Writing in his blood
Kevin Loring brings award-winning play Where the Blood Mixes and some high praise to the NAC
- Loring: One country, many nations
Over the past few years, Kevin Loring has acted at the NAC in powerful productions like Copper Thunderbird and The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. For him, the city serves as a symbol. “I love being a block away from Parliament, at the centre of power of the country. I love doing art there,” Loring says.
Where the Blood Mixes is Loring’s first time writing a full-length play and, astonishingly, it won him a Governor-General’s Award for Drama in 2009. Loring and director Glynis Leyshon have worked together in all the typical modes of current drama, stitching together projection, live music and multimedia elements. These plus a heady streak of comedy help to balance out the dense subject matter.
“This play deals with residential school survivors, so right there you have decades and generations of baggage.” But for Loring, the stereotypical themes and characters serve as an ironic prelude to a more universal story about a family reuniting and a community reconciling. “I’m not afraid of putting a stereotype on stage and then… just stripping it away completely,” a process by which Loring “reveals the humanity and truth and what is peculiar and intriguing behind that false mask.”
Where the Blood Mixes continues the NAC’s “absolutely visionary” mandate of producing at least one native play every season while keeping a focus on Canadian drama, a feat which Loring praises, praise that he also extends to NAC artistic director Peter Hinton.
“He has a vision of what a National Arts Centre should mean,” says Loring, “an ideal. And he’s not afraid of trying to meet that ideal… If you’re going to call it the National Arts Centre, I think you have to acknowledge that there were not just two founding nations in this country.”
As appeared in Ottawa XPress – March 18, 2010
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=19508
