5 minute read
THEATRE
PuSh FEST Aalaapi director embraces the rhythm of Inuit life
by Charlie Smith
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In 2017, musician and actor Laurence Dauphinais and radio documentary maker Marie-Laurence Rancourt decided to do something that most artists would never consider. The two women set out to make a theatre production concerning a topic about which they were completely ignorant: contemporary Inuit life in northern Canada.
“It was the 150th anniversary of Canada, and there were these very interesting grants at the Canada Council for the Arts,” Dauphinais explains by phone from Montreal. “They were basically programs inviting artists to take risks and get out of their comfort zone and dream big.”
Dauphinais and Rancourt quickly discovered that radio was an extremely important social and cultural aspect of everyday life in the North. Moreover, radio is available in Inuktitut—which is the language of Inuit communities—as well as in French and English.
People play bingo on the radio, share stories on the radio, and hold political and community meetings live on the radio.
“Radio is on all the time in Inuit houses,” Dauphinais relates. “It’s really, really the centre of community in a way.”
So Dauphinais and Rancourt decided to make this Inuit love of radio a centrepiece of their show, Aalaapi, which aims to convey what contemporary life is really like up North. They gave the microphone to Inuit women to share their realities in a “very antisensationalist way”.
“They’re for the most part extremely attached to their culture but also are connected to the global realities that we all know,” Dauphinais says.
The set is a façade of a house with a small window, through which the audience can see the women living out their lives. The exterior of the house functions as a screen, allowing Dauphinais, the director, to project multimedia images, live animation, and words and subtitles.
“I kind of knew that it was going to work,” she says, “because all of a sudden, we had the space; we had the sensation of voyeurism, of distance. People had to engage and be patient to get access to the culture they were watching.”
Through her research and the time she has spent with Inuit people, she’s learned that they have a different relationship to language than people down south. In Inuit culture, she maintains, there’s a lot of room for silence. The title of the production, Aalaapi, comes from the Inuktitut word meaning “creating silence in order to hear something beautiful”.
“You teach through what you do more than through what you say,” Dauphinais says. “So we thought that was pretty radical—the relationship to silence.”
She points out that Inuit communities have a slower rhythm, which she tried to mirror with a contemplative and poetic theatrical piece. The goal was to put the audience in a head space of deep listening, which is really the theme of the show, so they can appreciate a part of Canada that most of us don’t even know.
“We think we are a northern country, but 95 percent of our population lives in this tiny sliver in the south,” Dauphinais says. g
The set of Aalaapi has the frame of an Inuit house doubling as a screen for multimedia images, with much of the action taking place inside the window frame. Photo by Anne-Marie Baribeau.
Indigenous theatre artist Cliff Cardinal will deliver a radical retelling of a William Shakespeare classic. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
– Aalaapi director Laurence Dauphinais
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival will present Collectif Aalaapi and La Messe Basse’s Aalaapi at the Waterfront Theatre from January 29 to February 2.
by Charlie Smith
When reached in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, Chris Abraham isn’t in a mood to give away details about his company’s adaptation of a William Shakespeare play at this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
“We don’t actually announce the cast of the show until the night of the performance,” Abraham tells the Straight.
However, the artistic and general director of Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre is happy to explain why he commissioned Indigenous playwright, musician, and satirist Cliff Cardinal to develop his interpretation of As You Like It, which will be performed at the York Theatre. In the past, Cardinal wrote and performed the critically acclaimed and searing oneman play Huff, about youths who abuse solvents. According to Abraham, Cardinal is a cultural critic and “an examiner of the habits and rituals that we have of theatregoing”.
“Cliff’s gift as a writer—and you’ll certainly see this in his adaptation—is really to step right into the middle of controversy,” Abraham says, “and to write incredibly personally and candidly about the world in which he’s living in.”
In As You Like It, Shakespeare’s character Rosalind and her cousin venture into the forest of Arden to find her true love, Orlando. Abraham, an old hand at directing Shakespeare plays, says that he’s never seen anyone adapt a Shakespeare play as confidently and brazenly as Cardinal has.
According to Abraham, this play offered Cardinal an opening to look at “the tradition of the wise fool”, as well as the relationship that people have to society versus nature.
“I think where there are some similarities between Cliff and Shakespeare is that Cliff is a subversive writer,” Abraham notes. “He is what he seems to be saying on the surface…but he’s often saying something hidden underneath it.”
Nowadays, Shakespeare is coming under criticism in some academic circles for his portrayal of women and minorities in his plays, which were written in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Just last year, for example, Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival commissioned a film, Done/Undone, which shone a light on this scholarship.
So why would Crow’s Theatre commission Cardinal to offer his interpretation of a Shakespeare play at this time?
“I would say Cliff Cardinal’s radical retelling of As You Like It is a really provocative answer to that question,” Abraham says. Again, Abraham offers no details. “You have to come to see the show to find out.” g
Cliff’s gift as a writer…is really to step into the middle of controversy…
– Crow’s Theatre artistic and general director Chris Abraham
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents Crow’s Theatre’s William Shakespeare’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling by Cliff Cardinal at the York Theatre on February 4, 5, and 6.
