Peter Stevens, Artist-in-Residence

"Down with intelligence, long live death!"
-Spanish proverb

I am the artistic director at theatre sainte-catherine. With my not-for-profit arts organization Le Nouveau International; we have programmed fifty percent of the annual schedule with improv, theatre, music, comedy, film and art of all kinds. It has been a heavy load, full of late nights, regrets (both artistic and social) and there is no better way to start year three than with a visit from Peter Stevens (aka Nemo Dally). Peter is a rising comic-writer from Brampton, Ontario. We met while performing together in the Vanier Improv Company at York University. I was performing with my crass, political, and hilarious troupe Stag Nation. We were cantakerous and sensational and we loved it. Then I met Peter and he said to me immediately (we were 21 years of age): I will never do any material that is homophobic, sexist, racist or just plain stupid. This inspired me. I always aspired to bridge tragedy and "serious" plays with more silly and entertaining work, and I also felt that our generation was a generation that should pride itself in being one of the first that is not homophobic, sexist, racist or stupid. Of course, the road has been fraught with disappointment. Occasional small victories, which are the only ones I dwell in these days. After a debaucherous run with Ogoki Nights 2: LIFER; and a couple Match Made in Hell's, a return to why I began 'makin' art' fueled by Peter is a gift from god. Despite the fact that I do find art to be a bit of bourgeois, white-boy affair, or so goddam pretentious it loses itself credibility, and real work is real work; I do think art is survival. Art keeps us alive at night. As eric amber said: Artists suck. But life without art would really suck. That is something Peter would appreciate. But moreover, I believe that why life would really suck without art is that we would be more homophobic, sexist and stupid and racist than ever before. Art is a moral barometer, and also representative of the times (which is why youtube is such a sad symbol), and it is up to the community to create this notion of "times". It is hard to be idealist these days, but stick to your guns, as Océanne LeBlanc said: "Sure! Racism still exists, some people never change, but the non-racist people, as few as they may be, are the ones that I am going to live with, my small mountain of good people, call it idealistic but I see it happening." What I see happening is Peter Stevens leading this charge, like he did for me ten years ago. He still produces DIY shows that aspire to a certain grade of quality and not a masturbatory spontaneity and indulgence. He is coming to theatre sainte-catherine to sweep and mop, in both senses of the expression. He begins as a guest star in Dépflies (January 12th-14th), my new play series about lonely quebeckers (I know, again); then he will show his bread and butter: stand-up, sketch and improv alongside Stefan Peterson, Lise Vigneault, Christopher Betts and other guests yet to be decided upon in GRINDERS: COMEDY WEEKEND(Jan 19-21st). Then his final weekend will a New Creation: GODS IN THE LOCKEROOM, a post-apocalyptic romance story surrounding travel and sports in the modern era.

Old excerpt from rough draft of "PARIS"

S: Whatchya been workin' on these days Vlad?
V: Well, a bunch of stuff- I have this one new idea for Microwaveable Poems.
S: Microwaveable poems?
V: Yah. A poem. That you put in the mircrowave.
S: Aaand then what?
V: Haven't got that far... in the... development.
S: Oh.
V: I don't know you know? I just think it's a rad idea.

Bitterspeak

The day began as it always did: Adèle singing me a song on the subway that she sings while playing the "pear ball" at school. Pear ball, is a common game in schools here in Montreal, and perhaps across Canada. It involves standing up and pounding a ball with your two hands together, the ball is attached to a pole and swings around it. Two can play at this game, and one is the queen. Adèle informs me that there are a lot of songs, an endless number of songs one can sing while playing Pear Ball.

I drop her off and then sit at Park Lafontaine, ogling a fat oak, a squirrel sucking on a puddle, and the bird sanctuary for pigeons, gulls and mallards. A notice three different colour-tipped ducks, by which I mean, three male ducks with a different coloured feather inside their wing. One is purple, one is blue and one is brown. Is this their personality? My lack of ornithological knowledge is a staggering monument to my absence from scholastic pursuits. I pick up "Songlines", an undeniable masterpiece, and watch as Chatwin takes me into a barrage of facts, all thematically linked to his story about Australian natives, but completely irrelevant to the plot. I think to myself: what is he doing? He is improvising. Polished literary improv. Fact after fact after fact hits me over the head, pounding me further into a trance. That's it! Chatwin's done it!

My friend Ric has asked me to write an essay on anti-theatre. Or my version of anti-theatre. It is funny he asks this now, because Charlie and I are still deep in our obsession with the Chilean anti-poet and father of antipoetry, Nicanor Parra. His ribald sense of humour and thrashing of conventional literature is so utterly refreshing. Yet Parra restrains any outright, all-encomnpassing, broad-based disdain for more conventional or modernist poetry, the two exist together he feels. Like antimatter and matter. And so, on that note I feel it necessary to dive into notions of antitheatre. But first, as is always the case when dealing with an exchange of time, ideas and money: economics-

Suddenly a group of middle-aged women surround me. It is frightening at first (what if they talk to me? What if they eat me?), but wild in a sort of domestic-suburban horror movie sense. They are doing aerobics in the park, with a leader who leads them in knee high kicks, wires wrap around their heads and bodies, sweat and breath, they literally mount the knoll directly in front of me and and swarm around me. "Okay ladies, to your left." It is difficult to concentrate. Though I see it even now: this is fucking theatre. Being scared by a performance, genuine fear. But moreso is the vulnerability that some of the women have, I mean I have my judgements, and aerobics disgust me for some reason, maybe it is the association I make to yuppiehood ("these women must be rich, latté swilling yuppies), but as soon as I see their faces up close, red from blood movement, I find myself empathetic to them; and those that are confident and indifferent to me equally fascinate me, even though it is in a completely different way. My fear dissipates as they leave. That was a moment of free theatre. The sun bursts through the grey clouds and drenches the fake lake of Lafontaine with a billion rays, twinkling into a thousand wavelets and bouncing off my face in a warm hug. So this anti-theatre essay begins...

Part One: What Happens When A Normal Human Being Goes to the Theatre?

The Threshold

this video continues to bring me close to tears (start it at 5 minutes if you want the best part) Juan Carlos Gil has down syndrome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exDjR_t11wk

After week two of our(Le Nouveau International) run of "Les Cafés Tragiques" I have learned some valuable lessons. Most notably that improv is not viewed as "theatre". Tinkering with the art form of live performance to create a feeling of realism via improv thereby via the audience and the concept of being "live"; is usually viewed merely as just a casual neglect for the sacricity of the written word. I feel strongly about the written word, as strongly let's say as someone like Gary Snyder, a Master scholar, speaker of Japanese, Chinese and a fine poet, environmentalist and economist, one of the Black Mountain poets. Snyder obviously cares deeply about the value of research, studies, literature and the love of language. Yet he mentions in "The Etiquette of Freedom" that when he recites a poem (that he has toiled over, and has revised, and has finally decided upon) "I could recite it but I would probably change it; that doesn't matter though." The live performance has stagnated into a robotic regurgitation of lines, and no matter how much improvising within the lines can take place, a two hour play with no improvisation is always cold and filmic, distant and old, and an obvious reason why theatre cannot and has not survived without government funding. There was demand when shakespeare performed (though I am not well-learned as to the finances of the old theatres), because, I believe, he added action, violence, and a sort of burlesque to theatre that the likes of Ben Johnson were opposed to. This burlesque was merely attaching theatre to the people, making it secular, which is should be. Performance has always originated in the streets, or caves, and should not be a museum, it is a craft with no limits because at a base it is merely a conversation between two humans. Antiquated, or taxidermy theatre (as Johnstone called it) seem to think it is a dialogue between the people on stage ONLY. "sit down and shut up and watch us" as Crystle Reid, an environmental theatre artist, once put it. I do feel there is a sacricity to a great script, and these dialogues on stage, however without any connection to the audience, they fall into gibberish, detached from their audience who is indifferent. So, I do feel that all we search is a threshold, where beautiful, CALCULATED poetry spews out of performers mouths, while they also reach out, with the form, to these audience members whom are sitting there, becoming a mirror to the reality of every night, instead of a live film. This balance I feel we have attained with Cafés Tragiques, and yet a theatre critic dismissed it on the phone with me, as improv. Comedy. A lower art. Well, maybe so. But it is a lower caste I enjoy more than the higher caste. A place where the audience is forced to look at their performers equally. And still find a place for pure magic amid this void, this threshold, this place where poetry, the moment, the clown and the fleeting all collide throughout the entire night.

Share your goat (the unheralded talents of Simon Chavarie)

Listening to saidthegramophone.com with those monday morning tears of old shows, i must assure the world that all is going well. In a terrible fit of longing for Glyn Jones and Jesse Henderson, the old treeplanter dregs, the denizens of swamp and poetry up in the old boreal north of Nakina. For now this life has been traded for the baudelairian madness of city life. The make-up of downtown and Theatre Ste-Catherine, where angels and devils decide whether or not they are just that: angel or devil. Lord of both, Simon Chavarie, completely unrecognized by Québec or Canada as the genius he is, once again puts up a show Les Cafés Tragiques with yours truly and breaks the heart of a million dirtbags, and not one word in the media has been spoken of this next-level performer. But credit is delusional, and out of something, nothing. You'll have to excuse the tired maxim, I've been reading too much Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison. A warren of buddhist spirituality, and just plain old good times. The artists that have arisen in the Montreal scene, which I feel may be known eventually as some kind of bastion for the sole few that tried to get rid of Harper, an enclave of radicals, freethinkers, artists and punks; god forbid the yuppies and scenesters of the mile end from ever entering this gang, but those who did shows for no one, those who clenched the still-beating dragon heart of yesterday and the million rainy nights of-oh boy. Turning into a bit of a white boy pontificator now then! I speak simply of Danny Belair, Simon Chavarie, Caroline Braun, Vinny Dow, Catherine Moreau, Camille Rose, Josée, and Little Glue, a landscape artist with more work ethic than the entire city of Westmount. We know our enemies. They live in their own deathwork they made for themselves, primarily mobile devices (aka mini-coffins). For now I shall continue to peruse Dan Beirne's blog and remember Simon jumping onto me after I fell off the stage and pretending to love me. I am married only to the fleeting baby grackles that bound about on the grass of park Georges-Etienne-Cartier. Yes, slap me like Ouellet has so many times, slap me, because I think describing a stump recently cut for Hurricane Irene, is enough to make me sad and happy: a hoof sticking up from the ground, as though a giant cow was buried upside down with that one hoof sticking out of the ground, and now with time, that hoof had rotted, taken on some hardened characteristics and hollowed out a bit, the two hooves themselves, taken individually, appeared like two bison butting heads. The lichen that raged on all around like some kind of fine garland, painted onto this mystical hoof that made me want to dig like an archeologist until this wooden cow could be shone to the Saint-Henrians and we could put up a new statue of wood, an animal, and how the morning is for bullshit like this. Yes, the morning is for bullshit like this.

The Saint Henrian: Luck and Boys

Walking past the old corroyeurs' habitations, the smell of the tanneries, I am reminded of how great it is to still be able to walk the streets with a coffee in your hand and not be afraid that someone is going to bludgeon you to death with a large blunt object. Such is the freedom one seeks while patiently avoiding the large funny-shaped anguish above one's shoulder, like an unmoving cloud.

Reading Ezra Pound, I cannot re-iterate the importance of this author. His ABC of Writing, despite an elementary-sounding title, is one of the best books on writing for any young writer. He basically states that all poetry is song, and must be written as such. For any writer, he explains the complex nature of rhythm and inspiration and also provides valuable lessons for teachers; warning of the dangers of resting on one's laurels and feeling they have learned enough.

I picked up Ezra Pound's Selected Poems and was almost brought to tears in light of recent events with close friends.

"Here are your bells and confetti.
Go! rejuvenate things!
Rejuvenate even 'The Spectator'.
Go! and make cat calls!
Dance and make people blush
Dance the dance of the phallus
and tell anecdotes of Cybele!
Speak of the indecorous conduct of the Gods!
(Tell it to Mr. Strachey)

Ruffle the skirts of prudes,
speak of their knees and ankles.
But above all, go to practical people-
go! jangle their door-bells!
Say that you do not work
and that you will live for ever."


That was taken from SALUTATION THE SECOND in LUSTRA. This man is a great poet.

A million buds, some cherry-red, others an iridescent emerald green, are beginning to sprout on the Oaks and Maples of Saint Henri. Garbage and dogshit still dominate the sidewalk. I think of the beautiful TaraLee and her cheeks, and her wonderful spark while drinking a gin and tonic and kissing me on the cheek. How easy life is when you know you are the president of your own misery. I have always loved loneliness and sex and to speak of them is never crass or depressing, but a grand release from the bloody idiocy of pretention and society.

I cannot believe these trees just wave their boughs in this fierce april wind, and the leaves do not rip off. These trees are strong, and I am giddy in anticipation of the odours they will drench me with soon. Such is the freedom I love and cherish.

The Poet-in-residence