Mathew Herbert, 1st prize for obsessive and wonderful recording methods

I wish I could say the final result was more amazing. I mean, it ends up being well crafted and listenable ambient dance music, and considering how many crappy versions of that exist, I guess that's already great. But, whatever you think of the final result, the means he uses to get there are amazing and beautiful. In this video he's up in a hot air balloon, or sitting in the ocean waves recording drum tracks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktBApsVyCm4



These days I'm all about process... the means justifying the ends... and what a wonderful process this would be... I'm gonna make sure my next project ends up with me doing research in a hot air balloon!

books come alive

Thanks New Zealand film board for this extraordinary piece of animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0

Theatre Fails America... Canada too?

Great essay by Monologist Mike Daisey on American theatre. Or perhaps the slow death of the possibility of ever having a paying career in the theatre in America.


"The regional theater movement tried to create great work and make a vibrant American theater tradition flourish.

That dream is dead. The theaters endure, but the repertory companies they stood for have been long disbanded. When regional theaters need artists today, they outsource: They ship the actors, designers, and directors in from New York and slam them together to make the show.

Not everyone lost out with the removal of artists from the premises. Arts administrators flourished as the increasingly complex corporate infrastructure grew. Marketing and fundraising departments in regional theaters have grown hugely, replacing the artists who once worked there, raising millions of dollars from audiences that are growing smaller, older, and wealthier. It's not such a bad time to start a career in the theater, provided you don't want to actually make any theater."





when I think of some of the amazing, huge, beautiful theatres I have performed in all over the world that sit empty most of the time because it is simply too expensive to program theatre in the spaces that were designed to perform theatre, I wonder how true this essay is everywhere right now.

you can find the whole article here

Playing in the sandbox

A few shots of the wonderful production of Hamlet with Forward Theatre. I had the pleasure of playing Hamlet's Father (aka 'the ghost') and the Player King.





It was a great production. Sometimes, when you're doing a show, you just have to put your head down and ignore some choices that the production team are making and just do your best job with your part.





Chris Legacy (the director) managed to pull off a great looking production that was an amazing present for the actors and for the audience. It was smart, challenging, inventive and tragic. A huge sandbox surrounded by tiers of risers with chairs and cushions, and the whole scattered with piles of lovely red and gold autumn leaves that Chris must have been collecting for weeks.





In behind Chris hung a huge curtain that served a dozen purposes - a backdrop to anchor the set, the closet in which Polonius hangs, a ghostly shade in which the Ghost appears, a red river of blood when Hamlet kills Polonius, the shroud for his body after it falls.... etc etc The Fight Choreographer for the show was remarkable - the various kinds of violence that are so necessary to this piece looked extraordinary.

Jeremy Trite, our technician, took a pic of the end of the Player King's speech... you can recognize me by the top of my head...




I'm not in the final scene of slaughter at the court so I was able to race into the balcony and snap a quick pic of the final scene before racing back down for the bows. Here's a blurry shot of the final kill of Claudius. (Dagger to the throat... ouch!)

The most amazing scat

I think I've posted this before. But couldn't resist again. The scintillating young Louis Armstrong in the prime of his invention...

hacking at the brazilians

Sick like a dog this weekend, had tickets for the amazing Brazilian singer Gal Costa, so took at taxi down and sat huddled up with a huge smile on my face in the back of the amazing Massey hall. Sadly she didn`t do my favourite, `Baby`written with Caetano Vaeloso, but she was simply wonderful.



now I`m heading to bed with a hot toddy and whole bunch of aspirin and some beautiful bossa nova rhythms dancing in my befuddled brain...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTUnRlW_rVE

Giving up on the post

Sick at home in bed today. Lisa brings both papers home. The national papers. Not sure why they get that name... An easy read of forgettable articles about... well, I can't really remember. A self serving article by Conrad Black which was supposed to be about how he finds redemption in teaching, but is really about his love of long, pretentious sentences about himself. I go back to Ruskin.

Couple of years ago I wrote a show that I took across Canada that featured the National Post and the Globe and Mail as active participants. I spent the two months on tour cutting up the arts sections. I divided articles written about Canada from articles about (mostly) crap pop culture from the States. Movies, books, computer games. By the end of the run I had an immense clear garbage bag with articles that were advertising for American products that needed to be sold to Canadians, and a small clear kitchen bag of stories that were actually about Canadian culture. I carried those on stage and tried to talk about how strange it was to come from living abroad to a country that seemed to have no offical outlet for its own worldview. A culture that for an outsider would seem to have no interest or respect for itself.

They scream about how terrible the decline in readers is, but will they cure that by creating more empty and uncontroversial articles about ... well, mostly about nothing. I think we're desperate for information that actually connects to the life we are living. And I think on some level we're clear when we're being offered smoke and mirrors, bait and switch. Culture sections that are ads for celebrity movies. Lifestyle sections that are twelve pages of product placement.

I've had the good luck to live in countries where papers were filled with articles that took hours to read. Articles that were challenging and maybe even ( shock, horror!) made me work to understand. Info that made me want to talk about the issues over dinner.... that made me, well, at least remember what they had been about.





I go back to Ruskin. The Nature of Gothic. How to tell good architecture from bad. He says, "First, see if it looks like it had been built by strong men; if it has the sort of toughness, and largeness, and nonchalence, mixed in places with the exquisite tenderness which seems always to be the sign-manual of the broad vision, and massy power of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it. If the building has this character it is much in its favour.'

there's some truths to talk about over dinner.


I wish the culture mavens of Can-culture would dare to confront work that has this sort of complexity. The country is full of it. It just seems to scare the shit out of the self proclaimed national reporters and editors of Canadian culture.

Memories of Bonnie Scotland

It rained in Edinburgh. A lot. In fact, it was the rainiest year in over 100 years. Scotland is renowned for its soggy climate, so imagine how wet was. Rain on the castle, rain on the cobblestone streets and rain on the umbrellas of folk waiting in line to buy tickets for my show Whiskey Bars.

It was wet, soggy theatre madness. You think the Canadian Fringes are crazy – they have nothing on this elephant of a festival - over 2000 different theatre shows were performing. Which adds up to 19 000 (that's right - nineteen thousand!) performers wandering the streets trying to get audiences to come to their shows. Over the course of the three week festival around 1.7 million tickets were sold. And for our whole last week I watched the rain fall on my glorious sold-out line-ups… The average size for an audience at a show in Edinburgh is 8 people (that’s right, just Eight warm bodies), so a full house is a dream come true.

We arrived here on August 1st as an unknown Canadian one-man show. When we walked into our tiny venue we didn't expect much – it was seedy, to put it politely. A crumbling door at the end of a dank alleyway beside a gloomy ancient cemetery. The theatre is a 500-year-old vaulted church basement. Right next door is one of Edinburgh's least glamorous massage parlours, and on the other side armored cars bring in criminals to the Law Courts that sit high above. Reviewers have said complimentary things like "the seedy, dank atmosphere of the Vault creeps into every sinew of this performance".





I can't argue...but the locale was perfect for a one-man exploration of the music of Kurt Weill--composer of Mack the Knife. Weill basically invented a whole new style of music theatre in the 1920's, working with Bertold Brecht. I've been obsessed with Weill's music for years - I first heard his songs in a cabaret in East Berlin in the 1980's while living in a squat in West Berlin. How could I not fall in love after the glamour of squeaking through Checkpoint Charlie, sitting in a dank bar watching a cabaret show while drinking harsh Eastern Bloc vodka.

I first performed Whiskey Bars at the 2000 Toronto Fringe Festival. It took me years of touring, reworking the show and tweaking the script before I felt like it was good enough to bring to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. At the beginning in Edinburgh we played to audiences of three and four enthusiastic friends. We begged the folk who work in the theatres to come and check out the show, hoping to start some buzz. And amazingly, it worked. Britain's prestigious theatre mag, The Stage, dropped by & gave us a double thumbs-up: "Like Hedwig with far better melodies" they said. We got Five Stars from The Edinburgh Fringe Review, and Five Stars from Edinburgh's Broadway Baby Review. (you can read all the reviews here)

So, amazingly, for once, it worked. A little show wandered into town on a wing and a prayer, our whole gamble paid off (we even covered the cost of getting over there) the glowing reviews kept stacking up. The only question for the summer was, of course, could we handle any more British weather?

Whiskey Bars at Bread and Circus in Kensington Market every Tuesday at 8pm. Tickets $10.00 at the door, or through www.breadandcircus.ca





yes, that is a tea cozy....

Cease and Desist!

The Cease and Desist on “Whiskey Bars” (my cabaret with the songs of Kurt Weill) arrived from the New York lawyers the day before opening night. It was one of those fine spring Canadian mornings—after the rains but before the mosquitoes—and things had been looking pretty good as I wandered into the Festival office. I’d just come from the Hamilton Festival where “Whiskey Bars” had gone famously; they’d even used my crazed miniature piano promo image for the general Festival poster.

But I should have known something was wrong when the festival director leapt up, handed me a fax and pushed me back out the door, obviously wanting nothing to do with anything with the name of a New York law office printed across the top.

I sat on the steps of the building and read: “Cease and Desist.” In accordance with the theatrical and copyright controls over Kurt Weill’s music, I was hereby forbidden from performing his works and would be held liable in court for the unlicensed use of his music to this point. All further performances of the show “Whiskey Bars” with the songs of Kurt Weill, must be cancelled. Period.

But, but, but…I reread. Unlicensed. That wasn’t right—I had a license! I had paid for a standard contract with the Canadian society that deals with music sung live in concert. I’d been warned that the Kurt Weill Foundation was strict about using Weill’s legacy, so I’d tried to do the right thing. And this was a tiny one-man cabaret! Really tiny. Just me, with a bit of pancake makeup and a handful of songs. With the string of legal names on this letter, it felt like swatting a tiny Canadian mosquito with a huge New York Yankees baseball bat.

My first instinct was the one that has carried me boldly forward all my life in this career — I would run and hide. If I headed into the uncharted North, it might be weeks before they tracked me down. I could live off the grid, hunting for my meat, scavenging a few meager crops; I could survive for years, madly singing Weill alone, until their helicopters found me.

But as I headed home to pack my bag, a sense of desperate calm descended. I knew the Foundation forbade any unauthorized theatrical interpretations of Weill’s music theatre. But my show had songs sung pretty much as I’d do them in concert, set in a dramatic throughline. I had tried to follow the rules. Hadn’t I? Perhaps I could reason with them, beg with them, persuade them. Lawyers are people with hearts and emotions, aren’t they?

I changed my route and headed for a new and empowering destination: the local internet café. Several mega-espressos later, my fears seemed ludicrous. I had to confront this team of authoritarians and nit pickers, show them they couldn’t cow me. In a caffeinated frenzy, I drafted faxes, emails, printed up propositions, and by noon I had summed up my strongly worded missives in a couple of brief bullet points:

‘Hi, ummmmm, really, really, sooooooo really sorry about this. Super sorry, in fact. Honest, truly, I thought it was all legal and, in fact, I kind of still think the show is really good, in fact, people seem to like it… could we work something out, that is, just let me know, whenever you can, no hurry, I’ll be waiting. All the best. Hope the weather’s nice in Gotham.’

And attached to that threatening email, I sent them a full script of the show, a list of the songs I was singing, my Hamilton reviews, an explanation of what I was trying to do with the songs. I wanted to add “xo” at the bottom, just for luck.

So I waited. And I waited. I could have phoned New York, but honestly, when dealing with teams of lawyers, I felt like a Neanderthal, all inarticulate grunts. The day went by with no email reply. Opening night was 24 hours away, so I returned to the Festival office to see if I could put off canceling the show till the last minute. They cringed but agreed.

I spent a terrible sleepless night. My whole summer had been planned around doing a Canadian tour of different cities with this show— this would mean months of admin and rehearsal and fees down the drain.

The next morning there was a curt email from New York. “Dear Mr. Duthie. Performances at this festival only can continue. We will review your material. Thank you.”

It was like reading a SMS text message after a first date – Yes, they said 'can'. I love them. And hey, they thanked me! That must mean they love me! Everything is going to be all right. I kicked my heels, said blessings to the gods of theatre and headed out to do the show.

And somehow the deities of theatre did smile on me: my script and letter arrived during the Weill Foundation’s annual directors meeting. Weill experts and scholars, singing stars like the incredible interpreter of Weill’s music Teresa Stratas…all these people were actually meeting when my note arrived. And they liked my script. They sent me a letter from the Foundation saying that the Board had loved my show, loved my reviews and that from henceforth I would receive the enthusiastic support of the Kurt Weill Foundation for my efforts to sing the work of this most amazing composer.

So now I just have to do Weill justice.

Whiskey Bars every Tuesday at Bread and Circus in Kensington Market - tickets at www.breadandcircus.ca

Opening Whiskey

Played the first night last week of Whiskey Bars in Toronto. Fab! A great house of friends and theatre folk and a great cabaret setting. Bread and Circus in Kensington Market is perfect! The Vampyre paintings (look closely at the above pic) in the trendy little bar up front add to the general decadent cabaret atmosphere.





And the tiny theatre has a nice lighting hang, good sound and puts me in the lap of the audience. Which suits the show perfectly.





I'll be curious to see if the show develops a relationship to the Toronto audiences in the next 5 weeks. It's developed into such a dark story about this obsessed man on some personal road to redemption that I never know now whether it's going to click with the general 'zeitgeist' in a city. The Scottish at the Ed Fringe got it, but they have a dark, dark sense of humour... come to think of it, maybe that's where I got mine...

Creatures from the Id!!!!

A night out at La Villette Park in the north of Paris for their outdoor movie series - with their amazing inflatable full size movie screen. A picnic of fine food, a crowd French movie enthusiasts, a lovely evening and a truly wonderfully shlocky B movie - the Forbidden Planet

Up in the air

First day back home in Paris. Totally, brutally jet-lagged after long flight from Vancouver. Lisa drags me down to the Ferris Wheel in the Tuileries Gardens... I protest, a little, but find that in fact I still really like being up in the air... maybe its just that the view is better when you're not at 30,000 feet.

Fire on the Water

Couldn't resist posting some pics from the web of the amazing lightening storm on Saturday night. - and none of these pics are photo-shopped! - I was having a drink with a friend and when we saw the light we jumped up thinking there was a boat on fire in the harbour.

First an incredible Orange sunset, and then an immense lightening storm...

Fire down below

I flew to Vancouver to see my Mom yesterday and we went right over the fires in the Okanagan... the smoke had shrouded the whole of the Rockies and then we came to this very impressive blaze... apparently they evacuated another 3000 people today - you can see why...

Footage - the Barker

edited video of latest Cabaret work - The Barker's Spiel. Songs of Tom Waits, Nirvana, Jacques Brel...




first presented at the London Fringe Festival, The Barker's Spiel plays with cliches and stereotypes of cabaret and lounge singers, mixing and matching singers and songs.

the London Free Press says

"Bremner Duthie promises that miracles will happen as he opens his new show The Barker's Spiel at the London Fringe. He also offers a "side order of belief" and a "tiny sliver of hope."From carnival barker to Las Vegas performer to Berlin Cabaret singer, Duthie gives us the scoop on life as an entertainer. Everyone's looking to be entertained -- and Duthie serves up wares such as white-fingered monkeys and red velvet hats, juggling, singing and dancing…..