Literature – by Naomi Skwarna
On a slushy Tuesday morning, Toronto author Sheila Heti (The Middle Stories, Ticknor, and the soon to be released How Should A Person Be?) and U of T English specialist Fan Li sit down to toast and omelets at Aunties and Uncles to talk about writing, the happiest day, and narrating your own life.
Sheila Heti: So you’re going to get your BA and then you’re done?
Fan Li: I would like to be in an MFA program. And the chief reason isn’t because the program will suddenly catapult me to fame, or anything. It’s more like, I have thousands of dollars of bills, and I don’t want to pay them—
Sheila: Right. So you want to keep getting more loans.
[Laughter.]
Fan: By the way, I really liked The Middle Stories.
Sheila: Oh, thanks!
Fan: They’re succinct—totally unconventional. I really liked the quirkiness. I don’t know if that’s the right word. A lot of the stuff that we read in class is ultimately pretty conservative.
Sheila: Who are you reading?
Fan: I don’t know…like Life of Pi. I find meta-fiction to be interesting. There’s always this feeling I get from U of T that you can never get too experimental. What do you think of it?
Sheila: That’s why I’m a little afraid of creative writing programs. I think they always try to make any student’s writing into something you’ve already read. This book that I’m just finishing, I’ve probably had 20 people read it, friends of mine, at different stages, and they’ll say 30 things, and one thing will be really useful. With The Middle Stories and Ticknor, I didn’t really care if anybody read them, but this book I really want people to read.
Fan: Were you always this confident in your writing?
Sheila: Yeah. It’s one thing that I feel pretty sure about—that I know what I want to do, and I feel like I understand writing, to the degree that I feel close to it, or something.
Fan: Where do you think writing is going?
Sheila: I don’t think it goes anywhere—I think that’s kind of the frustrating thing about writing. It’s always story—there can be these little branches, but the current always seems to be about story being the central thing. Do you think it’s going anywhere?
Fan: I don’t know—I have this institutionalized view that writing in retrospect is always measured out in segments. I’m tired of postmodernism, fragmentation. I don’t want to be a neoclassicist, but I do want there to be a point.
Sheila: Most mainstream fiction is what you’re talking about—very conservative. It’s only in university that everything really seems postmodern. I think really, it’s probably going into memoir, if anything. People just writing about their own lives and not making things up. For me, to see the writer take some kind of risk—yeah. Any writer that does that—
Fan: Now there’s this focus on meta-fiction and how stories are written. Even as I walked in, I grabbed this table and the server [Zach] was like, “What are you guys doing?” and I said, “We’re interviewing an author, and then my friend [Naomi] is going to write about the interview”—he was like, “That’s very meta.”
[The food arrives.]
Sheila: That’s beautiful, with the butter melting. It’s like a photograph… I think of YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia—that’s the great artwork of our time. It’s not going to be any book, it’s not going to be any painting. It’s this totally democratic creation—a kind of library of everything.
Fan: I think that’s actually really incredible.
[Zach approaches the table.]
Zach: How are you guys doing…how’s the interview going?
NAOMI SKWARNA: Super good. Do you want to ask a question? Do you want to get in on this as well?
ZACH: Um…are you excited about the rock concert?
SHEILA: Always. I love rocks.
[Zach exits.]
Fan: I used to have this romanticized idea about what a writer does, he lives in la la land—he has such a great life. But every single writer you meet sort of bursts that bubble—
Sheila: But you do live in la la land and have a wonderful life!
Fan: Do you sort of ever live a story out in your head? Like transfer what you’re doing into a story?
Sheila Much less than I used to. I don’t do that so much, no.
Fan: I guess that’s the “mature writer” thing.
Sheila: I don’t think I like feeling that way anymore, because life isn’t a story. Life isn’t fiction, it’s really life, and to minimize life into just being a story—it makes an object out of your life. It makes you into a character, and you’re not a character, you’re just a…I don’t like that feeling so much anymore—it makes me nervous to reduce everything.
Fan: Everything in the past is always framed into a story. When people ask, “what’s the happiest moment of your life?” I can give, like, a manufactured answer—all the details of what happened, emotional climax—
Sheila: Were there three other friends there on the happiest day of your life? I had this conversation with a friend. Both of us (were) with three or four other friends when we were 12 or 13 years old.
Fan: Do you feel like there’s something happier, but you just don’t remember?
Sheila: Absolutely, that’s just the day—that’s just the title I gave. Of course there have to be happier days. It’s not a very interesting story—just a story.
Fan: Life is weird…a lot of weird things happen.
Sheila: I feel sorry for people that don’t feel that moment to moment—never having that feeling of how crazy and weird it is, how it doesn’t really make any sense at all, and how strange it is to be alive.
Dance – by Shoshana Wasser
Michael Trent is the artistic director of the professional company Dancemakers and an alumnus of Trinity College, class of 1985. Sarah Harris is the artistic director of the U of T Festival of Dance, a choreographer for Hart House’s Jerry Springer: The Opera, and a philosophy student at Victoria College.
DANCE
By Shoshana Wasser
Sarah Harris: I want to know how you got started!
Michael Trent: I actually trained a lot as a kid…but I wasn’t thinking of doing anything professionally with it. And by the end of high school, I’d abandoned the idea entirely. I went to U of T to study science. But about two weeks after my final biochem exam, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I thought about doing my MA in public health policy […] I didn’t think I would come back to dance, but I did.
Sarah: Me too—I trained all my life, did all the competitions, but when I started applying to universities, I thought, “I can’t make a career out of this, it’s not going to be stable enough for me.” I ended up studying philosophy, but I found myself increasingly getting involved. And here I am again, somehow in the dance world.
Michael: But any passion that comes to you at an early age is clearly important.
Sarah: Sure. If you start at a very young age, it’s just in you. But I’m waiting to see where my life decides to go. I don’t want to decide too early, and I’m already flip-flopping on what happens next. You were lucky that you just sort of had the universe “pick you up.”
Michael: I’ve never looked out on the horizon more than two or three years in terms of what’s coming next. And it’s worked really well. I feel that if you’re really committed to what you’re doing in the moment, and you open yourself up to every experience that comes your way, things will make themselves really clear to you. If you had told me four years ago that I’d be the artistic director of Dancemakers, I wouldn’t have believed it. It just came about at the right time.
Sarah: Where do you find inspiration for concepts for shows and choreography?
Michael: It’s changed a lot for me over the years. I’m finding that my work has more and more become a way for me to deal with questions that I have about the world, how we live with each other. Maybe it’s because of my university degree, or my analytical approach, but there’s some sort of curiosity and a questioning process that I go through. Also, I’ve been trying to create a performance space that is more like the people watching. We also see and react to things differently, bringing in our own experiences. It’s an opportunity for reflection.
Sarah: Makes sense.
Michael: But that’s also a problem surrounding contemporary dance: people fear it because they’re afraid that they’re not going to “get it.” And in our culture, people want to know how to think, and what the “right answer” is. It’s part of our job as artists to have a conversation with people around the possibilities.
Sarah: Have people ever told you that making a career in the arts is hard to do?
Michael: Well, just as much as anything. It’s not that I haven’t had to struggle to make my career happen—I certainly have—but I think it goes back to being committed to what you’re doing in the moment. You need to trust that if you put your energy into it, other things will come of it. Sometimes I get weary of people who say, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you get to do what you love.” Hopefully everyone does what they do because they love it. There’s almost a sense that there’s people in the “real world,” and then there are artists.
Sarah: I’m finding now that it’s just as hard to be a dancer as it is to be a choreographer, and trying to find resources that will help me learn.
Michael: Yeah, I didn’t learn how to become a choreographer. I didn’t do an undergrad in dance, so I never did a lot of the formal dance education that a lot of my colleagues had, with philosophy, dance history, and criticism. I just became a choreographer by doing.
Sarah: The other hard thing is communicating “what dance is” with the outside public. Although not everyone’s a dancer, everyone can appreciate it. It’s not easy for me to say, “I’m working on a dance show, and the concept is this,” and just have people come out.
Michael: My philosophy is that you never want to overestimate people’s knowledge—you need to talk to them and give them the tools to understand—but never to underestimate their intelligence.
Sarah: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Michael: I’ve been the lucky recipient of lots of wisdom from people who have been further along the experience line. The one thing that’s really guided my life is, “You just need to keep doing the work.” Spend as much time actively engaging in the thing as you can. Find a way of getting rid of the distractions, doing the important stuff first—because my tendency is not to, I’m a horrible procrastinator. What’s the best advice you’ve had?
Sarah: We always had this motto at my studio that we need to “stop thinking and start dancing.” You can always be thinking about the steps, what you’re doing, and what comes next, but you lose your experience in that moment. Although the audience is experiencing that moment, you are too, and if you’re thinking too hard, you really lose how it feels—and really, it’s all about how it feels.
Theatre – by Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy
Julia Lederer is a recent graduate of the master’s drama program at U of T. She previously studied Early Modern Studies and Theatre at Dalhousie University. A member of the independent theatre company Theatre In Her Shoes, Julia has written and performed a number of works, including her one-act play Boxed In, which hit the stages of Tarragon, SummerWorks, and Buddies in Bad Times in 2007. She is currently applying for grants and working on an extension of her short play Frame.
Kristen Thompson is the writer and actor of I, Claudia, her successful one-woman show that was adapted into a film in 2004 and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. This past September Crow’s Theatre remounted the play at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. Her second work, The Patient Hour, is in production. Thompson, who graduated in 1990 from the University College Drama Program, is the recipient of three Dora awards.
Julia Lederer: I have a thousand questions. I’m really interested in I, Claudia because I love it so much. I feel like the play is a wonderful example of creating your own vehicle and writing for yourself.
Kristen Thompson: The thing that sticks out in my mind about the creation of I, Claudia is that I used masks that we trained with at the National Theatre School. I wanted to write something about divorce because I thought it was the least explored essential topic that I had come across. Because the play was personal and because it was from a young voice, I felt very vulnerable. The night before, I called the people I initially presented the play to, and said, “I can’t possibly do this, what I have written is ridiculous and terrible,” and they said, “Why don’t you give us a chance to see it?” I couldn’t sleep, but I showed it to them, and they told me to show it publicly. That was a huge vote of confidence. But it’s hard to know sometimes what you can create—what you can get away with—in theatre.
Julia: With The Patient Hour, did you find it easier not to get caught up in it all by just being the writer and not in the production?
Kristen: That’s a great question. It’s not that I’m not filled with a tremendous amount of doubt—I’m not performing in it, so it’s different—but I feel my stomach start to heave when I think about the first rehearsal and opening night. You can’t escape [those feelings] when you are writing something that you care about.
My background at U of T was really helpful. Some people don’t have to go to school at all—they are ready to be actors. And then there were people like me that found acting through U of T. My instructors [at U of T] developed really thorough programs and laid the groundwork really well. I felt like I was on solid ground, but I needed more training onstage so I went to the National Theatre School of Canada, which is a three-year program where you’re onstage all the time. It was so intensive I could have been a doctor!
Julia: I also did playwriting and acting outside of university. Afterwards, I thought about applying to NTS about 300 times but I couldn’t decide what discipline, and I felt like I wasn’t finished learning the academic side of theatre, so I came to U of T. One of my main goals with theatre is to try to tie the academic with the practical. So while I was at U of T I was doing other things, like the Paprika and Fringe festivals.
Kristen: I started out acting in very small productions, and was very focused. I feel like I’ve only very slowly opened my scope over the last 10 years that I’ve been working professionally. When I finished at NTS, I took every job I got whether I liked the play or didn’t, whether I got paid or not. My objective was to be onstage, because there’s a whole other level of performance that you can’t get to until you can get over being onstage. And that takes years. I did most of my work for the first six to eight years at regional theatres.
Julia: I’ve really only worked here in Toronto in festivals. I find [most information] about shows and castings online. Like you said, you say yes to everything in the beginning. Now, I’m trying to figure out now how to say no to things!
Kristen: The only time I can remember ever putting myself out there when I was young was when I wanted to see a production one time really badly and I had no money. So I went to the box office to ask if I could have a ticket and they said I could if I helped with the strike [disabling the set after the show]. I was more apt to be intimidated in the past. But people in productions will need the extra help because there is no money in theatre!
Julia: But in recent years I’ve met and worked with adults who are able to have careers in the arts. That opened my eyes to the fact that it actually can happen. There are compromises—maybe you teach, maybe you do other things, but seeing that people can make it work has been really valuable. But I try to write a lot of grants and just take it day-to-day.
Kristen: Yeah, that was always my attitude. I thought that I had to have other jobs, do things on the side—that’s just reality. Even if you do really well from a theatre point of view, that doesn’t mean [you’re doing] really well financially. I actually think having another job sustains your sanity in the long run. And Toronto is a wonderful city for the arts. You can make generalizations about what is and isn’t available here, but then the question is, who are the artists who are going to do it here? You have to have someone who is willing to create it, and they have to want to do it pretty damn badly, because nothing gets created unless you want to create it badly.
Julia: There are fewer opportunities than there are artists, but it’s possible to create your own opportunities. I have a small company with four other women called Theatre in Her Shoes and we were blown away by the number of applications we received. Setting the groundwork and doing something yourself is frightening, but it’s also empowering. Honest communication is really hard to come by, and theatre can force that. You can learn about so many different things—and about yourself at the same time.
