No, I didn’t find the time to report on our performance in/trip to Guelph, Ontario (see previous post) while I was there, so here’s a little recap:
We arrived on Friday night and started off at The Albion Hotel, a pub/music venue that, I guess, used to be a hotel. The Albion was also the last place in Guelph we visited.
In fact, it was one of only three places I spent a significant amount of time in, the other two being the place I was billeted (with a sign over the door that read “living in style”) and the University of Guelph campus where our show was to take place.
Guelph is a small town, but it felt more like a few sections of a larger city glued together. For those of you familiar with Montreal, imagine part of NDG glued to Outremont glued to Wellington Street in Verdun glued to a sprawling and beautiful university campus, with a couple of streets reminiscent of Mile-End and the West Island thrown into the mix – and that’s it.
For such a small town, it had a very progressive vibe. We were invited by professor Alan Filewod, who’s also a character in our show (as a piece of verbatim theatre, Sinking Neptune uses actual public statements and writings from real people as play text). Filewod’s Political Intervention Theatre Project hosted the show.
The people we met from this group, from the university and in Guelph in general, were supportive and seemed to have a very progressive outlook that accepted challenges to the status quo.
Our show went over very well and during the talkback session, the audience posed some very thought provoking questions and even offered us some ideas (like getting some culture-jams related to the project going in Vancouver, which will soon host the 2010 Olympics, on Aboriginal land). There’s even talk of getting an infringement Festival going in Guelph, where I think it will go over well.
On the deck of the SS Imperialist, part of the Sinking Neptune set at the University of Guelph (photo by Matthias Elsdörfer)
The George Luscombe Theatre, where we performed, is a great, high-tech black box theatre space. For an actor like me, who’s used to performing in alleyways (Car Stories), stores that don’t want us there (various culture-jams) and bars (many other projects, including an earlier run of Sinking Neptune), it’s a nice change of pace and one worth noting.
The last time I performed in an equally high-tech venue was at King’s Theatre in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, again with Sinking Neptune. That time, though, the crowd was anything but progressive and the talkback became a heated attack on our play, prompted by a perceived attack on their tourism industry, which was largely centered on Lescarbot’s play.
Where politically-charged theatre with something to say frequently has to find it’s own space in a city like Montreal (at least on the Anglo side), Guelph seems ready to showcase it front and centre, which is great for a community this size, or any community for that matter.
I wonder what type of reaction we can expect when we eventually perform the show in Quebec City, another beautiful town that seems really progressive, where once again the city’s tourism industry will be centered around celebrating another Eurocentric milestone.
