FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Theatre by Nikki Sheppy Moving Pictures Newly anointed with the communal blessings of this year’s Harry and Martha Cohen Award for contributions to Calgary theatre, playwright Sharon Pollock looks profoundly comfortable amidst the honey-coloured walls and coffee-stained mugs of Starbucks. For more than 30 years now, she has called Alberta home. And it’s been good to her – she’s won two Governor General’s Awards (for Doc and Blood Relations), received popular acclaim for her plays, and now has a brand new show, Moving Pictures, just around the corner. She’s an intelligent and spirited woman in a thick knit sweater and glasses that look wildly, emblematically askew (a madcap genius?) until I realize that one metal arm is missing, leaving the whole apparatus to pitch and sway on her face. I’m reminded of W. O. Mitchell, who once conducted an entire (and much animated) reading with similarly disabled specs, finally flinging them to the floor when his gesticulations ventured too near his face. It’s an apt comparison, given that Pollock’s life and work are closely rooted in the community around her, as was Mitchell’s. It’s always been that way, she says. In fact, when she first strayed from her acting career to begin writing in the ’60s, it was at least partly a political act through which she hoped to bring to the stage regional and Canadian stories that could really speak to, and of, her audience. "Nobody seemed to be writing those plays so I decided that I would...," she says. "We as actors couldn’t even use our own voice at the time. We had this strange sort of mid-Atlantic accent that we used on the stage, an accent that usually identified CBC announcers. That’s how we spoke if we weren’t using a specific regional American or British accent. And I began to feel very strongly that in a way we were being silenced." Looking back over the years that brought her to this particular juncture in her career, Pollock wryly cites managing to survive the early years of playwrighting as a major apex in her achievements. She still marvels at how she did it, supplementing her income by waitressing, and touring Alberta in a frigid old schoolbus doing shows at libraries, community theatres and high schools. "I somehow think artists have to be misfits," she laughs, casting an eye back on her former self. "But I think that sense of not fitting is something that the artist carries within. It’s not something that other people see. It’s a self-portrait, really. There’s a hole there that drives them to create in order to fill it." Pollock views her work not as dramatic literature but as what she calls a "blueprint for performance." For her, the play functions in almost the same way as a symphonic score or the choreographic notations for a dance. In bold strokes, it sketches the common purpose in an orchestration of lighting, acting, movement, costuming and music. "I see other forms of writing as an intimate act between the reader and the published work. But the play is not an intimate experience at all. It’s a communal and social activity that endorses social cohesion. It has to be collaborative. You work with other interpretive artists in the realization of the work." Pollock doesn’t insist on the supremacy of authorial intention. Far from it. One of the wonderful things about writing for the theatre, she says, is how new productions constantly reinvent the play, finding unsuspected meanings in a text she thought she already knew everything about. "A play exists in performance. It’s ephemeral. It’s always changing.... When you watch what other people are doing with your play, already it’s starting to exist as a concrete entity separate from you.... Theatre for me is a manifestation of a community in performance. Ordinary people should feel that they’re stakeholders.... And I think if theatre is to be more than a rose in the lapel of the city, we have to keep that in mind." Theatre’s place in the community makes it the perfect venue for social discourse, says Pollock. She distrusts power – certainly absolute power – and a major theme in her work remains the question of accountability. Her 1995 play Fair Liberty’s Call questions the army’s cavalier and swiftly broken promises in post-Revolutionary, Loyalist Canada, while One Tiger To a Hill takes a pointed look at the behaviour of prison guards. "I always draw from what I call history – whether it be public history, personal history or the current events that are in the process of becoming history." Opening this week at Theatre Junction, Moving Pictures is no exception. It tells the story of Nell Shipman, an actress and early filmmaker who escaped historical notice partly because her drive for creative independence didn’t fit in with the demands of the nascent studio system. "She was very forward-looking for her time," says Pollock, citing Shipman’s strong female roles and her care for animals and their environment. "To her, the environment was never malevolent. In her films, the natural world created a situation of conflict, whether it be a storm, an earthquake, trees falling down, or whatever. But the way you solved that was not through any (destructive means); it was by looking for something else within the natural environment that would solve that problem." Shipman established Lionhead Lodge, near Banff National Park, where she began to make films using a veritable zoo of animals, including wildcats, eagles, bears, elk, desert foxes and panama deer. In a time when filmmakers were doing terrible things to make animals perform, Shipman abided by an ethical code of her own devising. Although Shipman’s career ultimately collapsed, Pollock sees her as a pioneering spirit whose ethics, creativity and risk-taking are a model for artists even today. "It amazes me that we don’t take more risks in theatre, because really the consequences of failure are so small and what you learn from that failure is so great. The heart surgeon makes a mistake and the patient dies. The engineer makes a mistake and the bridge collapses. The pilot makes a mistake and the plane goes down. The playwright makes a mistake and, okay, some money is lost at the box office, but nobody dies." |
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