All of my officially published pieces of journalism
As she tells it, Laurie Steven was sitting in Nate’s Deli 25 years ago this year when she decided to start a theatre company. Fresh from Toronto, the trained director was living through a round of “fairly massive budget cuts across the country.” With everything around her being slashed and burnt, Steven realized, “If I wanted to work in theatre, I’d have to found a company.”
The summer theatre season in the city looks to be varied and lush. The first thing on your summer plate is This Is What Happens Next, a show from the marvellous, mercurial performer and writer Daniel MacIvor – an honest-to-goodness star in the world of Canadian drama. It’s at the GCTC now until June 12.
Daniel MacIvor is one of Canada’s most respected theatrical artists. Widely renowned as both a writer and performer, he built his early career on stunning, engrossing one-man plays before leaving the genre to take up different challenges. This Is What Happens Next will be his return to the one-man-show format after years of sabbatical. When asked why he moved back into this kind of writing and performing, MacIvor readily admitted that it’s simply where his life led him. “I didn’t have a choice,” he said.
“We’ve known each other a long time; we’ve killed roaches together in a rented apartment in Toronto years ago” is how actor Graham Ashmore describes his 20-year friendship with his co-star Arne MacPherson. The kind of chemistry that a pair builds up over that length of time is something “you can’t define, but an audience really picks up on it.” MacPherson agreed easily, noting, “If the people watching believe in the friendship, then they have a stake in the process.”
This past weekend, one of Ottawa’s celebrated reading series played host to one of the city’s former residents made good. Author Peter Norman spent three years here at the beginning of his career and found them to be incredibly formative. “I got off the ground in poetry there. It was in that community that I started to write with concentration. I’d write for the open mic nights at reading series and then use the feedback to see what captured peoples’ attention.” He left Ottawa but took with him a long list of friends, supporters and burgeoning projects. “I did a tally once,” he muses, “and about 63 percent of my poems were written in Ottawa.”
W.H. Auden once described a poem as “a well-made verbal object.” Brilliantly, Auden wanted us to realize that the poem is not a catalogue of something, but is in fact a creation made out of the material of language. The most tedious poets are invariably the ones who forget this, and bury the crafting of language under gimmickry or confessional melodrama. At the other end of the spectrum are authors like Shane Rhodes.