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Cube Salon: tempus

Tempus fugit. Time is fleeting.

That’s what I was thinking as I looked down at my iPhone, hand freezing to it in the cold wind outside Cube Gallery, waiting for my friend Crystal (recruited as a last-minute photographer) to join me for tempus, the first installment in the current Cube Salon series, and the last performance at Cube’s Hamilton Avenue location.

Once inside, we were greeted by Evan Thornton, whom we’d both met in his role as theatre reviewer for the Wellington Oracle while we were volunteering for the Ottawa Fringe Festival this past summer. He welcomed us to the Salon, showed us where to put our coats, and recommended the Qu&ecaute;bec cider cheese.

As we were deciding where to sit, a very tall man with a sheaf of papers in his hand walked out of the back section of the gallery. It was Sterling Lynch, holding a copy of his play Home in Time; I waved, and he came over to shake our hands. Although I’d read the play (thoroughly, making notes), seen him perform (particularly in Nadine Thornhill’s Oreo this past Fringe season), read his blog Movement, and had numerous interactions with him over Twitter, this was my first time meeting him in person.

We chose seats in the second row, to stage right. Wayne Current dropped by to say hi; we had sat together at the GCTC for the opening night of BASH’d! and had a conversation about social media during the afterparty. Now, in suit and striped tie, he was preparing to read the stage directions for Home in Time. Wayne is producing Sterling’s companion play, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, for next year’s Ottawa Fringe. For once, I detected a touch of nervousness in Wayne’s normally entirely confident demeanour.

Curator Don Monet welcomed us with a brief explanation of how the salon concept started in 16th-century France, and how the Salon series put on by Cube were an attempt to recapture that sharing and co-operation between the arts. He went over the agenda for the evening, which included music, poetry, and theatre, as we enjoyed our wine and basked in the presence of the art on the gallery walls.

John Carroll, wearing a fedora and wool sportcoat, sat down and picked up his guitar, starting the show with a song by Dan Weisenberger from Vancouver Island, then his own Lost Radio (available on his CD ), before going on to play New Leaf, and finishing with Boldly When I Go.

Next, Jonathan Koensgen took the stage, and performed a reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, but with such clear emotion and theatrical cadence that this familiar poem seemed to take on new depth of meaning. The poem, describing as it does a state of immortality and timelessness, was well-chosen, perfectly in keeping with the evening’s theme.

We took a break, and I took the chance to chat with Breanna, about to play her part in Sterling’s Home in Time. She, like everyone else in the Ottawa theatre scene, has some pretty insightful things to say about theatre and the arts, and we ended up talking about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, of all things.

Don came out to introduce Sterling and the other actors. Before he did that, he asked us to look up at the ceiling. I could see plastic glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to wood planks. Don told us that those planks were the reason that musicians, particularly jazz musicians, loved to play in this room; the ceiling being made entirely of old-growth BC red cedar, there was no echo, and the timbre was perfect.

“You’re some of the last people to enjoy this,” he said.

I was eager to finally see Home in Time, even as only a partial staged reading. The centrepiece of the evening brought the words of the play to life, with a crisp, well-rehearsed reading by Wayne, Breanna, Colleen Sutton (who was also in Oreo), and Sterling himself.

Having read the play (which I highly recommend), I was acutely aware of the audience’s reactions to nuances of the plot and the dialogue for which I was already prepared. I also wondered (since the play in full is supposed to run just short of an hour) at what point they would cut it; the dialogue flows at a pace that makes it difficult to find a lull or natural break in the action. The point they chose was extremely effective, and definitely left the audience wanting more.

Sterling mentioned that, due to the attention the recent award had brought to the play, Peter Hinton of the NAC had arranged a full staged reading of the play for April.

Koensgen came out again holding a thick book, which he explained had been given to him that day by his mother as a gift; it was the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Having been called in at the last minute to fill in for Kel Parsons, due to illness, it turned out to be a well-timed gift indeed. Jonathan performed a stirring, brilliant interpretation of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, a poem in stark contrast to Kubla Khan, dealing with the ephemeral, transitive, impermanent nature of experience.

John Carroll set down a glass of red wine beside his chair and took up his guitar to finish off the show with more of his inspiring blues and roots vocals, lap steel, and acoustic guitar. It’s tempting to go catch him some Wednesday evening at the Chateau Lafayette, where he is something of a fixture.

We went over to chat with Sterling, Evan, and Don over at the bar. We talked for a while about arts blogging in Ottawa, particularly the necessity of covering each and every one of the Fringe Festival’s shows this year. I turned the Salon promo piece over in my hands and asked, “Why this?” Banksy’s well-known image of the protester about to overhand a bouquet of flowers in place of a Molotov cocktail was the image they’d chosen to represent the series. The general consensus was that the image was meant to convey the idea of artistic revolution.

I leaned on the bar and asked Don what was going to happen to the Cube Gallery space. “We’ve got it until March 1st,” he said. After that, it would be an antique furniture showroom until the owners had it torn down to make way for a condo development. I hung my head.

As we left, I looked up at the red cedar ceiling, wondering how many fleeting moments like this those beautiful strips of wood had witnessed over the years.

The next installment in the series, memento, will be at Cube Gallery’s new location, 1285 Wellington Street West, on March 13th at 7:30 pm. In the meantime, I recommend listening to pretty much anything by John Carroll, Paranoid Android by Radiohead, and, although it’s tempting, not Iron Maiden’s Two Minutes to Midnight.

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Andrew Snowdon is a theatregoer, concert attendee, and writer. He lives in Lowertown, Ottawa, between a typewriter and a MacBook, with a cup of coffee.

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The February Bluebird North Series – Artists sharing stories and songs

It’s commonly said that the sad songs are the best and I doubt you would have found any argument at the NAC’s fourth stage during Ottawa’s  February Bluebird North show. This being my first Bluebird concert I didn’t know really what to expect.

Played in by new host and local songstress Amanda Rheaume, folk and blues artists Lynne Hanson, Kelly Prescott, Matt De Zoete and Steve Marriner took to the stage and gave the crowd a wonderful acoustic set of their work.

The musicians performed one after another, each taking time to say a few words about the song and its inspiration. As in all good folk stories, the topics meandered from tragic to hilarious and often the two overlapped. The evening was put on by the Songwriter’s Association of Canada, so there was an emphasis on the “talky parts”. But, since I like that kind of stuff, it never took away from the show. Each of the musicians explained how they found motivation in their travels and relationships.

Of the idea behind her song More of the Same, Hanson told the story of her adopted grandfather and the loss of his wife to Alzheimer’s disease. The amazing raw imagery in the lyrics really grabbed me.

De Zoete looked to the past and his Dutch heritage, Prescott wrote about her relationships and Marriner even fit in an amusingly scathing song about a woman so bad he didn’t even have to date her. The take away message was clearly that if you want to keep a clean reputation, don’t piss off a musician.

I really dug the informal format. The full stage allowed the performers to converse and share jokes. While the theme of the music that night seemed to border more on the depressing, the laughs didn’t stop. It didn’t have the rehearsed feeling stage banter often has when you’re watching a group that you know has done this fifty times before.

 

If I could ask for more, all I would need would be more of the artists playing with each other’s songs. As when it happened, it was fantastic.

The night was special and unique and this is what will bring me back to future Bluebird North performances.

 

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