Bio

I was asked to write a bio for the Theatre & Company website and came up with the following:

Douglas Campbell joined Theatre & Company's Writer's Bloc in 2001 and found writing for the theatre to be exhilarating and addictive. A fragment of his play Pamphilia was produced as part of the New Works Festival in 2003, and Little Crickets was given a workshop and public reading as part of the NU2U program in 2005. He is also involved with MTSpace Multicultural Theatre who are developing his play Yes or No! for performance in October. In his forties Douglas was seized by the dance bug, and took every kind of dance class imaginable, including Flamenco, Tap, and Highland Dancing. He has appeared on stage several times, notably in a ballet recital, where he was the only male creature within a league of the theatre. (Not all pictures have been destroyed.) He has also studied Aikido for several years and knows how to disarm an assailant wielding a sword (in theory).

This will be appearing somewhere in here soon. I hope they are able to find something for me to do, a man of my parts.

Tickets for "Yes or No!' on sale now ..

Tickets are now available through the Centre in the Square box office. Just go to the Registry Theatre and click on Buy Tickets (the direct URL is so ugly I refuse to permit it on my blog)

Tickets are $18, Students & Seniors $15.

Cilla Vee

One more show, tomorrow night at Clay & Glass Gallery, 7:30pm. Movement and video. There were moments when my mind was overloaded with the projected images, the dancer and her shadow and could no longer make out what was what. Dancer, Claire Elizabeth Barratt and musician, Lee Garbutt.

Outdoors on the deck at the Huether a horner or wasp alighted on our table and with deliberation set down a pupae and flew away. Much speculation as to the significance of this event.

Cilla Vee

The MTSpace presents New York's Cilla Vee Movement Projects performing at Clay & Glass, August 16th 5:30 & 17th 7:30. The show is a half-hour long and tickets are $10. (The idea of the 5:30 start time is that people can catch it on the way home from work -- this is an experiment.) And you can hang-out with the artists afterwards; look at the picture above to decide if you think that's worthwhile. Full details on the show on the MTSpace page, and scroll down for a movement workshop conducted by Cilla Vee. Oh, and scroll up, way up, for a note on Yes or No!, playwright me, and I wish there were pictures of our wonderful cast, who are already busy at work developing.

(New York -- that oughta get them over from the Perimeter Institute.)

August 16th 5:30pm, 6pm 2006 — CityScape— at Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo

Cilla Vee Movement Projects "Percussion, projection, sound and dance evoke moments of New York City life"

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

Woman in the Dunes

Went to the Princess to see Woman in the Dunes by Teshigahara. Madame wanted to see it too but thought it would be next week, so she left for a weekend at a cottage in the far north with women friends (as they are wont to do). And I would have missed it too out of solidarity, and inertia, but it was so hot that the idea of a couple of hours in air conditioning was very appealing. Had a glass of water before the five-minute walk to the Princess and an iced tea on arrival in a pronounced sweat. Sparse audience consisting mostly of lone men -- hoped the promise of eroticism hadn't attracted the wrong type -- hoped I didn't look the wrong type -- took consolation from the T-shirt I wore, Isabella's, which said "Festival of Art & Spirit" and "St. Jerome's University" on the other -- obviously I was there for the spiritual aspects of the film.
Not long into the film realized my mistake in watering myself so generously. But I will say this -- nothing makes you concentrate on plot points so much as the urgent need to piss -- it was an education, calculating how much it could reasonably go on, and with all those shots of sand blowing in the wind, collapsing, sifting, the answer was -- I just had to make a trip. And when I came back, I realized I'd just missing the third act turning point -- something had happened, the woman was in pain, the villagers were moving her -- anyway, that was it.
It made me think of Beckett's Act without Words I which I watched a few weeks ago -- sand, confinement, scarcity of water, false hopes, even the scissors. I wonder if there is a relation. Some fellow on Amazon dismisses the Kobe Abe novel that was the basis of the film as "derivative" of Kafka's The Castle. This is like saying I am derivative of my parents. Or that I look like somebody else. Of course I am. And I do. Everything has a genealogy, even if it is accidental.

Yes or No!

Just noticed an article in the UW Student Newspaper, Imprint, on MTSpace Theatre, and its artistic director, Majdi Bou-Matar. Of particular interest (to me, anyway) is the reference to this fall's production of Yes or No! with script by playwright Douglas Campbell, that is to say, myself, and not the famous Canadian actor of the same name. (There is a mistake in the article -- the writer has doubled the size of the cast -- there is one Canadian couple and one Yugoslav couple.) We have a cast. Rehearsals start next week -- I should say development, because Majdi uses a lot of improvisation in his process, and my script will be a kind of rough guide. When he said this after the final audition, I gave a laugh which came out like a whimper, which earned me a hug from the actor next to me. And Iva said "Then you'll have two plays!". Iva is recently from Macedonia, so we have one speaker of the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, when we'd wanted two, but there are Serbian language tapes at the KPL, so I'm sure Gary will be okay. Performances will be at the Registry Theatre.

October 25 - 30, 2006 Yes or No! - at the Registry Theatre, Kitchener, Ontario

On the night of the Quebec referendum, two couples are drawn into a crisis of their own Yes or No! A comedy about sex, politics, identity and… Halloween!

Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition

Isabella will be at TOAE this weekend, purple section, booth 209. Be sure to visit her and bring lots of money. A deposed emir living in Nigeria has already expressed an interest in the picture at left (as well he might); unfortunately he does not have ready access to his considerable fortune, and Isabella politely declined the complicated financial arrangements he proposed. Nevertheless it's quite possible he and his retinue might fly in to Toronto for a short visit, so if you want to buy this piece (or indeed any of the pieces in the show; it's rumoured he has made offers to every artist exhibiting) then you'd better get down to Nathan Phillips Square bright and early. That's Isabella Stefanescu, booth 209, purple section (her booth is hard to miss. Her sister refers to it as "the castle". It is designed to withstand hurricanes. I believe it could survive a collision with a fully loaded 707.)

Our Theatre: Too Kind?

Interesting article in This Magazine (July/August issue) on Canadian political theatre by this writer entitled "The Dangers of Playing it Safe: How kindness is killing Canadian political theatre". One example he gives is Tomson Highway who can't get productions of his plays because it's hard to find enough professional Aboriginal actors (and directors are afraid to use non-Aboriginals because they are "worried about being accused of 'cultural appropriation'"). I wonder about that; there is the concept of "color-blind casting" -- in the production of Our Country's Good by the UW Drama Dept that I saw earlier this years, the cast who doubled as convicts and English officers included one black woman, and the two aborigines were played by an East Asian and Indian student (I believe). And if you can translate Les Belles-soeurs into Scots or Yiddish -- well, what I am saying is, this is theatre! Tomson says it's okay! So do his plays!

The other example is My Name is Rachel Corrie which was given a secret reading in Toronto at an undisclosed location. (I know! How thrilling!)

Here is something from Hipparchia's Choice by Michele Le Doeuff. I don't know if it is apropos. But I have been to Aikido for the first time in two weeks, and Kilkenny intermittently in hand I transcribe from my favorite philosopher:

Over the last twenty years interest seems to have been concentrated on the theoretical possibility of destroying language and undermining all speech. Having started as a theoretical phenomenon, this focus soon became social; it became integrated into everyday relations between intellectuals. We were begged not to use old words, all of which were suspected of bearing within them the sedimented residue of oppressive enemy thinking, either 'bourgeois' or 'metaphysical', depending on the preferences of the person you were talking to. Words were thought to be saturated with 'naiveties' (which were themselves complicit in an order which had to be broken) and were accused of surreptitiously leading back to theories which, it went without saying, we had all agreed to rid ourselves of. In a consensus on reciprocal censorship we have reduced each other to silence.

and

Of course ordinary reference points can be criticised and commonly held ideas may be untoward. But it is one thing to discuss something step by step with another person, with his, her or our common liberty in view, and quite another to practise the intellectual terrorism which robs the other of speech.

Excuse me, I have been called to bed.

Oops

Deleted my blog. I will recover it. Over time ...

Canada Day

Spent the afternoon and part of the evening with extended family that keeps on extending, most recently (and unexpectedly) from Eastern Europe to East Asia in my grand-nephew who arrived just three weeks prior to today, Canada Day, its father's eighteenth birthday. Our two mothers came for lunch at Isabella's sister's, as did their aunt; mixture of German and Romanian at the table but predominantly English. Wandered next door to my brother's to see the other nephew (the sensible one, that is to say, seven years old) and niece, and their swimming pool; then back to be serenaded on guitar and recorder by the teenage nephew and niece (the niece is sensible). And I don't know what possessed me but I think feeling guilty for always trying to edify the nephew, most recently with a DVD rental of Fellini's Amarcord (since the niece had a project on Fascism), which he watched to his credit with only a little complaining at the beginning -- but feeling guilty, as I said, I went to GenX and returned with Mars Attacks! which I thought would be a suitably escapist piece of entertainment for a rather blithe young man on his birthday. And all I can say is "Ack Ack! Ack Ack Ack!"; our heads almost exploded.
It's muggy. There was a too brief shower. Sounds of fireworks in the distance. And it's raining again.

The Sex of Knowing

One Sunday afternoon not too long ago I was walking in to the UW Library (because I needed a walk and I needed a book) and I overheard a couple walking towards me in the direction of the Perimeter Institute. The conversation went something like this:

He: ...
She: Well, I would argue there is no such thing as a feminist physics.
He: ...

That's all I caught. They were moving quite fast. Maybe they were particle physicists. Anyway, when I got to the library and was browsing the catalog and couldn't think of anything to read (since everything bored me), I remembered the library had gotten Michele Le Doeuff's The Sex of Knowing and I had never gotten around to checking it out. And partly the recollection was prompted by Isabella's Notebook Project, because the notebook covers the early nineties and this is when we were reading Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. There is a page of the notebook where Isabella records visiting the library at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and discovering that Hipparchia's Choice, a book of philosophy, had been cataloged as sociology!

The Sex of Knowing is about women and knowledge, and comes down on the side of "She" above, and against what she calls the "feminists of difference".

We are assured that "women's way of knowing" requires an affectionate, attentive rapport with the object of knowledge or an involvement typical of the closest emotional relationships, a kind of empathy whose effect would be either to classify Marie and Irene Curie as honorary great men or to erase them entirely from the discussion.

and

My learned women friends are often irritated to the point of anger, as if this form of feminism undermined their morale at least as much as -- if not more than -- the ambient misogyny in which they work

and

To put it as bluntly as possible: I differentiate between sciences said to have been founded by men alone, and sciences managed by men who refuse entry to anyone but men.

But that's by no means the principal target.

De Maistre did not invent the telescope himself, nor did he write the Illiad; but, when he affirms that the "masterpiece" is always a masculine product, he can imagine for an instant that algebra is almost his own creation.

And here's something I've been thinking about:

Utopia is not a crazy dream. It is a laboratory where, in the space of a page where a discourse displays its premises, ideas are reflected and test their coherence. Many ideas that were thus elaborated have passed into the realm of facts.

And I don't know where to stop. I'll stop here.

From the Lighthouse

Spent last week as Assistant Lighthouse Keepers at Cabot Head Lighthouse on the Bruce Peninsula. As the lighthouse is no longer operational, duties were light. (There is a fully automated and solar-powered beacon on a tower next to the original lighthouse.) Essentially we were living in and helping to look after the museum. This amounted to sweeping the stairs and putting out the sign. Also, I signed a paper for the fire inspector. And I shooed some tourists out of the gift-shop (in the lighthouse keeper's house, not shown) which was closed for the day while the keepers were away. And we counted the tourists -- maybe 15-20 a day. Otherwise, blessed silence and solitude.
Don't think I've every actually watched birds before, but found the cormorants, loons, terns and the cedar waxwings who congregated in a dead tree, quite absorbing. (I mean, it was just the waxwings in the dead tree, not the whole lot of them.) Isabella saw a bald eagle over Wingfield Basin from the tower one morning. Splendid vista of Georgian Bay from the tower and once in the middle of the night I went into the tower and the sky was glorious. (Don't especially like that word, glorious, but I've already used splendid.)
The week started cool but by the end it was hot and the bugs were jumping, making walks on the rocky beach short and nasty. How is it that in a strong wind a deer-fly can still hover in your face? When I put up my hoodie I felt like monk. When we parted the keeper told Isabella "I don't know if we can have you back, you make too much noise!" We were like hermits. Sometimes I wish I liked people. I mean I do but ... once last year when I was going through a bout of insomnia, Isabella said, "Imagine you are on a beach." and I said, "No, I couldn't, there might be people there."

Storytelling, etc.

To the Latitudes Storyteller Festival yesterday morning principally because I wanted to see the short piece MTSpace developed for a recent conference on the employment problems of immigrants, Me Here, Me Happy. Also saw the African Women's Alliance of Waterloo Region storytellers (including shy teenage dancers) and Isabel Cisterna, who told a story and also talked about arpillera, which are kind of story-telling quiltlets. She also runs Cafe Cabaret which will be in Victoria Park in a tent next to the clock tower, June 17.

And coming up, Legion of Memory, "a site-specific performance exploring war memorial and the displacement of war refugees who have come to live in the Kitchener-Waterloo region from the former Yugoslavia." June 16-25, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

A Rat

Last night I got into bed and heard the footsteps of what I took to be a heavy-footed mouse -- very heavy-footed -- in fact at first I took it to be our long-dead cat Popescu -- and if I were a rational creature I should have bolted from my bed and gotten a flashlight and a broom and started heaving boxes around (because the archives are in my bedroom too) -- but I have unparalled powers of wishful thinking and I managed to convince myself it was a mouse, albeit one that had eaten rather heavily (not surprising in our house where generations of mice have socked away dry cat food from the bowl of our cat, long senile before he died). And after I had fallen asleep I was awoken by groans and murmurs that suggested either some mammal was in the throes of amourous embrace or else giving birth -- but as I say -- wishful thinking -- it must have been a mouse.

But today I returned from work and saw the unmistable hindquarters of a large brown furry creature disappear under Isabella's computer table. Perhaps -- an opossum? What to do? Isabella is at her life drawing class -- no help there. I called the brother and asked about the Live Animal Trap. The brother said it would very likely be among our father's effects, in my mother's garage or basement. But he didn't volunteer to take care of the mammal problem himself. Damn. So I called the sister-in-law -- phone busy -- answering machine -- teenage nephew very likely on the phone. I left a message on the machine and waited. From under the computer desk, low whimpering. Not possibly a rat! Rats don't whimper! They squeak! Could it be that species of friendly South American desert mammal that had infested Globe Studios? These creatures know no natural enemy and are extremely friendly. Oh please, let it be!

No response from the sister-in-law, so I walked over to their house. They are very outdoorsy people -- the niece and nephew do wolf calls and my sister-in-law can listen and say "No, that's not right, it's winter." They will know what to do. We consulted. The whimpering very possibly indicated a juvenile animal of some kind -- maybe a young racoon? A guinea pig? ( I suppressed the image of its tail.) The sister-in-law made me supper while the niece gave me a detailed synopsis of a young adult novel about fugitive Jews in Vichy France. Meanwhile the brother-in-law collected various fish nets. We dropped in on my mom to pick up the Live Animal Trap.

And I was still looking for a flashlight when the brother-in-law poked under the computer table with a fish net and said "It's a rat" in his phlegmatic voice and adroitly scooped it up while I not quite gagged. He took it outside and dumped it down a drain. An odd thing to do but I suppose it was fitting.

So I am finishing a bottle of wine here trying to get over my scunner at the idea of a rat in the house. It's almost done.

pat...

Pat the Dog was successfully launched with T-shirts and buttons bearing the image of Pat. Pictures of inebriated playwrights duly to appear on web site (and since I am one of them we will not attempt to link to it, scroll down if you are curious, I'm sure you'll find it somewhere.) Our leaderess Lisa O'Connell to whom we are so grateful for so many things will be having a reading of her play Ellie at Theatre & Company this Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 I believe but you may want to check with the box office on that since I am an inebriated playwright and as for the link, again, you are on your own.

Pat, if you must know, is Mackenzie King's dog, or rather the name of the corporate dog -- what am I saying here -- Pat is like the Pope, or Dr. Who, it is rather a title held by serial manifestations of the same entity than a proper name, and we chose it as a local reference, since Mackenzie King went to school here, and in fact a bronze statue of his youthful self can be seen sitting on the front lawn of Kitchener Collegiate Institute unless it's been stolen to sell for scrap as has happened to so many fine equestrian statues in the United Kingdom due to the high price of bronze. Good night. And so to bed ...

The Duchess of Malfi

On Victoria Day (observed, that is May 22) got a pair of rush tickets to see a preview performance of The Duchess of Malfi at Stratford which opens June 2. My first time at the Tom Patterson Theatre, the "winter home of the Stratford Badminton club" -- I love the long stage. I also love the Studio Theatre. But I just hate the stage at the Festival Theatre -- I hate it. My heart sinks whenever I enter the Festival Theatre because whatever play is being done will look the same. It makes any play look like an arrangement of figurines on a hutch-cabinet. And in the middle, that damned post. Saw The Country Wife there once and they stuck a phallus on the post -- what else could you do? I'd like to take a chainsaw to that post.

Excuse me.

The Duchess of Malfi -- I suppose I shouldn't say anything since this was a preview -- but nobody's reading this -- here -- I'll tell you -- very striking visual design, everything black, the props, the set, the costumes (except for the Cardinal of necessity in red), the makeup (that is, black highlights, rather Goth in fact), and especially a long strip of vinyl? linoleum? anyway, a long very shiny strip that made the Patterson stage seem even narrower, almost Japanese. The scenes of violence were marred for me somewhat by a woman behind me who gave these little complacent, condescending, mirthless laughs (hardly laughs) usually rendered as "heh heh", expressing her understanding that someone in fact was not being strangled on stage, it was just acting.

The music -- in general I wish there was more live music in theatre -- I wish the madmen and women had sung "Oh let us howl a heavy note" instead of it being piped in. Of course there is the expense -- some of them were already naked, and how much it costs to have someone naked sing, I don't know. (But it is done.) Perhaps I am reimagining The Duchess of Malfi as a Jacobean Three-Penny Opera.

I don't know why we didn't think of rush tickets for Stratford before: you can reserve them by phone two hours before a performance, and in Waterloo we're an easy half-hour from Stratford. It takes a while to adjust to reduced circumstances. (I had stock options...)