CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW #70 Spring 1992
VideoCabaret and the Subversion of “Scenography”
by Michele White

A basic working definition of VideoCabaret International, the brainchild of Deanne Taylor, Michael Hollingsworth, and company, might be that it marries elements of high-tech minimalism with theatrical extravaganza within a poverty aesthetic that says “we find it on the streets”.

Its genesis may be found in the highly theatrical pieces of performance art that came out of the basement of the galleries, A Space in Toronto and the Western Front in Vancouver, in the seventies and resulted in the first incarnation of the Hummer Sisters, the performance art group to which Taylor belongs. The art of the time was off the walls, half performance and half graphic. As Deanne Taylor describes in, “we were more theatrically located than anyone else at A Space at the time. We wanted to work with performance and text, music and video, to think visually and put it in front of people. It wasn’t avoiding the gallery scene per se or anti-disciplinarian in intent, it was just multi-media, multi-dimensional in nature.” Perhaps what existed was a good example of what Leo Steinberg terms “inter-art traffic”.

There are now much closer associations between various forms of alternate, popular, and high art theatre which are embodied in groups like VideoCabaret and in the performance art movement. Arguably VideoCabaret, which has its origins in a Dada sensibility to the degree that Performance does, shares much of the same territory and agenda even though the latter is categorized as visual art and the former as theatre.

When Michael Hollingsworth returned to Toronto after a period of exile, disenfranchised from the established theatre community, he was looking for an alternate venue which was not so easily definable in terms of existing practice in the city. Hollingsworth wanted to draw on sources from the live rock and roll world to Marshall McLuhan while still working with text.

The Hummers were interested in the cabaret format and the idea of performance in a place where there could be interaction with the audience, where people could drink and smoke without being told in which direction to look and what to see. Their other major interest, video technology, became subject as well as means through the first VideoCabaret production, The Patty Rehearst Story, where the role of media was a significant part of the story. Hollingsworth learned to write for video – both prerecorded and performed live on stage.

VideoCabaret International, from these various beginnings, now describes itself as the oldest of the small alternative theatre companies and celebrated its fifteenth season in the spring of 1991.

Since 1985, two distinct streams have developed within the company. Michael Hollingsworth embarked upon the mega-cycle of his plays, The History of the Village of the Small Huts, which has involved the core company in its multiple incarnations over these years. At the same time, Deanne Taylor was translating her deep love for the Trinidad Carnival tradition into the Toronto Caribana experience through the Island to Island parade group she founded. And Taylor has written, developed, direction, and produced her opera about reproduction, 2nd Nature, in Toronto at The Theatre Centre in 1990 and Theatre Passe Muraille in the fall of 1991.

The scenographic progression from VideoCabaret’s Patty Rehearst through to the Histories and 2nd Nature is based in the two component parts inherent in the company’s title. Technology as both from and content and the audience as participant provide the foundation for the majority of their work.

The work begins with what will be seen rather than what will be heard.

The performance area for the 2nd Nature included 19 small arches with video screens inset and one large screen set back from the main stage. The video was produced live to allow spontaneity in the actors’ performances (in two hours of production there is only one prerecorded image). Video artists put props, models and maquettes on turntables or on their bodies, lined up the cameras, lit and shot the images. Simultaneously, a colour artist set colourization codes and manipulated effects during each scene through switchers he controlled. There were interactive moments between the video and the performers such as when the performers playing spermatozoa were backed up by a sea of video spermatozoa on their way to fertilize the ova. And there were performance moments when the video dominated before attention switched back to the performers. The childbirth at the end of Act One began with the actor playing Volo, moved to a psychedelic explosion on the video monitors accompanied by voice-over and the band, and then returned to the actor.

Visually the presentation of 2nd Nature has moved away from what Taylor affectionately calls “the everything out there for everyone to see, the big tech mess approach” of classic VideoCabaret where the performance space reflects the mechanics of production. In the first version of 2nd Nature the video production occurred behind the audience. Taylor wanted to try out a system in which there was a greater degree of focus on the stage alone. Now she is starting to return the mechanics of the visual experience to the audience, to envelop them more in the total performance process which includes music creation through the band and video creation through the video artists. In the second production of 2nd Nature, they are still too peripheral for what Taylor eventually thinks should happen. The 2nd Nature set ranged over the full horizontal potential of the theatre’s stage and presented multiple vertical levels for performance. Ultimately, she feels the stage itself might return to the more compact black box concept, although in this context she sees a white box (110 monitors in a white room which can all go to black thereby creating the black box). The physical production elements would then be drawn into the immediate space around the box and clearly available to the audience.

The physical nature of the performance space and its capacity to embrace the audience reflect the cabaret atmosphere which the company strives to achieve. This becomes more and more difficult to accomplish as VideoCabaret feels compelled to reach a bigger audience. The intimacy of the Cameron House, the Queen Street West bar which is their headquarters, Lee’s Palace, or the other “nightclub” venues which have normally been VideoCabaret’s “theatres”, will inevitably be lost. The two recent projects, the Histories and 2nd Nature, are conventional theatre productions and which, in fact, parody traditional theatre formats and require conventional theatre spaces. These productions acknowledge that, in a time of economic downturn, both the funding bodies and the company’s own sense of responsibility demand a broadening of the audience base.

The company has worked with very little financial backing since its inception. Hollingsworth refers to “economic necessities that become an aesthetic principle” in a half-joking way but in fact a poverty aesthetic informs a great deal of the group’s work. The aesthetic sensibility which has driven VideoCabaret’s work over these years has come out of their marginalized financial situation the imprimatur that the establishment, the cultural agencies and institutions provide has been largely absent.

The Histories by Michael Hollingsworth, the Hummer projects and Deanne Taylor’s opera, 2nd Nature, are a conscious process of self-referencing: a kind of personal growth for this primarily self-educated, self-defined art network which is recasting itself constantly against the high art establishment. VideoCabaret and its associated artists make their art out of what is around them, however limited the physical resources may be, partly out of necessity and partly out of the drive that motivates most contemporary art practice – the search for identity.

The set for 2nd Nature included corrugated cardboard arches, columns and vegetation, and crinkled tin-foil clouds. Taylor says that a third staging of the play would be done using costumes created from piles of coloured clothing bought at the Goodwill store. In redeveloping the costumes between the two productions, Taylor wanted to move from the consciously fantastical to a street-wise look. Taylor says: “Before they were more queenly and princessly and not so fifties evening gown glam.” But the crinolines and pom-poms are paired with sneakers and Spandex to mock satirically the costumed musical or operetta. It’s a kind of post-punk Iolanthe fairy visualization, which mixes eras and styles with all of the panache of a “borderline Queen Street band, dressed-up-dressed-down”.

This kind of visual play calls into question the privileged status of establishment theatre and its production values, and the privileged nature

Technology as both form and content and the audience as participant provide the foundation for the majority of their work.

of the audience it attracts. Addressing issues of privilege and the patriarchy began with the Hummer Sisters’ retro-feminist visual strategy. “We were collectors of rhinestones and rubber lace, very interested in our mothers’ aesthetic. We were four women in a theatre group who started by decorating a room for the audience and who had no budget for costume.” Very self-consciously they arranged leopardskin throws around the space and dressed up or masqueraded in curlers and crinolines – “girl stuff” – over black jeans and T-shirts, within a post-feminist aesthetic which strove to revalue “feminine” artifacts.

The feminist focus on claiming “decoration” or “art” as appropriate means for making alternative theatre provides an impetus for Taylor’s involvement in the Carnival parade tradition of Trinidad. This is the legacy of a culture with a very sophisticated apprehension of the visual aesthetic, where people learn to interpret “text” through purely visual means. In 2nd Nature, Taylor wanted to draw into a theatrical setting the visual world of Carnival and, by extension, Caribana. It is an attempt to recreate the whole realm of a Carnival band within the structure of a mock-opera. Taylor has

Addressing issues of privilege and the patriarchy began with the Hummer Sisters’ retro-feminist visual strategy.

translated the visual hierarchy of the band into the character structure of 2nd Nature. A band refers to a distinct parade group, one of many, which may typically include 100 floor members in a section wearing relatively simple, cheap costumes led by an individual or character whose more developed costume relates to the floor members’ costumes but also to band leaders, the king and queen. The king and queen costumes are much more elaborate physically and thematically.

The bands portray whole realms of human experience – historical, political, fictional, fantastical, sexual – within the masquerade form (which has antecedents in Greek and Elizabethan drama) but all through purely visual means and without language. Taylor has seen 2000 costumed people in a band on the road implying the gigantic end of a metaphor. She had also seen smaller bands accomplish the same end in a more compact way and felt she could translate this into the VideoCabaret idiom, in a kind of living cross-cultural experiment, where the visual experience, is valued more richly than within our culture.

In 2nd Nature, the character Volo (representing the ego, the voluntary functions, the mind) is equivalent to the Carnival band king. She wears silvery white and maintains a cool and regal aloofness until her catharsis in Act Two. Auto, keeper of the glands, immune system and hormones, becomes the queen. She wears black but also armbands and a lotus-shaped headdress that contain all the colours of the other characters. The lower powers, or individual characters in charge of different realms, are represented through the characters Cardia (the cardiovascular system) red and black, Gusta (the intestinal system) orange and yellow, Doc (the immune system) blue and green, and Ovary (the reproductive system) pink with hot pink polka dots. The floor members are replicated by the twenty video monitors as a sort of Greek chorus amplifying, through visual imagery, both concrete and abstract, the on-stage action.

The Carnival influence led her to pattern and colour coding for costumes. She wanted a strong connection between the black for Auto and the white for Volo; “the way the underworld and overworld aspects of Carnival come together as light and dark is a very strong theme in 2nd Nature.” Primary colour and patterns were assigned to the organ sisters, the back-up singers’ characters, and Ovary was given “a hot pink radical upsetting polka dot look because she’s the wild card, joker in the deck”. This coding allows for greater identification of the characters and for the quick re-identification of the second generation of the same characters in the second act when the performers exchange roles.

As Dara Rowlands put it in Artviews (Summer 1987): “There is a strong link between visual and literary creation in the concept behind the masquerade characters and the logic which guides their presentation. In parade, these characters have only a moment to present a lasting visual impression and to communicate their message musically. In designing a band (a distinct thematic group within the entire parade), a designer/producer simplifies ideology and narrative, and employs the elements of colour, construction, shape, form and imagery which best relate the theme. For Taylor, whose writing draws its strength from such immediate strategies, the seamless fusion of the politically activated artistic expression in Carnival reflected her own metaphorical wordplay.”

If VideoCabaret is theatre for those who want to see video, hear music, and have a visual experiences, then the role of the scenographer, in this context, takes on different dimensions. In the first place, VideoCabaret designers weren’t scenographers in the traditional sense of set, costume, and lighting artists but more often video artists working on video production and installation aspects in collaboration with the Hummers. Also the conventional practice of the director imposing an interpretation of a text on a body of people involved in separate processes is antithetic to the VideCabaret practice. Instead the emphasis is on the ensemble, on company development of material, the ‘tribe’ process of evolving the works where the text is not separate from the visualization. The work begins with what will be seen rather than what will be heard. It is an aesthetic in which the practitioners can continue to investigate themselves as artists through individual productions integrating music and text and costume and imagery with a long process of development. Scripts get two or three workshops of a week or more with the designers involved at the inception. The visual imagery of the characters and the evolution of the performance space goes through a process of constant dialogue, involving everyone. The process is a replacement of the romantic value system that rewards genius, originality, and individuality with a post-modern one that values the common experience of the collective.

VideoCabaret works with contemporary and immediate issues as subject matter through an evolutionary process. Its self-referencing, parodic processes reflect the present state of the arts and amplify the voice of a community. In the final parts of Hollingsworth’s Histories, which is the next major company project, it has the potential to expand into the high-tech video field it has claimed but within the scale of larger productions and space. It has a visual aesthetic which both allows for spontaneity and the possibility of survival through reduced means. (If need be, its product could be distributed through the video format in the future, bypassing the live theatre process.) VideoCabaret should be and is a company with gravitational pull for those disenfranchised from the traditional theatre world. And it’s the kind of company which will continue to mirror, albeit subversively, ourselves to ourselves.