It’s 50 years in the future. You’re in your landspeeder, zipping along the desert horizon to the Langara oasis for the opening production of Studio 58’s 2065 season! It features the usual outstanding student acting and production talent, plus a very special guest sponsored by the Studio 58 Legacy Fund, which you helped start back in 2015. “Who’d they bring in this year?” you wonder, doing a portal scan through the virtual implants in your right eye. “Ah, they’ve got Antony Holland again. Bravo!”
Holland founded Studio 58 in 1965 (at 94, he is Canada’s oldest working actor) and the Studio 58 Legacy Fund was created to celebrate the school’s 50th anniversary and help carry on its tradition of excellence. The fund will help expand the scope of Studio 58’s productions by providing exceptional practical learning opportunities not otherwise available within the program’s regular operating budget, allowing the hiring of guest artists to work on productions, and permitting the program to offer special workshops, mentorships, etc.
The fundraiser’s goal? To establish an endowment of at least $250,000 – and Langara College will match every dollar raised before March 31, 2015.
Performances play a crucial part within the total program. In the past – through special grant funding or partnerships with outside agencies and companies – Studio 58 was able to enhance the student experience through co-productions, special workshops and mentorships. Sadly, the financial landscape has changed hugely since 1965, which is why the school is now reaching out for help.
Studio 58 has never done anything like this, and is unlikely to again. Donors will receive a charitable tax receipt for any donation, whether made online at langara.bc.ca/studio-58/learn-about-us/legacy-fund.html or by cheque to Langara College Foundation, 100 West 49th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., V5Y 2Z6. Please specify Studio 58 Legacy Fund with your donation.
Left to right, Carl Kennedy, Tom Pickett and Giovanni Mocibob hold a seder in The Whipping Man. The symbolism of Passover is an integral part of Matthew Lopez’s play. (photo by Emily Cooper)
On April 9, 1865, the day before erev Passover, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate troops to the Union Army’s General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Va., ending the four-year American Civil War and setting the stage for the emancipation of African Americans. This intersection of events forms the backdrop of award-winning playwright Matthew Lopez’s powerful three-person drama The Whipping Man, currently at Pacific Theatre. The play, now one of the most produced dramas in America, is a searing exploration of family, friends, faith and freedom.
There were approximately 50,000 Jews in the South at the beginning of the Civil War. Their sons fought for the confederacy. Many of the families were successful and owned slaves. The Whipping Man is the story of one such family, the DeLeons of Richmond, Va.
The play opens on a stormy night with scion Caleb DeLeon (Giovanni Mocibob) returning in defeat from war to find his family’s mansion ransacked and all the slaves gone except for faithful old retainer Simon (Tom Pickett), who has remained to protect the premises and await the return of his wife and daughter. Another slave returns that night, John (Carl Kennedy), who was raised with Caleb – they are like “two peas in a pod,” according to Simon.
John has been on one of his forays, “liberating” food, utensils and other items from abandoned mansions in the area. He returns to find an injured Caleb, whose gangrenous leg needs to be amputated below the knee. Caleb’s refusal to go to the hospital means that Simon, aided by John, must perform the operation. Especially in the intimate space of Pacific Theatre, the intense, bloody scene, where the protagonists are fueled by whiskey and courage, is not for the faint-hearted, even though a judicious lighting cue takes some sting out of the visceral moment.
It was common for slaves to take the religion of their owners and to learn the customs and the rituals of their adopted faith, so, for Passover, Simon decides they need to have a seder. He sets about to find appropriate items for the seder plate from what little is left after the war: collard greens instead of bitter herbs, small squares of hardtack military ration as matzah, and the shank bone of Caleb’s dead horse, all to be accompanied by the requisite cups of (stolen) wine.
As the three sit among the ruins of the home that connects them, the words and songs of the Haggadah, celebrating the delivery of the Jews from bondage in Egypt, take on new meaning. Simon and John are now no longer slaves; Caleb is not anyone’s master. All three men are presumably equal and the interpersonal dynamics shift. Simon declares to Caleb at one point, “You don’t tell me what to do anymore, you ask me.” Each character must grapple with the upheaval of their world and the new freedom and responsibilities that it brings. As they work through their angst, secrets are disclosed that will forever change their lives.
The acting in this production is sublime. All three men give riveting performances, along with respectable southern accents.
Mocibob, who spends most of the time immobilized under a blanket on the stage – his leg having been amputated – peels away at the layers of his character, who has lost his faith, both literally and figuratively, during the years of war and who faces a moral conundrum regarding his family’s ownership of slaves, which, of course, affects his relationships to John and to Simon and his family.
Kennedy hits the right balance of pathos and anger in his portrayal of the young self-educated slave John, his experiences with the whipping man (a white man to whom Caleb’s father and other slave owners would send their slaves to be punished with lashings from a bull whip) and his slow acceptance of the reality of a crime he has committed.
But it is Pickett who really shines, as the wise old man who has seen it all and yet somehow remains unjaded. He infuses a majestic calmness into the role of Simon. We hear the heartbreaking recollection of Simon’s own whippings and the physical and emotional scars they left behind. We witness his stoicism when he receives news of the death of beloved “Father Abraham” (Abraham Lincoln, the “American Moses”) and hears of the fate of his family.
The set of The Whipping Man is appropriately dark and ominous. Fallen bricks and broken floorboards are set off with shadowy blue lighting and the glow of candlelight; the sound design is a mournful mix of rain and thunder. The shabby costumes add to the grit and desperation of the story. Together, the visual and audio serve as metaphors for the postwar devastation and confusion.
The play, while set more than 150 years ago, is still vitally relevant for contemporary audiences. Slavery, sadly, still exists and The Whipping Man program contains some data on modern-day slavery; hopefully, the play will encourage discussion about and involvement in combating it.
Theatre does not get much better than this – our attention is completely absorbed and we are transported to another time and place, yet by material that speaks to issues with which we still wrestle. There are Jessies on the horizon for this production.
Tickets for The Whipping Man, which runs until March 21, are available at pacifictheatre.org and 604-731-5518. The show is not suitable for children.
Tova Kornfeldis a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.
Leonard Shane’s artwork is on display at the Waldman Library until March 31. (photo by Olga Livshin)
When Leonard Shane was a child, his mother enrolled him in music lessons. “It lasted only a few months,” he told the Independent with a chuckle. “I didn’t like it. Then I began taking art classes, and it worked. I liked it. But I never painted as an adult until I retired.”
Shane worked all his professional life as an elementary school teacher. “I chose a profession because I wanted to make a living and I loved teaching. It demands lots of creativity. We worked on many creative projects with my classes – creative writing and art – and then I’d hang the children’s works all over the school.”
Fully engaged by teaching, he didn’t think about painting, didn’t have time for it either. “Teaching is an immense responsibility,” he said. “So many kids have personal issues. Some kids are damaged, and you try to help.”
Then, 14 years ago, he retired. “I thought, what to do with my days? So, I took up photography and painting. I could make art on my own terms.”
He also joined Toastmasters for a few years. “I felt alive when I spoke in front of an audience,” he recalled. “This is an important aspect of any art form for me: to express myself. That’s what my paintings are about. With each painting, I try to express what I feel at the moment. Some pieces are soft, the images demand watercolors. Others are strong, full of energy, and I make them in acrylics. With every picture, something wells up from the inside, it flows; it can’t be forced.”
He paints under the influence of inspiration, so there is no set schedule, no deadlines. “I paint when I’m in the mood. Sometimes, I don’t paint for weeks; other times, I have to do it every day, for three months in a row. But I always have some way out for my creativity. When we recently went on a trip to Mexico, I’d go alone to the beach and sketch. I love capturing the essence of a place, love painting outdoors. For me, it’s the preferable experience, enhanced by nature.”
Shane paints mostly landscapes and waterscapes. Sometimes, they are of places he visits often, walks past every day: boats in Richmond harbor or a shoreline in Delta, a local park or a neighborhood street. He might paint these images on location, from photographs, from memory or with the aid of the internet. He invariably puts his own unique style and interpretation into the paintings, making them his personal impressions.
“I take photos with my camera, transfer them to my computer and then put my easel in front of the computer screen,” he explained. “I’d zoom on the photo, sometimes only a part of it, and paint. Other times, a painting might be inspired by others’ artistic works, by visiting galleries. I never copy a photo, always let my imagination fly, let the image evolve. A painting is like a meditation. It allows me to look inside myself.”
Shane has a series of Jerusalem landscapes although he has never been to Israel. Those pictures are a reflection of his inner self, he said. “I learn a lot about myself through my paintings,” he explained.
Some of his pictures are playful, like cats or dogs. Others are lyrical, reverberating with his affection for British Columbia and its diverse scenery. Still others are philosophical. “The end result is not as important as the process,” he said with conviction. “Painting is like a journey. You never know where it will take you.”
Initially, he didn’t think about selling his artwork; it was just a hobby. But that has changed somewhat. “First time I put my paintings out, some kind of outdoor art sale, I was upset that everyone walked past, nobody bought [one],” he said. “Now, I just enjoy the process. I know that we all have different tastes, but the joy of creating art stays with you forever. And I know that, at some point, someone will come along who would love one of my paintings and buy it. One of my wife’s friends bought my painting recently. She often tells me that seeing it on her wall every day invigorates her. It’s very rewarding.”
Shane also makes greeting cards from his paintings and photographs and sells them through several local gift and coffee shops. “You build a relationship with the owners this way,” he said. “After awhile, I approached some of them and offered to hang my art in their shops, and many agreed.”
That’s how Karen Corrin of the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library saw his work – in a Starbucks.
“I have known Karen for a long time,” Shane said. “She is a good friend. Suddenly, she called me. She said: ‘I didn’t know you painted. Let’s have your show at the library.’”
Shane’s exhibit of watercolors and acrylic paintings is at the Waldman Library until March 31. To learn more, visit lenshaneart.com.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) and Carmel (Menashe Noy) in Gett. (photo from Music Box Films)
The marvelously claustrophobic and deeply damning Israeli courtroom drama Gett:The Trial of Viviane Amsalem – which opens March 13 at Vancity Theatre – actually consists of three trials.
Seeking a divorce after some 30 years, Viviane aims to cast her husband Elisha as the defendant. However, the government-funded religious court vested with authority over Jewish divorces won’t grant a gett without the husband’s consent – and the triumvirate of Orthodox rabbis insists it has limited power to pressure him. As a result, it often feels as if Viviane (rivetingly played by Ronit Elkabetz) is on trial. And, because the process seems arbitrary and unfairly skewed in favor of the husband (the taciturn, unwavering Simon Abkarian), the film explicitly puts the system itself on trial.
“Our work is very political,” said Shlomi Elkabetz, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with his sister Ronit. “Gett is a protest film.”
The Elkabetzes come from a Moroccan Sephardi background, and were born in Beersheva and raised around Haifa.
“We did not have any connection whatsoever to the cultural centres in Israel [growing up],” Elkabetz said during a visit to San Francisco last fall. “We did not have any access, not by our family members and not by the surroundings of the places we grew up in.”
As outsiders who had to push and elbow their way into Israel’s Ashkenazi-dominated cultural hierarchy, they take great satisfaction in Gett’s Ophir Award for best picture and selection as Israel’s official submission to the Oscars in the best foreign language film category. (It didn’t receive a nomination.)
The film’s structure and setup is simple and powerful: Viviane wants a divorce, and her husband says no.
“Just like that there is huge suspense, because we identify with the wish of Viviane to be free,” Elkabetz said. “The dream of the modern world is freedom. She wants something that all of us want.”
The corollary to rooting for Viviane is that the other characters assume the cloak of villains, but the filmmakers made a concerted effort to imbue Gett with nuance and ambiguity, which makes for a more interesting, provocative and richer work.
“[Ronit and I] don’t judge Viviane, we do not judge Elisha, not the judges, we do not judge [Viviane’s] advocate,” said Elkabetz. “Everybody has his place for performing their interior life and making it exterior in that little theatre of the court. Everybody is respected by us, the storytellers.”
Gett marks the third and final chapter of an exceptional trilogy that began, in the very first scene of To Take a Wife (2004), with Viviane’s seven brothers discouraging her from rocking the boat and seeking a divorce. Shiva (Seven Days), set a few years after Viviane has left Elisha, reunites the extended family for a funeral.
Shiva (2008) also won the Ophir for best picture, so the attention and respect of their peers is not a brand new experience for the Elkabetzes. One gets the feeling that Shlomi and Ronit (familiar to movie-goers from The Band’s Visit), a gay man and a woman, respectively, are fueled by the role of underdogs.
For his part, Shlomi Elkabetz wants to make accessible films that provoke audience reactions and, ideally, promote societal change. Intense and often intensely absurd, the beautifully crafted and acted Gett hits every mark.
“If I go to all this trouble, I want people to be aware of the film,” he said. “Part of my attraction in cinema is to try to make cinema that does not give up filmmaking. I’m not trying to flatter anyone but to be strict and radical and at the same time to be popular. Is it possible? I don’t know.”
Elkabetz laughs, at himself and the test he has set for himself. Consider it Gett’s fourth trial.
Michael Foxis a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
Caitlin McCarthy and Amitai Marmorstein co-star in What You’re Missing by Tamara Micner, which is at Chutzpah! March 10-15. (photo by Tim Matheson)
Playwright Tamara Micner returns to Vancouver in March for the North American première at Chutzpah! of What You’re Missing, a play based on her family’s stories, but in which we will all, no doubt, see aspects of our own experience.
Tamara Micner returns to Vancouver for the North American première at Chutzpah! of What You’re Missing, a play based on her family’s stories. (photo from Tamara Micner)
Micner left Vancouver in 2003 for Yale, where she earned her bachelor of arts in English literature. She worked with Google for a few years, which took her to San Francisco and Toronto, then studied at Cambridge, receiving her master’s of philosophy in 2011. When she last spoke with the Independent, she was on her way to London, England, because, as she told the JI, “for plays, London is the best city in the world.” There, she has continued learning and working, not only in theatre, but also as a journalist and copywriter. The JI caught up with Micner earlier this month.
JI: When the JI last spoke with you, Fantasmagoriana was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and you also had two new plays in the works, one of which was called Highlight. Could you share some aspects of its development, from its première at Cambridge in 2011 as Highlight to its run last year as What You’re Missing at King’s Head Theatre in London, to its upcoming production at Chutzpah?
TM: What You’re Missing has been in the works for four years, and hopefully it will continue to live after Chutzpah as well.
We started developing the play during my master’s degree at Cambridge, with a rehearsed reading and a run at the main student theatre. I then left it for awhile and worked on other projects, and gave myself time to come back to it with greater distance and a clearer head.
In 2013, I did more rewrites and started submitting it to theatres in London, including the King’s Head, which accepted it for final development. By the time we performed it last year, it was pretty well “finished.”
It’s gone through many rounds of changes. It started out more purely comedic and, over time, it’s gotten more political and more serious, alongside the comedy that (hopefully) pervades the piece.
JI: You described Highlight in the 2011 JI interview as being based on the beginning of your parents’ relationship, and as “a dysfunctional family comedy.” In general, what has been the reaction of family (and friends) to the plays in which they see themselves represented? Do you have any advice for aspiring writers as to how to use family/friend elements without causing (too many) hard feelings?
TM: My sense is that my relatives who inspired the characters in What You’re Missing have enjoyed seeing versions of themselves and their experiences represented onstage. (Or they’ve just been polite.) The play is critical and truthful, but it’s also a dramatization, and it’s written from a place of love and affection, which I think comes through. I wasn’t alive in the 1970s, when this play is set, so it’s drawing from elements of my family’s stories – from a specific time, place and set of experiences – to explore broader questions about family, love, politics, religion, gender and so on.
When we debuted the play in London, people of different nationalities, religions and backgrounds said that they related to the story and characters, and saw themselves or their lives reflected in the piece in some way. That response really pleased me (and was a relief!) because that was my hope. I see theatre as, among other things, a way to bring people together and remind us of the things we share.
I think artists need to share their truths, and personal experience is where a lot of our truths come from. That might cause hard feelings. But, if we’re honest and nuanced, rather than heavy-handed, people will respond and connect to the work, and the truth in it will come through.
JI: In 2011, you said that you chose to move to London for its theatre presence and because you loved the city. Has the city lived up to your expectations? Do you plan on staying for the foreseeable future?
TM: I’m very happy living in London. I’ve found a neighborhood and communities that I feel at home in, including easy access to pita, dates and baklava, and I’m still discovering more of the city and the country. I was approved for Polish citizenship last year, so assuming the U.K. doesn’t vote to leave the EU, I plan to stay here indefinitely.
JI: Will you be coming to Vancouver for the Chutzpah shows? If so, how much input, if any, will you have into this production? Did you have any hand in casting?
TM: Yes, I will be in Vancouver for the run. I’ve met with the director, John Cooper, in person and on Skype, and we’ve talked about the origins and development of the play and his vision for the production. He oversaw the casting, and I trust his instincts and judgment. It’s exciting to see how other people interpret your work and bring it to life, sometimes in surprising ways.
JI: Are there any projects you have currently on the go, or that you’re considering undertaking, that you would like to share with JI readers?
TM: I’m developing a new show, Wink the Other Eye, with two actors and a musician. It’s about music hall, a major genre of British entertainment from the mid-19th century until about the ’20s (when ragtime and revue, and radio, started taking over). For example, if you know the song “Daisy Bell,” that’s actually from music hall.
The show is devised – collaboratively created and written – which is a new style of working for me. We plan to do some showings of the piece in the spring, working toward a production later this year. We’ve been approved for funding from Arts Council England to finish development, which is a big help and a stamp of credibility.
Our show looks at Marie Lloyd, one of the most famous performers of her day, who toured the British Empire (South Africa, Australia, North America) and sang from the age of 15 until she died aged 52. She had a story similar to Whitney Houston’s, Judy Garland’s: an insatiable entertainer who lived to perform and had a pretty awful life offstage (including domestic abuse and alcoholism). The show combines live performances of her songs with important moments from her private life, and the actor who plays her is related to her. (We’ve put some of the music and comedy from the show online: soundcloud.com/winktheothereye.)
What You’re Missing is at the Rothstein Theatre from March 10-15. The other theatre offering is Kafka and Son, performed by Alon Nashman, on March 2. Visit chutzpahfestival.com for more information on these and other productions.
Rafaella Rabinovich’s designs from Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Jersey Lily directed by William B. Davis at the Jericho Arts Centre. (photo by Steven Hooper)
Rafaella Rabinovich always knew that she wanted to be a theatrical designer, and she became one – and a successful one at that, without many detours or hiccups.
“When I was 12, my father gave me a camera,” she said. “I photographed lots of shows and I knew I wanted to frame the stage myself.”
Rafaella Rabinovich’s costumes sing on stage. (photo from Rafaella Rabinovich)
After graduating from a high school for the arts in Israel and the mandatory army service, she enrolled in the set and costume design program at Rakefet Levy Design School for the Performing Arts in Tel Aviv. Upon finishing the program in 2010, she came to British Columbia. Today, she is a respected local set and costume designer, doing what she loves and living in a place she adores.
Of course, nothing was as easy or simple as it seems from a brief review of her resumé. “I wanted to make sets. I didn’t care about costumes,” she admitted, “but the design school where I studied only offered a combined program, so I took both. Now, I do more costumes than sets; it’s easier for me as a woman, but I still love doing sets.”
When she first came to British Columbia, she didn’t plan on staying. It helped that she was born in Canada and had Canadian citizenship. “I did have a Canadian passport so I wanted to look around and then travel to Africa,” she recalled. “I loved it here so I stayed. I still haven’t gotten to Africa, but it’s in my plans.”
To justify staying, she applied for a job, with Cirque du Soleil, no less. “I didn’t expect to be hired,” she said laughing, “but they got back to me. I ended up doing two jobs for them. After adding that to my resumé, it was easier to look for design jobs here. In the beginning, I worked as a waitress a lot. Now, I sustain myself with theatrical designs. I feel lucky.”
Unlike many costume designers, she doesn’t wish and never did wish to work in fashion. “I interned with a fashion firm and I learned a lot from them, but fashion doesn’t make my heart sing the way theatre does.”
She enjoys the variety her chosen profession offers, and she doesn’t shy from the smallest jobs. Circus and movies, commercials and theatre – they are all significant to her. From a couple costumes for a display at Science World to the set and costumes for the cast of 27 for her latest production, Fiddler on the Roof at Abbotsford’s Gallery 7, she has done it all. In the five years since she settled in Canada, she has worked on about 20 projects and, she is actively seeking more.
Rabinovich said she relishes every aspect of her work, from research to the final audience applause.
When she does her research for a show, she reads a lot. “For historical shows, classical paintings are great references. And, of course, I do a lot of research online,” she said. “I also read the plays. I need to know the story, the characters. We might have two stories set at the same time, but if the stories are different, the costumes and sets are different too. Think Oliver Twist and Napoleonic France: about the same time, but different places and different stories, different characters. I always need to know the character. Who she is, why she is wearing this hat, this dress. The costume has to complement her personality.”
One of Rabinovich’s past projects was a play that took place at the end of the 19th century, the same time period as Fiddler. “For that project, we wanted the costumes to be true to the times. But for Fiddler, I chose Marc Chagall as my inspiration.”
At times, she has collaborated with a director in her artistic decisions. “If he has a vision of the show, I would respect it,” she said. “He might say: ‘I want it sad’ or ‘It should be happy,’ and I would accommodate his suggestions in my designs.”
The sources of the costume materials and sets she creates vary greatly. Some pieces she buys in thrift or regular stores, others she designs from scratch or rents. “I’m not a seamstress but I know how to sew. Sometimes, if the project is on a low budget, I can sew the costumes myself, but usually, I have a seamstress. I know which vintage store in B.C. would be likely to have a fur coat of a certain color or a special type of curtains.”
She makes all her designs by hand, not on computer like some of her contemporaries. “I’m old- fashioned,” she joked. “I like feeling the fabrics, the textures.” She also likes incorporating lighting into her designs.
Each project she works on presents a different challenge, she explained, but all of them embrace their own rewards. “Seeing your vision come to life, take shape on stage, is wonderful. When you hit the right note, when you think, ‘Yes, that’s it!’ its feels good. And of course I love it when the audience applauds, when the actors wearing my costumes are happy. I’m behind the stage, invisible to the public, and I like it that way, but I’m part of it. They applaud my costumes, too.”
Gallery 7 Theatre’s performance of Fiddler on the Roof is on stage March 13- 21 at the Abbotsford Arts Centre. For more information, visit gallery7theatre.com.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
From the moment I read Pat Johnson’s interview with Faith Jones prior to last year’s Limmud, I knew I wanted to read The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach, 2014).
The title of the collection wasn’t mentioned but the topic was: “erotic Yiddish poetry.” Jones, who translated Dropkin’s work into English with Jennifer Kronovet and Samuel Solomon, gave an overview of the poet’s background, which is explained in more detail in The Acrobat. That Dropkin writes with and about such passion is notable given her life’s circumstances. Born in Belarus in 1887, she and her family had to rely on the charity of relatives after her father died. While difficult, it meant that she could receive an education, and she became a writer. In 1909, she married Shmaye Dropkin, a Bund activist whose political activities forced him to flee czarist Russia, and, in 1912, Dropkin (and their son) joined him in New York.
“There,” reads the Translators’ Note, “inspired by the foment of Yiddish culture she found, Dropkin shifted from writing in Russian to writing in Yiddish…. She became a part of the thriving Yiddish literary scene, publishing widely in Yiddish newspapers and literary journals. Yet, she was publicly criticized by her male contemporaries for the perceived extremity of her work. All this time, Dropkin raised five children; a sixth died in infancy. She occasionally wrote stories and novellas in serialization for money, especially during the Depression when her family needed the income. Although the bulk of her oeuvre dates from the 1920s and ’30s, Dropkin never stopped writing poems. She wrote almost until her death in 1956.”
The Acrobat is not a comprehensive collection, but rather, as Jones explained in an interview with Leah Falk at yivo.org, the translators “chose the ones that we thought we could make into good poems in English…. The poems, even some of her quite important poems, that we did not think we knew how to work with, or that lost something in the translation that we didn’t think would be regained, we didn’t keep…. We weren’t able to capture them in the way that we felt really did them justice.”
A page-facing translation – i.e. the Yiddish poem is on the page facing the English version – those who understand Yiddish can not only engage in discussions about a poem’s meanings, but its translation. For example, the title poem, which is generally translated as “The Circus Lady,” gives an idea of the complexity of language, and the different images that are conjured by words that basically mean the same thing.
Dropkin’s poems more than withstand the test of time. Eighty-plus years later, they retain their immediacy. As Edward Hirsch writes in the foreword, Dropkin’s “lyrics come fully loaded. They are erotically frank and emotionally unabashed, deeply engendered, relentlessly truthful. They are terse and musical, like songs, and carefully constructed to explode with maximum impact.”
More than a decade in the making, The Acrobat is, remarkably, the first collection of Dropkin’s work in English, and she could not have gotten a better group of translators. Their love of the poetry comes through, as does their skill. One could almost be forgiven for thinking that Dropkin wrote in English. The Acrobat is truly an inspiring – and sometimes challenging – read. But it is more than that.
In speaking to Johnson, Jones admitted another objective. “I would like people to think about re-envisioning our forbearers as people who were more like us,” she said. “We need to really explore the people in our past and, as a historian, this is what I hope for most: that people will explore the past, understanding that these people were not like us, but in other ways were very much like us.”
In this, she and her colleagues also succeed. This is your bubbe’s poetry, as much as it is yours. And, while thought may be a little unsettling, given some of the subject matter, it is also very cool.
***
He and She by Celia Dropkin (from The Acrobat)
He is a branch;
she – the green leaves on the branch.
From him to her flows
dark power, thick fertile sap.
She shudders with each touch of wind,
whispers and laughs,
turns the silver
of delighted eyes.
He is simple, mute.
Autumn dyes her deep
colors. The cold wind cruelly
exiles her from the branch,
while he remains the same, simple,
robust, mute.
Forty years ago, Ian Merkel was involved in clandestine film screenings. The films were nothing Canadians would consider illicit, but in apartheid South Africa, color barriers meant it was illegal to show films featuring blacks and whites together, and the films had to be smuggled into the country. Merkel watched these contraband films in friends’ garages. When the police raided the screenings, people sometimes landed in jail. Even with this possibility, for a young Merkel, film was worth the risk.
Ian Merkel (photo by Gabriel Morosan)
Years later, Merkel is still as passionate about the evocative nature of film as he ever was. He has been involved in many film related organizations in Vancouver, including as a board member and executive director of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. Today, Merkel in involved with the potential of working toward social change through film, and has become involved with Reel Causes and the Vancouver Foreign Film Society.
“Film, for me and a lot of people, is the most memorable art genre,” said Merkel about why he believes film can change the world.
According to their website, the mission of Reel Causes is “to educate, inspire and engage the community around social justice, environmental and health-related issues.”
Merkel described how the organization began in an interview with the Independent. “Mohamed Ehab, a pharmacist from Egypt, had just moved here and wanted to meet people. He loved movies, so he began having movie nights in his home, then began bringing films in [from out of town] for the public.”
In 2010, Reel Causes registered as a nonprofit society and has since partnered with many B.C.-based nonprofits to promote health, environmental stewardship and social justice.
“We bring films that are not political or religious and partner with what we call community causes, in order to educate people,” Merkel said. “The belief is that the media of film is one of the most powerful ways to get people involved in causes. People connect as a group while they watch a film and are able to engage with our community causes to effect positive change.”
Reel Causes has an arrangement with Vancity that enables the organization to screen films once a month at Vancity’s theatre at Simon Fraser University and once every six months at the Vancity Theatre downtown on Seymour Street. They aspire to raise awareness and funds for the causes with which they engage.
“Our most successful event was a partnership with the Lipstick Foundation, which provides esthetic services to patients in palliative care in a hospice on the North Shore,” Merkel said. “We showed a movie called Happy. The Lipstick Foundation brought a big sheet of paper and cupcakes. Whenever a person wrote on the sheet about what makes them happy, they got a cupcake. We had over 200 people there.”
Coming up next for Reel Causes is a film dealing with youth issues and a partnership with Artquake, an organization whose mission it is to empower young people and build confidence through art.
Reel Causes is at a turning point as an organization, Merkel said. Several younger people sit on their newly enlarged board of directors and Merkel said he anticipates passing the torch to a new generation soon, while still maintaining some involvement.
At the same time, he looks forward to turning his attention to his other passion: promoting foreign films.
The Vancouver Foreign Film Society was formed in May 2014 as a result of the dearth of independent movie theatres in Vancouver. While the Ridge Theatre has been demolished and Fifth Avenue and the Park are now owned by Cineplex, the demand for quality foreign and international films remains high. Eight films were screened by the society last year and 12 screenings are planned for this year at Pacific Cinémathèque.
“The criteria for our films is that they are produced outside of North America, but for some French films from Quebec we may bend the rules because they are never seen outside of Quebec,” said Merkel. “We’ve had films from France, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Australia and soon will show films from Japan, India, Spain, Turkey and Thailand.”
For Merkel, providing his insider knowledge of how to procure films and put on events is a labor of love. “The impact of a film will inspire for pure entertainment or for social justice,” he said. “Film shows us things that happen around the world and people remember powerful images from film. I see that film can stimulate the mind and somehow retain the content so those images are lodged in your mind.”
Heather Hermant in ribcage, which will be at the Firehall Arts Centre March 3-8. (photo by Tim Matheson)
As a graduate student, Toronto spoken word artist Heather Hermant took a workshop taught by Diane Roberts, a former artistic director of Vancouver’s urban ink productions. Roberts asked her students to research and embody an ancestor, and Hermant chose her great-great-grandmother Riva. The process eventually led to the multimedia theatrical project ribcage: this wide passage, which comes to Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre next month.
ribcage centres on Esther Brandeau, a Jewish woman who, posing as Jacques La Farge, a male Christian laborer, came to Canada from France in 1738. Said to be the first Jew to ever set foot in Canada, she was discovered, interrogated and later deported when she wouldn’t convert to Catholicism. Writes Hermant in a 2013 Canadian Theatre Review article, “Riva stepped aside as I followed an archival labyrinth – in Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City, and in every place that Brandeau was purported to have worked as a young man over five years across France.”
The 2005 workshop was Hermant’s introduction to Roberts’ Personal Legacy process and, writes Hermant in the CTR, it is “the first performance to move from idea to production through the Personal Legacy process. It was workshopped and presented in Vancouver as part of the 2010 Tremors Festival. The full production premièred at Le MAI in Montreal in October 2010.” A French version of the performance has also been created: thorax: une cage en éclats, translated by Quebec performer and scholar Nadine Desrochers.
“I began as a spoken word performer, and thought I would approach this performance as a series of spoken word pieces. In other words, what I usually did but longer, more material,” said Hermant, who is now a performer across several genres, as well as being a curator, scholar and educator. “When I began to work, I discovered that spoken word poetry as I knew it would not do it with this story. Partly, this had to do with language. I was working with French language archives and yet I write in English. On top of or because of that, a lot of the material I was creating was physical – gesture, movement. A lot of it was video. These were things that were unexpected and new for me since what I thought I was aiming for was spoken word poetry. So, it was a bit scary.
“But, in studio work with Diane Roberts, who directs the show and who has been there from the beginning of its creation, this is where you start. Starting with movement, for example, is a key to storytelling. According to Diane, working from the body first forces a kind of honesty that is difficult to achieve when using language. Luckily, it was in a performance class with Diane where I first discovered the story of Esther Brandeau. Words came late, which is odd for a poet, but in a way this was part of the story. It was as if an impossibility to fully know stood at the centre, and required all sorts of different approaches to do just that: to approach the story, which demanded its own form.”
As her research continued, Hermant realized the production would need a musical dimension. “I began to hear live fiddle and see live mixed video installation. When we came together in collaboration with composer/fiddle player Jaron Freeman-Fox, he composed most of the material in studio (as in dance/theatre studio) with me, working from my movement and the rhythms of some of my text.”
The video in the production, she explained, derives from her research in various countries, “often collected as a way of journaling” her work. “A bunch of the video material is from site-specific reenactments filmed by Melina Young. VJ Kaija Siirala and I worked in studio together to make all this eclectic rich footage into a mixed installation concept…. The video installations operate as a kind of memory space, their own kind of eye on what’s transpiring. Interdisciplinarity in this piece allows for different witness positions to come through, I think. Different ways of looking.”
Hermant doesn’t consider ribcage a play. “It is somewhere between spoken word and storytelling, physical theatre, a series of interdisciplinary tableaux, a performance installation, all of it in a theatre. I just understand it all as poetry, regardless of whether words are involved or not.”
As diverse as are the performance aspects, so too are ribcage’s themes: identity and sexuality, belonging and personal history, established roles and genders as well as rebellion against them. “Thematically,” explained Hermant, “ribcage is a confrontation with the meaning of history and how we know the past. It is about how we work and translate across languages, eras and bodies. It confronts holes and gaps and unknowns in any written record, and works from a place of longing, desire to know and to feel belonging and to understand the present moment. I created this piece because I was compelled by the personal resonances I found with the story of Esther Brandeau…. My show is about my own ancestral and personal histories, and the journey of my research, as much as it is about the story of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue. All of these stories enter into ribcage: this wide passage, through the different media and forms that I integrate.”
Heather Hermant in ribcage (photo by Tim Matheson)
Hermant noted that women passing as men, “especially in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries … was far more common than the exceptional cases seem to suggest. In addition to the most popular assumption and representations – that the primary motive for women who passed as men was to follow their male lovers, which circulates through pop culture across many eras, and of which there are indeed many documented historical examples – there were many cases of passers who did so out of economic necessity, there were many cases of passers who did so in order to partner with women, or a combination of these.”
For Hermant, the historical record must be regarded with care. “The important thing to me is to ask how a story is recorded, how it comes to us, what are the stakes for the person outed. In other words, it is vital to read askance and to distrust the document, even as the document gives us the story.
“What is particularly interesting for me in this case,” she continued, “is this is purportedly a case of a female passing as a male and a Jewish person passing as a Christian. I like to call this person a multicrosser. I find we need to challenge the assumption that passing is simply a ruse. Classical literature is full of titillating stories of passers, titillating primarily for straight male audiences. My queer positionality perhaps makes more available to me a knowledge that changing gender can be a profoundly sacred process, that sexuality may or may not have anything to do with it, and that queerness as many of us know ourselves today has history. This doesn’t mean sameness across time. That last sentence is vital. In other words, how people understand themselves today and the terms through which they do so are not the same as how people understood themselves 200 or 300 years ago. This is an inherent challenge to reading, understanding and representing things as they were long ago. It’s partly why I have not chosen to create a work that takes place only contained in a long ago era.”
Describing ribcage as “a midrash on the archive,” Hermant explained, “It’s a meditation, a questioning, a digging in deep into the idea of archive, into archives themselves, into memory and telling, loss, desire, the written word and its troubles, a need to understand belonging, compelled by questioning and not by a need or a belief in the possibility or utility of resolution. In fact, to me, such a stance is an ethical stance, and some might say a profoundly Jewish one – though of course not exclusively so – i.e. the imperative of the question. So, yes, of course, my Jew-ish-ness (hyphenation intentional) is important to me and to my show. ‘Jewishness,’ however defined … and a grappling thereof, informs the piece profoundly. As does my non-Jew-ish-ness, my queerness, my experiences of gender, my feminist leanings, my francophone ancestry, my being a settler ally working with an aboriginal and intercultural theatre company on unceded Coast Salish territory, my work as a scholar in gender studies, colonial history and historiography, my teaching, my concern for land and water…. The list goes on. It is all important to me, all profoundly inform the show, and none of these is mutually exclusive!”
And these are not the only aspects informing the show. “Dealing with difficult histories does not preclude humor, playfulness or joy. In fact,” said Hermant, “these are essential precisely for dealing with difficult histories. I choose the topics I choose – or they choose me – because I feel a responsibility and a call to do so. And because, very simply, they compel me.”
ribcage, produced by urban ink productions, will be at the Firehall Arts Centre March 3-8. Freeman-Fox’s original music will be performed by Vancouver musician Elliot Vaughan.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Germany’s Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird play at the Electric Owl on March 6 as part of the Chutzpah! festival. (photo from Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird via Chutzpah!)
Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird live up to the hype. They are indeed “helping klezmer reach a new renaissance, seasoning it with folk, punk and deep-digging lyrics, full of sarcasm and wicked self-irony.” They most certainly belong “to this caste of Yiddish music agitators” and their music is “[a]n absolute must for lovers of unusual, intelligent, challenging, exciting folk music and a blast at every instant.” They are “forward-marching and backward-glancing,” making “truly great art.”
And that’s not the half of it. On their website (paintedbird.de), you can read more about what reviewers have said, you can download the lyrics to all their songs, you can watch several videos – and you can get an excellent idea of what to expect when they perform at the Electric Owl on March 6 as part of this year’s Chutzpah! festival. Kahn spoke with the Jewish Independent ahead of that one-night only show.
JI: Could you share a bit about your background – how you came to be a musician, how and when you came to live in Berlin, for example?
DK: I’ve been a musician all my life but I first started working professionally as a singer-songwriter in Detroit, and then in New Orleans in 2001.
I was a part of founding the Earthwork music collective in Michigan, which has grown to a large community of artists and activists. I produced four albums of my songs with them. I first really invested in klezmer music and Yiddish after attending Klez Kanada, in Quebec, for the first time in 2004. It was there that I met Alan Bern, who was my accordion teacher. He had been living in Berlin for many years and he offered me his apartment to sublet. I was already quite interested in German theatre, particularly Brecht, and I wanted to live in Europe, so it fit.
After going to the Jewish festivals and workshops that summer in Krakow and Weimar, I had the idea to start the band the Painted Bird. And it was around then that I really started learning not only German, but Yiddish and incorporating translations into my songs, and performing in many languages at once. The band has had many members but the heart of it for all these years has always been Michael Tuttle, whom I met in New Orleans, playing bass, and Hampus Melin, a drummer from Sweden, whom we met in Berlin. We wanted to create a band that would be able to take traditional songs, folk songs, in different languages and infuse them with a modern sensibility that we take from the other music we dig – punk, jazz, new music. And Berlin is the perfect city for this band. It’s a real cosmopolis.
JI: You’ve studied drama and your bio notes that you’ve been a professional actor since age 12. How does acting fit in with your music career?
DK: From a performance perspective, I’ve never made too much of a distinction between ways of being on a stage. Songs and plays are simply different modes of collaborative or solo storytelling. As a musician, I get to employ many of the techniques I need to write, direct or act in the theatre. And I’ve never really quit making theatre. I’ve done many productions over the years, in the States, as well as in Germany. I’ve been involved as a composer or arranger of music and songs for various productions, and I’ve been acting and directing again, as well.
I’m currently very involved in Berlin at the Maxim Gorki theatre, a wonderful space for progressive work these days. The new artistic director, the Turkish-born German Shermin Langhoff, is an inspiring, powerful voice for diversity and political engagement in drama. I’ve been a kind of “house-poet” for the theatre, working on several productions as composer, actor, musician, etc. I’m about to direct a small play in their studio theatre space, an adaptation of Romain Gary’s The Dance of Genghis Cohn. It’s become an important family for me, and has also connected to the international klezmer family, as well. I curate a concert series there, focusing heavily on new Jewish music.
JI: What drew/draws you to Yiddish as a language in which to write and sing?
DK: Besides the connection it may have to my personal background as a descendant of immigrants from what we could call Yiddishland, I’m attracted to Yiddish on a purely esthetic level. I like the way Yiddish sounds, how it feels to sing and speak it. It tastes good. I like the things you can express in Yiddish that don’t quite work in other languages. And I like the challenge of trying to translate that not only into English, but into a kind of performance that makes sense to an audience that may not have the cultural or historical literacy to know where it comes from. I think Yiddish has a lot to teach us about the world we live in today, as well as the world of a century ago. It’s a language which defies borders, which defies easy categorization, which defies simple historical narratives. It’s a defiant language.
JI: Your lyrics are poetry, full of meaning, commentary on history and contemporary society. How would you describe your core beliefs/values? Do they have any foundation in Jewish traditions/ teachings?
DK: My core beliefs, which are never fixed, have their foundations in many things in my life. Some of those things are Jewish. Others simply come from being a child of Detroit in the late 20th century, being an ex-pat, being someone who travels a lot, etc. But some of what I received as a Jewish education goes against other values that I hold to. I try to take what I need from traditions and leave the rest alone. But this is itself a tradition. So, insofar as Jewish tradition contains a tradition of subverting other traditions, I’m a fairly traditional subversive.
JI: You also arrange the words of others, Heinrich Heine, Bertold Brecht, Itzik Manger, Leonard Cohen, and a wide range of writers. How do you choose, or what aspects of a poet’s words tend to interest/excite you?
DK: I work on what speaks to me.
I’ve loved Leonard Cohen since I was about 14 or 15 years old. I definitely owe the fact that I chose to be a songwriter and a poet largely to him. Brecht was the thinker and poet who kept me interested in the radical potential of the theatre to dynamically reflect the world in a political and lyrically effective way. My first plays that I worked on out of college were by him, in New Orleans and Detroit. Somehow, they were the best response I could find to the Bush era. Brecht wrote of living in “bad times for poetry.” I think I know what he meant. He was also a tremendous songwriter, who directly influenced people like Bob Dylan and performers like Nina Simone.
Heine and Manger were poets whom I really discovered in learning German and Yiddish. And now I understand that they are relatives of Cohen, Dylan (both Bob and Dylan Thomas) and others. They are just obscured behind the barriers of language and the catastrophes of history. I like to think of what a young woman I met once said after attending Klez Kanada and first encountering modern Yiddish poetry, she’s from Newfoundland, not Jewish, and she said: “I can’t believe it. It’s like a crime that I’ve been alive for 25 years and no one has ever told me about Itzik Manger!” I think a lot of people would feel that way if they could read him. He was amazing.
Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird’s 19+ show at the Electric Owl, 1926 Main St., starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30/$25. For the other musical performances, as well as the dance, theatre and comedy shows that take place during Chutzpah!, visit chutzpahfestival.com.
