.  The howl, dragged  from northern lights I couldn’t even understand. I stop, let my soul  go on ahead. Show me. (Shouting now.) Show me. (Frightened now.) The flaked ceiling points  to a bitten fingernail scratch   throwing grief across the back as a one perfect window  diffuses time. Noodles & coffee:  in a fractal tell a  haunting dirty knot  of restless  grime & eyes  bleed...

:: Note ::  ... anniversery ...

:: Note :: ... a  gentle soul was my uncle ... a thoughtful, caring individual who seemed to always be of service to the other ... my last image was of him talking to my son on a visit to Ottawa ... he had discovered Stefan's passion for history and listened to this teenager with attentiveness and respect ... before we left he gifted a book from his library ... other than his intense compassion & devotion to his family this was his deepest love - books: reading, researching, contemplating, collecting, challenging & most importantly sharing ... he was a bit of what I imagined 'a man of letters' and  wrote letters to my mother which she treasured more than any jewlery ... she will miss those words in meticulous handwriting ... we will miss his gentle caring soul ... in our thoughts we will receive his letters as he writes them from another place than the place of actuality ...