The Maitland River Project: Heard Before Scene

MENNESETUNG: THE MAITLAND RIVER PROJECT: HEARD BEFORE SCENE

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

The University of Guelph

GIL GARRATT

In partial fulfillment of requirements

for the degree of

Master of Arts.

January, 2011

University of Guelph

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1+1 Canada ABSTRACT

MENNESETUNG: THE MAITLAND RIVER PROJECT: HEARD BEFORE SCENE

Gil Garratt Advisor:

University of Guelph, 2011 Professor Ric Knowles

This thesis is an investigation of a performance work created by Gil Garratt between the fall of 2009 and the winter of 2010. The project revolves around a solo kayaking experiment on the Maitland River, from mouth to source. Through the use of video, musicscapes, and site-specific performance techniques Garratt attempts to disrupt functionalist approaches to space and resources with sensual tricks and tactics. The work also considers contemporary Landscape theory as a site for the inspection and disruption of pervasive scopic drives and voyeuristic tendencies in the apprehension of the notion of place. Table of Contents

Part A: Inspiration/Source 1

Part B: Investigation/ Course 8

Part C: Implementation/ Mouth 23

Part D: Watershed/Reflections 29 1

Mennesetung: the Maitland River Project: Heard Before Scene A Case Book, A Memoir, A Moist Missive

A Source, A Course, A Mouth

Part A: Inspiration/Source

To a large extent this project began as a reaction to a radio program on the CBC. I was locked into a seemingly unending cycle of long commutes in a small car, spending easily forty to fifty thousand kilometers a year on Southwestern Ontario roadways. I took up language methods, audio-books, and even the harmonica in a stainless steel harness around my shoulders, all in an effort to maintain a kind of mental stability, or even, if possible, an expansion of a kind. I was spending dozens of hours a week following the same painted meridians; the only significant variations being a handful of sideroads and possible traffic reconfigurations. I would become excited by the shapes of enormous combines and sprayers from local farms because they broke up the monotony of steel and glass designs I had now become visually numb to. Stagnation was a daily ritual, seemingly unavoidable and ubiquitous as brushing my teeth. My body would twist and ache whenever I got out of the car, spasming in the street doing my best commuter yoga with the car door still open, the dinging alarm bell telling me the keys were still in the ignition. Anna Maria Tremonti talked to me more often than my own mother.

Tremonti's morning news program The Current featured a series of episodes entitled: Watershed. The series aired a number of diverse radio documentaries essentially about water; everything from controversy surrounding the consumption of bottled water, to Northern Alberta tailings ponds, to the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts at the River Jordan, 2 and many other dribblings in between. On Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008, Tremonti hosted a three-part documentary about the Bow River in Calgary. Throughout the documentary Tremonti regularly interviewed Bob Sandford, then the chair of the United

Nations International Year of Fresh Water and Wonder of Water Initiative. Sandford is a major force in international water research, a fellow of the Biogeoscience Institute at the

University of Calgary, an Associate of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of

Saskatchewan, as well as the Director of the Western Watersheds Climate Research

Collaborative. In interview Sandford was frank about what he envisioned as the immanent end of the Bow River: a confluence of urban expansion, poor water policy, and receding glacial headwaters. At the conclusion of his emotional testimony, Sandford declared

It astounds me now how, over a period of only perhaps eight generations, we've

gone from a nation whose residents held in their mind a map of the country as it is

composed by rivers and watersheds... and how because of roads and rails and

airlines and other linear approaches to apprehending the notion of place, we've

lost contact with the sensuous, sinuous nature of our water courses. ("The Bow

River")

As a listener, confined to the steel box on the painted meridian highway, this message seemed emphatically clear, and I carried it forward in my commuter brain for thousands of kilometers in search of an appropriate response, seeing within it an imperative I could somehow enact.

There are obvious critiques to be filed at Sandford's statement; it contains a kind of ecological nostalgia, purporting that some kind of Utopian relationship to water existed in a kind of 'primitive' past. There is a belief espoused here that some earlier relationship ought to be 'recovered', a harkening to the supposed wisdom of generations past, and inherent in such an idea the assumption that contemporary ecological problems/outcomes have emerged exclusively from contemporary ideas/ambitions: an ahistorical perspective disguising romanticism about the past. However, within Sandford's assessment there is also a compelling kinesthetic assertion about the effect of the sensuality of travel on an individual's conception of space. If we accept (with critical caveats) Sandford's assertion, then one possible imperative for the performance artist emerges as an investigation of the effect of a water course's sensuality of travel on the performer's (and the audience's) sense of place. Or, as a question, how can 'linear approaches to apprehending the notion of place' be disrupted through performance acts that take as their ostensible texts experiential excursions on/in navigable water courses?

Notions surrounding the kinesthetic affect of travel on the traveler are not new observations. In his seminal book, The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau has written extensively on how consumers in a productivist society carve "their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality" (xviii) but all the while stressing that they do so according to "prescribed syntactical forms (temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic orders of space, etc." (xviii). To a huge extent de Certeau's central preoccupation surrounds the scopic behaviours and tendencies of contemporary Western society. The philosopher considers at great length the impact of a culture that sets its binary preoccupations on reading and writing, effectively enabling what he terms a

"semeiocracy" (xxi) where the producers and mercantile interests advance images and the consumer is essentially constrained to the role of voyeur, de Certeau argues that this 4 scopic obsession with reading and writing conditions and disciplines the consumer to experience (and therefore appreciate) the world they inhabit in a way that is abstracted and detached from other sensory experience. This reading of the world from a distant vantage discourages (if not disables) other sensory experiences and resulting shifts of perspective. Essentially de Certeau proposes that "spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life" (96).

This premise, that spatial practices structure the life that is enacted within them, is at the core of de Certeau's theories of 'everyday practice.' The philosopher contends throughout his work that there are 'tactics' and 'tricks' by which consumers can establish

"multiform resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline" (96), through styles and modes of "tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation" (97).

Admittedly, the bulk of de Certeau's tactics and tricks involve pedestrian initiatives

(creative walking practices), but at its centre, the principle remains one of making an effortful shift in apprehending the notion of place by shifting the very tactility with which citizens engage the space they occupy.

In attempting to address both Sandford's call and de Certeau's charge about tricks and tactics, I began to consider the possibility of creating a performance work that would involve a shift of spatial practice that could incorporate water as a central practice. Since

2004,1 have lived in Huron County, year round. Everyday, in my steel-box-harmonica - toting-audio-book-spasm-commuter-nightmare I would pass at least three times (often more) over the Maitland River on my painted meridian bridges. My first thought was that

I would somehow build a piece around my own traveling of the river.. .that I would solo the river in a kayak and consider the impact of such a shift of spatial practice on my perception. Would this change my relationship to the river in any unpredictable way, in any way that was not simply another participatory act in the dominant 'semeiocracy'?

The desire to read the river as a text is a complex one to jettison (if it can be, if it ought to be, if that's even what I'm trying to do). De Certeau, again, goes to great lengths to call attention to the way in which the "scopic drive haunts" (92) our relationship to the space we inhabit. He speaks at length about the Renaissance painters' approach to perspective, which for them was a kind of abstraction, an envisioning, and has now, in the opinion of de Certeau, become largely realized in urban architectures. The scopic drive necessarily contextualizes space as texts to consume, simply landscapes. Would it be possible for me to experience and then describe the river in any way that wasn't simply continuing this reading/writing frame?

Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri in their compilation Land/Scape/Theory argue for a new paradigm in the theatre's relationship to landscape, calling for "the restoration of the natural and built environment, and of the nonhuman order" (4). While the text is somewhat oblique about what precisely a 'nonhuman order' is, the general claim revolves around an attempt to disrupt the scopic drive when approaching notions of landscape; disrupting simplistic notions of landscape as an external, distant, removed, abstracted idea, and instead recognizing its immediate and present affect on the viewer; in essence, preventing the viewer of the landscape from occupying a solitary position from the landscape they are viewing. This is in effect resistance to the notion of the voyeur itself, insisting instead that the landscape and the eye upon it are to be regarded as indivisible.

As Chaudhuri elaborates in her contribution to the anthology, 6

the principal definitional debate has occurred around the issue of whether

landscape refers to an empirical reality, a piece of the world that is actually "out

there" or is always a representation - an image, an idea, rendering,

conceptualization, or fantasy about what's out there. (12)

In order to embrace this debate within my performance project, I will have to build the piece in such a way as to represent both my sensual, experiential act of resistance, and simultaneously the Maitland River itself, as presently as possible (if I am not already rendering them as divisible by treating these as distinct parts of my performance work).

In pursuit of an application of landscape theory to the practice of theatre and performance, Chaudhuri focuses on a definitional approach that attempts to simultaneously locate 'landscape' as a productive term within existing practices, and acknowledges its malleability within contemporary cultural discourse. As Chaudhuri elaborates, the "lack of a precise definition is not an index of cultural insignificance. On the contrary, the instability and ubiquity of the term reflect the cultural need for this concept" (12). Saliently, Chaudhuri defines the essential traditional tropes of landscape as "either to be admired (the 'prospect' landscape of fields and valleys), or peacefully enjoyed (the "refuge" landscape of shady glens and glassy streams), or revered (the sublime or monumental landscape of mountains, gorges, and canyons)" (12). That

Chaudhuri links certain emotional or philosophic preoccupations to specific topographies reflects the foundation of landscape theory in visual art, and it should be noted that the critic does later propose such terms are neither exclusive nor exhaustive.

However, at the centre of each of these configurations there remains a clear binary between the landscape and the viewer. Just as de Certeau critiques the artists who created 7

'perspective' during the Renaissance for constructing and constraining the viewpoint of the emerging urban world, Chaudhuri similarly declares that "the founding paradox of perspective as employed in landscape painting is that it appears to 'give' us the world - especially the natural world, its favourite subject - just at the very moment that it removes it from us - or rather, us from it - most decisively" (19). The landscape in theatre, as in art, is traditionally presented as an external force often in an antagonistic relationship with the protagonist. The landscape is treated most often as a metaphor, or a symbol somehow representing and depicting the temperaments and relationships in a given play.

In attempting to incorporate both Chaudhuri and de Certeau's claims into my sensual river response to Sandford's remarks, my emphasis on traveling the river as a tactic to disrupt my own sense of place, must shift significantly. I come to recognize that

I am privileging my travel over/in the river above/before the river itself. Somehow I need to readdress this notion. So far, the central question of my project has relied on two general theoretical assumptions: firstly, that a water-course can be considered a performance text in its own right, and secondly, that a performer by engaging with this water-course can, in some sense, enact that text. However again, I am resorting to a binary between myself and the river, and to a vantage point that positions me as a viewer of an objectified external text. How can I ensure that the river, the landscape, truly becomes a subject of the work and not just an object within it.

Also, I begin grappling with how I can, through my direct kinetic, sensual experience of the river (a topophilic affect), inform an audience's apprehension of 'the notion of place'? How can I, through performance, offer an audience some engagement with the river that breaks or disrupts their position as voyeurs? How can this topophilic 8 affect on the performer be conveyed/transferred to an audience? How can the performer's kinesthetic experience of the river become a performance work about the experience without completely objectifying the river itself? Can the river, in the context of the performance work, become more than simply another idealized vista? Can I disrupt both my own voyeurism (as well as my audience's) all the while presenting what is essentially another performance text?

Part B: Investigation/ Course

I have at this point established a format for the creation of the performance work, and established some parameters by which I can critique and examine that construction while building a presentation. At this point I should draw a line of definition between the

'performance work' and the 'presentation' as it seems clear these are now distinct

(though obviously overlapping) aspects of my project. The performance work actually begins with what will be a series of short expeditions in the river that will eventually lead me about 150km through its serpentine course. I classify these as part of the

'performance' text because they are performance acts and will occupy the central part of my 'presentation.' The 'performance' is the actual river expeditions themselves and any of the 'doing' of my project that occurs prior to the 'presentation' when this performance work will be conveyed to an audience. This distinction is best exemplified by the river excursions which I will perform. At the end of each expedition/performance I will create a short video confession talking about my experience of the river, and that video will be

'presented' in the final 'presentation.' 9

As a theoretical foundation for these confessional video works, I have drawn on

Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol.1 wherein the thinker thoroughly discusses the mechanisms and functions within a confessional discourse. For Foucault, confession is

a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without

the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply an interlocutor

but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and

intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in

which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to

surmount in order to be formulated (62)

Obviously, given that the work will have an eventual public presentation (and especially one within the obvious context of a University Degree) the power relationship between confessor (me) and audience (you) is a particularly potent one. Though at the actual time of the speaking of these confession it will definitely be a 'virtual presence' (as I will be alone operating the video camera at the river's edge) my awareness of the works eventual audience is ever present.

What I hope to do through these river confessions is both consider the questions already raised, and to attempt to depict, capture, or catalogue examples of what

Australian academic Joanne Tompkins describes as 'Methexis' (a term she acknowledges borrowing from colleague Paul Carter). In her book Unsettling Space: Contestations in

Contemporary Australian Theatre, Tompkins posits a view of methexis that "refers to marking the ground lightly and impermanently, taking account of the history of a particular landscape" (11). In Tompkins' construal, methexis is an approach through which "space is mobile rather than fixed, [which] helps split singular constructions of 10 spatiality" (12). And, by exposing the 'constructions of spatiality' "the methektic response to the landscape is to disclose the political effect of enclosing land and place"

(10). The artist seeking a methektic perspective must consider the landscape as a multidimensional site where historical participations and relationships are always at play, and where new, current, active participations and relationships are constantly developing.

Affecting a methektic gaze on landscape while creating a work of what is essentially 'landscape theatre' has also been widely theorized within the literature surrounding site-specific work. In his introduction to the Playwrights Canada Press

Critical Perspectives series text Environmental and Site-Specific Theatre, Andrew

Houston insists that

In every site-specific or environmental theatre project, the artist must spend a lot

of time walking around experiencing the site; trying to gain some insight into its

inhabitants, its workings, its reality, but also trying to imagine how it might

possess a life not yet realized, (vii)

Additionally, Houston adds that "studying the historicality of a particular site, event, person or social group is not intrinsically any more insightful than studying its sociality or spatiality" (ix). Houston appears to be asserting that the anthropological perspective of a site is no more revealing than the topological experience of it, insisting that we as cultural actors need to resist our tendency to privilege the 'record' or the 'archive' over the immediately sensual. Houston encourages the performance practitioner "to cultivate praxis, a transformation of knowledge into action" (iix), an arguably methektic approach.

Houston's work in environmental and site-specific theatre has been greatly influenced by the work of American geographer and urban planner Edward W. Soja. Soja proposed that space and spatiality need to be considered from a "recombinatorial and radically open perspective" (5), namely his concept of Thirdspace. In his similarly titled tome, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Soja argues that space and spatiality must become wide expanses of deep consideration that actively attempt to disrupt the privileging of historical documents, surveyors sticks, and empiricism over the imagined and the intuited. Soja defines Thirdspace as

a knowable and unknowable, real and imagined lifeworld of experiences,

emotions, events, and political choices that is existentially shaped by the

generative and problematic interplay between centres and peripheries, the abstract

and the concrete, the impassioned spaces of the conceptual and the lived, marked

out materially and metaphorically in spatial praxis, the transformation of (spatial)

knowledge into (spatial) action in a field of unevenly developed (spatial) power.

(31)

Soja's call demands a consideration of the spatial that acknowledges that the viewer of landscape conceptualizes that landscape within a culturally conditioned framework, and that exposing (or at least addressing) the imagined or intuited view of these landscapes reveals another equally important aspect of their present reality. How we imagine a space to be potentially speaks as much to its cultural function as any other historical or political perspective does. Primarily, Soja appears concerned with the relations of power surrounding space and spatiality. He emphasizes that dominance is often attributed to 'the record/archive' in any spatial discourse, and that imagination and sensuality are almost always treated as subordinate conceptions of space, thereby privileging the status of the keepers of the record/archive over the imaginer. 12

These perspectives from Soja, Tompkins, Houston, and de Certeau easily align my ambitions for the actual physical excursions themselves (the performance). However, attempting to apply them to the presentation presents other challenges. Obviously, my confessionals will be concerned with these ideas and themes, and yet I need to somehow ensure that the presentation I create does not itself purport to be a kind of 'bird's eye view' analysis that installs itself as a discourse about the landscape, about the objectified river. I need to work to create a presentation that endeavours to somehow disrupt this voyeur relationship.

The first impulse I have is to somehow take the audience to the river itself, to somehow bring them to its edge and allow for some kind of direct kinesthetic experience for themselves of its body. Also I begin to consider ways in which I might address the presentation of the videos that exposes both their construction and their latent content as historical records, their 'documentary feel.' I need to find a way to present the video confessions as though they are as much river-influenced and river-constructed in their actual media and image, as they are in their content. I also need to find a way to privilege the river and the river's image to at least the same degree as I am privileging my own image.

Applying a methektic lens to the Maitland River already seems inherent in my project's approach to traveling the water course itself. I am embracing a unique

'enunciation' as de Certeau would label it (de Certeau discusses at length his metaphorical framing device of considering urban travel in relation to speech acts: 13 individuals can enunciate actions within a prescribed spatial syntax). However, one significant discovery early in my research revealed a significant oversight on my part, and proved to really be a paradigm shifter in my whole concept of both the performance and the presentation; I learned from the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority's publication Windings: A History of the Lower Maitland River by Margaret S. Beecroft, that the name the Ojibwa who inhabited the valley for at least 4000 years had for the river was 'Mennesetung'. According to Beecroft, "the first syllable Mennes may be translated

'small berries" (3), and "[f]he second syllable Tung also carries more meaning than can be expressed in one English word, - namely 'heard before seen' (3).

When I first learned of this name, Mennesetung, I had preconceived ideas of what it would mean to my excursions. I assumed, from the outset, that I would hear the river before I would see it: that its rushing, its lapping would be detectable from the woods as I made my way to the banks. I assumed it was a kind of guide from outside of the river to the river's edge. Reflecting on this assumption, I think it emerged from a contemporary perspective of the river as a site of 'refuge.' The river is there, somewhere in the wooded parts of cleared Huron County farm country, and can be accessed and enjoyed for leisure: find it, indulge yourself, take refuge. The river is outside of me, and I will go to it for refuge.

From my very first excursion on the river I could see I was wrong in my interpretation. Mennesetung is a directive that warns would be travelers (and performance artists) of how to navigate its waters. The Maitland/Mennesetung

(Mennesetung/Maitland) river is incredibly serpentine, and its curves and folds are often invisible while traveling on it. Being attuned to the SOUND of the river is a critical 14 navigational tool, as rocks and rapids often emerge unforeseen. Naming the river

Mennesetung, is a kind of shared praxis, a way of transmitting experience and knowledge about the nature, character, and demands of the river onto the nascent traveler.

The name Mennesetung, also seems decidedly democratic. Mennesetung is information available to any and all who would travel the river regardless of class or means: it connotes a communal interest in the safety and education of all who learn it.

The name 'Maitland' was given to the river in 1826 after the Huron Tract was

'purchased' from the Ojibwa (then referred to as the Chippewa Nation in the Indian

Treaties surrounding the 'sale'). This commemorative act was done for Sir Peregrine

Maitland a British soldier and colonial administrator who was appointed lieutenant- governor of Upper Canada in 1818. This memorializing seems hugely undemocratic. The information available within such an act is devoid of spatial praxis (nothing about this name informs the traveler about the course). What is present within such an act of naming is a colonial hailing that privileges power, social status, and the crown over the landscape itself. Maitland becomes not only the name of the river, but a mechanism by which to instruct the society at large in the scope and breadth of colonial power and dominance: even the river will be made a monument.

Addressing this naming in my work seems critical, both in terms of exposing the politic and historicity inherent therein, but also in terms of the sensual experience of the river. The auditory experience of the river is a crucial part of the sensory experience and finding a way to present the auditory, as a performer seems essential.

I settle on the idea of creating an original score for the presentation, one that emerges out of the performance work. I want to create soundscapes, musicscapes that 15 reflect this topographical, methektic experience of the river itself. I endeavour to create original compositions after each excursion, record these compositions, and then play them with the corresponding video confessions in presentation. In this way, I intend to make the auditory a constant piece of necessary information in the audience's interpretation of the work. The audience's reception of the video confessionals will be coloured by a constant auditory experience and depiction of the river that demands a sensual response: the response to music.

In creating the music itself I have attempted to engage primarily with rhythm and mood, rather than melody and harmony. I am attempting through this music (all of which has been composed electronically, essentially contemporary ambient techno music) to incorporate intuitive senses of flow and current, aiming to privilege these qualities over more traditional musical criteria. Intuitively, I come to believe that this response to the river, is one of the most succinct articulations of the whole project... even if the music in the end is admittedly disjointed and disquieting, it is constructed as a reflection of the river that is not a linear narrative or traditionally informational.

One template for the project that must be acknowledged is the work of Welsh

Performance Researcher, Mike Pearson. His influential text In Comes I speaks at length about methods and means to integrate landscape (and its complexities) into performance, both for the creator himself and for his audience. Pearson speaks at length about a 16th

Century performance practice called 'chorography.' Admittedly, Pearson does not specifically stipulate that 'chorography' need be performance based, but he does repeatedly speak of it in the context of his work as a performance artist/researcher, and as 16 a template for work in a site-specific/environmental performance. In Pearson's construal chorographies "collected and arranged natural, historical and antiquarian information topographically" (9). Pearson describes chorographies as works that include everything from the biographical, to the geographical, to the biological, to the political, to the topographical all in an effort to depict/investigate a given region. Pearson contends that such work strives to blur

the boundary between critical and creative writing, autobiography and cultural

history, one text and the next [...] seeking rhizomatic connections in forms of

montage and collage- where pattern is favoured over argument - in the creation of

a signature style that may be as much poetic as informational [...]. [T]he author

identifies with the object of study, acknowledging affiliations and bias, and this

drives the research: while conventional academic practice is clearly present, it is

infused with personal observations and sources of lay knowledge. The method is

emotional, self-reflexive and revelatory. (9-10)

Principally, Pearson "urges a shift from the optic to the haptic in the apprehension of landscape" (11), an urge consistent with the central preoccupations of this river project as expressed in the corollary theories presented thus far. Further, Pearson insists that

"Landscape has no pre-existing form that is then inscribed with human activity: both being and environment are mutually emergent; continuously brought into being together"

(12). Pearson's view of this constitutive mutuality is precisely the relation I hope to foreground in my presentation.

In Theatre/Archaeology, an earlier publication co-authored with collaborator

Michael Shanks, Pearson also puts forward terms for the devising/development of 17 performance works derived from a disciplinary hybrid of theatre and archaeology.

Critical among these terms to the development of my river project is "the deep map" (64).

According to Pearson and Shanks, the deep map

attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of a location -juxtapositions

and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the

poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation

of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything

you might ever want to say about a place. (64-65)

Primarily, the Theatre/Archaeology model has been built around an approach to

'developed' spaces, to architectural sites, often abandoned, and purports to attempt to

'recover' the contained histories within such sites while simultaneously inscribing new events through performance/presentation. Still, at its philosophic centre, the work insists on an approach that attempts to foreground the sensual experience of spatiality as the generative centre of a work about a given site. Landscape is not a backdrop to the work, but rather its primary focus and principal investigation.

As I earlier surmised, arising from my readings of Pearson, Shanks, Soja, and

Houston I become aware that my presentation must necessarily involve a site-specific installation with the audience at the river. I also come to recognize the need to consider my 'confessional' videos as acts of autobiography that must necessarily be contextualized terms of their relation to the river, and to the emergent discourse surrounding autobiography in Canadian Theatre.

Sherrill Grace, co-editor along with Jerry Wasserman of Theatre and

Autobiography, suggests that Western audiences seek out autobiographical texts because 18

"they satisfy our desire for story at the same time as they promise to give us truths (if not

Truth)" (14). Grace further portends that autobiographical texts are "more democratic than many other forms of communication" (14). For her part, Susan Bennett largely rejects such broad claims. In her included essay "3-D A/B", Susan Bennett argues for thorough critical engagement with autobiography where the tendency toward fictionalized accounts is a given, and where the audience must endeavour to read the complex texts of the body before them. For Bennett the viewer must be suspicious of

"what we, despite everything, think of as real" (34).

Bennett emphasizes the body in autobiographical performance as a site of story telling that transcends, betrays, eludes or elucidates the explicitly constructed spoken narrative on offer. For Bennett the body is displayed

along an axis of two orders of signification. The first is the signification of

identity, not primarily the identity that the writer constructs for him or herself as

the autobiographical project, but the identity that is a production of the body's

exteriority. In its three dimensionality, the body is not, ever, simply those

identities it claims for itself, but also those identities claimed on its behalf [...].

On the other axis is the signification of the body as archive, the literal vessel of

somatic history. The body archives a history that may or may not be part of the

performance narrative, explicitly or implicitly; it also enacts that history

irrespective of the other constituents of performance and irrespective of the

autobiographer's intentions for it. The live, performing body renders the script 19

three-dimensional but it has itself been scripted, as it were, prior to its subject

matter (35).

Bennett's assertion that the body is a vehicle for revelation that is not as easily controlled or regulated as the explicit spoken text of an autobiography seems compelling and intuitive. Her observation is clear, and exemplifies a kind of critical lens for the inspection of autobiography that doesn't necessarily distrust the creator of the work, but rather insists that the creator is likely always to be revealing more than they intend to tell.

Similarly, Ric Knowles in his essay "Documemory, Autobiology, and the Utopian

Performative in Canadian Autobiographical Solo Performance" asserts a "particular" (57) interest in "documemory' in which the 'marked' [...] performing body as archive serves up embodied traces - scars - as documents of both individual and cultural memory" (58).

Knowles appears to be calling attention to the body as not only a vehicle for the performance of autobiography but also revealing it as a principal source for the uncovering/discovering of that autobiography. The body becomes both the site of the performance and a mnemonic of the individual's life, history, politic, culture.

Incorporating these notions of autobiographical theory into my river project is in some respects clear and intuitive and in others, profoundly challenging. Through the use of myself, my bodily self, as the subject of the river excursions, I believe I am explicitly indicting my body as a site for performance. The river excursions are a bodily act, and my emphasis on the study of the sensual dimension of this travel foregrounds a bodily response: a sensory, bodily response. However, I find it difficult to align the demands of these theories of autobiography with the landscape theorists stated desire to embrace and exalt 'nonhuman' subjects. I have thus far been attempting to find presentation methods 20 that will attempt to disrupt the 'human story' or body site and attempt to privilege or at least give equal footing to the 'water course' or river site.

Ultimately, I come to recognize that for the purposes of this performance/presentation these sites need not be mutually exclusive, but are instead, for all intents, mutually constitutive. In the context of this piece, the river and the performer constantly occupy the same space, the same course. Out of this I come to recognize a curious need: when I present my excursion confessionals, I must find real and present ways to simultaneously present river confessionals. I decide to videotape the river in a long, static, unedited, unaddressed, single shot.. .start a tape at the beginning and let it roll until the end.. .letting the river make its own articulations for the presentation (admittedly within a human contrived technological framework). If both the river and my body are the sites of this performance, then both the river and my body are the subjects of my presentation.

In this way, by somehow performatively franchising the river as a subject as well as site I hope to combat what Chaudhuri identifies as "resourcism - the idea that the natural world is an endless source of- or factory producing - raw materials for the more advanced factories of modern consumer culture" {Staging Place 25). This contemporary perspective, arguably driven by- or at least enabled by- the bird's eye view, of water as a resource continues to be at the centre of popular thinking on water courses. Even the highly sympathetic Conservation Authority's "Lower Maitland River Report" of August,

2000, concludes by saying "the Lower Maitland Valley is an extremely rich natural resource area, with unique recreational value in Southwestern Ontario" (36). Again, all of this language surrounding the river necessarily frames it as a commodity for 21 consumption: it is inherently reifying language. As Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace

Heim, and Claire Waterton attest in their introduction to Nature Performed:

Environment, Culture and Performance

the areas of planning, environmental policy and regulation are dominated by static

ideas about nature and nature-human relationships, ideas that might usefully be

disrupted by the application of notions like performance, with their emphasis on

activity, on ongoing 'doing' or 'making'. (10)

Szerszynski, Heim and Waterton are emphatic in their insistence that the codes and semiologies employed by bureaucracies of the 'natural environment' continue to reify and ultimately disempower the landscape as fixed points to be either protected or exploited, with little to no nuance or vision afforded in either direction. The relationship is always construed as being to the natural environment rather than with it.

A final theoretical influence that must be acknowledged in the creation of this river project is the British sculptor/installation (outstallation?) artist Andy Goldsworthy.

To speak of Goldsworthy's art in a salient, articulate way that does not diminish the scope of his work, betray its simplicities, understate its complexities seems impossible.

To speak of his work in any significant way that captures or contains its transcendent beauty and mindfulness seems equally impossible. Even Goldsworthy himself is a very reluctant interview subject and a rare lecturer, regularly expressing that articulating his work from the outside only frustrates and confounds him. The bulk of his written work is concerned primarily with the 'how' of his art making rather than the 'what it is': process over intention, creation over construction. In the introduction to his collection A 22

Collaboration With Nature, Goldsworthy reveals that for him "looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins" (1). For Goldsworthy, the presented work is essentially an afterthought, no more than a record of his sensual relationship to the looking/touching/material/place/form he has been engaging with. In this way,

Goldsworthy's approach is well aligned with the theorists aforementioned in this paper, though his works may seek to articulate these concepts in an entirely different way, relying on the transcendental experience of the work in action to the exclusion of stated theory or overtly expressed intentions.

Being unable to adequately articulate the range of Goldsworthy's field and scope on my own conception and process, I must rely on the educated reader to consult his imagery (particularly the work he has done with rivers) in order to appreciate the undeniable importance of his oeuvre to my study. Accepting this, one thing I come to recognize from Goldsworthy is the vital need to create elements of my presentation that are similarly unutterable and yet emphatically expressive and appropriate. I must find a way to similarly create a moment of transcendence. How daunting. I turn back to

Goldsworthy and draw some sliver of solace from his humble declaration that while standing in his site he knows that

Here is where I can learn. I might have walked past or worked there many times.

Some places I return to over and over again, going deeper - a relationship made in

layers over a long time. Staying in one place makes me aware of change. I might

give up after a while. My perception of a place is often so frustratingly limited.

The best of my work, sometimes the result of much struggle when made, appears 23

so obvious that it is incredible I didn't see it before. It was there all the time. (A

Collaboration With Nature 1)

Taking this charge from Goldsworthy, I come to acknowledge that I must resist the temptation to install my presentation from a purely theoretical place, and must instead ensure that I do embed myself in the river as literally and figuratively as I can and look for the answer (the methexis, the scopic shift, the kinesthetic affect, the topological impulse, the move from optic to haptic) to strike.

Part C: Implementation/ Mouth

The final shape of the performance becomes this:

• I travel the river, solo, in six separate excursions by kayak

• After each excursion I create a confessional video recording of myself

• I then compose an original piece of music

The final shape of the presentation becomes this:

• I edit all of the video thoroughly to reflect on the river both narratively and

aesthetically, attempt to make the videos have both appropriate content and an

appropriate aesthetic that demarks them as video constructions but also

attempts to integrate the river stylistically 24

• I project the video on to a series of screens, televisions, computer monitors

thereby attempting to capture a sense of the scope of the river and compel the

audience to disrupt their own tendencies as viewers of televised media by

running multiple screens simultaneously. Through this I will also hopefully

capture some textural elements of the river experience.

• I will have one screen exclusively dedicated to a single, static, unedited shot

of the river flowing, from one end of the tape to the other. This will be on the

largest screen and play continuously throughout the presentation.

• I will play the original musicscapes simultaneous to the interview segments

they correspond with in their chronological making.

• I will run some kind of preamble slide show like a traditional presentation that

reveals some of the theoretical underpinnings of the project and

correspondingly some hard-geography/archaeological/cultural factoids

underlying the river itself (esp. Mennesetung/Maitland: naming)

• I will find some way to have river water physically present on the stage/in the

playing space

• I will minimize my own interaction with the audience to the role of operator

of technology and thereby attempt to limit the amount of overt/explicit

reflecting on the event. I will try to trust that the videos, though edited, have a

more immediate relationship with the work being covered, and that my

present, contemporaneous hand is already more than visible in the

construction of the presentation itself 25

• Finally, I will take the audience to the river itself, most likely at Ball's Bridge

which is an incredibly beautiful, isolated place with a spectacular view of the

river. This is also a very rare bridge in Canada, with a single concrete

abutment and two iron spans under a pinned truss. I must try not to make that

event about the bridge though. Keep focused on the river.

The actual work of editing the videos is intensely time consuming. I see no way ways of reducing this work/time without also compromising the aesthetic choices I have made. In attempting to integrate the aesthetic of the river into the aesthetic of the videos I begin by manipulating the videos with repetition. Traveling the river is often incredibly repetitive, however in creating repeating loops within the video, I quickly discover that it is a delicate balance between curious and intriguing techniques and utterly banal and boring things to watch. Each video has multiple repetitions in it now, but less pronounced. Additionally, I begin to play with the tempo of some sections of the video just as the current of the river speeds and slows, trying to emulate its sudden shifts.

Finally, I colour, brighten, adjust the contrast and the white point of almost every frame.

Partly I do this to acknowledge the way the trees, the banks, the flowers, the wildlife, the electric fences, the bridges, the cars, the rocks are all constantly shifting and changing throughout my excursions, things I see regularly change dramatically, and again, I want to ensure that the audience is always aware that this is a work of performance art and not a record/archive/document of the river. 26

I should also acknowledge that there are excerpts of the videos that I have cut.

Mainly I cut repetitive statements and banal reflections, but this does afford me a kind of power and control over what the audience hears that in some ways jeopardizes any claims

I may make to authenticity. Fortunately, I feel fairly justified that as long as I overtly claim these edits by making their absence obvious (if not conspicuous) then at least I am entering into a good faith agreement with my audience: the presentation you are seeing is being manipulated by me.. .1 admit it.. .there's no willful deception. I believe this should counter any claims that the edits devalue the work itself. Genuine reconciliation, or maybe convenient logic.. .1 accept it and move forward.

Interestingly, as mentioned earlier, I left the footage where the river (and valley) is the exclusive subject completely unedited, and when projecting/playing those videos, I left them to run uninterrupted as they were originally shot. Again, obviously, there is still no genuine claim to authenticity in representing the landscape this way as I have still controlled the camera's gaze, but somehow this lack of editing does give the appearance of documentary or naturalist photography; it has the appearance of authenticity though it too has obviously been constructed/selected.

An additional consideration for the video segments is their placement in the presentation room: which will be on what screen? Which on what monitors? And why? In the end I choose to have the single static shot of the river be on the largest available screen, running constantly throughout the presentation. This will hopefully have the effect of keeping the flow of the river ever present in the presentation as a kind of steady, seamless bass note throughout the video. I intend to use the wide flat screen LCD (the screen with the highest resolution of picture) for the confessional videos. I am choosing 27 the LCD screen because it will provide the most robust image for all of the more complex edits of colour and texture that I have made to the confessions. However, I acknowledge that by choosing the LCD screen to present my own image I am, to some extent, foregrounding my self and my narrative account of the river over the other river images and thereby privileging my account of the landscape. As the piece is largely about the river's affect on my conception of place, and the two are arguably mutually constitutive, I am willing to embrace this conceit. Lastly, the video footage shot from the bow of the kayak will be on a television monitor and a computer monitor banking either side of the playing space. I choose this partly for symmetry, and partly to make them slightly peripheral as the unsteady nature of the photography (from a video camera literally strapped to the boat) makes them a bit dizzying to watch. This footage is a poignant portrait of the river and contains an accuracy of the kayak's shifting maneuvers, but for pragmatic viewing, it remains difficult on the eyes.

The slide show will be projected on the largest, central screen and will alternate between the informational slides and a duplicate of the static river shot (now running on two screens) hopefully serving to demonstrate that while the static river shot may appear to have some more evident claim to authenticity than the confessional videos, they remain reproductions.

My solution for having the water physically present on the stage is tied to my solution for what to do at Ball's Bridge as the site-specific installation that culminates the work. After hours of seemingly fruitless experimentation at the site I finally have my 28 epiphanic moment: in an overtly methektic act, I will attempt to re-inscribe the name

Mennesetung onto the Maitland River.

By choosing Ball's Bridge as a site for this part of the presentation I am obviously embracing an industrial aesthetic/historicity that the river contains; I have not chosen to bring the audience to an area where the banks are entirely tree lined and the illusion of complete conservation is intact, but instead I am bringing them to a site that is obviously post-industrial. In this way, I believe the river is contextualized to some extent in its

"Maitland" state, that is to say, from the bridge the river is revealed to be that post renaming Maitland River of Sir Peregrine Maitland and the colonial settlement project it represents. By assembling the audience on this bridge to witness the final part of this presentation I am compelling them to situate the river below the iron bridge, as something easily, routinely, traversable through iron infrastructure.

Once the audience is assembled on the bridge I will instruct them to look downstream. When they are all looking away I will be hidden, preset upstream of the bridge, and I will pour a huge barrel of small berries into the river and then, still unseen in the cedar trees, I will play the barrel like a drum, alerting the audience to something in the opposite direction. I will then attempt to maintain the unseen drumming until the berries have floated entirely by, under the bridge and into the distance. In so doing, I hope the image will methektically inscribe (re-inscribe?) the Ojibwe name/directive

"Mennesetung" into this performance/presentation of the river.

Part D: Watershed/Reflections 29

Reflecting on the final presentation I am immediately struck by the collision between intention and realization, by the way this project, whose parameters were defined and devised by me, prompted unexpected responses and surprising discoveries for myself. And although this may seem like a nai've statement, I was genuinely, in spite of (or perhaps because of) all my research and planning, constantly encountering unforeseen moments, sensations, and ideas.

The baldest example occurred during the video presentation. The LCD screen with its high-definition and broad letterbox framing, a truly opulent TV that I have to confess I practically begged my very reluctant mother to let me borrow for the presentation, the very screen I had so meticulously scrutinized for the theatrical ethics of whether or not I should have the audacity to foreground my own image on, malfunctioned and failed mid-presentation, entirely eliminating the audio on the third video. Fortunately, during the event itself I was able to quickly (almost seamlessly, and without alerting the audience) change feeds to the monitors and ended up instead running the confessionals through the digital projector I had used for the slide show. More important than the quick technical recovery was the theatrical result that emerged from this malfunction: for the entire second half of the presentation the two largest screens, almost parallel in size, closest of all the monitors in proximity to each other, were running simultaneous content: one with the confessional videos, the other with the static shot of the river. The aesthetic equilibrium of self as site and river as site were more closely realized through this error and compensation than I had originally conceived them to be. 30

I was also surprised by the reverberations that emerged out of staging the

presentation in the June Hill rehearsal hall of the Blyth Festival/Blyth Centre for the Arts.

Though the piece was meticulously rendered and structured, the presence of the

undeniably cluttered rehearsal hall seemed to materially infuse the presentation with a

feeling of being 'in process' or still 'open'. This openness seemed to serve the overall narrative of the presentation as it emerged: a definite quest narrative.

The 'quest' narrative that emerged from the confessionals similarly took on

surprising resonances and preoccupations. In the end two major strains of thought emerged: ruminations on the sensations of the river trip, and an interrogation of my relationship to the audience (both the audience present in the room and the larger

audience I encounter throughout my career as a performer). While I obviously knew full well that I was interested in considering my relationship to the river travel as a sensory

field, I had not anticipated the scope of my reactions to it. Throughout the videos I

confess to being tired, being disoriented, feeling lonely and lost, and trying to resist the urge toward being task oriented or simply 'conquering the river,' seemingly predictable reactions. Notably however, by the middle of the videos I confess to a particular

experience I had on the river where I stopped the kayak, undressed, stood naked on a rock over deep still waters and was paralyzed with a fear of jumping in, and not being able to

overcome this irrational panic. I am revealed in this moment, naked, wanting for a particular rush of sensation, to indulge this experience in what I believe is a full and open way, only to then resist it, for fear of essentially irrational things; my sensual relationship proves to be too intimidating for me to more fully (nakedly, as it were), explore it. The

subsequent videos (of the subsequent excursions) then reveal me attempting to re- 31 instigate, to re-inscribe, this moment onto myself, to allow myself to have this sensory enmeshment with the water but always finds me unsatisfied, trying to recreate an

'authentic' moment of inspiration and desire, and failing to. Ultimately, I confess in a later video to finally stopping the kayak (after repeated second guesses) and getting into the water for what proves to be a disappointing swim, in a less idyllic location than my first inspired (paralytic) moment. This particular sense of paralysis and frustration surrounding my engagement with the river proves to be more emblematic of the overall performance than an exceptional moment within the presentation.

Across the videos I repeatedly discuss and consider how the search for

'authenticity' is fraught with doublespeak and ouroboros-like conundrums for the performer/presenter. This fixation on 'authenticity' and 'the performed' is also at the centre of my interrogations of the audience/performer relationship. In the videos I continually ask the viewer about the genuine nature of their relationship to me, and my relationship to them (to you). As these confessions were entirely unscripted and I did not review tapes between excursions, I was surprised by the degree to which some of the ideas were considered and reconsidered across all of the videos. Much of this likely emerges from the work on Foucault and his conception of confession as an exchange of what is essentially social currency and power. Throughout the videos I return to the question of performer and audience as a site for mutual approval and trust. The performer seeks the audience's approval, and the audience is approved or hailed through the performance being constructed and offered to them; and yet both roles are rife with vulnerabilities and contradictions. 32

One exciting element that emerged with the dividing of the event between the presentation in the rehearsal hall and the installation at Ball's Bridge is that a parallel emerged between the structure of the piece and the notion of "heard before seen." For the audience, the event followed this same progression: hearing about the river

(contextualizing the experience) before seeing the river (actualizing the site).

The final act of the event, the installation at Ball's Bridge realized many of my ambitions for it. Once poured in the river, the berries, a variable I had very limited control over, exceeded my expectations. From experimentation, I knew the berries would float and follow the current. I also had a rough sense of the time it would take for them to leave the place where they were poured until they crossed under the bridge. What I was not prepared for was the way the berries collected and maintained a tight formation, long and red against the whitening edges of ice. Though my own vantage point, hidden in the trees, made it difficult for me to observe, from the feedback I received, their effect was both an aesthetically rich one, and a clear methektic inscription: small berries.. .heard before seen. Given the opportunity to develop this piece further, I would however love to have more berries...given the width of the river at the Ball's Bridge site I can't help but fantasize about the impact tens of thousands of berries would have as they came into view and overwhelmed the bridge (though, such an enormous act may betray the 'small' in 'small berries').

Finally, one last observation that emerged throughout the videos was my framing of my river excursions as always being explorations of new 'characters' of the river. I kept referring to the tenor of my kayak trips as having had a 'completely different character.' There are obvious resonances between the use of character as a descriptor here 33 and the world of playwriting and traditional theatre practice, and I do note this relationship in comic and ironic ways in the videos. However, the more crystal realization that emerges in the final video is my awareness that the river has gone largely unchanged in its path and flow since the retreat of Lake Algonquin and the Wisconsin Glacier some five thousand years ago. Yes, admittedly, a handful of bridges and locks have been erected over its 150kms, and erosion and conservation have each played their roles, but for the most part the river's character remains markedly consistent; there are slow, deep, glassy pools with seemingly no current whatsoever, shallow courses over deep silt and mud, rapids full of jagged rocks, and waterfalls. The impulse to categorize and compartmentalize these as separate 'characters' is an organizational imposition. What I came to recognize for myself was that I had an expectation of sameness, likely based on a life spent on sidewalks, roads, buses, cars, streetcars, and subways in a contemporary urban environment. Having grown up in Scarborough, and throughout Toronto, I have an imprinted expectation that my travel will always be consistent, subject only to minor variables like traffic, technical delays, and seasonal weather. I have been conditioned, through this generally predictable sensation of traveling, to anticipate consistency.

Traveling the river instead demands a shift of expectations and attention. As

Mennesetung directs: the would-be traveler (performer) must listen carefully and attentively in order to navigate its consistently unpredictable waters.

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