Changes Afoot in the Performing Arts
by Scott Rollans

On the stage, the environment has stepped out from the background scenery and into the spotlight. More and more performing artists find their inspiration in nature's beauty, and in the rapidly escalating battle to preserve it.

Environment Views met three such performers recently. Although their work varies widely in form and intent, playwright Brian Paisley, dancer Maria Formolo and composer R. Murray Schafer have all been touched by the environment muse.

With his ever-present pony tail and blue jeans, you don't need to see Brian Paisley's birth certificate to know he grew up in the sixties. Still, the founder of Edmonton's Fringe Theatre Festival expresses shock at his new image as an environmentalist playwright.

"When I was first called up about this article, I kept trying to deny it, that I was writing about the environment," he laughs. "Ultimately you're writing about how it affects people. It's just that the environment is an interesting dramatic reality. It's a point for extreme action and extreme belief."

Paisley has devoted a lot of thought to the environment lately, whether or not he's prepared to admit it. He's busy with the first draft of a screenplay, an "eco-thriller" entitled Forever Green. His other work-in-progress, a commissioned play called Bulldozer and Little Rainbow is bound to excite controversy when Edmonton's Chinook Theatre tours it through Northern Alberta.

Bulldozer follows a young urban kid as he visits his native grandfather in the North. The two walk the old man's trap line, and encounter a young white woman surveying the area for a logging company. As it becomes clear that his grandfather's way of life is being threatened, the boy must choose whether or not to act.

The environmental dilemma grew naturally out of the characters and setting, says Paisley. "I didn't set out to write about the environment - 'Yes, I'll write a story about logging in Northern Alberta.' But you start writing about Northern Alberta and it's pretty hard to avoid it. It's a bit like writing about South Africa and ignoring apartheid. And really, if you're writing about contemporary life, you're bound to eventually run up against an environmental question. It seems to me totally irresponsible to ignore it.

"Obviously, with a native Indian in Northern Alberta who's going to lose his trap line, who's way of life is changing, the chances are pretty good that it has something to do with us. And the chances are more than good that it has something to do with industrial development."

Paisley's use of native characters places him in the centre of another controversy. Many question the right of non-natives to portray native characters and issues in their work.

"I don't know what the answer to that is," says Paisley. "It's almost like saying I couldn't write about anything except male Northern Ireland immigrants to Canada, since that's the only thing I've really experienced. I find that very uncomfortable. I'm not black, but I can still have a black character, surely.

"I'm certainly not an expert on natives, but I think I've got some empathy for the situation. When I was doing research for the play I met with about three or four elders, talked about the way life has changed on reservations, about trap lines and all sorts of things, and one of the elders said to me, 'You're not part Indian, are you?' I took it as a bit of an endorsement. I thought, 'Okay, at least I'm on the right track.' I don't think that gives me the 'right' to write about it, but I don't think I'd be offended if an Indian wrote about a guy producing festivals in Edmonton."

If environmental concerns crept into Bulldozer, they loom at the centre of Paisley's screenplay Forever Green. In it, he takes the conflict between developers and environmentalists, and pushes it to the extreme.

"I thought, okay, let's predicate a government that is determined to build a super-duper pulp mill at whatever cost. Despite the fact it will devastate Indian land and government land and everything else, it doesn't matter.

"Now, if I'm an environmentalist, I can either protest that, or I can go to something like civil disobedience. Then I thought, what the hell, what happens if somebody gets really pissed off and says 'There's only one way to stop that plant, and it's got to go beyond that.'

"So what I've got is a thriller in which the charismatic leader of an environmental group decides to hire someone to assassinate the leader of the province, for good reason."

Paisley realizes that the violent scenario will ruffle more than a few feathers. "I've mentioned the premise to a couple of environmental people, and the reaction has always been that it's going to set the movement back.

"But that's not what I'm doing. All I'm doing is pushing it to the extreme. I want somebody to tell me why it's not a good thing, because I've got characters giving good strong arguments why this should happen. It's logical. I mean, if you're prepared to stand in front of a bulldozer, are you prepared to kill the guy driving the bulldozer to stop it?

To me that's a curious problem. How far does this war stay non-violent, until somebody looks at a pulp mill and says 'Let's blow the son of a bitch up'?

"At some point in the future, these battles for the environment will become radicalized. Yes, for us in Northern Alberta it seems like a long, long way in the future. But here we are, mismanaging one of the largest forests outside of the rain forests. Things certainly won't erupt in the way I'm writing about it, but hey, that's my job. I'm a storyteller."

Although you won't find any doomsday scenarios in Maria Formolo's work, the Edmonton dancer does share one characteristic with Brian Paisley. While she sees environmentalism as an inevitable component of her work, she's surprised at the emphasis others place on it.

"I wouldn't describe my work as political theatre, or just about environmental concerns," she says, "even though it is throughout all my work." Still, she'd be the last to suggest that her work has no message. "For me, art is also beauty and entertainment, but it has to have a personal meaning."

Often, that personal meaning takes an environmental shape. "Not every work I do is consciously, politically oriented towards that, but I was given a very deep appreciation for my place in nature from my parents and my upbringing in the Northern United States, in the forests. So that's always been a very deep part of my soul and my expression. Dancers who are brought up in the Bronx or in New York have a very different way of looking at the environment."

Formolo's career turned "green" very suddenly, almost twenty years ago, when she first heard whale song. "I heard this sound on my radio one morning on the way out to my dance class, and it just grabbed my soul. I got hold of the record, and started reading about the whales. I created The Whale Dance, one of my first really, really powerful choreographies, using the voice of the whales. It was dedicated to all species on the Earth who are facing extinction."

A recent work, Spiral, looks at nature through self-reflection. "I don't see that much difference between the inner environment and the outer environment. In Spiral I'm talking about the rain forests of the world, but I'm also talking about water as part of each human being.

"Clear water is our life. This planet is unique, in the solar system anyway, in that we have free water. The Spiral looks at the human being as a microcosm. We have all of the universe inside of us. We have some star dust inside of us, we have water, earth, air, fire, trees."

Exploring these "energy centres of the body", Formolo says, helps her feel grounded, even when she's in her office eight floors above street level. She hopes that, through Spiral, she can communicate that feeling.

However, while dance is an ideal form of emotional expression, Formolo doesn't hesitate to use language when needed. Before each segment of the piece, she addresses the audience directly. "I decided to actually talk about it, so people will be clued in. I explain to the audience, 'Here are the energy centres of the body, and here's how I'm working with them. Dance is my meditation.'"

Many see the influences of other cultures in her work. Formolo maintains that her dances are strictly personal expressions, but she finds it interesting, even exciting, that people find their own philosophies buried within her work. "When I performed in Japan, people kept saying, 'Oh, you must have studied Japanese culture!"

Of all Canada's performing artists, none can match composer R. Murray Schafer's devotion to blending art and the environment. While his colleagues lobby governments for new state-of-the-art concert halls, Schafer creates music for the great outdoors.

One of his most famous works, The Princess of the Stars, begins in the pre-dawn glow on the shore of a mountain lake. The audience hears the haunting, loon-like aria of the Princess, sung from the opposite shore. As the sun rises, the dawn birds begin to sing. The drama unfolds.

"Princess of the Stars is set in the environment, but more than that, it actually uses the elements of nature as a component in the piece," says Schafer, on the phone from his farm in Ontario. "For instance, the lighting is really just the dawn. One of the most neglected masterpieces of the twentieth century is the sunrise. Nobody gets up to see it anymore."

Six years ago in Banff, however, Schafer managed to change that. "In fact, lots of people came from Edmonton and drove all night," he marvels. "I met a lot of young people at performances who said that they left at midnight, from a party probably, drove all night and got there at five in the morning to see the show.

The show goes on rain or shine. That kind of unpredictability would make a conventional artist cringe, yet Schafer sees it as an asset. "I think there's a sense of awe when you go to Princess of the Stars no matter what the weather is like. I've been to performances when it was pouring rain, and they were some of the most beautiful I've ever seen. One really can't believe that these boats are moving in and out of the mist and the dark water. It's magical."

Schafer doesn't use that term lightly. In fact, he was delighted by the reaction of one little girl who saw the Banff production. "She said the animals were just pretend, but the Princess was real! She saw through the thing to something that was higher, in a way.

"The audience is really captivated by something like that. There's an atavistic desire on the part of a very large segment of modern civilized humanity, that something is somehow missing. The contact with nature seems to be missing in most people's lives."

The key to reestablishing that contact, according to Schafer, lies in creating a new mythology to celebrate nature. "With native mythology of any kind, the fact that you celebrate particular natural phenomena dignifies them in a way. In other words, it's not just 'a mountain', it's a special mountain, and it has a special story or legend associated with it. The lake where Princess of the Stars is done is not just any old lake. It's the lake where the Princess of the Stars was held prisoner.

"That's in a way what I'm trying to redo, to bring us back to that kind of consciousness, where we have a respect for some of the things that are around us in nature because they have a spiritual power or mythology associated with them."

If Princess of the Stars demanded an unusual level of commitment from its audiences, Schafer has spent the last few years working on a piece which goes a great deal further.

"It will take place in a forest, and it lasts for a week. The audience goes and camps in the forest, and under the supervision of various master craftsmen and master artists, they create the actual work, which is titled And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon.

Once again, Schafer has been gratified by the response. "I simply started to mention it around to a few people, 'Are you interested in coming with me up into the bush and creating a piece?' It's taken three years now, but I have eighteen volunteers who are coming, some of them from Germany, some from the States, some from Canada. They're paying their own way each year to do it, and they're doing a lot of homework in preparation for each year's gathering. I think that's the kind of awareness one has to expect.

"It's working marvelously well, because of the power of being in a camp for a week, and seeing how you can harmonize and draw on the natural forces like dawn, and sunset, and the rising moon. You begin to create rituals that are associated with all of those phenomena. And those rituals can be very simple. For instance, every morning at sunrise, one of the musicians plays some music across the lake, and that wakes us up. Similarly, when the campfire is finished at night, somebody again plays a piece of music across the lake, and that's the signal for the entire camp to go quiet."

Schafer credits his environmental awakening to a decision to leave Simon Fraser University in 1975 and move to a farm. "People who live in cities get the impression that when something goes wrong you phone a human to come and fix it up. If something goes wrong with your fridge, you phone a specialist and he'll fix it. If something goes wrong with your body you go to the doctor and he'll give you a transplant. Whereas in nature you accept things. You accept that there is sudden death, that there's violence. There's an incredible sort of intensity and beauty that makes you feel that you're an organic creature like the nature you're observing.

Despite the revolutionary nature of his work, Schafer refuses to accept that he's in any way extraordinary. "I'm really surprised that there aren't more people doing it, quite frankly. The only reason I can conclude that they're not, that most of them are still writing pieces for synthesizers or concert halls or whatever, is that you can't sell environmental music. You can't make big bucks out of it.

"I would call myself a political composer in that sense. I think that art can affect people's attitudes. I'm more interested in helping to bring about changes that I feel are desirable and necessary than in simply perpetuating the rottenness that I see around."

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