ACTING
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How She Played the Game written by Cynthia Cooper.
Carmannah’s Magical Forest.
Scraps, Talking With
Belladonna’s Adventures
Film
I have a B.A. (cum laude) in theater from the University of Ottawa. I’ve played in a few shows produced and directed by others, but mostly I’ve played in one-woman shows I’ve produced myself. Whether my own creations are theater or performance art seems to depend on who is watching. Indeed, in non-English theater, I think much of what I’ve done would be called theater, yet in the English world, it seems to fall more easily into the classification of performance art.
Yet…performance art is not generally heavily dependent on text, and my performances are always based in poetic text I’ve written myself. These poems are often rhythmical and repetitious and sometimes fall into the category of song lyrics, rather than poetry. Indeed in the mid-80’s I was writing rap, and have one 45 minute performance, Belladonna’s Adventures in Nah Nah Land written in 1985, which is entirely written in rap.
Here is how I make the distinction between a poetry reading, a play, and a performance:
Poetry Reading
I stand on the stage in my regular clothes and read my poems from pieces of paper or books. The poems are not memorized.
Performance Art
I organise the poems into thematically related sets, or stories; make a costume and/or props and/or stage set to enhance the telling; and present them from memory (i.e. no paper or books.)
Theater
I work with a director who interprets the text and tells me what to do and/or guides me through a discovery of the character I am presenting.
Some argue that the adoption of a character makes the disctinction between performance art and theater; that with theater the performer/actor always adopts a character and this is not so with performance art. Yet, my most recent performance was a type of gorilla theater presented at the Sziget Festival.
‘Angry Earth Mother’ wore a costume I constructed as artist-in-residence at the Agora at Sziget. It was a type of dress, made from canvas and attached to a form shaped from chicken wire. The canvas was colored with a paint I made from mixing earth, liquid white glue, and water. The glue gave it a stiffer, more durable finish. The performance started in the Agora by putting on the costume and rubbing mud all over my face and arms. Then I strolled through the festival grounds singing my latest poem, which seems more a song than a poem, and is a strong, anti-terrorism statement.
‘Angry Earth Mother’ is a character. But she is also part of me. The costume helped liberate her from the part of me that says I shouldn’t say and do things like that. I classify this performance as performance art.
Another performance I’ve done, also based in poetic text presented by a character, is Carmannah’s Magical Forest.
The most traditional theatre presentation I’ve done is How She Played the Game written by Cynthia Cooper.
