[An excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. In tribute to Sven Åge Birkeland, who was the first person ever to invite me to perform in Europe in 1996. Rest in Power Sven. You did so much.]
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When the run ended I had to return to Toronto, but made it back to Montreal for the end of the festival (which, as its name suggests, lasted twenty days). I had a specific reason for returning: I wanted to meet Sven Åge Birkeland and Knut Ove Arntzen. That year Les 20 jours du théâtre à risque had been part of an exchange with Norway. Norwegian artists Finn Iunker and Lisbeth J. Bodd had come to Montreal to stage a reading of Finn’s play The Answering Machine. For the second part of the exchange, Quebec artists Carole Nadeau and Gilles Arteau were supposed to go to Bergen to stage a Norwegian translation of a text by Gilles. Sven and Knut Ove had gone to Quebec City to meet with Gilles about the project, but Gilles had for some reason stood them up. (Sylvie tells me she later learned the reason was a significant crisis in his professional life: the artist-run centre he had founded was closing down.) When Sven and Knut Ove returned to Montreal they were furious, they had travelled all the way from Norway to meet him and he hadn’t bothered to show up. They were thinking of cancelling the second part of the exchange. Quick on her feet, Sylvie said that if they didn’t want Gilles to be part of the project then she had another writer in mind and that other writer was me. I had never been to Europe. I don’t think I had ever even met anyone who had been to Norway, and I had certainly never met anyone who ran a theatre in Europe (Sven ran the BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen).
At that time I was strongly feeling that my possibilities for making and presenting work in Toronto were running out. My work was getting steadily more experimental and Toronto theatre was getting steadily more conservative. People who liked my work were starting to feel they could no longer present it, that it would alienate viewers and funders alike, that it was a risk for them. (The name of Sylvie’s festival in Montreal was starting to seem more important to me every day.) A new conservative, provincial government – Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution” – was cutting everything, and therefore arts funding cuts could, at times, feel like the least of our worries. I remember reading that Harris had said: let them keep protesting until all the grass in front of City Hall has been completely stomped away. He didn’t care, protests or no protests he intended to cut. I remember complaining about the situation to a playwright I knew, and him carefully explaining to me that ‘hard times are good for artists.’ It was only years later I read a similar sentiment expressed in a different way by Roger Fry:
And here we touch on a curious economic accident, the importance of which as a determining condition of art production has never been properly emphasized. In modern life, great works of art generally have been, and I suspect, almost must be, produced in defiance of the tastes and predilections of society at large. The artist, therefore, except in those cases where he possesses inherited means, must be able to live and function on an extremely small sum. He must exist almost as sparrows do, by picking up the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. What wonder, then, that periods of artistic creation and impotence are as hard to predict or account for as the weather itself! And yet there is a certain irony in the fact that every civilization is ultimately judged by what of spiritual value it has contributed to the human patrimony. It is only at each present moment that this appears to be of so little consequence as to be negligible.As I was sitting on the train, on my way to Montreal to meet Sven and Knut Ove for the first time, I wondered about my situation: if I could no longer continue to make and present work in Toronto, was it really possible that I could begin to do so in Europe. I believe at that time, in my mind, the answer was probably not. I found it hard to imagine anything more far-fetched.
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Marie Nerland picked us up at he airport. Marie visited Montreal recently and when I met her for coffee I had the thought – a thought I’ve had more than a few times before – that she was the very first person I met in Europe. Bergen looks a bit like a town from a storybook: small clapboard houses, winding paths and hills surrounding a small lake, never-ending rain (I was told Norwegians call it ‘the shower’). The BIT Teatergarasjen was located in a former garage, a cavernous space that had barely been renovated for maximum coolness. The show that had ended just before we arrived was called Everybody Goes to Disco, from Moscow to San Francisco – by the Macedonian company Montažstroj – which I thought was pretty much the best title for a show ever. I was there with Carole Nadeau to stage a reading of the Norwegian translation of the text they had commissioned me to write: Unrehearsed Beauty. And to participate in the conference TheatreTextContext, which I was told was about innovative approaches to making text for experimental theatre. The example given was Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, which had recently been staged by Robert Wilson. For Unrehearsed Beauty I had the idea to write a text that could be used in absolutely any way, as described in the subtitle: A series of theatrical proposals – to be repeated, discarded, performed simultaneously and/or recombined in any and all of the many possible combinations – all vaguely relating to the topic of the author’s considerable moral ambivalence. (Numbers 1-49 in a continuing series.)
I had started as a playwright but didn’t want to be a playwright anymore, didn’t want to put words in other people’s mouths, wanted instead to create situations that provided everyone involved with maximum autonomy. It somehow seemed more ethical to me if performers said and did things they could take full responsibility for. At the conference, Finn Iunker, who basically still wanted to be a playwright, said that he particularly didn’t like the term. As an example of why he found it inaccurate, he asked the room: have you ever heard of a shipwright? He preferred the term theatre worker, someone who makes something, someone who builds theatre piece by piece. TheatreTextContext was the first time I had been around so many people who explicitly wanted to see theatre change. But over the course of the conference I came to understand something I hadn’t understood before, that simply because we all wanted to see theatre change didn’t mean we were searching for even remotely the same things.
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Knut Ove Arntzen is a theorist who teaches at the University of Bergen. His influence on Norwegian and international theatre has been considerable. One of the terms that Knut Ove coined, and introduced me to during that first visit to Bergen, was post-mainstream. If I understand it correctly, it has to do with the fact that there were many companies making successful large-scale, experimental work in the eighties; this was the work he referred to as the experimental mainstream (for example, some of the same companies I had seen growing up in Toronto: the Wooster Group, Needcompany, etc.). These were shows for large stages and large audiences, that played at international festivals and often combined challenging ways of approaching dance and theatre with spectacular stagings and performer virtuosity. The work that came after, that was still just emerging in the mid-nineties, and that I was apparently a part of, was what he referred to as post-mainstream. This work was often smaller or ambient, privileging an engaged amateurism over clear virtuosity, and was often made by groups or collectives as opposed to one genius director or choreographer.
The term post-mainstream continued to follow me around for many years. When we performed in Zagreb, at the Eurokaz Festival, it was one of the key words in the program, along with the term iconoclastic. Then, much later, we were invited to Tokyo to perform at the Tokyo Post-Mainstream Performing Arts Festival, run by Hiromi Maruoka, who had picked up the term when she performed at Eurokaz with the Japanese company Gekidan Kaitaisha. A term that had travelled from Norway to Croatia to Japan, and then with me back to Canada. There was a moment when I even thought post-mainstream might succeed and become a key performance-related art historical term or movement – like postmodernism, surrealism, conceptual art, or relational aesthetics – but it seems within the kinds of performance worlds I inhabit that no single term can ever fully stick, no name for it ever become dominant. Years later there was Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theatre, named for a category that, it seems to me, encapsulated both the experimental mainstream and the post mainstream and, in Germany at least, this term might now be the one most widely used.
I was in Europe for the first time with a desire to place my work within some larger international context, and I was finding it, but as I was discovering it bit by bit I was also discovering how deep my dissatisfaction with theatre and the world were. Post-mainstream was an idea that more or less described what I was trying to do – and it was even a term that I liked, I actually liked the sound of it – but, like that old joke about not wanting to be part of any club that would have me as a member, I couldn’t quite imagine how all this new information could someday become a part of my artistic life. There was now a term that accurately described what I did, but how did that help me or what else did it suggest? I wanted it just as strongly as I didn’t.
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One or two days before our staged reading of the Norwegian translation of Unrehearsed Beauty, Mads Ousdal decided to drop out of the project. The BIT Teatergarasjen had hired three actors from the Theatre Academy, and as we rehearsed I felt everything was going well, until we were told that Mads was leaving. Later, there was some speculation as to why he quit: that the work was too experimental, that he was worried it would make him look bad, that he was famous, or at least his father was a famous actor, but we weren’t treating him like he was famous, we were treating him like a normal collaborator. At any rate, we needed a solution and the solution was that I would play Mads’s role. (I was originally not supposed to perform at all.) Goril Mauseth and Elin Sogn would speak their already-memorized text in Norwegian translation and I would read the words I had written in English, since there was no time for me to memorize the text (and I obviously wasn’t able to read or speak Norwegian).
Carole created Unrehearsed Beauty with the audience sitting on the stage at small café tables, transforming it all into a more intimate space. Goril, Elin, and I would alternate between sitting at different tables, speaking our text in a quiet casual manner directly to the two or three audience members who surrounded us, and standing up, addressing the entire room. The show ended with the three of us sitting side by side in the normal audience seating, watching the actual audience, who were still all seated onstage, listening as Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” played on a record player at 78 instead of 33 1⁄3, Leonard’s chipmunk voice bringing another off-kilter aspect of Canada into Norway. Afterwards, I was surprised to learn one of the aspects people liked most was how they interpreted my being onstage with the two Norwegians, and the mixing of our respective languages, as a kind of thematic staging of the artistic collaboration between Canada and Norway. This was of course the furthest thing from my mind – I was only filling in for a performer who had quit, but in doing so it seems the thematic territory had shifted more than we thought.
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I sometimes think of these two coincidences that in many ways got me started (or, more accurately, got me started for a second time, since I had already been making work for almost ten years in Toronto). If Gilles had shown up for the meeting in Quebec City, it is likely he would have gone to Norway instead of me. If Mads had stayed in the project, it is likely those who saw it would have understood the work differently, and my role within the project would have felt considerably less prominent. Twice someone dropped out and each time I stepped in to replace them. If these replacements hadn’t happened, it is a distinct possibility I would have never gotten off the ground in Europe, or it would have all happened much later, or more gradually, or in some different way.
I don’t know if I should think of such occurrences as luck, chance, or opportunism. In a way they are examples of what I have always tried to do: take something negative or unexpected and turn it around so it might resemble a possibility. Anything that goes wrong might be also a chance for something nice to happen. At the very least it is unexpected, and therefore can shift us, even slightly, out of our routines and routine ways of thinking. I’m not sure I exactly like what I’m writing here. It feels to me too much like a motivational speech, an inspirational message, all that bullshit that can so easily devolve into capitalism insisting the individual must make the best of each and every situation, whatever hardships arise along the way. But if there’s anything I still like about performance, it’s that the unexpected might happen at any time, live in front of an audience or at any point during the process. It is a place where surprises can most productively occur, and it is still somewhat shocking to me that most shows are set up to ensure they so rarely do.
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