01.02.2008

tourists and touring

A quintessential tourist moment:
I went to the supermarket down the road which is named, with great imaginative flair, Choices. Despite the name it is a pretty good place, with a lot of organic products and really nice salads and sandwiches. They have this long aisle with shelves of dispensers containing things like oats, lentils, rice, all that. I was very excited to find that they had about eleven different varieties of muesli, including a lovely looking organic one. To get it out of the dispenser you place a plastic bag under the (rather wide—supersize?) opening of the dispenser and push down on a lever and thus your bag is filled. I, of course, had some things in my hands (didn't put them down) and when I performed that series of actions, first I did not have the bag in the correct position and second I had not anticipated the amount or speed of falling organic muesli with linseeds, almonds and flame-dried raisins.

Some went into the bag. Quite a bit went all over the floor and into this shelf thing below.

I looked at it all for a moment but didn't know what to do and felt really stupid, so somewhat shamefacedly I left the aisle and continued shopping. (Cowardly, I know) Then I get to the check out and the girl asks me what's the code for the muesli. "Code?" I ask, nervously. "Yeah, the code," she said, "you gotta go get the code."

I had no idea what she was talking about but I leave the check-out, return to the scene of the crime and what do I find but a young man, on his hands and knees with a dust-buster, taking all the things off all the shelves and cleaning away my muesli disaster. Oh boy. I approach, searching for some fucking list of numbers. He looks up. I'm looking right at the muesli. I have guilty written all over my face.

"Oh, hi," I say, in a slightly high-pitched voice. "I'm looking for the code...for the........muesli.............is this it? Here?" "Yeah, that's right," he says, with a lovely smile on his face. I pause. "I did that," I splurt out, "with the muesli, I'm so sorry, I just didn't understand how the thing worked and...." "Oh, that's alright," he said, "I was going to clean here anyway...."

What a sweetheart. I leave, feeling small, but much, much better.

                      ***

With touring, I am discovering, there's always something that doesn't go to plan, notwithstanding extremely careful and meticulous preparation.

With alias Grace in KL it was the absence of registration marks for the set, so it meant that the set took about four hours longer to set up than planned; and also that the computer crashed, taking the entire lighting and sound plot into the void. In New York, with SMO, it was the freight; in Toronto, sound issues; here in Vancouver the lovely unexpected snow, that I was delighting in, held up the truck which was delivering all of our sound equipment, so that alternative and not entirely satisfactory arrangements had to be made on the fly. This, together with a few other unexpected hassles, meant that we were pretty rushed going into our opening and that our wonderful crew of Bernie, Phillip and Jo were holding an awful lot of anxiety and stress.

The space we are working in here, The Vancouver Library, is quite spectacular. The architects were Moshe Safdie & Associates with Downs/Archambault and Partners. It is a large, circular building, and is kind of a modern-day version of the Colisseum in Rome. It's gorgeous, lots of light, lots of space.

(Safdie has designed Habitat in Montreal, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts addition, Quebec City's Museum of Civilization, the Ottawa City Hall and most recently the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts (across Homer Street from the Central Library).

Downs/Archambault has designed Canada Place, Kwantlen College in Langley, International Village in Vancouver, the YWCA Hotel in Vancouver, additions to Langara College and the Britannia Community Services Centre among other projects.)

It is a great space for the play, because not only is it stunning to look at, but also, like the other spaces we have used on this tour, it is a haven for the homeless and poor of the city because it has free public toilets and it's warm and relatively safe. Which is great for the play on many levels, but there are quite a large number of unstable people around and during the dress-rehearsal yesterday Jim was so freaked out by this guy who followed quite closely behind him and was swearing, that he actually had to drop out of character and make himself safe.

In the end, though, miraculously, our opening was really good. The performances were really solid, the sound was great (there's a fantastic intimacy which we can play with both aurally and physically in this space) and it all just came together and then floated, in that fabulous way that live performance can. We got a standing ovation, it was lovely.

We finished the evening off with a delightful dinner at the pub downstairs ('cos of Sonia's sore foot) and then some of us went off down the street in search of dessert and ended up at Templeton's, which is a truly fabulous diner with great food and excellent ambience. We had sundaes, milk-shakes, pear crumble, flambe bananas and frangelicos. Yep. A very satisfactory opening night.

ps. some images of Toronto and Vancouver now in the gallery (thanks again to Bernie Sweeney)