le piment rouge

2023-04-28T13:54:00.002-04:00

Here's a link to my new article "On the Ends and Endings of Protest," co-written with Jimena Ortuzar and illustrated with incredible photos of the 2001 FTAA protests by Caspian Kilkelly.

This article was written in a fever dream at the height of the pandemic, as I was preparing for the arrival of our second child and Jimena was moving to another continent. It only made it to publication thanks to the thoughtful and patient editorial guidance of Andy Lavender, Julia Peetz, and Becci Curtis.

DM me if you'd like to read it but get stuck at the paywall.

Abstract
The ending of a protest is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of the dramaturgy of politics. Retrospectively, a movement’s ending is what allows for an evaluation of what it has achieved. In this way, how a movement ends correlates, sometimes obliquely, with its ends. In this paper, we ask how a performance analysis of endings might help us re-evaluate protest and its afterlife. We examine three protest movements that ended in different ways: the sharp decline of the summit-hopping global justice protests of 1999 to 2001, the repression of the Istanbul protests against sexual violence of 2019 and the late afterlives of the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s. Each offers a different way of reading the relationship between the ends of a movement and its ending. From the heighted affective terrain of what Alain Badiou describes as “the intense time of the riot” to the subtler time of subterranean movements, our analysis of the ends of these movements aims to discover ways to build social movements that might sustain themselves overtime.

Link: https://lnkd.in/gsj5vJHX

"Necro-Performance and the Global War on Terror" at the 2022 3MT U of T Finals

2022-07-06T16:37:00.003-04:00

2022-02-09T13:17:00.003-05:00

Panel Discussion: Difficult but Necessary Conversation

Online Event by Zoom; February 10, 2022 @ 7:30pm EST

Attend Here

Description:

This panel explores themes of language and representation in media and art, and possible ways in which institutions can reflect systemic discrimination and engage in anti-oppression. Complex debates pertaining to language and art will be addressed, such as cultural appropriation; free speech and the stage; tokenistic or so-called “color-blind” casting”; and the history of racism, popular culture and theatre.

Moderator:

Matt Jones (he/him) is a writer, activist, teacher, and theatre creator living as an uninvited guest in T’karonto, thetraditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. He has published widely about the politics of war, terrorism, and racism in performance and is working on a book manuscript titled The Body at War, 2001-2016: Necro-Performance and the Global War on Terror. He has been involved in anti-war organizing for twenty years, most notably with the Montreal-based Collectif Échec à la guerre. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and he teaches at the Creative School at X University. Please visit www.mattjones.space for more information.

Panelists:

Montréal-based novelist, poet, playwright and engineer, Rana Bose is a founding editor of Montréal Serai and was awarded the Judy Mappin Prize by the Quebec Writers Federation (QWF) for his commitment to bringing Montréal's English-language arts and culture to the world at large.

Katherine Zien is Associate Professor in the English Department at McGill University. Zien researches and teaches theatre and performance in the Americas, with special focus on transnationalism, social movements, and racialization. Following her 2017 book Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panamaand the Canal Zone, Zien is currently working on two research projects, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant. These investigate, respectively, gender and sexuality activism in Latin America and the Caribbean, and performances of counterinsurgency during Latin America’s Cold War. Zien is also co-editor of the Routledge Cultures of the Global Cold War book series.

Nikki Shaffeeullah (she/her) is a director, writer, actor, facilitator, and activist who creates theatre, film, and poetry. Currently, Nikki is a curator with National Arts Centre – English Theatre, and a resident artist with Why Not Theatre. Past roles include artistic director of The AMY Project and editor-in-chief of alt.theatre magazine. Nikki believes art should disrupt the status quo, centre the margins, engage with the ancient, dream of the future, and be for everyone.

Interview with Alnoor Gova

2021-11-01T22:01:00.011-04:00

Here's an interview I did with Alnoor Gova on Vancouver Co-op Radio CFRO, speaking about my new book project, "The Body at War: Necro-Performance and the Global War on Terror."

2021-11-01T21:56:00.002-04:00

After the Occupation: Artists Respond to the Crisis in Afghanistan

Join Teesri Duniya Theatre for a panel discussion to bring awareness to the evolving

crisis facing Afghanistan. With the departure and abandonment of US, Canadian and

international presence, Afghanistan is being made to confront a cycle of violent

uprisings and resistance. The illegal occupation of Afghanistan by the international

community during the past 20+ years has failed to bring peace or an end to terrorism in

the region. It has only served to bring a deeper period of instability and corruption while

placing the lives of women, children, and marginalized peoples such as the Hazara

communities at severe risk.

In light of recent events, it is clear more than ever that Afghanistan’s fight for

sovereignty must be recognized and advocated for. In this period of time, we are once

again seeing a mass exodus of Afghans as a repeated history brought forth by the

impacts of imperialism, colonization, and Taliban rule. This panel will look closely at the

conditions that internally displaced and migrant Afghans face while providing a helpful

guide for the greater public’s support of Afghanistan.

In the words of Afghan poet Qahar Asi: "Until my hands grasp the sun, I battle with all

things dark and bleak, no shame in saying no and being stubborn, as this is the zenith

of my art and cultural integrity.”

Featuring:

Shaista Latif is a queer Afghan working-class artist, facilitator, and consultant. Her

works and collaborations have been presented by Why Not Theatre, Koffler Centre for

the Arts, Mercer Union, Blackwood Gallery, AGO, and festivals such as SummerWorks,

Progress, and 7A*11D. In 2020, Latif toured her critically acclaimed show The Archivist

(co-produced by Ontario Presents and Why Not Theatre). She is a published playwright

and voiced the character, Soraya, in the Oscar-nominated animated film The

Breadwinner. Her upcoming exhibit How I Learned to Serve Tea will be presented at

the Art Gallery of Guelph in October 2021. Latif’s works explore the politics of inclusion

and class.

Ariel Nasr is an English-Language Producer in the National Film Board’s Quebec

Atlantic Studio. Previous to joining the NFB, Ariel directed and co-produced the

award-winning film, The Forbidden Reel, a feature documentary drawing on thousands

of hours of film archives to trace the second half of the twentieth century through the

lens of Afghan filmmakers (IDFA, Hot Docs). Producer of the Academy

Award-nominated independent short drama Buzkashi Boys (2012), Nasr’s other

directing credits include the Canadian Screen Award-winning, The Boxing Girls of Kabul

(2011) as well as Good Morning Kandahar (2008), the interactive documentary, Kabul

Portraits (2015) and the documentary, La Mosquée, which documents the aftermath of

the Quebec City Mosque Shooting. A citizen of Canada, Afghanistan and the USA, Ariel

lives and works in Montreal.

Rahul Varma is a playwright, activist, and Artistic Director of Teesri Duniya Theatre

www.teesriduniyatheatre.com, a company he co-founded in 1981. In 1998, he

co-founded the journal alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage. Born in India, Rahul

writes both in Hindi and English, a language he acquired as an adult. His recent plays

include Counter Offence, Bhopal, Truth and Treason, and State of Denial. His

unproduced new works include My Father Would Have Killed Me (2020), Dad’s New

Wife (2019), and (in-progress) Merchant of God. His plays have been translated into

French, Italian, Hindi and Punjabi. He is honored to have worked with India’s

pre-eminent artist, the late Dr. Habib Tanvir.

He has received the Quebec Drama Federation’s Juror’s Award (1986), the Montreal

English Critics Circle award for interculturalism (1999), META’s Equity, Diversity, and

Inclusion award (2018), and a Lifetime Honorary Membership Award (2020) from the

Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

Matt Jones (Moderator) (he/him) is a writer, activist, teacher, and theatre creator. He

has published widely about the politics of war, terrorism, and racism in performance and

is working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, "The Shock and Awe of the

Real: Political Performance in an Age of War and Terror." He has been involved in

anti-war organizing for twenty years, most notably with the Montreal-based Collectif

Échec à la guerre. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s

Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and he teaches at the Creative

School at X University.

Date: Thursday, September 23rd at 6pm via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87240465125

This is an open event; no registration required.

Quarantine Performance Panel Discussion

2020-10-08T12:10:00.001-04:00

Please join us this Friday, October 9^th at 1:00pm EDT for a conversation with performing artists from around the globe about the challenges of maintaining an artistic practice during the COVD-19 pandemic.

Featuring:

Yannos Majestikos (Democratic Republic of the Congo/France), Aron De Casmaker (UK), Anne Sabourin (Canada), Jonathan Zak (Argentina), Imaginario Colectivo (Peru)

Join Zoom Meeting: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/89502765996

Passcode: 803499

Hosted by Matt Jones, Nae Hanashiro Avila, and Sebastian Samur

Quarantine Performance Research Team

University of Toronto

quarantineperformance.weebly.com

Quarantine Performance

2020-09-02T22:46:00.004-04:00

New Project:

Quarantine Performance:
Global Responses to COVID-19 in the Performing Arts

The Shock and Awe of the Real: Abstract & Acknowledgements

2020-07-26T10:12:00.002-04:00

My dissertation, The Shock and Awe of the Real: Political Performance and the War on Terror, has now been published here on ProQuest (library subsription required). Here is the abstract and acknowledgements. Please get in touch if you'd like to read it but can't access it.

The Shock and Awe of the Real: Political Performance and the War on Terror

Matt Jones

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies

University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

This dissertation offers a transnational study of theatre and performance that responded to the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond. Looking at work by artists primarily from Arab and Middle Eastern diasporas working in the US, UK, Canada, and Europe, the study examines how modes of performance in live art, documentary theatre, and participatory performance respond to and comment on the power imbalances, racial formations, and political injustices of these conflicts. Many of these performances are characterized by a deliberate blurring of the distinctions between performance and reality. This has meant that playwrights crafted scripts from the real words of soldiers instead of writing plays; performance artists harmed their real bodies, replicating the violence of war; actors performed in public space; and media artists used new technology to connect audiences to real warzones. This embrace of the real contrasts with postmodern suspicion of hyper-reality—which characterized much political performance in the 1990s—and marks a shift in understandings of the relationship between performance and the real. These strategies allowed artists to contend with the way that war today is also a multimedia attack on the way that reality is constructed and perceived. The dissertation traces the historical antecedents of these aesthetics in postmodern criticism of prior generations of political performance and shows how these artists struggled to discover new aesthetic strategies to criticize war, racism, and violence.

Acknowledgments

This project stretched across an unreasonable amount of time and completing it would not have been possible without the support of a great number of people.

First, I am deeply grateful to my dissertation committee. My supervisor, Barry Freeman, was level-headed, generous, and attuned to the importance of enjoying the process. From the very beginning, Barry showed great interest in the ideas I was developing and encouraged me to think of myself as a scholar and a professional, and that helped me get through the process. Thank you to Sara Salih for the many questions and to Antje Budde for her radical unpredictability. The project swerved in unexpected directions thanks to both of you. Thank you to Jen Harvie, my external reviewer, and Nikki Cesare-Schotzko, my internal reader and someone whose elliptical attitude to writing helped to temper my sometimes overly linear and encyclopedic ways of thinking.

Thank you to the faculty at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Stephen Johnson was generous and supportive throughout the process and helped me find a platform for my next project. I’m grateful to Tamara Trojanowska for helping me set my sights on the goal by continually asking when we would have a glass of wine to celebrate completing the dissertation. Thank you to everyone whose courses I took, especially Barry, Tamara, Stephen, Nikki, Bruce Barton, Veronika Ambros, Martin Revermann, James Cahill, and the late John Astington. Thank you to Xing Fan and Jacob Gallagher-Ross for valuable professionalization advice. I learned a great deal working as a Teaching Assistant and dramaturg for Baņuta Rubess and Djanet Sears. I’m grateful to Rebecca Biason, Samiha Chowdhury, Colleen Osborn, Julie Philips, and the late Luella Massey for their support. I’m thankful to my students in Scarborough, on the St. George campus, and at the University of Windsor, especially the inspiring Grace Phan and Chelsea Dab-Hilke.

I was fortunate to be part of an excellent cohort of creative and hilarious people: thank you Jenn Cole, Catie Thompson, Jimena Ortuzar, Allison Leadley, Alex McLean, David Janson, Kelsy Vivash, and Michael Reinhart for going through this with me. Much of this writing emerged from writing groups I was involved in. Thank you to Ashley Williamson and Joel Rogers for organizing them. I also enjoyed writing alongside Catie, Allison, Marjan Moosavi, Isabel Stowell-Kaplan, Will Fysh, Johanna Lawrie, Julianne Doner, Dolon Chakravartty, Marie-Annick Prevost, and Jacquey Taucar. Thanks also to my various reading circles, especially Greg Cook, Jesse Gutman, Mae J. Nam, Meryl Borato, Sean Mills, and Octavie Bellavance. I learned a lot about academic writing by teaching it at the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication. Thank you to Jane Freeman, Rachael Cayley, Peter Grav, Lauren Pais, and Tina Nair for your collegiality. Thanks to everyone at the Graduate Conflict Resolution Centre, especially Heather McGhee-Peggs, Rebecca Hazell, Jesse Adigwe, Priyanka Manohar, Margeaux Feldman, Terence Lai, Sam Filipenko, Kimberley Todd, and Tony Luong for helping me develop skills in both empathy and racquet sports. Thanks to Seika Boye for recruiting me to act as an undergraduate mentor. Thank you to everyone who was involved in the epic project that was my Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay show, especially Natalia Esling, Myrto Koumarianos, Christine Mazumdar, Leslie Robertson, Laura Lucci, Annie Crowley, Gina Brintnell, Paul Stoesser, Alain Richer, Allison, Johanna, Ashley, Catie, Isabel, Jenn, and the clown minstrels. Thanks to everyone who worked on ASMRtist, especially Sarah Marchand and Chelsea. Thank you to Mohammad Yaghoubi, Aida Keykhaii for introducing me to A Moment of Silence. Thanks, Jenn, for making me Wolfboy and Nikki for imagining me as Buckminster Fuller playing a an out-of-control Baron.

Thanks to everyone who made comments on this material at conferences, much of which set my thinking on new courses, especially Patricia Ybarra, Rustom Bharucha, Jenn Stephenson, Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta, and Laura Levin. Thank you to Natalie Alvarez for drafting me into the unexpected role of police trainer and giving me new angles from which to think about war and performance. I’m grateful to those who acted as mentor to me at conferences, especially Ric Knowles, Gwyneth Shanks, and Amy Cook. Thank you Frederik Byrn Køhlert for the feasts, the Chromecast parties, and for shadow editing many things I wrote.

To all my friends and family who supported me through this long process, I am deeply grateful for your love and hilarity.

To my mugole, Jacquie Kiggundu, writing was never a solitary endeavour when you were around. Thank you for sticking through it with me.

This project was a much more modest and conservative one when it began, but my thinking was continually opened up and, frankly, revolutionized by my encounters with all of the people above. What is more, I am forever indebted to the artists and activists whose work I have written about. To all those who struggle against war, terror, and racism, you are teaching us to imagine a better world.

This research was supported by scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, and the University of Toronto.

New article: Citizen in Exception: Omar Khadr and the Performative Gap in the Law

2020-06-22T10:37:00.001-04:00

My new article, "Citizen in Exception: Omar Khadr and the Performative Gap in the Law," is out today in Theatre Research in Canada. The full issue is available for free here.

Performing Post-Truth: An Interview with Director Ashlie Corcoran

2020-03-30T15:13:00.002-04:00

An interview I conducted with Ashlie Corcoran from Theatre Smash is out today on the website of Theatre Journal. You can find a link to it here.

Interviews with the cast of ASMRtist

2019-12-19T12:13:00.003-05:00

Available in Gatherings vol. 1, no. 1, Matt Jones interviews Amanda Cordner and En Lai Mah from ASMRtist about sense memories. See here: https://issuu.com/theatredocs/docs/gatherings_chpbk_vol1.

Everywhere and Somewhere: Performance After the End of Space

2018-11-07T17:06:00.001-05:00

Everywhere and Somewhere: Performance After the End of Space

A short pecha kucha format video about performances about the War on Terror that take place both everywhere and yet somewhere. Created as an online feature for Canadian Theatre Review 176 (2018). See here for four other excellent pecha kuchas. Thanks to Alana Gerecke and Laura Levin for editing it and to David Jones for helping with the recording.

Poems from Guantánamo

2018-02-20T18:43:00.006-05:00

I recently appeared on the podcast Books Like Us, to discuss Poems from Guantánamo, a collection of poems written by detainees at the infamous US prison camp. Listen to the interview here.

Tar Sands Tourism

2018-02-17T17:55:00.001-05:00

Tar Sands Tourism: an excursion through Alberta’s controversial new tourist industry

It might not top your vacation list, but Alberta’s Wood Buffalo region certainly offers the seasoned traveler something unique. Where else can you go for a stroll in woodland built on the site of a former mine, ogle at 850-tonne mining equipment, spend a day learning about bitumen extraction and take in the world’s largest industrial development project by helicopter?

Welcome to Fort McMurray, the epicentre of Alberta’s new oil boom, where tourism might not mean going for a dip in the lake and the sand might not feel so soft under your feet, but there’s certainly plenty to see and do.

“Our tourism industry is not built specifically around the oil sands,” says Gina Dobbie of Fort McMurray Tourism, explaining that the region has long been an attraction for hunters, fishers and tourists looking to catch a glimpse of the spectacular Aurora Borealis. She adds, “The opportunity to take a tour of the first successful oil sands company and to visit the award winning Oil Sands Discovery Centre are high on the list of things to do.”

What’s behind this new industry? Is it just gloss for what the United Nations Environment Program has dubbed one of the world’s top 100 hotspots of ecologically degradation? Or is oil sands tourism merely taking account of the new face of Alberta’s north? And who goes to Northern Alberta on vacation, anyway?

Wood Bison Trails

About 40 kilometres north of the city stand two bison carved out of stone at the side of the highway. This is the Wood Bison Trails, a former mine that Syncrude, the biggest oil sands company, has successfully reclaimed and turned into forestland. You can choose from three paths to hike, depending on your sense of adventure. The longest one boasts an impressive view of Northern Alberta wilderness—and an odd close-up of the Suncor refinery. The other distraction is the rather pungent smell. Is that gasoline?

Back at the starting point, Nirav Patel is showing his family around the park. I ask him if there’s much to see in Fort McMurray.

“One or two days is enough,” he huffs. An engineer working at Syncrude, he has come out to explain to his family the difference between oil extraction here and back home in India. The park is just a place to let the kids loose for a few minutes.

Syncrude says that the 104-hectare park is just one of 4,624 hectares they’ve successfully reclaimed in the region, but just exactly what that means has critics wondering. Mike Hudema of Greenpeace Alberta says the site is the only one in the province to have received a reclamation certificate from the government. “The site was where the overburden was kept, so it was much easier to reclaim than the huge mines or toxic lakes,” he says, referring to the massive tailings ponds around the mines. A tailings pond is where the water used in the separation process, now contaminated with refuse from mining, is stored. Syncrude says the reason they have yet to reclaim a tailings pond is that it’s such a long process, one which they are investing heavily in.

Wood Bison Viewpoint

Five minutes up the road I run into more bison: real ones this time. The Wood Bison Viewpoint is a patch of grassland where Syncrude initially brought 30 bison to graze. The population is now up to 300.

Although it’s a bit of a stretch to see them (they’re in a pen about 200 metres from the viewing area) the sight of bison is exciting. It’s the first wild animals I’ve seen on my trip.

Architect Terry Langis is taking pictures of the bison with a telephoto lens. He tells me that Fort McMurray is no stranger to tourism. “Professionals come to see the technology, and Europeans come for the wilderness. They can’t believe the open space.”

To the south the wilderness does seem to stretch on forever. Beyond the bison pasture is a field of maturing trees planted by Syncrude. The view ahead is serene: a bison calf stumbles towards its mother, birds caw from somewhere in the forest behind. Just don’t look north.

There, barely hidden behind a couple trees, stands Syncrude’s coking facility at Mildred Lake, the glow of its perpetual flame reflected in the tailings pond in front of it. Controversy arose last month when 500 migrating ducks drowned in one of these ponds. It kind of spoils the moment.

Giants of Mining

Across the street is the Giants of Mining exhibit. Here Syncrude has left some of the enormous machinery used in an earlier stage of mining.

Until recently all mining was done by these huge excavators, called bucket wheels. A giant wheel with teeth would spin around, pummelling through the earth and sending the oil-soaked sand back along conveyor belts, which would be trucked off for processing. At night the heat would cause the teeth to glow red in the dark. Today the bucket wheel is being abandoned in favour of the simpler truck and shovel method.

At the back of the bucket wheel is a freight box that acts as a counterweight to the wheel. Underneath, sparrows and crows have built nests, their own peculiar way of adapting to the surroundings.

Jenilee Purcell is impressed by the big machines but disappointed that she wasn’t able to get on one of the plant tours. “I really wanted to go onsite and see the big loaders,” she says. I ask her if she came here on holiday. “I came to see my family,” she laughs. “This isn’t the kind of place you go on vacation.”

Oil Sands Discovery Centre

Back downtown to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. We arrive in time for an outdoor tour of the Discovery Centre gardens, where they have assembled some more of the old machines, including a 6-storey bucket wheel nicknamed Cyrus.

Inside, the exhibits focus on the science behind tar sands mining. You can look at bitumen, the substance used to synthesize crude oil, through a microscope and watch how it is separated from sand. You learn that the oil sands were likely created from marine plankton and other organic material millions of years ago. You can pretend to drive an actual size dump truck (the kind used in today’s truck and shovel mining), while listening to audio of the CB radio and watching video of different mining sites.

In the theatre, a demonstration is being given of how oil is extracted from tar sands. The guide shows how the simple principle that oil and water don’t mix drives the process. She adds boiling water to a beaker of tar sands and stirs the mixture up. Soon the solution separates, with the sand sinking to the bottom and a thin line of bitumen remaining on the top. She scoops out a sample and passes it around for us to smell. It reminds me of the Wood Bison Trail odour.

At the end of the presentation I ask about the elephant in the room. “Is this a fairly clean process?”

The guide responds simply, “They’re making it as clean as they can.”

In the Environment section, exhibits document the process of monitoring air quality and water toxicity and the local beaver population. However, none of the exhibits seems to mention that tar sands mining may be responsible for these problems. When I ask why there is no information on the substantial criticisms the tar sands have received, I’m directed to a branch of the provincial government.

“The role of the Centre is to tell the story of the history, science, and technology of the oil sands and its industry,” says Shawna Cass from Alberta Culture and Community Spirit, the office that supports the Centre. “The information provided on the environmental impact of mining oil sands is also an important part of the story, and focuses on land reclamation, air monitoring and water issues.”

The response sounds similar to industry claims about the greenness of oil sands mining.

“This is the biggest concern with the Oil Sands Discovery Centre,” says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute. “They do an adequate job explaining the technical aspects of oil sands development, but do not provide a balanced commentary on potential impacts.”

Tar sands tourism: a new industry?

Tar sands tourism may be a different way to spend your week off, but has limited appeal if you want to hear more than the industry line. Certainly, everyone I met was there to visit family. But with production expected to expand to as much as 2 billion barrels per day by 2010 (up from 1.26 billion in 2006), the dusty city of Fort McMurray is likely far from seeing its last tourist.

Originally written in 2008. Photos by Robin Jones.

A Soldier's Tale

2014-03-16T15:13:00.001-04:00

THE CHARLEBOIS POST - CANADA: Bonus Feature: Interview - Director Michael Greyey...: Forgotten Stories of War

I distinctly wanted the audience to have a contemporary experience of what war is.

by Matt Jones

This year will see a number of plays about war hit Canadian stages. But whose stories do we miss out on when we talk about the nation at war? Signal Theatre’s new production A Soldier’s Tale, is a mix of dance, theatre, and live music that seeks to tell stories about communities that are often forgotten in stories of war. Its first act focuses on First Nations soldiers returning to Saskatchewan after World War II and then it jumps 50 years to the deserts of Iraq. I spoke to
director Michael Greyeyes about First Nations soldiers fighting for the British Empire, imagining Iraq today, and sitting in a trench being rained on by a firehose.

CHARPO: The show looks like an ambitious production! You have 13 performers and it incorporates dance, narrative, theatre and live music. How would you characterize the show?

GREYEYES: This piece has been in development for a number of years. It began with a conversation with a symphony based in Philadelphia that wanted to look at re-working Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat. And I said, I’m just not interested in a story about the devil, a Judeo-Christian theme about knowledge and selling one’s soul. But I am interested deeply in soldiers and their experiences.

CHARPO: How did you get interested in the stories of soldiers?

GREYEYES: I’d just finished working on Paul Robeson’s feature film Passchendaele. Being a soldier in big budget films is extremely immersive. We go through boot camp, we train as soldiers and then the filming is often quite gruelling. You live like a soldier, you’re outside in the elements, so the immersive effect of being a soldier and thinking like a soldier made me sympathetic to a soldier’s experience. Then we immediately moved into families because families bear the brunt of soldiers’ experience. As the piece developed we became more interested in all the stories, which includes the story of the Iraqi nationals that are affected by the war. In the end, that’s where our Second Act moved. Act One is based in Saskatchewan, in approximately 1947 and examines the life of soldiers returning from World War II. But Act Two is set in Iraq.

This image of young men so far from home, fighting in Berlin and Tokyo, really inspired me

CHARPO: Why the sudden leap across time and space?

GREYEYES: I distinctly wanted the audience to have a contemporary experience of what war is. So in one sense we’re telling this story about an American soldier who lays down her weapon, takes off her uniform and begins to dance. Almost immediately we start to see Iraqi people moving across the stage, addressing the violence and then we have more US soldiers. So there’s this uneasy mix of soldiers as intruders and occupiers versus a community that’s certainly ambivalent about their presence, in some cases distrustful, in some cases deeply resentful, and the matrix of emotions is quite complex. In the end our second act really found its emotional truth in the story of the Iraqi citizens as they had to negotiate this American war.

CHARPO: The piece touches on a number of communities’ experience of war, across time as well. How did you address the trans-historical and trans-cultural aspects of it?

GREYEYES: As aboriginal people, [writer] Tara Beagan and I recognize that our people have participated in every major armed conflict in the 20rh century. Our young men and more recently our young women have played a part in all these foreign conflicts: Panama, the first Gulf War, Vietnam, World War II. It was really clarified to me as a young man through our gatherings and through pow wows where we always begin with Grand Entry and we honour our veterans, so there’s often old men in uniform. And when I was a young man I heard this song called Soldier Boy. It’s an honour song that came out of the West. The lyrics are very haiku-like, they’re very beautiful: “Soldier Boy, You’ve been frightened, Berlin and Tokyo.” So this image of young men so far from home, fighting in Berlin and Tokyo, really inspired me. I really wanted Act One to be to be a First Nations perspective of what happens to our soldiers as we participate in these conflicts that have nothing to do with us, nothing to do with our homeland. The tremendous irony of this transhistorical experience is that in many cases we were in pitched battle with our own government yet we were fighting their battles for them. There’s a paradox and not just a bit of irony in the fact that our young people were dying for a country that never understood them. I’ve always been troubled by that.

You can look back on the previous conflicts and the reasons for them vary, but the effects on the soldiers are always the same.

CHARPO: You had personal experience of First Nations soldiers, but how did you approach the Iraqi situation?

GREYEYES: Tara was always saying: “I think we need Middle Eastern blood to be part of this mixture, as part of our intercultural examination of this conflict in a far-reaching way.” But in the end, we weren’t able to do that. For me it became clear that the Iraqi people were the Indians of Act II. When I look at what’s happened to Iraqis with the Western occupation I recognize that their communities are destroyed, the occupiers are still walking amongst them.

CHARPO: Is the juxtaposition of the two acts a gesture of solidarity to the Iraqis?

GREYEYES: Not exactly. One reason that we have this two-act structure and this double time is that the effects of contemporary war are trans-generational. Looking at PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], for example, in World War One they called it shellshock, in World War II they called it combat fatigue. Now it has another name, it’s PTSD or operational stress. But for soldiers, war remains the same. You can look back on the previous conflicts and the reasons for them vary, but the effects on the soldiers are always the same.

CHARPO: War creates these extreme states of trauma and exhilaration. Why is dance an appropriate way to approach these states?

GREYEYES: I remember I was in Alberta, sitting in a trench, and the firehoses above us were raining water down on us. I thought, “If I want an audience to understand the physical nature of war, what soldiers are experiencing, what victims of violence are experiencing, it must be physically based. For an audience member to see a dancer hurling themselves to the floor, their breath knocked out of them, they see the sweat and they see the violence of the movement, then we move beyond language, we move into a visual fluency that allows the audience to move past politics, past the intellectual rationales, but we need to go to war, this guy was a tyrant.” It’s a kind of experiential sharing. She’s out of breath, I’m out of breath. And hopefully then I can create a stronger connection to soldiers and the victims of violence.

We wanted contemporary dance movement colliding with the images of a Cree painter.

CHARPO: That speaks well to the trans-historical or universal experience of war that you’re talking about. I wonder about the opposite: the use of distinct cultural music that is tying these specific experiences together through their uniqueness. I’m thinking of the way that at the preview of the show at the Music Gallery, John Gzowski’s music was borrowing from Middle Eastern music and First Nations rhythms and American blues.

GREYEYES: John is an extraordinary collaborator. His fluency of musical understanding is very wide. Signal is intercultural: we believe that when cultures meet each other a new borderland opens up in which the cultures are fusing, intermingling and altering each other continually. So we wanted elements of the West colliding with elements of the East and ricocheting back and forth. But I also needed that music to place us in another world. It’s not a film, we can’t use the deserts of Arizona or Senegal to put us in this other world, so I wanted the music to provide the effect of place.

CHARPO: Did you use a similar strategy with the choreography?

GREYEYES: In Act One I was looking for new ways to devise movement. It’s set in Saskatchewan in the winter and I thought, “How do I stage winter? How does movement express the austerity of Saskatchewan, my home?” So we actually went to the paintings of Bob Boyer, a Cree artist, and I gave images to all the dancers and said, “Take this and I want you to translate with your body these paintings into relationships, into body shapes, into movement.” And we developed a whole vocabulary all based on linear and geometric icons and rhythms inside Bob Boyer’s paintings. It’s coming from a deeply indigenous place. For Act Two, we used some of the same methodology. I said, “Imagine, if you look at the carpet, the clothing, the patterning and the architecture of that part of the world, there’s an ornateness which differs radically from the austerity of Saskatchewan. We didn’t have John’s music yet, so the movement emerged from the textures and the textiles of that region. And so we created a choreography that was more sinuous, more ornate, that was less linear, more circular, curvilinear. This was important to me because we were creating these two opposing worlds. So in a sense, we wanted the West colliding with the Middle East. We wanted contemporary dance movement colliding with the images of a Cree painter. There were lots of collisions, elements that we don’t imagine go together but work viscerally. I’m hoping that our work will start to trouble our audience’s perceptions about war.

Feb. 20 - 22, 2014

Disaster theatre: Rahul Varma's Bhopal

2014-01-08T15:25:00.002-05:00

There is something obscenely theatrical about the Bhopal disaster. On the night of December 2nd 1984, a leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant caused a 27-ton cloud of methyl isocyanate to drift across the Indian metropolis of Bhopal, a city of a million people, killing thousands of its residents in their sleep and poisoning hundreds of thousands more. The effects are still being felt since Union Carbide never finished decontaminating the site. When the plant was sold off, its new owners, Dow Chemical—themselves no strangers to the fatal potential of chemicals denied any responsibility for actions that had preceded their tenure.

Eclipsed as the world’s largest industrial accident only by the slow accumulation of cancer-related deaths that followed the Chernobyl disaster, the Bhopal disaster was a product of corporate hubris of Titanic proportions. Just as the great ship lacked lifeboats, Union Carbide had downgraded and neglected to maintain six levels of safety systems that could have contained the leak. What the Titanic symbolized for progress, Bhopal might symbolize for India’s experience of globalization. While Union Carbide had come with promises of capital and jobs to jump-start the economy, the price of corporate cost-saving and local corruption would be paid for on the bodies of Indians. Even in the lawsuits that followed the accident, it was eight Indian employees who would be convicted of causing death by negligence while American CEO Warren Anderson, the arch-villain of the story if there ever was one, went into hiding after the Indian government tried to extradite him and remains a free man in the US.

The disaster is so theatrical that it threatens to elude theatrical representation: how can a meagre stage and a troupe of actors give a sense of the enormous industrial infrastructure, the international transactions that led to the disaster, and the mass death, the slow death by disease, that continued over generations. It’s no simple task, but it’s one that has haunted playwright Rahul Varma, whose Bhopal is in revival at the Segal Centre this month, since he first heard reports of the accident on TV as it was happening.

[read on...]

Artificial Life in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Bariera

2013-11-25T16:05:00.002-05:00

The nightmare that the characters in Bariera struggle to exist in is that of the intolerable social. The anonymous student and his coveted tram driver are consistently thwarted in their attempts to find intimate space by intruders, who appear as stampeding herds, ominous car headlights, pestering telephone users or the of the ubiquitous face of a bureaucrat demanding blood donations.

By winning a pot of money at the beginning of the film, the student hopes to escape the life prescribed for him: he drops out of school and attempts to find love. However, neither money nor an object of desire are enough to guarantee success: his quest for autonomy is impossible with incessant intrusions of the social. His pursuit of pleasure becomes sadomasochistic. Just as the game that wins him the money requires its bound contestants to injure themselves. In its dramatization of the tension between desire and social constraint, the film reveals what Chris Jenks describes as the way transgression “does not deny limits or boundaries, rather it exceeds them and thus completes them” (7). Importantly, society does not relate to desire in a repressive way, but rather in an obstructive way, frustrating its flow, but not necessarily leading towards a specific end.

The mechanisms of social control reveal their efficiency with each step the student takes to assert individualism. When the couple seems to be most alone, figures appear from nowhere to interrupt them. The intolerable social seems not only to be the Communist regime, but a more insidious form of carceral society, in which the individual is not only watched to prevent political dissent, but just for the sake of being watched. In that sense, Skolimowski’s hero is more of a metaphysical rebel, in Camus’s terms, than a slave.

Autonomy is finally reduced to control over the body. By damaging his body, the student attempts to assert some ownership over it. But when he damages his body most, by tumbling down a hill, he does so with a mask of the blood donor bureaucrat on his head, his injuries donating blood to the cause of himself against the regime, yet paradoxically in the name of the regime.

Kundera’s Owners of the Keys and Chyytilová’s Daisies

2013-11-25T15:59:00.000-05:00

Perhaps this would be to his chagrin, but Milan Kundera’s play could be described as neatly dialectical, in the way that he develops meaning out of the play of opposites. Kundera builds this tension right from the opening scenes juxtaposing states of dress and undress to the more general contrast between the insipid comedy of manners going on in the next room and the high stakes undercover resistance story that John and Vera are immersed in. This reaches its tragicomic peak when Helen demands her autonomy, effectively sealing her death. The climax of the play occurs when John is faced with a choice that sets in opposition his personal and political commitments. This opposite, however, has no immediate synthesis: since both choices end in unacceptable death, it is an undecideable, to borrow Derrida’s term. Kundera wants to set up an opposition between two ways of attempting to find a solution. On one side is the mathematical logic of the resistance fighters: Vera calculates the predictable consequence of each decision and works out the one that would result in the least amount of loss. What is abominable is that it sacrifices John’s in-laws. On the other side, John holds onto a logic of honour: if his family is to die, so must he. This is equally abominable since it only adds more corpses to the pile. Though he tries to find an intermediate solution, John eventually capitulates to Vera, demonstrating that there is no way to transcend this situation.

Věra Chyytilová’s Daisies likewise plays with polar contrasts. After deciding that the world is no good, Marie and Marie decide to be bad. Like the characters in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, Marie and Marie shamelessly disregard social conventions as they get drunk on wine they pilfer from other people’s tables and eclipse performers by making a spectacle of themselves. Throughout their nihilistic escapade they are irresistibly charming, which makes the codes of behaviour they step outside appear as tedious and pointless constraints. Likewise, the men who buy them dinner and make elaborate declarations of love to them over the phone seem dull, repressed and pathetic in contrast to the girls’ flamboyant and free femininity. Their society does not tolerate such behaviour, though, and humourless authority figures respond by escorting them out of restaurants, but a darker sign of what kind of consequences could be in store for them is hinted at in a flash-forward scene in which the girls are dunked in water like witches. The threat of death disciplines the Maries but their effort to be good by cleaning up the mess they’ve made after staging a food fight in a banquet hall is tokenistic and absurd. As they slop all the food together on a single plate, put unmatched pieces of broken plates together to form a whole, they adapt to good behaviour by parodying it.

Quebec's Imagined Communities

2013-11-25T15:57:00.003-05:00

(written in 2011)

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities locates the origin of nationalism in the “Creole” states of Latin America and the US. He argues that growing tensions between colony and mother country fostered a discrete identity in the colonies based on what made them different rather than what they shared (language, heritage). The development of print capitalism brought together geographically dispersed populations through national distribution networks of readers, uniting them around a common local culture. Innovatively, nationalism is seen here not as a product of the consolidation of European capitalism but as a result of anti-imperialism.

The centrality of colonialism to Anderson’s thesis makes it surprising that Canada and Quebec get no mention in the book, either as proof of or exception to the argument. If Canada’s beginnings saw it cling loyally to the colonial motherland, repudiating many of the tendencies Anderson outlines, it nevertheless defined itself in opposition to subaltern identities, both French and American, as its leaders imagined the nature of its community/ies in diverse, competing, ways. In this sense, Canada is actually an exemplary representation of Anderdon’s thesis if the process of imagination is understood dialectically as the product of a struggle for power and rights and not simply as discursive outgrowth of print capitalism.

On the French side, the rough trajectory of the struggle to imagine itself seems to consist in a gradual radicalization and localization of political demands. Even as he demanded local power, Louis-Joseph Papineau’s 92 Resolutions was rhetorically committed to remaining within the Empire: “The People of this province of Lower Canada, have shown the strongest attachment to the British Empire” (Point 1). By the time of his grandson Henri Bourassa, French interests were imagined to be reconcilable with a Canadian federation that distanced itself from war-hungry Britain. World War One would test this theory. Bourassa first declared the war justified on the basis that “Le Canada, nation anglo-française” had ethnic, intellectual and economic ties to Britain and France that went beyond the imperial relationship (Durocher 251). René Durocher argues that Bourassa hoped English and French Canadians might “découvrir leur commun nationalisme et ainsi freiner l’impérialisme” (252). However, as the Conscription Crisis intensified, the intransigence of Canadian politicians and, more fundamentally, the belligerence of the English-language media had pushed Bourassa to oppose the war by 1916.

The same war would come to play a major role in the mythology of the (English) Canadian nation, with the Battle of Vimy Ridge acting as a (paradoxical) symbol of national independence as Canadian soldiers left 20,000 Germans dead in a battle for British influence in Europe. The officially imagined Canadian community continued to tie itself to loyalty to the Empire through this coming-of-age story of an obedient, responsible, independent child.^¹

Prior to this, Canada had been imagined by its leaders as a British outpost trying to deal with le fait français, either through the hard assimilation tactics of Lord Durham or through various strategies of containment by way of concessions to the French and the promotion of francophone figures into the visible leadership of the country. These two tactics continued in alternance into the second half of the century, as Diefenbaker’s anglophilia gave way to Trudeau’s bilingual federalism, though this could be interspersed by periods of tough stand-offs, such as 1970’s War Measures Act and 1982’s Night of the Long Knives. In Quebec, since the Quiet Revolution, the imagined community has changed from an ethnic-religious-linguistic to a geographic-linguistic identity, transforming the frontiers of the imagined community from all of Canada to the borders of Quebec.

The influence of print capitalism in Canada developed differently from Anderson’s model. Instead of a single indigenous (or Creole) print culture carving out an identity distinct from a mother country that shares the same language, the Canadian example is one of two language communities with their own print cultures as well as an overlapping translated, bilingual culture. This, in fact, reinforces Anderson’s point that language is not the defining feature in the creation of nations. In contrast, he argues, “The major states of nineteenth-century Europe were vast polyglot polities, of which the boundaries almost never coincided with language-communities” (196). However, competing print cultures in Canada would articulate different imagined nations, with different imagined borders. In popular discourse in English Canada, Canadian identity is usually defined according to a series of narcissistic traits and an ambiguous relationship to the US and the UK. Not only do such definitions seek to sidestep the nation’s origins as a colonial settler society and an outpost of British imperial expansion, they forget le fait français as quickly as did the author of the Maple Leaf Forever. Such neglect is partially wilful and partially an accident of having a separate print culture (and separate media). In Quebec popular discourse, meanwhile, English Canada seems to exist largely as a benevolent or imposing political (rather than cultural) entity. English culture is experienced, and accepted, in great part as American culture. Another kind of English Canadian nationalism that attempts to imagine Quebec as backward and Quebec nationalism as ethnocentric. The Canadian nation is then imagined narcissistically as more open and tolerant as a way to score points against the enemy separatists and forge an alliance with blocks of citizens.^²

Jill MacDougall’s fascinating analysis of Quebec’s performance of nationhood in the St-Jean-Baptiste parade highlights the importance of the dream in imagining (and performing) the utopian project of creating a new nation. The national dream is not limited to the non-existent nation. Jean Chrétien’s pre-referendum speech alluded to the “end of a dream” should the Oui side win. He went on to outline his vision of that dream: “A country whose values of tolerance, understanding, generosity have made us what we are” (A16). The federalist dream is marched out as a dystopian counter-dream to the utopian separatist one. In it, the existing nation is imagined in a language of hyperbolic sentimentalism.

Since MacDougall’s analysis is restricted to a parade it is limited to a particularly kitsch aspect of Quebec nationalism and she risks adopting the gaze of the Saidian imperialist anthropologist (certainly, many English Canadians might find it problematic to evaluate the English Canadian national dream on the basis of Roch Voisine’s performances on Parliament Hill). This points to the fact that a mature national project needs to be broad enough to include diverse models of subjectivity into the identities it claims to represent. Recent St-Jean events have featured not only a parade of national saint figures but also an alternative music festival (l’Autre St-Jean) and raucous street parties ending in skirmishes with the riot police… in Mile End. However, can this diversification ever match the possibilities for subjectivity that exist beyond nationalism? Indeed, disparagement with Quebec nationalism is often portrayed with the affect of being “beyond” all nationalism: anti-sovereigntists are more likely to stay home than attend a July 1 celebration, but this cynicism often a tacit acceptance of the status quo, i.e. of tolerance for Canadian nationalism. This raises the question of whether the paradoxes of nationalism affect established and embryonic nations in the same way.

Finally, a note on the ambiguous relationship of nation to capitalism. The Canadian ruling class sought to found its own nation once production had advanced to a point at which local state regulation was needed to guarantee accumulation. The lumpen Quebec bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century was led towards nationalism because it needed a state to secure its social position and felt left out of the Canadian state. Many of these concerns have been achieved as a result of the nationalist movement of the last century. Language laws have undone some of the systemic discrimination in the production hierarchy. The reforms of the Quiet Revolution prepared the population for life as educated workers in a modern, urban capitalist market and allowed for the flourishing of a Quebec bourgeoisie (so-called “Québec Inc.”) that now has an ambivalent relationship to the dreams of sovereignty of its youth. The nation is ultimately, then, a capitalist project that requires all of society to dream it.

1 A curious reversal of these roles is found in Jean Chrétien’s pre-referendum speech, “Why destroy Canada?” The federal government is now the parent lecturing to a wayward adolescent: “Do you really think it makes sense, any sense at all, to dye your hair green and run off with an alcoholic truck driver?” he seems to say.

2 Perhaps the most desperate version of this was Jan Wong’s attempt to recruit Dawson College shooter Kimveer Gil as a victim of a xenophobic Quebec (among Gil’s extensive online inanities was only one mention of Quebec: “It’s OK, I guess.”).

Arcard, Lepage, Majzels and Post-history in Quebec

2013-11-25T15:51:00.003-05:00

Quebec entered post-modernity perhaps in 1980, perhaps in 1995 when the political forces that had been driving counter-culture were dealt significant blows to their ability to act as brave voices of a silent majority. Already in the Déclin de l’empire américain (1986) characters were filling the existential vapidity left by the collapse of their Marxist-Leninist dreams of youth by diving into sexual obsession. For all Denys Arcand’s pretence to transcending the political, politics would slip back into his work by the time of his sentimental paean to privatized heathcare, Les Invasions Barbares (2003). In the film, Rémy is eased to his death far from the maddening crowds of the public hospitals, by now an embarrassing and inefficient relic of the days when “lutte" primarily signified “class struggle” and not, as Elvis Gratton thought, “wrestle”.

If the decline of Quebec’s era of politicized culture plunged it into a period of darkness (une deuxième grande noirceur?), it wasn’t unique in a world in which monetarism was replacing Keynesianism in economic policy as fast as postmodernism was replacing Marxism in critical theory. Earlier in the century Hannah Arendt had feared that politics might disappear from the world entirely (politics may no longer “have any meaning at all,” she worried). For her, totalitarianism was the ultimate form anti-politics could take. Daniel Bensaïd rethinks this in the context of the triumph of market capitalism:

Politics finds itself crushed between the order of financial markets—which is made to seem natural—and the moralising prescriptions of ventriloquist capitalism. The end of politics and the end of history then coincide in the infernal repetition of the eternity of the commodity. (1)

This is played out in Invasions. As much as the peripheral story of 9/11 “barbarians” hints at the emergence of the new historical meta-narrative of the War on Terror, the events the characters go through very much take place in a world in which history is over. Death itself has become a commodity, a humanitarian luxury product that rescues the individual from the cruel anonymous egalitarianism of public healthcare.

History, in the Fukoyaman sense, appears in various guises in Robert Lepage’s work. The Moulin à images is a veritable Debordian spectacle of post-history. Wary of falling into the genre of “Parcs Canada” triumphalism, Lepage is careful not to ignore the moments of conflict in Quebec’s history but these are nonetheless subsumed into a larger anti-ideological narrative centred on technological progress: history is the transition from waterways to roads to rail to air.

Not that Lepage is entirely comfortable with the death of history. Its corpse loiters on his stage as tragic nostalgia. In Dragon bleu, idealism has brought Pierre Lamontagne all the way to Shanghai where, turning his back on “Ce vieux Québec, s’enfermé sur lui-même avec le même projet nationaliste qui va nulle part,” he has assimilated linguistically, culturally and sexually to his adopted home. Maoism brought Lamontagne to China, but capitalism has caught up to it just as surely as it did to Gilles Duceppe and Pierre Karl Péladeau. Lamontagne daydreams about the women dancers of the Peking Revolutionary Opera; between scenes we see images of the heroic Chinese masses holding aloft Coke bottles instead of Little Red Books; Claire Forêt, Lamontagne’s ex-wife, shows up with the latest in hipster kitsch from Canada: a peasant cap with a red maple leaf instead of a star. History (and, with it, the possibility of glory) is reduced to the trivialities of commodity culture—worse, the same Western commodity culture (even the same commodities) Lamontagne fled.

Lamontagne retreats into calligraphy and tattooing. His politics only resurface in a moment of indignation at his ex-wife for thinking she can show up and fix a midlife crisis by shopping for a commodity-baby in rural China. History has given Lamontagne his edges: his compassion, his resistance to capitalist utilitarianism, his openness to the Other, but it has left him in solitude. Post-history leaves empty subjectivities grasping at commodities for salvation. Lamontagne gives up creation and becomes an art dealer. Unable to create, he can only buy, sell and promote in the purgatory of Bensaïd’s “infernal repetition of the eternity of the commodity.”

He forges a relationship with a young artist, Xiao Ling, whom he represents and markets. Claire Forêt, however, worries that the market for artists is too small in China. She tracks down Xiao Ling (she’s hoping to get her baby) in another city where she works knocking off nineteen Van Gogh self-portraits a day. She thinks Xiao Ling’s only hope of making it is by moving to Canada where the art market is more developed. Forêt, archetypal Canadian entrepreneur, orients art—like life—towards successful commodity production and distribution. In one of the three endings of the play, she brings Xiao Ling with her to Canada, saving her from the fate of living the eternity of the commodity in a place that ranks lower on the international hierarchy of commodity production.

Lepage’s 1998 film, Nô, makes his boldest claims on history, tackling some of the sore (if well documented) points of Quebec’s political history. The film features bumbling, comic felquistes, a polite but out-of-touch federalist ambassador and his gallocentric Outremont wife, a sympathetic but hopelessly geeky anglo. Irony separates the spectator from engagement with the historical moment and imposes a post-historical gaze on the events. Politics are laid out as the politics of the moment, a moment that is romantically charged with conflict and that will die, at the end of the film, with the results of the 1980 referendum. This is not to say that the film offers a “neutral” or anti-ideological bilan of the political situation in 1970. The Canadian federalist project comes off as distinctly parochial: the official representation of French Canada at Expo ’70 in Osaka is a production of a period farce from France that the ambassador’s wife finds poorly executed and the joual-spouting lead actress thinks is “de la marde,” only selected “parce qu’on est un peuple colonisé” whose own culture is undervalued. The lapse of almost forty years allows us to find some detachment from these events that have been so often reconstructed, through the romantic lens of Falardeau, the quiet tragic lens of Breault or the vindictive lens of so many English-language documentaries. But if the film depicts who we were in 1970, it seems to imply that we are that no longer. The film ends in 1980 with Michel, felquiste-now-turned-péquiste, and Sophie, the actress, shutting off the televised results of the referendum to focus on each other, precipitating the post-1980 shift away from politics in culture. Their rediscovery of each other marks their entry into post-history.

If history is dying in Lepage, it is utterly extinguished in the work of Robert Majzels. City of Forgetting takes place entirely in the realm of post-history. Ché Guevara, Le Corbusier, Paul de Chomedey, the Greek goddess Clytemnestra hang out in the tourist traps of Montreal with punk rock street urchin Suzy Creamcheez. Stripped of their historical context, history appears only as hubris. Ché Guevara spouts Marxist jargon as if it were an insane banter divorced entirely from normal life, which it is, in the novel, since Majzels inserts quotations into new contexts (Guevara’s Many Vietnams speech makes for an uncomfortable job interview; 46). Frustrated that he can’t make sense with the words he knows, Guevara succumbs to that postmodern truism: “No way to fix a meaning with any certainty” (63). Stripped of the glory provided them by history, the characters bumble around Montreal as homeless oddballs. They interact with Montrealers, who we meet as shoppers or police who try to stop them from interrupting the cycle of shopping. The novel, then, takes place in Bensaïd’s “infernal repetition of the eternity of the commodity.” It’s a world the characters are unable to enter, chained as they are to history.

Artistic Director’s Note - Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay

2013-11-22T11:16:00.001-05:00

From the program to Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay, March 21, 2013

We stayed up all night, my friends and I, reading, watching, listening to reports about Guantanamo Bay until the prison camp infected our dreams. When our dreams became nightmares, we felt we could say something about it that wasn’t just another report. We looked at the camp as foolish witnesses, as clowns who cannot tell you what goes on there, only what it’s like to be outside it, to wonder, to need to know. Guantanamo Bay is so close to the sea. The detainees hear it at night, they write about it in poems etched onto Styrofoam cups, but they are never permitted to see it. Reading the words of the detainees in translation we try to reconstruct their world in our minds like they reconstruct the sea.

Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed were the first prisoners to die at Guantanamo in 2006. They were former hunger strikers who had been force fed during their detention. A government report concluded that they had hanged themselves in their cells in a suicide pact. They had made mannequins of themselves using clothes to distract the guards and made nooses from their bedsheets. Their deaths were described by Rear Admiral Harry Harris as “an act of asymmetrical warfare committed against us.” A later independent investigation wondered how they had managed to tie their hands and feet together, stuff rags down their throats, climb up on the sinks in their cells, jump off and hang dead for two hours, unnoticed by guards. Another report claims the men had been dry-boarded at a secret camp, called Camp No, outside the periphery of the regular prison facility.

In this play, we do not reveal the truth about these men’s deaths, since we do not know what that is. Rather, we are telling you our story, a story about looking into Guantanamo Bay and not being able to see. A guard at Camp Delta calls Guantanamo Bay a scene “set behind diamond-shaped windows.” Guantanamo Bay: a place of secrecy. But unlike the countless CIA blacksites around the world we know nothing about, Guantanamo Bay is asking to be looked at, to be approved of, to build a community that condones torture. Sometimes it is only by looking in from an askew angle that we can see what matters.

In the spirit of secrecy and revelation, we divided into cells to create the piece. The cells worked autonomously from each other. Information was passed strategically between them. As images passed between the cells, they lost literal meaning and began to gain the kind of significance that images have in dreams. The effect is something like a collage made from poems by the detainees, songs taken from the Torture Playlist used to humiliate the detainees and keep them awake, and from the euphemistic language of the GITMO authorities. The connection we have with Guantanamo Bay is political, especially because of our government’s uncritical attitude towards it, but it is also a part of the world that our psyches must adapt to. As long as it remains open we cannot dream in peace.

Matt Jones
Dictator/Artistic Director

Omar Khadr: Citizen in Exception

2013-11-19T18:09:00.004-05:00

Omar Khadr: Citizen in Exception

Here's a link to a review I wrote of Janice Williamson's collection Omar Khadr, Oh Canada (McGill-Queen's 2012).

Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay

2013-03-07T13:13:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time in Guantánamo Bay, three men were found dead in their prison cells. How did they die? Two clowns take a skewed look into the legal black hole that is the Guantánamo Bay prison camp but find themselves faced with a series of obstacles that make it impossible to find out what happened. Death Clowns in Guantánamo Bay is a play about torture, death and the impossible necessity of communicating suffering across distance and cultures. Using mannequin doubles, readymade sculptures, morbid clowning, a singing SWAT-team chorus and gallows humour, the play asks audiences to look at life in the camp in a darkly ludic and dreamlike manner.

March 21-24, 2013

Thursday 8pm
Friday 8pm
Saturday 8pm
Sunday 2pm (pay what you can)

Studio Theatre, 4 Glen Morris Street, Toronto

Please note that seating is extremely limited

Tickets $10. Reservations: 416.978.7986 | graddrama.utoronto.ca

Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay is a collaborative creation by various cells of the Blacklist Committee for Unsafe Theatre:

Artistic Director/Dictator: Matt Jones
Director: Ashley Williamson
Politburo: Matt Jones, Natalia Esling, Myrto Koumarianos, Allison Leadley
Ubermarionette Cell: Leslie Robertson, Christine Mazumdar, Rob Bril, Alan Belerique, Myrto Koumarianos, Grace Poltrack, Peter van Wart, Anna-Marija Stojic, Audrey Amar, Alex Contreras, Kaitlin Heller, Ula Jurecki
Movement Dramaturge: Natalia Esling
Vocal Coach: Lauren Shepherd
Readymades Cell: Jenn Cole, Laura Lucci, Annie Crowley, Gina Brintnell, Paul Stoesser
Uniformity Cell: Martine Plourde, Lisa Aikman
Hacker Cell: Ashley Williamson, Hacker Man G (Ghassan Knayzeb), Hacker Man E (Ergin Babani)
Clown Minstrel Cell: David Jones, Robin Jones
Propaganda Cell: Cameron Crookston, Louis Duarte, Luella Massey
Lighting: Alain Richer
Central Committee: Johanna Lawrie, Catie Thompson, Isabel Stowell-Kaplan, Lauren Shepherd, Matt Jones

Facebook event

Zero Dark Thirty

2013-01-28T19:14:00.001-05:00

"Sorry we killed your parents; here's a glowing stick you can play with."

Here's a link to Michael Moore's contrarian defence of Zero Dark Thirty, but two can play at that game. So here is my contrarian critique of Moore's contrarianism.

After seeing the film, I'm less inclined to call Kathryn Bigelow the contemporary Leni Riefenstahl, as Naomi Wolf did recently, but Moore's unexpected defence of the film is far too generous. The film may have a more ambiguous position on torture than some critics were willing to grant it but it certainly offers an unequivocal defence of the targeted assassinations and extrajudicial justice promoted by the Obama administration. This is what Moore, who has been a reluctant Democrat since 2004, ignores when he claims that thanks to Obama torture is over and the CIA has turned from playing at being schoolboy sadists into proper detectives.

The characters in the film who commit acts of torture are sympathetic people who respond to the slight revulsion they feel for what they've done by trying to get themselves promoted to better jobs. It's hardly penance and they continue to pine for the days when evidence attained from their reluctant use of torture could be used. While the torture scenes are portrayed in such graphic detail that, as Moore points out, makes it difficult to view them as anything but reprehensible, the discomfort it elicits in the protagonists becomes an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to accomplish their goal. In this, torture is set up as the alternative to which targeted assassination is legitimized.

Moore's second argument is that the detective strategy works, whereas the torture strategy leads to false declarations and dubious intelligence. Here Moore falls prey to the film's unquestioning support for triumphant American imperialism under liberal leadership.

The scene of the final CIA meeting to decide whether to attack the compound that may or may not be housing bin Laden is particularly revealing. The evidence they are given is based on some shrewd detective work but rests largely on a hunch. The Head of the CIA conducts a straw poll, to which his advisers respond equivocally, then he shrugs and authorizes the attack. The cavalier racism and contempt for Pakistan's national sovereignty that underlies such a decision is then buried by historical hindsight.

Bin Laden's eventual execution happens quickly, just out of the frame. "Do you realize what you've done?" asks his stone-faced comrade. They drink in the gravity of the moment for a second before getting back to securing the command. This is a deeply ideological scene, which reminds me of Slavoj Žižek's description of ideology not as the false consciousness of "they know not what they do" but as the conscious cynicism of "they know what they do but they do it anyway."

On the one hand, it does describe false consciousness: whatever it is that the soldier thinks he has done it is not to have committed an illegal act of murder outside the legitimate field of war. While the film wants us to think long and hard about the legitimacy of torture as a tactic, the ethics of extrajudicial execution are never put into question. On the contrary, the execution is what may redeem torture in the first place.

The film's position on torture, on the other hand, is an example of knowing what is wrong yet they participate in. As Žižek points out about Full Metal Jacket, the character known as Private Joker, who has written "Born to Kill" and drawn a peace symbol on his helmet, is the soldier most subjected to military ideology precisely because he is the only one who imagines himself to be outside this ideology even as he participates in it as a soldier. Likewise in this film, the characters who experience moral awakening after torturing suspects continue to participate in the operation. Ideology, as Althusser pointed out, is an act and the soldier's realization does not ultimately stop him from completing the act. Moreover, his moral dilemma is necessary to justify the mission as a difficult resolution to the complex human problem of the ethical execution. These scenes of excess allow Bigelow to build enough moral ambiguity to make the film complex but we should be sceptical of the way such dilemmas are framed in a way that inevitably legitimizes the acts Bigelow wants us to look at and ignores the larger context of more than a decade of war, occupation and violence conducted by American forces on the people's of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Victorianator!

2011-08-25T19:22:00.004-04:00

Elocution Solution

If you wish your cellphone banter sounded less like something overheard on Jersey Shore and more like an evening with Ian McKellen, then a new iPhone app developed by a team of poets, graphic designers and computer scientists at Concordia University in Montreal could be just the thing to improve your oratory flair.

The Victorianator is a game in which players score points for how well they master the techniques of Victorian elocution, from giving words their proper inflection to accenting their delivery with appropriate gesticulation.

The game has two stages. First, players have to recite a famous Victorian poem in perfect monotone as a spindly needle flickers up and down measuring how accurate they are. Next, a steampunk robot instructs the player in a series of gestures that they’ll be adding to the poem.

As the player performs the gesture, the iPhone 4’s accelerometer tracks the movement of their arm and scores them on how well they emulate the robot. A successful gesture produces a synthetic effect on the poem just recorded. So if you hold your arm out to signal a prolongation, the sound of the word will be extended.

If you raise your hand skywards for emphasis, the pitch will rise on your recording. You soon find yourself madly gesticulating and shaking your phone as your own prerecorded voice quivers in response.

The project was put together by LudicVoice, a research group led by Jason Camlot, who teaches Victorian literature at Concordia.

“Rock Band was the initial model. We wanted to do Recitation Hero,” he jokes. The team collected hundreds of examples of oratory techniques from Victorian elocution manuals and it studied the diagrams and diacritical marks that authors invented as they attempted to systematize a language of voice and gesture.

The team wanted to make a historical game, but weren’t too concerned about verisimilitude. But it was important for Camlot that all the gestures used came straight from the Victorian source material. Likewise, the effects the movements have on the voice are meant to resemble the epic intonation found in early poetry recordings from the 1890s.

“That’s why it’s called Victorianator. Through the gestures you’re Victorianating a recording. You’re triggering these synthetic vocal actions that are supposed to be modelled after Victorian elocutionary actions and you’re turning a non-Victorian performance of the poem into a Victorian one.”

The Victorianator can be downloaded on iTunes.

Special to The Globe and Mail

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011 5:30PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011 6:00PM EDT

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