Now Y're Flyin'

2006-08-17T10:11:00.000-07:00

Growing up a Newfoundlander of Cockney parentage who later lived in French Quebec, I developed a fascination for accents, gestures, and other distinguishing cultural features. I perform what I call docu-dances: staged one-woman shows I research, choreograph, and perform, working with the rhythm of voices and language like a musical ‘score’.

My parents are from the East End of London - there are many true Cockneys in my family! They came to Canada in 1964 when Dad got a job selling Ruston fishing engines in Newfoundland. He also got the acting bug. The St. John’s Players, an amateur company composed of many British ex-pats, took my parents under their lively social wing and my father on to many acting and directing awards, as well as a professional actor status.

So between the English accents at home, the many Newfoundland accents outside, and an actor at the dinner table, we kids grew up playing with voices like some families do music. And with dancers for parents, we were always on the move. With Socialists for parents, we developed a great hunger for the stories of peoples’ struggles and triumphs.

At first my own interest in working with people lead me to medical school, but a vague 19 year old’s notion that there must be better ways to treat the body (than giving drugs when it breaks down), combined with bouts of crying when I’d go see dance and theatre, lead me to leave medicine after two years and travel to Montreal to study dance full time.

The first time I worked with text and dance was at the start of the first Gulf War: George Bush’s state of the Union address became my ‘music’. I marched and danced a dance of death and pain in response to his mechanical words. This was followed by female friends from St. John’s discussing the war and their anger with it, and ended with Bessie, a midwife from the coast of Newfoundland, talking so gently about the most beautiful thing she’d known: bringing life into the world.

After that I was hooked. It’s hard to keep Newfoundlanders quiet anyway – we are still a highly oral culture, our accents and expressions having been preserved by the isolation of the massive bays that make up our ragged, 10,000 mile-long coastline. We didn’t join Canada until 1949 and roads didn’t connect us until long after that. The accents of Devon, Dorset, Waterford and others can still be heard in their pure form from 2-300 years ago.

Bessie the midwife inspired me to go out and record the life stories of people whose accents are disappearing with the advent of television (which many did not get until the 1970s) and whose way of life is going with the emptying of our rural communities. Cod was the reason Newfoundland was declared the first British colony in 1583. But there has been a complete ban on cod fishing here since 1992.

And that is when I started my interviews. Vernon Petten is a fisherman Dad had worked with since he arrived here. While we ate sweet cod cheeks in his kitchen Vernon told us, in an accent straight from Devon, stories of the good days of the fisheries and of his life,:

“Like years now in the early 70s,’71, we’d ‘ave a MILLion pounds of gutt’d cawd (cod) aboard, what we calls a gutt’d ‘ead awn (head on).

And my grandmudder, Aunt Mariah ‘er name was, she used to walk from Long Pond to ‘Arbour Grace, walk the train tracks. They say she took salmon with her and she'd strap them to her back and she'd walk along. 40 mile! Now, she was some tough, now, wasn't she? Yuh, she'd strap them salmon to ‘er back, and she'd walk along. And she'd do ‘er knittin' along the way."

From there I traveled mostly on my own, sometimes with a friend. I will arrive in a community and ask at the B&B where I’m staying, on the bus into town, at the local shop – “who’s a good storyteller here? Not traditional stories handed down from generation to generation, but people who can make doing the laundry sound interesting?” And invariably one or two people come to mind automatically.

A phone call and an inviting of myself over for a cup of tea is usually the start to the relationship. I describe who I am, “where I belong to”, and slowly introduce the idea of recording our conversation. I explain how I love the way a person’s life can be a microcosm of the history, politics, and essence of a place. I explain how I make stories into a ‘play’, with music and dance. And I ask their permission to do so with their stories.

I have been refused outright once – the first time I asked! But it has been fairly clear sailing since. We love to tell our stories.

On Newfoundland’s isolated South coast, where you can still only travel by boat or helicopter, the B&B owners themselves became the subjects. On the island of Ramea the woman was not the epitomy of the hospitable Newfoundlander:

“Oh my god, friggin’ box just gawt me in tha knee..I 'ates dis kin' a work, it drives me - cleanin' cupboards (cawbarts). Oh dese friggin dawgs got me drove, d'ere worse dan youngsters every tie-em da bow-ell is ahm-pty dey wahnts mow-er. Yes my dear, 'ave whatever you wants, I don't care. I'm feelin’ real shitty to-day! I shouldn'a gawn back ta sleep ahfter I firs' woke up 6 t'irty. Oh my (sighs).”

But Mary Margaret Mullins in Rencontre (pronounced Rown Counter) East was:

“I told 'un I said I can't go takin' in strangers now, because I got tha chimley taken awf, da bridge is all tore up, and da furnace is bein put in now da once - and ya knows ya can't go takin' in strangers in dat state - I would feel h'awkward, ya

know? But dey said we're comin' anyway. So I said cawm awn den. And dey never cawmplayned wa-ence, dey 'ad de toy-em of dere lah-eeves.”

I battled one hundred mile an hour winds and driving rain to get to the house of Martha Rowsell on Quebec’s isolated lower North Shore. Once inside and dry, I was moved by Martha’s humour:

“8 years after our last boy was born, we ‘ad a daughter. “ ‘Ow come you was born?” we should have called ‘er! We called ‘er Bonnie. And that name shot in my mind the morning that girl was born, just like the wink of an eye.”

and the intimate story Martha was willing to tell me:

“My son and I went to Hawke’s Junction for to pick up the h’ashes that – our other son was into that accident up north? In Yellowknife? So we brought the ashes back ‘ere. There was 5 of them altogether ‘ay? They put a bomb! They was all sittin’ in their boxcars, ready for to go in for to go to work, and the bomb was put on the track. Gold mine strike 1992. ‘Ee was just there workin’ one week and a ‘alf. Ee didn’t belong to the union. We talked to ‘im on Father’s Day, we didn’t even know that ‘ee was gone even, from where ‘ee was livin’in ‘Awke’s Junction. And then we got the phone call. My good God.”

We ‘ad to get ‘is ashes back ‘ere. Cause ‘ee wanted it blowin’ in the wind? Up by Jacques Cartier? The monument here on the hill? And we was going to do what ‘ee always wanted to do – ‘ave his ashes blowin’ in the wind. He said it didn’t make no difference which way ‘ee died.”

My favourite meeting was with my sister on Newfoundland’s French peninsula, the Port-au-Port. We were camping in May, a (fool)hardy endeavour in our climate. Rebecca ran into some people on their all-terrain vehicle who said “Sure if we knew you were COM-in, you could ‘ave ‘ad de CAB-in,” a Newfoundland English spoken with French vowels and emPHAsis.

The next night it was pouring rain and sure enough we were in their cabin eating lobster and listening to Julia’s experiences of growing up French:

“And when we moved from the Cape to De Gras, De Gras was all English and we didn't know, the teacher was English, all the kids were English and we were French. So we couldn't communicate with the rest of the kids, see? So me and my two brudders and my sister, we'd speak French between ourselves but right low… because we weren't allowed. Oh no! they would strap us, we weren't allowed to speak French because French wasn't important. Oh nobody spoke French. if you spoke French my dear, you were like that ( indicates low)...”

Julia and Jamus Benoit have become our ‘French Newfoundland Mom and Dad.’

Julia was the first person to see me ‘play’ her on stage. It was the most nervous I have ever been! But she enjoyed it and was proud that her own struggle to maintain her French reflected her whole region – and that people wanted to listen.

Traveling to isolated communities gets challenging because of the time and cost involved. A show like Taking in Strangers, in which I play 20 different people in 90 minutes, took 3 years to put together. While the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council has always supported me strongly, their funds are modest. My work does straddle the lines between dance and theatre, so at the national level it has not been always easy to find funding. But the Canada Council for the Arts did come through eventually, the delay probably partly due to my learning curve in describing this blend of art and community work!

I have toured my work across Canada – to everything from a performance art festival in Vancouver, dance festivals in St. John’s, Toronto and Montreal, to a community development conference in Quebec. I have performed in venues interested in Canadian culture in Germany, Italy, Iceland and Brazil. My favourite place has probably been schools, where in individual classrooms we can make links with the history, geography and culture of our country through the work. And I can get the kids or their adults making their own work based on local culture through dance, stories, video or radio.

Touring the show back to the communities is not easy at all! The travel costs alone within our huge country are exorbitant. But this November a show I do with 3 musicians from the Port-au-Port (on the music, dances and stories of the region) will travel the whole province, at the invitation of our provincial government. 1800 miles of driving and a couple of long flights will take us there!

The work has a strong community focus. It is not for all audiences. But those either interested directly in Newfoundland and Quebec culture (I have also made shows on New York and England), or more widely in modern storytelling and new ways of making dance, or in making links with their own rural experiences, seem to enjoy the honesty and fresh presentation of these stories.

A big challenge has been in bringing in visual elements. I was nervous in the past to show the people I play – what if I didn’t stand up to it? But a naughty video editor put some interview footage into a demo of my work – and it worked! So now I include slides and where possible video and voiceover of my interviewees, and it only adds depth to the shows.

The final element that makes the work meaningful for me is the one I started with, dance. Telling people’s own stories, in their own words and accents is extremely fulfilling. Sometimes I tell them as straight theatre. But some stories lend themselves to moving through space, exaggerating gestures or illustrating words with movements that expand into mime and sometimes abstract into full-blown modern dance. As Mrs Giovannni, a 105 year-old midwife from Blackpool who worked Newfoundland’s south coast for many years recently reminded me, “When you’re dancing you’re free.” And when you’re dancing to real stories you’re flying.

Welcome to docudance

2006-08-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone this is the official docudance blog. Check back to get further information about my antics as I create more dance...