Musically speaking, Speedy Ortiz is definitely different than almost everything climbing the charts today. There are times when Dupuis’ voice is struggling to be heard, and it occasionally seems more like she’s visiting from another, quieter act. At other times, the four are in perfect sync, each contributing to an unpredictable musical dynamic, as if each were responsible for pulling the show’s tone in a different direction. The crowd seems intrigued.

La Sala Rossa is filled with a casually dressed crowd in their late 20s and early 30s. Some rather large beards and grungy ensembles can be spotted in the crowd, here and there. It is clear that the majority of the crowd is here for headliner Chelsea Light Moving, a New York City band featuring alt-rock legend Thurston Moore. But Speedy Ortiz still manages to pique the audience’s curiosity. The band continues to lead the crowd into song after song, Dupuis seemingly guiding the other band members with less than a glance at the audience. Her melodic vocals begin to carry the room away, only to be submerged by a tangled mix of beating drum and guitar clashes.

So much so, that the music makes her words inaudible and incomprehensible. From what the audience can hear, her lyrics are choppy and poetic, a mix of the singer’s personal anecdotes and her stream of consciousness. Left to interpretation, they could mean just about anything you would like them to, or, then again, nothing at all. Dupuis continues singing, fixing the crowd with a doll-like empty stare; her demeanour is oddly fitting for her indiscernible lyrics. At times the music is so heavy and distorted that it seems to create glitches in the sound system – although it was hard to tell whether this was Speedy Ortiz’s doing or an issue with the venue itself.

Between Dupuis’ indiscernible lyrics and the band’s roaring sounds, there are times when Speedy Ortiz is downright hard to listen to for those uninitiated to the indie or punk scene. But the band doesn’t seem to be aiming to appeal to those who aren’t already into the scene. It’s the few instances in which you can actually hear the band’s new wave experimental sounds, or see Dupuis smile behind her dark expression, that may just keep you searching for more. Otherwise, they carry on as if to say, ‘this is us, take or leave it,’ and they do it well.

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Guillermo Trejo began his project “Protesta” about three years ago when he decided to draw attention to the political uprisings in Mexico. At the time, in 2009, the Mexican population was engaged in several protests against their current government and the local elections that were currently underway, demonstrating disappointment in the elected political party and questioning the legitimacy of the electoral process itself. About a year ago, when Trejo’s project was receiving attention from different galleries, a similar backlash once again erupted in Mexico, this time with regard to the Mexican general elections. The majority of Mexican media outlets, which are suspected to have been coerced by the government itself, underreported these two social uprisings. For Trejo, this project has always been a “fresh” subject, worthy of discussion. However, to call his work a conceptual exploration of the exchange of ideas within the public sphere, as the ARPRIM does in introducing Trejo’s project, is to fundamentally exaggerate the exhibit’s power.

“Protesta” is comprised of a series of hardly visible revolutionary slogans that hang on opposite sides of the gallery space. Trejo retrieved these slogans from photographs of the Mexican uprisings, which were published by certain media outlets, printed them on large sheets of paper, and had them covered in paint in order to illustrate how the Mexican government attempted to erase the traces of such protests. According to the ARPRIM gallery, Trejo attempts to explore a certain socio-political tension that is both shaped and accentuated by conflicts surrounding the use of public space.

Trejo’s work is unique in that it uses the raw revolutionary material in question as a source of inspiration behind the exhibit. But his work does not fully engage with or explore the material in question as it merely reproduces it within a modern art space. In doing so, Trejo has separated these original inscriptions from their politically and socially charged contexts, reproduced them in a clean and calculated fashion, and, it would seem, almost cleansed them of any sense of cultural dynamism or revolutionary struggle. Moreover, the slogans in question are prototypical revolutionary mottos (e.g., “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning behind the suffering”) further impeding any expression of the character and individuality of these protests.

Although Trejo’s intent may in fact have been to explore the power of words as used in public discourse by distancing them from their context, he provides them with so little contextualization that they fail to resonate with the viewer. It is almost too obvious that the artist himself has taken on the roles of both protester and government by producing the posters and covering them up, leaving the artworks themselves empty of any sense of the clash in Mexico’s streets.

The seemingly effortless physical production of these thinly covered posters combined with the banality of the slogans themselves weakens his message. In all of this, Mexico seems lost, the pieces of “Protesta” fade into the background, and Trejo’s work serves as little more than a quiet reminder that social activists and the state often, as we already know, stand in opposition to one another.

“Protesta” will be running at ARPRIM (372 St. Catherine W., # 426) until October 5.

The post The words of Mexican protesters appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“In some shows,” explains Harnden, “there is a real feeling of a therapeutic process happening in the audience.” You Arrive deals with many difficult subjects, including family trauma, child development, and interpersonal relationships. The play itself is centered on the concept of ‘arrival.’ Arriving, for Harnden, involves achieving a personal balance between thoughts and emotions to reach a place of stable peace. This state, described by Harnden as “staying connected,” can be disrupted by childhood trauma.

You Arrive represents Harnden’s accumulated personal knowledge and experience in the field of psychology. Harnden is a professor in the Creative Arts Therapies department of Concordia University, which studies the ways in which theatrical and psychotherapeutic methods are combined in order to generate personal, emotional, and developmental change within individuals. Harnden has also spent over a decade at the Montreal Children’s Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, researching and practicing clinical work with troubled adolescents.

You Arrive explores the creation and destruction of the self in children and adolescents. Harnden emphasizes the notion that a child needs to see a reflection of themselves in their caregiver. This self-reflection gives the child the sense that they are being seen, listened to, and understood by those around them. This in turn allows the child to develop a degree of emotional regulation, a process by which both a flooding or absence of emotion is avoided. The parent, for their part, needs to facilitate healthy childhood development by containing their children’s feelings as well as regulating their own emotions, tempering feelings of anger and anxiety so as to avoid negatively influencing the child. Harnden seems to empathize with the difficulty of child rearing, stating during the performance that “[parenting] is never perfect – [it just has to be] good enough.”

But what happens when it isn’t good enough? Some forms of unhealthy familial relationships can create childhood trauma. When a caregiver is repeatedly unable to regulate their emotions, their child will be constantly over-flooded and subjected to high levels of stress, internalizing their caregiver’s feelings, eventually making them unable to separate their emotions from those of their caregiver. This leads to adolescents, and even adults, experiencing emotional flights without any real cause.

You Arrive uses several mediums of communication simultaneously. “I wanted [the performance] to have that multimedia feel,” says Harnden. “[The viewers] take the content in differently.” You Arrive delivers its message through references to famous theoretical claims within psychology, Harnden’s own narration of said claims, and the cast’s performance itself. Four young Drama Therapy students (Maud Gendron-Langvin, Meaghan George, Serena Spiegel, and Shea Wood) present the themes of You Arrive, portraying relationships between family members as well as characters’ internal struggles.

Harnden’s sensitive narration and the cast’s skilled portrayal of childhood trauma interact positively and reinforce one another’s power. The combined effect communicates the difficulty certain children experience in recovering from traumatic experiences. But You Arrive also offers the hopeful possibility of, one day, reaching a sense of arrival, even if it’s after years of psychotherapy. To arrive is to achieve a sense of wholeness, security, and continuity, in both one’s thoughts and feelings.

You Arrive has both an educational and artistic quality – it seeks to explain psychological themes through Harnden’s descriptive narration, framed by the cast’s portrayal of concrete events. Yet You Arrive also communicates its themes through a plurality of voices and frequent use of visual metaphors. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Harnden’s theatrical work is the way the message itself is infused in, and reinforced by, the structure of the piece. As Harden explains, the use of different mediums leads the audience to gravitate between intellectual and emotional experiences, allowing for a sense of multi-dimensional understanding, or in other words, arrival.

The post Theatrical therapy appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“In some shows,” explains Harnden, “there is a real feeling of a therapeutic process happening in the audience.” You Arrive deals with many difficult subjects, including family trauma, child development, and interpersonal relationships. The play itself is centered on the concept of ‘arrival.’ Arriving, for Harnden, involves achieving a personal balance between thoughts and emotions to reach a place of stable peace. This state, described by Harnden as “staying connected,” can be disrupted by childhood trauma.

You Arrive represents Harnden’s accumulated personal knowledge and experience in the field of psychology. Harnden is a professor in the Creative Arts Therapies department of Concordia University, which studies the ways in which theatrical and psychotherapeutic methods are combined in order to generate personal, emotional, and developmental change within individuals. Harnden has also spent over a decade at the Montreal Children’s Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, researching and practicing clinical work with troubled adolescents.

You Arrive explores the creation and destruction of the self in children and adolescents. Harnden emphasizes the notion that a child needs to see a reflection of themselves in their caregiver. This self-reflection gives the child the sense that they are being seen, listened to, and understood by those around them. This in turn allows the child to develop a degree of emotional regulation, a process by which both a flooding or absence of emotion is avoided. The parent, for their part, needs to facilitate healthy childhood development by containing their children’s feelings as well as regulating their own emotions, tempering feelings of anger and anxiety so as to avoid negatively influencing the child. Harnden seems to empathize with the difficulty of child rearing, stating during the performance that “[parenting] is never perfect – [it just has to be] good enough.”

But what happens when it isn’t good enough? Some forms of unhealthy familial relationships can create childhood trauma. When a caregiver is repeatedly unable to regulate their emotions, their child will be constantly over-flooded and subjected to high levels of stress, internalizing their caregiver’s feelings, eventually making them unable to separate their emotions from those of their caregiver. This leads to adolescents, and even adults, experiencing emotional flights without any real cause.

You Arrive uses several mediums of communication simultaneously. “I wanted [the performance] to have that multimedia feel,” says Harnden. “[The viewers] take the content in differently.” You Arrive delivers its message through references to famous theoretical claims within psychology, Harnden’s own narration of said claims, and the cast’s performance itself. Four young Drama Therapy students present the themes of You Arrive, portraying relationships between family members as well as characters’ internal struggles.

Harnden’s sensitive narration and the cast’s skilled portrayal of childhood trauma interact positively and reinforce one another’s power. The combined effect communicates the difficulty certain children experience in recovering from traumatic experiences. But You Arrive also offers the hopeful possibility of, one day, reaching a sense of arrival, even if it’s after years of psychotherapy. To arrive is to achieve a sense of wholeness, security, and continuity, in both one’s thoughts and feelings.

You Arrive has both an educational and artistic quality – it seeks to explain psychological themes through Harnden’s descriptive narration, framed by the cast’s portrayal of concrete events. Yet You Arrive also communicates its themes through a plurality of voices and frequent use of visual metaphors. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Harnden’s theatrical work is the way the message itself is infused in, and reinforced by, the structure of the piece. As Harden explains, the use of different mediums leads the audience to gravitate between intellectual and emotional experiences, allowing for a sense of multi-dimensional understanding, or in other words, arrival.

The post Theatrical therapy appeared first on The McGill Daily.