Look out! This theatre could change your mind!! By Brian Bowman
If you want to shake your lethargy, rattle your complacency and roll into a new awareness, you need look no farther than Regina based “Curtain Razors” – a multidisciplinary theatre company led by Michele Sereda which, since 1989, has been focused on new ways of telling stories. Its principal aim, says Sereda, is to encourage community support and appreciation for professional, contemporary theatre. Curtain Razors presents diverse, innovative shows that challenge the traditional format of storytelling and aims to enhance artistic experiences for audiences and performers.
Sereda has been shaking up audiences in Regina and elsewhere with performance art projects like “Extras” which collaborated with European artists Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Keresty (collectively known as the Szuper Gallery), Regina based guitarist/composer Ramses Calderon and 60 “extras” to create a site specific performance at Queen Elizabeth Court at City Hall in August of 2008. More recently, she worked with Ken Mitchell in his tribute to Saskatchewan’s famous poet, Edna Jacques, and with Heather Cline as part of her “Populating Vedutta” project. Her work with students at Piapot First Nations led to “Building Bridges” with partners Ann Verrall of Halifax, Elwood Jimmy of SÂKÊWÊWAK Cooperative, Ramses Calderon and Sask Film Pool. This one became a film that is now in final edit.
“I have no interest in pulling up pain,” says Sereda. “I have no interest in pulling up those stories – I want to go in that room and make art with them. I don’t want a specific agenda. I argue that if you start doing a series of artistic exercises that are basically creation exercises, the pain and those stories will naturally come out because of who they are. I truly believe that everyone has the capacity to be genuine and that’s what I want to work from first. I’m really interested in an individual’s “presence” and how they bring that forth.”
“I had the students listen to Ramses music and write all of their imagery out through stream of consciousness. I took them through Tai Chi and Yoga exercises and turned the chemistry lab, where we were working, upside down. I wanted to destabilize them, because when we are destabilized we go into survival mode and act instinctively. It builds self-confidence, because it puts them in a state of confusion and compels them to make a decision,” says Sereda. “It’s confusing for awhile because film is layers of collaborative work, but when they saw the rough cut it started to make sense. So now, that little community is pumped and we’re going back out there for another project.”
Sereda is currently involved with a performance/film/ installation project called “Ballet” - again with Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Keresty. It will open at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in late April and stay up through early May. For this one, she went to The Museum of English Rural Archives based in Reading, England, which is the UK’s archive for agriculture and similar to the Western Development Museum here. “Ballet” is an 11.5 minute film installation which incorporates various other elements to explore the issue of farmers in crisis and it's link to social choreography.
“Suzanne picked 30 films from the 1930s–1950s to uncover the social choreography of food production,” says Sereda. “We also looked at Robert Astley’s nine segment American PBS series called “Perfect Lives”, produced by the Kitchen in New York, which looks at the food production industry and culture in society. ‘Ballet’ references all of these things. We worked with 10 young people who had never farmed and matched locations from industrial films with locations in Reading to produce the film.”
The film is paired with the work of Toronto painter, Natalca Hussar, whose work is themed on Ukrainian culture, and the entire presentation will occupy at least two of the Mackenzie’s galleries. The first gallery will reference how the work was made, interspersed with futuristic farm photos of the 1950s from the Mackenzie’s permanent collection. The second gallery will feature the film “Ballet” and the third will host a ‘happening’ on May 6. This will be a cinematic film set, with a three piece band, to create a fairy-tale mood for a performance piece that looks at nature and our desire to contain it.
“Canadian theater comes out of the Dominion Drama Festivals and people like Robertson Davies and colonial sensitivity, which was relevant once, but maybe not now,” says Sereda. “I like to shake the traditionalists because it means they have to re-think token casting and the way material is presented and viewed. I like to challenge our perceptions.”
Steve McDonnell and Brian Bowman of BuzzCity chat with Semko Fontaine Taylor and drummer Charles Dumont @ The Copper Kettle prior to their show @ O'Hanlon's Irish Pub, Regina, Saskatchewan, January 20, 2011.
