The boss submits to an in-depth interview
by Émilie Charlebois (Editor-in-Chief, The Charlebois Post - Toronto)
Throughout the past year The Charlebois Post has had the pleasure of discovering just how rich and diverse Toronto theatre is, while recruiting an amazing team of contributors who helped us officially launch The Charlebois Post - Toronto last month. And if we weren’t spoiled enough, SummerWorks is just around the corner; offering everyone in the city an opportunity to check out future award winning productions and the chance to party with the people behind them. The festival’s Artistic Producer Michael Rubenfeld took the time to tell CharPo-TO what SummerWorks has in store for its 22nd season of cheap thrills and quality, thought-provoking fun.
So to start, for anyone who isn’t familiar with SummerWorks, what would you say the festival is all about?
It is a performance festival that creates a space for artists, both emerging and emerged, to put up work that is pushing boundaries, asking complicated questions, taking risks, and is attempting virtuosity.
And for regular SummerWorks attendees, what sets this year apart from other years?
I guess I would say two things. The thing about the festival is that the programming in the theatre section is very much dictated by the work that’s submitted. As zeitgeist and subject matters start to shift, so does the kind of work that we end up receiving. The work is different primarily because what people are interested in writing about is different and changing. Also, each year’s jury is different and has particular tastes or interests in terms of what they think is relevant or not…so that would be the first thing. The second thing is that we’ve got our music series this year, which we’ve had for five years, but this is the first year that we’re including collaborations. We’ve curated these collaborations between musicians and performance-makers. For example we have this piece with Hawksley Workman and Christian Barry from 2b theatre. And we have this other piece with Buck 65, who’s a musician, and a dance-maker named Ame Henderson. That’s an evolution in our music series because usually the music has been straight up concerts; this year they’re filtered more through a theatrical lens than ever before.
Cool
Yeah it’s really cool. And the other really major addition this year is the Live Art series. This is the first year that we’re doing it. I’ve always been interested in questions of performance, and alternative performance possibilities, so we’ve adopted a term called “live art” which is well known in all parts of Europe but less known in Canada. But really all it does is create an umbrella for art to happen, that can be through different lenses. It can be considered a piece of theatre, it can be considered a piece of performance art, but it all exists in the same context called live art. And often in live art, the content and the form are working together, so that usually means in very untraditional spaces, and the content of the work and the space that you’re putting the work will go together. For example, we have an artist named Nina Arsenault who’s very interested in situating herself within a kind of populist context, but having a very experimental performance. So we’re putting her in a store that used to be a comic book store right across from the Starbucks on Queen and Dovercourt making the space that the performance is happening in just as important as the performance itself. With live art people are creating work to exist in alternative venues. The other major thing about live art is the audience is implicated much more than say, a traditional context. The audience often is just as much a part of the performance as the performer themselves. They’re not asked to perform, but their specific presence is really key to the performance happening…and most of it is free or quite cheap!
One/Un (Photo credit: Production Lombric)
In terms of selecting participants for the festival, SummerWorks went from using a lottery to a juried system. Last year I spoke with Amy Blackmore, the Artistic Director for the Montreal Fringe Festival, who said that the lottery system actually helped them keep the festival fresh and unpredictable every year. What do you feel are some of the pros and cons of each system?
Well I wouldn’t go so much as to say pros or cons, it’s just a completely different system. The idea of never knowing what you’re going to get still exists, it’s just that before we offer that to the audience, we curate it. For me, I would rather that somebody has decided that the work I am going to see has value, before paying money to see it. In the lottery system, once you’re in, you have no more control over whether or not the work is good. And that’s the difference. When you come to SummerWorks, you may not know what you’re going to get but you’re going to know that somebody knows what you’re getting.
And the people who decide that this is of value, and this is what SummerWorks wants to be showcasing, who are they? Who makes up the jury and how are they selected?
I put the jury together every year, and it’s always myself plus three others. It’s always theatre professionals who are working within the community. I usually like to mix it up between a combination of people who are working artists, and whose work and opinions I respect. This year I put a jury together, one is a younger artist named Jordan Tannahill, who’s done the festival before and he also creates a lot of experimental work; Erin Shields who’s a Governor General Award winning playwright, she’s also done the festival on a few different occasions, and a gentleman named Nigel Shawn Williams a very established actor and director who has worked across the country directing and acting on stage. So people whose work I know very well and who also have different tastes and perspectives.
Based on the descriptions you gave, is it really important that the jury members have a good sense of SummerWorks, either as former participants or having been involved in any other kind of way? Or is it more a matter of their body of work?
Body of work…the way they think about art. It’s mostly to do with the way their brains work, the way they think about art. I really ask them to bring their personal tastes. That’s really important. But yeah, they definitely have to have an understanding of the SummerWorks aesthetic and they are all people who understand what the festival is, the kind of work we’re looking for. It’s all connected to what I said earlier: it’s work that’s challenging, work that asks complicated questions about the world we live in. So it’s filtered through that lens.
And exactly what kind of criteria are used to select the performers? Is it just a matter of being risky? What would you consider to be “important questions”? Because that can be very broad.
It can be broad. It’s tough to say. Usually the work is representative of the city we live in, the country we live in, so it’s usually quite diverse; that’s very important. And when I say diverse, I mean it’s representative of the people, so it’s diverse culturally, but it’s also diverse topically and diverse formally. (cont'd)
My Pregnant Brother (photo credit: Pam Price)
SummerWorks didn’t receive funding from Heritage Canada last year, after having received five years of support; and speculations were made that this had to do with Catherine Frid’s Homegrown being performed the previous year. Do you think this has potentially hindered any artistic creativity or that artists may be self-censoring and avoiding theatre that’s too political?
Well I can’t speak for all artists, I can only speak for the festival and the way we program. Certainly from our perspective, censorship is never something that we encourage. In fact, I would say that for us it just reaffirmed our mandate. The festival is no longer relevant if it’s not programming challenging work. So it’s possible that there are some artists who self-censor (this is just speculation), but this wouldn’t affect how we program. We certainly don’t self-censor. And any year, certainly every year that I’ve been at the festival…we’re always going to continue to ask very complicated questions, challenging questions. And we really believe that for work to be relevant it has to be questioning contemporary systems of thinking, because I believe that’s the real value of our form.
And do you think that theatre that asks important and challenging questions is necessarily political?
Yeah, I think so. But the idea of political doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily challenging government or challenging public policy. Political can also be socio-political. For example, there’s a piece in the festival that Nina Arsenault is doing, her work is about asking audiences to question their relationship to the body and she does that in very provocative and challenging ways. And to me that’s a political question, a socio-political question. To me the idea of politics can be personal politics or social politics. I would say that a lot of the work probably leans more towards social politics. A relationship play can be political if it is challenging a social norm about how we think about what a relationship is. For me, that’s a political question.
Back to the issue of financing the festival: even though government money was pulled, the festival managed to receive an incredible amount of private donations to make up for the loss and then this year, funding was re-instituted. What do you think these gestures say about the government and the public’s respective attitudes towards the arts and festivals like SummerWorks?
I think that what happened was that there was a lack of understanding as to just how valuable the festival is to people of this country, and the role that it plays. Certainly when we lost our funding, the donations ultimately became a very clear message as to the value of the festival. So I like to think that that kind of support, that kind of voice in support of the festival that came out as a result of our funding being lost, could have only been a reason for why the funding returned, because the communication as to the value was clear. (cont'd)
When It Rains
Since your appointment as Artistic Producer in 2008, what have been some of your goals?
It’s certainly a question of relevance, a question of where the theatrical form fits in to larger discourse, where its value is and what its contribution is. So what theory means, or what performance even means. I feel like this country is very young just in terms of its theatrical institutions and even some of its theatrical ideas. I think that with the festival, my goal is really to continue to push this question as to what theatre can be or what it should be; trying to encourage the form to evolve, to encourage artists to ask questions about theatre, what it has to offer and how theatre can be made or should be made…or even what performance is. I started a music series because I was really interested in having other forms parallel with the theatrical form to see what kind of work can come out of those questions.
And do you feel that your own approach to the festival has changed or evolved throughout the years?
I think that it evolves every year because the questions just change every year. As with the evolution of the music series. I was very interested for a long time in having music and theatre together, and then the questions just started to change for me, like how can we go further to push formal questions. Then I just decided to curate work that brings the forms together, almost systematically, to see what comes up, to see how to answer that question. What happens when you put these two different kinds of artists together to make it work? Certainly it changes, but I think it really changes based on where we’re at as a culture. Things like the Live Art series are certainly like a response to questions that I’ve had just about “what is live performance?” and “what are the possibilities?” and so curating a Live Art series is a response to that question: how far can we push performance? What are the ways to make all kinds of performance? Also, I’m really really interested in zeitgeist so the design concept changes every year in response to some of the questions that are being filtered in the city. The design for this year, one of the really big, relevant questions that has been in and around the arts community over the years, has been this question of censorship. We decided to respond to it with our graphic design. You know last year the G20 was a really big deal and so we responded to that in our design. Every year we try and situate some of the questions and the conversations we want to have with the programming but also with the design of the festival.
So it’s an all round body of work, everything relates to each other.
Yeah, we’re really trying to have the art be a contribution to the larger discourse that’s happening, particularly in Canada.
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| Nina Arsenault |
We’ve already talked about one of them, but aside from something like a major budget cut, have there been any other significant challenges that you’ve faced during your time as Artistic Producer?
Well, we seem to have some sort of controversy every year. In my first year, one of the shows we programmed was about this church group in the United States whose mandate was “God hates all homosexuals” and one of the things that they do is, any time anyone is doing anything somewhat critical of their perspective, they decide that they’re going to picket. Their press release said “we’re coming to the festival!” and they were going to picket this particular show that was called The Pastor Phelps Project and they were on the way and ended up being stopped at the border, but 150 people showed up to picket against the picketers. So that was something that was complicated. I think that also sometimes because we’re trying to push boundaries (and we’re never interested in controversy for the sake of controversy) but I think that any time you are putting challenging work that questions the status quo, people are going to react. It means always being prepared for people who don’t necessarily like those questions, or like to be provoked into discomfort.
You never know what to expect. Is there anything you’re particularly excited about for this year’s festival?
There are a number of shows in our National series that I’m interested in. I’ve curated four shows from outside of Toronto that are coming in this year. They’re all very strong shows. I’m familiar with one that I’ve seen, called One/Un from Montreal. And there’s another really great piece coming from Montreal called My Pregnant Brother. I’m excited that 2b theatre, who have a history with the festival, are coming back with two shows. Anthony Black's new show When It Rains. He did a show called Invisible Atom at the festival about five or six years ago, that has since toured all around the world, so it’s nice to have him back with his new show. And their second show is the Hawksley Workman project, The God That Comes, and that’s also something that we’re really excited about. (cont'd)
(From the Live Art series)
As most people should be!
Yeah, exactly. And we have a new Daniel MacIvor piece, also in the National series, which is really exciting. The work is really strong this year. There are some great writers. Like Anton Piatigorsky, Rosa Laborde and Nicholas Billon. Erin Shields has a new piece in the festival, Waawaate Fobister… and we’ve also got a thing called the Performance Bar. We started the Performance Bar two years ago, and the idea was that we wanted a fun spot where people could drink and also see really great live performances. We wanted the evening to be a mash-up or a blend of different kinds of performance, almost like cabaret style. When we originally did it, we worked with The National Theatre of the World, who were our hosts, and then last year we tried something new but it didn’t work out as well because of our funding issues. But we were able to bring back the Performance Bar this year. It’s being hosted by improv genius Ron Pederson and the show is being conceived and directed by Atomic Vaudeville. People should know them from a show that was in the festival two years ago called Ride The Cyclone, which was a really major hit for us. So Ron Pederson and Atomic Vaudeville are coming together to create Captain Ron’s Ship of Friendship. And it’s an evening of comedy and music. There’s going to be some video artists, performance artists, actors, happenings, exchanges…and every night is completely different, all under the banner of what we’re calling our Performance Bar. People can come and start drinking at eight every night and we go until two in the morning. Performances from 10:00pm until about 12:00 every night, pay what you can.
So there really is no reason not to go.
No, and it’s all been curated by Erin Brubacher; the music has been curated by Julie Fowler who also curates our Music series. So there’s a lot of great musicians, and a lot of world class performers including Ron Pederson. He’s in National Theatre of the World, he was also on MadTV…he’s just kind of a genius. He’s playing this character named Captain Ron, and the idea is that he’s been sailing the seas and he’s come in search of this magical thing he’s heard of, but never seen, called “the theatre.” And he’s very excited to learn all about it, to share it with you, and become your best friend.
What do you hope people will get out of this year’s festival? And is there anything you would like them to be mindful of?
Well…for people who have come to the festival, they know that it’s probably one of the best things ever! (laughs) Before I ran the festival, I was a participant and I think that just showing up and coming to see works in itself is enough. Because I think you’ll walk away with this clear idea that some of the best work that you’re going to see in Canada happens at SummerWorks. So what do I want people to go away with? I think I want people to go away with the thing that I hope people leave from every piece of theatre or piece of performance: to feel that you’ve been engaged and entertained, possibly transformed and really having walked away feeling like you not only spent some valuable time, but that your relationship to the form and the value of the form is clear. Because I think that sometimes people think that theatre’s not for them. I think the nice thing about SummerWorks, is that it’s really for everyone. It’s all really a lot of groundbreaking work, but the theatre’s also really accessible, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s cool!
And any advice for people, either in terms of the attitudes they should have towards some of the performances, or how they should go about attending the various events?
Well it’s all worth seeing. There’s not a single show that’s not worth seeing. Take time to experience as much as possible and have as diverse a festival as possible…to check everything out. The Live Art is all very new and inexpensive, most of it is free or five bucks. Try to see some of everything; theatre, live art, go to something in the Music series and finish your night at the Performance Bar, come have a drink and see some more performance. It’s going to be fun, you know sometimes people think theatre’s a chore, sometimes I think seeing performance is a chore, but the festival never is. It’s always exciting.
I guess having “summer” in the name of the festival is pretty key: this is something in Toronto, this summer, come spend your day with us.
Yeah, come spend your day with us…come spend your week with us! You know, the more you put in, the more you get out of it.
See CharPo-Toronto's SummerWorks Index
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