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Bardolatry* Thrives at the University of Guelph
Shakespeare Exhibit Fills Art Centre
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| From left: Second-year students Katie O'Brien, Jennifer Norrie and Kendra Cooke heard about the opening of the “Shakespeare - Made in Canada” festival from a friend and decided to see for themselves the Sanders portrait of William Shakespeare. They joined an overflow crowd at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre for the Jan. 11 event and took pictures of themselves with what U of G president Alastair Summerlee called the “definitive” image of the Bard. Photo by Mary Dickieson |
It takes a 150-page catalogue to summarize the Shakespeare exhibition at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (MSAC).
Filling more than 80 per cent of the art centre's gallery space and taking up more than half of its exhibition year, the “Shakespeare — Made in Canada” exhibition “has been an enormous and exciting undertaking,” says MSAC director Judith Nasby.
She and her staff have been working on the exhibition for more than a year with joint curator Prof. Daniel Fischlin, English and Theatre Studies, and a team of co-curators who have filled the MSAC galleries with some surprising displays and art objects.
“The exhibition includes more than 200 artworks and archival items borrowed from individuals and organizations across Canada,” says Nasby.
The content of the exhibition ranges from theatrical set designs to 17th-century mathematics to contemporary native and francophone adaptations of Shakespeare's plays.
One gallery showcases changes in portraiture from Shakespeare's time to the present, and there's an audio intervention in the Donald Forster Sculpture Park. Other displays draw on the Stratford Festival archives and the U of G Library's Canadian theatre archives.
The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project also fills gallery space with photographs, audio and video presentations from its database and the 'Speare video game.
A second-floor gallery is being used for the educational program developed by the Office of Open Learning and representatives of the Upper Grand District and Wellington Catholic District school boards.
As many as 10,000 schoolchildren are expected to visit the exhibition and take part in workshops related to their classroom studies in English, drama, the visual arts, history and science.
Members of the curatorial team also contributed to the catalogue, which is called Shakespeare — Made in Canada: Contemporary Adaptations in Theatre, Pop Culture and Visual Arts. It was published by the art centre and co-edited by Nasby and MSAC assistant curator Dawn Shea. The catalogue is available at the art centre for $20.
Stratford Is a World Stage
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| Stratford's distinctive thrust stage is featured in a gallery exhibition crediting Tom Patterson, the Stratford businessman who developed the idea for a Shakespearean theatre in his rural community; British director Tyrone Guthrie, who developed the vision; and renowned theatrical designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who designed the curtainless hexagonal platform. Photo courtesy Stratford Festival of Canada |
In Act IV, Scene 6 of King Lear, the mad Lear utters an obscure line: “This (is) a good block.” Richard Monette remembers directing William Hutt in the role in 1996. When Hutt came to the line in rehearsal, he stamped his foot on the stage, rather than touching his head as many actors do. For Monette, the gesture was right for Lear and also captured an essential truth about the Festival's unique thrust stage. “It worked,” says Monette. “It was a brilliant theatrical moment.”
For actors, the thrust stage that Hutt honoured with his gesture is both enormously demanding and intensely exciting. “What we consider good acting at Stratford is different from other companies,” says Antoni Cimolino, Festival actor turned general director. “Acting here has been driven by the architecture. You don't have to hurl what you're doing across the void to the audience, so everything seems more natural and easy.”
With minimal sets, actors and the story they're telling become the centre of the audience experience. Seen by the audience in three dimensions whenever they're on stage, the actors must perform with extraordinary concentration and skill.
“An actor cannot lie on that stage,” says Hutt, who appeared in the Festival's first season and most other seasons. “On a proscenium stage, he has the protection of scenery at his back. Here, he must be able to respond intuitively to the size and shape of the space around him.”
The late Mervyn Blake, who played 42 seasons with the Festival, agreed. “I felt I couldn't move without being noticed. But the best thing to do is to stand still and involve yourself in the scene.”
For the Festival's first four seasons, this extraordinary performance space was located under a huge blue-grey and rust canvas tent. When the permanent theatre was built in 1957, the stage remained in place, and architect Robert Fairfield created the permanent building around it. The balcony, with its central pillar marking the geographic centre of the structure, held the engineer's tripod used for making all radial measurements.
By Pat Morden, in association with the Stratford Festival of Canada
Portraiture and the Bard
MSAC director Judith Nasby put together an exhibition of contemporary portraiture by artists from across Canada to reveal the influence of the Bard on contemporary notions of character and to serve as an interesting counterpoint to the 17th-century oil-on-panel Sanders portrait that is considered to be the likeness of William Shakespeare. She says she chose artists who would extend our ideas of what constitutes a portrait. In this photo, gallery visitors are discussing Cheryl Ruddick's two-metre-long drawing of a dress that alludes to Shakespeare's character Ophelia and her death by drowning. In the foreground, an entirely different approach to portraiture is a wearable Bottom head by Guelph artist Ryan Price. Nick Bottom is one of Shakespeare's most hilarious comic figures. In Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom is convinced of his attractiveness to women and is unaware when Puck magically transforms his head into that of an ass. Price's Bottom head combines donkey and human features.
Photo by Mary Dickieson
All's Well in the Archives
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| William Hutt wore this costume when portraying the king in a Stratford production of All's Well That Ends Well. The sketch is part of a collection of memorabilia and papers donated by Hutt to U of G's theatre archives. Drawing by Tanya Moisewitsch |
Lorne Bruce, head of archival and special collections at the University of Guelph Library, is co-curator of a Shakespeare exhibition that features material from the Library's L.W. Conolly Theatre Archives. The collection, which focuses on modern Ontario theatre, is represented by scripts, photos, house programs, sketches and scale set models of Shakespearean productions.
“The library's theatre archives began in a modest fashion with the acquisition of one small collection in 1969,” says Bruce. “In the subsequent - decades, the archival collections have rapidly expanded to form the largest archival theatre holdings in Canada, with a significant portion devoted to Shakespearean production and adaptation.”
Most major Ontario theatres are now represented, along with a number of prominent individual artists, such as William Hutt, who have deposited their personal records.
“The breadth and depth of Guelph's holdings demonstrate that the work of Canadian playwrights transcends provincial boundaries,” says Bruce. “Without a doubt, our theatres and our performers, playwrights and designers have made a national and international impact.”
Native Earth Workshop Produces Video for Shakespeare Exhibition
As a prelude to the Shakespeare exhibition, Native Earth Performing Arts held a theatre workshop at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre last semester. A videotape presentation of the workshop is now showing as part of the MSAC exhibition. Viewers can watch as native actors develop an adaptation of Julius Caesar written by Yvette Nolan and co-directed by Kennedy Cathy MacKinnon. The six-minute film shows how the acting troupe uses Shakespeare as the source of text to explore dysfunction in native governments and their community's role in that. The video was produced by Guelph drama graduate Marion Gruner and graduate student Sorouja Moll, who says the actors aren't “merely reviving a play by a dead white male. Instead, they're grappling with the story of their people as it's being played out now.”
Photo courtesy MSAC
Will in the Comics
The Macdonald Stewart Art Centre features a graphic novel by Guelph artist Nick Craine as part of its Shakespeare exhibition. Parchment of Light: The Life & Death of William Shakespeare is an MSAC publication and sells for $10. It consolidates the history of Shakespeare into a meaningful portrait that blends narrative and illustration.
“Shakespeare was working in the gutter of the arts in his own time,” says Craine. “Theatre was his entry point to survival. In exchange, Will elevated the theatrical medium from disposable pop to meaningful complex structure and eventually masterpiece.
“The comic book is the artistic gutter of our times. To portray the Bard's life in a comic strip narrative makes the telling itself a relentless artistic action.”
Designing for Shakespeare
This set model is part of the L.W. Conolly Theatre Archive at U of G and represents one of the more unusual stage designs for Shakespeare's The Tempest. It was designed by William Chesney in 1987 and is as much a work of art as it is a working theatre set. Prof. Pat Flood, English and Theatre Studies, contributes to the Shakespeare exhibition from her research to throw light on the production of the Bard's works from the point of view of theatrical designers. “As a professor and a professional theatre designer, I have long felt the need to promote and encourage understanding of theatrical design as an art form in its own right,” she says.
Photo courtesy CASP
Kids Give 'Speare Two Thumbs Up
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| Jackson Mill, 12, and his sister, Chloe, 9, say 'Speare is “pretty hard.” Jackson produced Clay- mation videos for the CASP game but hasn't seen them yet as a 'Speare player because his Clay- mation stories are reserved as payoffs for players who make it into the final phase of the game. Photo by Mary Dickieson |
A video game that raises the bar on Flash technology and is a pioneer in educational gaming is up and running at the “Shakespeare — Made in Canada” festival exhibition. It's called 'Speare and was designed to teach gamers about literacy within a familiar arcade environment.
“We took the video gaming medium and made it an educational tool, and it hasn't been easy, but I think we've done an amazing job of it,” says English professor Daniel Fischlin, who's also the director of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP), which will host the game for free at www.canadianshakespeares.ca.
“Gamers say that, in terms of the level of programming and concept, this game is unique,” he says. “The game is beautiful graphically, and all the elements are text-based and learning-based. And it teaches literacy without being overly didactic.”
'Speare, which was created by the CASP team, fuses the appeal of an arcade game with the goal of improving basic visual and textual literacy by using the works of William Shakespeare. The 3-D game puts players in a futuristic spaceship that they navigate through a faraway galaxy in search of missing knowledge based on an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
“There are all these nested things, like video Claymation scenes from Romeo and Juliet and games within the game, to keep kids interested in the different components,” says Fischlin.
The layers within the game seem to have paid off. When the CASP team tested 'Speare on a group of Grade 6 students, the kids had to be dragged away from the consoles after three hours of playing, he says.
Once gamers finish the game, their reward is access to the most highly interactive version of Romeo and Juliet anywhere on the web.
Fischlin and his team have also created a whole series of pedagogical tools for teachers and students based on the actual game content. “We've made a direct connection between gaming and activities that can be done in the classroom,” he says.
In addition to 'Speare, CASP has contributed posters, photographs and other material collected while compiling its database of Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare's work.
*Although William Shakespeare is credited with adding more than 3,000 words to the English language, “bardolatry” is not one of them. The term was coined by George Bernard Shaw (from the English “bard” and “latria,” Greek for worship) in reference to the way Romantic critics factored Shakespeare into an object of almost religious adoration.