Sharing their culture – with song, dance and heart

Every performance of the Le La La dancers repeats a form that goes back thousands of years. But it takes this Victoria company and its director George Me’las Taylor to make the Kwakwaka’wakw (kwa kwa key wok) songs and dances new again.

Taylor’s willingness to share his culture is powered by a prodigious talent. He’s a showman. He’s a singer and drummer and knows how to wear a mask and animate it.

Last Saturday on the stage of the Victoria Aboriginal Cultural Festival, Taylor, born in Alert Bay, B.C., was in full voice, singing, drumming and introducing the dances.

“We perform these dances,” he said, not just for spectacle, “but because they belong to us.”

He meant “belong” in both a cultural and a family sense. In the Kwakwaka’wakw tradition, a dance and the mask that identifies it is the property of a particular family, passed on by inheritance or marriage. That means at any occasion that demands a potlatch, such as a birth, death or marriage, the family members can enact the dances they own. Some dances are considered sacred and are witnessed only in the context of a potlatch.

Since I first saw them perform in Toronto in 2006, Le La La (it means travelling from here to there) has only grown stronger at a kind of storytelling that’s at once specific to the spiritualism of the Kwakwaka’wakw and universally understood. Taylor’s nation has inhabited the northern tip of Vancouver Island, nearby islands and coastal inlets for millennia. Two of George and Melanie Taylor’s sons, Jason, 32, and Jarid, 29, have always danced with Le La La. Today the company also includes nephews and grand-nephews and grandson Lason Taylor, who is 5 years old. Melanie is the company manager.

The Kwakwaka’wakw are renowned artists whose reputation extends back to the time of Contact and includes important carvers such as the late Mungo Martin and his grandson Chief Tony Hunt. The full intent of the masks is only revealed when they are danced. Introducing Wild Woman of the Woods or Dzunukwa, Taylor tells the story of a haunting character represented with a mask featuring a hook nose and big red lips. She’s known as a bringer of wealth, but like many a mythical creature she has a dark side. Children were warned not to wander into the woods in case Dzunukwa might be abroad. She likes to snatch up young ones and take them home to eat. A Le La La dancer in a fur suit, wearing the magnificent mask, bears a cedar bark basket on his back – all the better for carrying home small children.

Bukwus, the wild man of the woods, possesses great strength and can make himself invisible. One interpretation has it that Bukwus might offer food that a wise person would refuse, because it is Bukwus’ habit to consume the souls of the living. Bukwus might also be an aboriginal interpretation of Big Foot.

Le La La’s Bukwus enters the stage in an outfit that looks like moss; he is truly scary. The transformation dance is an opportunity to see how dancers really do take on the identity of the animals and spirits they depict. On Saturday, 18-year-old Calvin Charlie-Dawson performed this dance with great agility, surrounded as he transformed himself by dancers Ethan Taylor and Jarid Taylor, wearing button blankets.

As a director at large of the Aboriginal Tourism Association of British Columbia, George Taylor has an official role as an ambassador for first nations culture. And ever since establishing Le La La in 1987 he has been taking the message of friendship and unity around the world, from Europe, to China and Mexico and all points of the North American compass.

“My father always told me to be proud to be first nations, and I am proud. But I am also a proud Canadian,” Taylor tells his audience. He means it and he lives it. In fact he says it again.

Family, pride, love, respect, harmony and peace. These are the values that Le La La stands for.

Photos, clockwise from top left: Haida chief Lance Baker, George Me’las Taylor, Jenna Lancaster; Calvin Charlie Dawson as the Raven with Jarid Taylor; Ethan Taylor dancing the Nun the bear; Lason Taylor; Andy Everson of K’ómoks First Nation and Ethan Taylor.

See George Taylor at the prow of a canoe at the opening of Victoria’s aboriginal cultural festival: http://www.cheknews.ca/aboriginal-festival-kicks-off-traditional-canoe-landing-189217/

For more about the company go to www.lelaladancers.com

Hands across the water

Watching first nations’ artists carve their works is nothing new for Victoria, where Thunderbird Park, around the corner from the legislative buildings, was the site of a carving shed from its opening in 1941.

But it’s not every day that a Coast Salish artist sits down for a demonstration with carver friends from the Iatmul tribe in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. Elaine Monds, founder and director of Alcheringa Gallery on Yates Street in Victoria, has been facilitating such cross-cultural interactions for a number of years. And it was on her premises that three carvers were at work with their tools on Saturday, showing visitors how it’s done.

This was the fourth visit to Vancouver Island for Claytus Yambon, who is well acquainted with artist John Marston of Ladysmith. In 2009, the two of them participated in a project called Hailans to Ailans which paired Papua New Guinea aboriginal artists and their Northwest Coast counterparts. Near Marston’s home, Yambon and Marston carved a magnificent red cedar war canoe called “Bummdianmari” (one mind, one people), that features a prow with female image and a stylized alligator. The sides of the canoe display carvings integrating the motifs of both cultures.

“It was the most unexpected thing that ever happened in my life,” said Yambon of that first venture into another Pacific art tradition. He was whittling away at a swamp hen, a creature that is central to the Iatmul way of life. “They are what we survive on.” Beside him, Marston was in the early stages of carving a mask out of a large disk of alder. For him too the exchange with the Papua New Guineans, which took him to Yambon’s village in Sepik, was a life-changer. “It expanded not only my art practice but my life’s horizons. Witnessing a culture that is relatively intact from ancient times to today was pretty moving for me.”

Both his parents were carvers, said Marston, as is his brother Luke. “We work with alder when its green, as it dries it gets harder and changes colour. This mask will be dark brown when it’s finished.” The smooth face, which will ultimately incorporate both female and male aspects, showed a remarkable serenity.

Edward Dumoi, also from Sepik, was carving a cat. It was his first time in British Columbia. “I’m self-taught,” said Dumoi, noting that his father who died when Edward was young had been an artist. Dumoi’s work bridges the traditional and the contemporary. Domestic cats are a favourite subject, carved with the same panache as his totemic finials for houseposts. He can see the effects of the cultural exchanges that have been going on across the Pacific. “After John had been to visit us, I noticed that he’d used some of our stylings in his work. Maybe I’ll do the same,” he said, with a broad grin.

Lavinia: what’s in a name? Lots

Lavinia

Created and performed by Jon Lachlan Stewart

Uno Fest, Metro Studio, Victoria

May 25 to 26, 2016

The references to Shakespeare’s women in this compelling drama, created by quick-change artist Jon Lachlan Stewart, are simply the underpinning to the contemporary issues the show raises. Lavinia is a victim of a brutal attack in which her hands were chopped off. She’s the outspoken one in a support group for women who’ve suffered physical and sexual abuse.

Shakespeare’s Lavinia appears in Titus Andronicus. She is the daughter of the Roman ruler, a virtuous woman who is raped. Stewart’s Lavinia is a punkish teen with long, straight, pink-tinted hair under a black wool toque. She introduces us to the other members of the support group (represented in framed silhouettes hung from above): Silvia, her best friend, named for Shakespeare’s character in Two Gentleman of Verona; Helena, blogger and Youtube celebrity, from Shakespeare’s unloved Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Lady Macbeth, who has a streak of violence; and the not-to-be mentioned, now absent Ophelia.

Stewart, a member of the Montreal troupe Surreal SoReal Theatre, is a fascinating performer. Tall and limber, he skips between two wigs mounted either side of the stage, transforming himself before our eyes. One wig is Lavinia’s; the other shiny hairpiece makes him handsome Proteus, best friend of Valentine (the other gentleman of Verona) and pursuer of Silvia, Valentine’s fiancée. As in Shakespeare, Proteus has a girlfriend too: Julia. While in character as Lavinia or Proteus, Stewart also impersonates others, notably deep-voiced Linda, leader of the therapy group, who’s given to dancing Elizabethan jigs and repeating words like conducive, as in “that behaviour is not conducive to recovery.”

Lavinia, an uncontrolled brat in group and a self-appointed voice for her friend Silvia, drives the script. “I don’t want to survive,” she says. “I want to live.” Proteus, on the other hand, is calm, poised and very capable of dissembling, especially when covering up a crime against his friend’s loved one, Silvia.

The show deftly raises issues familiar from the case against former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi: what constitutes assault and how sexual assault is handled in the courts. A talk-back session is scheduled to follow the Thursday 8 pm performance of Lavinia. The play and the performance provide much material for discussion.

Also recommended ̶ before Uno Fest’s close: ana, from Victoria’s Impulse Theatre, on from Thursday through Saturday, and A Chitenge Story, a work-in-development by Makambe K. Simamba of Calgary, at Intrepid Theatre Club on Saturday at 4:30.

Telling it like it is: inside the joint

Circus Incognito

Created and performed by Jamie Adkins

Intrepid Theatre’s Uno Fest, McPherson Playhouse, Victoria

May 21, 2016

Inside/Out

Written and performed by Patrick Keating

Uno Fest, Metro Studio, Victoria

May 24 and 25, 2016

Jamie Adkins was trained in the clown tradition, and so was Patrick Keating. But Adkins didn’t have to go to jail to find his calling. A native of San Diego, where he became a street performer at 13, Adkins added a lot of skills to his repertoire as he made his way from California to Montreal, where he joined Cirque Éloize.

On Saturday night, he delighted youngsters and adults alike with Circus Incognitus, a show of astounding variety. Adkins is one funny guy, with a talent for surprising us. From an opening scene with a flashlight in the dark, to the “grande finale” involving a tightrope and a pair of ladders used like stilts, Adkins never skipped a beat, rolling from one routine to another with a light heart and true engagement with his audience. It takes a great performer to look like a klutz doing things worthy of a trapeze artist.

A deft mover, Adkins made a dance partner out of a wooden chair, over-balancing and tipping it on its edge. He juggled with ping pong balls that he later pushed into his mouth to make grotesque faces. He caught oranges thrown at him — on a fork held in his mouth. He dressed up and dressed down in his Buster Keaton suit and borrowed a few expressions from Charlie Chaplin in a mostly wordless act. One word Adkins did announce, with a child’s expression of wonder: “magic.” And magic this show was, from beginning to end.

When he was 13, Patrick Keating was a speed freak, on his way to heroin addiction. His first time behind bars was in juvenile detention, a hell hole for children. Keating was in and out of prisons in Quebec and British Columbia for nearly 10 years. Gallows humour informs his amazing monologue, as revealing a depiction of prison life as any memoir, but much more entertaining. His timing is impeccable.

Keating enters bearing a banker’s box of belongings, like a man just released from the joint. “It was my choice,” he says. Incarceration, that is. A judge offered him the choice of rehab or prison and he chose sentencing. “Life on the instalment plan,” is how he terms his lengthy stint.

A shy kid from an Irish Catholic background who grew up in east-end Montreal, Keating first earned respect after a school yard fight. Not yet a teenager, he became the drug dealers’ guard with a 12-guage shotgun aimed at the door. Soon this rather slight man was getting big sentences for armed robbery that meant penitentiary time. There he needed all his smarts just to survive. Keating’s tales bring to life characters such as the transgendered Madot, who sews her boyfriend a three-piece suit out of prison greens; Noel, the fearless Rastafarian; or Buddy, the car fanatic who had his pedal foot nearly blown off by a cop.

There’s much wisdom in Keating’s show, about how loyalty and generosity are developed in prison and how the arts, theatre in this case, can be a way to true rehabilitation. Keating performs Inside/Out again at 8:30 Wednesday in the Metro Studio.

Uno Fest takes off

The Unfortunate Ruth

Written and performed by Tara Travis at Uno Fest

Metro Studio, Victoria, BC

May 18 – 20, 2016

Shylock

By Mark Leiren-Young

Performed by John Huston at Uno Fest

Metro Studio

May 19 – 20, 2016

Victoria’s 19^th Uno Fest, an annual event produced by Intrepid Theatre, is off to a terrific start to 10 days of performance of 14 solo shows.

The running gag in Tara Travis’s The Unfortunate Ruth, is “I have a hunch,” a line delivered by the Ruth, a buck-toothed hunchback receptionist in a white coat. Ruthie, her Doppelganger, is also a receptionist – in a clinic that performs ultrasounds on pregnant women.

I have to admit that I didn’t quite get this show, which grew out of Travis’s fascination with “identical twins, parallel universes, the work of Mind of a Snail and a particularly rare medical condition called fetus in fetu.”

Buck-toothed Ruth has a fetus in her hump that makes its presence known by gripping Ruth’s heart with its legs. Ruth calls the fetus Cordelia, Cordy for short. The other Ruth, known as Ruthie (a quick on-stage costume change takes place), has a fetus growing in her abdominal cavity. She could see it herself with her ultrasound wand, if she cared to. Then, just to complicate things, there are talking cartoon fetuses projected on a screen behind each Ruth. In one video scene, one fetus eats the other. There’s a confusion of names: who knows where the fetus Gertrude fits in? what about this unicorn and the ashes in the urns? And which of the Ruths is the one who survives surgical removal?

Travis, a Vancouver performer who brought this show to the Vancouver Fringe in 2014, gets off some good lines and disports herself with aplomb, puzzling as her show remains to this viewer.

Victoria playwright Mark Leiren-Young’s Shylock is the stuff of great solo performances and John Huston is the actor to do it justice. Essentially a lecture, this Shylock soliloquy is a literal undressing as an actor bares his heart before his post-show audience. Huston is John Davies, an actor trained in the classical tradition (think the Stratford Festival as run by an Englishman), and currently embodying a villainous, obnoxious Shylock in a festival’s controversial production of Merchant of Venice. He enters — swarthy, dirty, costumed with a hawk-like nose, grey page-boy wig and full Elizabethan accoutrement — and delivers his most memorable soliloquy. “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? . . If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute . . .”

This Shylock is either a victim of anti-Semitism, or a reason for inciting it. In his one-sided “talk-back” address to the audience, Davies, Jewish himself, answers his critics (“you must be a Jew-hating Jew,”) and makes a plea for returning to theatre that is about art and not about pandering to patrons or protecting the public from things they’d rather not acknowledge. Davies believes Shakespeare was an anti-Semite; Shylock is his villain, not someone with whom we need to sympathize.

As he’s raising issue after issue, eloquently displaying the power of “dangerous words,” the actor is wiping off his make-up, removing his wig, working down to his leggings and stocking-feet. Huston holds our attention every minute. (He performs an adaptation of The Screwtape Letters at Christ Church Cathedral, Saturday, May 21 at 7:30 pm.)

Erasing borders with jazz

Song of Lahore

Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken

Song of Lahore

Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken

Cinecenta, University of Victoria

May 17 to 19, 2016

This documentary opens on a very sad note, as the camera follows some Pakistani musicians – artists who all learned at the knee of a father or uncle – through the ruins of the once vibrant Lahore music scene. After independence in 1947 tabla, flute and sitar players, violinists and guitarists enjoyed fame and thrived, making music for the Bollywood film industry. In the cold war years, an American program of jazz ambassadors, including Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and other greats, introduced the subcontinent to a form of music that was similar to their own centuries’ old instrumentation. Improvisation came naturally to them and the rhythms were not hard to match.

Then in 1977 came General Zia, Sharia law and suppression of music and all the other arts. The Taliban only made things worse. At the time this film was made, musicians were still playing in semi-secret in Pakistan’s second largest city. And they feared a complete loss of a proud and complex musical tradition. It would be like losing your language.

As we hear from Saleem Khan, son of Namdar Khan, considered the country’s finest violinist, things had come to such a pass that instruments were broken beyond repair and in scarce supply. No musician could make a living with his art form. But in 2004 Izaat Majeed pulled together seasoned players and started the Sachal Studios for recording music. Returning to the jazz they’d heard as young men, the players recorded Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” on tabla drums, Indian keyboard. flute and sitar. It went viral.

Next came an invitation from Wynton Marsalis to perform with his band for a special concert in the Lincoln Center program “Jazz at Lincoln.” In one scene we’re in the grimy lanes of Lahore and in the next six brown guys are strolling through Times Square, jamming with the Naked Cowboy.

Conductor Nijat Ali, who loses his father and mentor during the course of the film, has to struggle to bring off this unusual merger of East and West, but as Marsalis says, musicians will always come together. What started as a lament becomes an uplifting story of how art overcomes difference and conflict in a vivid documentary that recalls Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club. The closing credits roll over images of the musicians finally getting to give a concert before a huge audience in Lahore.

Photo credit: Frank Stewart

Hogging it: Rosenblatt and Callaghan

Stomachs Unite Drawing #11 Chow Down Drawing #18

It’s anything but hogwash: an intellectual and artistic engagement between two CanLit titans entitled Hoggwash, because Joe Rosenblatt’s letters are addressed to James Hogg, Barry Callaghan’s alter ego and poetic protagonist. The release of the book, published by Exile Editions and subtitled The Callaghan and Rosenblatt Epistolary Convergence, is accompanied by an exhibition of Callaghan’s and Rosenblatt’s drawings and paintings on at the GN Studio in Oakville until May 11.

The works displayed on two walls at GN Studio are all new. (Those pieces reproduced in the book are no longer in the artists’ possession.)These pictures seem to converse across the room. Callaghan’s surrealistic, Dali-esque beings, all feet and lips and teeth, address Rosenblatt’s birds, cats, fish, dogs and other half-human creatures with much on their minds, and not all of it philosophic.

Hoggwash began with a proposal from Rosenblatt. “Ten years ago I suggested to Barry that I would like to write to the leading protagonist in his epic poem, James Hogg and ask him a series of philosophical questions, pointed questions, as to the birth, or reincarnation of Hogg who emerges on an ice floe in Toronto Harbour and is set upon by thugs and crucified. Barry as Hogg would answer my questions, referring to our mutual friend Barry Callaghan.”

The epistles would also serve as a forum for the two authors’ thoughts on religion, philosophy, poetry and literature in general. The result (full disclosure; I acted as copy editor) is a unique Canadian literary document and a lively entertainment.

Callaghan sets the pace for Hoggwash in an opening Q&A with Rosenblatt, quoting liberally from Rosenblatt’s poetry. “You seem to me to be a blue angel, always in a delirium of poems and in this delirium you are, over and over again, born like death, with burning branches growing . . . .”

Rosenblatt describes himself as a “disillusioned romantic” and admits to a strange kind of voyeurism, the study of bees and their pollinating ways. Hogg is captured in a poem as a man living through “an endless winter of endless / nights, . . . sitting / squat hour after hour by a seal hole in the ice, / waiting for the snout of the seal . . . .” Hogg is in some ways the straight man to Rosenblatt’s remarks on Hogg’s musings about Martin Heidegger, God, the Virgin Mary and his Toronto subway Stations of the Cross. As for Callaghan, Hogg remarks, he “can be a bit of a gadabout and a rounder.”

This is not the first time either poet has emerged as a visual artist to be reckoned with. Writing about Callaghan’s Hogg works for an Ottawa exhibition, artist Vera Frenkel identified him as “a naturally skilled draughtsman.” Drawing and painting were something he did from an early age, prompting a poet visiting the Morley Callaghan household to ask what his son was to be, “poet or painter?” But like Rosenblatt, Callaghan needs a theme and Hogg (the actual James Hogg immigrated to Upper Canada in 1824 from Glasgow) has provided him with lots of inspiration.

Among the Callaghan watercolours on display at GN, a large picture of limbs and lips locking, called “Hogg Remembers the All of their Love,” is a tender depiction of two lovers. Other paintings are more in-your-face, even sinister, such as “Hogg in Purgatory” or “Hogg Pursued by Devils in Hell.” These Hogg paintings are expressive in their jumble of body extremities and Janus-like visages of the earthly/heavenly polarities in Hogg’s thinking.

Drawing and painting is more of a constant pursuit for Rosenblatt, who has a solo show concurrently running at Yumart Gallery in Toronto. Making his artist’s statement, the poet says, “In my drawings personalities grow exactly like limbs . . . . Those creatures in my landscape carry my genetic material. . . . The drawing paper demands its form. It wants to be fed and craves for limbs. And perhaps a spiritual envelope called the soul.” At GN you can see in Rosenblatt’s black-and-white drawings accentuated with bright splotches of paint that the hand that draws the lines is the same one whence Rosenblatt’s thoughts proceed on paper. “Stomachs Unite” is a good illustration of the Stoma principle under discussion in Hoggwash. Other works, such as “Chow Down” and “Eat or Be Eaten” could be visual equivalents of his ripostes to Hogg.

There’s plenty of food for thought in Hoggwash, both the book and the art works; readers and viewers might well demand a sequel.

“Hoggwash: The Exhibition,” April 16 to May 11, gnstudio / contemporary art, 123 Lakeshore Road West, Oakville, ON

“Angels, Demons and Spirits,” works by Joe Rosenblatt, May 7 to 28 at Yumart Gallery, 401 Richmond St. West, Suite B20, Toronto, ON

Hoggwash: The Callaghan and Rosenblatt Epistolary Convergence, Exile Editions, 118 pages, $17.95 pbk.

Art work courtesy of the artists, from top: “Stomachs Unite”; “Compared to What,” Drawing #11; “Chow Down”; “Compared to What” Drawing #18

Zingers drive The Summoned

The Summoned

By Fabrizio Filippo

Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

April 27 to May 29, 2016

The dialogue in The Summoned – and this play is nothing but dialogue – moves at the speed of electrons; appropriate considering the subject is digital technology. Fabrizio Filippo, the forever-young actor and playwright, wrote the heady 90-minute play and stars as Aldous, the son of Annie Mann (Maggie Huculak) who partly presides over this whirlwind production.

A collection of eccentric characters has been summoned for the reading of the last will and testament of Khan (“not Mr. Khan; Khan, like Cher”) a billionaire technology proprietor. Think Steve Jobs, Steve Bezos or any tech giant. It’s the striving of all the egos in this Silicon Valley simulacrum that propels The Summoned and makes the piece, ably directed by Richard Rose, a wearying watch.

“How far from our nature will technology take us?” is the leading question in this comedic sci-fi entertainment that spins on the theme, will humans overcome mortality? Emblazoned on the blue screen before the show begins is the statement, If It Can Be Done It Will Be Done.

Filippo, in hoody, jeans and sneakers, sets the pace with a machine-gun delivery to introduce the scene: a budget hotel near the Toronto airport where participants await the announcement from the grave (or cyberspace) of Khan’s legacy. High security is required. Tony Nappo is a goofy security type called Quentin who carries a large shoulder bag from which he pulls out numerous flip-phones, crushing them to bits as he grows frustrated with the proceedings. He sprays the room with odoriferous air freshener, later revealed to be nanno-robots with some ill intent. Annie Mann comes on, mike in hand, as if giving a TED talk; she is owner of the hotel, a possible Khan liaison, which makes Aldous his possible son.

John Bourgeois plays an explosive Gary Alameda, president of Khan’s tech empire. Kelli Fox is Laura Kessler, a sassy, sexy lawyer who has been handmaid to Khan’s ambitions and has a tendency to break into uncontrollable giggles. Rachel Cairns is Isla, a sparky airline stewardess who had some pivotal mid-air encounter with Khan.

Security is the big concern here, because apparently Khan (voiced by Alon Nashman, listed in the program as Walkie Talkie) built his empire on the creation of cyber security, with mechanisms such as “Log Secure System Refresh”. Sounds vaguely like a toilet bowl cleaner, says one wag.

Pronouncements are the order of the day, spoken rapid-fire and aimed to kill, as the characters spar over the big stakes, a fortune worth billions. Khan authored a quote that went down as real Shakespeare quote: “It is not in the stars, our destiny, but in ourselves.” Annie laments, “nature lost its grip on us.” And there are lots of zingers, along the lines of “the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to the exclamation mark.”

Kurt Firla’s video design and Jason Hand’s lighting and set design place the whole event in a wacky world of infinite possibility, i.e. cyberspace. Much of the dialogue is cleverly synched to text-style utterances running across the blue screen.

Not very much of lasting import is under scrutiny in The Summoned, but Filippo’s show makes a showcase for some terrific performers, including the playwright himself.

Top: Rachel Cairns and Fabrizio Filippo. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

Wunderbar play-acting from Wunderbaum

Wunderbaum Looking for Paul (c) Steven A. Gunther 06

Looking for Paul: Inez van Dam vs. The Buttplug Gnome

Wunderbaum

World Stage, Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto

April 27 to 30, 2016

The buttplug in the title of this show is not entirely a red herring, but enough about that for now.

First, about Paul. He is Paul McCarthy, a 70-year-old Los Angeles sculptor and performance artist. His work often bears an implicit critique of American consumerist society.Quite a few of his works can be found in public spaces in Europe. The “buttplug gnome” is the name given by Rotterdammers to “Santa Claus,” a sculpture McCarthy made in 2001. For some years, it has stood prominently in the Eendrachtsplein square in Rotterdam. The dwarf-like Santa bears a Christmas tree in his right hand, shaped like a – there is no mistaking it – buttplug.

Needless to say, some citizens take offence at this work, innocent though it first appears. It’s a particular issue for Inez van Dam, who lives in a sunny apartment above the bookstore she owns on the Eendrachtsplein, where the sight of the buttplug gnome is absolutely unavoidable.

Wunderbaum, the Dutch Flemish company from the Netherlands, is as cunning as Paul McCarthy. The show opens when Californian Daniel Frankl introduces himself – awkwardly – telling us how he got involved with Wunderbaum when the collective was awarded a $20,000 residency in Los Angeles to create a theatrical piece. He is the middle man between the Netherlanders and Paul McCarthy, who is to be the subject of their production.

Frankl calls to the stage Inez van Dam, who is sitting in the audience. She bears a sheaf of notes that she reads from, rambling on about herself as images appear on the screen above her, not always in synch with her talk. The message: Inez hates the big black gnome with its big black anal dildo, it’s inappropriate, it spoils her view and she resents the American intrusion into her city’s culture.

Beside her, five white chairs with microphone stands foretell a dreadful evening. What transpires, after three more actors come on stage, is a reading of emails comprising an account of what happens after the troupe goes to LA, with Inez. Threaded through this discussion is a mind-numbing debate on the merits and demerits of the arts funding model in the US and in Holland.

Walter, Matijs and Marleen, along with Daniel and Inez, take their seats, each bearing a sheaf of printouts. At first the email messages, along the lines of Daniel’s “I’m extremely excited about this project. European theatre is edgier and richer because you have the money to spend on the process,” make a tedious exercise in revealing the creative process. Then things heat up: Marleen bursts out with a message to Inez: “Are you willing to show your cunt on stage?” Inez has professed an abhorrence of even being on a public stage.

Slowly, from gestures and looks that pass between the email correspondents, drama begins to erupt. Marleen is the most vociferous: she wants to do a real show, maybe Streetcar Named Desire. Walter gets a wild notion of involving Lady Gaga. Daniel shuts him down, warning that Los Angelinos are fed up with celebrity-stalking. They get laughs from the audience as things grow more intriguing, Marleen flirting online with Daniel; others suggesting a meet in the hotel pool. Drinking becomes a running gag. Inez looks for a way out of the project.

Just when it appears that no show will materialize, stagehands are called to remove the chairs and mikes and the cast exits stage left. The crude bunk and bed, an open toilet and the child’s wading pool that have been lying in darkness throughout the email reading are now highlighted. The time-lapse video of an LA intersection that has been running on the screen is now projected on the back wall of the stage. Women with cameras are summoned, to create live video of the action.

Matijs enters in a long t-shirt, wearing big ears on his concealed face, a ratty blond wig and huge puffy hands. He makes for the toilet and pulls down his underwear. Walter comes in with a wooden sword in a pirate outfit, yelling “room service” over and over again, as he too de-pants. Marleen is in a skimpy black dress and high heels. Daniel is a chef wheeling a cart with bottles of ketchup, mayonnaise, chocolate syrup and a bowl of spaghetti. Inez is collared and chained to a post.

What follows, in this makeshift hotel setting, is a piece of performance art that resembles the sort of thing Paul McCarthy might do. You know you’re not in the real Hollywood, though, because the men are frontally nude and the women remain dressed. It’s a food fight writ large as the stage and the actors are covered in fake feces, ketchup, whipcream, spaghetti and liquid chocolate. The Wunderbaum collective – Walter Bart, Yannick Noomen, Matijs Jansen, Maartje Remmers and Marleen Scholten – has pulled off a wonder. And yes, there are actions with dill pickles that bring to mind that infamous buttplug.

Photo: Santa Claus and Looking for Paul: Inez van Dam vs. The Buttplug Gnome.

Credit for Wunderbaum photo: Steven A. Gunther

Moraes’s dance runs on testosterone

Talk about a catchy title. Testosterone, the full-length dance that Newton Moraes has created with four male dancers premieres Thursday, April 28, at Dancemakers Centre for Creation. The show is his biggest, best, most complex and compelling work to date.

Under construction since January, the show — in rehearsal at least — delivers much that one would associate with the male hormone and much that is unexpected.

Moraes admits he didn’t know a lot about testosterone until he started doing a bit of research. Both men and women, to some degree, are driven by the hormone. “It’s important for us. Too much and you get aggression and fighting, but there is a positive aspect to it, in building muscles and giving us a sex drive. A lack of testosterone can lead to depression and illness.” And in middle age, men start to lose testosterone, the way women lose estrogen. These facts went into the mix along with personal observations about how we are a lot more than the sum of our endocrine systems.

A Brazilian who came to Toronto from Porto Alegre in 1991, Moraes has embraced the cultural and gender diversity of his adopted city and that had much to do with the shaping of Testosterone.

“I am a feminist. I believe in equal rights for women and men. I think there are lots of things being done for women nowadays that are wonderful and we as humans are advancing when we recognize LGBTQ rights. But when I was thinking of male friends of mine and how society has changed, reversing roles for men and women in the home for instance, I thought, how are these changes affecting men?”

A grant from the Ontario Arts Council and support from Dance Ontario Weekend made it possible for Moraes to put much more work into this show than is usually the case for independent choreograhers. Still, he had to work a back-breaking day job to raise enough money to pay everyone adequately. His choice of dancers was fortuitous: Colombian-born Falciony Patino Cruz; Brazilian Marco Placencio; Italian Canadian Emilio Colalillo; and Shakeil Rollock, who is of Caribbean descent. Physically, temperamentally and culturally they make a fascinating mix.

Also, says Moraes, they each brought skills from different schools of dance. “So they bring different ways of expressing themselves, in the way they move, the way they dress, the way they connect with each other.”

Partnering between men is central to Testosterone, and since male dancers are not trained to lift other males, Moraes brought in choreographer Allen Kaeja to give a master class in elements of dance such as lifting, catching and overbalancing into the next move. There is a fair amount of body-slamming going on in Testosterone, balanced with some very tender moments. Feedback from Toronto dancer/choreographers Ronald Taylor, Kevin Ormsby and BaKari I. Lindsay has helped sharpen the piece.

The dancers enter in business power-suits and among the many changes they undergo in the hour is a moment when Placencio performs in high heels, wearing a dress. Moraes invited trans artist Lola Ryan to coach the dancers on how to access their inner female.

“Testosterone is not just about expressing our macho masculinity,” says the choreographer. “It’s also about accepting the feminine side of ourselves.”

Photo of Falciony Patino Cruz, Emilio Colalillo and Shakeil Rollock by Emmanuel Marcos

Testosterone

April 28 to 30 at 8 pm and May 1 at 3pm, at the Dancemakers Theatre, 313, 9 Trinity St, Distillery District Toronto as part of Danceworks/Co-works

Tickets: $25 General Admission $20 Seniors, CADA Members and Students

Call: 647-920-2883

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