DAVID FANCY
“Unbridled”; “Breaking boundaries”; “Nudity”; “Revolution”: these are the types of words and phrases which reappear like neon signposts throughout Martin Morrow’s Wild Theatre: the History of One Yellow Rabbit, bold invitations to follow him through a story of the Calgary-based theatre company’s first two decades of wideranging theatrical exploration, increasingly secure organizational and financial footing, and international touring dates. With so many important areas to document and analyze, Morrow resorts to an epic structure, juxtaposing and interweaving a variety of narrative threads, including the company’s early history, the importance of different venues in shaping its work, and the lives and inspirations of its members. A number of anchoring themes emerge from this structure, with perhaps the most pivotal being the notion of “wild theatre” itself: that nebulous performative utopia ever-sought by the company (and frequently achieved, in Morrow’s estimation), the impossible horizon of theatre in which all bounds can be broken, all norms refused, and the audience at once energized and engaged.
Morrow launches the book by providing a broad range of cultural reference in order to describe the creative primeval soup – the “crazy cocktail” (23) of punk, visual arts, post-Beat wanderlust, performance art, improvisation, and influences from European theatrical tradition – from which One Yellow Rabbit’s founding members and their work emerged. This commitment to contextualization continues throughout with discussions of the company’s relationships with and positioning vis à vis other Canadian artists such as John Murrell, Ronnie Burkett, Daniel MacIvor, Brad Fraser, and Kids in the Hall. Specific forays into the history of the Jim Keegstra affair for the company’s production of Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp, or details about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz when discussing a dramatization of Octavio Paz’s biography of the famous seventeenth century Mexican proto-feminist, add extra depth when necessary.
An equally important portrait to emerge is that of the “Wild West” Calgary of the company’s birth – described by one of the company’s board members as a “dog eat dog capitalist scene”(73) – a city with a population the company has both antagonized and seduced with their work. We follow One Yellow Rabbit from venue to venue throughout this city, from their first productions in Calgary’s Loose Moose Simplex space and the Off Off Centre to increasingly large spaces within the Calgary Performing Arts Centre, as well as bear witness to the emergence of their annual festival (the High Performance Rodeo) and summer training intensive.
It is in these structures and venues, as well as other locations around the world – from the Edinburgh Fringe, to Expo 86 in Vancouver, to Mexico – that we are provided useful insight into the creative process of the company’s various members, including Gyllian Raby’s strong early vision, galvanized by training in the UK, Denise Clarke’s choreographic abundance, and Blake Brooker’s interest in textual strategies gleaned from the Beat poets.
Morrow is a very good storyteller, writing with charm (he describes a particular production as having been staged with “Brechtian brio”[40]), staging cliff-hangers at the end of every chapter, and launching new chapters with engaging lead sentences (“One Yellow Rabbit’s most memorable tour began in Hell and ended in Heaven”[255]) which keep the reader anticipating the next financial crisis, the next theatrical exploration, or the next overseas adventure throughout the book’s almost four hundred pages.
Morrow ably embarks upon the project with somewhat of a “just one of the guys” voice born out of long professional and personal association with the company. Indeed, a penultimate chapter takes the form of a long and unabashed piece of ebullient hagiography, as Morrow devotes numerous pages to each of One Yellow Rabbit’s current members, complementing the book’s earlier accounts of resilience and faith in the face of the unknown with a comprehensive portrait of each member’s life, loves, passions, flaws, and triumphs. The “Rabbits,” as Morrow affectionately refers to them throughout, are not entirely sure how they managed to create their company and, as Ken Gass asserts in the volume’s preface, tracing the human interactions between the company’s members is essential to understanding the emergence of the company: “The accidental meeting of a few like-minded theatre artists can, if they survive the inevitable initial bouts of friction, create a permanent collective or performance ensemble that launches a movement or defines an era” (13).
If the scholarly reader is occasionally left craving more in-depth analysis of the specifics of “wild theatre” (what continues to make it “revolutionary”?) or perhaps even fuming at the occasional easy swipe directed towards any hint of protracted thought or use of language (Morrow’s description of G.B.Shaw as a “windbag”is characteristic of the anti-intellectual strain in the book), such absences and excesses are readily forgiven in the light of Morrow’s sheer critical vitality, a thoroughness of historical and biographical detail, and his overall commitment to providing readers with a high-octane portrait of an important group of Canadian artists that will no doubt help inspire many other artists to blaze their own trails in the future.