>>PREVIEW
THE HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
One Yellow Rabbit
Runs until January 29
Epcor Centre and Tower Centre
Let’s call Michael Green the Guy Weadick of the avant garde.
Of course, there was a time when the founder of the High Performance Rodeo would’ve cringed at the very idea of being compared to the founder of the Calgary Stampede.
"I used to hate the Stampede and anything to do with Stampede," says Green over a pint of Guinness in that antithesis of a western saloon, the Ship & Anchor.
And in its 19-year history, his Rodeo has become a kind of anti-Stampede itself. It’s small, not big. It’s in January, not July. It’s steeped in experiment, not tradition. And while it does offer a lot of wild rides, there isn’t a corn dog or a stick of candy floss to be had.
But lately, Green, 48, is beginning to soften his stance toward the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth. Blame it on his nine-year-old daughter. "I take her down and watch the little baby pigs race and look at the beautiful animals in their pens being groomed. It’s really nice," he says. "I like seeing the whole thing through her eyes."
Parenthood hasn’t just made Green less intransigent toward what he calls his "ancient esthetic nemesis," it’s also had an effect on his programming. Given that the Rodeo has always been a reflection of his tastes and interests, it was only a matter of time before we’d see family-friendly entertainment at the festival. In fact, he’s been talking about it for the last few years, but since you can’t secure a show by in-demand companies like Montreal’s Les Deux Mondes and Toronto’s Red Sky overnight, it’s taken until this year, the Rodeo’s 20th anniversary, for the family fare to appear. When he was able to get the former’s Living Memory – a poetic evocation of childhood – and the latter’s double-bill of aboriginal folk tales, Sun Spirits, Green says he decided to run with the family theme.
"After that, it was easy to bring a couple of other (family shows) in there. When I knew (The Rheostatics) were going to come, I asked them to do Harmelodia (the band’s children’s album) and the iDUB dance folks (from Vancouver) actually suggested they could do an all-ages gig."
However, he quickly adds, "I feel I have to assure the hard-core Rodeo fans that we’re not going all cuddly on them. There will be as much of the adult entertainment we love as ever – if not more." But hey, one glance at this year’s poster and program art, featuring a nude couple in cowboy boots wearing those scary bison-skull masks, ought to be enough to indicate that this ain’t the kids’ fest.
After two decades, patrons come to the Rodeo with certain expectations, whether you want to define those as contemporary, exploratory, non-traditional performances, or (as someone with the public school board once famously put it) naked men swearing. Beyond that, however, the Rodeo can pretty much be whatever it wants to be. Begun in the winter of 1987 simply as an audacious act of guerrilla theatre, secretly staged in One Yellow Rabbit’s downtown office after hours (the troupe didn’t have a performance venue at the time), it has never been bound by any strict definitions or narrow mandates. That’s why a festival that has, in the past, brought us ex-Warhol starlet Penny Arcade and a gaggle of strippers, or Daniel MacIvor as a suburban psycho killer, can also offer shows to take your offspring to. And that’s also why this year’s Rodeo looks less like a theatre fest and more like a showcase for music and dance.
"In a lot of ways, the festival is a kind of snapshot of who One Yellow Rabbit is hanging out with, and these days we’re hanging out with a lot of musicians and dancers," explains Green. At the same time, he has no problem blurring the meaning of the word "theatre" to justify a two-night stand by Montreal ensemble The Bell Orchestre or a week-long residency by The Rheostatics, who’ll be doing an album-by-album retrospective.
"I always present everything as if it’s theatre," he says. "In the case of The Rheostatics, they’re in a folk-song tradition of telling stories in songs. They’re touching on images and themes that are central to the Canadian experience, in a literal way, and in a lot of ways that makes them throwbacks to troubadours, one of the original forms of theatre."
As for The Bell Orchestre, a side project for members of The Arcade Fire: "I close my eyes, I listen to that music, and the images flow," he says. "Their music is almost cinematic. In a way, that’s perfect theatre."
It may still be billed as a "festival of new and experimental theatre," but lately Green is looking at the Rodeo more as a pan-artistic showcase. He points to that granddaddy of arts fêtes, the Edinburgh Festival, as his inspiration. "They don’t worry about whether it’s music, dance or theatre," he says, "they’re just putting together a real good entertainment package."
Considering how much the Rodeo has grown in 19 years, and the way it has brought burgeoning smaller festivals such as Mutton Busting and the International Festival of Animated Objects under its banner, it’s not hard to imagine it one day becoming a major-league event à la Edinburgh. That, of course, would require a much larger annual budget than its current one of just under $400,000, and more alliances with other local presenters. Green briefly indulges in some blue-sky thoughts about bigger projects, maybe even – horror of horrors! – a joint venture with the Stampede. But then he swiftly returns to Earth. Turns out that, as much as he’s an avant-garde artist and aficionado, he’s a fiscal conservative when it comes to producing.
He says a fellow maverick, Big Rock Brewery founder and OYR patron Ed McNally, is always telling him he’s too cautious. "But One Yellow Rabbit has survived by sticking close to the ground and not taking risks that are beyond us."
That’s also one reason the Rodeo has lasted so long. It began on the thinnest of shoestrings and still relies more on box-office revenues than other, larger festivals of vanguard work. Green loves to attend Montreal’s biennial Festival Théâtre des Ameriques, but also knows he could never pull that off with the Rodeo’s funding. "Their whole lineup has ‘no commercial potential’ written all over it. I couldn’t sell those shows here," he says. "Maybe if you have a budget of $3 million you can afford to give your tickets away – I don’t know. But we’re not in a situation like that and so that keeps us honest, in a way, it keeps us from sliding down that elitist slipway. I put together a festival of the most interesting stuff that I can find, that I feel pretty confident I can sell tickets to. Because Calgarians deserve to be entertained. This is taxpayers’ money and people’s hard-earned cash, and it’s my responsibility that it’s well used. The art has to be appreciated."
He seeks that interesting stuff by travelling annually to festivals across Canada and abroad. "I see more work across the country than anybody I know, so I have less patience than a lot of people," he says. "What you see at the High Performance Rodeo are pieces that I think there’s a very good chance I won’t get bored at. And if I’m not going to get bored, there’s not much chance of other people getting bored."
Each festival takes the better part of two-and-a-half years to organize, says Green, and he devotes more time to it than to his own acting and creating with OYR. "It’s turned into almost an all-consuming enterprise. Probably three-quarters of my work time now is spent on it," he figures. "But I love it, I really do, and I especially love the Rodeo time. It’s a long month, but I’ve got to tell you, it flies by. It’s a drug and I’m hooked on it."
Want to learn more about the Rodeo? Grab the Fall 2005 issue of Canadian Theatre Review, or read Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit by Martin Morrow (The Banff Centre Press).
20 Rodeos, 10 milestones
Here’s a selection of significant dates in the High Performance Rodeo’s progress:
· 1987 – The Secret Elevator Experimental Performance Festival is secretly held after hours in One Yellow Rabbit’s tiny office in the SOMA building. Patrons are instructed to gather in the alley and are taken to the office by elevator.
· 1988 – The festival is renamed the High Performance Rodeo and relocated to OYR’s new venue, the 60-seat Secret Theatre on the Plus-15 level of the Centre for Performing Arts (now the Epcor Centre).
· 1991 – Daniel MacIvor, a budding actor-playwright from Toronto via Nova Scotia, makes an electrifying Rodeo debut with the one-man House. He goes on to become a major Canadian talent and revisits OYR many times.
· January 1993 – New York downtown legend Penny Arcade blows the hinges off the Rodeo, playing to packed houses with her provocative Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!
· November 1993 – The Rodeo accommodates bigger shows by the likes of Mump and Smoot and dance duo Pierre-Paul Savoie and Jeff Hall by also using the new Uptown Stage.
· 1995 – The Rodeo presents its first show in the 1,800-seat Jack Singer Concert Hall – A Certain Level of Denial by chocolate-loving U.S. performance artist and right-wing scapegoat Karen Finley.
· 1996 – The Rodeo celebrates its 10th anniversary in the Rabbit’s new home, the 160-seat Big Secret Theatre, with such Rodeo faves as MacIvor, Arcade and Doug Curtis.
· 1997 – The festival presents one of its most popular shows – Bruce McCulloch’s Slightly Bigger Cities – and one of its most reviled – Goat Island’s frustrating, impenetrable How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies.
· 2001 – Compagnie Marie Chouinard makes its Rodeo debut with the Montreal choreographer’s stunning retrospective of her solo dance work, which proves so wildly popular with audiences that the troupe returns two more times (to date).
· 2005 – After years of pursuit, curator Michael Green finally gets his woman — American über-performance artist and sometime pop star Laurie Anderson, who brings her solo The End of the Moon. Is partner Lou Reed next? |
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