Malcolm Page
John Juliani's company, Savage God, provided much alternative theatre in Vancouver, 1966- 72. This work was usually little publicized, for few performances and in small locations. To establish the significance of Savage God, a representative selection of documents is printed here, including Juliani's manifestos and explanations in interviews.
La compagnie 'Savage God', dirigée par John Juliani, alimentait dans les années 1966 à 1972 une importante activité théâtrale 'alternative' à Vancouver, quoique chaque spectacle offert l'ait été peu de fois, dans des locaux marginaux, et précédé une d'publicité fort restreinte. Dans le but de démontrer l'importance de cette troupe, l'auteur rassemble ici une sélection de documents représentatifs, y compris des manifestes et des extraits d'interviews accordés par Juliani.
For six years, 1966-1972, Savage God provided virtually the only alternative and experimental theatrical activity in Vancouver. Mainstream theatre in these years was represented by the Vancouver Playhouse and the Arts Club Theatre, the latter a small-scale operation at the time. Gallimaufry performed off-Broadway plays in the summers of 1968 and 1969. Savage God, however, was creating and defining the actual concept of alternative theatre. By 1972, Savage God's last Vancouver season, things had changed: There were several performing groups funded by Local Initiatives and Opportunities for Youth grants, as well as Tamahnous (founded 1971) and the New Play Centre (first public shows in 1972).1
Defining Savage God is difficult: Renate Usmiani, in the only extended study, describes it as 'a cultural phenomenon around the personality of director John Juliani.' 2 Indeed, Savage God has continuity through Juliani alone, though several actors, such as Norman Browning and Jackie Crossland, remained with Juliani for years. Juliani trained at the National Theatre School, acted with the Stratford Festival in 1964 and 1965, then joined the Vancouver Playhouse for the 1965-66 season. He took a short-term appointment at Simon Fraser University Theatre in summer 1966, then became a Theatre Resident there until his departure - in dispute with the administration - in May 1969. Juliani travelled and lived in eastern Canada in 1973-76, working as co-ordinator of the graduate drama programme at York University for two years from 1974, this work coalescing with Savage God. The work continued in Edmonton, 1976-82, largely in the form of poetry readings and choreography for the Tournesol dance company. Juliani joined C.B.C. in Vancouver as a radio drama producer in 1982. He stressed in 1987 that Savage God was still alive, that, for instance, the film he produced and directed, Latitude 55 (released in 1981) was Savage God Film 1.
The content of Savage God's programmes varied greatly, including the European avant-garde, with a focus on the neglected and little-known, new approaches to classic texts, and, finally, Canadian work. The following chronology documents Savage God in Vancouver. There are three phases:
1. Savage God 1-6, July 1966-May 1969. All were performed at Simon Fraser University. The university setting, especially in the late sixties, encouraged experiment and unorthodoxy.
2. Savage God 6-8, July 1969-August 1970. Each of these involved a number of different shows, and Savage God 8 subdivides into four stages, noted here as 8A to 8D. All took place in Vancouver Art Gallery where Tony Emery, the Gallery Director at the time, welcomed a variety of activities. The production of The Criminals for the Playhouse Stage 2 in February 1970 is included as close in spirit to Savage God.
3. Savage God 9 (PACET), April - Sept 1971, and Savage God 10, Sept 1972. These took the form of many presentations in many locations, as the documentation shows. Juliani was highly articulate: the programmes contained lengthy manifestos and there are several interviews, somewhat inaccessible, in places such as the SFU student newspaper, The Peak. This selection attempts to include all the major statements together with representative comments by observers.
Evaluation of a living and controversial
figure is difficult, especially when much of the work was done in obscurity,
often only once for a handful of people. Even those few divide into the
admirers, deeply interested in all the work of Savage God, and the sceptics,
accustomed to conventional theatre and often unsympathetic to the new.
Savage God is significant as an early alternative group, the only continuing
alternative in Vancouver in these years. The list of works presented is
impressive. The quality is more difficult to establish, if only because
there was little with which to compare it in the city. The testimony of
the newspaper and radio critics is very favourable, and includes Christopher
Dafoe, Ben Metcalfe and James Barber. 3
I believe Savage God showed both the possibilities of a few actors, sound
and movement, and new insights into dramatists as varied as Shakespeare,
Betti and Beckett.
Two features of the work of Savage God remain unique. The PACET project of 1971 was a tour de force, 27 different shows in 20 days in 10 locations with 10 actors. Further, assumptions about theatre were constantly challenged. Many of these - flexible seating, programmes at the end, a full-length play run without intermission or halved into two evenings, the same play presented in different ways - may seem trivial or perverse. Together, they question many assumptions about the nature of theatre and of the play. Other directors may well have tried all of these ideas. But there may never have been so many innovations, so many approaches tried out almost simultaneously - and at so low a cost.
Savage God's continuity came from John Juliani alone, representing precisely what he wanted to do in theatre, such as the unexpected use of multi-media technology in The Glass Menagerie. In some of his opaque statements he seems to enjoy making mystery. When Savage God in 1974-75 added the Research Institute of the Plague, the name was chosen to give the initials 'RIP.' Such playfulness is outweighed by flexibility, by always seeking new and different means, by intense dedication to theatre and to the theatrical experience as serious and important.
SAVAGE GOD 1
The Blind Men and Escurial by Michel de Ghelderode, Orison and Fando, and Lis, Fernando Arrabal, translated by John Juliani, Simon Fraser University, 27-30 July 1966
PROGRAMME NOTE:
And what is infernal and truly accursed
in our time is that we daily aesthetically over forms instead of being
like martyrs at the stake who make signs through the flames....
The modern theatre is still waiting for a form that will harmonize with the moral, intellectual and emotional viewpoint of our age, an age that has been accused of wearing its complacency like a laurel wreath. The history of the theatre arts in our century has been an attempt to shatter that complacency by means of a bombardment of the senses. In every case, it has been a matter of shocking man until he momentarily loses control of his reasoning mind and a destructive 'second state' springs forth from the discursive intelligence.
Impressionism, Pointilism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism, the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Theatre of Cruelty, Total Theatre, Theatre of the Grotesque, action painting, nonsense verse, pop art, free verse, cinéma vérité, and a variety of hallunicatory drugs have all been an attempt to appease a savage god - the Imagination. The apparently arbitrary and often violent juxtaposition of eccentricity, conventionality, the grotesque, the sublime, innocence and cruelty has, paradoxically, become a cliché of contemporary art.
It is through the reconciliation of these discordant qualities in an orchestration of shapes, sounds, colors and movement that the imagination reveals itself in a new language, the hieroglyphics of which are designed to lure our daemons to the surface.
Need such an attempt be morbid? Perhaps. But no more morbid than the craze for heightened awareness that motivates the taking of LSD. Irrelevant? Perhaps. But is it not a grotesque corollary of this decade that the poetry of the launching pad has made the excesses of Hiroshima read like an abc of self-annihilation. For every Titan missile there are hordes of potential mutants; for every new form, a glaring question mark.
The Savage God is an anthology of such question marks, an acknowledgement of the ambivalance of our age, and modest tribute to those theatre artists who insist on investing those question marks with the chilling relevance of a hastily gulped icicle.
SAVAGE GOD 2
The Conquest of Everest and Chamber Music by Arthur Kopit, Simon Fraser University, 26-28 Jan, 2-4 Feb 1967
PROGRAMME NOTE:
The increasing emphasis in science on
the relativity of the truth, and in art, music, and literature on FORM
which is unstructured, leads inescapably to one destiny, namely, to the
expression of that which is buried deepest in human nature.
Lawrence M. Kubie, M.D., Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process The publication in 1900 of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams did much to determine the development of the arts in the twentieth century. Man's age-old fascination with dreams was now freshly crowned with a controversial but scientific halo and his creative attempts in all the media to reconstruct the unconscious produced a danse macabre of the apparently formless, the bizarre, and the illogical.
Positing the then still-debated insights into the nature of dreams, the patent disillusionment, even at the turn of the century, with naturalism and representation, and the continuous advances in technology, twentieth century man's early attempts at exploring the unconscious could only be at once highly subjective, multi-levelled, abstract, and progressively dehumanized. Inevitable, too, in an effort to suggest the stato-dynamic reality of this dream world was a fusion of creative and interpretive art forms. It is with this concept of a total theatre, heavily, if not always consciously, influenced by oriental philosophies, that the modem artist had been obsessively and often self-indulgently concerned. This persistent attempt at a synthesis of shape, movement, sound and light in a subjective context similar to that of the dream has produced Impressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and finally the Happening.
In all these explorations, however, the traditional theatre has lagged notoriously far behind. Ironically so, if one considers that most of the major artistic innovations of the past sixty years were instigated by the theories of Jarry, Craig, and Artaud, men, who for all their versatility, were primarily men of the Theatre. Why then have we had to wait for painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers and film-makers to make their own theatre before theatre could begin to approach the level of the other arts?
Mainly because the theatre with the exception of the early experimental work of Meyerhold and Piscator, and the current work in Prague by Svoboda, has been inordinately slow to embrace the full implications of the new technology in the areas of architecture and stage design and to acknowledge the waning prestige of the word as sole arbiter of meaning in the Theatre.
This is not to say, however, that the Happening, with its technological wizardry and its championing of connotation is, NECESSARILY, the theatrical form that harmonizes with the moral, intellectual and emotional viewpoint of our age.
JOHN JULIANI
My first work at Simon Fraser was two
Arrabal plays and two De Ghelderode plays, and I was looking for a way
to tie the two authors together in a single evening's presentation. Savage
God seemed appropriate - the notion of a lightning bolt that simultaneously
endangers and illuminates. When the next semester arrived and it was again
my 'turn' to do something, we chose two Kopit plays. I called that work
Savage God 2, and gradually with a little premeditation, Savage God became
a way of enumerating works, like composers do. It was a way of tying together
isolated but not unrelated experiences.
SAVAGE GOD 3
The Devils by John Whiting, Simon Fraser University, 25-29 July 1967
JACK RICHARDS
Stunning is perhaps the only word to adequately
describe the Simon Fraser University production of John Whiting's The
Devils... The audience was stunned by the length of the play, which
ran 4 ½ hours from an 8 p.m. start. It was stunned by a production
that outdid Cecil B. de Mille in an effort to be an epic. It was stunned
by the volume of sound which poured through the loud-speakers at times.
And it was stunned by some of the deliberate shock effects on the stage....
There was much on the debit side. Director John Juliani refused to allow
the audience any use of its imagination. Everything was laboriously spelled
out in block letters sometimes to the point of nausea.
ARTHUR MCDOUGALL
Savage God I pointed up 'questions about
the direction and techniques of contemporary drama. Within a framework
of medieval and an almost child like (not childish: there is a difference)
consciousness of the human condition, these four plays were word, character
and atmosphere pieces of the Theatre of Cruelty, where new ideas of WHAT
the theatre must do were more to the fore than HOW it should do it.' Savage
God 2 went 'further in their use of technical experiment, and in a greater
use of symbolic gestures that are housed in the unconscious. This is the
"meta-language" that Juliani talks about.'
The Devils 'carries the implications of "God" to the ultimate.' There are two films used in the play. These are films of scenes (one written, one invented) between King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, and de Laubardemont, their deputy... These people represent the immense, distant power (equals God) that have ultimate control over the lives of men ... The Court (on film), saying things of great importance for the men on stage, represents an abstraction. In the next film, there is a storm raging, and the film is distorted and abstract in itself. The same two men, plus Grandier, on stage, are shouting over the storm, but the implication is that the distant powers have won.
SAVAGE GOD 3 ½
Hurrah for the Bridge by Paul Foster, Simon Fraser University, 24 Nov 1967. The play was then filmed as Hurrah and shown with a repeat of the stage version on 4 Feb 1968
PRESS RELEASE
This 'evening of theatre' represents a
fusion of acting, actor-audience relationship, 'text' and direction as
they operate in two different media with the same material.
ROBIN SHIELD
It was in Savage God 3 ½ that [Juliani]
came nearest to presenting a multi-dimensional poem; where the audience
found themselves outside asking 'Yes, yes, but why? Why bother, and why
in theatre?' I for one felt very much as I do when experiencing verbal
poetry. The script was without a recognizable plot, and the dialogue was,
I imagine, deliberately unintelligible. What mattered was the mood which
the different voices evoked.
SAVAGE GOD 4
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Kawartha Festival, Lindsay, Ontario, Summer 1968, and Simon Fraser University, 3-5 October 1968
JOHN JULIANI
As Savage God 4 it represents another
attempt, the most sophisticated in the series up to date, to explore the
thematic, presentational, and philosophical implications of a multi-dimensional
awareness in the theatre.... The most important reason why Savage God 4
will be like its predecessors [is that] it's controversial. One has to
decide within five minutes of entering the auditorium whether or not one
is going to stay....
This is our boldest attempt to date in the integration of visual and verbal information on the stage. There are some 40 minutes of film ranging from black-and-white to colour and over 100 slides also ranging from literal and photographic to abstract... Presentationally it is an adaptation... Although the production is a logical and, I believe, honest extension of Williams' original ideas, it is sufficiently altered in its physical envelope to warrant my terming it an adaptation. For the first time in the history of the theatre we have the power and ability to significantly alter the very nature of a work by means other than the adjusting of its verbal contents... The theatre has become a predominantly visual metaphor... Until the visual and technological components of this new language have been raised to the same degree of respectability as their verbal counterparts there can be no basis of judgement whatever as to the validity or invalidity of one or the other.
JULIANI INTERVIEWED ON SAVAGE GOD
From the onset Savage God has been defined
quite simply as 'The Imagination, insatiable, unrelenting, fiercely energetic,
wary of categorization and inveterately iconoclastic.' Now this does not
seem to me to circumscribe the scope of the series in any way whatever.
There is no intrinsic reason why under the terms of this definition Savage
God 8 couldn't be a production of a work by Oscar Wilde in Tokyo in 1985.
These minority complaints about the prevalance of themes of violence and morbidity are premised on a simplistic notion of theatre as entertainment. This narrow interpretation of entertainment I equate with escapism. I am quite convinced that The Sound of Music will continue to exist and propagate its species without my having to contribute to the litter. It is not my cup of tea. Nor, quite frankly, do I see the necessity for apologizing that it is not my cup of tea.
If there has been a concentration of morbidity in the Savage God series to date, I suggest that it may be attributed to two considerations. Firstly, the works presented were examples of the contemporary theatre and the contemporary theatre has rarely been averse to exploiting such themes. is it illogical to suggest that such themes were seen by the authors to reflect to some degree the contemporary situation?... Secondly, the seeming preoccupation with themes of violence and morbidity may have been prompted by a conscious desire on my part to provide the widest possible range of physical and emotional scope for actors as yet unversed in the amenities of speech training.
The plays in the Savage God series have all provided a robust emotional fabric that could be 'torn to tatters' without making undue demands on dexterity of speech. There has been an attempt to provide a progression thematically from the 'todayness' of Fando and Lis to the Elizabethan proportions of The Devils where we have an example of a work Shakespearean in scope and contemporary in content and execution, with none of the demands made by the difficulties of blank verse.
Some observations:
Theatre IS and will become increasingly a therapeutic device and exercise. But for artists to consciously aim at this therapy is a danger... Art as process does not preclude the necessity for high standards.
Theatre IS political. But to consciously see theatre as exclusively political is as dangerous a trap as to see it as exclusively religious or therapeutic. The theatre IS everything: it should not be used AS anything... Theatre is by its very nature a political activity that transcends politics.
Relevancy in the theatre is complete emotional and intellectual involvement. In that order. Relevancy in the theatre is shock - the shock of new ideas, of sudden insights, and of shattered pre-conceptions.
SAVAGE GOD 5
The Horse by Julius Hay, Simon Fraser University, 28 March - 1 April 1969
The programme, in newspaper format, is entitled 'Horse Sheet'; Juliani is credited with mise en scene, set design and the role of Honorary Teuton. Most of the 'Sheet' documents the complicated conflict between, on the one hand Juliani and other members of the Centre for the Arts, and, on the other, Patrick Lyndon, Chairman of the Centre, and the University administration (the conflict led to Juliani's departure from S.F.U. during the summer). The brief account of Savage God ends with the assertion that the bulk of Hay's work, 'may ultimately, when it has been "discovered", survive all but a handful of plays by Brecht.'
A second Hay play, Have, went into rehearsal to follow The Horse but was not performed as Juliani was forced to leave S.F.U. Rehearsals continued for a time in the streets and in the courtyard of the Vancouver School of Art.
SAVAGE GOD 6
Orison, Solemn Communion and Impossible Loves, by Fernando Arrabal, Simon Fraser University, 9 May 1969
SAVAGE GOD 7
Illuminations, Part 1: 'The Centre Cannot Hold,' Vancouver Art Gallery, 25 July, 1 and 8 August 1969
This was a script by Juliani based on quotations from W.B. Yeats and evolved through collective creation: the three performances were different stages in its evolution and its presentation in Savage God 8A was a fourth stage.
SAVAGE GOD 8A
Greenlawn Rest Home by Beverly Simons; Arrabalesques; The Harmfulness of Tobacco by Anton Chekhov; The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau; The Beard by Michael McClure; Darts by Lodewyck de Boer; Illuminations, Pt. 1, Vancouver Art Gallery, 19-22 and 26-29 August 1969
CHRISTOPHER DAFOE
When he came down from Simon Fraser Juliani
said that he would perform in the streets if necessary in order to keep
his company together. It was no empty threat. If the Vancouver Art Gallery
had not provided lodgings it may have come to that. The company is apparently
without funds. It has, however, something more important than money. The
type of determination displayed by Juliani and the spirit of ensemble evident
in the acting company can carry the group a long way...
The Savage God audiences tend to be young, although here and there in the crowd one can spy a member of the older generation. During every performance at least half a dozen walked out and these drop-outs were, more often than not, middle aged or elderly couples unable or unwilling to stand the pace or unprepared to put up with the uncertainties of experimental theatre... The Savage God series has allowed us to participate in the development of an acting company and a style of playing. I think many of those who have attended all or most of the current series have participated in their own development as well.
SAVAGE GOD 8B
Fando and Lis by Fernando Arrabal; a Hamlet workshop; A Special Kind of Lonely by Ralph Kendall. One performance of each of the three. Vancouver Art Gallery, 17-19 Dec 1969
CHRISTOPHER DAFOE
The Hamlet workshop attempted,
to discover the true emotions of the nunnery scene.
The 'Nativity comedy' by a member of the company was a tour of a tinsel-city film studio, with Pirandello tricks around the casting and production of a film.
Whatever one may feel about Arrabal and his works, it is difficult not to be impressed by the means with which the Savage God people bring Fando and Lis to life on the almost naked floor of the gallery. It is a performance that depends on sound and conveyed emotion to make its essential points and exists as a series of shared impressions between actor and observer.
BEN METCALFE
The audience is encouraged to lie and
sit about, and to wander from gallery to gallery. Juliani's audience can
never again be docile theatregoers. This is theatre of a kind that cannot
be institutionalized.
SAVAGE GOD 8C
A Celebration, Vancouver Art Gallery, 7 Jan 1970
PROGRAMME NOTE
If we have learned anything from the 'excesses',
in many cases the deliberate excesses of our artist revolutionaries in
this century it is that Life and Art must ultimately seek to be reconciled
or cease to remain organic. A Celebration, the last offering in
the current Savage God series, is a wedding in content and presentation
of the ideals of Life and Art... Deliberate public mistake is the essence
of experimental theatre... Savage God- would appear to be, potentially
at least, an alternative to, if not a substitute for, the compromises inherent
in commercialism. Savage God has attempted from its outset to articulate
the attributes of process as product and ritual as release as
the cardinal features of this century's assault on orthodoxy in the act
of communication. ("eee" = emergent, experimental, ensemble)
MALCOLM PAGE
The audience of about 200 - very young,
with beads and long hair prominent, gathered in a hall with 19th century
water-colours on the wall, which we ignored, forming a circle within touching
distance of motionless girls in leotards holding a rope. More performers
entered, and were caught in the rope while three men read in turn in English,
French and German, scientific statements on the characteristics of cells.
The captives were dragged into the adjoining room, the audience following,
where they mimed, with much sighing and attitudinizing, the division and
subdivision of cells.
Moving to a third room, the men in the audience were separated from the women, the men watching the girls of the cast rush through stages in a girl's life from birth, through ballet class, sex education, first date and teenage revolt till she met the boy. The spectators and their chairs were then thrust to the walls, creating a large acting area, and the show moved straight into a commedia dell'arte sketch with the boy and girl as Scaramouche and Columbine and a variant on Orpheus and Eurydice. The cast led us downstairs and along a corridor in darkness, with cloth on the walls, rustling paper underfoot, streamers from the roof, and women in white gracefully strewing something - nuts? - on the ground. We were handed candles as we entered another darkened room, its floor strewn with ferns, in which the boy and girl, now groom and bride, kneeled by a flaming altar. Oriental music played, and we all touched a ring as it was passed round, before a priest married the couple. Suddenly I realised it was for real: John Juliani was marrying Donna Wong, and art had become life, theatrical illusion become reality. We formed a procession behind the couple, with our candles, and went to yet another room, where we threw chyrsanthemums at the couple, applauded, and joined the cast for coffee. In less than two hours Savage God had in succession displayed theatre as wordless movement and gesture, entertainment around growing up, a version of a traditional form of drama, and finally ritual.
JULIANI ON SAVAGE GOD EARLY IN 1970
Premised on the conviction that theatre
is a pure art form and not merely a vehicle for the illustration of dramatic
literature, the words under the Savage God aegis have sought a more complete
language for the theatre - a metalanguage - a synthesis between word and
non-word, between product and process, between art and life.
My present work is a return, after a necessary period of inquiry into the technical modes of presentation, to the simplicity that marked the very first offering in the Savage God series at SFU in the summer of 1966. With me the concentration has always been chiefly on the art of the actor-priest...
The occasion for Savage God to leave the mountain has been advantageous from some points of view. More importantly, it has enabled us to reach a wider audience, both quantitively and qualitively, than was possible at SFU. Also we have been able to remind our detractors, if that is not too strong a word to describe them, of what we have been preaching and practising since the outset, viz. in the Theatre finances are essentially irrelevant....
At the Art Gallery, we were attempting to reach a different and new, but not necessarily younger, audience for the Theatre. To do so, we have pioneered a few ideas in both the Gallery series to date. Audience mobility, Free Theatre, One Performance Only, No programmes at the door, and Process as Product - any of these could be elaborated on at some length, but they are all recognizable as hallmarks of the different approach to Theatre articulated by Savage God.... The Art Gallery experience was the beginning of an attempt to provide an alternative-complement to existing theatrical experience in this city, by trying to make the Theatre as galvanizing an experience, as vital a need, as cohesive a factor as it was in the days of the Greeks.
The Criminals, by Jose Triana, Playhouse 2 at the Arts Theatre, directed by John Juliani
JOHN JULIANI
My approach with The Criminals
is an extension of Savage God at the Art Gallery and SFU, although this
is not officially a Savage God production... Rehearsals have been opened
to members of the community in an effort to bring a cross-section of wider
influences to bear on the process of rehearsing a play. Accordingly, psychiatrists,
social workers, photographers, dramatists, as well as a liberal representation
of theatre workers have been invited to attend and participate in rehearsals...
Because I see the play, on one level anyway, as being about alienation, we are attempting to create this experience for the audience by fragmenting their perception of the piece. The Arts Club is being transformed into an attic-basement-brain context, the arterial system of which communicates to the world outside. The audience will, in a way, be eavesdropping on the performance in much the way they might were they to peep through a keyhole in their own closets....
The play has been divided into two parts: The Crime, The Punishment. While each of these parts is self-contained, a minimum of two evenings will be required in order to see the entire work. There are several reasons for this:
a) a desire to extend the Theatre experience beyond 'an evening in the theatre,' predictable in length and saturation, and entertaining in a superficial sense.
b) a desire to counteract an intermission and the opportunity it affords for chit chat and evasion.
c) each individual part is too saturated to be followed in the same evening by a similar experience....
On purchasing tickets, audience members will be requested to choose their seats according to their desired degree of proximity to the physical action. Maximum, medium and minimum vulnerability are the categories.
I can say that nobody will have seen
anything like it, anywhere. There are certain novelties and innovations
which I'm not aware of having been done in or outside Canada.
From this point of view I should have a powerful emotional impact on all audiences....
Every production is a definition of the play in a new context; part of the reason so much of theatre is dead, is because some directors do not explore the context of their production. I must take into consideration that some of my audience were listening to the outcome of the Chicago conspiracy trials driving to the Arts Club, and even if the author of The Criminals could not have known that five years ago, the actors and I must know, because it's there in the room along with the set and everything else.
QUESTIONNAIRE AT PERFORMANCE A 32-item questionnaire was distributed, the questions including
1. My initial reaction when buying my tickets was curiosity/annoyance/ amusement/indifference.
2. Did you ever feel endangered/frustrated/bored/embarrassed/isolated/ excited?
3. Did the 'smells' annoy you? Were you aware of them?
4. When did the experience end for you? before the 'play' ended/when the audience rose/when you were outside/when you left the room/when you got home/it hasn't ended yet
5. Did you ever think of walking out?
PROGRAMME NOTE
In the second week of the run, costumes,
lighting and sound, which for the opening nights had been developed to
'polluted' naturalistic extremes, were gradually phased out of the presentation.
The seating was severely altered on successive nights and the deliberate
dilation (for therapeutic purposes) of the piece gradually relaxed to coincide
with more 'normal' concepts of theatrical time and space.
SAVAGE GOD 8D
The Criminals by Jose Triani (in 2 versions); Darts by Lodewyck de Boer. One performance of each, Vancouver Art Gallery, 12-14 August 1970
This was the fourth and last phase in experiment with the actor/audience relationship: the four parts of 8 are also linked in all being presented at the Art Gallery. The programme booklet has alternate white and black pages, the latter having silver printing. One page asks: 'We are attempting to establish criteria that by-pass those of the strictly "commerical-professional" theatre. To do this, we need your opinions and criticisms. Would you please take the time to record for us your impressions of Savage God?'
The first Criminals was presented to an audience of 25 'so seated that its individual members are completely isolated from one another for the duration of the play.' The first was text alone; the second accompanied throughout by loud electronic Moog synthesizer sound and for part of the time by film of the original production at the Arts.
This programme subsequently played at the International First Underground Theatre Group Festival in Toronto.
'Ready or Not You Must Be Caught' was also performed in Toronto: an exploration of process involving the audience.
SAVAGE GOD 9 (PACET)
(PACET - Pilot Altemative-Complement to the Existing Theatre)
Juliani received $19,350 from the Canada Council to pay 10 actors for 5 months (half the cost of one regional theatre production at the time). Savage God presented a large number of productions, of varying kinds, in different locations. Five took place between 20 April and 3 June and 18 from 20-30 June: only 6 of these had any advance publicity. The main season was of 27 shows in 20 days in 10 locations, 16 Aug. - 4 Sept. 1971. The season included Ibsen's Little Eyolf (in the Art Gallery, the three acts performed in three different locations and lighting; Strindberg's The Stronger at an outdoor cafe in Gaoler's Mews, in Gastown; and Jackie Crossland performing Beckett's Happy Days in a hollow tree in Stanley Park at sunset.
INTERVIEW WITH JOHN JULIANI
Everything shared in a public context
during PACET was governed by one motive: the desire to tangibly reach the
audience, to hold them for as long as was deemed mutually necessary, to
release them into an informal atmosphere of social contact, deliberation
and evaluation, and to receive from them direct impressions of the experience
of which they had been an integral part. The contact sought was to be primarily
emotional and visceral and secondarily intellectual and cerebral. This
basic priority, viz. to establish a vital, immediate relationship with
the audience, determined the presentational means we actually employed.
PROGRAMME NOTE
No art form in this century has resisted
change as consistently and obstinately as has the theatre. The theatre
in philosophy, content and presentation has clung, and by and large continues
to cling, to its old priorities and definitions. Savage God 9 (PACET),
through the medium of a largely conventional repertoire, is a modest attempt
to explore alternative avenues on behalf of an institution that will need
to change drastically in the decade to come.
PROGRAMME NOTE
Act of Love, The Song, Heritage, 3
radio plays by Merv Campone
We have 'adapted' them for the stage and used them as a vehicle for exploring the process of translation of dramatic material from one medium to another, and the effects and challenges of such a process on the actor and his craft and on his relationship with an audience. It is conceivable that in future plays of all lengths and descriptions will be composed that will depend for their appreciation on a more uniform tapping of the entire range of human sensory and extra-sensory perception.
JOHN JULIANI
The Canada Council had no alternative
to the existing situation to suggest. Despite the fact that problems in
regional theatre had been visible and surfacing for some time, no systematic
study had been made. Savage God had to take the first step ... A cohesive
group of actors capable of articulating its aims should always come first...
During the course of the pilot project we discovered that an astonishing
number of locations were willingly made available.
JOHN JULIANI: REPORT TO CANADA COUNCIL
Juliani submitted a 466-page report to
the Canada Council. He chronicled his various difficulties: the union objections
to Equity and non-Equity people working together, the uncertainty about
practising democracy opposed to Juliani as director, and the conflicts
in his company between the anarchists and traditionalists, between those
who sought primarily an experience in togetherness and those who wanted
to get on with the plays. Among the 'alternative principles' established
were free admission, one performance only in any one space, limited advertising,
direct feedback, flexible seating and staging, the ensemble principle and
non-regular seasons.
The final part of his manuscript is his recommendations for the Canadian theatre. He stresses the need for life-long training for actors, attacks the theatrical unions as obstructive, and wants theatre Boards of Governors to be made purely advisory, and to have equal representation for artists. He argues for 'cultivating the artist as an art form as thoroughly and single-mindedly as one cultivates the more glamorous and better-known ingredients of the theatre.' To increase access he wants informal theatre, using existing facilities of any kind, cheaply advertised (by such means as public rehearsals) and with some free evenings in any run. Most important, he wants a national network of 'free' or alternative theatres, to receive as much subsidy as the professional regionals, though he envisages many more of the 'free' groups. (Don Rubin provides an accessible account of PACET in John Juliani's Savage God: an Experiment in Canadian Theatre,' Theatre Quarterly, Nos. 19-20,1975,151-63)
SAVAGE GOD 10
Rehearsed public readings of full-length pieces, short plays, poetry and monologues by Canadian writers and composers: Jerry Cohen, Peter Hay, Cam Hubert, Ann Hungerford, Ralph Kendall, Marjorie Morris, Barbara Nye, Sharon Pollock, Frank Powley and Munroe Scott. 30 presentations at the Library, Arts Club, Galerie Allen, Burnaby Art Gallery and Burnaby Arts Centre, with forums and community TV transmissions, 5-30 September 1972.
This September season had been preceded by public readings of work-in-progress: parts of The Big Game, by Ed Turner, were read by Savage God actors at the Art Gallery on 22 October 1971 and at the Library on 4 November 1971.
PROGRAMME NOTE
Savage God 10 is a sequel to last summer's
activity, and focuses its attention exclusively on the needs of the recently
'discovered' Canadian playwright. The current project began in September
1971 without any financial backing, and since February 1972 has been funded
uniquely by the Local Initiatives Program. Like its predecessor, Savage
God 10 is conceived as a research project designed to explore and articulate
alternative-complements in a specific sphere of the Canadian theatrical
establishment.
The overall aims of the project are as follows:
1. To introduce the original work of relatively unknown and unproduced Canadian playwrights and visual artists, the majority of whom are British Columbians, to local audiences through a variety of media.
2. To de-emphasize the present penchant for often indiscriminate production of Canadian plays, by helping to create a public awareness of the vital need for placing equal emphasis on the more developmental periods of a writer's evolution.
3. To articulate and develop a distinct alternative to the present method of encouraging, developing and producing the work of Canadian playwrights.
4. To continue to explore and create and otherwise encourage the maximum use of new and existing facilities for the production of work by Canadian writers in all media.
5. To examine the alternatives to the present role of the literary agent in Canada.
JULIANI IN 1975
Savage God comes from a statement made
by William Butler Yeats. At the turn of the century he went to see Jarry's
Ubu Roi, which many feel was a kind of prophecy of iconoclasm for
the whole century, in all the arts. Yeats was of a different tradition,
he was a symbolist whose work was beautifully refined, tender and mystical.
He saw Ubu Roi, that cacophony of unorthodoxy, and he said something
to the tune of 'What's going to happen to the future? What's going to happen
after people like myself and the other symbolists? The Savage God?' He
was puzzled and perhaps fearful of the excesses he foresaw. But he was
very right about what happened to the arts: Cubism, Dada, Futurism, etc.
All we're really doing now is redoing or rediscovering things that were
discovered during a relatively brief period at the turn of the century.
We're not doing any really new experimental work - simply following up
what was opened up to us by earlier iconoclasts... Savage God is my way
of not creating a distinction between my life and my work. It is a concept.
My definition of theatre is wide enough that it includes film, therapy,
working in a prison, etc. It allows me to do what I want to do. Many people
speak of Savage God as a company but it isn't. My wife Donna and I are
the only people who have been through it from the beginning. Ideally, it
will never be categorized because it can't be categorized. Like me, Savage
God is wary of categorization and fond of contradiction. I hate being pigeon-holed.
'That way madness lies.'
Notes
Forum - SAVAGE GOD IN VANCOUVER, 1966-72: A DOCUMENTARY ACCOUNT
Malcolm Page
1 For a survey of other
theatrical activity in Vancouver at this time, see my article, 'Change
in Vancouver Theatre, 1963-80,' Theatre History in Canada, 2.1,
Spring 1981, 40-58
Return to article
2 USMIANI, Second Stage:
The Alternative Theatre Movement in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983),
p 66 Usmiani sees Richard Schechner as an influence on Juliani (p 77);
Juliani denies knowledge of Schechner till later. Usmiani implies that
The Centralia Incident at Simon Fraser University in 1967 was a
Savage God work (p 80). Centralia was in fact devised and directed
by Michael Bawtree. Juliani was brought in during rehearsals and says that
he was effectively director of the second half, 'adding some of the energy
of Savage God. The title of Usmiani's Chap 2, 'In the Beginning was Toronto,'
is misleading: as she notes, Passe Muraille began in 1969 (p 43) and Factory
Theatre Lab in 1970 (p 32). I am very grateful to John Juliani for his
co-operation and for answering all my questions.
Return to article
3 For favourable comment,
see such BARBER columns in The Province as 'Wedded at Juliani Nuptials-Life-Art-God,'
9 Jan 1970, 'Darts Stretches the Mind,' 15 Aug 1970, 'The Criminals:
Simple but Heavy,' 13 Aug 1970; also Martha Robinson, 'Savage God fills
void with verve,' Sun, 7 May 1971, Olivia Ward, 'Unexpected Flares
in Darkness Plays,' Province, 17 Aug 1971, Olivia Ward, 'The Savage
God - with a Gentle Heart,' Province, 3 Sept 1971, Viveca Ohm, 'Yet
another Good Night for Savage God Company,' Sun, 28 Aug 1971.
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