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Emma Zabloski makes it look easy.

She was sitting in a sliver of shade on the concrete steps of Laurier House as I arrived for our appointment.

“I was just thinking about going to lie in the grass,” she said.

This is hardly the picture of nervousness and stress one would expect from the director of a production less than two weeks before opening night—especially when the show hasn’t even seen its first full group rehearsal.

Emma is directing Six: At Home, a collaborative effort consisting of six solo performances taking place throughout the halls and rooms of Laurier House. Located in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill neighbourhood, Laurier House was once the residence of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and later William Lyon Mackenzie King, and is now a National Historic Site operated by Parks Canada.

Having never taken the opportunity to visit Laurier House, I asked Emma to give me a quick tour.  We looked over velvet ropes into rooms that were, in most cases, preserved just as the last resident, Mackenzie King, had left them: silverware, furniture, fixtures; even items like a straight razor and leather strop in the bathroom.   Dark wood and wallpapered walls stretching up to high white textured ceilings on all three floors of the house give it a rich, 1920s feel.

“It’s like we’ve stepped into an Edward Gorey drawing,” I remarked; even in the early afternoon sun, there was a dark, sinister quality to the space.

As well there might be; King is known for having always remembered to call his mother—even after she passed away.  He would regularly hold séances in this house, in an effort to contact the spirits of the dead.

Emma opened a door in the hallway.  A grey air-conditioning unit took up most of the floor; a yellow metal ladder rested against the attic opening above.  Unlike the rest of the rooms we had seen, this one was uncarpeted, with the wood strip flooring showing.

“They only found out this was his séance room after they put the air-conditioning in,” she said.  I shook my head.

We sat down to talk on a wide, low couch in an open area on the second floor.

Emma speaks with a perfect blend of the enthusiasm of a performing artist and the measured articulation of an academic.  It’s no surprise that, in addition to theatre, she also does teaching work.  She is possessed of the calm certainty that is the sign of a constantly calculating mind and has an obvious knack for observation.

I asked her why she had chosen Laurier House as a venue around which to develop a production.  She confessed that, before choosing it as a venue, she’d never been inside.  In fact, Laurier House wasn’t her first choice.

“The concept was formulated during my bike trip in Europe,” Emma explained.  She compared the idea to having someone over for dinner: “You have a guest, a host, and a form,” she said, but within that framework, any number of things could happen.  Six: At Home is a “shared theatrical experience” where the performers are performing with, rather than for, the audience.

She knew she wanted to do a production using a house as a venue; at first, she had tried to find a private residence she could use (“I had this idea for a scene in a bathtub,” she mentioned with a tinge of regret), but her leads didn’t pan out—someone had roommates to worry about, another was concerned with insurance issues.  While looking at bed-and-breakfasts in the area, she happened across Laurier House on the map, and sent their office an e-mail.  Much to her surprise and delight, they invited her to meet with them, and were immediately taken with the idea.

“They said, ‘Oh, since you’re an artist, you probably don’t have very much money, so you can use the space for free.’” Emma shrugged and smiled.

Before selecting a venue, Emma and the other performers had already started doing research for their pieces, poring through archives of the Ottawa Citizen, looking for “forgotten bits of Ottawa history” as inspiration for characters and situations.  When Laurier House was chosen, Mackenzie King’s spiritualistic tendencies gave them the idea to frame the vignettes as a sort of séance.  The idea of the audience passing through the rooms, calling forth these characters to live out their stories, “wouldn’t have come about if we hadn’t had this space,” said Emma,  ”The fuzzy wallpaper, the carpet…” She reached down and ran her fingers through the thick red pile, completely at home in her surroundings.

“It’s stressful as hell right at this moment,” she confessed, mentioning a last-minute change one of the performers was requesting to their piece; two were coming to rehearse in the space after our interview.  ”It’s still in process,” she said, “but everyone has structures; everyone has text; everyone has scenes.”

From the second stairwell across the hall, a Parks Canada staff member called across, “You’re the Fringe people, right?”  We waved as she continued upstairs.  ”The staff are so supportive and interested,” Emma said, “It breaks up the monotony of just having groups come through.  It gives them exposure, as well.”  They’ve even, according to Emma, appointed staff to stay after hours to help as guides with the performance.  (Other government departments, and segments of the private sector, could perhaps learn something from Parks Canada when it comes to co-operating with the arts community.)

Knowing that Sara Waisvisz was one of the performers, I asked Emma if she had had anything to do with the title of the piece (seeing as how at least two of this past year’s Rideau Award nominees credited Sara with coming up with titles for their productions).  Emma laughed.  ”We were playing with silly things like An Evening with the Dead.”  Based on a suggestion by Laura Astwood (another of the performers), they settled on Six: At Home, “at home” being a phrase used (on invitations and announcements) in the early part of this century to indicate that a household was open to receive guests.

This is the first time Emma’s worked on this style of collaborative work, and she finds it requires adjusting the usual role of a director. “You give up control and ownership.  Everyone is responsible for their own research and piece.”  Would she ever do this again?  ”This show was created for this time and place,” she said, but plans on pursuing similar collaborations in the future.  ”I’d love to do something on a larger scale.”  We talked about The Rideau Project, Vancouver’s Hive and other pieces conceived along similar lines.

Suddenly, the staccato piano notes of a ghostly rendition of Beethoven’s Für Elise pierced the air; I half-expected the lights to dim and the furniture to start moving around the room.  The source proved to be somewhat short of supernatural: a guide was demonstrating the player piano in the other room to an older gentleman.  Still, in that hallway, opposite a curious large urn on a stand in a room, surrounded by portraits of those long dead, the music underscored the atmosphere of the entire house.

As the music played, Emma’s eyes sparkled behind her glasses and a smile crossed her face.  In that moment, I understood the secret of her confidence: inspiration.  How could one not be inspired in a place like this?

And, maybe, just a little creeped out.

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Six: At Home will run for eight performances at Laurier House (335 Laurier Avenue East) from Friday, June 18th through Saturday, June 26th (full schedule here); tickets are limited to 48 per performance.  As it is extremely unlikely (due to the site-specific nature of the production) that it will be performed again after this run, I would strongly suggest buying advance tickets by calling the Ottawa Fringe Festival Box Office at (613) 232-6162 or ordering online.

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

Tags: Emma Zabloski, Laurier House, Ottawa Fringe Festival, Six: At Home, theatre in Ottawa

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 8:40 am and is filed under Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.