More Questions @YAC – Landscape part 6
On Friday August 23, we met onstage at the Yukon Arts Centre.
Photo by Suzanne de la Barre
Jacob’s Process Notes:
My interests in landscape theatre emerge from a desire for more imagination and wonder in theatre. One of my favourite types of wonder is in the highlight to found realities – “I didn’t notice it and now I see it! The magic was there all along!”. This means I like site-specific work that actually uses the site to shape the work, rather than feeling pasted into a place from a rehearsal room.I like the same thing in theatre that happens in a Theatre. Theatre buildings are incredibly specific places, even in their standardization. When I watch performances that embrace and amplify the specificities of a theatre room, I’m excited again for the potential contained in those buildings.
When planning this first residency, I wanted to make sure that along with the exposure to the intimacy and immensity available outside, that we didn’t forget about the potential of a theatre to be a landscape. So we met on stage.
It was a day of processing and mapping the work and discussions of the previous week. We needed to surface what we knew, what questions remained and what happens next. And we needed to surface the big questions that remained.
Out came the index cards, post-it notes and craft paper. Setting up a table for each category, we moved around, creating our own responses while being able to read - in real-time - the responses of others.
Jacob’s Process Notes:
In any work processes and surfacing complex ideas in a group, I’ve found silent work to be a fruitful way to start. Processes like this create the conditions for diverse opinions, questions and approaches to sit at the same table for a while, avoiding immediate language and performance-based conflicts that frequent “free flowing” group discussions.
Photo by Suzanne de la Barre
What we wrote
The four prompts were:
The following day we read them allowed, separated from whether we wrote them. Heather was good enough to capture that and do preliminary sorting.
What do we know will be included?
COLLABORATION
- Relation to landscape, land, bodies
- Have Yukon Indigenous collaborations in the core team
- Sharing food
- Indigenous perspectives stories, values
- More Yukon Indigenous artist int the team or creative/performance role
- community outreach a dialogue with diverse Yukon population, Indigenous
- Yukon College course, First Nation 140, 101
- Matriarchs, knowledge circle, shift in language
- Bodies, sound, puppets
- Creating and sharing performance
- Research into other practices of landscape art
- Process service, purpose, people, landscapes, a/ttention(s)
SITES/ELEMENTS
- Leaves, soil, fur, rocks, ice, water, berries, feathers, hooves, rust, glass, bells, siding crystal, Powdered natural things, cotton candy flush
- Learning to practice and living on the land respectively
- Winter time: how does winter fit in to this
- Wall of snow to project video, kids were throwing snowballs at the screen
- Snow cabin
- Puppet making
- Making the space to feel comfortable, collaborate
- (s)hiver, Burning Away the Winter Blues, Santa Claus Parade, Rendezvous
- Forest Games
- unifying or obstructing natures rhythms with intention: sounds,
- Found materials or bury the bones we can’t use
ACTIONS/EMOTIONS
- Stillness
- Awareness
- Irreverence and humour
- Shifting perspective, depth of field
- scales shifts
- Play
- Patience
- Silence
- Materials: materials in performance, exploration,
- What is found here, what is brought here?
- Found material include surplus, reuse, found on site
What will be different?
If we succeed, how will we know?
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
- “I’ve never noticed that before”
- Dance party
- The Yukon is internationally renowned to experience this kind of experience
- It makes Diane Smith laugh hard
- Land-based healing, medicine walks
- Extended land-based learning. Process isn’t only technical. Shared social space of making.
- Community, creating, sharing, knowing
- Kids who grow up here keep making things and worlds to entertain each other
CREATOR RESPONSE
- If we succeed we will have the energy to continue
- we will know because we will be changed
- We will feel connected to others (somehow)
- We will have a sense of what being connected to the land feels like
- we will use/ theatres differently
- We will roar
- The trees will dance with us
- Might have a better understanding of how to collaborate with landscape
- We might not know
- We will have different ways to articulate and be understood
- We might sense how to listen to the earth in new ways
- I will be excited by new questions
KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE
- New knowledge systems embodied knowledge systems
- Could there be different ways to share space with Indigenous, non-indigenous
- We will behave differently, move differently out doors, including viewers
- Body memories, how we move in space understanding body restrictions with audience and cast that have disabilities, mobility requirements
- We might attend differently: patterns, rhythms, time scales
- Human perception
- Climate. Government. Global
- Developing of collective artistic memories of the land
- There is values/processes that can spark similar work in different locations
- Artist as keepers of other wisdoms
- Inheriting and transmitting other ways of knowing/knowledge
- Orality
- What are ways to include patterns of knowing
What happens next?
THEMES
- Training
- Testing ideas
- Grant writing / research
- Lit review / activity review
- creating for audiences
- Working/including non-artists: community building, building relationships with Indigenous
SITES
- More camping on site (3 days minimum)
- Camping at different sites in Canada
- New York City (on rooftops), remote and urban
- Traveling model at different locations with a stable framework
- Questions of home
- A week of sleeping at Stepping Stone (eg)
- More sleeping in the landscape
- Camping for a longer periods and/or in a different season\
- Finally get Jacob and filmmaker to Cooper mine
- Exploring ground, water, air,
- Being in the water (full body)
- One spot the whole time
- Developing a collaborative practice including a week of choping wood and carrying water
COLLABORATION
- Who’s already doing this: Children, mine workers, creatures of the woods, journalists
- Inviting non-artists to work with the earth / land
- Find or merge a structure for collaborating
- Similar with more diverse background
- Create multiple opportunities
- Venues for informal exchange with more residents from Whitehorse and the region
- Group of people over a long period of time
- All doing it at different locations - technology integration
- Letting it spread, or not?
- Humans in landscape
- Simultaneous/similar residency in Yukon at different location and sharing together at the end as part of the residency.
SOUND/MUSIC
- Sound and music
- Singing in Landscape, in residence
RESEARCH
- Grant writing
- Trust process
- Grant writing for proposal and development
- Lit review
PERFORMING / VISUAL ARTS
- solo work for integration
- something that is more than process
- Studio time with Materials // tour lab around the territory with the audience out doors
- Big puppet work
- How big would something have to be to see from Grey Mountain?
- Developing short segment pieces outdoors and test with audience
- Different artists perform while we prep dinner, set up and wash
- 3 short consecutive Theatre in the Bush
- “Covering” famous land art work (eg Andy Goldsworthy)
- Narratives - ways of sensing the land
What are the big question you're holding?
- I doubt the Group of 7 thought they were advancing colonialist genocide. How do we avoid being blinded by our privilege as white, university educated artists?
- How do we avoid making work that advances colonialism in spite of our best intentions?
- How do I get all the stimulus and connectivity of an international residency without leaving Itsy behind?
- What have we gained individually, collectively from the process / residency?
- What is transferable to a possible bigger picture?
- What stories fill such a show?
- How do we articulate / connect “value” (where that often means $ / resources)
- Landscape / Human - How to find a good balance in a “ecosystem performance”
- How to bring the outside, inside? (and vice versa)
- Sustainable practices
- What stories need to be told? How can the land help tell and listen to them?
- How is the work Anti-empire? How does it open space for right relations?
- How do we bring in a diverse audience?
- How do we show how our bodies are made by / connected to the land? Does this move beyond or alongside “presence”?
- What part does the road play?
- Are there other terms? What are the offers and/or limitations of the term “landscape”?
- What other conceptualizations of nature exist than our cultural “box” have not been included? eg places of mass urbanization or where nature has lost its integrity
- How do comfort and shelter making figure in? Can they be integrated instead of being marginalized?
- How would / will more Indigenous collaborators change the shape and conceptual / spiritual underpinnings of this?
- Further investigation of the spiritual properties of land based art. Storytelling and who or what is telling the story.
- How does this become part of the work of reconciliation?
- How to fund the project?
- How do “non-theatre people” fit in and how do we make them feel at home?
- How do we see / hear / touch what’s right in front of us?
- How do we experience what’s ten miles / a hundred miles away?
- Why research & develop work outside if it’s going bck in the theatre box?
- How do we access / experience / understand performance of the landscape?
- Developing / making 1 show?
- How to earn an audience with landscape? (with both understanding of the word “audience”)
- What is the form of the performance? How much structure is necessary to engage?
- Is this to develop a new artistic practice for artists and land? -or- Is this to develop a community member and land?
- Is this my audience? Is this their art?
- How important is “original”? (and what is that?)
- What does any of this mean anyway? How do we play with the “So what?”
- (What) Is there specific about theatre? (rather than land art / dance / performance / field score)
- How do you create performance that centred around land not humans? Is it possible to decentralize humans from the story of the land?
- Why / how the human scale in the landscape is so important to JZ (me)?
- Dramaturgy of space / land in connection with our body / audience body
- How long will it take? How long does it take? How will we do it in less time than we wish?
- How do you see human presence on land without looking for man-made materials, industry, or litter, or, or, or?
- How will we save ourselves?
- What was (y)our best moments this residency?
- “When does the performance begin?” - Tamai Yanisurai
Next, What’s Next.