Notes from a call

[Early weeks of COIVD19]

Burning Questions

• Curiosity, playfulness and vulnerability translating between the somatic and the screen.
• How to create conditions for home made DIY spectacles.
• Giant scale Motion capture in old gravel pits and using the chips in our phones to create group amateur improv.
• Future Fables

What unexpected artistic possibility or startling innovation is exciting you right now?

• Community created puppets / Drive in puppet shows
• A return to deep work and local roots
• Video conferencing filters as a form of mask work

Non Artistic questions developed during and after:

• How to prevent the return to what was going on before. Because my experience of that system was of a pyramid scheme and subsidiary of the airline industry and it created shows and experiences that alienated me deeply.
• I really value “I statements” and get very triggered by “we all like…” and “the universal spiritual power of theatre is…” statements – as if we all agreed. We don’t. [1]

• I hear fear and assume a lack of curiosity.
  I wonder if scarcity creates fear, fear kills curiosity. Lack of curiosity is alienation.
  In my job, the one we share,
  I feel often deeply alienated from our practice.
  I think it’s in the nature of the job.

• If we are the people,
  maybe most deeply alienated
  from our form while supposed to be most able to lead,
  
• Why should this be saved?
• What else could be true? For me, this is not an “art for art sake” / “follow your heart” thing that ignores the relation with context and community but the opposite – an admission of the entanglement and complexities.
• And also being in the studio, in process more.
• Some of these things present as generational. And I want to avoid agism on all sides.
• When someone talked about practice – this was a balm. I crave ensemble and the rigour of practice more than anything. I craved it before, since it was also absent then.

==

I take shots at the arts industries relation to the “airline industry” [2]

And want to exclude Air North.
How to make more companies that are worth excluding?
Is it scale? Combined First Nation and local ownership? Sponsorships of Nakai events? That 3 Business flights a day between Toronto and Ottawa aren’t necessary but 3 flights a week to Old Crow are?

I can probably stand behind that. And the sponsorship. That that relation matters, their sponsorship means we can put more of our small budget into artist and local contractors. And means I’m now thinking about how to thank them and have them part of the festival even if we don’t fly anyone anywhere.

==

if we’re talking about the social change, then we’re looking at a radical shift that includes something like UBI at CERB like levels and significant reshaping of regulations on rent and amalgamation [3]