>>PREVIEW
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITIES
Mammalian Diving Reflex
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites Festival
Runs February 10 to 19
Engineered Air Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
In October I found myself standing in an apartment in an urban senior citizens’ home in Toronto with a man I had met 15 minutes before. He was talking about killing people in Angola. Last February on Stephen Avenue I waited for a police officer to tell me what he imagined being a father would be like (his wife was due to have their first baby in a few months). He couldn’t come up with an answer.
This year I’ve had people I barely know tell me about sexual abuse in their families and others tell me why they think Kanye West sounds like a woman. I’ve stood up in front of an audience and retold these stories, warped through the lens of my own personal bias. I’ve also stood up in front of an audience and had my own stories and opinions (both incendiary and innocuous) repeated, twisted and exposed.
And I’ve had people ignore me when I talked to them.
This is my experience working on Diplomatic Immunities, a multimedia performance that takes a small group of people into a community to talk to strangers about pretty much anything. This group of collaborators takes these experiences and creates a series of performances. There is no script and the piece evolves from show to show – it learns from experience, changes focus, follows its own impulses and has its own moods and opinions (it even contradicts itself). It’s human. That also means it’s sometimes gloriously flawed.
Created by Toronto theatre artist and provocateur Darren O’Donnell and producer Naomi Campbell, known collectively as Mammalian Diving Reflex, from a series of community events meant to dismantle the barriers between individuals, Diplomatic Immunities brings together the company’s theatrical and socio-political goals. It aims to challenge the way we perceive and interact with theatre and with the world around us. And yeah, a lot of companies claim that lofty goal, but Mammalian Diving Reflex actually detonates the conventional forms of theatre and speaks honestly and nakedly with the audience. Diplomatic Immunities carries these risky objectives to a new extreme.
And I am a part of this experiment. In February 2005, O’Donnell and Campbell were invited to Calgary by Alberta Theatre Projects to begin developing Diplomatic Immunities as a part of the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays. A group of artists from the festival took part in the workshop and, as one of ATP’s resident dramaturges, I also signed up. In any other workshop I would be listening from the sidelines, offering feedback on what I observed to the writer and director (that’s what a dramaturge does), but in this workshop everyone who was in the room was creating and performing the piece.
After a week working on the project, I was hooked and eager to do it again. Actually, to be honest, I was kind of desperate to do it again. And I am, now that Diplomatic Immunities has returned to playRites for a full run. In preparation for our Calgary show, I travelled to Toronto in October to work with the group of artists that are developing the project for a run there this spring.
In both Calgary and Toronto, the week of work was mainly composed of interviews. The group interviewed each other, we went out on the street and interviewed strangers together and, by the end of the week, we were having conversations with strangers on our own. Beyond interviews and conversations, there have been attempts to gain more meaningful access to people’s lives. In Toronto we knocked on people’s doors as a group asking for tours of their homes – with mixed success. And we unsuccessfully tried to get someone to invite us into their home so that we could cook them dinner.
In the interest of keeping things open to chance and interpretation, there isn’t much conversation about what we are doing beforehand. And there are very few rules about how the interviews and interactions are conducted, but the central rule and the one that guides the project is: any question can be asked, but no question must be answered.
And by any question, we mean any question. Not just the nice ones. Because nice questions are boring – unless they lead to more intimate questions. And, oddly enough, it can be much easier to ask a stranger a strange and invasive question than it is to ask those questions of someone you know. And most people will just answer the question no matter how strange.
What proves to be more difficult is getting over your own hang-ups and fears about how people will react to you, whether or not you will offend someone, and dealing with the fact that being honest sometimes means being ugly. And very few of us want to be ugly.
And then there is the challenge of taking all of this information – these people, their stories and our experience of all of it – and making a show out of it; something entertaining and fascinating and alive. Beginning with the workshop and two public presentations at ATP, and continuing with monthly workshop presentations in Toronto, Mammalian Diving Reflex has been experimenting with the form of Diplomatic Immunities. The show is malleable, but there is still a structure to the rehearsal and performance. The few public presentations so far have included everything from song and dance breaks, to performers interacting with video, to heated discussions with the audience about whether some of the people interviewed were misunderstood saints or lying assholes. Audience members have even weighed in on what they think of the people onstage.
There are still aspects of the performance yet to be tested. Is there a performance style? How do you use the media appropriately? What does a certain arrangement of material say about the city versus another arrangement of material? And how does interaction with an audience affect it all? Each new workshop and each new group of artists answers a few of these questions and asks a few new ones. The experiment is part of the show – each performance tests something different.
The Calgary Diplomatic Immunities ensemble met for the first time on January 23. There are seven of us this time around: from Toronto, O’Donnell, Campbell and new media artist Faisal Anwar, and from Calgary, theatre artist Jennie Esdale, performance and visual artist Terrance Houle, Tarik Robinson of hip-hop group Dragon Fli Empire and me. I look forward to seeing what this new group of people will bring to the show that I have had a small part of developing for almost a year now.
And I am looking forward to living in the project again. It asks me to do scary things, like not know what will happen next, talk to people I wouldn’t normally talk to and, most frighteningly, to be honest and held accountable for everything I say.
Vicki Stroich is associate dramaturge at Alberta Theatre Projects. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.