The Future?

Ok, just go and read this from the Globe & Mail: Canadians are no longer giving to charities as they once did

and after that sit back and consider the future of your theatre company and all those nights that you have sat in a bar and dissed the blue rinse set.

Maybe we should stop and think about the future of theatre. Maybe we should consider that Rob Ford the new Toronto mayor suggest we look to the private sector for funding. Maybe we should consider that elephant grey is not the best colour for a living room.

Silver Ticket Award

On June 28, 2010 I was honoured by receiving the Silver Ticket Award For an Outstanding Contribution to the Stage. I wanted to write about this earlier but I wanted to include the speech that I made but as I did not know beforehand that I was actually getting this award the speech was ex tempore and I wanted to make a transcript so that I could include it here. I have deleted the various pauses and ummms but here is what I said.

“You know I’m going to use this. 

 Thanks Marlene. I didn’t know and I didn’t have a speech.

35 years ago, almost to the month, I walked onto the stage at the Shaw Festival and said my first words as a professional actor. And on that stage were Teddy Atienza, Mary Savidge and Domini Blythe. I was playing the requisite slave in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I was fresh out of theatre school and the only person who was wearing less clothes on the stage than me was Domini Blythe. For a young man fresh out of the Ryerson Theatre School walking on stage to see Domini Blythe in a skirt and a necklace was like heaven.

Last year in the last performance that I played….oh the very first words I said at the Shaw Festival was..The Romans are in the courtyard.

Last year in Birdland’s production of the remount of the Last Days of Judas Iscariot I played Pontius Pilate and my first words were… Your Honor I have a 2 o’clock tee time. Can I go now?

And so I went from slave to Roman in 35 years.

It’s been an interesting 35 years. You know, you can’t sharpen a knife with cotton batton. And you can’t get rigorous artistic ideas without a really strong intellectual and artistic challenge. You need granite to sharpen and so tonight, for this award, I would like to thank not only the people who have been dear friends and supporters and artistic collaborators but I would like to thank all those who don’t like me. 

Who have fought…I don’t know if David Ferry is in the house. David and I, were years ago, almost came to blows over dinner one night. And I respect him to this day as a man of great intellectual vigour.

And to all those people I have not agreed with or who have not agreed with me, who have challenged and we fought and we struggled and everything we have done is to make this a better community, to make this a better art. To make theatre something that is powerful and living and necessary.

Because without art we have no soul and without a soul we have nothing.

And so I welcome this award and I thank everybody for this award because I want to keep going to theatre. I want to keep seeing those intellectual ideas. I want to keep seeing those artistic challenges. To not only challenge me but to challenge everybody else.

Thank you so very much."



 

All about the Voice

I remember reading that when sound engineers first digitally created the sound of an orchestra it sounded wrong because it was too clear. So they added in the sounds of fingers / bows on strings: breath flowing over reeds: the rasp and slides. All the messiness of music and life was added back in and then it sounded right.

It is those seeming peripherals, those barely acknowledged touches where rich connotations lay. It is as if the notes without the rest only tell us a part of the story.

So, why go on about this. It is because I believe that the same principles exist in the actor’s voice.

I listen to plays, direct actors, coach auditions and for the vast majority it is clear that from the day that they left theatre school people stopped doing whatever voice exercises that they had learned. I cannot speak to how they are taught but what I hear is vocal disconnection, unsupported imprecise diction and no vocal richness.

I am often heard to say: “stay in the center of your voice”. Sometimes people take that to mean that there is only one note that is perfect. In fact it is not that at all. The center of your voice is the place where there is an unconstrained open passage from crotch to mouth where the full richness of every emotion has free and easy passage. Thus the voice gets to carry all the emotional messiness of the character in each and every word.

Mostly what happens though is a constraint in the throat that strips emotional connotations so that the artist begins to push harder emotionally and vocally which further thins the emotional voice.

Fecund: \FEE-kuhnd; FEK-uhnd\ , adjective;
1. Capable of producing offspring or vegetation; fruitful; prolific.
2. Intellectually productive or inventive.

For me fecundity is rich, ripe, an oak log rotting in a forest that is home to moss and mushrooms. It is amber and alto and soprano ribbons of autumnal honey sunlight. It is a place where life and death are in a slow motion dance. It is the primeval, primordial home (center) of our voice. And so the voice must become the conduit of that emotional fecundity.

Why do we shy away from it? Is it only the lack of vocal exercise? I think not. It takes a profound leap of courage, faith and desire to actually live in that place. It forces us to be open, to reveal ourselves, to know that after the minutiae of work that we do not need to push and strain but know confidently that we can allow that fecundity to flow out of us complete, multi-layered, carefully woven and right for the character.

So the character’s voice can be whatever it needs to be as long as it is part of that open emotional corridor.

In Intimate Apparel I have pushed this kind of work fully into the performances and I am grateful that the cast has followed me to this place. Once you do this kind of work and your director’s ear is tuned to this it becomes both amazing and frustrating.

Amazing for when it soars it is like being wrapped in subliminal textures that have you feeling with your whole body.

Frustrating because even ½ a note too high and seduction becomes lecture and drawing in becomes sitting back.

So finally for me it is all about the voice. The voice and the necessary emotional connotations that must cozen it. The actor’s voice should sit atop of emotional nuances as deep as the Mariana Trench but all too often what we get is just the vocal thinness of a puddle

And that is the great shame of our theatre.