Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit - Softcover

Morrow, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0920159974 ISBN 13: 9780920159972

Publisher: Banff Centre Press, 2003

Synopsis

Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit is a breezy, irreverent chronicle of the company considered by many to be English Canada's foremost creation theatre. In its romp through the company's twenty year history, the book also documents OYR's friends and collaborators -- puppet master Ronnie Burkett, playwrights Daniel MacIvor and Brad Fraser, and comedians Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney of the Kids in the Hall. There are also guest appearances by everyone from Beat poet Michael McClure to New York performance artists Karen Finley and Penny Arcade. At the heart of the book, however, is the story of an unlikely troupe of artists with diverse talents and shared tastes who have forged a unique style of physical theatre away from the world's cultural centres, combining a western entrepreneurial spirit with a creative imagination and edginess that defy Alberta's conservative image.

About this title

About the Author

Winner of the Nathan Cohen Award for excellence in theatre criticism in 1995, Martin Morrow is a Calgary-based freelance writer and arts journalist who has followed the careers of the Rabbits since their early days. Wild Theatre is Morrow's first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Chapter Six: From an Elevator to a Rodeo

Once the company was ensconced in its perfectly legal Secret Theatre at the Centre for Performing Arts, the festival seemed like a natural choice to keep the venue busy between Rabbit shows. First of all, a name change was required, and the felicitous choice was High Performance Rodeo. Michael Green remembers lifting the term "high performance" from the magazine of that name, a publication dedicated to performance art. "I fancied that high performance was a whole genre, and that s what I wanted to see at the festival whatever that meant." Also calling it a "rodeo" would seem a no-brainer in Calgary, home of the Rabbit-reviled Stampede, opening the way for all sorts of cowboy clichés in the marketing.

"Rodeo" also implied wild and dangerous attributes the festival aimed for and, occasionally, achieved. More often, though, the early festival was like an avant-garde gong show, minus the gong. Artists mostly local, largely inexperienced presented experimental work, often conceived for the event itself, before an indulgent audience. Sometimes the experiments fizzled or blew up in everyone s face. Now and again, they d be cool in indescribable ways. (I still remember Neil Cadger, as a modern-day Orpheus, playing a wire-strung "musical chair" with a bottleneck and violin bow.) The ever-supportive Kate Zimmerman, part of that indulgent audience, felt she had to remind Calgary Herald readers that this wasn t the Stratford Festival: "A rodeo, by its nature, is a dynamic and risky event" (29 March 1988)

In true Rabbit spirit, Green had started a festival without quite knowing what he was doing. For the first Rodeo, staged in March 1988 in the Secret Theatre, he took all comers. "I just went out into the community and asked anyone to please do it. We d give them the gate, although we d have to keep some of it to cover some overhead. That was really all I had to offer." Out of the $5.50 ticket price, the performers and technicians got $4. "There were a lot of artists just starting out in those early days," he says, "and it must have seemed like a good enough idea to them. And I didn t limit it to theatre; I really wanted it to be an open-ended expression of different forms of performance. It was a reflection of what One Yellow Rabbit s mandate was. In our own work we would try to create a new mix of different performance styles and genres."

The 1988 Rodeo, which ran two weeks, included a young woman doing a striptease while reading Descartes, a satire of homophobic AIDS propaganda involving dancers, musicians, and tape loops, and Green himself, encased in an acrylic box full of crumpled paper, where he blew a trumpet and played with feathers in yet another Stromsmoe/Green creation called Baby s Breath. Nobody quite knew what to make of it all, but coming on the heels of the big-name, big-ticket Olympic Arts Festival, this was clearly an alternative event in every way. It didn t even fit the formal definition of performance art visual artists using a performance medium. Although visual artists would participate in the festival from time to time, they were heavily outweighed by dancers, musicians, poets, actors, and comedians.

It was, however, a good time to ride on the coattails of the performance art movement, which had finally penetrated the consciousness of John Q. Public. Laurie Anderson had scored an unexpected radio hit in 1981 with her single "O Superman" and her concert performances took the art form out of SoHo galleries and onto network television from the US Public Broadcasting System to Saturday Night Live and Letterman. As well, category-defying performers from the margins of the mainstream, such as Eric Bogosian and Sandra Bernhard, were being tagged as performance artists. Michael Green had seen his first performance art at Calgary s more adventurous galleries, including Artons, Clouds and Water, and the Off Centre Centre, and had strongly identified with it. "I used to think I was more of a performance artist than a theatre artist," he says.

Green likens himself to Tom Sawyer, suckering a bunch of locals into doing performance pieces so he could build a festival. Maybe he was also Andy Hardy, whipping up enthusiasm in the Calgary arts community: "Hey, gang! Let s do some performance art! I ve got this retail space that we ve turned into a theatre, and Sandi s made some lights out of juice cans, and " Although this was hardly Andy Hardy style entertainment. Indeed, some thought it was most unwholesome.

"Quite early on in the Rodeo s development," says Green, "I was very conscious of attempting to give something back to the community that I felt had really supported us, and my growth in particular. So I was in discussion with the Calgary Board of Education to put a special night aside at the High Performance Rodeo to encourage any groups of high school students who weren t happy with doing The Music Man or The Crucible and maybe wanted to come forward and show some work that they had created themselves. And the man at the board was very polite, but he said You know, we can t possibly allow our students [to participate]. We can t condone this kind of event, because One Yellow Rabbit is experimental theatre and, well, frankly, everyone knows that experimental theatre is naked men swearing. Now, it occurred to me that I had never had a naked man swearing in a show and certainly I had never sworn naked so Gary [Stromsmoe] and I put together a piece where we had a naked man chained up and I swore while I whipped him. I figure if they re going to accuse you of it, you may as well do it. Especially if it sounds like fun."

Edition details

• Publisher: Banff Centre Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0920159974
• ISBN 13: 9780920159972
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400