The Barber of Seville ... ish

My teacher and accordion-guru-for-life Tiina Kiik will be performing in a new production of The Barber of Seville opening at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto's Distillery District on May 9, 2013.

No, not that Barber of Seville -- rather, it's "a free-wheeling adaptation of The Barber of Seville by Michael O'Brien and John Millard, based on the play by Beaumarchais and the opera by Rossini."

If you missed the original (1966! were you even born then?) production of Barber at Theatre Columbus, this is a rare opportunity to revisit Toronto theatre history. It was hugely popular and included in its cast Donald Adams, Todd Duckworth, David Fox, Paulina Gillis, Martin Julien, Alisa Palmer, Martha Ross, Luis Ochoa, Dragoslav Tanaskovic, and Martin van de Ven. Nominated for six Dora Mavor Moore Awards, it won three:

Outstanding Performance by a Female: Paulina Gillis
Outstanding Production of a Musical
Outstanding Sound or Music: John Millard

The all-new production opening on Thursday will feature Dan Chameroy, Robert Clutton, Lise Cormier, Oliver Dennis, Raquel Duffy, Rick Hyslop, Tiina Kiik, Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster, Gregory Prest, William Webster, and Daniel Williston.

For tickets, visit the Young Centre website or call 416-866-8666.

Writing Without a Parachute: The Art of Freefall

Barbara Turner-Vesselago has published a new book titled Writing Without a Parachute: The Art of Freefall.  Freefall is a writing technique that “invokes the courage to fall without a parachute, into the words as they come, into the thoughts before they have fully formed in the mind, into the unplanned structures that take shape, without prompting, to contain them.” This gives hope to those of us whose inner critics and censors are not only authoritarian, but like to assume the greater mantle of Reality.

Barbara is an excellent writer and teacher, two proficiencies not often found in the same person. And, though I don't know that she would describe herself in this way, she is a profoundly gifted motivator.

Writing Without a Parachute gives a brief history of the technique of Freefall, how she came to it and how the events of her life have determined her approach to it. It offers some habits useful to the writing life:

·        balancing will and surrender

·        not talking about your writing

and my favorite, the intriguingly named:

·        habit of a “walk-on manner.”

The advice is sensible and experiential. As the proverb says, “Let the work teach you how to do it.” For someone whose writing process is not an easy fit with more prescriptive approaches, this is a huge relief. Barbara’s five writing precepts are intended to be helpful adjuncts to one’s own process, not determinants of it. And she doesn't expect you to take it on faith. Try it and see! she urges. Don't just take my word for it.

This technique encourages “not knowing” in the act of writing, something I've always had great difficulty with. “But where is it all leading?” is my usual despairing – and unhelpful – mantra. Just now I'm listening to a CD of Pema Chodron who seems to be saying exactly the same thing when she talks about dwelling in the discomfort of no firm ground to stand on.

If there is a precept I wish I had encountered earlier in my life it is “Follow the energy.” I would have saved myself a lot of time, boredom and anguish had I known at the outset to write “what has energy for you.” As opposed to spending quite a long time writing what had energy for others, or what I felt ought to have energy for me – but didn't.

Well, I will just have to “Proceed in a Walk-on Manner,” a useful injunction both in writing and in life.

There are exercises.  In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I am the friend she cites who once told her: “But nobody ever does the exercises in a writing book!” I think it's only proper to add that many of Barbara's students (who presumably did the exercises) have gone on to have books published. Whereas, me -- no. So.

Listen, I would love to chat more about this but I must go.  I want to get back to the book now because it is making me happy. Simple.

Will I in fact do the exercises? Well. The more important thing is, this book makes me want to write, immediately and a lot, with a burning intensity I thought I had lost.

Writing Without a Parachute: The Art of Freefall is available from:

Freefall Writing

The UK Book Depository

Vala Publishers

To find out more about Barbara Turner-Vesselago and her writing workshops or to receive her free newsletter see:

http://www.freefallwriting.com/

or visit on Facebook at:

https://www.facebook.com/FreefallWriting

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On the heels of my posts about Sus Dungo and Vintergatan, a few folks have kindly suggested other bands. I thought I would repost some here.

Accordion Videos and Links recommended a Russian band called Iva Nova. This video begins with a longish intro and discussion that is probably enlightening if you speak Russian; for the rest of us, the music starts around 2:50 and features some great accordion.

AVL also suggested Detektivbiran as being in the same vein as Vintergatan. Here are a couple of my favourites of theirs:

And finally, Anonymous posted about a Derbyshire trio called Haiku Salut whose video includes a rare sighting of an accordionist in the wild. Apparently they do grow on trees!


Haiku Salut - Los Elefantes from Haiku Salut on Vimeo.

Thanks so much for the tips!

I wonder if anyone fell as I did into the Philip Glass opera Satjagraha on PBS yesterday afternoon? It was the the Metropolitan Opera's 2011 production and it was so hypnotic I think maybe it should be accompanied by a drug warning. I chanced on it after watching the American Figure Skating Nationals, a viewing combination that can really mess with your head. We don't have cable so the impact of these things is not diluted by having trizillion other channels, just the small handful detected by our wobbly rabbit ears. Whatever is coming in at any given moment depends on the weather, and whether or not our next door neighbour is operating power tools.

In other couch potato news, I was completely blown away by Kat Edmonson on Austin City Limits the other night:

Seriously, how did I not know about this woman? And the band!! Oh my.

And not just the pants, either

Trudging home through the snow, pretending I was Jo in Little Women coming home from another unrewarding day at Aunt Josephine's, I realized that I had several advantages over my literary hero(ine). No, it wasn't just the ability to wear pants and my lack of an impecunious father. It was the entire winter wardrobe. No way was Jo March equipped as I was with my fat jeans over long underwear, a pouffy down coat, Blundstones, an H&M fake fur hat with ear flaps, and sun glasses. I know -- quite a picture, isn't it?

They would kill for a down coat.

She was liable to be wearing instead something called a muffler, or a wrap or, best case scenario, a cloak. A cloak sounds warm, but is really a glorified cape. And have you ever tried wearing a cape in a blizzard? No, well. Neither have I, but I am sure it is neither pleasant nor effective.

Aunt March in winter plumage

So here is Jo, wearing this ineffectual outer clothing, plus long skirts that will helpfully become encrusted with snow within a few steps, snow that will later melt and make the skirts so heavy she will wish she is dead. She won't say this of course because it isn't ladylike, and ladylike is what her impecunious father most wants her to be. But of course he is not there because, instead of providing for his family, he is doing something vague and unpaid in the Civil War. Meanwhile his children have to trudge off to work in clothes that are effectively textile snowplows. You don't fool anyone, Mr. March! -- you are just Bronson Alcott in sheep's clothing.

Jo clearing the snow with a broom and her skirt.  She is taking a break to call up to Laurie in the house next door. I have never forgiven her for handing him over to Amy.

I like to imagine that Birchcliff, where I live, and 19th-century Concord are very similar, if you subtract the monster trucks and several tons of stained slushy road snow. And honestly, we don't know for sure that Jo March wasn't wearing pants. She could be hiding anything at all under that Matterhorn of a skirt.

Re: the snow -- I heard someone in yoga class ironically call it "a frozen water blessing."

A picture of Jo reading while eating russets in the attic. Ursula LeGuin used it as a bookplate.

Louisa May Alcott

My wonderful friend Barbara just sent me this video, which I thought I would share with you. I believe there is an accordion in there somewhere.

Have an exceptional Christmas!

Stuck in a room of one's own

So you get the room. Then what?

Virginia Woolf defined the goal in A Room of One's Own: space, both literal and figurative, for women to write. I don't know if progress to date would have delighted or depressed her.

She might be pleased to find out how many women have entered the ranks of best-selling writers (though I'm not sure she would consider Barbara Cartland's stellar sales record with unalloyed triumph). But I imagine she would be disappointed at the gender imbalance that persists in our newspapers and publications.

I suspect many women respond to this imbalance with some ambivalence -- say, a mixture of rage, guilt, and self-talk. Or maybe that's just me; others take a more balanced, less reactive approach. Kerry Clare has commented on the issue thoughtfully in her excellent Taking Responsibility for the CWILA Numbers: My Piece of the Pie. The CWILA of the title is Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, and the numbers are the rather bleak statistics they have assembled regarding how Canadian publications respond to female authorship.

As described by Gillian Jerome, the methodology was this:

Specifically, we first surveyed the pool from which reviewers had to draw by consulting the titles submitted to the Governor General’s Literary Awards; then noted all the book reviews in each of fourteen national literary publications, and then counted how many were written by women and how many were written by men; we also looked at how many reviews were written about books written by women and men respectively.

We aimed to include in this count as many high-profile, nationally circulated literary publications as possible, paying special attention to our two national newspapers, whose column space devoted to literature is arguably the most limited, and therefore the most coveted.

The results, for good and bad, are in the numbers, which can be found here.

Virginia Woolf's full prescription was that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" -- and money of course is what is really at issue, not only in writing but in a culture that pretends to gender equity. You could argue that, take care of the money, and the room will take care of itself.

The pay gap between women's and men's earning has been stubborn and persistent. Opinions as to why differ greatly and include a bit of blame-the-victim: women just do not speak up for themselves, correctly value their worth, negotiate skillfully. Muddying the waters is the fact that the dollar is also sized differently for different groups of women. An article by Tumblr executive editor Jessica Bennett in the New York Times lays it out: in the United States, for every male dollar, the going rate is 77 cents for white women; 69 cents for black women, and a shocking 57 cents for Latina women.


In Canada, in 2010 the Toronto Sun reported that:

Canadian men on average get paid more than 20% more than their female colleagues, giving the country one of the highest gender gaps among the 30 OECD nations.

Only Korea, Japan and Germany rank higher than Canada in paying men more than women. Canada is in fourth place along with the United Kingdom, according to Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development statistics. 

Recent OECD figures are available using the OECD gender data browser, which is instructive if somewhat eye-crossing.

Meanwhile, here in Ontario things are even worse. According to the Ontario Pay Equity Commission: "The most recent Statistics Canada data shows that the gender wage gap in Ontario is 28% for full-time, full-year workers. This means that for every $1.00 earned by a male worker, a female worker earns 71 cents." In fact, the use of "full-time, full-year workers" to arrive at the number is likely to understate the case, since women are more likely to engage in part-time employment.

I don't mean to be depressing just before Christmas (or the end of the world, whichever comes first). Rather, I find it perversely cheering to find that the numbers, however dismal, support what I have found anecdotally to be true. It is terrible when every bone in your body and both your eyes tell you it's raining, but the weather report insists the sun is shining as hard as it ever has. No worries, the skies are just as gray as you thought!

Please sir, I want some more

As Dickens Year draws to a close I must confess that my bicentenary resolutions soon fell by the wayside. I came nowhere close to reading all the Dickens novels, only managing Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, and selections from A Christmas Carol. GE and CC I had read before, though so long ago that parts of them came as a big surprise to me.

So did the ending of Oliver Twist when I dipped into it last night. People, are you aware that Fagin dies at the end? I was gobsmacked. Clearly I've seen Carol Reed's movie Oliver! so many times that it has completely subsumed the book. Sure, Ron Moody loses his retirement savings -- a.k.a. his cache of stolen treasure -- in the green, sludgy waters of the Dickensian ghetto. But a death sentence?

In the book, Fagin is sentenced to hang.  In the movie, he pulls himself up by his bootstraps -- or somebody else's -- and it all ends on a note of hopeful entrepreneurism as he goes off arm in arm with the Artful Dodger, presumably to launch the pickpocket version of a start-up.

An opportunity to discover what else I am misremembering about Dickens begins today when Soulpepper Theatre Company and the Young Centre launch the annual Word Festival, which is this year dedicated to the work of Dickens. Performances include Miriam Margolyes in Dickens' Women, The National Theatre of the World's Impromptu Splendor, and free staged readings of Dickens' short stories.

And, there will be soup. Dickens’ Kitchen at the Young Centre will be serving a pay-what-you-can community meal on Saturday December 15 from noon to 8 p.m.with hot soup provided by The Stop Community Food Centre. All proceeds will support The Stop.

Best of all (for me), Michael will be participating in the marathon Dickens read that starts today at 5 p.m. and continues until Saturday evening when the Festival wraps up.  He will be reading from the end of Oliver Twist -- which is how I am in a position to know about Fagin's fate, sorry about the spoiler -- at or around 9:15 and 9:45 on Saturday December 15th. With more than 90 readers participating over four days, it's a masterpiece of organization and scheduling. Last year's marathon reading (of the King James Bible) came in very close to the projected times.

The entire reading will be streamed live and can be watched on the Word Festival website starting at 5 p.m. today.

For more information and tickets to performances, visit youngcentre.ca/thewordfestival.