>>PREVIEW
TABITHA: A GIRL AND HER BOX
Runs until April 28
Ground Zero Theatre
(Pumphouse Theatres)
Four years ago, Carrie Schiffler was a woman with a unique skillset and a simple, capitalist drive. A former stripper, she was aware that a new exercise called strippercize was being taught in the U.S. Deciding to supplement her income as an actor and yoga instructor, she founded Dance 4Play, a Canadian strippercize program with the slogan: "Tap into Your Inner Cheese and Learn a Dance That’s Sure to Please."
"I watched a video tape of that woman from the States and basically stole all her ideas," says Schiffler of her continuing business, adding, "and, of course, used my own moves from back in the day."
Now, Schiffler’s moves, the routines she perfected about 20 years ago, are at the centre of her one-woman show, Tabitha: A Girl and Her Box. The second production of Ground Zero Theatre’s 2007 Groundbreaker series, Tabitha is an autobiographical account of Schiffler’s three-year career as a stripper and her experiences both on and off the stage. Following Ken Cameron’s autobiographical account of his vacation in Morocco after the death of his sister, the play is a fit for both Ground Zero’s new biographical mandate for the series, and also for Schiffler herself.
"I’m not interested in historical dramas unless that person is part of the history," she says. "I think I prefer a more soulful type of entertainment."
Schiffler began creating Tabitha as a way of processing her own story, trying to learn, essentially, what she had learned from three years in seedy Ontario bars. During an artistic residency at the Banff Centre, Schiffler realized that the erotic poetry that had begun her residency was gradually gravitating toward a strip club, grounding what had originally been esoteric poems in the literal world of her own experiences.
So, two years ago, Schiffler performed the first version of Tabitha as part of Theatre Junction’s Random Acts series as a 20-minute piece. Since that performance, the show has been expanded into a full one-act production still performed by Schiffler herself.
Save for the necessary cut-and-paste of any biographical story, contracting events or using a single incident to explain many others, Tabitha began and remains an unvarnished portrait of her young self. From her troubled relationship with her mother and father to the unwanted advances of a would-be boyfriend trying to invite himself along on a solo overseas trip, Schiffler’s show is full of deeply personal details. Perhaps no detail is as striking, however, as the inclusion of a rape scene. Included as an essential element of Schiffler’s personal journey, she nonetheless admits that distance is still essential when confronting the abuse.
"In order for it not to get the better of me emotionally, I’m viewing it as another dance in a sense, another creative movement piece in the play," she says. "Connecting the words to the physical to the choreography is very precise, so in a sense I’m losing myself in the dance again. I’m not doing it because it’s therapy, because I’ve done my therapy outside of the theatre, and that’s where I think it should be."
Despite including a rape in the show, however, Schiffler does not look back on her experiences as exploitative. Though she is cognizant of the stereotype of strippers as marginalized women, she says that her own experience has taught her that people are often more in control than they realize, able to "turn shit into sugar."
"I never felt like the business itself was exploiting me," says Schiffler. "I met certain people along my journey during those three years that tried to exploit me, absolutely, but they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the business. They weren’t club owners."
For Schiffler, the experience is ultimately not a sensationalist one, but rather a part of her life, the meaning of which she has only now begun to fully process. Even if her experience has already provided the basis for a lucrative strippercize side venture, she says simply that audiences hoping to find exploitative nudity are not going to find anything of the kind.
"Go see One Yellow Rabbit if you want that," she says. |
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