Longer than a minute

A while ago I was cutting down some footage from Whiskey Bars and I showed it to a friend. He saw that it was three minutes long (cut from an hour long show). He shook his head and said, 'No one will ever watch this. It's too long. Get it down to below a minute." I took his advice, for better or worse, but lately it's been nagging me. When did our concentration level get to the point where more than a minute of focus seems like an effort. I recently watching the opera Les Troyens - all five and a half hours of it - and I can't say I really got into it until the second hour.

Anyway... enough ranting. I write that just because I'm putting up a new video for a song from the new album, 'The Sky Was Blue', and its four and a half minutes long. Quite a stretch for the new age. An homage to The Talking Heads, and the songwriting skills of David Byrne. Heaven.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvkRycrxro8



filmed in the Yukon in Dawson City, and at the best bar in Canada, the Pit, at the Westminster Hotel.

Unforgettable

Just back in from the most extraordinary piece of theatre. A Chilean troup performing 'Sin Sangre' (Without Blood) based on a book (short story?) by a Chilean writer. The most exquisite mixture of film and theatre. The whole performed behind one transparent movie screen, and in front of another, allowing them to layer amazing effects. And combined with a beautiful, simple, heartbreaking script. Just amazing. I am still in shock from how powerful the whole thing was. Combining video and theatre is hard enough at the best of times, but making a piece based around this combination, and then making it into real theatre.... wow!

I post the trailer for the piece, which does it no justice, and link to a film (of the film) of the whole piece from a festival in France.

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



and an 'arte' video of the whole show

http://liveweb.arte.tv/fr/video/Sin_Sangre_au_festival_Temps_d_images/

You never stop

The end of the year coming up and I'm trying to wrap up a million projects, while do the admin for a million projects coming up and strangely enough I don't have a million hours in the day to do it. Sometime I curse the fact as an artist you stumble out of bed, wash your face (not compulsory) and then there you are, working. And the day continues until late at night you find yourself... working. And sometimes I bless that fact. Since if you love your work, it means you get to keep on doing it, and doing it, and doing it.

Here's Baryshnikov in his 50's working and working...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZ0KLLzs5U



If I'm lucky, I'd like to be doing what I do, like he's still doing what he does. That would be amazing.

Most boring, and most documented?

Sometime in the ancient pre-history of the 1980's I had the pleasure of seeing the first North American gig of the band New Order (the reformed Joy Division, after the suicide of their lead singer). The excitement was intense, the crowd was pumped up and we were jammed against the edge of the stage desperate to see what was going to happen.

About half an hour into the gig, I started to notice my attention, along with most of the crowd, start to wander away. Skinny hipster musicians (ok, they weren't called hipsters then, but you know what I mean) staring at the keyboards and synthesizers and pressing buttons. I don't think they even looked up at us or said anything. The rest of the gig was spent at the bar, with the rest of the crowd, occasionally checking over our shoulders to see if they were 'doing anything'.

Not until this iphone concert have I considered that there could be much, much more boring ways of making music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BfPHs-hdkU

Amazing review for Lisa's new (first!) novel

Read the whole article here.





a couple of choice quotes

"Toronto-based Lisa Pasold's debut novel is as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker."

and

"Millard is an exceptionally refreshing heroine -- wonderfully independent and completely unwilling to rely on anyone else for her needs. Millard's first-person account of her story is wonderful. Though she's celebrated for her bluffing skills during games of poker, she's thoughtful and straightforward with the reader."

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...