The first act is set in the year 2045. Four war veterans, Lane (Ruthie Pytka-Jones), Tate (Thoby King), Marty (Nicholas LePage), and Haydée (Jedidah Nabwangu), are sequestered in a care facility, under the influence of a drug called Ephembrium. The drug keeps what looks like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at bay by trapping them in the “perpetual present”; their memories blocked and emotions numbed.

Turning back the clock thirty years, the second act transpires in the bar where they initially enlisted and signed up for the drug. Their life-defining moments are shared with Lola (Ruby Iacobelli) and Chloe (Claire Morse), members of a resistance group dedicated to making them reconsider their decision to effectively leave the human race behind.

Bukowski was one of the uniquely idiosyncratic voices of the twentieth century in the U.S.. The greater portion of his work featured intensely personal accounts of his life as a member of the working-class, detailing his drinking, unsettling relationships with women, and the intense pain and drudgery of life. In the recordings of his riotous public poetry readings, he always growls down the microphone with a beer in hand, often threatening to jump off the stage and fight those who interrupt. Burning in Water turns Bukowski’s poems into monologues, stripped of the author’s voice and reshaped by Vanderkruyk’s characters.

Those familiar with Bukowski may find it hard or even confusing to reconcile such clearly autobiographical work with its new context. Despite the play’s ambition, the storyline overall fails to cohere, and the inclusion of Bukowski’s poems is confusing at times, coming at the expense of a clear narrative.

Despite the play’s ambition, the storyline overall fails to cohere, and the inclusion of Bukowski’s poems is confusing at times, coming at the expense of a clear narrative.

The first act also feels devoid of the dramatic development necessary to invest an audience in the action. The former soldiers are a miserable bunch – they complain about their poorly-made sandwiches, argue nonsensically, and recreate toy combat guns. Every jarring and offbeat moment in this act begs the question: what would make these people want to opt-out of being human? But the answer comes too late, making it difficult for the audience to connect to the characters for the whole first half of the show. While the second act is somewhat more engaging, it also features elements that remain unconvincing, such as the arrival of an anti-war movement in the form of the resistance group.

Still, the set and production create distinct and immersive atmospheres for both settings – first a clinical care facility with its checkered vinyl floors and then a bar littered with anti-war posters. There is also no lack of innovation in the production, either – a romantic dialogue plays out between a lonely young recruit and bar staff later in the play, depicted in a series of flirtatious text messages projected against the back of the stage.

The cast is similarly successful throughout. Nabwangu’s monologue as Haydée, in which she recalls the personal pain rooted in her inability to reach out and accept those who loved her, is as powerful as any of Bukowski’s original poems. Pytka-Jones as Lane also stands out with an energetic performance that can swiftly turn the play’s tone on a dime. Effortlessly moving from goofy and awkward extroversion to a bare vulnerability, her body movements echo these shifts – smooth in execution but jarring in their effect. A desperate attempt at intimacy between Nabwangu and Pytka-Jones’ characters gives the play some much-needed energy in its second act.

The play is clearly seeking to find a contemporary interpretation of Bukowski’s work. Vanderkruyk tells The Daily that the play was “a reappropriation more than anything, which is a thing many artists do nowadays and it is how many people interact with their world.” Moreover, her play projects current concerns onto Bukowski’s poetry. “I think that the preoccupations in that play are the ones he might have dealt with if he were alive currently,” Vanderkruyk says.

Bukowski’s strength as a poet surely lay in the immediacy and authenticity of his voice. Bringing the poems in this new context seems like a strange choice when Vanderkruyk clearly has a strong enough vision and innovative ideas of her own, even if they sometimes feel underdeveloped. Taking a production so far away from the source material, however, is certainly a brave choice; audiences should be prepared for a unique and engaging story that sometimes reaches to find its own voice.

 
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame runs March 25 to 28 at TNC Theatre (3485 McTavish) at 8 p.m..

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Instead of America, Kim finds herself in Palawan, a squalid refugee camp in the Philippines, waiting indefinitely for her asylum to be processed. Finally, a case of mistaken identity sends her to Connecticut where she adopts the life of an American family’s sponsored child. It is not until Kim arrives at McGill University, and encounters other Vietnamese students, that she begins to come to terms with the reality of her own story.

Short-listed for the Concordia First Book Prize, Palawan Story is the first novel from Vu, a McGill alumnus who works as a family physician in Montreal. Like her protagonist, Vu grew up in Saigon before leaving for America at the age of ten, and then later moving to Canada. Speaking to The Daily, she indicated that much of her novel was inspired by the notion of memory loss, explaining that her focus was “how we get back our memory by telling each other stories; to build up a second identity.” Kim’s perception of America and the Vietnam War are largely based on other people’s experiences, pointing to Vu’s own preoccupation with personal and collective memory. Vu mentioned in the interview that “I do have memories [of the Vietnam War] but a lot are very hazy. Did I see that, or watch it on TV?”

Palawan Story is also a process of individual and collective remembering – it unfolds as a series of fragmented recollections and extended monologues in which characters share their stories. Kim is put on a boat with the promise of a better life in America, but when she encounters a survivor of the My Lai massacre, the survivor’s horrific story quickly complicates her constructed image of America. Through the vivid retelling, the survivor’s account of the mass killing of between 300 to 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers thus becomes part of Kim’s story, although she herself never directly suffers from American war crimes.

With any narrative composed of fragments, there is often a danger of superficial characterization – the reader fears that the author will never break past the characters’ surface. Palawan Story, however, still manages to achieve depth of character by revisiting each fragmented narrative. Kim’s mother, for example, is first introduced unsympathetically through childhood recollections of constant scoldings, but as Kim grows up and learns more stories about her mother, she, along with the reader, discovers a more complicated being. Vu’s strength as a novelist lies in this artful development of characters through the stories they tell and receive.

The immigration story is a trope in North American fiction. While Palawan Story belongs in this category, it also ultimately subverts it, particularly disrupting the idealization of America as landing point. While Kim does arrive in America and obtains the promised opportunities of a secure middle class life and higher education, Connecticut never really feels like home for Kim before she leaves for Canada. Moreover, she feels strongly that above all else, her relationship with her family and the country she left behind have to be resolved. It is her struggle to recollect these past relationships that takes centre stage and moves the reader.

In a world overflowing with patriotic American narratives about the Vietnam War told from the perspectives of American soldiers who fought in it, Palawan Story provides a fresh and insightful look at the lives of those affected by the war. The novel uses storytelling and the murkiness of memory to demonstrate how no one narrative can ever paint the full picture.

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A Concordia University graduate, Markovic previously found success in March 2013 with his show “Shades of Isolation” which also featured homelessness as the subject of his sculptures. “Fringe,” while continuing to explore homelessness, focuses more broadly on those which Markovic described to The Daily as living “on the fringe […] people who choose to opt­ out, don’t want to participate in society the way it is set up, and who want to live an alternative form of life.” For Markovic, “opting out” can mean “homelessness, travelling the world on a bicycle, living off the grid – there are many possibilities.” In particular the way that many people who are homeless seem to be “living in a kind of limbo or a bubble with no exit,” provided metaphorical power to these outsiders that he felt any audience might be able to identify with.

Out of combinations of paper, smatterings of wire, copper tubing, and copious amounts of glue, Markovic has created evocative figurines of homelessness. The sculptures are stylized with pale elongated limbs and clad in rumpled, falling-apart clothing. Many are accompanied by their dogs, or grasp what few possessions they own: books, paintings, a bicycle. In one sculpture scene, a pair of bedraggled lovers run hand in hand from a storm. In another, an itinerant musician carries his elaborate stringed instrument to his next impromptu concert.

The use of paper as the primary material is strikingly suited to the theme of fringe city life, being both everywhere and nowhere at once. After all, if there is anything more synonymous with modern city streets than homelessness, it is surely the discarded scraps of paper that litter them. This is a far cry from the pristine origami wildlife that we usually associate with paper sculpture, the paper instead evoking the nature of the urban environment. The dozen or so sculptures are also accompanied by an array of similar sketches displayed on the surrounding walls; however, they ultimately lack the visual power and presence of the sculptures.

But for all the presence the sculptures possess, it is unlikely that they can change or influence the mainstream stereotypes of homelessness. When Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the poverty endured by Depression-era farm labourers affected those on the other side of the country who saw them, their effective power existed precisely because the viewers lived on the other side of the country. Montrealers, on the other hand, already encounter homelessness everyday.

That said, putting homelessness so blatantly on display in a gallery gives those who would normally walk right by a rare opportunity to stare at and absorb its simulacrum. Markovic himself has found that part of the reason his previous work has resonated with audiences, is that people are already concerned about those who have found themselves on society’s edges. “People experience this on a day to day basis, going to work or just going about their daily activities they see people who live on the fringe,” he explained, “and on a certain level they do […] feel they are somehow related in that they share the same environment; they are part of their lives.”

Like Lange before him, Markovic portrays his subjects with dignity, selecting titles such as Artist, Reader, and Scavenger of Lost Worlds. However grounded in reality the figures may be, though, they also posses an otherworldly quality. The arresting essence of these figures is an aesthetic triumph, indicating a clear intent beyond simply documenting ‘the fringes,’ and toward considering the metaphorical and symbolic qualities of existence on society’s edge. The care Markovic takes in observing and representing homelessness makes it clear that, despite the aesthetic focus, he doesn’t have a romanticized conception of his subjects or their lives. Indeed, far from objectifying those on the fringe, Markovic’s work may actually subjectify them, in trying to allow his audience to reach their own conclusions.

As far Markovic’s own conclusions, the artist is optimistic about his city’s actions on homelessness, spikes aside. He is “proud to be a Montrealer […] in the sense that we are doing a lot: in my neighbourhood alone there are five missions […] that’s just in the Berri area, yet so much more can be done.” Perhaps shows like “On the Fringe,” if not as representative as real interactions with homelessness on the streets of Montreal, may still cause one or two more passers-by to stop and look around.

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One cartoonist who certainly has something to contribute is Montreal-based animator and underground comic veteran Diane Obomsawin. On Loving Women is her latest collection of comics, published this week by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly. This short collection (80 pages) features a series of accounts following the sexual awakening of Obomsawin’s friends or lovers. Her panels aren’t populated with people as we recognize them, but rather a variety of simply-rendered anthropomorphized animals with huge goofy cartoon eyes that dominate their faces.

In the first story, six-year-old Mathilde covers her bedroom walls with drawings of horses. She goes on to explain how all “the women I fall for always have horse faces.” Sure enough, whereas a boyfriend she has at school is a mouse, the women that Mathilde falls for literally have horses faces. This touch is reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s depiction of Jews as mice and Germans as cats in Maus, a graphic novel about the experience of the author’s father as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. Fortunately, this is as far as the potential symbolism goes, with the choices of particular animals often left mysterious, more like Matt Groening’s self conscious rabbits in his long-running comic strip Life is Hell than Spiegelman’s mice. With its bold simplicity and idiosyncrasy, Obomsawin’s art brings a unity to the various accounts.

While Obomsawin’s characters, drawn in simple black and white, may seem unassuming and almost childlike, we soon find them ready to get some action. The stories manage to capture a variety of experiences, charged with the exuberance of the young characters who are discovering their identities. Confusion turns into self-assured desire as Obomsawin’s characters find themselves, and lovers.

Artists and audiences have rightly focused on the hostility that many gay and lesbian teenagers are met with as they grow up, an issue that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” internet-based program brought into sharp focus. On Loving Women manages to capture a different, yet complementary perspective: how personal confusion eventually leads to self discovery. And discovery can be found in all kinds of places, from the school yard to a long train journey having lesbian erotica read out by the niece of a nun in the next door cabin.

These stories capture the excitement of being young and discovering yourself, and despite recounting one particular experience, manage to capture something universal. Where On Loving Women succeeds the most is where the memories being shared are those the author’s friends and lovers seem happiest to remember. Obomsawin’s efforts to convey their sentiments are nowhere clearer than in her decision to end on a high note.

That is not to say everyone in these accounts has it easy. Marie’s mother sends her away to Ontario to separate her from her girlfriend, and later moves her to a different school when she starts a relationship with a fellow pupil. Confusion leads another girl on a bout of serial promiscuity with every kind of man. There is also jealousy as girlfriends are stolen, and disappointment when advances are spurned in dramatic fashion – not to mention the sorry string of boyfriends who are left baffled.

One of the book’s successes, which falls in line with Drawn & Quarterly’s other publications, is in capturing a snapshot of life in Canada, and specifically Montreal. Maxime takes us to Babyface, one of Montreal’s first lesbian bars, where we learn “there was always a lot going on in the restroom.” Like Bechdel, who would often editorialize on the politics of the day, Obomsawin weaves the legal reforms of the 1970s that decriminalized homosexuality in Canada into Maxime’s story. All in all, On Loving Women is a provocative and powerful use of the comic medium, evocatively documenting the experiences of a generation of lesbians.

On Loving Women is available at Drawn & Quarterly (211 Bernard W.) for $16.95.

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Queen Elizabeth II is currently equally shared with fifteen other independent countries. While the Queen is in fact just one old lady with a lot of different hats, each country’s monarch is legally distinct. For the most part, the Queen resides in the United Kingdom and governmental and ceremonial duties in Canada are enacted by various representatives of the crown.

David E. Smith admits in the introduction to his book The Invisible Crown, a “degree in constitutional law is almost a prerequisite for clarifying an arrangement of power that recognizes as head of state a non-resident monarch.” The Monarchist League of Canada’s (MLC) chief executive officer went so far as to say that “indifference” rather than republicanism is the Crown’s real threat.

I am a republican: that is to say, I am in favour of power residing with the population, and dismantling the undemocratic institutions of our past. I believe that the monarchy, along with the House of Lords, should be abandoned in Britain, and it is in Canadian interests to follow the same path. The debate is an old one, but one I believe important to revisit.

It is worth noting that the crown was increasingly sidelined until the arrival of the recent Harper administration which fetishizes a certain kind of conservative view of history.

One source of continual controversy is the cost of the monarchy to Canadian citizens. The MLC takes it upon itself to provide figures and concluded that just under $57 million was spent in the routine cost of the ‘Maple Crown’ in 2011-12, coming out at $1.63 per head. This does not include the cost of the diamond jubilee celebrations in Canada, which came to $64 million. The MLC offers the not unreasonable comparison to the Senate (approximately $90 million), National Gallery (approximately $51 million) and the Library of Parliament (approximately $41 million).

The MLC is also at pains to point out that this money is spent on Canadian constitutional activities, and not for the royals in any other capacity. That said, it is easy to understand why Citizens for a Canadian Republic felt it was gratuitous when they discovered that their country was expected to pay $1 million for the Queen’s attendance in Ottawa on Canada Day in 2010.

While similar administrative costs might be incurred irrespective of what kind of head of state Canada chooses, the fact is that it represents an investment on the part of Canada’s citizens. This makes it essential that they actually have the opportunity to choose a constitutional arrangement that is more in their interest – ideally, one whose main interest isn’t to maintain anachronistic delusions about empire and Britain’s place in the world.

It is worth noting that the crown was increasingly sidelined until the arrival of the recent Harper administration which fetishizes a certain kind of conservative view of history. This often manifests itself in strange ways, such as in September 2011 for example, when the order went out to all Canadian embassies to ensure portraits of the Queen were on display. Left unresolved, this kind of exacting pettiness could end up escalating into more questionable assertions about Canadian identity.

Among the questionable arguments in favour of Canada retaining its monarchy is the outright absurd claim that it is a cornerstone of stability and unity in the democratic state.

Polls conducted last year show that support in Canada for abolishing the monarchy found that the 45 per cent in favour of abolition had fallen to 37 per cent after the birth of Prince George. Monarchists held this up as a sign that the royals were as relevant as ever and that George would offer a new era of a popular monarchy. As wonderful a thing it is when a child is born, for that to be the supporting sentiment of a nation’s constitutional system degrades the meaning of both life and the institution.

The uncomfortable fact of British life is that the nation’s collective consciousness has increasingly become poisoned by tabloid culture. The royal family represents a quasi-historical ideal of glory and empire. Yet at the same time the public reads of their disgrace, whether in divorce, affairs, or personal lapses of judgement. As the late Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII.” Baby George may hold the British media in his thrall, but rest assured that once he is of age he won’t escape their barbed hooks and the cruel court of public opinion. Why Canada, with its more unassuming and well-adjusted public sphere, would wish to aspire to the degradations of British public life truly escapes me.

Among the questionable arguments in favour of Canada retaining its monarchy is the outright absurd claim that it is a cornerstone of stability and unity in the democratic state. To see how spurious this assertion is, you only have to look back across the pond. Right now the United Kingdom is looking distinctly less united. The growing divide between the north and south of Britain has been a major national problem for many years. In September, Scotland will undertake a referendum on independence – a  threat to British national unity – and the monarch seems powerless to intervene. Suggesting that the royal family might unite the country in single spirit can only be taken in jest.

It might simply be better to have a head of state representing Canada, who is not only Canadian, but whose greatest achievement is something more than inheriting a collection of solid gold hats.

Canada will no doubt sympathize with such issues of national sovereignty. Support for the Canadian monarchy is far from universal or evenly distributed; unsurprisingly low in Quebec and relatively high in British Columbia. That said, the issue seems to be ignored when compared with other Commonwealth countries. Australia, for example, has long had a serious republican movement, and in 1999 went as far as having a referendum on the issue – the monarchists carried the day with 54.87 per cent of the vote.

But recent political events, specifically the collapse of the Bloc Québécois and the rise of the NDP in Quebec, suggests that flexible federalism is in everybody’s interest. What better way to build on this potential than when Queen Elizabeth II sheds her mortal coil and instead of King Charles filling her spot on Canadian banknotes, something more Canadian fills his place?

The best safeguard to stability is empowering our democratic institutions and extending the franchise. In many Western countries, political apathy and disillusionment is prominent among the challenges to maintaining the democratic ideal. Reforming the constitutional system so that it is more relevant, comprehensible, and accessible to the Canadian people is an obvious opportunity to move against this trend. It might simply be better to have a head of state representing Canada, who is not only Canadian, but whose greatest achievement is something more than inheriting a collection of solid gold hats.

Daniel Woodhouse is a PhD 2 in Mathematics. To contact Daniel, email commentary@mcgilldaily.com.

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In 2000, the NDP seemed to be vanishing off the Canadian political radar with a meagre 13 seats in Parliament. But three years later the party elected Jack Layton, a mustachioed veteran of Toronto municipal politics with a fresh vision for electoral success, as leader. Despite starting with a leader who wasn’t even an MP, the party managed to make steady electoral progress. Going into the 2011 election, the NDP had 36 seats in the house and the party was openly optimistic. Despite the optimism, it would have been difficult to foresee the political coup that followed. Jack Layton, often referred to as the “happy warrior” for his unwavering optimism, became leader of the opposition. But just shortly afterwards, he announced a leave of absence after being diagnosed with cancer and died in August 2011.

Welcome to the NDP

Liu grew up in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, attending Royal West Academy and College Jean-de-Brébeuf, among Canada’s most prestigious high schools and CEGEPs, respectively. Her father, a biologist, and mother, who teaches Cantonese, emigrated from Hong Kong before she was born. In high school, she began investigating which political parties best represented her values as an environmentalist and feminist. She decided on the NDP and obtained a membership card. Before long she became involved with campaigns and was one of the presidents of the Youth Wing of the Quebec NDP.

It had long been NDP policy to leave no seat uncontested, and Liu was among the candidates who were entered in 2011. Many were in their early twenties, and many had no expectation of reaching Ottawa. During the election, she did not campaign in her riding, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, and instead helped Thomas Mulcair with his campaign in Outremont, using her fluent Cantonese to appeal to Chinese-Canadian voters. She only found out that she had taken the lead when her friends texted her that she was ahead in the polls. Thomas Mulcair would go on to succeed the late Layton as party leader.

Liu on the work she does

I spoke with Liu by phone while Parliament was out of session this January. When not occupied by Parliament, she returns to her riding, where her office becomes a consultancy for individuals, community organizations, and businesses, to gain advice on using federal services. “What we do is more proactive, and not just reacting to problems they face; we will send them information about federal grants that they could qualify for,” she said.

I asked her what the major issues in her riding are at the moment. “The cuts to Canada Post and door-to-door delivery,” she said. “I have a lot of seniors in my [constituency] – older folks who have mobility issues and who live at home. They are concerned about having to walk to a community mailbox to get their mail.”

NDP success

When Liu was elected in 2011, the local press was skeptical. One local newspaper ran the headline “Deux nouvelles députées du NPD qui en savent bien peu” (“Two new MPs from the NDP who don’t know much”). And in The Daily’s 2011 article about Liu and the “Orange Crush,” one commenter seemed unhappy about her riding’s new MP.

“Nobody really knew anything about her […] actually, we didn’t even know we had a NDP candidate around until we saw her name on our voting sheet,” the commenter said.

While this seems like an obvious criticism to make about the unexpected new crop of young, inexperienced NDP MPs, it is not one that seems to have been borne out by the evidence.

“I’m not the first member of parliament to win an election based on the popularity of my leader,” said Liu. Layton’s popularity was the major reason for the NDP’s success in the election. With U.S. politics increasingly coming under fire for being unrepresentative and unfair, Canadian politics stand in stark contrast. How did the NDP manage to jump from being being the fourth largest party represented in parliament to one of the largest oppositions in Canadian history?

Brad Lavigne, the director of the 2011 NDP election campaign, has recently published his book Building the Orange Wave. He would argue that the NDP’s success was rooted in the direction Layton took the party when he became leader in 2003. In particular, he cited Layton’s ambition to make the party a genuine contender for government, as well as the importance placed on courting the Quebec vote.

The NDP’s approach to Quebec – their own version of ‘flexible federalism’ – is clearly exemplified by their document on Quebecois separatism, the Sherbrooke Declaration. Unlike the Liberals’ Clarity Act, the NDP policy would give Quebec the right to self-determination and a referendum to be passed with more than 50 per cent. On the issue of the Bloc Québecois, Liu is forthright about the sentiment of her riding. “They are not interested in going back into those constitutional debates, and going back to the question of a referendum. They found an option that is […] progressive.”

These views of the election seem to be broadly supported in a recent paper “Riding the Orange Wave: Leadership, Values, Issues, and the 2011 Canadian Election,” authored by five political scientists, including three from McGill. “Neither fluke polls, leaders’ debates, nor a decline in support for Quebec sovereignty were the driving forces behind the orange wave,” the paper concludes. Instead they find that the NDP’s success was due to “a combination of Jack Layton’s leadership and the discovery by many voters of the NDP’s proximity on some values and issues.”

Samuel Harris, Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) VP External, was an NDP society member in 2011, and knew many of the McGill MPs. He recalled being optimistic about how his friends would fare in Parliament. “These were people who were not necessarily from wealthy families and had worked part-time jobs, who were very active with the party, the club, were in relationships, were very good academically and wanted to do either law or graduate school afterwards […] I think if you wanted students to be elected to Parliament, these are exactly the kinds of hardworking people with a lot of experiences that you want.”

“I have a really great record as a Member of Parliament working for my constituents for the past two years,” said Liu. “When I go door to door in my riding what I hear is that the issues that people care about are the issues we are defending in the House of Commons.”

A parliamentary critic

When Parliament is in session, Liu has a very different set of concerns. During question period, Liu is Deputy Critic for Science and Technology, and for six hours a week she sits on the Committee on International Trade.

“Traditionally, [committees are] the place in which all parties are able to work together, and we’ve seen that, in the case with the environment committee in the Mulroney year […], we were actually able to work together to produce a really successful report on acid rain across party lines that was actually widely read among the public,” she said. “[The Conservatives] have been rejecting 100 per cent of the propositions that the opposition parties have been proposing to change our amendments […] which is […] unprecedented in majority governments. This is not [what] was done under the majority government of Paul Martin.”

Despite the Conservatives’ apparent unwillingness to collaborate, Liu seems proud of her achievements in Ottawa. “One of [the] first things [I did] as a Member of Parliament was tabling a private members bill to have senior citizens who qualify for the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) to automatically receive it,” she said. Formerly, seniors who qualified for the GIS – a monthly supplement for seniors under the poverty line – had to sign up to receive it.

“The main problem that we’re trying to address here is that many people don’t make the initial […] application to receive the guaranteed income supplement,” Liu told CBC news when the NDP tabled the bill in March 2012.

Layton always made a point to emphasize that his constituents were his priority and that he considered them deeply when making political decisions in Ottawa. In his case, it is not simply a trite sentiment, and even got Layton into trouble on occasion. During the 2004 election campaign, a reporter asked him if he held the then-Prime Minister Paul Martin responsible for the deaths of the homeless due to his cuts on affordable housing. ”I’ve always said I hold him responsible for that,” said Layton, provoking a small media uproar and some backlash.

Liu seems to share the priorities of her party’s former leader. In her case, the cause is the GIS, and the ‘ordinary people’ who she is taking into consideration are the seniors living in her district who Liu feels may not be subscribing to a program that could be helping them.

As a Deputy Critic for Science and Technology, Liu finds herself representing a very different constituency. The policies of the Harper administration have been widely criticized by scientists and commentators as ideologically motivated attacks, slashing funding and effectively muzzling scientists. In particular, the cuts to governmental environmental institutions laid out in omnibus budget Bill C-38 were dubbed “Harper’s war on science” by critics.

Science and medicine journal Nature published an editorial criticizing the restrictions placed on Canadian scientists when talking to the public, and argued that investigations had revealed “a confused and Byzantine approach to the press, prioritizing message control and showing little understanding of the importance of the free flow of scientific knowledge.”

When I asked Liu if she is optimistic about the situation improving for Canadian scientists, she interjected before I could finish the question; “Absolutely not!” She spoke about the latest consultation being conducted by the Conservatives. According to Liu, the questionnaire being used is nothing more than a transparent attempt to re-evaluate science based on its commercial impact.

“The Conservatives think science should be fully at the service of industry, whereas I think – and my party thinks – [that] science should benefit us economically, but also benefit the health and environment of Canadians,” she said.

What lies ahead

It seems that the real test for the legacy of this NDP opposition is whether or not they can win the next election and really start implementing their own political platform. For their part, it seems that the new MPs have managed to overcome the initial skepticism surrounding their election to Parliament. Charmaine Borg, one of the ‘McGill MPs,’ has been given the position of Digital Issues critic, becoming the youngest full critic in Canada’s history. During her term, she helped to force the Conservatives to abandon the controversial C-30 bill, known colloquially as the ‘Internet surveillance bill.’

Toward the end of my conversation with Liu, I asked her if entering Parliament provided her with some privileged insights into Canadian politics. “Using the Member of Parliaments’ gym can be very strange. I’ll often see my colleagues in their workout shorts and t-shirts,” she said, laughing.

And if it came down to an athletic competition to win the next election, who would win? “I would say the NDP.” She is totally serious. ”After the 2011 elections the average age of parliamentarians in the House of Commons went down by ten years: about a dozen folks were elected [who are] under the age of 30.”

With many young people disillusioned with their democratic systems, it is encouraging to know that in Canada at least one generation, albeit all from a singular political party, has been given a chance to shape their future.

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Brave New Productions continues the tradition of putting mystery on stage with their adaptation of Done To Death, written in 1970 by American playwright Fred Carmichael. The play imagines a group of five crime writers who have been unable to keep up with the times and have lost their audience. A new opportunity arises when an American production company brings them all together to have an almighty brainstorming session to conceive of a new murder mystery.

The Olives (Stephanie McKenna and Sean Curley) are a husband and wife crime writing team whose recipe of high society, martini-spilling murders have fallen out of fashion. Mildred Z Maxwell (Emma McQueen), professed master of the logical crime construction “constantly thinking of new ways to kill people,” most closely fits the Christie mould. Brad Benedict (Zachary Brown) is a fresh-faced sensationalist spy writer in the manner of Ian Fleming, and Rodney Duckton (Bryan Libero) is an aging hardboiled detective fiction writer hearkening back to the likes of Raymond Chandler.

At first the writers express mutual admiration, but soon they are soon criticizing and lampooning each other’s work. They imagine parodies of their work in a comedic skewering of their respective sub-genres. As the writers describe plots to each other the stage lighting alters and the audience is presented with multiple vignettes in the style of the respective writers, with hilariously hammed up performances. The stakes are raised, however, when, as all this is playing out, actual murders begin happening. Soon the writers realize that tracking down a culprit is very different from the stories they once wrote.

The tone is one of irreverent tribute, with director McQueen commenting in her notes, “Isn’t it wonderful when a play comes along that reminds us why they’re called plays?” At its best, Done To Death manages to convincingly evoke the genre of mystery fiction: the idea of a plot about the murder of a rich man, played out on stage in the form of the characters’ fantasies, took me back to a childhood of watching Columbo re-runs. Not all the subcategories of mystery are as successfully evoked. The James Bond spoofs feel silly and dated, most of all since James Bond himself continues to be successfully reinvented. Brown plays the writer in an almost childish manner, excited by various ingenious gadgets. By contrast,James Bond creator Ian Fleming actually served as a naval intelligence officer alongside wartime spies.

McKenna as Jessica Olive manages a compelling performance as the high society crime writer energized by the prospect of being caught in a mystery all of their own.  When it becomes clear that any one of the writers could be the murderer, she gleefully exclaims, “We’re all still in the running!” Other cast members make a strong effort to match her energy. Angelo Venucci plays the creepy butler Gregory and Kayleigh Choiniere is hysterical ingenue Jane, poking good fun at the tired tropes.

As any fan of murder mysteries will tell you, motive is the most important component to any murder. And it is motive that is the real missing ingredient in this drama. Once the bodies start piling up it becomes clear that it is all a springboard to broadly lampoon the writers’ respective genres. While many of the tropes deserve everything they get and there is much fun to be had, to set up a murder mystery and fail to deliver the satisfactory resolution the convention demands is a cardinal sin. In addition, though the structure of the play easily lends itself to comment on the genre of mystery fiction as a whole, it doesn’t offer more than superficial insight. I expect more than a few audience members will be going home to dig out those old mystery paperbacks, and find a more satisfying ending.

Done to Death runs January 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, and 18 at 8 p.m., at 3680 Jeanne-Mance.

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Married couple Kate (Georgia Gleason) and Deeley (Daniel Carter) are having Anna (Amalea Ruffett), an old friend of Kate’s, over for dinner. Kate hasn’t seen her in a long time and is unsure of what has happened in the intervening years, while Deeley, Kate’s husband, seems apprehensive. Is she a vegetarian now? Turns out she isn’t, and the casserole Kate prepared is suitable for the meal. As the evening progresses, the characters start bringing up their respective memories of their first meeting 20 years ago. A sense of unease builds as the past is slowly unearthed. What really were the circumstances of Kate and Deeley first meeting and falling in love? Have Deeley and Anna met before?

Old Times’ small cast made it an attractive choice for first time director Caleb Harrison, who was drawn to the idea of maximizing control over the performance. The production certainly looks like a deliberate and polished directorial effort. With the absence of a large cast to direct, Harrison has been able to focus in-depth on the individual performances, ensuring that every move across the stage, every drink being poured, and the way each character comports themselves helps tell a story.

While not an inaccessible play, those unfamiliar with Pinter’s work may find the first act a listless drama. As the characters serve each other drinks and reminisce about their time in London, there is little dramatic tension beyond Deeley’s dry cattiness and the increasing awkwardness; it feels like they all share some unspoken grievance that the audience is left to guess at. The second act, however, finds the characters on the attack and the unease quickly becomes far more uncomfortable, even creepy. Pinter’s plot may have first-time audience members running to the internet for some kind of clue as to what exactly happened on-stage, but it was actually his intention not to offer the audience anything resembling an obvious plot.

The director’s notes admit, “all the action of the play happens off-stage,” but this isn’t quite strong enough. The drama is not derived from events that have occurred off-stage, but rather from what could have potentially happened off-stage. The audience is expected to work hard to make sense of not only what is happening, but also what happened in the characters’ past. Harrison notes that in this play “memory is a weapon,” and perhaps the student audience is being invited to consider the significance their own memories will have on them in 20 years.

The cast members do an exceptional job of inhabiting their roles. Carter as Deeley functions as the play’s main fulcrum, and casts an eloquently sinister presence over the other two characters that is evocatively broken down by the play’s climax. Ruffett arrives on-stage as an abrasive, outgoing, and provocative catalyst riling up Carter’s more proper Deeley. Gleason as Kate seems sidelined in the first act but the balance of power ends up taking a surprising shift. All three manage to effectively evoke an underlying sexual tension and discomfort, and switch from aggressive to passive participants in the drama seamlessly.

Old Times aims to set a high standard for student theatre productions and succeeds. It is a strong performance of Pinter’s work, and if Pinter is ever diminished in his legacy it certainly won’t be due to productions such as this one. While the material may not satisfy all audiences, it certainly won’t outstay its welcome, and provides a great introduction to Pinter newcomers.

Old Times will run from December 4 to 7 at 8 p.m. at Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre (3485 McTavish). Tickets are $6 for students and $10 for adults. To reserve tickets, email tnc.foh@gmail.com.

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So what is a zine? The big idea behind zines is that someone with creativity, imagination, and something to say can make their own magazine. From photocopied, folded, and stapled fanzines to silk screened covers on special paper, stitched binding, and by-hand finishing touches, the appearances of zines can be as varied as the content.

Expozine, the annual meeting of zine creators and their readers, where zines are bought and sold, took place last weekend, November 16 and 17, in a church basement. Walking around the main convention hall you can see Cometbus’ point. There is a cornucopia of publications that you won’t find in a regular newsstand. There are feminists, anarchists, punk rockers, cartoonists, artists, and poets. Every group that turns to zines to express themselves ends up creating their own subgenre. The LGBTQ community took up zines in the 1980s, and, despite the limited circulation, those zines remain as some of the best self-created records of the scene.

Montreal-based artist Kerri Flannigan’s zine Nailbiter, winner of Expozine’s 2010 best English zine category, features stories from people coping with anxiety. Inspired by the sense of alienation the contributors felt about the existing resources, Nailbiter best represents the opportunity and potential the medium offers. Among her zines this year is “grandparents zine,” containing short pieces of writing about the contributors’ relationships with their grandparents alongside pen and ink portraits.

With such specific topics, can zines continue to flourish alongside the internet, while print media continues to threaten death? Expozine co-founder and zinester Louis Rastelli doesn’t seem at all worried. He gets asked about the internet every year, he explains. “First of all information is not the same as an artifact. Secondly the internet is ridiculously ephemeral.” Rastelli himself is attempting to ensure zines don’t disappear forever through his co-founded project Archive Montreal, a local organization that attempts to preserve zines from becoming lost and forgotten. Turns out that even the zine creators can be pretty bad at keeping copies of their own work.

But where can a newcomer to the world of zines start? Thanks to the internet, they may already have been exposed to them. A Softer World, from Toronto, began its life as a zine before becoming the popular web-comic that could still be picked up in print from the creator’s stall. For Al Lafrance, of Bloody Underrated, there is no substitute for coming to a convention, to “buy something random without even looking in it.” Among his own contribution to random zines that could be picked up was Pickles, Pickles (yes, it’s all about pickles), a four inch square booklet containing 52 illustrated facts and 1 recipe.

For those prepared to take the risk, the main attraction of the medium seems to be the unexpected discoveries. With recent technological developments, smaller creators now have direct access to industry quality printing; most of the stalls were selling books as well. The technical gap between zinester and major publisher is rapidly narrowing. Existing outside the mainstream is the raison d’être of zines, allowing for anyone with a voice to publish. But with so many zines available and yet still hard to come by, it can be difficult for the zine newcomer to know what to read. These alternative publications are always trying to find their readership, distributing copies not only at the annual Expozine but also online and in such zine-friendly outlets as the Concordia bookstore. The biggest sign of promise for the zinester’s future, however, is that they still seem to see a vast world of creative possibilities in front of them.

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The fact that some 20,000 to 80,000 prisoners in the U.S. prison system, including juveniles, are in solitary confinement at any given moment should raise more than an eyebrow, and it is in response to this cruelty that Guenther has written her book.

Guenther traces the history of the U.S. prison system, up to the present day, divided into three distinct stages. The very first prisons were called penitentiaries, owing to the desired response from those held within. Solitary confinement was inflicted wholesale post-independence by the U.S. government with the rather Christian belief that, left to their own company, the guilty person would have no choice but to reflect upon their crimes and undergo some kind of personal, spiritual, and redemptive experience. It was believed the prisoner would emerge a restored person, but instead they came out damaged and depleted. Solitary confinement in all its incarnations has worked against any kind of attempt at prisoner rehabilitation.

It became clear then that solitary confinement had a severe effect on the prisoner, but in the second stage of the U.S. prison system its effects were more deliberately exploited. In the wake of Cold War era CIA experiments on behaviour alteration and sensory deprivation, the prison system looked to appropriate these techniques for their own ends. They attempted, a la A Clockwork Orange, to wipe the minds of their prisoners clean of all the criminal tendencies in the same manner scientists had tried to condition animals. It turned out that all behavioural alteration did was force prisoners to respond pathologically to the pathological circumstances they were subjected to ñ the prisoners coming out of solitary had difficulty re-engaging with society, building relationships, and being around large groups of people.

The contemporary prison system has abandoned all pretense to rehabilitation of the population, using solitary confinement almost automatically as a means to exert control. The Secure Housing Units that prisoners now find themselves in are designed for large-scale solitary confinement. Prisoners can be indefinitely isolated for obscure reasons and with no means to defend themselves against the charges that put them there.

Solitary Confinement, Social Death and its Afterlives is more than a history lesson; the effects of solitary confinement pose some troubling philosophical questions, including how the lack of human contact unhinges the prisoner from a coherent sense of reality. We often casually imagine that we perceive the world as individuals, and through our own senses, yet a great deal of our consciousness is shaped by our interactions with others. If it were true that we could experience the world in isolation, why would otherwise healthy prisoners locked in solitary report experiencing hallucinations and losing control of their senses?

Guenther, who facilitates a weekly discussion at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, approaches these questions with a series of phenomenological critiques examining how reality is a construct of how we perceive the world, both taking a hard look at the shortcomings of the existing literature and also the ethical implications for a society using solitary as punishment. These sections are, frankly, a trial for a reader unfamiliar with this branch of philosophy. Which is a shame, because this seems to be exactly the kind of contribution that philosophers should be bringing to our public discourse. And, moreover, it really seems that Guenther is getting to the heart of the what is being inflicted on prisoners. In short, the classic existential questions, about living and trusting our own senses, become existential realities that those locked in solitary have to endure.

It is an unsurprising, but troubling, avenue that the book explores when it considers how the U.S. prison system exists as a legacy of slavery. It immediately exposes an overlooked point: slavery was never completely abolished. The very amendment that set out to prohibit the practice left an explicit exception for those who are convicted of crimes. Southern states that were forced to free their slaves simply criminalized them, often by making vagrancy and unemployment criminal offenses. Prisoners could find themselves working on the same plantations that they worked on as slaves. Today, there are more black men in prison than there were enslaved in 1850.

In the most accessible of the critiques that Guenther offers, she questions the rhetoric of human rights that is used by prisoners and their defenders. While it sometimes seems that she is viewing solitary confinement as a thought experiment rather than a fact of the criminal justice system, Guenther makes a few cogent points. It is clear, she remarks, that what is done to prisoners isn’t adequately described by the word “dehumanizing.” It is, in fact, “de-animalizing.” What is inflicted damages not what makes a person human, but what makes them a living creature. Let us hope Guenther’s critiques, and those of her fellow activists, are taken to heart.

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Something Like a War, directed by Deepa Dhanraj, consists of a series of interviews with the women affected by the sterilization policy, as well as with those involved in its implementation. The main focus shifts from a group of women in rural India discussing their relations to their bodies, their wombs, and their sexuality, to the gynecologists who perform the operations, ‘motivators’ who use money and deceit to bring women to the operating table, and finally to government officials overseeing the policy. The women talk freely about their lives, in a way not dissimilar to Western productions such as The Vagina Monologues. The interviewees are scathing in their condemnations of the population control policies that have left them feeling helpless and objectified. It is also worth noting that the policy wasn’t restricted to women, and the documentary doesn’t restrict its scope; one group of men also share how they were forced to undergo vasectomies in aid of meeting a government target.

The film feels no need to underscore the horror of what was being perpetrated, sparsely interspersing interviews with short quotes and statistics. The horrible crime is caught on film. We watch a woman almost having to be carried out after the swift sterilization, her face grimacing in pain. On her way out she passes the next woman who gets a glimpse of what is about to happen to her. One woman undergoing the operation is caught on camera crying, “Bastard, get off me!”

If there was any danger in letting the interviews speak for themselves it would be that the wider context for the government policy could be lost. Fortunately for those attending Cinema Politica Concordia’s screening, the film was introduced by Professor Madhav Badami from the McGill School of Urban Planning, who gave a wider background to the events. During the 1960s, within intellectual circles and the ruling class, there was a surge of concern about population growth. It went so far that people started to believe that the poor were responsible for their own poverty, due to overpopulating, and that it surely fell to their enlightened leaders to intervene, even brutally if necessary.

The most disturbing issue, and one that the film failed to explore (although Badami gave a brief overview), was the role Western groups, such as the U.S. Rockefeller foundation, played in financially promoting the family planning policy. The film effectively tells the story of how the Indian government implemented policies that dis-empower and harm women. The story of how Western groups and policy brought this damage to India remained untold and uncomfortable questions were left for the audience to answer alone. This is hardly a significant complaint, since the power and importance of the film lies in the director’s desire to empower the women affected to tell their own story in their own words.

While Indira Gandhi, who ruled India at the time, ended up losing power and her seat as consequence of the policies she introduced – including family planning ones – the groups that financially motivated and influenced Indian politics from afar remain spared from any kind of consequence.

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In the halcyon days of the 1970s, the Top 40 skewed a little older, and you could get a ticket to an arena show for about the same as the cost of a new album – maybe $15. A significant part of the change has to do with how the Baby Boomer generation grew up and settled down, brought rock and roll into the mainstream. Now it’s no longer just the kids who want to go along to concerts, but the kids’ parents as well. Rock and roll and mainstream entertainment belong to the baby boomers, and their pockets are significantly deeper than many of the young music fans out there. It is also true that with record sales in jeopardy, live music has become the most reliable source of income for the industry. But the main villains for many music fans are the large concert promoters. With the absence of significant competition in the market, promoters are left free to set prices as high as they like.

The rise of large promoters began in the 1960s when the industry began printing tickets by computer, revolutionizing sale and distribution. Now, thanks to the internet, people can buy and print off tickets at home. All this convenience is given to us for that familiar service charge appended to the face value of the ticket. The companies that began by offering their service to theatres, sports teams, and music venues eventually established dominance over the live entertainment industry itself. Standing out as the most successful is Evenko in much of Canada and Ticketmaster in the United States, which expanded into concert promotion with their merger with Live Nation in 2009.

With such a powerful monopoly in place it might seem that the pop music fan without much cash is stuck at home longingly watching concert footage on YouTube, back where Bieber himself started.

In Montreal, at least, there do seem to exist alternatives. And almost necessarily, they look very different to anything Ticketmaster or any of its subsidiaries will try and sell you.

The Daily talked to Matthew E Duffy, a Montreal based artist and musician, in his Mile End office for his perspective about his attempts to undercut this corporate culture. Having started by getting involved in the “psyche-noise” scene in Halifax, he comes from a venue of smaller backgrounds: “house shows and house parties are really important to the scene there because there isn’t a lot of venue space,” he explains. He since moved to Montreal, saw how local labels work, and along the way performed with other artists at large festivals, including Claire Boucher (a.k.a. Grimes) at Fun Fun Fun in 2011.

The music events he organizes are somewhere between house party and small gig, with no entry price and unconventional locations. “I sometimes do performance pieces or ritualesque candlelight ceremonies,” he explains. “Meanwhile there is a band playing in the other room [where] I run what is basically a non profit bar. But I only serve relatively fancy drinks.”

He will freely admit to trying to create events and spaces where he feels artists can be more expressive and liberated from the corporate concert scene, though sometimes the expectations people have of live entertainment can be hard to avoid. “I asked [one person] ‘why are you here? you are obviously uncomfortable,’ and they [were] complaining, but they are still there complaining, and I’m like ‘the door is open, you didn’t pay anything to get here, no one is taking advantage. You can leave if you want.’”

Many in Montreal may be more at home with Duffy’s non-consumerist means of artistic production. “People in Montreal do not like paying $10, $15 – even […] just that much – anything above that and you seem to have difficulty selling tickets… The Dream played here for POP Montreal and they had really poor attendance and it was primarily probably due to the ticket price issue. It was far downtown, an expensive show, like $40, which isn’t really too much in the grand scheme of some shows but people in Montreal just have less money.”

Duffy’s assumptions about the state of Montreal’s disposable income aside, there do seem to be there are real alternatives to homogenized live music and entertainment in the city. But does Duffy have any grievances against major concert providers? “I enjoy the satisfaction of buying a fancy coffee – I understand consumerism; I try to avoid it, but I can see why it can be damaging, and the over-commercialization of stuff is just bad.”

Duffy remains relatively philosophical about the failings of capitalism to make live music available to its fans. But it remains damning that the industry uses the huge fan base of its stars to charge the high ticket prices that denies access to the pop culture zeitgeist for so many young fans.

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The year is 1965. Germaine Lauzon, middle-aged housewife, has hit the jackpot. She can literally thank her lucky stars because a million of them (in coupon form) have turned up in boxes at her Plateau-Mont-Royal house as a competition prize. Unfortunately, before she can trade them in for the latest domestic luxuries that she has been eyeing up in a catalogue, she needs them stuck into booklets. Inconsiderate of the pent-up jealousy they harbour, she invites her sisters and friends over to help her with the task. With close to 15 housewives in the same room, and her daughter’s friends dropping by, gossip runs free and emotions high. Pretty soon the helpers start to become thieves.

First performed in the late 1960s, Les Belles Soeurs shocked Quebec audiences with its kitchen-sink depiction of ordinary women with hopes, fears, and bad language. 40 years on, it remains perhaps Michel Tremblay’s most famous work, and is now being performed by McGill’s own Players’ Theatre. Les Belles Soeurs is famous as one of the first plays to use joual, a traditional Quebecois dialect and a central part of working class culture that for a long time had only been the subject of scorn rather than celebration. It is hard not to conclude that the English translation sacrifices much of its local identity. Indeed, the director, Stephanie Zidel, admits that “the language doesn’t translate effectively into metropolitan English.” Were it not for the god-damn-it-we’re-in-Quebec-Fleur-de-Lis-wallpaper painted onto the set you might struggle to identify exactly where in North America we are living. But this loss in specifics reveals the universal nature of the characters and their struggle.

The drama itself really takes off when all the women are together and begin to bounce off one another. Pretty soon they are letting each other know exactly what they think of the Italian girl down the street, exchanging rape jokes, and complaining about men in their lives. The verbal violence turns inward as dissatisfaction pours out, and soon the darkness of repressed lives and despondency are revealed. We see how the women become their own torturers. A play which, at the time, portrayed life unflinchingly, now,serves to remind us of the importance of what has changed. The horror at the revelation that the Angeline has found happiness attending a nightclub would be funny, were it not for how it kills her to turn her back on it in order to keep her oldest friend.

This seems to have been a passion project for Zidel, and she certainly handled the challenge, keeping the action focused with a large cast all on stage at once. Among an accomplished cast, Connor Spencer stood out, bringing seething jealous energy to the stage. The refrain, “I kill myself for my pack of morons,”  which she spits out, leaves you with a clear impression of how these women have come to regard their own families.

Whether or not the humour saves the drama from bleakness will remain unclear until this production arrives in front of its audience. Indeed, the student audience who will be receiving it are far removed from the women the play set out to portray and the audience it was originally written for. “I think there [are] a lot of things we might find scandalizing that they might have found funny,” suggests Zidel. Still, many of the challenges remain accessible to today’s audiences: “If your friend comes up to you and says she’s pregnant, that’s something that is still hard to deal with.” Whether audiences remain to be scandalized or not, Les Belles Soeurs is a powerful piece of theatre.

[flickr id=”72157636747716886″]

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Audience members were invited to go in, wander around or sit down, and generally feel free to get involved in the performance, which consisted of three cycles. It was unclear upon walking in who exactly was audience and who was performer, and this was just one of the ambiguities that was exploited in last week’s production of TRUNK: oscillator, the latest piece by Craning Neck Theatre, a Toronto-based company.

The most ambiguous part of the show came with the setup of the whole production. It was unclear what it was exactly that I had walked into. As Jeremy Waller, director and principal creator, explained in the program, “TRUNK is a play. It is a menagerie. It is an installation. It is a porous glass case for people to enter, reflect, and hopefully act – with and against.”

I sat down with a beer on one of the chapel pews strewn around the edges of the room to find out exactly what was going on.

Voice-overs in the first cycle set the scene: an Anglican minister emigrated to Canada and fell in love with another woman while his wife, suffering from mental illness, was sent off to a convent. In the darkness of the room, you could feel the unease. It was unclear how exactly the story was going to unfold, or even if it would be shown at all.

Near the trunk, a bicycle was lying in the middle of the floor, and it occurred to me that there was nothing to stop me from walking up to it and giving it a ride around. Other audience members would have no idea whether or not what I was doing was “part of the production.”

Eventually, one of the performers (the son of the Anglican minister) did ride the bicycle, and I sat there, feeling glad that I hadn’t, because it was pretty dark in the room. The father soon removed his son from the bike to avoid any accidents.

Another significant portion of this tapestry was the three-piece band ominously set up on the chapel stage. For TRUNK’s first cycle, the band restricted itself to contributing to the ambience of the room, but by the second cycle the show really kicked off as the musicians broke into song. This was a powerful climax to the cycle, and the son was soon on stage, topless and playing air guitar while across the chapel another performer started screaming “Let it out” into a microphone.

These were perhaps among the easier moments for an audience member to keep track of; however, when action moved across the hall and into a side corridor it became unclear where performance ended and audiences began.

Waller explained that this confusion is representative of what the company sets out to do in their productions. He described the venue at Loyola Chapel as an opportunity for an “intimate show in a big space.” Indeed, the one obstacle that the company has to deal with is keeping all the various threads of the performance playing out across the hall in some coherent whole that the audience can follow. According to Waller, this is part of their mission to keep the audience “on their toes.”

Craning Neck Theatre’s performance was certainly intended to have an overarching narrative, as the program notes explain. With a story taken from the director’s family, TRUNK was ambitious, striving to take the audience on a deliberately disorienting ride while still trying to hold some form of narrative.

While the performance I watched was hampered by a smaller and more passive audience, this kind of theatrical performance art has the potential to go deeper through its interactive quality. Sadly, this particular performance had set itself a few too many challenges, leaving the audience highly disengaged.

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I attended the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011 when I happened to be working near the city. For 25 days the city was flooded with fliers and posters advertising student theatre companies, a hundred all-too-similar stand-ups hoping for their big break, and a sizeable crowd of London media crews setting up camp in the city, while locals took advantage of the fuss and let out their homes. As I walked up the Royal Mile it became apparent that a kind of madness had infected the city. I was surrounded by street performers desperately looking for an audience in the passersby, promotional material attached to every available surface, and crazed promoters perpetually thrusting publicity for one production or another into my hands. Everything looked kind of crazy by the end of the second week. Even the posters. Especially the posters.

The festival is now regarded by performers as a brutal but necessary ordeal, with multiple shows every night, overcrowded venues, and everyone drinking like there’s no tomorrow. It is a time when you wouldn’t be surprised to see a seasoned professional have a public meltdown. To top it off, there is a nagging feeling that the whole thing has kind of sold out commercially, and lost its magic somewhere down the road.

It’s with this Scottish hoopla in mind that I was pleasantly surprised at how easygoing the Montreal Fringe Festival, which just wrapped up this week, is. One Saturday afternoon, I sauntered over to the box office on the corner of St. Laurent and Rachel to buy tickets and found only two people in line in front of me. I didn’t have to line up for half an hour; I didn’t have to shatter the dreams of students desperately promoting their play; I didn’t find posters plastering every available surface. It seemed the goal of the festival was for Montrealers to enjoy themselves – something Edinburgh could learn from. As I stood in line, I realized that the Montreal Fringe actually holds to the original ideal: a festival that is all about showcasing alternative performing arts, without any commercial agenda.

The first show I saw was a one-man show entitled “Verbal Diarrhoea or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Bomb at Love” in which British comic Gerard Harris gave a rundown of his personal romantic experiences in an hour-long string of anecdotes and observations. Harris’ rundown was extremely comprehensive, covering his childhood, his failed marriage, and his move to Canada as part of his quest to find love and sex – a quest that seems to have involved a lot of crying and masturbating in his apartment. The show was well-received by the audience, despite the lack of professional polish expected in the cutthroat UK stand-up comedy scene.

No one even bothered to check that I had actually bought a ticket to see “Osama the Hero” by Lifelong Productions when I walked in and took my seat – an experience that stands in stark contrast to waiting in the Edinburgh rain being herded into a venue by festival staff. “Osama the Hero” follows the misguided vigilante attempts of concerned neighbours fighting terrorism. “Osama” switched effortlessly and instantaneously between humour and intense confrontation until it reached its shocking climax and denouement, making it my festival highlight.

Finally, I checked out “Treue Körper,” a showcase of modern dance where four distinct performances feature a variety of styles and tones. The performances ranged from a solo dance set to a broken military soundtrack – an aggressive satire of female sexualization and submission – to a whole troupe of dancers marching automata-like, wrapped up in pillow cases. Such a diverse showcase gave me well-rounded exposure to the exciting new trends brewing in the dance world.

I picked all the shows I attended in true democratic Fringe style: randomly and on-the-spot, standing right outside the box office. The Edinburgh fanatics would do well to buy a ticket to Montreal and get back into the real spirit of the Fringe.

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