Praxis, Metaxis, Adidas Sneakers

2011-10-01T18:33:00.002-04:00

There's a well inside of me,

mineral rich and making me ill.

I want to pack it in, seal it off,

but every time I draw down

I come back bucket-heavy.

There's a well inside of me and

most nights I dream of

giant fish crowded golden

in shallow water -

morning, sick with scales.

There's a well inside of me

as deep as your big blue eyes.

I know I said I'd leave it alone,

but when I think of what we did

I can't help searching for stones.

I made something!

2011-10-01T18:30:00.003-04:00

This is it! Backwards!

On Ossification

2011-06-03T15:40:00.005-04:00

This is a piece I've been working on for a long time. With the help of a newly formed and utterly wicked writing group, it's gotten a little boost since last night and I thought I'd post it. I'm still not convinced that the lines look right...

On Ossification

When I inhale a certain way and make that expression,

look down at my knuckles

and stretch out my fingers

When I'm wearing that sweater

and thinking about what happened -

everything that just happened

and everything
that happened a long time ago

and everything

that could happen later

When I'm playing air guitar

with bent knees and my head thrown back

I think,

you must be in my blood by now:
all those bones we rattled
and the shaky feeling I'd get
when I knew we had to shift,
weary with stretched ligaments
and brittle compromise.

I want to make clear that
what we understand about each other
was carved out,

sewn together,
grafted

fragment by startled fragment.

Fractured it was all,

but then the seams settled.

I think I made you into marrow;
I can feel you on the inside

of my bones.
Biting nails as I think it,
and restless,
I bend.

the last of the overwrought heartbreak poems? here's hoping.

2011-05-17T15:28:00.015-04:00

Born to Circle

Your picture, hard-cornered, is stamped on the centre of my heart.
It bridges the blue and the red blood.
You are wearing pink and sitting on the loveseat in my bachelor apartment.

The cerulean of your eyes is invading my aortic valve,
blinking open and closed. Palpitating.
Interrupting oxygen.

What I see in you, there, on my couch, frays the very edges of me.
Memory hits the limits of its reconnaissance,
scrambles backward against the last things you said.

Starts again.

You’re a spinning image, born to circle -
a broken record of recognition.

2011-04-14T09:13:00.008-04:00

This morning it was sunny
and I walked out of my house, crossed the street and
turned to watch a robin fly
into the passenger-side window of a car.

Its wings spread wide open as it landed
on the asphalt and its little legs stretched out behind it.
Then it folded itself up and died - its eyes
closed as it slept on its stomach,
all curled up just like I am every night.

It was on its way somewhere.
It was in the middle of something.
Unprepared. I know,
and I hate the thought of it.

2011-01-12T19:40:00.002-05:00

"I'd explain that I understood the need for poetry because language can never be trusted and what the world doesn't need is another long story and all the real stories have become untellable anyway. I'd explain that I understood his use of a pseudonym, since we can only ever write despite ourselves. Isn't that right, my brother? We can only ever live despite ourselves?"

-David Chariandy, Soucouyant (129)

For now.

2010-12-21T00:24:00.003-05:00

“It’s only 11:30,” the streetcar driver chimed and “only” was echoed throughout the car in a fit of collective sarcasm. It was Monday night.

“You don’t want me to go across Dundas West, do you? Or else you’d have to go to Toronto Western,” the driver explained to a confused passenger who was on his way to St. Joe's Hospital. Someone outside altered the tracks to point us in the proper direction.

“TW – the butcher shop!” said another guy, laughing to his buddy. I laughed with him.

The streetcar driver picked it up a few clicks; we were late. I still love coming home.

I’ve been lazy when it comes to writing about you. I’ve been ignoring the yawning year that now lies between those days when there was still nothing but questions – pure potential. I am able to witness those days now with even more artfulness; because desire makes us great writers, ideally. Because talking about it to you made things better and worse all at once.

I can be good at love, be good and loving. I can be bad at love. I can convince myself that I’d be best of all if I were your lover, which I’ll never be. This is conventional, and if I’ve learned anything from convention it’s to wait for the pattern to culminate.

So while I wait I’ll write. I could start with your last phone message and how your voice is the perfect compound; you sound like my best friend and my last girlfriend all at once. What could be better?

Or I could start with December 3^rd of last year, when we were in a church together for a CD release party. A meeting in the dining hall had been cancelled and as we all poured in at intermission to buy drinks I noticed a table of bannock, untouched. I saw other people go for it and so I ate some too, facing the lineup to the bar. There you were, and I knew who you were but suddenly you also knew who I was – more than before. You had no reason to want to talk to me, but it looked like you wanted to talk to me. I was eating fried dough; never before has that made me appealing to anyone.

We didn’t talk, but you marked me then and I was up for that.

Atwood, "Variations at the Word Sleep"

2010-11-21T21:49:00.003-05:00

I would like to watch you sleeping, 
which may not happen. 
I would like to watch you, 
sleeping. I would like to sleep 
with you, to enter 
your sleep as its smooth dark wave 
slides over my head 
 
and walk with you through that lucent 
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves 
with its watery sun & three moons 
towards the cave where you must descend, 
towards your worst fear
  
I would like to give you the silver 
branch, the small white flower, the one 
word that will protect you 
from the grief at the center 
of your dream, from the grief 
at the center I would like to follow 
you up the long stairway 
again & become 
the boat that would row you back 
carefully, a flame 
in two cupped hands to where your body lies 
beside me, and as you enter 
it as easily as breathing in  
 
I would like to be the air 
that inhabits you for a moment 
only. I would like to be that unnoticed 
& that necessary

2010-10-28T15:18:00.002-04:00

"Then I said something. I said,

suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened.

Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose.

It doesn't hurt to suppose.

Say none of the other had ever happened.

You know what I mean? Then what?

I said."

-Raymond Carver, "Chef's House"

with mixed metaphors and the same old sentiment

2010-10-25T23:26:00.004-04:00

You are living your life. You are happy and relieved.

You are buoyed by new admirers, and reassured in your decision.

You are growing and thriving.

But you left behind huge chunks of your disposition.

I am storing them for you in my frontal lobe.

They shift with sleep.

They're heavy with gravity.

I am holding onto you for you.

This is a finite tenancy.

You are growing out of me all structured and sound.

I am growing crooked and timorous.

Always thirsty, like a sugar maple on a city street.

(the part in between the other parts)

2010-10-07T23:54:00.004-04:00

I have built little sand castles, made them bigger, gone to catch some sleep and returned the next day to find the beach flat - no evidence of architecture.

I no longer have an opinion on romantic love.

Every morning I drink a mug of CalMag and swallow a vitamin B12 supplement and a multivitamin. Every night I take 12.5 mg of Paxil CR and do a relaxation exercise.

I think what still shocks me is that with all my vigilance and over-anticipation, things still happen in ways I'd never expect them to, in ways I'd never imagine. It's almost enough to stop worrying.

July 5/10

I am older.

2010-09-10T17:00:00.000-04:00

I look older.

And then the part after that.

2010-09-05T22:57:00.006-04:00

I settled west like the sun, and cracked the whole world open before it was ready - before eyes had finished adjusting to a lack. I stopped needing; desire became a reflex. Peace had come and it was different than I thought it would be. I wasn’t disappointed. I wasn’t elated. Once was not enough. What is my responsibility here, now? What does it mean that I don’t feel like doing much? What happened to me, and how is it playing out on my physicality?

I am taking the stones out of my mouth one by one. This statement might seem like a metaphor for some kind of imposed silence, but that’s wrong. My mouth is just a passage-way; the stones had to get out somehow. All of these stones are piled up inside my throat, down through my windpipe, beside it, in between my ribs. My stomach is full of stones. If I find a way to let them out, I'll still feel the ache of their mineral residue. “Oh, love can be a shower of stones.”

It’s tedious to say that I miss you. I miss what we had. I miss where we thought we were going. I miss our common confidence. I miss your family. I miss how close we were getting to something ideal. What do others think will happen with us? Does anyone care? Is it not amazing to anyone else that we live apart, rarely talk - that we turned away from everything we had? What is the sum of my parts now that they aren’t bound up with yours? Does it make sense that I’m here - as far west as I think I’ll ever stay - and weirdly calm when on my own? Does it make sense?

Ode en route to Guelph via Greyhound bus.

2010-09-04T16:01:00.006-04:00

Riding on this Greyhound bus is making me think about you more than I have in weeks. I’m remembering the good trips we had together, and the sad trips, and the trips where I was frustrated because you made us almost miss the bus. I used to beat myself up – perhaps I still do – for not loving you perfectly. I guess I was missing the point; I could never have loved you perfectly. In the way this whole world works to make us aim at progress, makes us focus on the beyond – distracted from what’s right there beside us – I realize now that I loved you not perfectly, but truly. I loved you with all the desire I have not to be alone here.

The next part.

2010-06-15T18:03:00.005-04:00

Do you ever feel as though - and I am not speaking abstractly here - you are going to be swept off the face of the earth? It doesn't have to be while you're facing real danger, like you've hit turbulence on an airplane, or you're driving through a snowstorm on backroads, or you're being held and made to do things against your will. It can happen, and does happen, when you're sitting at your desk at home, or when you're surrounded by people you know, or when you're lying in bed on a clear night all alone, or maybe beside someone who has fallen out of love with you but who circumstance compels you to continue on with.

Exactly how you will be taken off of this earth is unclear; in fact, you could very well be the agent of your own erasure. Maybe that's what is so dreadful about the whole thing, that even if it were you it wouldn't really feel like you. And let's face it, if you're not in that turbulent aircraft, if you're not hitting that patch of black ice, if you are in fact sitting at your desk or lying in your own bed, it's quite likely that some part of you is responsible.

When I feel like I am going to be swept off the face of the earth, it's because my mind has failed to understand adequately how we, all of us, are a) still here and b) able to live with trauma. I should acknowledge my positionality here and, as a middle class north american white woman, own up to the fact that my experience with trauma is relatively little. But I have experienced it - I've experienced it even while I was aware of how lucky I am and how much I benefit from the world being the way it is.

Trauma's very ontology has to do with physically, mentally - BODILY - not being able to to cope with phenomena. It has to do with imposition. It has to do with approximating and compromising and letting go. What do we need when we experience trauma, and in what cases are we able to get it, if there's even anything ultimately to be got? What are we able and not able to call trauma? How might it, whatever it is, facilitate solidarity, collectivity, a united sense that it's impossible to live the way we are living? How do any of us gain or regain a sense that we belong here, that we are very probably going to stay here for awhile? If there is really, truly nothing to be scared of, how do we turn off the alarm bells? Because I hear them everywhere.

The Start.

2010-06-02T22:39:00.006-04:00

I’m going to write this thing, this magical thing, and it’s going to make me feel better. It’s going to be the solution to everything that’s gone wrong and my mood will turn around and I’ll become the creative, hyper-clever, industrious person I always thought I might be. I’m going to find it all inside of me, because certainly it’s there. What is it? What is happening to me? Is my character supposed to benefit from this exercise in never being able to control anything? I’m lying in bed at my parents’ house and the light is on and the door is open and if I want to get up and turn the light off/shut the door I have to slide out of my bed, grab my crutches and crutch across the room and then with the light out I have to crutch back, around the clothes and things I've left on the floor, and replicate the position I am lying in, which is actually quite comfortable. But there is a lamp on, so I fabricated the previous sentence to make things sound harder than they were. They’re not that hard, and I’ve been doing more fabricating lately than I’d like to admit.

I have been attempting for days to solve the problem of my brain's insistence on looping through my past and a series of unlikely futures. Sometimes when I'm on my bicycle, or having a conversation with a friend, or embracing my partner in what is supposed to be a moment for just the two of us, I completely leave myself - so much so that when I return I wonder what's happened, what I've missed. In the early hours of the morning I wake up and the rotten feeling in my chest precedes my first conscious thought. I don't even work myself into this anxious state - it wakes me up. I feel as though there is a cavity in my brain that needs to be fed with worried thoughts and misguided anticipation. I am not thriving. I went off anti-depressants and felt so liberated, so empowered by the idea that I no longer relied on prescription medication. Now I want to curl up, curl around those parts of myself that were covered over for so many years. I'm bowled over by my brain's old habits, band-aided by SSRIs until just now. My teenage self pounds at my ribcage, butts its head against my heart, shakes my shoulders when I'm sleeping. I have already led too many lives with this mental malfeasance. My mind makes do by forgetting, while my body can only remember in shocks and fits.

Ode to Spiral Fracture

2010-05-26T10:32:00.007-04:00

I wrote this on May 8th, a couple of weeks after my leg was broken by a car that hit me while I was on my bike.

I have not been writing.
I've barely been reading
or listening to any music -
let alone playing music.
I have been frozen,
immobile.
I have been doing a lot
of talking and listening
for the appropriate reaction.

I have been staving off
the really desperate notion
that there is no order,
that I was already so lucky -
born lucky -
and I remain lucky;
tensed into a
haphazard gratitude,
because of course
I still want to be here.

My limb reminds me of
a large fish, caught
and therefore less beautiful
than when we perceived
it underwater.
It ripples and trembles,
giving the impression
that its bones are soft.
Its bones are not soft:
they were conquered
by something harder,
something they were
never meant to touch.
So I sit and wait to adapt to
this new terrestrial reality.
A fish out of water.

Playing with Privilege, endnotes & works cited

2010-04-06T23:37:00.002-04:00

**A note for confused readers: I decided to post my rather cumbersome M.A. Major Research Paper, called "Playing with Privilege," on this blog. Since the blog is ordered chronologically, you see the last part first. I'd suggest starting from the beginning, which you can find here.

1. Although Differ/End does not explicitly intend a certain audience, the decision to keep it in K-W has been a conscious one; the play’s principle aim is to educate members of its own community on an issue that is becoming increasingly close to home—as Six Nations protests have increased in Brantford. Members of the Six Nations and Caledonian communities did attend the February performances; however, as I learned from the audience surveys I conducted, people at the June remount were largely non-native residents of K-W.

2. However, Houston and Gil Garratt are currently in talks with members of Six Nations to bring the play to the Reserve in the fall. Houston tells me, “It could be a benefit to the Haudenosaunee in the sense that we’re showing them that there are people outside of their community who acknowledge that the history has not been told … and that we owe them an apology, and then we owe them a plan” (Houston “Interview” 6/18/08).

Works Cited
Actor 1. Personal Interview. 18 May 2008.
Actor 2. Personal Interview. 7 June 2008.
Arthur, Paul. “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments).” Theorizing Documentary. Ed. Michael Renov. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. 108-134.
Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
---. Rainbow of Desire : The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. London ; New York: Routledge, 1995.
Boler, Megan. “The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism’s gaze.” Cultural Studies 11.2 (1997): 253-273.
CBC News. In Depth: Caledonia Historical Timeline. 1 Nov 2006. CBC.ca. 5 May 2008. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/caledonia-landclaim/historical-timeline.html
CBC News. In Depth: Caledonia Land Claim Timeline. 1 Nov 2006. CBC.ca 5 May 2008. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/caledonia-landclaim/
CBC News. “Judge tells Ontario to end Caledonia dispute talks.” 8 Aug 2006. CBC.ca. 7 May 2008. http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/08/08/caledonia-decision.html
“Culpable.” Def. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary [OED]. 2nd ed. 1989.
Differ/End: The Caledonia Project. By Gil Garrett. Dir. Andy Houston. Studio 180, Waterloo. 14 Feb 2008.
---. City Hall, Kitchener. 9-12 June 2008.
Differ/End’s Q&A Sessions. City Hall, Kitchener. 8-12 June 2008.
Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Garratt, Gil. Differ/End: The Caledonia Project [Production Draft]. Waterloo: University of Waterloo, May 2008.
Houston, Andy. Personal Interview. 18 June 2008.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. London: Flamingo, 2000.
Keefer, Tom. “The Politics of Solidarity: Six Nations, Leadership, and the Settler Left.” Upping the Anti: a journal of theory and action 4 (May 2007): 10 pp. Uppingtheanti.org. 10 Aug 2007. May 18, 2008 http://uppingtheanti.org/node/2728
Kershaw, Baz. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Legall, Paul. “I'm ‘caught in the middle’ of land dispute: developer.” The Spectator [Hamilton] 2 Mar 2006. A07.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Differened: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Martin, Randy. “Boal and the Horizons of theatrical commitment.” A Boal Companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. Ed. Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman. New York: Routledge, 2006. 23-32.
O’Connell, Lisa. Personal Interview. 5 June 2008.
O’Donnell, Darren. Social Acupuncture. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2006.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982.

Photography Credits
1. Differ/End’s cast greets the audience—by Robyn Letson (10 June 2008)
2. Information on Brantford and alternative media—by Robyn Letson (12 June 2008)
3. “The Baconator”—by Andy Houston (June 2008)
4. Coffee cup with soil from Douglas Creek Estates, atop one version of The Human Map—by Robyn Letson (10 June 2008)
5. “Hi. We’re from the University of Waterloo”—by Robyn Letson (7 June 2008)
6. The audience participates in “Musical Land Claim”—by Robyn Letson (10 June 2008)
7. “The Haldimand History Game”—by Robyn Letson (12 June 2008)
8. Drawing “The Human Map”—by Robyn Letson (10 June 2008)

Playing with Privilege, 7

2010-04-06T23:29:00.004-04:00

Conclusion: Exposing the Process
An audience member at a public rehearsal for the June remount noted that the transition between the documentary and self-reflexive segments was “jarring”—she explained that she was used to theatre being an imaginary space, and that the play kept throwing her back and forth between imagination and reality; this disturbed her (Q&A). Houston discussed with her the purpose of such a style, and the play’s effort to present the journey that the class took from ignorance to (at least partial) enlightenment. Still, it was hard for her to stomach, and I would argue that her concern is integral to the piece. Differ/End’s scholastic framework includes interrogating a current community issue, finding the facts, and conducting dramaturgy by using O’Donnell’s principles of social acupuncture. But as Houston asserts in our interview, “I never do a theory course, or I never do a scholastic course, without making it applied to a performance in some way. I don’t ever believe in separating those things in theatre research ever”.
Differ/End embodies praxis, and bears out the complexities of negotiating between scholarship and activism. Because its creators chose to move beyond the space of the classroom and even the theatre, they have given their audiences access to alternative ways of knowing and witnessing; this suspends the play between “a critique of what is and a display of what is possible” (Martin 23). For these reasons, Differ/End will always be about process—always incomplete and ephemeral. From the beginning it has been about trying to resolve binaries: intellect vs. art, theory vs. practice, text vs. the body, conflict vs. peace. Houston worried from the outset that the production would become “too earnest”, so the rehearsal process started out with dancing and game-playing. Indeed, it started by trying to connect a visceral physical score with an information-heavy text, and both of these aspects of the performance were fraught with the problem of trying to “make a play that speaks authoritatively without being exhaustive” (Q&A).

Differ/End is a text-heavy piece, and often relays long and detailed reports by the students. The challenge for the piece was to create a physical score that did not upstage the text, but rather underlined the themes that make up the heart of the conflict—mapping, protest, opposing forces, land, authority, and negotiation. A student in the class came up with what she calls The Human Map. Rather that mapping geography, The Human Map traces bodies, hands, feet, and uses them as landmarks to represent a community. Throughout the performance, maps are made in chalk on the floor, creating images where there were none before, and putting everyone in the cast to work on the creation of the space. These chalked images and maps are different in each performance. Differ/End’s maps are imperfect, unfixed and fleeting. At one point, each of the students individually relay different parts of an interview with a Six Nations activist while the rest of the cast listens and works, drawing on the floor and laying down to have their bodies traced by others. I would argue that these moments embody an idea of praxis that is centrally rooted in the project of Differ/End. The students are never inactive—they are always at work, speaking and educating through dialogue, or communicating visually and physically through the creation of images.

There was a desire on the part of Houston and the cast to manifest their own process of approaching, and the overwhelming feelings that followed researching the issue. When I ask him about the numerous stories of students getting lost on their way back from Caledonia to K-W, Houston cites the overwhelming emotions that hit them driving home, making it difficult to concentrate:
when you’ve taken in all that…it’s kind of shocking because there’s a huge feeling of “I can’t believe that this has happened to you” and … there’s this kind of shame about that, and then there’s a kind of embarrassment around the fact that you didn’t know that, no one’s ever told you that.

This affective experience is relived in the performance space each night, as audience and cast assemble to confront their varying familiarity with the land-claim dispute. The piece itself is a manifestation of overwhelming affect; at any one moment there is a flood of textual information, along with images and words projected onto the screens at the front of the performance space, and students creating images with their bodies, or drawing maps in chalk. Differ/End exposes its own process of creation by overwhelming its audience. As a witness, I was at first agitated by this performative tactic, but I eventually realized that it was important to simply take in what I could; I would not retain everything, but how could I expect to in only ninety minutes? This is what makes coming back to the performance again and again so exciting; something new will always be gained by watching.

Differ/End’s performers are vital to its meaning and efficacy. They are constantly negotiating between their identities as students, actors, and activists. As students, they witness and document the issue; as actors, they dramatize and aestheticize it; and as activists, they pull their creation out of the theatre and into the public sphere, imploring their audience to participate. Such negotiations permit a dissembling of the master narratives Lyotard warns against, because positionality has its limits—the performers find themselves alternately enfranchised and disenfranchised depending on context. As Differ/End’s physical score manifests, these negotiations are taxing work, demanding constant attention and reflection.

The land-claim dispute in Caledonia remains unresolved; this means Differ/End’s work is not finished. There is a responsibility on the part of both the creators and participants of the piece to continue interrogating themselves and those around them. Both my paper and the piece itself run the risk of failure and injustice, primarily because our positions give us the privilege to walk away if we so choose; those fighting for their land do not have such privilege. Through continued education and action, we must keep ourselves in check and remember our own culpability. Although Differ/End is about much more than Caledonia, it remains critically rooted to the situation there. The student-actor-activists, who are fundamental to Differ/End’s meaning, must push forward with their work while continuing to reflect on their positionalities. If Differ/End is to carry on, it must do so in solidarity with those directly affected by the issue.

As I attempt to do justice to Differ/End, to document it in a way that relays its incredible originality and importance as a theatre piece, I find myself overwhelmed. I am running out of time, I have not interviewed enough of the people involved, and I still have many more questions. I worry that the play is not perfect, that though it tries to work in solidarity with Six Nations, it does not do enough. I still worry the play will not make it to Six Nations or to Caledonia (and as of Summer 2009 it still has not). I worry that my own writing does not effectively capture the essence of the play and that it is all too enormous to try and explain succinctly. But I continue to write because I need to document the occasion of Differ/End, however failingly. The last thing I want to do is nail the play down, because its momentum is what makes it compelling; before I turn around, everything will have changed again. As the situation in Caledonia and along the Haldimand Tract shifts, so will the play, and so will those who participate in it. In every conversation I have with Lisa O’Connell about dramaturgy and Differ/End, she reiterates that it is about process, and will remain unfinished for a long time to come. In a pervasively product-driven society, this is perhaps Differ/End’s most important political manifestation. Artist-scholar-activist Randy Martin captures what so compels me about this piece when he writes, “When political theatre takes these myriad associations as its materials, when it makes legible its dependencies, its limitations, its fabulations, and excesses, it finds itself an ensemble amidst so many others bearing heavily on still more to come” (31).

For Endnotes, Works Cited and Photography credits, please click on "Newer Post" below!

Playing with Privilege, 6

2010-04-06T23:19:00.005-04:00

Game Playing & Social Acupuncture
One of the most memorable scenes in Differ/End is a game that relies on audience participation. “Musical Land Claim” includes six audience members, each of whom is given a large nametag bearing one of the six nations in the Haudenosaunee confederacy. The host tells participants that this game is much like musical chairs, “but instead of being out, you just have to stay in the game and sit on the remaining chairs anyway, all of you, together” (Garratt 25). As the chairs are taken away, participants must find creative ways to pile onto the remaining “land,” until they are left with no chairs. The game is always one of the most comical and engaging parts of the show; during the June performances at City Hall, audience members were always very eager to participate, even though they had no idea what they were in for until they were standing in the middle of the performance space. “Musical Land Claim” is important to Differ/End in a number of ways; it drives home, in an unavoidable way, the loss of land that Indigenous peoples have faced in Canada—as fun and communal as the game is, there remains an undercurrent of serious interrogation. As well, the game elicits contact between strangers in the audience. Much like the greeting at the beginning of the show, audience members are taken out of their comfort zones and put into contact with each other in a safe space.

I would also argue that the game emphasizes Differ/End’s irreproducibility. The participants’ creative ways of dealing with their reduced space changed with every performance; there was no way of guessing what participants would do on a given night—some would grab chairs from the audience, or sit on the ground, or try to forcibly keep chairs from being removed. These spontaneous tactics aided in the individuality of each performance. Although I do not think Differ/End is in imminent danger of commodification, “Musical Land Claim” seems to be a statement of opposition to the type of theatre work that aims at strict reproduction, which can be replicated at different times and places with a purity of form and content. There is a generosity in the dramaturgy that Differ/End practices; in this instance the play allows its audience to affect its production through active participation in the performance space. This keeps the audience interested and gives participants the space to perform, blurring the line between actor and spectator, and turning the latter into what Augusto Boal calls a “Spect-actor” (Games xxx).

“Music Land Claim” is based on the dramaturgical practice of Darren O’Donnell, a theatre practitioner in Toronto who uses children’s games, amongst other techniques, to promote new modes of civic engagement. When I asked Andy Houston which texts he used in his dramaturgy class, he directed me to O’Donnell’s Social Acupuncture. The concept of “social acupuncture” comes from O’Donnell’s experience with traditional Chinese medicine. He writes:
the social body, like the physical body, is a complex and nuanced system with many excesses here and deficiencies there. For example, the amount of resources plugged into the media spectacle, with its endless parade of entertainments, is an excess dialectically related to a deficient and apathetic, politically alienated public (47).

O’Donnell explains that traditional Chinese medicine sees the body as a unified system in an ongoing process, where everything is related and affected. This principle is true not only of the physical body, but of the social body as well. He warns, “Like real acupuncture, social acupuncture can be uncomfortable, but this is a good thing. The dispersal of holding patterns, of energetic excesses and deficiencies, will usually generate discomfort, the social equivalent of confusion, a necessary part of any learning process” (50). O’Donnell’s book is not a conventional dramaturgy text. Its first section is titled “Life in the Shit Factory”, and indeed O’Donnell is crass, sardonic and often completely pessimistic. However, when I read Social Acupuncture and reflected on Differ/End, the connections were obvious. The play accepts the impossibility of its own task, and contends with the question of “how to create thoughtful, rigorous work while allowing for the unknown, the unexpected and the awkward—how to find meaning in qualities other than virtuosity and razzle-dazzle” (21).

Rather than remain in the classroom, students were asked to go out and engage face-to-face with their “objects of study”. Students drew inspiration from O’Donnell’s theatrical endeavors, one of which involves taking a group of strangers onto the streets and having them stop pedestrians to ask questions about their lives, in a polite and non-threatening manner. The students in Houston’s class were empowered by the knowledge that they could conduct research this way. One actor tells me that she has always engaged with strangers in random and irreverent ways, regardless of social implications. However, she did not know that these interactions might be a viable method of dramaturgical research. Now, she and many of her fellow castmates do not feel intimidated by what she calls taking a “bold approach” to dramaturgy (Actor 2). Student-researchers staged (and often recorded) spontaneous interviews with members of their own communities, with people from Six Nations, with non-native homeowners in Caledonia, and spent a significant amount of time on the contested site interviewing protestors. These conversations gave voice to those who do not necessarily get quoted on the news or in print. It also gave students the chance to engage with people who came from recognizably different walks of life. Of course, some of what students witnessed and heard was shocking, but it was undeniably real, and integral to their project.

These dramaturgical interactions prompt critical ethical questions. As O’Donnell states, “any old conversation is not enough to introduce democracy; we have to interrogate who is conversing, who isn’t and what we are talking about” (33). The spontaneous interactions between students and interview subjects put the project in a complex ethical regime. Although the project was stamped and approved by the University of Waterloo’s Ethics Board, there was no way of accounting for potential results of such unplanned interactions. Students are aware of the privilege that came with the conversations and interactions they had, and keep themselves in check during the play through discussion and reflection. Importantly, the show’s creators allow their audience to interview them at the Q&A sessions following each performance; in this way, they became the audience’s “object of study”. Differ/End’s goal is to provoke conversations that acknowledge positionality and alternative points of view, and these conversations go beyond the space of performance. Now that the actors have engaged so intensely with the situation in Caledonia, they feel more able to speak about it with those around them. During one of the Q&A’s, when the actors were asked how the project has affected them, one stated, “I've been talking about the issue more. I bring it up at work, I bring it up at school, I talk to strangers about it.”

Although I do not agree with everything O’Donnell does, I would argue that the importance of his work lies in its bringing together of people from different social spheres. In a social climate where the importance of live theatre is becoming increasingly difficult to defend, O’Donnell has reconceptualized what theatre can mean, and what makes it effective; he stands up for intimacy and its effect on civic engagement. Although both his work and Differ/End are inevitably evanescent, a certain “communitas” (Turner 45) is gained from shared social space, which occurs as a result of these performances. They are democratic, generous, and fun. They instigate conversations that continue once the show has ended. After Differ/End is over, warm pie is offered to the audience and we all stand around eating and chatting about what we have witnessed. I would go so far as to borrow Jill Dolan’s term “utopian performative” in describing Differ/End, especially regarding a scene such as “Musical Land Claim”. It is impossible to gauge the social impact of such a performative tactic, but the game is indeed one of those “small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a … feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” (Dolan 5).

Performance and Excess: The Haldimand History Game
The final scene in Differ/End involves very different game, conducted by the show’s host, and featuring one of the young women in the cast as the sole contestant. The host informs his contestant that she will be tested on facts about the Caledonia land-claim dispute, and for every question she answers wrong, she will “lose something” (Garratt 74). The host assures her, however, that she should not get any of the questions wrong, because she has been “studying this stuff for … months” (74). Although she answers the first two questions correctly, she soon begins to falter. With each question she answers incorrectly—and indeed she answers all of the ensuing questions incorrectly—the host’s two male assistants demand an article of her clothing. When the game is through, she is left wearing only her undergarments, traumatized and humiliated in front of the audience. In a fickle attempt to make up for what he has done, the host offers her a Canadian flag to wrap herself in. The game is about authority, power, and corruption; it is about knowledge and positionality, and how both can be used to dominate and exploit others.

Privilege is not a solid state; it is constituted by context. Students in Differ/End had formerly occupied a privileged position as researchers investigating the land-claim dispute in Caledonia, but the student forced to participate in “The Haldimand History Game” is rendered powerless by the very knowledge that had formerly empowered her. What does this say about privilege and positionality? What does this have to do with Caledonia? The game interrogates the risk of not knowing. Up until this point, the students have used knowledge to educate and empower; it is here flipped upside down, privileging some while abusing others. The contestant’s position as a student does not change, but the situation changes her relationship to knowledge. And what about the position of the host? By variously embodying a student and a ringmaster, he has more power than his fellow students do. Although the play seemed democratic up until now, the host is suddenly revealed as exceptionally powerful. “The Haldimand History Game” exposes the risk of Differ/End—the risk inherent to playing with privilege. But the game is about more than just a loss of privilege, it is about a loss of rights. The contestant is forced to take part in a game with rules she has not made; she has become a victim of knowledge, as it is used to oppress and disenfranchise. In a Lyotardian sense, the game’s author is also its judge; he is the one who possesses knowledge—both of the game’s form and its content.

At the first performance of the June run, during this climactic final scene, City Hall security guards loudly chatted and made a great deal of noise. When asked to quiet down, they began speaking and moving even louder to show their authority over us. Of course, this occurrence caused the actors and audience stress, but it also provided a level of irony impossible to achieve anywhere else. The noisemaking of the security guards manifested their own inflated sense of power; it was an ironic coincidence that their utilization of this power to dominate another group occurred at the moment power was interrogated in the play. Both the game and the security guards’ interruption seemed senseless, absurd—but both exposed people in positions of authority playing with their privilege to oppress others. This layering of “play” power and real power would not have been possible in a normal theatre space, conventionally considered “sacred” in our culture.

Baz Kershaw’s argument in The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard is that theatre’s efficacy in relation to social justice has become possible only when performance happens outside of a traditional theatre space. This is because “its excesses are more directly shaped by the cultural pathologies that threaten radicalism in theatre” (16). Kershaw’s argument prompts an interrogation of why performances continue take place in the theatre. Is it because we seek protection from a potentially disruptive public? Is it because we need the refuge of a separate, sacred place to properly engage? Some would argue that the technological and audio-visual capabilities of current theatres aid in the spectacle of performance. However, these are all residual symptoms of what Kershaw calls the “theatre estate” (32), and performances beyond it “re-vision the creative process itself” (23). The aggressive security guards in City Hall certainly prompted me to question the risk of taking theatre out of traditional performance spaces, especially theatre with a complex and controversial subject matter. However, I believe the play’s exposure in a public place is essential to its subject. Differ/End is about space—space to live, space to control, space to speak and act. The conflict between the performers and security guards at City Hall was also bound up in space. Who was encroaching on whose space? Who has ownership of City Hall? The security guards’ increasingly disruptive behaviour was an obvious response to our request that they quiet down (in fact, I was the one who asked them), and they had the power to effectively ruin the final scene. This disturbed and angered the audience, but positionality prevented anyone from approaching the security guards after the show. They were the ones wearing the uniforms, standing together—they were the ones who had been trained in the exertion of power.

The situation is compounded by fact that the final scene is an exceptionally uncomfortable one. During a Q&A session at a later performance, we discussed the issue of whether or not the audience should stand up for the performer who is forced to remove her clothing. Although many in the audience felt they wanted to, none of them did. I call such a performative occasion excessive because, while watching the scene through the disruption of the security guards, the audience was paralyzed—they were experiencing an excess of power from both within and outside of the play. Even if none of the audience members felt this paralysis and discomfort as strongly as I did, I still believe it was an important occasion. The audience had been ushered in as “spect-actors” at other points in the play—but at this crucial moment the fourth wall was still firmly in place. “The Haldimand History Game” challenged audience members to be present with their own discomfort; it raised questions regarding the imaginary divide between performers and spectators, and it disrupted conventional theatre practice. If a play intends to “[attack] the injustices produced by … exploitation in modern democracies” but remains in a theatre, how can those involved make any legitimate claim against “succumbing to what they attack” (Kershaw 54)? It was essential to Differ/End’s political position that it be held outside of a conventional theatre space. The performance of Differ/End radicalized the space of City Hall; as one audience member noted, “[the space] makes contact with the ideas that are spoken of … the building tells me a lot more about this community” (Q&A). The performative excess that occurred when Differ/End moved to Kitchener City Hall prompts questions of what such a structure actually represents, who is allowed to speak in it, and in what ways; such an occasion exposes the place of performance and those involved in it as critically bound up in the creation of its meaning.

For the 7th and FINAL installment, please click on "Newer Post" below!

Playing with Privilege, 5

2010-04-06T23:07:00.004-04:00

Playing with Privilege: Solidarity & Empathy
The students dramatize their first visit to Caledonia: they are all jammed into a minivan, here replicated by a wooden table, and have entered the occupied site. They find themselves afraid to get out of their vehicle, unsure of what to say and of the reaction they might get. Finally, they all chorus in unison, “Hi. We’re from the University of Waterloo” (Garratt 40). For me, this is one of the most profound and important lines in the play—it represents the tense and fascinating moment when scholars must confront their positionality in the face of their “object of study”. It should be noted that none of the students in Differ/End are Haudenosuanee, or from Caledonia. So what were these privileged students, these outsiders, doing at the Reclamation site? Did they have any right to be there? How could any of them claim to be doing more help than harm? Stepping out of their cars and onto the streets was far more difficult and even dangerous than opening a textbook, and their willingness to be present with that reality is critical. However, as sympathetic as I am to their vulnerability in this moment, I still ask myself whether their entrance onto the scene might actually impact positive change.

In this context, the actors are privileged—provided with the time, support, and resources to conduct research on the dispute. In other contexts, as students and young people, they undoubtedly find themselves in positions where they lack privilege. The fact that their university’s Theatre of the Arts was reserved for the Symphony instead of their play is an example of this. University students in Ontario inherently manifest a plurality of privilege, which is constantly compounded by the situations they find themselves in. They necessarily have the means to pay or borrow their way through school, which denotes privilege; but rising tuition, rising interest on student loans, and the expense of additional resources means that whatever money they do make is rarely their own. As well, their sexual, racial, gendered, and differently abled subjectivities critically affect their potential privilege or oppression.

Differ/End’s students recognize their tenuous positionality as they awkwardly announce, “We’re from the University of Waterloo.” Although in the context of this scene their position as students facilitates privilege, at other times this position can be used against them, as we will see when the play draws to a close.

As I attended rehearsals for the June remount of Differ/End, I became increasingly concerned that the play was too distant from its subject matter. When I attended the play during its initial run, Andy Houston mentioned during the Q&A session following the performance that Differ/End would go to Caledonia. I was prompted to take up the play as a research topic in hopes that I would be able to follow it there and document the reaction by Six Nations and Caledonian audience members. When I learned that Differ/End would instead be remounted at Kitchener City Hall, I was disappointed; I thought the play was avoiding its true task. Fortunately, I came across Tom Keefer’s article, “The Politics of Solidarity: Six Nations, Leadership, and the Settler Left.” Keefer discusses a prevalent problem in attempts by non-native activists to work in solidarity with the Six Nations protestors in Caledonia. He argues that non-native activists, in attempting to forge solidarity, are preoccupied with “how to relate to the struggle at Six Nations” (1), and see the only possible answer as coming from Six Nations leadership. Although Keefer agrees that “any non-native activist interested in doing solidarity activism needs to work in close collaboration with indigenous activists and must be responsive to indigenous experiences and political perspectives” (2), in this particular context, taking leadership has not proven to be a productive or meaningful form of activism. As Keefer explains, the Six Nations Confederacy is very large and extremely complex; to assume it is made up of a homogenized group of people is naïve. Non-native activists become distracted by the fact that this “complex situation is refracted by the diverse channels through which political power is exercised within the community (including clan mothers and traditional chiefs, the band council, men’s and women’s councils, NGOs, and various levels of formal and informal on-site leadership)” (3). He argues that the largest factor in this situation is the Two Row Wampum agreement between Six Nations and settler populations, which many Six Nations people use as a guiding principle in their relationship with settlers. It holds that “both the Six Nations community and the settler communities are to ‘steer their own boats’ and not interfere with each other’s internal affairs” (5). Keefer would like to see settler activists work in solidarity with Six Nations protestors by adhering to the law of the Two Row Wampum. He contends that misguided white activists have a tendency to “live vicariously through the radical struggle” (6) of oppressed groups, while showing a reluctance to go into their own communities and interrogate structures of racism and oppression. This has had a harmful effect on the Six Nations cause in Caledonia. While settler activists who sympathize with Indigenous protestors have remained confused and inactive, “media savvy personalities like Gary McHale have organized dozens of rallies and public meetings … where they have effectively demanded ‘equal rights for whites’ who are seen as oppressed because the Canadian state has not moved in to stop the ‘terroristic’ natives. Dozens of … neo-Nazis have participated in [these] public events” (6-7). While right-wing protestors have been able to organize rallies and gain attention from the media, activists hoping to work in solidarity have hesitated, sitting on the fence and waiting for Six Nations activists to tell them what to do. Keefer warns of the blurry line that exists between “assuaging white guilt” and “shifting the balance of forces arrayed against Six Nations” (8). Many people in Caledonia do not support racism nor anti-Indigenous protests, and agree with the Six Nations cause, but for the most part these people have not organized; they remain isolated and unsure of how to effectively express their concerns and solidarity. Racism and antagonism grow between the two sides, as right-wing protestors led by Gary McHale—who does not even live in Caledonia—continue to influence the town’s politics. Caledonia suffers from the fact that “there is so little anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist work taking place within non-native communities” (10).

Significantly, the actors in Differ/End do not portray anyone other than students from the University of Waterloo. Although they relay others’ points of view, these voices are never seamlessly embodied; they are always cited—translated through the actors as students. The play is “a process of approaching, as outsiders to a community, as students, as non-native” (Q&A). Houston felt it important to conduct sympathetic versus empathic research, so that students would avoid the temptation of relating too strongly to those who were interviewed. Sympathetic research is constituted by a relationship that recognizes the myriad differences between the researcher and who or what is being researched; empathic research involves the researcher personally identifying with the object of study. As outsiders to the problem, and moreover, as privileged, non-native university students, those conducting research were encouraged to be constantly aware of their own positionalities.

In “The risks of empathy: interrogating multiculturalism’s gaze”, Megan Boler asks, “who and what, I wonder, benefits from the production of empathy?” (255) As an educator, she is wary of what is termed “passive empathy”, which occurs when “identification is easy” and becomes a means of distraction from seeking justice (255). This relates closely to Keefer’s argument about white activists living vicariously through the struggles of the oppressed. Rather than passive identification, Boler seeks a form of empathy that involves culpability. She states, “At stake is not only the ability to empathize with the very distant other, but to recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles [that] the other must confront” (257). As a privileged space where “the other” is often examined, the university is under the constant threat of breeding a culture of comfort and passive empathy amongst those who work and study there. The students in Differ/End contend with this by first attempting to deny their implication in the land-claim dispute, claiming, “it’s all too late…it’s too late…things can’t be undone, this isn’t our fault, my fault. I didn’t do this, any of this. I wasn’t even born” (Garratt 5). As their research continues, they find that they cannot escape the ignorance that so many members of their various communities use as a defense. Now that they know, indeed even before they knew, they are implicated. One student cites an interview with Six Nations activist Wolf Thomas, who reminded his interviewers that according to Canadian law, “ignorance is no defense” (Thomas qtd. in Garratt 55). The student goes on to say, “Just because you bought [land], and have the papers, just because you didn’t know it was contested, just because you didn’t know what was done to the people of Six Nations, shouldn’t exempt you from the consequences” (55).

Boler calls for a form of empathy that does not necessitate identification with the oppressed, because such empathy permits an “abdication of responsibility” (260). If Differ/End is equally as concerned with the thoughts and questions of a group of drama undergraduates as it is with those in Caledonia, this is because the piece does not abdicate; its work is to locate and confront ignorance in its own community. Rather than inserting oneself into a situation as the oppressed, Boler suggests students stand back and bear witness, “[emphasizing] a collective educational responsibility” (262). These ideas are borne out by Differ/End’s student researchers. In an interview with me, an actor describes casually speaking to a young woman who was eating dinner with her children at a restaurant on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford. After a long day of attempting to record formal interviews, he decided that rather than announce himself, he would simply bear witness silently and give the person room to say what she wanted, without recording anything. He remarks, “I thought that was interesting, y’know, so we don’t say anything, [and] someone opens themselves up completely. We say we’re from the University of Waterloo and we’re doing a project on this, then the tension comes” (Actor 1). In this context, the actor exerts control over his positionality; he is able to conceal his identity as a student-researcher. His conversation did not make it into the script, but nevertheless the actor plays with his privilege, acting as witness rather than as student-researcher.

For Part 6, please click on "Newer Post" below!

*

2010-03-16T23:26:00.003-04:00

"Second such event after returning home: cutting my thumb while using a new Belgian seraded-edged slicing knife that slipped on a small Israeli tomato while I was thinking about Super Tuesday two years ago and whistling Dixie.

Am I unconsciously angry?"

from "Spring Fugue" by Harold Brodkey.

*I am so close to posting more than just quotes; please wait.

I miss you already...

2010-01-15T09:48:00.000-05:00

"A Knitter's Prayer"

Unknit me -
all those blistering strange small intricate stitches -
shell stitch, moss stitch, pearl and all too plain,
unknit me to the very first row of ribbing,
let only the original simple knot remain.

Then let us start again.

-P.K. Page, 1916-2010

So Long

2009-12-31T21:11:00.003-05:00

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

Rumi, "A Great Wagon"

Playing with Privilege, 4 (a longy but a goody)

2009-06-08T14:00:00.006-04:00

Cultural Criticism, Meaning-Making, & The Politics of Consumption

Differ/End is littered with personal accounts, which work to remind us of its creators’ subjectivity. After describing the suburban landscape that makes up a large part of the drive from K-W to Caledonia, a student recalls a sign that she passes on her way: “right in front of the Wendys, strapped to a lamppost just a couple of feet from the right lane, this sign, this enormous, fucking hamburger with THE BACONATOR right above it” (Garratt 21). For the student, the sign comes to mean something more than just a fast-food advertisement. She continues,

it’s not about the burger, I mean, I’m a vegetarian. But it’s there, and we’re driving down to Caledonia, the site of this huge uprising, the site of this spiraling conflict that just seems so unresolvable [sic], the site of such incredible racism and hate and oppression, a place where we Canadians, who love to blow the horn of diplomacy into everyone’s faces can’t even sort it out … and I can’t help but feel, stupid as it may seem, that the BACONATOR is this horrific metaphor of it all (21).

And suddenly, she becomes the Baconator. Sitting atop another student’s shoulders, she holds a flashlight under her chin, yelling “I am the Baconator!” as the rest of the cast rhymes off the jingle from the Wendy’s television commercial. At first the scene receives laughs from the audience, but soon we realize that things are becoming quite horrific. The group becomes frightened, as their fellow student towers over them, unrecognizable, and cries, “That’s right mother fucker, prepare to be Baconated” (22). When the music suddenly stops, she asks, “What’s with that? Baconating the shit out of everybody?” and then realizes, “I don’t want this viciousness[,] this domination … I don’t want to be a Baconator” (22). By creating and engaging with this metaphor, the student explores what it means to consume such a product, while forcing a connection between corporate consumption and Caledonia.

The Baconator is not the only corporate imagery interrogated for its symbolism by Differ/End. The play also makes provocative use of Canada’s other maple leaf, the ubiquitous Tim Horton’s coffee cup. A student pours disputed soil out of a Tim Hortons cup and onto a table, explaining, “This is probably going to be uncomfortable but we need it for illustration. This extra large Tim Hortons cup is full of soil from [the reclamation] site. In essence this is a cup of disputed soil” (31). The rest of the cast lines up on either side of the table, facing the audience. Another student tells us that “In some of the pictures from the really heated times surrounding the erection of the first barricade, there are people visible, on either side of the barricades, cops included, drinking Tim Hortons. While creating this play, we did it too” (32). The consumption of Tim Hortons products can easily be glossed over as apolitical, but in Differ/End it is directly interrogated. A student explains that the group will pay “a little sacrament to the disturbing unifying power of the former Canadian hockey legend business, turned massive publicly traded American Corporation, Tim Hortons” (32). The host sings a hymn to Tim Hortons as students cross their cups over their foreheads, then they tilt up the cups as if pouring coffee into their mouths, but instead, soil falls out of their cups and onto the floor. The students hand back their cups, reciting, “Tim Be With You”, “And Also With You” (33)—a disturbing perversion of the moment in Catholic mass brought to my mind earlier in the play. The segment, by correlating Christian ritual with corporate consumption, forces an interrogation of the politics behind both practices. It compels the audience to question our relationship to corporate consumption, to religion, and to the land. As a student, I am keenly aware of how susceptible my sector of the Canadian population is to branding and advertisements; the play interrogates two of the myriad brands we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

Wrestling with and deconstructing these symbols is necessary to the activism in Differ/End. In North American society, culture is increasingly encroached upon by corporations who are met with far too little critical resistance, making the culture jamming that occurs in Differ/End vital and timely. In a play about land and ownership, corporate symbols become especially political. Both the Baconator and Tim Hortons mattered to the issue, as part of its landscape. As a young university student and culture jammer tells Naomi Klein in No Logo, “this is my environment … and these ads are really directed at me. If these images can affect me, then I can affect them back” (Stasko qtd. in Klein 292).

As a result of witnessing the play, these images have become inextricably linked for me to the new meanings that Differ/End has given them. A cup of Tim Hortons coffee is no longer just that. The meaning-making performed in Differ/End reveals the artistry of its creators; their use of corporate imagery creates an aesthetic of subversion. They refuse to conform to the decided meanings of these images, and in doing so create something new. “The Baconator” and “Ode to Tim Hortons” reveal the liminality of Differ/End’s performers, who are at once students, artists, and activists. In these scenes they literally act upon their environment.

Another performer does not have such an easy time making metaphor out of what he sees around him; he does not move as freely between his position as student and as activist-artist. He describes a detour that he took on his way to Caledonia through his hometown of Brantford; he and a few others stop at Kanata Village, a “little Native Historical Centre” (Garratt 24) where he used to go on field trips in public school. As he and the others explore the deserted centre, he comes across a large mask in the bushes at the back of the property. He tells us, “I remember it. It used to be on the big sign where you came in. It’s huge like that, billboard size. We all stand over it. A face, with long dark hair, distorted features. Rotting leaves encrusted all over its face…grapevines have bound one of the ears to the earth. There are dozens and dozens of insects, wood bugs, crawling in the nostrils” (25). As he looks at it, he becomes convinced that “It’s a symbol of…something” (25). Like any good student of the arts, he has been trained to recognize a symbol. He sees the decaying mask on his way to Caledonia and knows that it is poetic, but he cannot finish the metaphor; the mask remains a symbol without a signifier. The student finishes his monologue, angrily stating, “I want [the mask] to be utterly full of resonance. But it’s just garbage … I want to cry my face off, or vomit, or just anything momentous. I want something momentous but I just get a forgotten sign in the grapevines” (25). This is a pivotal moment in the play’s documentary process; it forces the narrative to reflect back on itself, interrogating the very act of meaning-making. Is it that no symbol can be made from the mask? Or is it that the subject matter overwhelms such a task? Why is this student unable to make meaning as easily as his classmates do with corporate symbols? Perhaps if the student had more time, or if he had a better understanding of rhetoric, he could instill some profound meaning upon the decaying mask, but the pressing issue in Caledonia forces him to move on.

The student finds himself caught in between two positionalities—student and activist-artist. His role as student is to analyze and interpret the image he sees before him, but as an activist he is forced to disrupt his intellectual exercise and continue without the symbol. I find myself relating to the frustration he feels at his inability to make his experience poetic. It is as if, by creating a coherent and meaningful symbol, we might fulfill some greater purpose or even do someone justice. Failure at this makes us wonder what went wrong, what we are missing. If this is not our task as students, then what is?

The monologue speaks to the complex problem of the play itself and the position of its creators as both students and activists. The student’s confusion and disappointment reveal his position as limited. In order to do justice to the issue, he must negotiate with other parts of his identity. As a student he is unable to make meaning out of the mask, but as an artist and activist he is able to perform a monologue that acknowledges the difficulty of Differ/End’s project. At stake is not the meaning of the mask, but the decision to remain or to move on, and what this says about the performer’s positionality. Differ/End’s creators face problems of not knowing who or what to believe, running out of time, the imminent need to document a vital issue, and the attempt to “tell the truth, without being absolutely sure” (Boal Rainbow 39).

Paul Arthur’s discussion of such postmodern political documentary films as Roger and Me and Lightening Over Braddock in “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments)” relates closely to these problems. He argues that the films manifest an “aesthetic of failure” (127); they are made with the subjectivity of their creators in full view, and document both technical and philosophical failures in attempts to find the truth. Rather than concretely depicting the “real story” behind their subject matter, these films possess “the open admission of, indeed a central obsession with, inadequacy emblazoned by formal disjunction and underwritten by dramatic displays of nontotalized knowledge—patriarchal mastery in disarray” (132). In our interview, Andy Houston also speaks of “the problem of failing” in Differ/End; he states, “that strikes me as fundamentally what’s at stake here in this negotiation—it’s about non-Aboriginals being present with their own failure to do this right, to do the relationship justice, and I want us to be present with that”. Rather than an abdication of responsibility, failure works in the play as a mobilizing force. The creators’ initial lack of knowledge did not impair them, but compelled them to bear witness, to ask questions and to bring their newfound awareness back to their community. Now, even after months of research, they realize it is impossible to know everything about the Caledonia land-claim dispute—there is no master narrative. When asked what he feels the goal of Differ/End is, an actor states, “trying to get people to talk about fixing it, because I have no idea how to fix it” (Q&A).

Please find Part 5 here!

2009-06-03T14:30:00.002-04:00

"I see a world that rejects hate, that rejects judgmental condemnation, and rejects prejudice and racism. I see a government that honours the privacy of its citizens without unwarranted surveillance; I see a society where war is not an option – and negotiation with mutual respect is the hallmark rather than mutual self-destruction. I see a society where the welfare of all is equally important as the riches of the few. I see a world that discusses solutions without demanding its own answers. We have given war, pestilence, hate, green, judgment, ego, self-sufficiency a good try – and it failed. We need a new paradigm that consists of kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect in all our relationships. "

-Dr. George Tiller (1941-2009), assassinated abortion provider

Playing with Privilege, 3

2009-05-22T15:42:00.003-04:00

The Differend
A student explains that the title of the play comes from Jean-Francois Lyotard; “the differend” is Lyotard’s concept for contending with “the impossibility of avoiding conflicts (the impossibility of indifference) and … the absence of a universal genre of discourse to regulate them (or, if you prefer, the inevitable partiality of the judge)” (xii). Assumptions are made regarding truth and universality by those whose language and linguistic idioms are dominant. Lyotard problematizes these master narratives for their rendering silent those who do not share dominant language/idioms. He states, “A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, if the author of the damages turns out directly to be one’s judge” (13). This notion is particularly pertinent to the subject of Indigenous land-claims, where one must ask, “how can the Aboriginals legitimately take political action against Canada, if the only system they are franchised to work through is just an extension of the Canadian Government itself?” (Garratt 56) How can something be resolved between two groups whose structures and societies are fundamentally different? Lyotard’s differend is explicitly applied to the play through a specific example:

the Europeans wash up on the shores of the Americas … they’re looking around for somebody in charge, and they see these chiefs … They assume that there must be parallel hierarchical structure within Native cultures as there are within European cultures. That the men they see, these chiefs, are obviously the ones in charge … there was an assumption made, based on a distinct cultural experience but that resulted in a miscommunication and ultimately a nightmare. Different people are different. Differ. End (14).

Lyotard asserts that new idioms must be created, “new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend” (Lyotard 13). The project of Differ/End is to open up dialogue between and amongst those involved and those outside, in hopes of creating such idioms. Through audio-video footage and verbal transcription, Differ/End documents stories of Indigenous protestors and Caledonian residents in an effort to see the problem from every angle. Rather than attempting to “solve” the differend, the play interrogates Canadian master narratives and presents alternative histories. But before we go further, it is necessary to put the Caledonia land-claim dispute into context.

Political Context: “It’s Grand to Be in Caledonia”
Six Nations protesters began their occupation of the Douglas Creek Estates in Caledonia on February 28th, 2006. As a reporter for the Hamilton Spectator describes, protestors “strung a large banner proclaiming ‘Six Nations Land’ between two lamp posts at the subdivision entrance off Argyle Street” (Legall A07). Since then, they have remained on the site, maintaining a constant presence to ensure that no further development takes place. The partially developed site is part of the Haldimand Tract, a stretch of land totaling nearly one million acres—six nautical miles on either side of the Grand River, from its source to Lake Erie (see CBC News In Depth: Caledonia Historical Timeline). In 1784, the British Crown gave the Haldimand Tract to Six Nations for their loyalty during the American Revolution. Since then, the tract has been reduced, properties have been leased and sold, and Six Nations find themselves in possession of only 45000 of the original acres (Garratt 37). At stake for Six Nations protestors is the right to the land originally given to them in the Haldimand Proclamation. It is critical to note that Six Nations protestors do not occupy developed land—they are not attempting to force people out of their homes; only undeveloped or partially developed territory is reclaimed. In the spring and summer of 2006, the situation in Caledonia intensified, and it became the source of national news coverage. Protests and counter protests caused clashes between a number of Six Nations people and Caledonians.

An unfiltered view of the situation in Caledonia is impossible to find. Spectacular images in mainstream media sources, such as those taken at the OPP raid of the occupied site on April 20th, 2006, show protestors wearing bandanas and driving around on ATVs. These images were included in news documents months after the raid took place (see CBC News “Judge tells Ontario to end Caledonia dispute talks”, 8 August 2006). In fact, in the CBC’s timeline of the current dispute (CBC News In Depth: Caledonia Land Claim Timeline), the only photograph shown is perhaps the most pervasive: that of an Indigenous protestor, wearing a bandana over her or his face and a Mohawk Warriors ballcap, speaking into a walkie-talkie. This image represents the Indigenous protestor as unknown and dangerous, covering up, doing things behind “our” backs. As one of the students in Differ/End notes, “They were a ‘they’, a ‘them’ an ‘other’ I othered them immediately, as a group. And what do they want us to do[?] I us’d all of ‘us’” (Garratt 5). Differ/End provides alternative histories and reports from Caledonia that are inaccessible through mainstream media sources. Media was the subject of many students’ casebooks for their dramaturgy class. The conclusion by many was that they could not garner satisfactory information on the dispute from any major media source.

My own research has left me with the same problem. Notable in many major news articles on the dispute is the privileging of non-native voices and opinions over those of Six Nations people. In nearly every article I came across, both sides were interviewed, but protestors were rarely quoted before non-natives. The lack of Indigenous voices present and given import in mainstream media prompted me to create my own dramaturgical supplement for Differ/End’s June remount. Because the remount happened too quickly to facilitate any major changes to the script, Andy Houston and I decided to provide the audience with information on current Six Nations reclamation sites in Caledonia and surrounding areas, specifically in Brantford. This information was displayed along with the students’ casebooks in a room above the performance space, where audience members were encouraged to visit during intermission. I created a display that served as a guideline for engaging with media that covered Six Nations protests. Along with articles from the Brantford Expositor, I displayed articles from sources such as Tekawennake News, The Dominion, People’s Voice, and Upping the Anti. I displayed signs suggesting that we “Ask [Our] Newspaper Questions,” “Talk to Friends and Family About What’s Going On” and “Find Alternative News Sources.”

I created a brochure titled “What’s Happening Now and What Can We Do?” that audience members could take with them. It provides a brief timeline of the Brantford protests as well as a list of web resources; the list consists of Indigenous and alternative media sources such as Six Nations Reclamation Information, Solidarity and Autonomy: Six Nations and Caledonia Resource Page, and CKRZ: Six Nations Radio. Dramaturgically, I felt these brochures continued the play’s theme of audience as participant. Along with the conventional program that the audience takes home, I wanted to provide them with a tangible source of education and provocation. It is my hope that those who witnessed Differ/End and my display are now able to broaden their engagement with media and information relating to the Six Nations cause, and realize that their education on the subject does not have to begin and end with the evening news or Saturday’s paper.

Access Part 4 by clicking here.

Playing with Privilege, part deux

2009-05-15T09:22:00.008-04:00

Research as Performance, Performance as Research
Differ/End: The Caledonia Project had its initial run at the University of Waterloo’s Studio 180, a black box theatre whose house seats a maximum of sixty people. When I attended the performance, the house was at capacity and filled mainly with university students. Entering the theatre, I noted the seating arrangement: the audience sat in rows set diagonally across the theatre, divided by the performance space. As Augusto Boal has noted, theatre is fundamentally about “seeing [ourselves] seeing” (Rainbow 13), and I was reminded of this as I sat down to watch Differ/End. Before the play even started, the audience became participants—we were on display to each other from opposite sides of the stage.

Differ/End is made up of interconnected segments, which together form a composite portrayal of an undergraduate drama class’s coming-to-awareness of the dispute in Caledonia. Simply put, Differ/End presents a group of students performing their research. Student-actors present the audience with findings from a semester’s worth of detective work. The play is like a live dramaturgical casebook, starting with the problem and presenting evidence in an attempt to form a better understanding, and perhaps even reach some semblance of a solution.
Central to the importance of the piece is its imperative work in building solidarity between Six Nations and non-natives in its community. It avoids polemics by utilizing a documentary and self-reflexive style, especially when discussing the words and actions of extremists on both sides. While strong opinions are sometimes given, the fact that the piece is an ensemble tempers every outlook and enables the play to present a range of different views. Although text-heavy, Differ/End manages to do more than simply relate facts; it is an entertaining, imagistic piece of theatre, engaging its audience by having them participate. This in turn creates a jarring effect, as the audience shifts between passivity and activity.

The efficacy of the project is a complex issue, perhaps impossible to measure. But I will argue that the work of Differ/End is to expose, implicate and educate its audience[1] as the issue becomes increasingly close to home. In an interview, one actor notes, “it’s important to reach those people who think they’re distanced from it, throw it in their faces.” As I will continue to discuss, the show ushers its audience into a communal space, but with this inclusion comes responsibility and culpability. While Studio 180 is small, dark, and cloistered away in one of the University’s arts buildings, Kitchener City Hall is impossible to miss—it is an enormous structure located in the middle of downtown Kitchener. The June '08 remount put Differ/End in the centre of official civic space. In this new environment the play became akin to a public forum, accessible to whoever was willing to participate.

Before I begin, I should attempt to make clear that although the performers are University of Waterloo students, and all of them play students in Differ/End, it is not entirely correct to say they play themselves. In the script they are identified by numbers; however, throughout the performance they call each other by their real names. When I first saw the play, I assumed the actors were playing themselves and speaking their own words, but in talking to them later I learned that this is not completely true. The performers embody characters whose outlooks and attitudes they do not always share. The liminal space that the performers occupy—between their own identities and their characters’—speaks to the uncomfortable position of the play itself. Differ/End occupies a number of liminal spaces, between art and activism, documentary and fiction, scholarship and practice. I will argue that this is part of what makes it an effective piece of theatre. Designation—student vs. actor—becomes even more complicated when discussing the June remount, where performing had little to do with the university or the actors’ academic lives. When discussing the performance of Differ/End I will use the term students, because students inhabit the world of the play; outside of the play, they are actors/performers.

“The first I heard about Caledonia…”

As the play begins, the cast enters the space, looking rather confused and worried. They seem to wonder, “What is everyone doing here? What are we doing here?” They sit on the floor, warily looking around at each other and the audience. One of them tentatively starts the dialogue, remarking, “To be honest, when I first heard about it I thought Caledonia was way up North somewhere … It was 30 seconds on the evening news … I remember a guy in a bandana, or maybe a woman, and a Canadian flag, another flag I didn’t recognize, and an OPP cruiser … And I thought…it was just some futile gesture” (Garratt 4). A number of the other students state their initial reactions to the land-claim dispute, which manifest a plurality of awareness regarding the issue. While one exclaims, “I couldn’t believe that after Dudley George, the government would allow anything to get that desperate. I actually felt pretty embarrassed” (6), another admits, “My first thought? ‘Oh, another pointless aboriginal protest’ Sorry” (4). I recall the first time I heard the opening line of the play, being pierced by the recollection that I too thought Caledonia was “way up North somewhere”; perhaps a number of audience members were similarly struck. In this way, the audience begins at the same place as the students, recalling our own processes of cognizance.

One of the students is not dressed like the others; while they don casual clothing, he wears a fine black suit and dress shoes. While they give their testimonials, he walks around the performance space sipping a martini. When they have finished, he greets everyone and thanks us for coming, and the cast follows suit. He then asks everyone to stand up (if we are able) and “shake hands with the strangers around [us] and thank them for coming to the show” (6). As we do this, the cast walks around to each audience member and shakes her or his hand, looking each one in the eye and expressing sincere gratitude. The suited student, who we can only assume is our host, explains, “This is a collective experience and we all contribute to it so let’s acknowledge that” (6). To be honest, it feels pretty good; it is new and different to have such intimate interaction with actors and fellow spectators during a performance. In a way, it reminds me of Catholic mass when I was a kid—my favourite part was always “Peace be with you,” when I got to engage with total strangers and shake their hands. As an audience, we are warmly invited to be participants in the piece, as if Differ/End is an exercise in community building. However, this also works on a subtle level to implicate us. The gesture, seemingly friendly and comforting, is an attempt to prevent passivity on the part of the audience.

As our host continually endeavors to begin the “play proper”, students interrupt him with exercises and additional information about their experience, in attempts to better prepare us for what we are about to witness. One conducts a pseudo-meditation with the audience, asking us to “Focus on [our] breathing” and to “let all that tension go … all that tension from going out to see a play about the Caledonia Crisis and Aboriginal Land Claims” (7). Another reminds us, “you are now culpable”, that our culpability starts here (9). Up until now, the cast has been kind and gentle to the audience, easing us into Differ/End’s controversial subject matter. This speech is jarring; the student is angry, and his classmate’s insistence that he “slow down” only encourages his temper to flare. He will not let us off the hook; we are here, and as long as we are here we will come face-to-face with our own culpability.
If there is a single word that has changed my sense of subjectivity, it is culpability. Before Differ/End I had not heard it said in quite some time, but since I first saw the play it has guided not only my work as a researcher, but almost every aspect of my life. Its definition, “deserving blame or censure,” (OED) is harsh, but as a member of white upper-middle class society I believe it necessary to turn my pointed finger back upon myself if I wish to live and work ethically. From Differ/End I have learned that culpability entails more than just feeling guilty and apologizing; for me, it has facilitated an interrogation of the role(s) I play, socially, politically, and personally. Culpability is the reason I have written this paper.

[1] Differ/End does not explicitly intend a certain audience, the decision to keep it in K-W has been a conscious one; the play’s principle aim is to educate members of its own community on an issue that is becoming increasingly close to home—as Six Nations protests have increased in Brantford. Members of the Six Nations and Caledonian communities did attend the February performances; however, as I learned from the audience surveys I conducted, people at the June remount were largely non-native residents of K-W .

Access the next part by clicking "Newer Post" below!

Playing with Privilege, Part 1

2009-05-14T23:25:00.007-04:00

So since I never really got around to trying to publish my Major Research Paper (ie, the culminating project for my M.A.) in earnest, I thought I'd just throw it up here. Things move fast (well, relatively) in academia and I'm afraid it might not really ever see the light of day. So I'm going to post a section a week here (if I can remember) to make myself feel less like it was all for naught. TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK!

Playing with Privilege: Exposing Differ/End: The Caledonia Project and its Position as Activist Theatre

“When talking honestly about ourselves is the goal of a spectacle, the spectacle loses its power as such, and we are the only thing left. It feels good to sit in a room with a bunch of people and reconnect with the basic principles of inquiry and self-responsibility.”
–Darren O’Donnell, Social Acupuncture

“We did get lost...we did get sick to our stomachs...and Gil did sweep up some soil, and I felt sick to my stomach; it felt like we were stealing their land.”
–Lisa O'Connell, Head Dramaturge, Differ/End: The Caledonia Project

Introduction: What, Why & How?
This paper is an inquiry into the efficacy of theatre for social change. It presents a case study of a single play, interrogating the ethical and political implications of the play’s creation and potential effects on its audience. As a drama student, I am also concerned with the positionality of those involved in activist theatre and how their attempts to research, document, and dramatize a complex political issue pulls them into the meaning of the piece itself. Why is such theatre work important? How might it manage to do good rather than harm? Has it really done anything? These are some of the questions that guide the following investigation.

Differ/End: The Caledonia Project is a play written by Gil Garratt, directed by Andy Houston and performed by seventeen undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo. The project began in a third-year dramaturgy class in fall 2007, when Houston asked his students to research everything they could on the land-claim dispute between the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) people and developers in Caledonia, which gained national notoriety in early 2006. The class conducted research with the assistance of Lisa O’Connell, a professional dramaturge in Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W). After the course ended, playwright Gil Garratt took their work and condensed it into a two-act play. Although the course was over, seventeen students from the class returned in February 2008, unpaid and not for credit, to rehearse and perform the play. Differ/End was remounted in June 2008 for a four-day run at the Rotunda in Kitchener City Hall, as part of the Tapestries Multicultural Festival.

When I saw the play in February, I was overwhelmed; I had never seen a university theatre production like it. As a drama student who often wonders what is at stake politically in theatre practice, and who has long grown tired of productions that simply maintain the status quo, I am compelled by Differ/End’s project. In its attempt to at once document and theatricalize an ongoing community issue, it forges an unusual kind of theatre work, which begins as research in the academy and becomes a provocative communal occasion. Its creators took a leap of faith, conducting research in hopes that they could eventually produce a piece of theatre; but not just any theatre—theatre that actually does justice to those involved in the issue.

Differ/End has an inherent mission: to implicate those who witness it as part of the issue. By educating and implicating, the play intends to effect social change. So how does it do this, and what does it mean? Furthermore, who are the people in the play? Are they students playing themselves, or actors playing students? Are they activists? Their changing positionality, discussed throughout the play, constitutes how they function in the creation and construction of the project.

When I saw Differ/End at the University of Waterloo, the much larger Theatre of the Arts down the hall, which seats 500, was housing the K-W Symphony. I found it interesting that a play created and produced by students at the University of Waterloo, discussing a community-related issue, had been so upstaged by an event that had nothing at all to do with the university’s drama students. It was obvious from the space each production occupied that Differ/End did not fit as easily into the performing arts economy as the Symphony did. The location of Differ/End’s February production exposes efficacy as one of its principle problems. On one hand, it would be hypocritical to stage a play that presumes to position itself on the front line of an issue in a conventional theatre; if Differ/End’s dramaturgy intends to be radical, the space of the performance should bear this out. As Baz Kershaw argues, “in the process of being staged in theatre buildings, in submitting to contemporary theatre as a disciplinary machine, [potentially radical performances] succumb to what they attack” (54). Staging radical performance in a conventionally removed theatre space reinscribes that performance as part of a theatrical tradition it is trying to subvert. On the other hand, such a venue provides many more people an opportunity to see the play. If 500 people could see it nightly, Differ/End might conceivably impact real social change. But of course, this is not how theatre works. How can I imagine that a play about an uncomfortable issue, performed by a bunch of amateurs, would sell out at the Theatre of the Arts? Differ/End addresses these problems by moving out of the theatre and into the public sphere.

In order to better understand its position as a piece of activist theatre, I committed to attending as many rehearsals for Differ/End’s June remount as I could, participating in and documenting the process of production, as well as attending each performance. It was not enough for me to sit back and observe, so I actively participated in the rehearsals and productions. If my own research and scholarship were going to benefit from Differ/End, I wanted to give whatever I could back to those involved. I began as an outsider, just as the researchers did when they first traveled to Caledonia, but in my efforts to participate and reciprocate, I have become intimately connected with the project. The following discussion of Differ/End is based on the rehearsals and performances I attended during its remount at Kitchener City Hall in June 2008, as well as interviews I conducted with the cast and crew. Following a brief description of the play and its political context, I will discuss a number of scenes that provoke wider considerations of cultural criticism, positionality, and the efficacy of theatre for social change.

Access the next part by clicking "Newer Post" below!

A Timely History Lesson

2009-04-15T11:39:00.006-04:00

For anyone interested, there is an excellent documentary on KPFA and Pacifica Radio - the first listener-supported radio station in America - today on Democracy Now!

It's a really moving and important look at public media in America in the last 60 years, at a time when mainstream media is becoming increasingly and dangerously corporate. For me, it comes as a realization that even though times seem really bad and even scary now, people stood up to and faced down even larger and scarier attacks on freedom and liberty - and things are better because of their struggle.

So listen up!

"You see most liberals think that if you can find the middle of anything and squat there, that somehow or another virtue has been achieved." ... "I think if there is any possibility of saving democracy, it rests in the media"
- Elsa Knight Thompson on KPFA

Lazy Journalism is Dangerous Journalism (and it's also annoying.)

2009-03-25T11:54:00.015-04:00

Nick Taylor-Vaisey's article, "Can We Talk? Notes from Canada's Free Speech Front Line," featured in the March 4th issue of Xtra (Ottawa edition) presumes that the wave of pro-life organizing on campuses across Canada can be seamlessly juxtaposed with the struggles of marginalized groups (namely queer groups) on campuses and their right to freedom of expression. In attempting to create a kinship between these issues, Taylor-Vaisey conveniently leaves out major occurrences in the anti-choice movements on the U of Guelph and U of Calgary campuses. Far from a harbinger of freedom, Life Choice - the pro-life group on the U of Guelph campus - stages events at which materials are handed out likening abortion to a criminal offence and calling to "Make Abortion Extinct." Last fall, the group hosted a talk titled "Refuse to Choose." What Taylor-Vaisey and liberal-minded students like them (I'm using this pronoun because I'm not sure how Taylor-Vaisey identifies) assume is that a free speech stance is synonymous with the inclusion of anti-choice groups on campus; but this assumption is fraught for many reasons, principally that a student union refusing to give funds and club status to groups that go against their policies has nothing to do with censorship. Student unions can and do choose not to accredit (i.e give funding and student space) to groups that do not abide by their policies; if pro-lifers want to get together and talk about what they believe in, no one is stopping them - they just can't do so as official student groups on campuses whose student unions have a pro-choice policy (like the CSA's does.) The reason pro-life groups have such a difficult time adhering to pro-choice/anti-oppression policies is because a pro-life stance is fundamentally a stance that opposes freedom of expression. When the CSA at U of Guelph, or when any student union around the country, decides not to accredit these groups, they are doing so on the behalf of their student('s) bodies and communities to promote the continuation of bodily sovereignty and freedom of expression. I should note here that Life Choice IS in fact an accredited group on the U of Guelph at present, due to the CSA's mishandling of a decision to deny the group accredation last fall.

It's easy to make the pro-life movement on our campuses a free speech issue when one is able to conveniently see it as simply a moral-philosophical debate. What burns me up is how people forget that there are front lines in this struggle. Taylor-Vaisey states more than once that these pro-life groups are on the "front lines" of the struggle for free speech. This is outrageous! There are buses in Guelph with ads painted on them telling townspeople that "this is a child not a choice." There is nowhere to get an abortion in Guelph. In fact, when I type in "abortion + guelph" to Google, this is the first hit. There were people who, after the Life Fair event hosted by Life Choice last spring, had to seek counselling. And our campus is fortunate enough to have thus far avoided the (this is the project's official site, so please visit with caution) "Genocide Awareness Project," which far too many women have had to suffer through on their campuses and in their communities. Through these examples, we come a bit closer (though still, probably not close enough) to the front lines of women's health and reproductive rights. Why were none of these issues raised in Taylor-Vaisey's article? The groups they cite as "victims" of censorship do not attempt to hold open debates, they do not engage with Women's Centres on campus, they do not raise awareness about the lack of support for pregnant students and students who are mothers on campus (not on our campus anyway) - this is not their project, because women and children are not at the centre of their project. They exist as part of a much larger project - a backlash, if you will, against all those who have fought for freedom of expression and for anti-oppression on our campuses.

We have to look harder at who is behind this conservative struggle, and what is at stake in vehemently maintaining an anti-choice stance. There is a crucial difference between an individual who might personally feel life starts at conception, or that adoption is a better option than abortion, and an organized group of people whose work it is to graphically impose their system of beliefs on members of their community, in the hopes of completely erasing the option of abortion. I think this difference has a lot to do with ideology - and with power. Ideology has kept a certain group of people at the top of the heap for a long time, and morality is the weapon of choice when it comes to ensuring that this power is kept. When we start debating, when we start loosening up long-held beliefs and assumptions, this is when ideology becomes vulnerable. Morgentaler's case was not that long ago, and it is the aim of many of these groups to hearken back to a time before he stood up for change, before "things got out of control." Why do you think, to cite another example, that the Mormon church funded the enormous prop 8 campaign in California last fall? The dominant ideology has been poked and prodded pretty hard in the last 100 or so years. "If we allow abortions, what next?" "If gays can get married, what next?" "If workers are allowed to unionize, what next?"

It's in the interest of groups like Life Choice to pose as the voices of "alternative options." But we have to dig a bit deeper to discern what their actual project is. I really do think that if this group had women's (and children's) interests at stake, they would be holding discussions on how to increase support for student-parents on campus, they would be informing themselves and others on women's health issues, they would be hosting or attending panels on why, for so many women, motherhood and post-secondary education are mutually exclusive life choices (ha.) But Life Choice and groups like it are not interested in socio-economic issues - which is why they have so quickly ensured that their existence is the stuff of moral and philosophical debate. Finally, the decision to bear a child is not an "alternative" option in our society today. How can it be when there is no Planned Parenthood Guelph, when there are no abortion clinics in this town? I've heard it said that on our "liberal university campuses" the decision to have a child is not a popular one. This viewpoint confounds me slightly - but even if it does hold some water, the solution is not to accredit a pro-life group. That question can and must be grappled with from a pro-choice position. It is a cultural and socio-economic question, a question about women and how we are treated.

And the Life Choice issue on our campus, as a number of us have been saying for awhile now, is not an issue of free speech. The group was given accredation by the CSA with the understanding that it would adhere to our student union's policies, which include:

"Appendix F, 4.2 in the CSA’s Policy Manual, which states that women have the right to an educational environment free of advertisement, entertainment, programming and/or materials which promote violence against women, sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Furthermore, the fundamental right of all women to control their bodies by:

i) Access to safe, reliable birth control and family planning information and the right of choice in the method.

ii) Freedom of choice choosing one’s stance in the matter of abortion."

Life Choice violated the above section of the CSA’s Policy Manual when at the "Life Fair" last spring they disseminated materials that called for the criminalization and even extinction of abortion.

It disturbs me that the Taylor-Vaisey thinks likening queer groups on campus to pro-life groups on campus is a good idea, and it's taken me a few days to really articulate why. This week saw Women's Studies all but eradicated as a program at the U of Guelph, with the administration citing that the program costs too much money (meanwhile our prez makes $400,000 a year, more than four times the cost of the program) and that women's studies will be "integrated" (read: tokenized) into the larger curriculum. This issue has been well documented here in Guelph, and elsewhere as well. I think Taylor-Vaisey's disturbingly misguided article is prime evidence of the dire need for Women's and Gender studies programs in post-secondary education, hell - in ALL levels of education (and let's remember that indeed there will be a gender studies program at a Guelph high school next September, further evidence that this city's university is moving backward.) As one of the hosts of "Earful of Queer" stated on Monday's radio show, "queerphobia stems from sexism - it stems from the idea that there is a certain role for men and a certain role for women, and so people who are queer tend to not follow those roles, and the oppression they face is a direct result of sexism and a direct result of the patriarchy." I can't say it better myself. When we're forced to stand up for women's bodily sovereignty on campus, we're fighting the same conservative, patricarchal project that queers fight when we struggle against homophobia and marginalization. Certainly there are nuances and complications, but to me Taylor-Vaisey's article makes both queers and women susceptible to the kind of divide-and-conquer strategy that those in power have relied upon for hundreds of years. What Taylor-Vaisey lacks, and what I think so many of us tragically lack, is basic knowledge of anti-oppression - what it means, where we stand, what it says about our relationships to those within and outside our various communities. And I think the fact that PIRGs across the country are confronting conservative projects to shut them down (see the link on my March 21st blog post), and the fact that U of G's Women's Studies program is facing extinction, does not bode well at all for an increase in anti-oppression training. And who benefits from that?

One thing I want to ask anyone who might read this post (if anyone still even bothers with my blog anymore!) is WHY do you think so many folks are buying into this "free speech" rhetoric when it comes to the anti-choice issue? Why did Nick Taylor-Vaisey, presumably a queer journalist, write the piece they wrote? I just don't understand the motives behind it. I'd love some ideas.

And here I thought it was just a creepy trend...

2009-03-21T22:24:00.003-04:00

http://ryersonfreepress.ca/site/?p=745&preview=true

2009-03-21T15:21:00.001-04:00

I'm sorry, blog, that I have not posted since March 2nd.

It's nothing personal; I've been busy and I have writer's block.

I'll be back soon, I promise.

The Minor Chord Rock Song is Gonna Heal You in the Long Run

2009-03-02T20:48:00.024-05:00

I've been wanting to write a post about mix CDs for awhile now. I think we're at this weird epoch in the history of music-sharing, where all that's great about it may too quickly be forgotten. I mean, people can wave their iPhones around in a club and have an application tell them what song is playing and who performs it. We don't even have to ask each other anymore! I've been fortunate (I think) enough to live in a time where music is highly accessible. However, I've seen my own ability to really spend time with music slowly dwindle in the last few years. The pre-iPod world necessitated spending time with music - if not albums, then certainly songs. I used to carry around my discman, with three or four cds in my backpack, and just play the SHIT out of those cds. Those were the days - first and second year university - where I walked everwhere and listened to music at a constant. When I listen now to the albums I listened to then, I'm reminded of how intimately familiar I was with them. I just can't say the same for a lot of the music I purchase today....and my iPod doesn't even work anymore.

That's just a preface though. What I really want to talk about is the power of the mix CD/tape. Most of my musical knowledge has come from either sitting down with a friend and having them play me music (in a dorm room, in a car, at their parents' house, in the library) or from receiving a mix CD made by a friend. Early in our friendship, my best pal Ariel made me Miximus Malkmus, my introduction to Pavement - complete with illustrations, an alternate title, and a booklet full of information on each Pavement song she had included (Malkmus quotes and all.) It remains one of the most beautiful crafted gifts I've ever received. When I was hating Peterborough and my life in the winter of '07, I met Amy Fort. She made me a mix CD called O To Be Sure after the first time we hung out - an eerily fitting title. It opened up with "Elephant Gun" by Beirut and I can safely say it changed my whole life. Amy never includes the track listing on her CDs, a principle I've now adopted; I think it helps maintain a sense of discovery. I held fast to this way of doing things until last weekend, when my friend Cam Malcolm brought me a mix CD with the songs listed plus a comment on each song. I might just have to steal his game.

I think that without knowing it we - those of us who really love music - possess the ability to heal each other by sharing music; or at least to help each other out and make things better. For instance, I had a terrible weekend. When I came back to Guelph on Sunday night and started doing my dishes, I put on Cam's mix. The first song is by Orillia Opry: "I need some help. I tried to help myself once or twice, and it was hell."

How did he do that?

When we make a mix CD/tape, we don't need to commit to saying anything specific, to getting a tangible point across. We just need to get the selection and the order right, because the songs have already hit us and the receiver of the mix is already somebody meaningful for us. When I listen to a song that I'm planning to put on a mix for someone, I listen as if they're sitting in the room with me. I need their presence with me, butI also need to keep from completely losing myself in what they might want. It's a balance that can't be overthought. (A welcome challenge for yours truly.)

I made my friend Jonas a CD lately; there was so much I wanted to say so badly to him, but I knew it would never come out. So I made a CD and packed it with as much meaning as I could muster. I want to share the list of songs here, because shortly after completing the CD I reflected upon where I had first heard them, and how they came to mean so much to me. I realized that most of them were listened to in the company (or by the provokation) of people I love. I'll say as a disclaimer that this CD is kind of a "Letson Greatest Hits." It will probably prove to anyone reading this who's received a CD from me that I really am predictable and have no imagination. Jury's still out on that one.

1. This Kid That I Knew - Peter and the Wolf
-number 8 on the mix cd Amy Fort made me for my 25th birthday. She sings backup vocals on this song.
2. Comfy in Nautica - Panda Bear
-uhh, this song kind of discredits my whole thesis. Person Pitch was the best record on Pitchfork's 2007 list...so I pirated the record and this is the only song that really stayed with me. "Coolness is having courage, the courage to do what's right. Try to remember always just to have a good time." Sometimes I worry about coolness and this song makes me worry less.
3. Hit and Pearle - Dosh
-I read the most beautiful review for this record by one Vish Khanna while I was on the can; VK can convince me of anything. I'm really glad I stumbled upon that review, because Wolves & Wishes is one of my favourite records of the last year.
4. The Jam I'm In - The Bicycles
-Matt Dotzenroth found this old Bicycles song somewhere and then sent it to me via email for my birthday.
5. The Minus Ball - Two Minute Miracles
-Cam Malcolm sent me this song after I sent him a song that I think is kind of uncool. This song is undoubtedly cool, and I can't stop listening to it.
6. Black Cab - Jens Lekman
-I always liked this song, but then I saw Jens last spring and he played this song as an encore. Now I need this song, all the time. One of the best sing-a-longs in my life right now.
7. You Send Me - Sam Cooke
-Cam Malcolm always used to play Sam Cooke in his parents' red van. And I used to drive around with him a lot. I know Jonas likes Sam Cooke because he covered "Bring It on Home to Me" on his last record, Let's All Get Happy Together, one of the saddest records I've ever heard.
8. Blood and Faeces - Royal City
-When I moved to Guelph I took my parents' ridiculous 50+ cd stereo. I was inspired by my friend Joel Smith, who also absurdly has a 50+ cd stereo. Like, Joel, I fill it up with cds and put the whole thing on shuffle. Then I cook, or clean my kitchen. This song came on one time while I was in my kitchen and it nearly killed me. I waited a long time to buy this record, and finally I found a beautiful copy of it here in Guelph at the late-great Daydream Nation. I've been a big Royal City fan for awhile now - I have a visceral memory of listening to Little Heart's Ease in my discman while I walked around Traill campus (at Trent) on a really shitty November day in second year. That memory of me in my kitchen with this song is from my first November in Guelph.
9. Table and Chairs - Andrew Bird
-I listen to a lot of Andrew Bird. But this song was not a central part of my A.B. canon until recently. Ariel Sharratt posted some lyrics from the song as her facebook status, so I paid attention to it (because she is way cooler than me and I will do many things to try and catch up.) I listened to it more and more, and now I think it's one of the most hopeful songs I've ever heard.
10. All I Really Want to Do - Bob Dylan
-Heard it in that aforementioned red van. It's since become one of the most important songs in my life. And yes, I put it on every mix cd I ever make anyone.
11. Family Tree - Ben Kweller
-Y'know, I have no idea what finally compelled me to start listening to Ben Kweller. This song gets me.
12. All Mixed Up - Red House Painters (Cars cover)
-My dear friend James Taylor gave me a Red House Painters cd (Old Ramon) for Christmas when I was like, 18. No turning back. This cover is...so fucking good. I had this really awful intense weird breakup just before I turned 21, and I discovered Songs for a Blue Guitar shortly afterward; it literally got me through that experience more sane and collected than I could have hoped. Songs on that record said things I don't think anyone could have known to say at the time.
13. The Pink Ghosts - The Acorn
-Matt Dotzenroth is from Ottawa. He picked up the Acorn's first two CDs there when we were in 2nd year. I ended up borrowing them for about 10 months and got probably way more into the Acorn than he did at the time.
14. No Blues - Baby Eagle (Julie Doiron's version)
-Cam Malcolm left this CD, among others, in my mailbox last January. It's great.
15. Homesick - Snailhouse
-Jonas Bonnetta first prompted me to listen to Snailhouse. I bought the new record at the Cornerstone sometime last year...and it's even better than I had hoped.

In short I think these shitty discs, whose quality will run out long before the gesture of giving and receiving them ever will, are our way of loving each other. They're opuses, they're mysteries, they're knitted sweaters. I think they're our attempts at perfection; at least, they're my attempt at perfection. And I create each of them with the humble hope that one is coming back my way, making the whole idea of perfection in the first place completely beside the point.

What Happened.

2009-02-23T20:09:00.012-05:00

Have you ever showed up somewhere with the unflagging certainty you are supposed to be there at that exact time, on that exact date, in that exact place - only to be wrong?

But how could you have been wrong?

The date fit so perfectly into your gridlocked schedule, like the last pie slice that clicks into place when you've just about won Trivial Pursuit. And not only that, you've been waiting for this appointment, taking heart in its occurance, counting on it. The person you've made the date with isn't a close aquaintance; you've only met them once before. So when you march up the front steps and through the front door, take off your boots, stuff all your cumbersome winter wear into the sleeves of your coat, and hop up the stairs, you are elevated only by the complete confidence that this meeting is supposed to happen now. You flop down in relief across from the person you've made the date with, who is sitting exactly where you expect they'll be sitting. And then they smile at you said say, "Now I'm sure we were meeting at this time on Wednesday."

Tiny pieces of your brain flutter down like snow (or maybe ashes.)
It's written in their book - and even if it wasn't, they are the caller of the shots, not you.
Suddenly, you hear other people walk in the door and your "date" (still cool as a cucumber) says, "In fact, those people are supposed to be here now," as if the book wasn't hard enough evidence.

All the power and control you had been storing up to bring here hits the floor.

So you quickly leave the room. You walk downstairs, pass the people with your head down as they walk up. Hear the door upstairs close, certain that they're talking about you - apologies are being made for you. You throw on your things and step outside, knot growing in throat.

And you crumble home, broken by the very thing that was supposed to be fixing you.

Go on, get outraged.

2009-02-09T21:21:00.017-05:00

How do we, over here, in North America, excuse ourselves from the daily torture and rape of thousands of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Is it built into human nature that geographical distance and societal difference provide an excuse to turn away?

When preparing for a high school workshop on feminism, I found a video called "This is What a Feminist Looks Like." It's a great introductory video because it deconstructs some of the myths that surround feminism. To me, the most profound idea in the video is that being a feminist means being "connected to every woman on the planet." This really changed my thinking, and it has provoked me to become more present with women's struggles, to actually imagine the physical reality of those struggles in a visceral way. I want to talk a little bit about feminist work that can be done on a day-to-day basis - namely, the act of unlearning. What is the actual work of unlearning? Here's the best example I can think of: when I'm walking down the street and I see someone driving foolishly, I often find myself immediately imagining it's a woman. Why? Where does this notion come from? Are women actually worse drivers than men? No. And if some sociological study were done that proved women were worse drivers than men - would that suddenly give me the entitlement to assume any foolish driver is a woman? No, because behind such studies lie agendas, and behind such assumptions lie actual societal realities that are rarely considered. How many young women are taught to drive by their fathers, who have themselves been bred to believe that women cannot drive as well as men? What is our criteria for a "good driver," and where does it come from? Is there not something suspect about representing women in this way, and actively perpetuating such representation? All of this is unlearning. Once we start to expose these patterns within our own thought processes, we can untangle some of the patriarchal assumptions we all make about those around us.

I think questioning why films like Bride Wars are not only being made but are actually being viewed by a multitude of women is crucial. Who makes these films? Are these films made by women? Sure, maybe these are not films we would ever go and see, but does that let us off the hook? Should we not still be deeply suspicious of these motivated representations (to steal a term from bell hooks)? One of the most profound revelations I ever had about such representations was provoked by hooks, who states (watch this video! please!), "the most successful political movement in the United States of the last twenty years is really feminist movement. And that there is tremendous backlash to feminism that is being enacted on the stage of mass media … It’s no accident, we know that when women went into the factories in the World Wars because men were not here, that when those wars ended, mass media was used to get women out of the factory and back into the home. Well in a sense mass media is being used in that very same way right now – to get women out of feminism, and back into some patriarchal mode of thinking."

As women, we are not encouraged to feel connected to one another. We watch ourselves depicted by popular media as in competition with each other, or in performance for a male - usually absent (see: every commercial for women's products on television, popular music, popular film, print.) Who are we cleaning the house for? Who are we dying our hair for? Who and what are we getting angry at each other for? Why does it have to be this way? Why? If you can ask yourself at least once every day, earnestly, "Why does it have to be this way?" I think you are doing important work.

I watched a film called Caramel last night, a beautiful film about a salon in Beirut and the four women who run it. Men play minimal roles in the film, and yet their absent presence haunts the narrative from beginning to end. While men drive much of the women's purpose and motivation in the film, we are also introduced to the possibilities that these women have of forging their own lives - of being all right with their own secrets, of creating worlds for themselves and between each other. And there's even a lesbian character. Holla! Even though finding a man and getting married is what's "supposed" to happen, through this narrative we are given a glimpse of the playful in-between (metaxis!). And, importantly, we see women's relationships celebrated. Seeking out films and other mediatized representations of women that are against the grain, that are created by women, is also work we must do - and it's really fun and enjoyable, so let's not even call it work.

And so now I want to circle back to the situation in the DRC, and do some hard thinking on what might be done to first connect with, and then stand up for, all those women. In order to connect I think it's obvious that we must expose ourselves to this situation in all its horror. Yes, we have the luxury of never witnessing these atrocities. You can bet we won't be seeing it on our evening news. When we do the work of exposing ourselves, I think we also have to be present with our own emotional reactions. If we have experienced abuse, have we been able to heal? Is it productive or healthy for us to take these other struggles on before we have fully recovered from our own? And if we are among the few fortunate women who have not experienced abuse, how do we connect? What is stopping us? What is at stake in connecting? Eve Ensler, in an interview on Democracy Now, calls the situation in the Congo "an end-of-the-world scenario." If more of us were able to see it in such a context, how would we be reacting? What constitutes an "end-of-the-world scenario" for us, and why isn't it the crisis in the DRC? And what can we possibly do? I think that question often runs the risk of hurling us back into complacency. We are so vulnerable to complacency - it's the way things have been set up. I can barely watch a 50 minute newscast without stopping to check my email, getting up to grab some water, fidgeting around. My own constant activity makes me complacent. And our complacency inhibits our willingness to question the reality being imposed upon us. Although I would caution against becoming complete and utter conspiracy theorists, I think many of us suffer from a lack of societal susipicion. So, what can we do? Take time to learn the basics. Seek out the information. Ask people if they've heard about what's going on. Bring it up. Unlearn. Try to stop seeing yourself as the standard by which everyone else should be measured. Find out what V-Day is. And that only has to be the beginning...

Deciduous

2009-02-07T13:49:00.002-05:00

I'm sure there was a time

all calm before
our twinned anxieties
branched out to tangle
that briefly quiet copse
we'd come across.

I'd tear out arms of ivy,
exhausted, all while
you tied and tethered
yourself deeper
into a maze of bramble.
I bumbled with
the broken sticks
and tripped--
aghast at all the weeds.

I guess you planted
while I went to seed.

Pkowww

2009-02-06T15:51:00.004-05:00

I'm listening to a great interview on Democracy Now! at the moment. Amy Goodman is talking to P.W. Singer about robotics and warfare. Amy asked if robotic technologies are available to companies like Blackwater, and this was his response - which absolutely boggled my mind:

P.W. SINGER: Yeah. There’s a section in the book. I call it “Soldiers of Fortran,” after the old software program Fortran. And there’s a great story in it, which actually encapsulates some of the weird ways this is going, where a group of college students fundraised money to do something about Darfur, and they ended up actually raising about a half-million dollars. It went well beyond their wildest dreams.
And so, then they explored whether they could hire their own private military company. And they called—you know, sent messages out via email, and a number of private military companies called them back, to their dorm room, and one of them actually offered to lease them some drones and—to use in Darfur. And the kids were talking about this. They didn’t imagine it would take off like this, but it did. Now, fortunately, some other people spoke with them and said, “Hey, this is really not the best use of the money that you fundraised.”
But it points to how these systems, they’re not just accessible to militaries. As you noted, they’re being used by DHS, by police agencies. And, of course, many of them use commercial technology. For $1,000, you could do it yourself. You can build the version of a Raven drone. ...

WOW. You can hear the whole interview here.

Nanay: A Testimonial Play

2009-02-03T13:40:00.003-05:00

If you've got some time, please check out this great interview about a documentary theatre piece on Filipina caregivers in Canada, which is being presented at the PuSh festival in Vancouver. This interview with director Alex Ferguson discusses documentary theatre, which has an important place in modern theatre. It seems to be coming back into use in Canada - and for good reason. I thought this recording had the full play, but unfortunately it's just an interview. Pretty exciting, nonetheless. Let's hope it gets to Toronto!

That's Feminism.

2009-01-29T22:51:00.009-05:00

Liz Lemon loves food.
A woman. On network television. Who loves food - especially junk food - and owns it. (Remember that time she ate all those fake cheezies and thought she was pregnant? Then still ate them?) It's a revelation!

Sustaining and Standing Up

2009-01-27T19:29:00.007-05:00

I got a bit worried when I heard tonight that the Conservative government will be pouring tons of money into infrastructure, even though that seems to be the most encouraging part of their shiny new budget. Not that I'm a Luddite or anything, but I do worry that the whole "we're in a recession, let's build stuff!" mentality is a dangerous one when our country's (read: planet's) environmental sustainability hangs in the balance.
I guess I'm still smarting from the observations of my own suburban upbringing, the last few years of which coincided with the Ontario government's "Places to Grow" project. The project pegged certain small towns and cities as places in need of an infrastructure boost. While this could ideally mean improvements to public works and services, often enough it meant a massive trend of cookie-cutter big box developments across Ontario. Hence the reason I can't drive anywhere in this province without seeing that big penguin billboard flanked by a) a flat, barren field, b) a dirty development site, or c) Walmart. I'm not saying the equation is anywhere near as easy as "Places to Grow"=SmartCentres, but the two are far from mutually exclusive. Developers see a municipality making strides to grow, and they want in.
Take Brantford for example. Now, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this case, but I do know a bit about it from my work on Differ/End last summer. Brantford has been on the losing side of Canada's economy for the last couple decades, and so the news of a "growth plan" was very welcome. Big business (and not just Canadian big business) got wind of this, and Brantford started developing. However, not without the resistance of Six Nations protestors, who occupied development sites, claiming them (and rightfully so) as their own. Of course, this threw many Brantford residents (not to mention developers) into a tizzy. "They're ruining our one chance of being a healthy city again" I read over and over again in the Expositor. I did read one letter though that presented an alternative view. The writer saw the Six Nations occupations as an opportunity for the entire community to slow down and ask themselves, "What is being built?" "Why is it happening so fast?" "What kind of jobs are being created - and at what expense?" I will take this one step further and say that Six Nations might have even helped Brantford out. Six Nations folks have shut down six development sites in Brantford, and the injuction the city tried to pass against them (making their protests illegal) has thus far failed. According to one community member, many in Brantford support Six Nations - perhaps seeing things the way that lone writer did many months ago. And what were the developments that the Haudenosaunee reclaimants worked to stop? One was a housing development by Empire Communities, whose slogan I'm not even kidding, reads "Where in the Empire Do You Want to Live?" (Please do me a favour and take a moment to revel in this irony.) Another, if I'm not mistaken, was a Hampton Inn...Kingspan Insulation, a large roofing manufacturer building a facility in Brampton, has also been halted.
I think what people are starting to realize - and we've taken a long time to do so, and we're not doing it even nearly fast enough - is that there is no quick and dirty way to foster communities, to create infrastructure that doesn't encroach on other people and on the land. And, though this time of crisis is a delicious opportunity for big business to amp up its tirade on the places we live, turning them into real-life Sim Cities, we can and do stand up.
What does and what can infrastructure mean? If we want it to mean something besides sprawl, we've got to be imaginative.

Those Cold Swedish Winters

2009-01-25T21:34:00.011-05:00

Tonight I went to see Let the Right One In - a Swedish film about vampires. Well, it's really about one vampire, and she's twelve years old. It's also about a boy named Oskar, also twelve, who lives in the same apartment complex.
It's winter. It's potentially the 1980s. I think Let the Right One In had to take place in Sweden, where it is only sunny for short periods of the day in winter, where there is enough snow to cover up blood, and where bodies can easily be kicked into a river where they'll freeze solid in the ice. There is a cruelty to this film that doesn't announce itself, perhaps because of its omnipresence; its existence inside the very core of such a cold, dark place. Should I be saying that about Sweden? I don't think I have any real idea what it might be like there. But indeed beautiful things come out of there: Ingmar Bergman films and Jens Lekman songs, to name a couple.
The climate of the film bears down on its characters, but also gives them the freedom to create intimate worlds for themselves. And when I say that, I am not talking about the fantastical. This movie is really about a vampire - the everyday life of a vampire, without any theatrical pretension. So what becomes unreal, uncanny, is the relationship that the two characters forge. Oskar is isolated - he is brutalized by the other boys at school, his parents are divorced, and he is kind of obsessed with murder. His introduction to Eli (the vampire) happens at night, in the snow. While they talk, his nose runs - incessantly. Inside, they tenderly tap morse code to each other on the shared walled between their apartment units. Eli crawls into bed naked with Oskar, her face stained with blood; not turning around, Oskar asks if she wants to go steady (she says yes.) Although Eli repeatedly tells Oskar that she is "not a girl," he doesn't care - he still likes her and wants her.
(This is a queeeeeeer film folks.)
Young people are capable of complexities that are, I think, difficult to glimpse once one is past adolescence. This film glimpses - indeed it keenly and respectfully observes.
And it's creepy as hell, and it's funny. And it will make you very worried walking home by yourself on our vaguely more hospitable winter nights.
Fuck Twilight!
Please, if you think you can handle it (you can), go see this film in its original Swedish awesomeness, before Hollywood wrecks it like they do so many films from elsewhere.
Also, I think there are some valuable connections to be made between Jens (see above) and this film. They have similar sensibilities. Both take conventional (or obvious) genres (the pop song, the vampire/horror film), remove the corporate formulas and theatrics, and make them intimate. To call them "oddball / weird / boundary-pushing" is trivial, and exposes the parts of me that have been made to love tradition and normalcy.
...Ew. Now that's gross.

I want this to work out.

2009-01-19T13:21:00.004-05:00

2009-01-18T17:02:00.006-05:00

"Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought how wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they'd been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us."

One more thing...

2009-01-17T20:27:00.004-05:00

"Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well." -Alan Wolfe

Community, Immunity, Solidarity, & Silence

2009-01-17T17:41:00.011-05:00

I want to write a bit about community, and my own experience with how that word, in practice, can take very different forms.
Last night, I went out to a show at the Albion in Guelph. It was the second anniversary of a record label that had started here (and has since moved to Toronto) called Out of this Spark. Now, this show, theoretically, was the definition of "Guelph community arts" - folks in Guelph had started this label with their friends, and now everyone was back to celebrate its successes. The venue was packed with people (mainly white, mainly my age), who were there for what seemed like a number of different reasons. But the overarching reason was that the show was cool and familiar - the bands on the bill were hot Toronto indie acts, many of whom got their start in Guelph. Because jes got rather sick yesterday, I went by myself. And it was jes who really urged me to go; she had been excited about the show for awhile because she loves Jenny Omnichord and Timber Timbre. So I went ("for both of us") on my own. On my way, I had no anxieties about going to a show alone; I knew a couple of people who would also be there, and I was going to see music, so no big deal. However, when I arrived in the venue, I was overwhelmed by how terrible it was to be there alone. The few people I had counted on weren't there yet. Being alone at an indie rock show is like getting a nosebleed in grade school - everyone knows it's a nightmare, but no one is selfless enough to join you in riding it out. When the first act started I quickly realized that nearly no one was actually there to see the music. People were there to talk to each other, to take pride and comfort in who they knew there. Even when my friends arrived, they had this ability to bounce around the room - drinking, hugging, making small talk - that I did not share. As the night progressed, I felt increasingly a) exhausted and b) uncool. In fact, I felt immensely uncool. I left after Timber Timbre's set; the sound was terrible, and the audience made it impossible to really be present with his music anyway.
When I lived in Peterborough and went to Trent, I was in a band, and when I go to shows like the one I just wrote about, I am riddled with nostalgia and confusion. Perhaps my frustration at the cold shoulder I get as an outsider to the "Guelph scene" comes from the fact that I was once in a similar scene. Now I'm like an angry kid who's changed schools and suddenly finds herself eating lunch alone in a bathroom stall. I worry that people went to the shows I went to in Peterborough, alone, anxious, feeling uncool. And because I was inside the community, I had no reason to look out. In fact, perhaps it even made me uncomfortable to look out. There is a lot more here - a lot more about the whole "indie scene" that I now find ridiculous and even angering. And that hurts because I love music. I am a true blue fan. But, for all the bands that come and go, for all the buzz and name-dropping, I don't always see that kind of love here in Guelph. I mean, I know it's here - I know that within the community of folks who went to that show last night, there is a genuine love for whatever ties that bind them. I guess I just grow tired of all that has to come along with being a fan of "indie music." You had to wear certain things (keffiyehs - don't get me started), you have to know certain people, you have to have a certain demeanor, you have to be a little bit to the left politically (but you shouldn't get too into that)...and you must explicate legitimate links to a certain network of people/bands/scenes. It's as if this whole amalgam was in search of some beating heart at the centre; as if those you know become a chain, ideally leading you closer to that imagined hub. My band was not cool. We were nerds. But we were fans, and I honestly think that's what worked best about us; it was my favourite thing about us anyway. I don't want to harp on Guelph's music scene, because I think it's vibrant and energizing for a lot of folks who live here - and I think there are some musicians here who do great work and create wonderful, important music. And, of course, playing music and being in a band is everything to some people - there's nothing wrong with celebrating that. I guess I just wish we existed in a society where community didn't necessitate exclusion (but would that not explode the very definition of community?) Where our sights were not so firmly set on knowing the "right people," at the expensive of actually looking around. Community protects and empowers us; it also makes us comfortable and complacent. We so easily forget generosity - and the work it takes to be generous.

Today, jes and I co-facilitated a "Feminism 101" workshop at the Positive Social Action Conference on campus. I was a stranger there too (though having jes makes a difference,) but there, people wanted to know each other. And I guess what enlivens me so much about the workshops we do is the promotion and fostering of that spirit. We get people together, talking and engaging with others - and in the space of the workshop, people were so eager to do this work. There was such an air of kindness, solidarity and encouragement - even through difference. Not to pat ourselves on the back; I don't think we were responsible for this, but that the communal space was created through the commitment of every individual there. And even still, I am certain we could have gone further. Following the workshop, we headed down to a Guelph-Gaza rally at City Hall, where were entered into another community space. Here, we saw people of different races and different ages. And as much as people spoke, they also listened. As much as we looked forward, we were encouraged to look all around us. There was room to be silent, to be alone. I should admit also that there was a sense of comfort here, comfort in knowing that there are people in my city of residence who care about this issue. But more than that - and I think this cuts sharply through my white, privileged sense of comfort - there are people in my community who are haplessly bound up in this issue; who come out to this rally not just to see their friends, but because they need to know that others struggle with them. And together, we all do this work as best we can; we say, "we are here doing work, but there is more work to be done." The rally did not end with thank-yous, it ended with a moment of silence.

This is not a poem.

2009-01-13T11:13:00.005-05:00

"This is not a poem,
this is a blanket thrown over a cycle of violence.
A conflict, cut open with a seraded knife;
my arms waving like a frantic flag.
This not a poem,
this is a shame
as a big as a country
as striking as a sniper...

This is not a reason
to burn another people to ashes
to rip them of what we were ripped of..."
-Karine Silverwoman

Kick-Ass Preteens

2009-01-11T15:55:00.002-05:00

What were you doing when you were ten?

A brief departure

2009-01-09T15:01:00.005-05:00

Because I am neurotic and a chronic worrier, I sometimes get stuck way too far inside my own head. Today, I was told that in order to be more mindful and "in the present," I should write a list of five things I'm grateful for today. So, I thought I'd do that.

1. jes - who consisently makes me a better, happier, healthier person.
2. 2666, the novel I'm reading right now - because it's weird and funny and epic and I won't be finished anytime soon. So I'm grateful for Erin too, who gave it to me.
3. My apartment and my neighbourhood - I was walking home today and the houses and trees on my hill looked so beautiful. Similarly, I was looking out my apartment's big fabulous window and got the great sensation of being inside a snowglobe that no one had to flip over. It's so quiet here.
4. Andrew Bird - whose songs make me feel more like myself, and who I think/hope would be a great friend if I knew him. And who is putting a new record out in 11 days!
5. Days off - This whole "working part-time thing" is pretty sweet, especially because I know it won't last. I really like working all day for a couple of days and then having a whole weekday off. And I guess I'm just grateful to my employer, Broadview, in general - for somehow finding the money to give me a part-time contract even when times are tough.

So, that's it. Pre-tty simple. It's my birthday tomorrow. I'm grateful for that too; I'm not embarrassed to say that my birthday is probably my favourite day of the year.

And now here's some reading...be grateful for Canada's alt press!

2009-01-08T12:22:00.001-05:00

WHAT THE F#@$?!!

y'know what...

2009-01-07T14:58:00.007-05:00

My tirade yetersday I think was a bit misguided. It's not Obama (although I'm still angry about "delicate".) This is a bone-chillingly brilliant time for the Israeli military to launch the kind of assault they have on Gaza. Everyone is freaking about the economy, Bush hasn't left office yet, and Obama really can't say anything without coming under serious amounts of criticism. His plate is full as it is, and I understand his caution. Not to mention, whether it should be a factor or not, the fact that his identity as non-white must compound the already impossible situation he finds himself in regarding this issue.
It appears that the Israeli government is now just seeing how much it can get away with. So...are we going to let it get away with bombing more UN schools, and continuing to kill over a hundred kids? Well, according to our government, yes, Israel will continue to get away with it because such incidents are the fault of Hamas. How foolish of me to believe that we didn't live in a world where an entire population could be punished for the extremism of a few, while vast majority of us not only watched but justified our inaction.
I don't feel I should be writing on this - I don't have the knowledge, the authority, the ethical confidence. But I also don't feel I should be writing about anything else while something like this is going on.

Here's some more reading:
Gaza clashes resume after truce
Jewish Women Occupy Israeli Consulate in Toronto
Cracking Israeli Apartheid
Israeli Voices for Peace by Amy Goodman
Why Do So Few Speak Up For Gaza? Please read this article!

On wars and words

2009-01-06T20:59:00.008-05:00

Frankly, it worries me that Obama used the word "delicate" in his long-overdue statement on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. I mean, the fact that he only weighed in on the whole thing TODAY and that he's leaving it all up to BUSH, are also greatly troubling...but I want to focus on his use of the word "delicate." I've been listening and reading a lot of news coverage on the Gaza assault. Schools are being bombed, entire families are being wiped out, 25% of the deaths (according to official tolls) are civilian. And let's keep in mind that there is a fence around Gaza. As a spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency says, "let’s be clear here. When you get a leaflet saying 'Leave your house. It’s about to be attacked. Go to safety,' there is no safety in Gaza. Your listeners must realize that there is a large fence around Gaza. In conflicts, people grab their children and flee to safety. There’s no safety in Gaza today. There is nowhere for these people to flee." Over 500 Palastinian deaths! In a week and a half!
I don't necessarily take issue with what I think Obama was trying to say, which is that U.S. foreign affairs must treat the relationship (if we can use that word) between Palestine and Israel with utmost caution and respect for its complexity. But I do take issue with the usage of a word like "delicate." Although he was using it in reference to foreign affairs "negotiations" taking place with "one president at a time," its presence in his statement is a dangerous sign of ignorance and distance from the crisis in Gaza, which is in every way the antithesis of "delicate," and is happening in complete absence of "negotiation." Delicate implies dantiness, fragility. Perhaps if there were some kind of peace negotiation going on between Israel and Palestine, we could use words like "delicate," but what is "delicate" about a full-blown military assault on a civilian population with nowhere to go?
And "delicate" becomes especially outrageous when we hear, from the UNRWA spokesperson I quoted above, that "the coordinates of all of our facilities in Gaza were handed over to the Israelis well before this offensive began." And yet one of these facilities, Amsa Elementary school, suffered a direct hit from the Israeli air strike. Why?
It is enough that most of us here in Canada and the States cannot know what it must be like to be Gazan - cannot be fully present with that horror. But for our new "free world leader" to make a statement as utterly disregarding as Obama made is chilling to me. We might all blame Bush for his anti-intellectualism, and we are certainly justified in doing so. But are we witnessing here, if I dare say it, a case of dangerous over-intellectualism? Does Obama see this crisis as merely a complex ethical problem? Indeed, it is that...but who cares? Who cares until a ceasefire is called? And if not now, when would the president-elect deem it appropriate to call for one? Will Gaza have to wait until late January?
And...yes, of course there is a lot at stake for Obama in having an opinion on what's happening in Gaza - perhaps everything...which is one of the most fucked up parts of this anything-but-delicate "situation".

It's just like my Russian History professor said,

2009-01-03T12:20:00.000-05:00

"The first casualty of war is the truth."

lord if you've got lungs...

2009-01-02T19:27:00.000-05:00

TV on the Radio's Dear Science is an album for everyone. It's earnest, intelligent, searching - music you have to move to. I don't think there is a song I don't like; each is carefully crafted, skillfully built. Tunde Adebimbe's vocals are so brave. "Shout Me Out"!! It starts out as a cool, minimalist pop song, with Adembimbe's soulful vocals the main feature. THEN, it turns into this...I don't know... incredible dance song, with crispy beautiful guitars and drum loops...THEN it turns into something else, something shoegazy and covered in Big Muff...then it's the latter two mixed together. A journey! Dear Science is a record made by grownups, and though most of the songs make you want to forget everything and dance, there are dark ideas in the words. This is the dichotomy that great pop songs are all about!

I feel so saturated by new music, especially new "indie dance music," and it stresses me out. I barely spend time with records anymore, and the ones I do spend time with don't seem cool enough, or at least not cool anymore; someone will have already been listening to what I've just discovered for at least two months already. This record, though, isn't indifferent - and I recognize that about it because it doesn't sound like so much of the music I feel I "should" be listening to.

This is an affirming album - consciously accessible, honest, generous, and built with care.

Why wasn't I listening to this band sooner? No one told me!

day one of 2009. i stayed in my pjs until 6:30 pm. off to a good start.

2009-01-01T23:56:00.000-05:00

A few things:

I'm currently reading 2666 by Roberto Bolano. My sister gave it to me for Christmas. I think it's great so far. Bolano's writing reminds me of Borges. I wonder if I'm the only person who sees that connection, or if it's even really plausible. I haven't read that much Borges. This book makes me want to read Borges though. There is a literary device, and I'm sure it has a name that I should know, that Marques uses a lot, and whenever I see other writers using it I get really excited. It's a narrative moment when the narrator (almost always 3rd person) begins to talk about the future. An occurance in a character's present situation will prompt the narrative voice to begin revealing future events in the character's life - sometimes minor and sometimes major. It sounds something like, "later, he would take that photograph and burn it along with any other item that might remind him of her." Bolano hasn't really done this, but his context as a Spanish author made me think about it. Actually, I just finished a novel by A. M. Homes and she does it. So...I've been thinking about it and the effect it has on me as a reader. It causes me some anxiety, puts the narrator in an uncomfortably powerful position. But for those reasons I greatly enjoy it. Does anyone know what it's called? I should try and find out. Anyway, 2666. I think its going to be major.

The novel has made a lot of "Best of '08" lists. I love these kinds of lists. I think they're maybe my favourite part about the new year. Today I listened to (part of) CBC Radio 3's countdown of the best records of 2008, and then I read Pitchfork's "Top 50 Albums of 2008" (I knew about 3% of the records they were writing about.) Thank god for these lists because they give me enough to read and listen to for the next few months. And I have some gift cards to spend, so now I have some great ideas. Thank you, pop culture, for needing "best of" lists. I need them too.

My resolutions as they stand right now are to a) go to yoga, and b) read/listen to at least 1/2 an hour of news a day via The Dominion, Rabble.ca, CBC, Democracy Now!, and where ever else I can find it. I also want to write about music more. I just want to write more in general. I need to get better at writing non-academically, or I will continue to annoy myself (and others I'm sure.) So I'll blog.

Some of my bests in '08:

Musical love affair: Andrew Bird (no new record in 2008, but the old ones have entered the realm of lifetime favourites for me.)

Show: Bicycles CD release party, "The Last Shmaltz", in Toronto.

Guelph shows (not that this category and the above are mutually exclusive): Both Dublin Street United Church shows were delicious - especially Gentlemen Reg and Ohbijou. I effing loved seeing Timber Timbre in a church in the dark. I want him to come back and do that again. Seeing Snailhouse at the Cornerstone was really lovely and the venue served the whole experience really well, which was a pleasant surprise.

Play: Differ/End, for obvious reasons.

Some favourite records: The Cons, Kensington Heights; Dosh Wolves and Wishes; The Bicycles Oh No! It's Love; Fleet Foxes, S/T (I actually really love the LP, but I think that's because I stumbled upon it first, because I'm not cool.); Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago.

Song: Before thinking too hard about it I'm going to go ahead and say "Some Are Lakes" by Land of Talk.

Fiction: I had a great time reading The Book of Other People, a short story collection edited by Zadie Smith. Not published in '08, but that's when I read most of it. Oh, and No One Belongs Here More Than You! Miranda July! Also, not published in '08, but definitely at the top of my list for '08 reads.

Non-Fiction: Social Acupunture by Darren O'Donnell (again, not 08, but what are you going to do.)

Film: yikes, I don't even know. Y'know, there is just a lot I haven't seen that I know I'm going to think are great, like Milk and Doubt and Rachel Getting Married, oh, and Slum Dog Millionaire. I'll get back to you on that one. I liked Iron Man a lot, for what it's worth....and was incredibly disappointed by Synecdoche, New York.

Next time I want to talk about Tina Fey.

Letson out.

on positionality and being wrong

2008-07-28T13:06:00.000-04:00

Ok. So. Context constitutes privilege. Privilege is not a "solid state". Everyone movies through fluctuating amounts of privilege depending on their relationship to hegemony.
So, while the students in Differ/End find themselves in the privileged position of researchers, with the time, resources and support to conduct research on the Caledonia land dispute, their position as students can make them powerless in other contexts.
Let's take the final scene for example: a student is oppressed and abused because she does not possess the knowledge to succeed at the game she was forced to participate in. What does this say about privilege and positionality? What does this have to do with the land claim dispute in Caledonia? That's what I need to answer. Knowledge is used against her. She is oppressed by men. She is a student of colour. What is at stake in not knowing? What is the risk of putting on this play? Her position as student does not change, but the situation changes. What about the position of the host? By variously embodying a student and a ringmaster, he has more power than his fellow students do. What is the risk of not knowing? A loss of privilege, a loss of basic rights. The game is more than a loss of privilege, it is about a loss of rights. Why does nobody help her? Why do her fellow students watch this happen without being able to do anything? They seem trapped by an unwritten contract. Who are they at this point?
What does this have to do with Caledonia? The young woman is forced to take part in a game with rules she has not made. She is a victim of the game, in a Lyotardian sense. She has been disenfranchised by the host and his execution of the game.

Opening Lines

2008-06-11T12:20:00.000-04:00

"we did get lost...we did get sick to our stomachs...and Gil did sweep up some soil, and I felt sick to my stomach; I thought we were stealing their land." -Lisa O'Connell, Lead Dramaturge for Differ/End: The Caledonia Project

Differ/End, is an original play produced by University of Waterloo drama students, under the direction of Professor Andy Houston. It began as a dramaturgy course, where Houston asked his students to research everything they could on a particular aspect of the Caledonia land dispute, ongoing since early 2006. The class amassed an immense amount of research over the fall term of 2007, with the assistance of Lisa O'Connell, a professional dramaturge in Waterloo. In 2008, playwright Gil Garratt took their work and condensed it into a ninety-minute script. There was an open call for any students of the dramaturgy class to participate in the play, unpaid and not for course credit. Seventeen of the roughly twenty students in the fall-term class showed up to workshop the piece. It was performed at the University of Waterloo in mid-February 2008.

A Pedagogy for Liberation...and Kitchener City Hall

2008-06-06T13:37:00.000-04:00

Last night I read a bit more of Pedagogy for Liberation by Shor and Freire. I'm reading the section "Do First-World Students Need Liberating?" and it's been incredibly pertinent to my research. Shor is able to aptly discuss the problems with North American pedagogy and institutionalized education, and Freire offers excellent counterpoints, putting Shor's situation in a larger context and identifying structural problems in N.A. education. Freire insists that "education is not the lever for social transformation" (Shor Freire 129), which is a bit of a sticking point for Shor. Freire's point is that engagement between the institution and the outside world is necessary for social transformation. Educators enter institutions with ideal notions that they can start revolutions, but Freire maintains that the best defense against the despair and cynicism that inevitably follows this shattered idealism is the notion that the classroom is not where social transformation will occur. One must leave the classroom.
Lisa O'Connell, the dramaturg for Differ/End, interestingly commented on the product-driven nature of our education system. I think this speaks closely to what Shor and Freire discuss, especially when Shor comments, "The more elite the school the more it communicates to the students that they are going places so there is a reason to put up with the curriculum. Playing by the rules in an elite school can pay off in your future" (128). There is a lack of regard for process, and it is mobilized to convince students to be passive. The N.A. education system, according to Shor, breeds a "culture of silence" and a "culture of sabotage" (121, 123).
Significantly problematic for Freire is the dichotomy between "reading the words" and "reading the world" in N.A. classrooms, "increasing the separation of the words we read and the world we live in" (135). So students become excellent at understanding theory and concepts, can even play with theory and concepts, but do not see their application in the real world. Shor points out that "Domination is also the very structure of knowing; concepts are presented irrelevant to reality; descriptions of reality achieve no critical integration; critical thought is separated from living" (137). This is evidence of a system that actively prevents students from engaging critically, so that they will consume without consideration, and perpetuate normative cultural and social practices in the real world, expecting the same success that is achieved by perpetuating curricular norms in the classroom. Because our education system is highly normative (137), the "norm" becomes the ideal, and this is what is transcended beyond the classroom.

Last evening I went to Kitchener to watch rehearsal for Differ/End in City Hall. The place is amazing! Very very ominous and austere. Andy has adapted the show to the new space very very nicely, and the students are doing all kinds of interesting things with the venue that will add much to the show. Seeing it again with sound and props really brought its controversy and intensity back to the fore for me. I also talked to Lisa O'Connell, who provided some great insight into the process of developing the research and script, and gave insights from a professional perspective into the process of creating such a piece. I'll be posting pictures of the space soon. Oh, I also wanted to comment on the rehearsal as public. This is a very interesting an significant change for the production - from the tiny, cloistered room in Hagey Hall to the enormous, central location of City Hall. Although the rehearsals are after hours, all kinds of people trickle through, some trying to ask the students questions as they wait in the wings, some silently watching, some glancing and passing quickly by. While one of the students was upstairs for part of the first act, she spoke to some interested people and conversed about Caledonia, now she says those people are going to come and watch the show! I'm secretly hoping for some really crazy stuff to go down either during the rehearsals or one of the shows, just to alleviate some of those notions of theatre as the "sacred space".

in solidarity?

2008-06-04T16:39:00.000-04:00

My own research project is inevitably bound up in questions of my own ability to work in solidarity. Scholarly practice has made me a habitual "neutrally positioned" subject. Can this be the case in my current project? Shouldn't my research and finished paper bear out the kind of change that I'm looking so desperately for within the project itself? It is important and productive to expose *Differ/End* as alternative theatre and as a pedagogical tactic for inciting social justice; this way, the production can be both praised and critiqued. But how to avoid actually ignoring, or becoming distracted from, the ACTUAL situation at hand?
I have been charged with the task of presenting a dramaturgical analysis of recent land claim disputes along the Haldimand Tract. I have decided to use mainstream and alternative media sources to explicate the situation of land claim disputes in recent months. I have attempted to highlight contentious passages from the mainstream media to potentially critique and deconstruct. But can I reasonably ask an audience to do this? The only reason I am using a source like the Brantford Expositer, besides the fact that it relentlessly covers the Brandford protests, is because it will denote an apparent objectivity on my part as a researcher. But I do not want to be objective in my analysis of the material. I want to use the Expositor articles against themselves. These sources will be posted alongside "alternative" news sources. Hopefully these new sources will fill in important gaps that have been left by the Expositor.
But is this enough?

from "Luminous Emergency" by Mary di Michele

2008-06-03T12:46:00.000-04:00

How is it that we love
for the sake of what we loved
when what we loved
we would not go back to loving?