This year our talented playwrights will take audiences on an interactive journey winding in and out of the nooks and crannies of our home at St. Luke’s United Church.
Join us for an evening of theatrical exploration and our famous potluck dinner after-party.
Featuring our Tier 2 Playwrights’ Kitchen: Leon Aureus, Marjorie Chan, Lisa Li, and Elyne Quan
Also featuring Tier 1 Playwrights: Yiwei Hu, Susan Lock, Mayko Nguyen, Arlene Paculan, Miquelon Rodriguez, and Fan Wu
Saturday, June 9, 2012 – 7:30pm
St. Luke’s United Church 157 Carlton St. (at Sherbourne St.) pay-what-you-can ($10 suggested minimum) AT THE DOOR. CASH ONLY.
Includes admission and post-show potluck reception.
Unfortunately, this event is not wheelchair accessible.
*Capacity is limited. First come, first served* For more info call us at 416.920.2828 or email info@fu-gen.org
As we come to the end of our fiscal year, the fu-GEN office has been hard at work wrapping up the 7th Annual Potluck Festival and GENesis Conference. We had our post mortem, cleaned out the office, and archived the Festival and Conference material. I'm even getting used to our new Interim Artistic Director (David Yee) being in the office all the time! It has been a monumental year for fu-GEN, hosting this first-ever conference, and we couldn't be happier with how it ran.
I know it's been a long week of waiting, but we finally have some photos ready! No word of a lie, thousands of photos were taken at our 7th Annual Potluck Festival and GENesis Conference. After looking through ALL of them, I can say without hesitation that it was a great week for Asian Canadians.
fu-GEN's 7th Annual Potluck Festival featuring GENesis: Asian-Canadian Theatre Conference has come to an end.
(beat).
(pregnant pause).
(beat).
Eight full-length new play readings, 9 new play excerpt readings, 6 artist panels, 1 keynote speech, 20 academic paper presentations, and an uncountable amount of food have been presented over the course of the past week. I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to summarize the week, but all that comes to mind is that you had to be there. I have never been in a theatre filled with so many Asian Canadians and so many people (from across the country) support of us in our movement.
I can’t remember exactly how it happened but about 6 six years ago I decided I wanted to write a play called Brown Balls. Why Brown Balls? Because it made me giggle. And, it made me wonder what that play would be about. If I heard of a show with that name, I’d want to see it. Wouldn’t you?
Byron gets excited about his "Brown Balls"
I’ve been working on this play for about 5 years now and I’ve had some wonderful help on the way from the Ontario Arts Council, Cahoots Theatre Company, Carlos Bulosan Theatre and, of course, fu-GEN. In that time, it has completely transformed. Originally, it was a play for my ‘peeps.’ It was about friendship, nostalgia and old school R & B music. It was about my feelings growing up Filipino in Toronto. I wanted to write a feel good play because there’s so much crap in the world that some times you just want to laugh. But now, with the help of some friends, a special fiancé, gifted actors, and some of the best dramaturges I know, it’s become something I couldn’t have expected. My vision for Brown Balls has expanded. Now, it’s about the experience of Asian-Canadian men - not just Filipinos - in North America. It’s about gender, race, power and hegemony – not just about sex.
My goal is to take the audience for a ride. At first, I want them to laugh their asses off. But in the end, I hope that they can look at their selves and the people around them in a very different way.
To be honest, I’m always nervous when people see this piece. There’s some really uncomfortable stuff in it that even makes me cringe. But isn’t that the point? I hope to push myself and my audience to places that are foreign and scary and ugly and maybe when the house lights come up, we’re somehow different.
I feel like this week in the office has been a little bit ephemeral. It’s not even halfway through the week and I can barely remember Monday. What I do remember from last week is that it was super busy until Wednesday and things started to cool down, but apparently it’s been busy enough to leave me with a lapse in my memory.
I don’t even know how to begin to summarize.
The War Wall as of April 21, 2010
Our wonderful producers, Byron and Matt have finally finished casting K7. It took longer than they’d have liked, but with over 30 actors, the whole event is monumental. The specs for the performance space are slowly being worked out, contracts are being signed and conference sponsors are being organized. Byron is constantly taking the time to teach me valuable lessons about the challenges one faces as a producer. This is a job that seems to require a lot of juggling.
Rehearsals for both K7 and the Potluck have started, meaning that the rehearsal space next door to the office is always busy. Pluses: good company, I finally get to meet all the people I’ve been e-mailing, there’s always extra food lying around. Minuses: the occasional loud yell that startles everyone in the office. I suppose that isn’t really a minus, I mean, at least it’s entertaining.
K7 Schedule- MADNESS!
Said rehearsals mean that we are seeing Andrew, Nina and David all around the office. Busy as ever, the three of them are managing to direct/dramaturg several readings. Their lives are all short on sleep, and their levels of health are questionable, but we love them dearly and it’s truly wonderful to see their faces.
Andrea’s getting all of our materials on the streets! She had a newsletter mailed out yesterday, we had a MASSIVE flyering event last week (thanks to our wonderful volunteers!). Look for our origami lotus flyers all over the city. If you fold it up and take a picture of it in a creative place, you can submit at www.fu-gen.org/secret to win a prize!
Carin has been in and out of the office. Despite the fact that Carin had a nasty case of the flu, she has been in constant communication with us. Making sure that things happen, that people are happy, and that artists and academics will arrive, Carin's life is never slow. She's refining budgets and ensuring our cash flow is steady. Scary job, eh?
As for me? I’ve been busy nagging people to do various tasks. I feel like a big part of my job right now is to hold on to all the loose ends and slowly figure out ways to tie them together without letting one slip away. I’m learning something every day and I feel really lucky to be writing e-mails to all of the incredible people across the continent that are coming to Toronto to be part of this explosive event.
We have one and a half weeks to go! Friday you can look forward to a post from our K7-ers and next week you will see our load in! Exciting times...
It’s late at night and as I’m figuratively spinning a bunch of plates I’ve roughly labeled ‘plot’ and ‘character’ in order to get this draft of Wong’s Garden ready for the next workshop, I’ve got some chicken in black bean sauce cooking in the background and I’m checking the time to see when I should be giving my loved one a wake-up call since she’s in another time zone right now.
I’m busy writing a play that should be in an Artistic Director’s recycle bin: it’s well over two hours long, the action is divided into three acts with no scene breaks and everything takes place in a living room within the span of under 24 hours. Most people who’ve ever written a play like this are dead and here I am, very much alive, losing sleep over this piece I’m dying to ‘get right’.
And who’s looking over my shoulder while I do this? A ghost. He’s been dead since 1938 but he does make the odd appearance in my life. I used to have entire conversations with him in 2000 and into 2001 and he never quite leaves my side. Now before you think I’ve gone completely off the deep end (and you might not be entirely wrong), Ödön von Horváth has been a great source of inspiration for me since I was introduced to him in 1997 by my acting teacher, Joel Miller, while I drifted through the Concordia University Theatre Program.
Ödön’s plays are an Artistic Director’s nightmare: they’re too long, they have too many characters and even though the dramatic action is always tightly written, each scene and each line can be so dense so as to require a tremendous amount of energy and dramaturgical investigation to unpack.
Ödön looks on
I loved Ödön’s work from the beginning and when I found out a little bit more about this dead playwright, I really felt as if I’d found a kindred spirit. He was a linguistic and cultural mutt: Hungarian mother tongue, educated in German, grew up in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Germany, and he wrote exclusively in his second language: German. I have a French-Canadian mother and a Chinese father and having been educated in English in Quebec while living in a French speaking area while surrounded by second generation Italians at school, I didn’t feel like I belonged to very much either. There was an outsider quality to Ödön’s work that felt honest to me and as a non-separatist in Quebec in the 1990s, I also felt like my society had gone ape-shit with stupidity with me caught in the middle (although by no means nothing at all like what Ödön, and everyone else, experienced in 1930s Germany).
Ödön, like most thinking people from his time and place, was appalled at how the world around him was fast deteriorating into a society that would embrace National Socialism as a one-stop, multi-faceted solution to all their woes. Ödön could have written didactic polemics against the people who thrust forward the policies, he could have felt so angered by what was going on around him so as to cast off all art and to holler, through his writing, about the injustices and stupidity committed in the name of patriotism… but Ödön didn’t exactly do this. Instead, he wrote plays (and a few novels) with tightly written dramatic action with characters from his time and place who struggled to preserve their sense of dignity (often with appalling results). It may sound like the ‘easy way out’ to not stand on a soap box and denounce didactically, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, what you know deep inside is wrong with the world and to instead do something as lazy as portraying people as people, no better and no worse than what they are, but it wasn’t easy at all: Ödön was chased all over Europe by German authorities, he had his books burned, and he would have been put into a concentration camp had he not died in a freakish accident in Paris in 1938 at the age of 36.
At this point, my chicken in black-bean sauce is cooked (and eaten!) and I’ve already called and woken up my loved one. I’m about to start a major rewrite of Act III of Wong’s Garden and my head is full with raising the stakes of my characters and preserving a logical unity of action while going for the jugular at every turn. And there’s Ödön, peering over my shoulder, his eyes piercing into my soul and he asks me “How do your characters preserve their sense of dignity?” I want to answer but Ödön doesn’t want an answer, it’s not that kind of question. “HOW DO YOUR CHARACTERS PRESERVE THEIR SENSE OF DIGNITY?”, he repeats. I don’t know how, Ödön, they just will because you and I know that no other choice exists. Ödön is silent for now. It’s time to rewrite Act III.
Eating with Lola I tell my dramaturg and mentor, Ann Powell, that I don't know what I'm doing. Not in a "OMG, I am so screwed for the love of God, help me!" kind of way. More of a "I am so very honoured to finally meet you. Show me, guide me, teach me!" kind of way.
I love puppetry. I have for a long time. And there are a lot of things about puppetry that come naturally to me. I happily admit, though, to knowing little about the technique of it. Writing for puppetry is another challenge. Add the composition of music and we've got a potential nightmare. One would think I would shy away from writing a one-woman puppet show. One would. But not this one playwright. Eating with Lola is well underway.
Enter Ann. The Co-Artistic Director of Puppetmongers, I have admired Ann's work since I saw The Pirate Widow Cheng. Now I am so very grateful for the chance to be mentored under her while working on Eating with Lola.
Here is a list of things that have made me squeal with delight at the possibilities with my play:
*I can create the illusion of a "close-up" by creating larger puppets. (insert turning on of light bulb here)
*I will have to cut most of the dialogue since puppets are better at showing things rather than talking about things.
*The puppeteer has to look at the puppet. Once this is done, the puppeteer won't even exist to the audience.
*Lola will have to be reborn.
On the last point, let me explain. The puppet of Lola (grandmother in Filipino) is a basic muppet toy I found made to look like a Lola. Ann challenges me to see of I can work with a puppet without a mouth.
When she says that, my world is turned upside down. I am loving this process.
