Reflections on Festival Season

Summer is arriving in Winnipeg; festival season is about to bloom. Winnipeople will soon flock to the many festivals that fill this city’s sweet, sunny months, enjoying our town’s neighbourhoods, cultures and arts. It’s rich living for the Heart of the Continent – especially for Winnipeg’s artists.

Because even if they aren’t the sole focus (they often are), artists make up a huge chunk of a summer festivals’ programming. They’ll be strutting the stages, painting the buildings, playing music in the parks with the blessings and backings of established, branded events.

And audiences will come. Not just the season subscribers, culture vultures, and die-hard enthusiasts who attend the arts all through the year (If there is a god, may she richly bless each and every one of you). But crowds of people. Masses. Sometimes the whole city shows up. That’s what festival season is for artists: a chance to bite into the sweet fruit of all out, balls-to-the-wall support. It’s not guaranteed, but festival season is the best chance to be celebrated – really celebrated – as an artist.

I’m looking forward to festival season, even as I plan a career change away from ‘artist.’

Almost seven years ago, I cofounded Theatre by the River with a number of young actors, mostly new graduates from U of W. We looked at Winnipeg’s theatre scene and saw (rightly) that there wasn’t much work for young, local actors. So we made our own, showcasing our talents in the hopes of eventually moving from occasional gigs to full time careers. We’ve produced some fantastic shows in seven years (he said so himself) with deeply relevant messages for Winnipeg audiences. I have a treasure chest of memories from each production and I’m hoping to gather some more this summer (TBTR is presenting a staged reading of Transit of Venus at U of W on June 5 and 6 – shameless plug!).

But I haven’t snagged the career I hoped at. Which I’m willing to chalk up to lack of talent or effort. But I look around at the undeniably talented dancers, painters, musicians and actors I know and see very few wearing the title of full time, professional artist. Winnipeg only has a handful of people under that banner (most working in arts admin). That’s the reality. And now, approaching my 30^th birthday, it’s hard to pretend otherwise.

There is a window of opportunity for self-exploitation; a handful of years when the sleepless nights can be shrugged off, the small turn-outs celebrated for their intimacy, and your empty wallet made into a useful prop. You’ll work yourself hard and outrun the consequences. Throttle the living daylights out of this time.

Because the window narrows, then shuts. You will, eventually, get tired of working hard for few material rewards. Your inability to make a living solely doing what you love (your ‘calling’ you’ll say among sympathetic friends) will become frustrating. You won’t want money, but the nice things money buys...

There are ways of propping that window open, however, and the real point of writing this piece is sharing that advice. That treasure chest of memories you fill as you go about your business? Go through it, not just once or twice, but often. The young boy, the teen goth and the senior, laughing together at a Shakespearean joke; the friend who references your play as he copes with a new group home opening on his street; the normally quiet kids shouting down the bullies as you hold an extended kiss with a man – these are victories. They’re worth remembering.

And when summer comes, bite into it. Happy festival season.

This piece first appeared in The Uniter.

Three Actors Walk Into A Bar...

Ross McMillan and Sarah Constible in Steve Ratzlaff's Dionysus in Stony Mountain (photo credit Leif Norman)

Ross McMillan and Sarah Constible are two mainstays of the Winnipeg theatre scene. They’re being directed by Bill Kerr in Theatre Projects Manitoba’s upcoming production of 'Dionysus in Stony Mountain’ by Steve Ratzlaff. I caught up with them (on behalf of The Uniter) having a break at Elephant and Castle between rehearsals.

SC:       Is it recording right now (leans in to Android) Hellloooooo?

BK:      Do you know the British hen party tradition? It’s like a stagette… what they do, Ryan Air flights are so cheap that they spend like $150 to get to Dublin and they spend 48 hours getting tricked there. So you see these mobs of drunken women throwing up and yelling and fighting. And it’s another weekend in Dublin.

SC:       Oh my god. I’ve got to go to this place called Ireland.

SC:       We were doing a line run the other day and there was an old Winnipeg Sun sitting there and I started flipping through it and there were two articles within two pages of each other about different offenders from Stony... It seems like the Winnipeg Sun is filled with all these sensationalist stories and I think the play we’re working on, a lot of it goes ‘Why is this the society we’ve decided to embrace?’

MT:     Does anyone here have experience with the justice system?

RM:     No!

SC:      Twenty years. Twenty years, yep. Killed that kid.

BK:      My foster brother has been incarcerated a number of times, though not here in Manitoba. So I’m fairly familiar with the failure of the justice system as a place that 'certainly didn’t rehabilitate him' let’s put it that way… it’s hardly a place of reform, yet somehow it’s claimed to be.

SC:       And Steve’s not only touching on the justice system, he was a teacher in the regular education system too.

RM:     I asked Steve what he was doing with this play, after seeing its earliest draft. And he said ‘Well, I just want to take some Nietzsche and shove it in the faces of the middle class just to see. Just to go ‘how do you like that?’’ If you take the quite persuasive argument of one of the main characters in the play, it really recommends that you don’t take the weak members of society and revere them as victims. The implication left hanging in the play is that you let them die… I think he wants to provoke a discussion. That’s quite a piece of provoking, I’d say.

BK:      We can get caught up in the sense that nothing ever gets better. But there has actually been real change. Whatever -ism you care to look at, like post colonialism – we were just talking about Ireland – yeah, a lot of the problems are replicated but there is a country there and there wasn’t before. Partitioned, but certain things have improved.

SC:       I can now marry a black man…

BK:      Yes, you can! Exactly. So there’s always a ying and yang, but there is genuine change.

RM:     Yes, true. But look at the States. Look at all the social advances that started in the 60s: feminism and the civil rights movement. A lot of people on the Right are now talking very openly about taking these away, about rolling these back. These changes aren’t necessarily permanent. And the British could invade Ireland again.

SC:       Well the only reason they have a platform is because of the Internet. Now we have this democratization of communication - that’s the only reason these nutjobs are getting a chance to say their point of view.

RM:     Not necessarily. Look at the Republican nomination race. These nutjobs are mainstream now.

SC:       What? You’re saying Santorum is a nutjob? What is your problem?

RM:     He’s a fine man… He’s a good-looking man. He gives me the horn.

BK:      (laughing) There’s the quote right there.

RM:     And he’s doing it on purpose!

RM:     One of the most forcefully put point of views in Dionysus in Stony Mountain is not just critical of boot licking liberalism, but scornful of it. And not just scornful of it, but pointing an accusatory finger of it being the sentiment that is sickening our society. And that’s what he’s presenting to an audience and asking them to consider.  That’s definitely not preaching to the choir.

SC:       He’s going to offend everybody-

BK:      You mean intrigue!

SC:       Intrigue - that’s the word.

BK:      It asks real questions.

RM:     And underneath all that, there’s grief. There’s real grief that comes as a surprise. As perhaps it always does. That after all the blaming and guilt and anger, sometimes what you find underneath that is grief. Beyond which there’s not much to say… sometimes when you let people give vent to what appears to be their most deeply held grievances and beliefs - when they finally get it all out - underneath it is something as simple as grief that can suddenly transfigure a person and make everything they’ve been saying, not irrelevant…

SC:       Enhanced?

RM:     Enhanced, yes. But you can suddenly see that underneath all the arguments and moral haggling, sometimes what really needs to be recognized is simple pain. And real pain can’t be dealt with institutionally; it can only dealt with between two people. And if you ever experience that, you’re lucky.

Dionysus in Stony Mountain runs March 29 to April 8 - details and tickets here.

Altar Boyz Preview

(l-r: Michael Lyons, Marc Devigne, Jeremy Walmsley, Joseph Sevillo and Simon Miron - the cast of Altar Boyz)

Prairie Theatre Exchange’s main space is in a state of controlled chaos as the media call for Altar Boyz – PTE’s current co-production with Winnipeg Studio Theatre – gets going. Lights shoot from every angle; the accompanist strikes a few chords on his piano; the five actors who make up the mock Christian boy band warm up their voices – each rehearsing a different song. Artistic Director Bob Metcalfe has to shout to rein everything in.

Then the guys leap into their first song and dance (We Are the Altar Boyz) for the gathered cameras. It’s a jumping, twisting number, welcoming Winnipeg to the final show of the ‘Raise the Praise’ tour. The Boyz harmonize and gyrate for the sake of their audience’s souls. The piece ends and the guys are covered with a light sheen of sweat. Their chests are heaving. Then they do it again. And again.

And despite 12-hour rehearsals over the past three days, the piece still sparks with energy. Three years after the satirical Altar Boyz made a sweeping run at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, these guys are pumped to be back.

“We’re so lucky that things worked out, that we get to be here with the same cast,” says Jeremy Walmsley, who plays boy band leader Matthew. He’s joined by Joseph Sevillo (Mark), Michael Lyons (Luke), Marc Devigne (Juan), and Simon Miron (Abraham, the band’s lone Jew) to fill out the cast of the 2005 Off Broadway hit. Each actor is nostalgic about the 2009 Fringe production.

“Every show sold out,” says Lyons. “We always had line ups. And the audience really got into it –”

“They got super loud,” Walmsley adds.

“Coming in for a show and having lineups stretch to the Globe, it was surreal,” Miron says. ”You do feel like a rock star doing this play.”

“It’s rare that you get a chance to do something you love twice,” says Winnipeg Studio Theatre director Kayla Gordon. With this co-production, she’s gained the budget for a full set, costumes and props – the original run was scaled down due to Fringe setup constraints. The cast has also gained the time to find a more refined, blended sound.

“We’ve switched up some of the parts to clean things up, make it more specific,” Walmsley says.

“To get five guys with different vocal training to blend, that’s hard,” Miron observes. “This time, we’re trying to sound just like the album; it forces you to lift up your performance.”

Walmsley looks at the lights and glowing stage, then smiles.

“It really feels like a concert.”

Altar Boyz runs February 23 through March 11 at Prairie Theatre Exchange renovated Portage Place location. 30 minutes before the show starts, any unsold tickets are available to students for just $10. Go to www.pte.mb.ca for more info.