Hilton Als wrote in a recent New Yorker review of "Master Class" that what Tyne Daly "understands about her role as Maria Callas is that Callas can't put herself on: she doesn't distinguish between her life and her performance. Her life is a career, and her career is her life..."
The performers in Still Life, opening this week at the Summerworks festival,aren't plagued by the inability to distinguish between life and art, but they will dare to skirt the line in the production when it opens on Friday, August 5 at the Passe Muraille Backspace. Still Life is a "collective creation through improvisation" that has been developed over the last two years and now reaches the festival for what will definitely be an memorable experience. I sat down for tea with three of the play's performers and was led to believe that what audiences have in store is not the messy indulgence that "collective creation" could suggest but an opportunity to see something fresh and unique. "It's an investigation about queer culture in Toronto today," said Indrit Kasapi, one of the four actors who appears on stage, but the nature of the production puts a personal spin on this agenda.
Still Life concerns a group of friends who spend an evening in a hospital room putting together the pieces of a gay bashing incident that has united them all. Throughout the play they share stories that reveal a search for identity that goes beyond just assembling information about their traumatic experience, and what makes it genuine for these actors is that the stories that they created throughout their two year working process were based on incidents in their own lives. "When you go to theatre school you're told to leave your troubles at the door, but with this process it was about bringing our lives into the rehearsal room and trying to see how we can make art out of it," said Kasapi. Cole J. Alvis, fresh off his directorial project Here You Are at the 2011 Fringe Festival and appears on stage here, explained that "There is a layer where we are creating characters, so while the stories are our own and are coming from an honest place, we have the privilege of saying ‘That's my character.'" Co-star Alisha Stranges provided the most colourful explanation, that the presence of her real life and her character's make for "two colours of yarn, one is us and one is the character inside the story and we weave them together."
What makes the production interesting is that the performances are based on a solid structure from which the actors work, but are not performed from a written script; it's not improv theatre, nor is it some strange hybrid of sketch comedy and dramatic catharsis. "We start from a physical base always, an exploration we call the Grid, playing with group dynamics, and it turns into a physical exploration and we bring in sound and text," is how Stranges explained the beginning of the process. "We would always go in with a theme, and whatever came up in our minds we would start to voice. The physical base gives you something to return to, because just talking can become stagnant."
The benefit of two years of development work contributes now to performances that, while not freely made up off the top of the actor's heads, are always told from a fresh source of energy. "There's a structure, you'll see the same themes in each show, but you won't hear it come out the same way each time," said Kasapi. Alvis explained it with an example: "The heart of the story is there, we know for example that we're going to talk about a trip to Portugal, but the things we choose to reference may be different between shows." The benefit? "It forces you to be a good actor!" according to Kasapi, and Stranges added that "it has trained us to be alive and genuine in every moment."
The benefits of this process include raising awareness for the actors beyond just acting experience that they hope will translate to the audience: "What I find exciting about this process is how political we've become just being in the room together," says Alvis, "it's required me to distil my thought about my own community and raise my awareness."
What is important, however, is that the play work on a political level because of what it accomplishes on a personal one. "One of my favourite comments after a show at the 519 [where the play was originally workshopped last year] was someone who said that, while the specific experiences were our own, it was done in such an authentic way that they were able to hook in and understand something that they had already felt outside of," said Alvis, "which takes us back to the way we're creating, which is keeping it quite personal to us and our hearts. When it translates on stage, the hope is that other people will feel that they understand."
"It can be whittled down to just a play about gay bashing," said Kasapi, "but it's about an event that changes people's lives. It's not a mystery play, it's about dealing with the experience...I want people to walk out with a sense of empowerment." Or as Stranges put it more succinctly, "It may or may not ‘get better', but what have you learned?"
Still Life plays at Passe Muraille's Backspace
August 5th at 2pm, August 6th at 7pm, August 8th at 9.30pm, August 9th at 7pm, August 11th at 4.30pm, August 13th at 9.30pm and August 14th at 2pm. For more information go to www.summerworks.ca/2011/tickets.php, for tickets visit www.artsboxoffice.ca
