UPBAG

if you want to come to the opening on thursday at 8pm at buddies then hit me with an email:
darren@mammalian.ca

i forgot to tell yvonne that the HPS offices in Pittsburgh that I will be visiting are in the 10th floor of the "cathedral of learning", the gigantic phallus in the middle of the U Pitt campus with themed classrooms that she told me about when she went to a conference there. I'll definitely have to make a replica.

so based on a couple of super-short conversations i've had with some baggies, i've included you guys in a grant i'm writing about an upcoming show. at this point, these are simply ideas - no committment is required. i talk about soft city cause that's the only think i know about. let me know if this is okay. it's going to the tac and the oac - where we get stable funding and to the cananda council where we are trying to get stable funding. let me know if any of this is problematic.

The Encyclopedia of Us – workshop

The Encyclopedia of Us is a new work and a cross-country collaboration between Mammalian Diving Reflex and Vancouver’s Theatre Replacement, a new company formed by former Boca Del Lupo members Maiko Bae Yamamoto and Jaime Long. In January 2005 Darren went to Vancouver to collaborate with Theatre Replacement on their inaugural show, The Empty Orchestra, serving as co-writer and director of the piece. During rehearsals The Encyclopedia of Us was conceived.

The Encyclopedia of Us will combine the interests of both companies, utilizing Mammalian Diving Reflex’s obsession with text-based idea-driven works, and Theatre Replacement’s dedication to a physical vocabulary and developing material in rehearsal. With Mammalian Diving Reflex, we usually have at least a first draft of the script before we enter rehearsal, while Theatre Replacement begins with improvisation, working on their feet to find characters and circumstances, and only later sitting down to hammer out text where required. With The Encyclopedia of Us we will challenge both companies by combining these processes, spending time as a group in rehearsal at our laptops, as well as jamming on our feet.

At this point the details of the piece remain vague but the parameters strict. Traveling through the alphabet we will share with the audience small details of our lives that explore the theme of friendship, the mechanics of friendship, what it means to be friends, the lifeline of friendships and the challenges to friendships. Building on the more recent relational approach in Mammalian Diving Reflex’s work, we will use ourselves and our lives as material, creating a gently interactive piece that attempts to bring the possibility of friendship into the theatre.

The Encyclopedia of Us will begin its creation process with a two-week workshop at Toronto's Theatre Centre as part of Mammalian Diving Reflex's annual residency. Theatre Replacement, (Maiko , Jaime, Vancouver director and broadcaster Adrienne Wong, and actor Hazel Venzon) will come here to work with Darren, Naomi and videographer Jon Sasaki to amass the base material for the show.

Discussions have begun with Toronto craft collective Benevolent Arts Guild (BAG) to possibly use their work as a set, in particular their current project Soft City, a replica of a city made from felt and other soft materials. BAG members include Darren, Yvonne Ng, Jason Van Horne (from the City Beautification Ensemble) Rose Bianchinni and Catherine Stinson.

In preparation for our workshop a year from now, Mammalian Diving Reflex and Theatre Replacement have set up a Yahoo Discussion Group and have begun to toss ideas back and forth across the country. A workshop in the fall of 2006 will be hosted by Theatre Replacement in Vancouver, with the goal of premieres in both Toronto and Vancouver in the spring of 2007.

just a quick note: I don't have to project at vazaleen anymore, so I don't have to leave early, but I might still go later on, and others are still encouraged to come too. However, I'm now more drawn to my original plan of going to see Bruce LaBruce's Raspberry Reich at MOCCA tonight, with speakers and party, etc. I can't make it to either of the screenings tomorrow night, so I'm torn. It starts at 8 though, so that would be cutting the craft pretty short.
here's a review

i'm going to have to leave early, because i have to project films at vazaleen and have to be there before 10. so i guess i should leave around 9. you should all come too, but maybe a bit later on. after the band, there will be double dutch skipping on stage! and nirm will be there for her pre-birthday party.

somebody (i.e. me?) has to get something together soon to send to the tv people. so we should discuss that at the meeting. in particular, i think we need something more tangible for yvonne to demo. the "mental processing" stage probably won't make much sense to the average crafter. perhaps an alternate hand-sewing construction phase? perhaps the velcro and city planning stage?

for inviting me, catherine. i'll do my best to behave. in fact, if i actually participate it will be a miracle. but i'll try.

i've been invited to join this blog. not sure by who. are you sure you want my opinion on these matters?

i just opened up the constantines CD i bought last night at wavelength and the booklet thingy has this crazy picture of a bunch of bendy skyscrapers growing up from a field of cars, and inside, the lyrics are written alongside a picture of a highway that might be the gardiner expressway.

(also, i'm testing whether this will get e-mailed to all of us. i think i set the blog up to do that.)

jason wrote:

personally i'm happy building a pre, post or post-post apocalyptic city. but a city devoid of people doesn't necessarily mean that it's cold and dead, in fact teeming with the wild growth of nature it could be far more lovable... and maybe some humans have survived whatever-has-happened and remain tenants. but if we are going to show a city after it has begun to renaturalize should we start thinking about crumbling, vine covered structures?

also look at rem koolhas's 'delirious new york', also from the 70's, it investigates the mythos, visions and aspirations of the big apple outside of it's concrete existence ...and as visual inspiration it's pretty good too, there are drawings of many wonderfully sassy architectural ideas, plus a depiction of the chrysler building in bed (represented as manhattan island) with the empire state building, complete with deflated goodyear blimp condom. tee-hee! i'll see if i can get my hands on this book by the 22nd.

on the topic of the autos, little felt cars would be nice, but they're gonna have to be small! about the size of your baby toe, so i guess they'd be pretty simple... we could decorate them with puffy paint bumpers and headlights and such.

yvonne wrote:

i like the idea of making everything, including the cars rather than buying them. i think lino stuffed cars would be cute. i don't know if my way of thinking about the project works with the unpopulated city/ everyone is dead concept. i kind of see the 'soft city' as opposed to the lifeless ie. cold, rational, rigid city; instead of the hard buildings, it's like the city that you can hug, live among, dream in/about, etc. my initial thinking about soft cities came from a book called Soft City written in the 1970s (by my classmate's dad!) which is considered a pretty seminal early work in this whole cities discourse. Here is a quote from it which captures the essence of Raban's idea really well (and seems to fit with our project so perfectly!):

"For better or worse, [the city] invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that the living city is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relation between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture"

tonight we started our construction projects. yvonne has a skeleton TD centre made, rose has almost finished a brownstone, catherine is letting first canadian place dry, and jason did a lot of "research" on the festival building. perhaps his stuffed building will be ready by the brick and mortar building's grand opening.
We made extensive use of skyscraperpage.com for our research.

Before getting down to business, we feasted on pizza and no-name mac 'n cheese. During dinner we decided that we all should have matching haircuts, modeled after Jason's new do. We also discussed shortening the group's name to just Benevolent Arts Guild, or BAG for short.

meeting adjourned!

and welcome home to darren!

hey guys,

we now have a guild e-mail address that forwards to us all. perhaps not that useful, since it's not too hard to e-mail 3 people at once, but perhaps down the line it might become useful. I don't want to mention the address here so that we won't get attacked by spammers, so let's just say it starts with "theguild" and then has the same domain as my e-mail. get it?

i also invited us all to become members of the blog so that we can login as ourselves and all the posts won't be signed by the upper parkdale benevolent arts guild. it could get confusing.

so, once jason has checked his schedule, let's set up meeting #2!!