east downtowner

winter, and construction.

This week our strip of St.Clair west has been getting new sidewalks. Buses hardly move, dry days are tinted with blowing dust, and when the workers go home the street looks like it's been bombed. huge piles of garbage here and there don't help.

Frankly, passing improvised dumps in the city parks, detouring around construction on every other street, and waiting 30 minutes at improvised busstops INSIDE of subway stations make it feel like the city is falling apart. An ode to a broken metropolis to follow.

Lots of things in the air this month, one of the most intriguing being a dance workshop that has been both deeply mysterious and hilariously up front. Which is nice.

Last week the skateboards came out, this week we had a day in the Enwave theatre, where the show will premiere next spring. Through it all the challenge was to remember past work in the body - I'm not going to explain anything right, I'm not a dancer and I don't have a useful "body memory" to get me through anything beyond how to balance up my own front steps when staggering home after a bender - and bring the memory out - and when memory fails to try to find the impulse driving the other dancers and match it.

It turned into - in my limited sense of things - an attempt to reinvent how people connect through movement. I felt that I was watching people try to read each other's minds, or find some intangible sympatico in the midst of group movement. Not following each other, but both reading and reacting in synch - you can't teach this stuff.

And I wish more of us tried it every day or two in all the other things we have to do in our lives. Wouldn't it be great to prove your identity, not with a password or a bunch of stupid numbers, but by demonstrating that you can connect with another human being?

Yeah well. Until that happens. Other stuff:

Our experiment in video and movement, Nohayquiensepa is going up at the SummerWorks Festival this August, and Bea and I are also working on her script of La Communion, a play about girl soldiers in Colombia, and we got through taxes again and our house is a mess with the basement torn up and us in limbo awaiting some bureaucrat to stamp a permit so we can get on with it, and we are looking to get back to Colombia with a couple of different initiatives, and my mom was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.

The other night, at the Harold Awards, Kirsten Johnson said that she and the other founders of the award realized that they took a lot of things for granted. A lot of amazing acheivements, a lot of hardworking, dedicated people. They saw the award as a reminder to appreciate that... which is the thought I'm hanging on to this week.

If I told you specifically what I was there to see (on my only "day off" in the last month and a half), I would be in violation of a publication ban.

Well I can tell you why my personal life led me there: a new play in the works based on an event that took place 3 years ago involving a number of young men doing something that looked like a legally unfashionable form of rebellion. I wanted to see why they are still in pretrial, these now 11, not so young, brown men.

I got to listen to a polished and powerful man run rhetorical rings around a defense lawyer who was struggling to get an answer to a complicated question. I almost nodded off a few times. I've forgotten how even intense, charged language can be deadly boring - which is one aspect of strong rhetoric (i.e, words with power).

I can't resist. More from our workshop:



(The song is "Beggar's Prayer" by Emiliana Torinni)

And this:

I was allowed into the Studio Theatre at Harbourfront last week and got to play so long as I showed the results to people. With a few friends we did stuff like this.

most of our focus was on more sober things, but when you set up a space with cameras and projectors, things have a way of happening...

This one was Ravi Jain's inspiration once he got familiar with the setup.

This week I thought I would be coming down, but we started renovating the basement - right now contractors are digging up the floor to give us real headroom down there. And three or four shows are piling up in front of me demanding attention. So I guess no weekend now, but the tired that leaves me with is okay, because good shit's happening.

We have presented our final performance of "Defenestration", and the group is now off to their next projects. This image is from the show, a moment when, as one friend put it, "a number of people arguing about stupidities stop arguing, and let the harsh reality of Colombia walk through their midst, transforming their perspectives".

I'm not sure if I had seen it like that, but that's what's nice about audiences: they tell you what you are doing, because you can't be sure of it yourself.

In this picture the Canadian performers are standing upstage, seeing a group of displaced people enter slowly, and one of them, a woman named Christina, enacts a moment from her forced eviction from her former home.

We were particularly gratified that Christina could perform with us at all: within days of our arrival in Colombia, she had been accused, along with a number of students, of being a terrorist. In Colombia such an accusation - basically any suspicion - is enough to prompt a legal arrest. There was no evidence to support the arrest, but here the authorities have the power to arrest first and find evidence later. Fortunately for Christina, a good lawyer supported her situation, and after a week and a half, her status was downgraded to house arrest (with permission to also attend the theatre) At this point the company of artists we have been working with went to her house, and with the backup of a Mariachi band, serenaded her.

Fortunately, by the time we presented our work, she had been freed.

A quick shot of a young man I met last Sunday at a big BBQ - style get together we had with about 120 displaced people, with the help of a group called Corandicol. I was shooting the event, which included a number of installations in which kids re-created their journey from their homes, through forced displacement (a phrase which glosses over a variety of practices, mostly violent, in which families are pushed off the land they occupy through force - some killed outright, some "disappeared", some simply threatened), to their arrival in Bogota.

Jostyn stood behind me for about half an hour before I relented, at which point he became the cameraman, and I his assistant.

We are at the end of three weeks of work in Bogota with director Patricia Ariza. This shot is of one of the quieter moments of the piece that has come together in that time.

For me, it has been an uphill labour to get the setup I needed for the video component that has been my main focus. 15 minutes before our first presentation yesterday and I was finally hooking up a video monitor - I didn't know what the show would look like until we did it before an audience. Add to that the mundane fact that all of us were feeling pretty greasy because a water main had burst in the neighbourhood and we had been without water for 2 days.

The beautiful thing about Bogota is that you can see the impact of theatre on the people around you. It carries weight. It speaks to their concerns - because they all have deep and immediate concerns. And in the beauty of this community is the sad fact that they are made stronger because they have to live in a country that faces so much adversity. I read the newspaper and wonder what theatre could matter to people here. Then I see how much strength a displaced person takes from seeing - or better yet, participating in - a piece that speaks even indirectly to what they face. It really is a question of engaging in a process that analyses a society's challenges intelligently, and feeds, even a little, the human need for hope.