13 Ways of Looking at a Madman

13 Ways of Looking at a Madman…
DaPoPo Theatre’s touring project summer 2006

DaPoPo Theatre is returning by invitation to Berlin, Germany with their newest original touring theatre project, 13 Ways of Looking at a Madman.

The Beginnings

DaPoPo’s inaugural theatre project, Four Actors in Search of a Nation, traveled to Berlin in late 2004. Actors Steph Berntson, Christopher Cohoon, Amanda Jernigan and GaRRy Williams toured their original work to Berlin to appear as part of “Just say it”, the FEZ Wuhlheide Children and Youth Activity Centre’s week-long symposium on the English language and English-language cultures.

Out of this experience grew an invitation by Russell Radzinski, owner of the Emerson Gallery Berlin. Impressed with the seriousness of Four Actors’ performers, Radzinski imagined including DaPoPo as part of a future summer festival wherein interdisciplinary views of Canadian arts in Canada are featured, with Atlantic Provinces' arts being of particular focus.

That invitation has come to pass and now DaPoPo Theatre returns to Berlin in July 2006 to perform 13 Ways of Looking at a Madman at the Emerson Gallery Berlin.

The Process

13 Ways of Looking at a Madman is the collaborative project of 13 different writers and 6 actors. It is a work made up of the combined perspectives of one relatively obscure figure in early Canada’s story – “Sandy” Keith Jr.

History has variously described Keith - nephew of now nationally-recognized and well-documented Nova Scotia brewery magnate Alexander Keith - as a white-collar swindler, Victorian gentleman and family man, entrepreneur, petty criminal, Confederate sympathizer, arms dealer and terrorist. Keith was a Halifax resident but later fled to the US and then to Germany. After committing suicide in 1876, a detailed but convoluted picture his life emerged - forged through personal and professional deception and betrayal, and finalized through terrorist acts and murder.

The subjects by which we can attempt to chronicle a life such as Keith’s in order to help make sense of it - his fluid identity, his criminal convictions, his documented ethically and politically motivated actions – only go so far in capturing who he was. Furthermore, such subjects scratch only the surface of the deeper underlying themes a life such as Keith’s reveals: Who was the private man behind the menace? What is a terrorist? What makes a terrorist tick? What is the moral divide between justice and a just crime? These themes, which resonate well in today’s volatile political climate, will be illuminated and explored by DaPoPo Theatre’s contributing writers and actors.

Each writer will contribute one scene, portraying various moments and characters in Keith’s life and times. By showing 13 different perspectives on the same subject material, we focus on the myth of objective storytelling itself. Under the vision and guidance of director GaRRy Williams, 13 Ways of Looking at a Madman will take shape, develop and cohere through the creative work of a group of Canadian artists – all from widely different backgrounds, both personal and professional. 13 Ways will be informed by these individuals’ ideas about and experiences in writing, as well as their respective research and imagination. This allows us to escape the single narrative voice and work from a wide variety inherent in individual expression. Williams will compile the collected scenes, unify them and bring together the six actors to explore, interpret and animate the texts.

The resulting effort will combine various forms of dynamic theatrical presentation with heightened poetic expression and self-awareness; meta-theatrical stagecraft with philosophical meditation. This has been DaPoPo’s focus from its inception. We have explored the theatrical approaches of Grotowski and Meyerhold, respectively, in our works Four Actors in Search of a Nation, The Modern World and RUR [Rossum’s Universal Robots]. The cumulative experience of these styles will help lend to each scene a clearly articulated perspective. The crux of this play, like Four Actors, revolves around myth-making and storytelling itself, as well as the concept of subjective understanding in the information age as defined by the limiting nature of personal experience, common knowledge and language.

The six actors performing in 13 Ways will play multiple characters with minimal, deconstructed costumes, sets and props. There will be an original soundscape. DaPoPo Theatre will present the finished piece in Halifax before and after the trip to Germany. Other potential performance dates in Germany as well as Luxemburg and Poland are currently being finalized.

13 Writers: Biographies

The Writers Behind 13 Ways

of Looking at a Madman…Biographies

Adam Bayne
Adam is a young actor and writer from New Brunswick with a background in physical theatre and a passion for postmodernism. He trained at George Brown College in Toronto and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. He has performed in Winnipeg, Toronto, Halifax, New Brunswick and recently off-Broadway in New York. His plays Take Me Flying and Hostage have collectively had over 12 public performances.

Steph Bernston
Featured on the National Campus and Community Radio Association’s “Dig Your Roots” web site and was selected as one of 15 artists to appear on their accompanying compilation album. She participated in the association’s public broadcast in 2004, rhyming off 20 minutes of original material for independent radio stations across the country. Steph garnered third place in CBC’s third annual national “Poetry Face-Off”. She performed an original piece, Vertigo, for the CBC television short feature, “Artspots”. Steph mounted a production of her play, der-I’ve at the London Ontario Fringe Festival in 2004; it subsequently toured the East Coast as an open educational workshop. She recently appeared in Ottawa as one of 10 invited independent poets at the first annual Canadian Spoken Word Olympics. She appeared in DaPoPo’s Four Actors in Search of a Nation.

Evan Brown
No biography available at this time

Stephen Cloutier
Cloutier wrote the political theatre piece The Modern World: A Political Love Story for DaPoPo Theatre in 2003. As a poet, playwright and academic Cloutier is concerned with exploring political and social concerns that face our world. He brings a sharp political angle to the 13 Ways project. Cloutier graduated from the University of Leichester (UK) with a PhD in 20th Century British Literature. He currently teaches part-time at Saint Mary’s University.

Dustin Harvey
Harvey’s passion for theatre came from a desire to create something important in his community of Elmsdale, N.S., resulting in over a dozen plays he wrote and directed which featured young actors and were performed for audiences without charge. Harvey has worked with several theatre companies in Nova Scotia as well as in Calgary, St. John’s and Ireland. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Studies from Acadia University and is a graduate of the post-graduate acting programme at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in London, UK. Harvey appeared in DaPoPo’s Modern World: A Political Love Story.

Scott Hicks
Scott is an avid reader and writer of short fiction. While attending Mount Allison University in New Brunswick he was co-president of the creative writing group and co-editor two years running of the creative writing journal, Seven Mondays. He was recipient of Mount Allison’s Graham Atlantic Prize in creative writing in 1995 and 2000. At Concordia University in Montreal he attended the creative writing programme and has been published in journals in Toronto and Montreal. Currently, he runs a community creative writing group in Halifax.

Amanda Jernigan
Jernigan’s stories, poems and essays have appeared in a range of Canadian literary journals. She is a frequent contributor to The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes & Queries and is a consulting editor for both magazines. In 2002, she co-edited The New Quarterly’s special issue, “Wild Writers We Have Known: A Celebration of the Canadian Short Story and Story Writers”. In addition to her work as a freelance writer and editor, Amanda is working on a manuscript for Orders, her own first collection of poems. She appeared in DaPoPo’s Four Actors in Search of a Nation.

Fabien Melanson
Melanson studied Dramatic Arts at U de Moncton as well as Video and Television production at the New Brunswick Community College in Woodstock. In 1998 he produced his first play, L’Ile. The following year his video Cap Pele, Mon Coin De Pays placed among the top 10 out of 3,500 entries in a contest hosted by TV5 in honour of the Somet de la Francophone held in Moncton that year. Melanson has been working in film and television since 2000 both behind and in front of the camera. He has appeared in Samuel et la Mer, a mini-series which aired on Radio Canada. In 2004, he returned to the Maritimes from Vancouver, where he furthered his studies in acting and screenwriting. He appeared in DaPoPo’s The Modern World: A Political Love Story.

Kim Parkhill
Parkhill is a Halifax-based actor and writer, with a Bachelor of Nursing (University of New Brunswick) and an MBA (Saint Mary's University). She subsequently trained at Neptune Theatre School in the Pre-Professional Training Program and continues to be a student of experience. She has performed with numerous grass-roots theatre organizations, playing a wide range of roles from Shakespeare to sketch comedy. Most recently, she participated in the collective adaptation and performance of DaPoPo's RUR [Rossum’s Universal Robots] (2005) and The Sex Play (2006). Parkhill's one-act play, Warp & Weft, co-created with Lizon Richard, was produced for the 2004 Atlantic Fringe Festival. She is currently working independently on a new two-act play as well as studying creative writing with the Institute of Children's Literature.

Matthew Trafford
Matthew J. Trafford has been writing drama since age 13 when he won the grand prize in Young People Theatre’s “Wordplay” contest. He has also published poetry in Echolocation, Pottersfield Portfolio and the Dalhousie Review. His acting roles include the Narrator in The Little Prince and Lockitt in The Beggar’s Opera. He lived in Prague for six months, where he reviewed film for The Prague Daily Monitor. He recently performed in the Montreal and Toronto Festivals as the lead in Disgust, written by Montreal playwright Linda Besner. He is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia and is studying sign language in Toronto.

Garry Williams
Williams holds a Bachelor of Music with a minor in English from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. Two of his scripts for dinner theatre have been professionally produced, along with three children’s musicals. He has led creative writing workshops for children and youth and guided theatre professionals in the collective writing process. Garry teaches at the Canadian Conservatory of Music and at Neptune Theatre School. He directed the 2005 Gilbert and Sullivan Society production of Patience and is currently directing their production of The Mikado. As artistic director of DaPoPo Theatre he directed Four Actors in Search of a Nation (2004), The Modern World: A Political Love Story (2005) RUR [Rossum’s Universal Robots] (2005) and The Sex Play (2006). Other directing credits include Fiddler on the Roof (2003), Annie Get Your Gun (2002), Twelfth Night (2001), The Dumb Waiter (1997), Assassins (1994), Black Comedy (1992) and Adaptions (1990).

Audition Call: 13 Ways

Audition Call: 13 Ways

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We will be holding auditions for actors interested in participating with DaPoPo's summer project "13 Ways of Looking at a Madman."

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This is an opportunity for emerging theatre artists (male & female, Equity and non-Equity) to participate in an intensive training experience and creation process during the preparation, performance and touring of an original show. There is no fee for participation but the project will require significant time commitment, travel overseas and participation in fundraising for the project. Auditions are required from those wishing to be considered for the project

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Audition Details

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Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia

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Date: April 20 & 21, 2006, 1 - 5 PM,

******April 22, 2006, 10 AM - 12 PM.

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Requirements: Please prepare an original performance piece, approximately 5 minutes long. No monologues, songs or improvisations, though the piece may combine elements of all three.

Your piece should demonstrate your ability to:

1) Connect with an audience;
2) work seriously in abstract forms;

3) bring intelligence, abandon and intuition to your performance.

Contact: Call Pip at 830-7477 to book your audition time.

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For those unable to make audition dates, video or DVD auditions along with resume will be accepted if delivered by April 20th. Send to:

Garry Williams, Artistic Director

DaPoPo Theatre

2151 Gottingen St., PO Box 47007

Halifax NS B3K 5Y2.

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Please note: If cast, actors must be available for rehearsal commencing June 20, 2006 in Halifax, NS. Rehearsals will be a minimum of 4-5 hours daily, at least 5 days a week, leading up to the European tour. There will be three preview performances in Halifax at the end of the rehearsal period and the production will travel to Berlin, Germany for a July 22, 2006 premiere. Other performances are being scheduled over the ensuing two-week period. All selected actors must be available to be overseas during this time frame (approx mid-July to first part of August). All actors must actively participate in fundraising events for the trip.