Vancouver Pro Musica catches ghostly zone in Shadow Catch
By Alexander Varty, November 30, 2011
To
the busy commuter, hurtling into or out of the city on Powell or
Cordova Street, Oppenheimer Park is little more than a flat, green break
amid the rundown houses and low-rise businesses of the Downtown
Eastside. Civic historians and local residents know it as something
else, however: a site of gatherings and contention with links to the
Squamish and Musqueam First Nations, to the toddling first steps of
Stamp’s Mill and Japantown, to the gilded era of the railroad days and
the labour unrest of the 1930s.
These are the stories told in Shadow Catch—and they’re told in a language that is both perfectly appropriate to this ghostly zone, and just different enough from standard practice to stimulate a new appreciation of the historic park, and the embattled neighbourhood that surrounds it.
If it’s hard to say exactly what this Vancouver Pro Musica production is, that’s because it’s largely unprecedented: a 21st-century opera that draws on ancient Japanese Noh theatre.
“I think what gives this piece its strength is how many disparate, wonderful elements are coming together—and how well they ended up working together,” says Benton Roark, one of four composers who have contributed to Shadow Catch, in a telephone interview from his Vancouver home. He and director Colleen Lanki, who teaches Noh at UBC, conceived of the work almost two years ago. Their initial idea was to fuse the historic form with contemporary opera; after realizing that this hybrid idiom would be an ideal way of depicting various aspects of the Downtown Eastside, they enlisted Strathcona resident Daphne Marlatt to craft the libretto.
In many ways, it’s a poetic outgrowth of Marlatt and Carole Itter’s 1979 book of oral history, Opening Doors, which was recently reissued as part of Vancouver’s 125th-anniversary celebrations.
“I can’t seem to get away from it!” says Marlatt in a separate telephone interview. “But it was partly determined by the fact that the group wanted to apply for Legacy 125 money. And we did get a grant, so that meant that we really needed to do something that would feature a part of the history of the city.”
Marlatt credits Lanki with Shadow Catch’s four-part structure, which reflects four of the five traditional Noh protagonists: god, woman, warrior, and demon. They’re represented here by K’emk’émeley, the spirit of the park’s long-gone old-growth maple forest; a former madam from the neighbourhood’s days as Vancouver’s red-light district; a Japanese-Canadian member of the fabled Asahi baseball team, based in Oppenheimer Park during the 1930s; and a corrupt cop responsible for beating up working-class protesters during the Depression. Common to all four acts is a young runaway, who arrives in Vancouver, sets up camp in the park, and is visited in turn by these lonely ghosts.
“It’s about figures that have been haunted by an event in their past,” says Marlatt. “And this is very Noh theatre: they can’t let go of the place, they can’t leave the place, because it’s tied to this event in their past that they have strong emotions about. They cannot let go of those feelings until their story is told to a stranger—and through the telling of their story, there’s this release, and their spirit can move on.”
Both Marlatt and Roark stress that Shadow Catch is not pure Noh, which western audiences often find sombre and austere. Neither, they say, is it didactic.
“It’s not a history lesson: it’s poetry,” Roark explains. “But hopefully it will draw people in to aspects of the neighbourhood’s history that they don’t know.”
Shadow Catch runs at the Firehall Arts Centre from Friday to Sunday (December 2 to 4).
FIREHALL ARTS CENTRE
280 East Cordova Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6A 1L3
Click here for a map to our location.
Box Office: 604.689.0926
Office: 604.689.0691
Fax: 604.684.5841
Email: firehall@firehallartscentre.ca
These are the stories told in Shadow Catch—and they’re told in a language that is both perfectly appropriate to this ghostly zone, and just different enough from standard practice to stimulate a new appreciation of the historic park, and the embattled neighbourhood that surrounds it.
If it’s hard to say exactly what this Vancouver Pro Musica production is, that’s because it’s largely unprecedented: a 21st-century opera that draws on ancient Japanese Noh theatre.
“I think what gives this piece its strength is how many disparate, wonderful elements are coming together—and how well they ended up working together,” says Benton Roark, one of four composers who have contributed to Shadow Catch, in a telephone interview from his Vancouver home. He and director Colleen Lanki, who teaches Noh at UBC, conceived of the work almost two years ago. Their initial idea was to fuse the historic form with contemporary opera; after realizing that this hybrid idiom would be an ideal way of depicting various aspects of the Downtown Eastside, they enlisted Strathcona resident Daphne Marlatt to craft the libretto.
In many ways, it’s a poetic outgrowth of Marlatt and Carole Itter’s 1979 book of oral history, Opening Doors, which was recently reissued as part of Vancouver’s 125th-anniversary celebrations.
“I can’t seem to get away from it!” says Marlatt in a separate telephone interview. “But it was partly determined by the fact that the group wanted to apply for Legacy 125 money. And we did get a grant, so that meant that we really needed to do something that would feature a part of the history of the city.”
Marlatt credits Lanki with Shadow Catch’s four-part structure, which reflects four of the five traditional Noh protagonists: god, woman, warrior, and demon. They’re represented here by K’emk’émeley, the spirit of the park’s long-gone old-growth maple forest; a former madam from the neighbourhood’s days as Vancouver’s red-light district; a Japanese-Canadian member of the fabled Asahi baseball team, based in Oppenheimer Park during the 1930s; and a corrupt cop responsible for beating up working-class protesters during the Depression. Common to all four acts is a young runaway, who arrives in Vancouver, sets up camp in the park, and is visited in turn by these lonely ghosts.
“It’s about figures that have been haunted by an event in their past,” says Marlatt. “And this is very Noh theatre: they can’t let go of the place, they can’t leave the place, because it’s tied to this event in their past that they have strong emotions about. They cannot let go of those feelings until their story is told to a stranger—and through the telling of their story, there’s this release, and their spirit can move on.”
Both Marlatt and Roark stress that Shadow Catch is not pure Noh, which western audiences often find sombre and austere. Neither, they say, is it didactic.
“It’s not a history lesson: it’s poetry,” Roark explains. “But hopefully it will draw people in to aspects of the neighbourhood’s history that they don’t know.”
Shadow Catch runs at the Firehall Arts Centre from Friday to Sunday (December 2 to 4).
FIREHALL ARTS CENTRE
280 East Cordova Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6A 1L3
Click here for a map to our location.
Box Office: 604.689.0926
Office: 604.689.0691
Fax: 604.684.5841
Email: firehall@firehallartscentre.ca
