Electric Company Theatre

KIM COLLIER ON THE TYRANNY OF NARRATIVE,

AVOIDING STAGNATION, AND BLOODY REVENGE

The Vancouver Review, Fall 2008 

Kim Collier has been on our radar for over a decade, ever since she co-founded the Electric Company Theatre with three cohorts, including her husband, Jonathon Young. The company emerged just ahead of a host of new young theatre groups like Boca del Lupo, Theatre Replacement and NeWorld, all of whom have sought to take theatre to new and interesting places, literally and figuratively. Collectively, they got West Coasters excited about merging technology, place and theatrical vision. Raves were written, new territory marked out, and their ambition grew with each new production.

VR: What is the tone of discussion amongst theatre people in Vancouver?

KC: It’s a very West Coast thing to have a lack of dialogue around theatre. When you travel to other cities in Canada, artists are talking in a really different way. They’re better at articulating the impulses around the work, whereas we talk more about the product—what it is, rather than exploring the work’s foundations. When we began, the stage was dominated by literary works, well acted. But I think there’s curiosity around form and stage techniques, and opportunities have arisen with the advent of new technologies, and that is being explored artistically.

VR: Studies in Motion was like watching a Peter Greenway film, multi-layered eye candy that lost the plot by burying the text.

KC: With SiM we wanted to explore how a play can be delivered along with new technologies. The goal is to have a strong narrative and piece of writing that does move the audience, engages their hearts and minds. If that didn’t happen for you, that’s something we’re trying to achieve with the new version coming up [it will be re-staged in spring 2009 as part of the Playhouse season]. The core wasn’t finished the first time around. We were still writing it when we were in rehearsal—the play itself wasn’t done. But it was a done-looking production, so what you’re saying makes sense to me.

I think there’s a lot of theatre happening in the city that is deliberately non-narrative because our large stages are dominated by those literary-driven theatre pieces. All together it makes for a great theatre community. It allows theatre to be something else, rather than being defined by the tyranny of narrative. That doesn’t have to be the only criteria of what theatre can be, or how it can communicate. Whether it’s associative, visual, episodic or just thematic without being tied to story, I think it’s great because it’s allowing the art form to avoid stagnation.

VR: No Exit seemed both a perfect fit and a radical departure for you. It struck me that the audience was happy to start reflecting. It was palpable—the only time we’ve seen a production so mediated by technology where that happened. The French translation is Behind Closed Doors, and you took that literally and inverted Sartre’s staging concept with what your program introduced as “a live-cinematic interpretation.”

KC: Taking a piece of well-established and really strong writing is new, because all of those companies at PuSh and ours [normally] create our shows from scratch. It was a big experiment. It might not have worked if the audience felt disconnected because the main narrative was on the screens. A lot of people talk about Jonathon [Young]’s role as the Valet being a conduit to the screens—that if we hadn’t had a live presence there it wouldn’t have been the same. I also decided not to make it too filmic but rough and ready, so we brought the actors to and from the camera. Many people thought it wouldn’t work.

All of Sartre’s thematic concerns of alienation, etcetera, are a natural fit for us philosophically, and they remain relevant, but we felt the form was a little dated. And I felt aspects of the play were dated, not in terms of the larger human questions it poses but the specifics, the characters’ context and crises faced in France toward the end of the war. The Cradeau character struggles with cowardice, which wouldn’t resonate so much on the West Coast, where we have so little direct experience with war. We were more in looking at the dynamics between the characters and hearing the embedded philosophies.

VR: We still don’t have many stories emerging, if you will, from out “heartland.” What kind of theatre can emerge from, well, Kitimat?

KC: No wonder! We’re still building our audiences and we don’t have a cultural inheritance to refer to. We live in such a truly exotic place. It’s outrageous! David Ross at [Kamloops’] Western Canada Theatre Company has commissioned many stories to be born out of those landscapes. I can think of a few written for that geographic area, like John Lazarus’ The Trials of Eddy Haymour, about an odd man who created an island in the Okanagan. And of course there’s Thomson Highway’s work Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, to just name two.

VR: What has the presence of large and different cultural groups had on your decisions as a company?

KC: The theatre community always talks about “the mosaic,” and the need for stories to reflect all the cultures that inhabit our city—from the actual stories to who’s on stage. NeWorld, Boca del Lupo and Theatre Replacement all work on that, but the Electric Company doesn’t have that at the front of our mandate. With us, we hope that those from a different cultural descent will find value in the work. I think that diversity of storytelling is finally happening. Anosh Irani comes to mind, as does Kevin Loring’s new play Where the Blood Mixes, and others exploring First Nations issues. We are philosophically colour-blind in terms of casting. But it’s tough, because during the audition process you see that not a lot of actors are coming in to the profession because of family or other expectations. We need more diversity entering the schools and coming out so [that] we see that talent end up on stage. At some point it’ll becomes natural, but we’ve got a ways to go yet.

VR: In a quarter century of attending cultural events, we still largely see the same crowds for each idiom. Audiences still don’t mingle much. But you’re working on that with HIVE, for which several theatre companies produce short installation pieces simultaneously in one building.

KC: With HIVE we were trying to create a theatre “happening,” an event that would reach a different demographic. One impulse was for audience-swapping and those audiences got to know each other’s companies. We’re always thinking, “how do we diversify, access new communities?” I think we’ll see a different audience yet again for the Electric Company at the Belfry in Victoria [a restaging of Brilliant!, about inventor and electrical engineer Nicola Tesla, later this fall] because they don’t come to shows we produce independently.

VR: A “happening” is a very 60’s idea, much older even.

KC: I don’t know about what went on in the 60’s. I’m a very uninformed theatre artist in terms of history. I’m much more intuitive. My life hasn’t afforded me the time to research the past. Sometimes I feel liberated not knowing certain things. We’re informed by all the plays we see and by the artists we work with who are much older than us, and we encounter their experience through collaboration. I was hugely informed by the work of Robert Lepage and Carbone 14 when I lived in Toronto in the 80’d.

VR: Nothing says “Vancouver in summer” better than a downward spiral of violence and vengeance. You directed the rarely staged Titus to critical acclaim, yet it’s generally considered a tough slog on many levels.

KC: With Titus, I thought, “How can I make this as accessible as possible?” I’m a visually driven person; I don’t hear things well. It’s Shakespeare, and some audience members would be coming for the first time, so anything I could do to make it pleasurable and avoid them feeling pushed away needed consideration. I threw a glamorous promenade walk, which represented Saturnius and Tamora’s wedding. And there was a swordfight I developed from a reference to swords merely being drawn. For some, just the language will draw them in, but you need to remember the composition of your audience and be as generous as you can.

The piece looks at what humans can do to each other. We never evolve from our revenge instincts, so we can all relate to those natural, human impulses. The play looks tenuously at what can happen when civilizing constructs fail. Titus is always calling for justice, but there is no justice in Rome at this time because it’s become so corrupt. But instead of ending on the final act of revenge, which is quite dark, I shifted it a bit. I thought it was really important that the audience felt as though they were citizens of the Roman Empire, so I took part of a speech from Titus’ brother Marcus Andronicus and left it for the end:

Now judge what cause had Titus to revenge

These wrongs, unspeakable, past patience,

Or more than any living man could bear.

Now you have heard (seen) the truth,

Have we done aught amiss,--show us wherein,

Speak, Romans, speak; and if you say we shall,

Lo, hand in hand, Lucius and I will fall.

What say you, Romans? What say you?

So it puts the question in the hands of the audience if they would condone these acts from a moral standpoint. I wanted the audience to go away thinking, and not feeling soaked in blood.

VR: And where is The Electric Company heading with its own work?

KC: The piece we’re developing right now is made for the [Arts Culb’s] Stanley Theatre, and refers to its history. It was originally built as a vaudeville stage but became, primarily, a movie house. Ironically, the first film shown there was One Romantic Night, a screen adaptation of the play The Swan by Ferenc Molnar [that] was silent-screen actress Lillian Gish’s first talkie. So we’ve got many theatrical and filmic references to play with. It looks at how stories function, how we are influenced by stories like those from Hollywood, and how they’ve impacted our ideas of who we are. Thematically that’s where we’re headed right now. If you live in a place, the work you do reflects the lives you’re living in that place. Even if a work doesn’t look as if it’s born of a place, in a way it always is.

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