Frozen mini waterfalls along the many BC roads Adams Lake
The best photo subjects ever: the iconic rock formations east of Kamloops.
I deliberately left David in these shots
The North Thompson fringed with ice
Throughout the day, we stopped and read poems from David's grandfather's prolific collection of poetry
Exaltation
How often have I, in the sleepy night,
Stirred up, to put on paper, fourteen lines!
Hemming my wild thoughts in those tight confines.
And yet they lilt their joy with feet so light
I scarcely know the message I indite:
Only I know that, when the morning shines,
No halo round my lowly pillow twines,
And all the exaltation’s taken flight.
For Psyche speaks, and she the clearer speaks
The more we are unconscious of the clay
And out of self, in the forgotten hour:
Then truths we have absorbed through days, or weeks
Or years, unfold as in a crystal ray
Like from the bud the rose bursts into flower. Gordon Stace Smith
Footsteps in the Snow
and
Theatre
Walking on Water
This winter has been cold enough to freeze most of the lake,
providing wide open spaces to walk, skate, ski, and snowshoe.
On sunny days the brilliance can be overwhelming.
YouTube Video
Walking onstage
As most of you know, Avril is a drama teacher at a high school in West Vancouver. Each year
the Theatre Company performs a play. This year's production was the published play entitled
Radium Girls
which Avril co-directed with her colleague Jenn.
I attended the
play on its fifth night, sitting with Avril and her co-director on a second
floor overlooking the stage below. The use of space was unconventional. The
directors chose to use alley style theatre. In alley style, the stage area is a
rectangle on the floor where the audience usually sits. The stage area lies
between the audience which is divided and seated on both sides, a variation on
theatre in the round used by Shakespearean companies. The actors also use the
elevated stage at one end of the alley for various emphatic scenes. There are
actor entrances and exits, which include using the "stage", via the
four corners of the space, plus up the middle of the two sets of audiences.
Actors come and
go in close proximity to the sitting audience, nothing that could trip the
actors can be left in the aisle ways.The audience is made a participant by
accommodating the actors' movements in and out: the audience is aware but
agrees to ignore the exits and entrances taking place. Actors turn to face and
speak to the audience on either side, and sometimes there are separate sets of
dialogue happening alternately, at each end of the 'stage' area. This has the
audience watching actors, back and forth as if watching a tennis game, and it
amused the actors to see the audience's heads moving back and forth in unison.
Using a large space and having the audience on both sides makes the
choreography of movement extra important. As you can imagine, it's a blocking
challenge for the director, as to where actors stand etc., as well as a
challenge re lighting and voice projection.
For visual proportion,
actors can never stand too close to one another, in order to use the largeness
of space etc. In rehearsals Avril carried a pole as she walked among the
players to indicate to them when they needed to back away from each other.
They'd automatically start backing up whenever they saw Avril and the pole
coming! The alley presentation is very complex but the result is an intimacy
between audience and actors, and I found the result was very natural, not at
all "staged"!
The plot is based on the
true story of young women, employed and underpaid, who were part of the WW1 war
effort with their job of painting the numbers on watches which were worn by the
soldiers. The women were encouraged to keep their brushes sharp by using their
mouths and lips, something that seems like a shocking workplace violation to us
now. But it happened. Plus, to make the numbers visible in the darkness of the
trenches, the paint contained radioactive radium, and the radium was causing
oral cancer in the women. The women were repeatedly told that their efforts
could literally mean life or death for the boys overseas, and even when the
results began to show up, they were slow to draw a connection between the paint
and their illness. When they did, their concerns about the cause were not
accepted by authorities, including by a medical doctor and a judge, who were
part of the cover up for a terrible and costly sandal. Approximately 40 women
died as a result.
This year there
were two trios of actors for the lead women roles. Each trio performed for
three nights.
Radium was
hailed as a cure all and thought harmless. For one thing it brought X Rays to
the war effort and to world medicine. It was assumed to be harmless, though
Madame Currie herself eventually died from working with it. The story
progression is bringing justice to this injustice, highlighting the women and
their female supporters (including a feisty woman reporter and the wife of the
employer responsible) who are moved and bravely speak up. Brilliantly and
emotionally performed, these high school students moved a rapt audience to the
point of tears. I could see people leaning forward as they watched. Such use of
drama can cause an audience to make their own connections to this sort of
societal horror and empathize with its ragged course.
Each year Rockridge's productions bring particular issues to focus, from
well known plays like Pippin to devised plays (written by the actors) about
dilemmas faced by teenagers (e.g. relationships, living with technology) to
this year's interesting human rights/political/environmental topic...always
leaving the audience with something to think about.
But more
importantly, there was another real life drama happening behind the scenes,
among the cast and directors: deep bonding through the friendships formed,
between students and between students and the adults working with them. The
experience of creating something of worth and quality together, of being guided
by mature adults through the process, of moving and handling heights and depths
of emotion, and just the experience of buckling down to a cycle of hard work,
is truly a priceless gift. For this purpose drama in schools is incredibly
rich. It introduces important values and experiences, all positive precedents
that will stay with these students forever.
