OTL Blog

As plans were underway late Friday afternoon for a last-ditch theatrical protest to stop the City of Montreal’s proposed anti-mask law from passing, word broke that the city was backpedaling on the proposed legislation and would not be voting on it at tonight’s council meeting as planned.

While this news sounded at first like a victory for those standing up to this proposed violation of our charter right to freedom of expression, it soon became apparent that the city wasn’t scrapping the plan but rather reviewing the language of it.  Perhaps they want to remove anything in it that could make it sound like it could be used, as the Montreal Gazette observed, against someone at the Santa Claus Parade.

This is far from an admission that the whole idea was ill-conceived or a promise to not to impede on our rights again in the future, but rather a temporary reprieve that could allow the city to re-shape and better pitch a plan that has no place on the agenda at all in a society that allows people to express themselves freely.

Which is why we have one question for everyone who has ever attended a protest or played a masked character in the streets theatrically, as well as everyone who believes that peaceful people at protests have a right not to have their faces put in some database and those who believe in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: what are you doing tonight?

OTL will theatrically bury this proposed bylaw in hopes that city officials will take note and wipe the actual proposition off the table completely.  This will be part of a larger protest called Manifesuprise being organized by Le gros bon sens.  It follows the Bal Masqué, a masquerade ball that took place outside of the last council meeting earlier this month organized by the same group.  With many groups and individuals such as La ligues des droits and attorney Julius Grey still standing in opposition to this law despite attempts to remove it fr0m the public discourse, the protestors won’t be alone.

The whole thing starts at 5:30pm at Berri Square and you’re invited to join in the theatre or the protest in general.  Wear a mask if you’ve got one, the more the merrier!  If you can’t make it out, but would like to let Mayor Tremblay and the opposition parties know how you feel, contact info can be found here.

By not staying silent, we will hopefully be able to turn this temporary victory into a lasting protection of our rights as theatre artists, protestors and above all citizens.

We will run a report on what happened later this week.

Tony Nardi is not someone who likes to keep silent.  He’s also someone who likes to keep the discussion going and continues to incorporate new voices into the dialogue he started and performs as Two Letters…and counting.  Tonight, Sunday and Tuesday, he’ll be reading his letters live again at UQAM and filming what happens.

In Fall 2005, Nardi, a Canadian stage and screen actor received a script for the TV series Rent a Goalie which he found contained content which was highly offensive to Italians.  He wrote to about his displeasure to a film and television producer responsible for the project.  Around the same time, he read a series of reviews of The Amourous Servant, a commedia dell’arte play by Carlo Goldoni which he found completely ignorant of what the art form Nardi was proficient in was all about.  He wrote to the critics.

These correspondences were highly dramatic and while technically written to individuals went well beyond the artistic “middle-men” in question to speak of Nardi’s struggles with cultural stereotypes in the Canadian theatre, film and television world in the first letter and the misconceptions of commedia dell’arte and what Nardi sees as a developing actor-less theatre culture in the second.

After friends convinced Nardi to not let the letters die and go public with them, he decided they needed to be staged.  He began workshopping them with a handful of people in 2006 and got very strong responses.  The dramatic nature of some of the opinions gave Nardi the idea to incorporate the thoughts he heard into the letters in the form of “ghosts” talking to him and stage the two letters as a performance piece.

Two Letters exposes the fear many people in Canada’s arts industries have of coming forward about what they see as negative stereotypes due to the risk of not getting work in the industry.  Some of the “ghosts” that speak to him agree with him but suggest that he doesn’t rock the boat too much with his views.  Others, who are on the side of his project debate the format it should take (more letter, less performance vs. more performance less letter).  This is a work in progress in every sense of the term.

The first letter will be performed and filmed tonight, the second on Sunday and Tuesday will be a post-mortem on the two letters and a look to the future.  All performances are free to attend and begin at 7pm in Studio J2545 on the 2nd floor of UQAM’s Pavillon Judith Jasmin, 1495 St-Denis corner of de Maisonneuve.

With the proposed reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham now cancelled (more will follow in a few days), phase 2 of the protest against the City of Montreal’s proposed anti-mask law still being planned (a petition will be online very soon and the theatrical jam happens this coming Monday) and the controversy over new arts funding measures still simmering, what better time (and quite possibly the only time we’ll get in the next little while) to talk a bit about this blog and fill new readers in on just what it’s purpose is and let everyone know how we treat comments.

The OTL Blog began this past November (2008) with a mission to speak about not only Optative Theatrical Laboratories and related projects, performances and culture-jams but also of various issues in the realm of activism and the arts.  Our posts aren’t just re-posts of stuff that you can find elsewhere online.  We publish new original content such as analysis, reports, stories and announcements of what’s coming soon all written by our writers.  We add new material every Monday, Wednesday and Friday without fail and may offer additional posts if stuff happens that can’t wait to be published.

The OTL Blog is part of a series of online grassroots media projects such as the infringement’s Talking Stick, Le baton de parole and infringement TV that hope to build an original online response to corporate media dominance.  To keep up the pace on this blog and increase the pace elsewhere, we’re looking for new contributors to this and other publications.  If you feel you have something you can add to the discussion, then please contact media@infringementfestival.com

Another way you can join the discussion is by commenting on the posts.  We believe in free speech and will not censor comments that disagree with our writer’s viewpoint.  You may notice that the comments are moderated and there is a very good reason for that.  Every day we get at least ten “comments” which are nothing more than spam.  We’re talking flat-out nonsensical paragraphs with tons of hyperlinks to places like online pharmacies and other smaller comments that say something like “love your blog, now check out my online casino site!”

If your comment or your robot’s comment is nothing more than an ad, please look elsewhere to post it, or see if you meet the infringement’s criteria for ethical sponsorship then contact us.  That’s not to say that you can’t include a link to your art project, community group, blog or personal website in your comment, in fact please do so, just make sure you actually have something to say about the post you are commenting on.

We will publish all comments that aren’t spam, are on topic (hint: a post about the Plains of Abraham may not be the best place to express “Car Stories rocks!) and contain no overt sexism, racism or homophobia, we’ll publish it regardless of whether or not you agree with us.  So hopefully some of you will get writing and all of you will get commenting and our discussion will grow.

In Armenia a very old rite called “The Red Apple” marks the woman’s loss of virginity following the night of her wedding. It can be argued that this symbolizes much more than simply a “loss of virginity”, indeed, the symbolism of the celebration is very violent.

Armenians celebrate weddings by chanting and dancing outside and inside their homes, brandishing cakes and foods and inviting the neighbors over.  During the The Red Apple, which is a similar celebration on the day following the wedding, the family of the groom brandishes a meter long sword topped by a Red Apple. They parade and dance in the street with the Apple and the sword.  While not everyone practices this tradition, as there are different types of classes, families, interests and localities in Armenia, everyone knows of The Red Apple.

When one thinks of it for a few seconds, this is the piercing of a “fruit” by a very phallic and deadly tool. This is a celebration of the woman loosing her hymen. At first when the women at Utopiana, a NGO for contemporary arts, told me of this celebration I was not sure what “an apple stuck on a sword” implied.  I said: “so what?” but quickly realized the red apple is the vulva/blood/flesh and the sword was a phallus, or masculine power. The rite itself may be “cute” but the symbols are clearly violent and patriarchal – for example, the sword has to be oversized (not just a regular knife) and of course, it is also a deadly tool.

Thus the Women’s Resource Center in Yerevan (Armenia’s largest city) will “Bury the Red Apple” on March 8th, International Women’s Day, by performing a funeral procession towards Republic Square, the town center.

The funeral rite will be stylized as Armenian. We will lead Mr. Apple, someone dressed in a 3D apple outfit, with chains, carrying flowers and a tombstone while a woman-priest (a teacher from the women’s center will dress up as one) will chant a modified reading of “funeral biblical scripts” replaced by verses about the end of the Apple. We will end the walk in a “lover’s park” in front of Congress Hotel where we will rip the Red Apple apart and bury the pieces in the ground. As a final celebration we will pour cement onto the spot and inscribe “Here lays the Red Apple” (“…..-2009). A party in the park will follow.

I am sure the priests ready to admit the positive side of our protest, are rare. Men here deny a lot to conserve what they see as national Armenian values. The point of such a colorful protest is the theatrical value of such an old issue- a lot of women will hear of this burial through the media (the modern theatrical component protesting the old traditions) and I am sure a lot of women will secretly agree with its powerful message which at once both a mockery and a pleasure filled comedy for change.

We’ve been talking quite a bit about the controversy surrounding the proposed re-enactment of the battle of the Plains of Abraham in this space, but since our last post on the subject a couple of days ago, others have been speaking about it as well.

From federal Heritage Minister Josee Verner’s profound disgust at people opposing the re-enactment, to sovereignists calling for people across the country to speak out against it, to random letters to the editor the voices have been raising.  Now comes news out of Ottawa that the Harper government may scrap the battle re-creation altogether.

Now, English-speaking Quebecers are adding their voices to the discussion.  A consortium of groups are opposing the re-enactment and are looking for others to come on board.  OTL is spearheading this project so while it’s normally the policy of this blog to avoid merely copy-pasting press releases, this one’s from us and it gets right to the point, so here goes…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Anglophone Quebecers demand cancellation of Plains of Abraham re-enactment

A collective of Anglophone Quebecers is demanding the cancellation of the Plains of Abraham re-enactment.   Organized by OTL, an activist theatre collective in Montreal that has been calling for the event’s cancellation for several weeks now on its blog, the group is now mobilizing to gather support across the Quebec Anglophone community.

“The obvious question that needs to be asked is why re-enacting this battle is deemed so important,” says organizer Donovan King, an Anglo-Quebecer of Irish heritage. “One needs only to look at the situation in Northern Ireland, where every July 12 military re-enactment parades of the Orange Order “celebrate” the British Protestant defeat over Irish Catholics during a 1690 battle. The result is social unrest, rioting, violence, and sectarian hatred. Clearly re-enacting colonial military dominance over a historically oppressed group is both morally reprehensible and likely to cause serious problems in the society. Why would Canada support, let alone fund and organize such a degrading activity?”

The collective is calling for prominent Anglo-Quebecers to add their voices to the opposition against the Plains of Abraham re-enactment.

For more information:  514-699-3378 or otl@optative.net

A battle is heating up in Quebec City regarding the Plains of Abraham, but it isn’t exactly the sort of fight that the National Battlefields Commission was hoping for. As reported earlier 2009 marks the 250th anniversary of the infamous Plains of Abraham battle at Quebec City that signified the defeat of “New France” to British imperialists, and the subjugation of French-speaking habitants. It is ingrained in the collective memory of Quebecers and Canadians as “The Conquest”, and the federal government’s National Battlefields Commission plans to re-enact it with “four days of intensive siege”

Essentially the outcome of this battle, the military defeat of the French forces, represented a transfer of colonial power from one European country to another. The British ejected the French elite, installed their own, and picked up the colonial project where the French had left off. The remaining French-speakers were relegated to second class citizenship, and the First Nations were not consulted at all, despite the fact that this is their ancient territory. Despite francophone re-empowerment following the Quiet Revolution, the Plains of Abraham battle is still a touchy subject because it signifies domination over French-speakers by the British and later on Canadian governments.

The ongoing efforts to re-enact the 1759 battle on the Plains of Abraham has continued to cause controversy over the past few weeks, and what started as a grassroots effort to cancel the offensive commemoration has blossomed into a full-blown political battle. It began with grumblings from sovereignty and anti-war camps, and it wasn’t long before prominent sovereigntists threatened to disrupt the event. A group calling itself operation1759 was formed and immediately set about demanding the re-enactment’s cancellation and began culture-jamming official propaganda.

On February 4th the Bloc Quebecois, the voice of Quebec in Ottawa, demanded that the re-enactment be cancelled, and shortly after Quebec’s official opposition, the Parti Quebecois joined in the call. Across Canada there appears to be little appetite for the divisive commemoration. It appears that many Anglophones, both in Quebec and the rest of Canada are adding their voices in opposition to the re-enactment, and even academics as far away as France are calling the re-enactment plans “stupid”. More recently, the Bloc has linked the Plains of Abraham re-enactment with the sponsorship scandal via a posted video on their site. There is also a protest planned on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on February 22 that aims to pressure the Conservative minority federal government to cancel it without delay.

The obvious question that needs to be asked is why re-enacting this battle is deemed so important. One needs only to look at the situation in Northern Ireland where every July the Protestant Orange Order launches loud military-style parades into Catholic neighbourhoods that often degenerate into sectarian violence, racism, and hatred. Every July 12 the Orange Order parades are designed to “celebrate” the British Protestant defeat over Irish Catholics during the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, an unsubtle provocation directed against a traditionally oppressed people. The Orange Order “musicians” are known to hammer on massive war drums as they march through Catholic neighbourhoods.

The violence, rioting, and damage caused by these racist war-parade re-enactments actually resulted in the creation of a Parades Commission that attempts to keep the peace. Clearly the act of re-enacting military dominance over an historically oppressed group is both morally reprehensible and likely to cause anger, division, resentment, and possibly violence. Why would Canada support, let alone fund and organize such an activity?

More pressure is currently needed to ensure this Eurocentric re-enactment gets cancelled, preferably with a strong anti-war argument. To add your voice to the chorus of disapproval sign a pro-nationalist petition and/or join the facebook opposition. If you want to focus on opposing the re-enactment from an anti-war perspective, contact OTL (otl@optative.net) to help create a dramatic plan. You can also contact Dr. Amir Khadir of Quebec Solidaire and ask him to take an anti-war stance in the National Assembly of Quebec City.

Since we reported on reaction to arts funding in the Harper government’s most recent budget last week, a new controversy has sparked up.  It’s not over lack of funding for a particular area of the arts, but rather due to $25 million being spent on the Canada Prize for the Arts.

The problem?  After canceling PromArts and Trade Routes, two programs designed to help theatre companies, dance troupes and musicians take their art overseas, the Arts Prize, originally proposed by the founders of Tornonto’s Luminato Festival is an international competition open to artists around the world designed to bring artists from other countries to Canada by awarding them the prize money.

This has many unimpressed.  Opponents of the plan, while encouraged that some money will be going to the arts from the Harper conservatives at all, are dismayed that it won’t be going to Canadian artists.

It’s wonderful that there is $25 million being put into the arts sector,” The Quebec Drama Federation‘s Jane Needles told the CBC‘s Jian Ghomeshi on Q last Friday, “but to put it to international use when our own artists have trouble getting across the ocean now because of cuts to the Trade Routes program … this is a huge problem.”

They also point to the fact that it looks like public money is being given to the private sector.

Supporters of the Arts Prize disagree with the private sector allegation and are trying to characterize it as something that will put Canada on the international stage like Sweden’s Nobel Prize. In a move similar to the recent framing of the battle over the Plains of Abraham re-enactment, they are trying to cast opposition to the prize in the all-to-familiar Quebec versus English Canada (or in this case Toronto) discourse.

While some might argue that Harper seems more interested in promoting Canada by importing culture to it than by helping culture develop here, one way he could make this idea a progressive one would be to follow the example of the Freedom to Create Prize, a global award designed to promote artists fighting oppression recently awarded to Cont Mhlanga of Zimbabwe, and strongly encourage Canadians to take part in the competition.  Though that seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, south of the border, “…museums, theaters and arts centers…” are being singled out as areas of society that won’t be eligible for any of the economic stimulus money in an amendment to the Obama plan brought forth by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and approved by a vote of 73-24, including some prominent Democratic senators.  There is already an e-mail campaign underway and plans are being made for more action.

In an attempt to save the final remaining uncommodified public spaces in New York City from corporations, theatre activist Bill Talen, aka Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, is running for mayor.

“This may be a canvass upon which to dramatize the kinds of things we’ve talked to you about today,” Talen said after making the announcement that he is considering running during the January 18th edition of the Hour of Power, a weekly webcast he co-hosts with Savitri D, “reclaiming parks for the First Amendment, for our enjoyment of wonder, to get the corporations and the rich people out of there.”

Under the administration of Michael Bloomberg, privatization has flourished and is now threatening previously untouched spaces with long community histories.  The Northside Pavillion in Union Square Park was at the center of the civil rights, suffragette, abolition and union movements and now runs the risk of being turned into an upscale for-profit restaurant.

Meanwhile, several small businesses operating in the historic Coney Island amusement park are facing eviction at the hands of developers and the only entity with the power to stop it is the City of New York.  As the Bloomberg administration and his rivals in the upcoming election don’t seem to want to do anything to stop this gentrification, the Rev may very well be stepping into the political arena to do just that.

“It seems like the policy of the Bloomberg administration is that when parks have rich people living around them they become privatized and they become a front yard of the rich people,” Talen observed, “and when poor people live around the parks they become criminalized and if you accidentally walk through the park at the wrong moment you get arrested in their sweeps.”

Since this announcement, he has begun campaigning and even promised to shut down Wall Street.

Talen is probably best known for retail interventions at places like Starbucks, The Disney Store and Victoria’s Secret and the 2007 Morgan Spurlock produced film What Would Jesus Buy?

Many independent activist arts collectives have always found ways to get things done with little or no funding.  When you challenge corporate influence, having some of their financial influence help you out in some way is, to put it mildly, unlikely and in many cases unwanted.  Who wants to take money from a system you oppose.  The infringement festival, for example has a strict code of who can and can’t sponsor their event.

The next, most logical type of funding to try and get are government grants for artists.  These aren’t that easy to come by in general and even less likely for artists whose work challenges.  Still, every now and then a miracle does occur, like in 2004 when OTL’s Car Stories got $20 000 from the Canada Council for the Arts.

All arts funding in Canada came under fire just before the last election when the Harper government decided to make significant cuts to key programs and transfer the money to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.  This prompted quite a bit of protest which was sometimes merged with the more general anti-Harper sentiment.  Here’s a video that circulated at the time:

Now that they’ve gone through the experience of almost losing their government, the Conservatives have thrown some spending into their budget and yes, some of it is on the arts.

Is it enough?  Does the budget really recognize “the importance of our artistic institutions and the role they play in Canadians’ lives” as it says in a recent Canadian Conference of the Arts Bulletin?  Jane Needles, Executive Director of the Quebec Drama Federation (QDF) isn’t sure.  In a recent News Bulletin, she went through where there will be funding and where there won’t and questioned, as many others are, whether any of this funding is actually new.  She also pointed out that “the response from the Minister that no matter what is done the artists are going to complain anyway indicates that we have a Minister who clearly does not understand the reality of working in the arts and all of the associated concerns and problems faced by our milieu.”

Following the États généraux du théâtre professionnel, The Conseil québécois du théâtre (CQT) is calling for a letter-writing campaing to members of the house of commons, asking them to re-inject money into the areas where funding has been cut.  Both the CQT and the QDF are asking the Quebec government to put more money into the Conseil des arts et lettres (CALQ) budget and are encouraging people to write letters as well.

Without government funding, some arts organizations just close up shop, while others get creative and find new ways to achieve their goals such as fundraisers, personal donations and plain old doing it on the cheap.   A good example of this happened in 2006, when Theatre 400, a Nova Scotia group planning a re-enactment of Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France, closed shop because they were turned down for two Canada Council grants.  OTL had applied for Canada Council funding as well for Sinking Neptune, a project challenging the racism and pro-colonial attitude in Lescarbot’s work and the Eurocentricity found in doing a celebratory re-enactment.  OTL was rejected as well, but instead of scrapping the project, took the 10 hour drive and did the counter-performance to the (now-cancelled) official version in Anapolis Royal anyways.

While drive and motivation along with creative minimal funding can make an activist theatre project happen, a bit of cold hard cash really goes a long way.  It’s sad that our government has decided to turn it’s back on artists and instead decide to fund it’s own image by transferring money to a huge corporate spectacle that should be able to fund itself.

So what’s the Montreal infringement festival going to be like this year?  Good question!

While the infringement may have been mentioned several times on this blog already and anyone who knows OTL has heard of the festival, we have never really discussed it in any detail in this space.  The sixth consecutive edition of the Montreal infringement will run from June 18th through 28th 2009 and is now accepting artist applications (and still looking for volunteer organizers and helpers), so what better time to try and answer the question of what may be in store.

In 2004, the infringement was created to offer a new way of doing things.  It was a bridge between the worlds of activism and the arts and its very first edition saw over 25 acts jump on board in just a few months, including Montreal playwright David Fennario, award-winning transgendered performer and writer S. Bear Bergman performing in a real bathroom and Car Stories, the interactive theatre piece that had sparked the creation of the festival after being kicked out of the corporate St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival.  It was clear that a festival rooted in resistance to oppression and offering a place for artists and activists with something to say to speak out was both needed and welcome in Montreal and later the same summer in Toronto.

original infringement logo

2005 proved that it was also a welcome and needed change south of the border in Buffalo, where a festival was established which is currently the biggest one in the circuit (it’s going into it’s fifth edition this summer) and in New York City, which hosted a one time event in Manhattan (and this year will play host to the first-ever Brooklyn infringement).  In Montréal the same year music came to the festival full-force.  There was one music show the last night in 2004 and by 05, music made up more than half of what was being offered.

In 2006, the theatre section of the Montreal festival featured Gary Corbin’s …four one-legged men, a show about four different characters, each with only one leg.  Corbin is himself disabled and had experienced many difficulties breaking onto the theatre scene until he eventually put together his own show and staged it at the Buffalo infringement the previous year.  This was also the first year that the festival built its own black box theatre space, with lights, sound and curtains.  The music section grew in Montreal and the festival spread to Ottawa and Regina and returned to Toronto.

Gary Corbin

The francophone side of the Montreal infringement grew significantly in 2007 thanks to Landriault and his Chansons a Double Dose series (which later became Le Maître Chanteur).  The same year, the first infringement on European shores happened in Bordeaux, France.  Over the years, the festival had always tried to challenge corporate intrusions on the Main during street festivals that ran at the same time and this year, the Reclaim the Main campaign was fully integrated into its culture-jamming framework in the form of the fake ad company PubPartout.

The francophone side grew again in 2008 when, for its fifth anniversary, the festival ran almost the whole month of June.  This year, the pre-season saw several infringement Socials in sections of the city where the fest had never operated before such as Griffintown and St-Henri.  The festival also drew international culture-jammers Kinetic Aesthetic from the UK who aided Reclaim the Main and performed their own piece Sleep Sitting Up, to highlight the plight of the city’s homeless.

Kinetic Aesthetic

If one thing is clear, it’s that while the fundamentals of being a critical alternative to corporate mainstream arts festivals remain, the specifics of the infringement change from year to year.  This is inevitable because the festival is a composite of its parts and those parts are brought by whoever is taking part that year.  Participants are encouraged to bring what they would hope to find.

So what’s the Montreal infringement festival going to be like this year? Why don’t you get involved and tell us.