The Varsity Magazine: Dialogue

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE VOL. VI NO. 2 JANUARY 28, 2013

The Varsity publishes the Varsity Magazine three times a year. Each issue is based around a specific theme. The Dialogue Magazine looks at conversations and communication, investigating how back-and-forth exchanges inspire artists and define our relationship with the arts, not to mention each other. Enjoy reading, and look out for our next magazine, coming mid-March.

A place to talk James Maiangowi pg 6 Creepin’ conversations Assunta Alegiani pg 11

DIALOGUE Behind the scenes, beneath the pages Murad Hemmadi pg 12

Recording a scene Madeline Malczewska pg 16

Digital dialogue Damanjit Lamba pg 14

illustration from Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel

Letter from the editor We’re talking, but are we listening?

Probably not. The truth is it’s sometimes easier to just tune everything out and look ahead. If you’ve got to get something done, it can be simplest to keep your head down, not listen to outside voices, and try to get working. Trying to figure out our lives as university students, we barely have time for others or just assume that we know what’s best for ourselves. Right now, it seems like the aspiration of most young writers is to craft the perfect personal essay: a piece that will reveal how exciting and interesting their life is. A piece that involves no interviews or real outside research, but instead draws on the rich tapestry of the writer’s past, perhaps with a phone call or email to an old friend thrown in to confirm a stray detail. To be honest, when I read an article or loosely fictionalized story along these lines, I’m just frustrated that I couldn’t come up with a viable idea for a piece of my own.

Of course, personal stories with strong narratives have their place. But to be able to continue to write, and not just recount some weird night two summers ago, you need to put yourself out there, interview and listen to people, and attempt to understand any contradictions that you encounter. In other words, you need to participate in a dialogue.

In choosing dialogue as the theme of our arts magazine, we wanted to take a chance to look out at the world. Yes, inward refection is an essential part of processing life, but our overall interactions with art and other people are built up from the small conversations and exchanges that happen everyday. Our writers turned their attention to the role dialogue plays in creativity (turn to pg 12 for Murad Hemmadi’s article on the conversations that feed the process of ghostwriting), and how it shapes our connection with art (Damanjit Lamba’s piece on online communication between artists and their audiences, found on pg 14). They even raised the question of whether conversation itself can be considered a form of art (a bartender and a hairstylist give their perspectives on pg 9 and pg 20, respectively).

The magazine is also about how dialogue is changing. You’ll note that while the musicians and photographer that Lamba interviewed are better connected to their fans than they would have been just a few years ago, there are no bands or collectives in the article. Immersed in fast-paced digital media, is face-to-face dialogue simply impossible? On pg 8 Sophia Costomiris reflects on the difference between digital and print dialogue, highlighting thought-provoking, and frankly scary, points about how the way we communicate is evolving. This magazine may not contain clear answers to these doubts about the future, but that’s not the point. Instead, our aim is to get you asking questions and starting discussions, maybe even arguments. Enjoy the magazine!

Simon Frank Varsity Magazine Editor, 2012-2013

VISUALIZING DIALOGUE Babel isn’t such a bad idea. Strip the story down to its bones (there isn’t much to strip anyway, it’s only nine biblical verses long), and it’s about people with the capacity to communicate enough to build something big.

In our last magazine issue, we strove to present the different experiences of the night. The time between sundown and sunrise contains infinite stories, and displaying them demanded emphatic difference.

This time we’ve taken another tack. Dialogue requires diversity, but it also demands enough in common to talk to one another. The stories in this magazine approach dialogue in drastically different ways, but at their core they’re all about communicating with each other. We’ve tried to reflect this in the shape the magazine has taken, paring down visually in order to let them speak for themselves, to each other, and to the reader.

Get conversating.

The Design Team 2012-2013

The Magazine Team

DESIGN EDITORS Suzy Nevins Dan Seljak design@thevarsity.ca

MAGAZINE VOL. VI

No. 2

CONTACT 21 Sussex Avenue, Suite 306 Toronto, ON, M5S 1J6 Phone: 416-946-7600 thevarsity.ca

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Murad Hemmadi editor@thevarsity.ca MAGAZINE EDITOR Simon Frank magazine@thevarsity.ca ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR Brigit Katz arts@thevarsity.ca

PHOTO EDITOR Bernarda Gospic photo@thevarsity.ca PRODUCTION EDITOR Alex Ross production@thevarsity.ca MANAGING ONLINE EDITOR Patrick Love online@thevarsity.ca SENIOR COPY EDITOR Catherine Kabasele copy@thevarsity.ca ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Minhee Bae illustration@thevarsity.ca VIDEO EDITOR Wyatt Clough video@thevarsity.ca

ASSOCIATE MAGAZINE EDITOR Damanjit Lamba ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR Nathan Watson ASSOCIATE ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR Danielle Klein ASSOCIATE ONLINE EDITOR Sofia Luu COPY EDITORS Elizabeth Benn Lois Boody Zareen Din Karen Fuhrmann Aisha Kakinuma Hassan Mohana Sarmiento Michelle Speyer Jasmine Vallve Catherine Virelli Miranda Whittaker FACT CHECKERS Zareen Din Jasmine Vallve Catherine Virelli

DESIGNERS Ethan Chiel Pen Long Natalie Morcos Suzy Nevins Josh Oliver Dan Seljak Shaquilla Singh Nathan Watson COVER Suzy Nevins & Dan Seljak

TABLE OF CONTENTS Nathan Watson PHOTO & ILLUSTRATION William Ahn Minhee Bae Bernarda Gospic Wendy Gu Janice Liu Nancy Ji Jenny Kim

CONTRIBUTORS Assunta Alegiani, Zoë Bedard, Ethan Chiel, Sophia Costomiris, Emma Fox, Simon Frank, Bernarda Gospic, Murad Hemmadi, Danielle Klein, Damanjit Lamba, Alanna Lipson, Sofia Luu, James Maiangowi, Madeline Malczewska, Ishita Petkar, Alex Ross, Dan Seljak, Katrina Vogan SPECIAL THANKS #TheAvenue, David Hayes, Keane Stewart’s Keen Kookies, Britt Wilson, Zach Worton, Glenn Danzig, Peter Birkemoe, Chingy’s Holidae Inn music video BUSINESS OFFICE BUSINESS MANAGER business@thevarsity.ca John Fountas ADVERTISING MANAGER Tina Yazdi advertising@thevarsity.ca ADVERTISING EXECUTIVES Victoria Botvinnik victoria@thevarsity.ca Nick Brownlee nick@thevarsity.ca Sofia Luu sofia@thevarsity.ca Maokai Shen maokai@thevarsity.ca

JANUARY 28, 2013

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Learning to read the signs The development and use of sign language Article by ZOË BEDARD Photos by BERNARDA GOSPIC For as long as there have been people there has been sign language, in some combination of hand shapes, body movements, and facial expressions.

One of the earliest references to sign language in literary history is found in Plato’s Cratylus, when Socrates declares, “If we hadn’t a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?”

A strongly held misconception about sign language is that it is somehow reliant on the principles of spoken language, and is simply a translation of spoken word into gestures.

In reality, the only element of sign languages that is influenced by spoken languages is the manual alphabet. Not considered a true component of sign language, the

spoken alphabet can be finger-spelt to spell out proper names.

Sign languages have developed almost entirely independent of spoken languages. This is most clearly seen in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, which share English as their dominant spoken language.

However, American Sign Language (asl), used in the US and Canada, is almost unintelligible to those who know British Sign Language, used in the other three countries. The grammatical structure of asl has more in common with spoken Japanese than it does with English.

When you find yourself on a night out and can’t make yourself heard over the loud music or noisy patrons why not try communicating with sign language instead?

On the right are step-by-step instructions to signing some common greetings.

The universal language?

Learning about the legacy of Esperanto Article by KATRINA VOGAN | Illustration by MINHEE BAE

‘‘What’s your name?’’

‘‘Nice to meet you’’ About 2 million people worldwide greet the new day with a “Bonan matenon!” and say hello with a “Saluton!” These people are speakers of Esperanto, the world’s only constructed language.

In the 1870s and 1880s, a Polish scientist named Leyzer Leyvi Zamengov created Esperanto in an effort to construct a language that was equally accessible to all people.

The language would be uniquely consistent.

“All natural languages have exceptions of all kinds and various quirky features, which accumulate as the language changes and is subject to internal and external influences,” Elan Dresher, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto, told The Varsity.

“But Esperanto had no history and was constructed with the aim of being easy to learn, so, as far as I know, no exceptions were built into it.” This regularity extends into Esperanto’s pronunciation rules.

Proponents of Esperanto claim that the consistency of the language means that Esperanto is uniquely easy to learn, and moreover, that it is universally easy to learn. Dresher isn’t so certain: “One might think that it could be adopted as a kind of ‘neutral’ language that is equally easy or hard for everyone, but that is not the case. Esperanto is very heavily based on Indo-European languages…

And of those languages it is more like Spanish and Russian… I’m not sure what appeal it would ultimately have as a neutral international language.” Additionally, Dresher notes that should Esperanto become used worldwide, dialects and inconsistencies would develop as a result. “In short, if [Esperanto] is successful and becomes widely used, its own success will undermine its original purpose.”

Speakers of Esperanto undoubtedly feel differently. There are many organizations worldwide dedicated to the promotion of Esperanto: Canada’s is the Kanada Esperanto-Asocio.

There are local clubs in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Victoria, Edmonton, and Calgary. There is also a Quebec Esperanto Society. Toronto is home to a weekly Esperanto discussion circle. In a notable intersection of Canadiana and Esperanto, a young William Shatner starred in the Esperanto film Inkubo (Incubus) before he became famous for Star Trek. Vivi longe kaj sukcesu (Live Long and Prosper)! www.esperanto.ca/toronto

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THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

s e l b b u b h c e e Sp n the o s t s i t r a ic Two com imperfect text f impact o

W

hen asked how the lettering of a comic helps tell a story, Britt Wilson laughs, then gives fair warning.

“You overestimate just how much I think about what I’m doing.”

That isn’t to say she doesn’t take it seriously, at least some of the time.

Wilson is a Toronto-based illustrator, who has done everything from illustrating book covers to lettering for a run of the wildly popular Adventure Time comic series.

She has even taught classes about comics at Little Island, the kidfocused younger sibling of Toronto comics hub The Beguiling.

Wilson does work that involves either only lettering or only illustration — her job on the Adventure Time issues, for instance, is just lettering — but she explains that they constitute an organic whole. “I’m still pursuing both of them pretty heavily… I do a lot of cartooning and graphic novels right now, which has also led me to do more lettering, because as I do more lettering for [my projects], people are seeing it and wanting it for theirs.

“I would never want to give up one or the other. I love them both equally… They’re one and the same for me.”

Wilson’s stylistic integration of lettering with illustration is a large component of her success. Her style is whimsical and bouncy, hence the appeal of her work to children, but it's not without an edge. “It’s hard because I love swearing. I actually was trying to think of a pseudonym for my kids' things because I do love doing children’s things… But I hate that I

CHIEL & Article by ETHAN Speech bubble DAN SELJAK |

by JANICE LIU

can’t swear in front of children and that there are only so many potty jokes that are appropriate for the under-nine crowd.”

This consistency in visual style is present, but it isn’t really a conscious decision, nor is it Wilson’s primary aim. Whether she’s working on comics, illustrations, or editorial cartooning, her work is united by what she calls a ‘current.’ “It’s not something that I think about consciously, but it does come though... I don’t necessarily try for it, it just happens.”

The process isn’t smooth, though.

The answer to a question on how often Wilson hits a creative block comes immediately: “Oh my God, every day,” especially recently as she has been working on a graphic novel, which she has to write scripts for.

Wilson’s studio is in her apartment, and long hours working in a room with only her cat for company can make an outside voice the key to breaking the block. Sometimes the key to a breakthrough is walking away, or simply showing the work to someone else. Creative blocks happen more rarely with lettering, though, which “tends to just go.”

Wilson isn’t the only illustrator and letterer for whom things seem to flow organically. Zach Worton, another Toronto cartoon artist, has his own reasons for being organic.

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY ZACh WORTON

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY BRITT WILSON

“IT’S HARD BECAUSE I LOVE SWEARING. I ACTUALLY WAS TRYING TO THINK OF A PSEUDONYM FOR MY KIDS THINGS BECAUSE I DO LOVE DOING CHILDREN’S THINGS … BUT I HATE THAT I CAN’T SWEAR IN FRONT OF CHILDREN AND THAT THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY POTTY JOKES THAT ARE APPROPRIATE FOR THE UNDER NINE CROWD.” — BRITT WILSON “Everything doesn’t need to be perfect all the time. It’s, y’know, I think comics are, they have their own life. I don’t think they’re just drawings and words on a page; there’s something way more to it than that. And I think when people try to make it too perfect it becomes disingenuous, to me.”

In 2011 Drawn & Quarterly published Worton’s longest work to date, The Klondike, a set of fictionalized, interwoven stories about the Klondike Gold Rush that took place in the Yukon at the end of the nineteenth century. The comic was popular with a niche crowd, drawn in by historical interests and Worton’s unique take on storytelling. “It’s not an actionpacked adventure story western. It was told very deliberately as a historical book. History isn’t always exciting... I didn’t want to make it something that it wasn’t. I feel like there was enough action, enough tension in it to be compelling.”

Worton’s careful approach shows in his work. His illustrations are tight and meticulous, though crowded when they need to be. By his own admission Worton's style is heavily

influenced by European artists like Hergé or Mœbius. It shows in his lettering too. He writes in clean, capital letters, except for the errant “i,” which is consistently lower case. Sounds such as yelling or loud noises (like gunshots) are represented by larger variations on the same lettering style, sometimes using double lines for emphasis. Worton’s letters are shaped in the same fashion as his stories are, to portray what is necessary. They’re meant to tell stories as they are.

Worton and Wilson both work by hand, and find that it brings a higher calibre of artistry to the final product. While Wilson knows artists who do amazing digital work, and though she occasionally uses digital means to speed up her process, she finds that working digitally detracts from the satisfaction she gets in creating her work. “I’ve played around with doing vector lettering either by just altering an existing font or by drawing something and tracing it into illustrator.

It’s just that I feel less organic, I feel less involved in it. And I’m always ...not in love with the final.”

Worton, meanwhile, voices concern for how the reader experiences digital lettering that is juxtaposed with clearly analogue visuals. “You can tell when something is done by a computer. It’s too perfect, it’s too clean.

There’s no real heart in it, I feel. It’s a cold bunch of pixels printed on a page..

If you look at any comic you’re going to find imperfections always. Giving it the illusion that it’s something that it’s not is doing it a disservice.”

Good lettering plays one of two roles. It either communicates with the audience by becoming invisible, allowing the actual text and pictures of a piece to resonate, or it stands on its own, adding emotion or a mood to an otherwise boring typeface. Both of these roles mean working with the rest of a comic, either by blending in or by sticking out. The best thing anyone can do to realize this is simply to look closely. As Wilson puts it, “I think the graphic novel and the lettering are very important. One isn’t necessarily more important than the other... It’s worth paying attention.”

JANUARY 28, 2013

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LGBTOUT’s continuing efforts

to provide a safe space on campus for dialogue and self-discovery

Article by JAMES MAIANGOWI

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THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

S

alome is on stage, and Salome is beautiful.

It’s early in the night and there’s a slight crowd huddled together around her in the club, no more than a couple dozen people upstairs total. Heads nodding to the beat. It’s early, with only a few drifts of conversation — “Did you hear about So-and-So?” “No, can’t be, that’s so unlike him, but then, I remember this one time, in September” — fading in and out of earshot. It’s the Village on a Thursday, Ke$ha’s on the speakers, warbling, “Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young,” and that’s good enough for everyone here right now.

Salome is on stage dancing and she’s a vision from the ’40s, all dark flowing hair and severely gorgeous glasses. She’s good, too good for this crowd, too good to be on so early in the night, too graceful in her slight flourishes for them to notice, too funny in split-second poses for them to laugh, too sharp for anyone to catch her edge. The crowd just stands around, mutely devoted, watching her dance, applauding the odd provocation (slap on the bum, wink and a kiss) tossed their way. Her hair comes down, her shawl comes off. The crowd cheers.

The lgbtout execs are standing around in one corner near the tables, quiet in conversation.

Doug’s manning the ‘door’ tonight, right by the stairs, and after a smoke outside Rochelle joins him handing out gift bags, greeting people as they come up. There aren’t many yet. Second floor of Crews & Tangos, 10 pm, and it’s quiet. Josh is by the bar, polishing clean glasses. Matthew’s by the tables, looking thoughtful.

“See, usually — last year, yeah — we had them Fridays,” he says, hands neatly adjusting the brochures and cards on the table, sec pamphlets, upcoming events. “But the Barn closed down over the summer, most places already have schedules set up way in advance, and this was the only time we could get an event, so...”

So here we are. Lbgtout’s first Homohop of the year, mid-January, on a Thursday, at a different bar, no cover charge, and no longer an all-ages event.

It’s survived, and the lgbtout execs in charge are mostly familiar faces from last year, but it’s so different now, not just slightly different but almost outrageously so. Just about everything but the name is new. “It’s still around,” goes one argument.

“But at what price?” goes the other.

And then, there’s the added worry of money. Without cover, the Homohop’s only way of making money tonight is drink sales. If things go well enough, Crews and Tangos will agree to host it again.

If not, the Homohop goes away for what might be a very long time.

There’s a tension in the air, not nervous exactly, but ‘what ifs’ and ‘I hopes’ are on the tips of tongues, as everyone bustles around trying to get the place in order. Homohop’s still around, yeah, if only for a night, but what about tomorrow? The atmosphere’s full of these sorts of questions: The drop-in’s going well, at least compared to last year, but are we ever going to get new space? What about the execs? Will tabloid fervour about sec and their party at Oasis Aqua Lounge spread to other campus groups like us? A hundred and one things to worry about before the music and the lights take over and the party can start.

People are coming up the stairs now, Doug and Rochelle hand out the gift bags one by one, and suddenly there are no more gift bags. Josh is pouring drinks as fast as they’re ordered, and there’s finally some movement on the floor: small groups, three or four people at most, have started dancing. Salome twirls on the dying bars of ‘Die Young,’ poses and winks with great camp style, and the night begins. ***

THE VARSITY: When?

DOUG: I came out when I was 15 in high school in Venezuela — actually, I was outed by this creepy guy.

AYYAZ: I was not out in Qatar.

TV: What was that like?

DOUG: In the end it really didn’t matter, ’cause I had already been coming out to a few people. Being gay isn’t something I’m going to hide about myself.

AYYAZ: It was not something that was talked about in Qatar. There were no real labels of that sort there.

TV: But I mean, how was that for you back then?

DOUG: Yeah, it was really hard for a while, as the only out guy in the school. I went from basically being unknown to being ‘The Gay.’ Even my teachers knew.

AYYAZ: [Pause] Some interesting dynamics in high school, yeah.

TV: Country-wise, I mean … how is it like?

DOUG: It’s sexist as fuck; macho culture is the only thing there. There are some gay people there but there’s not really much [of] a community. Very clandestine organizations. There’s a march, but going there is such sacrifice.

AYYAZ: One of the things with Qatar is there was greater acceptance of not being hypermasculine, or anything like that. There’s more affection in Qatar between men — I should say, between heterosexual men. Two men holding hands is not considered an issue at all. You don’t see that here at all. *** When I heard this magazine’s theme was ‘Dialogue,’ I said “huh” and that was that. After a thankfully abandoned attempt to say something intelligent about the Socratic dialogues, I decided to try a new angle and trundled over to the lgbtout’s drop-in. I needed inspiration, and old newspaper instincts die

lies,” Cathy said of the drop-in centre, which aims to give them space to talk about it. Quite a few people, including several current and former execs in lgbtout, have first come out publicly in the centre.

“There’s also a social need and a great social value in having a social space for lgbt students on campus,” she adds.

Of course, lgbtout is a student group on campus, so life can be complicated and uncertain.

Right now the drop-in centre serves as both a social centre and a place for people to talk over their problems, hopes, and fears. Sometimes the mix works well, but other times…

After a long, enjoyable conversation about lgbtout and what they do around campus, I realized I’d forgotten about why I came and improvised a question about dialogue at the centre.

Both Cathie and Ayyaz stared at me in openmouthed wonder for several seconds, before Cathie said, very gently, “That’s the whole point, sweetie. You can talk here. You can ask.”

I made a mental note to avoid stupid questions in the future, and asked Ayyaz, who had mentioned he was from Qatar, if he had the time for a quick interview later in the week. *** TV: What’s different in Canada?

DOUG: The fact I can be totally myself here is a little overwhelming.

AYYAZ: There’s a huge emphasis on the idea or label of ‘being gay.’

TV: How so?

DOUG: Due to the fact I can be myself here, I’m starting to discover more about myself. It’s been such a beautiful experience. I got a chance not just to be the ‘gay guy.’ I am gay, but back home it wasn’t like that.

AYYAZ: It’s difficult to say exactly, but here there’s more of an emphasis on going with the prevailing majority idea of what it means to ‘be gay.’ There’s less freedom in a sense — remember earlier, about ‘coming out?’ That’s a very western thing. In Qatar, the idea of ‘coming out’ just doesn’t exist.

TV: So for you, identities are… ?

hard. I knew a couple people who worked there, so I figured maybe they could say something about dialogue and give me a lead, or inspiration, somehow.

I met Cathie and Ayyaz at the drop-in centre, located under a neat arch in University College just off St. George. Both are executives and volunteers for lgbtout. Cathie joined this year, while Ayyaz joined in 2011.

Lgbtout which was founded in 1969, is the oldest university lgbt group in the country, and does much of what you would expect an lgbt group on a university campus to do: organizes social events, provides references and support material for students with questions, and runs the drop-in centre, which currently functions as a catch-all conversational centre of sorts.

“Overall there is a huge need for a space for people who aren’t out to their friends and fami-

AYYAZ: I find it problematic to say that I identified with the ‘gay identity’ because I felt that I would be misunderstood — that’s something that comes over from Qatar, because if you’re interested in men that defines all of who you are. The same things apply in Canada — if you’re gay here then it can feel in some sense that comes to define the entirety of your personality to other people. *** Identifying as something is emblematic of our generation, and you and me and everyone we know is a beautiful and unique snowflake, and yet somehow we’ve already found a problem: what happens when a person’s group identity clashes with their personal identity?

I won’t get hilariously out of my depth theorizing about identity here, but something Ayyaz said about the western ‘gay identity’ struck me.

CONTINUED PG 10

JANUARY 28, 2013

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Reading between the pixels

How digital media is changing the way we communicate Article by SOPHIA COSTOMIRIS | Photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC

A

t home over Christmas, my father came into my room and declared I was spending too much time on the Internet.

Showing him the emails I was writing did nothing to assuage his feeling that I was wasting time that could be better spent. It wasn’t the solitary act of writing that bothered him, but the medium I had chosen for it. I ribbed him and called him a Luddite, because his complaint — that digital texts are an inadequate way to communicate — is mind-numbingly ancient, the literary equivalent of shouting about “kids these days.” Even Plato lamented that the written word rendered focal memory obsolete. But perhaps my dad had a point. There is a distinction of more than format between writing a letter and dashing out an email, or spending 10 minutes crafting the perfect tweet. I began to wonder: does the medium in which we write to each other change how we communicate? Could it even change what we choose to say?

Anyone with a university semester under their belt is probably familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s exhortation that “the medium is the message.”

My father’s worries aren’t unfounded: when Facebook-chatting or emailing, I simply click lackadaisically between my 11 Google Chrome tabs. Browsing the web encourages a flightiness of attention that can result in serendipitous discoveries, but the experience of writing or receiving a letter is a sort of lexical solipsism — there’s only one communique existing at a time, only one text which is realized by the act of reading it. Digital communication naturally emphasizes the new: your phone buzzes with a new text before you can even hit send; you can follow a Twitter livefeed of a sports event and its ensuing riot. This flightiness is rewarded on the web, because the brain can easily make intuitive connections between pieces of information. Compare this to the physical act of writing on paper, which forces the writer (and the subsequent reader) to temporarily immerse themselves in individual texts in order to absorb their information.

Maryanne Wolf, a professor of childhood development at Tufts University, has said that humans were never meant to read. Each new reader’s brain must create its own method of reading; learning to read and write is not an automatic process which humans are as predisposed to as, say, spoken language. Rather, it is an “open architecture,” and how we learn to read depends on the formal structure of the language read (for example, readers of character languages which use logograms, symbols for entire words or syllables, such as Chinese, rely more on visual memory), as well as the time we put into learning how to read. This means, writes Wolf, that learning to communicate in a digital medium, where a shorter attention span is rewarded, could have dramatic effects on the fundamentals of how we read and write to one another. In 300 milliseconds the brain can access a huge array of visual and semantic information, which allows us to decode what we are reading, but it takes another 200 milliseconds for us to further process what we have read, to begin critical analyses of the text.

The way we talk on the web rewards skipping this second step,

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meaning we often don’t absorb or analyze this new information: in high school anatomy you might have been told to write out your notes, in order to better retain the names of 206 bones, but you can skim an email without fully absorbing its content, facilitated by the physical act of scrolling.

In his 1977 work Image-Music-Text, Roland Barthes, a literary theorist who had been bemoaning the decline of text since at least 1940, wrote about the distinction between an “author” and a “scriptor.” Though at the time of his writing the Internet was but a glimmer in the eye of the US military, this distinction between the two types of writers aligns quite neatly with the different mental processes and experiences of communicating on paper and on the web. Barthes’ “author” is our Romantic concept of a God-like artistic creator, one who forms an entirely new world out of their imagination alone. The “scriptor,” on the other hand, can only combine and re-combine existing texts and concepts in new ways, never creating anything truly original. Barthes was writing specifically about books, but we can see similar patterns emerging in e-communication. According to Barthes, the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text as it is written. This creates a new openness for the reader, who can discover in a scriptor’s text whatever she sees fit, but it also means that it is possible to get by on a much shallower relationship with the written word. Grammar sticklers decry the ruin of language brought on by instant communication, and practically speaking, they are correct: digital dialogue rewards reactionary speed and relevancy over accuracy and depth.

My father’s distaste for communicating on the web is two-fold: as a writer, I think he finds the very act of scrolling through emails, rather than holding them in his hands, to be inadequate, and he intuitively worries about what Wolf has confirmed, that when reading and writing on the web we skip those extra 200 milliseconds of analysis and understanding. As digital communicators, we choose words for their immediate value because the nature of the digital medium rewards peripheral attention to the present. This means that the web provides an amazing platform for minority opinions and marginalized voices (witness endless articles on the phenomenon of the Arab Spring and social media) where as hard texts, like letters, do not. Alternatively, physical texts protect information in a solid way that is simply unavailable to digital ephemera, but they are less intuitively accessible.

When we communicate via digital mediums, on Facebook or with email and texting, we can see patterns of shared thought emerging: on a cold day, everyone will be talking online about the weather.

Social media urges us to take part in whatever the zeitgeist is presently, a communal reaction to the current mood. Alternatively, written communication like notes passed in class or letters and postcards, is intimate by nature. We hold them in our hands, and the thoughts expressed by the writer are just for us, the reader. On the web, topics of discussion tend to be cyclical — what’s trending on Twitter, what links are being shared, ad infinitum — because our attention is so divided. No one was addressed directly, so no one was listening and everything must be shared again.

Bar speak A bartender discusses the art of conversation Article by DANIELLE KLEIN | Photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC

“I’ve worked in probably well over 20 different bars,” Jasmine tells me, as we walk in the cold night at Hart House Circle, the CN Tower providing a bright backdrop.

“I’ve been in the business since I’ve been legally able to serve, and I’ve been in it for about four years. I’ve worked in an array of environments such as clubs, Irish bars, regular restaurants, upscale dining atmospheres — I’ve had a taste of all kinds of bar environments.

“It’s been a very rewarding experience past the point of what I thought was just a part-time job. It’s actually helped lead me to achieve others goal in my life.”

A seasoned bartender, Jasmine’s demeanour is simultaneously personable and edgy.

Though she chose not to disclose her last name, Jasmine’s quickly apparent charm and magnetism makes our conversation feel like a warm chat between friends, indicative of the reason for her prolonged success in the bartending business. She laughs while recalling anecdotes about her experiences, coloured with intriguing customers and glimpses of the brief melodramas of their lives.

“Working at a bar is like witnessing a soap opera. It’s very entertaining.”

She describes the diverse crowd of people who she has met in the workplace. “Many people may think that working in a bar is just about serving customers, or you’re al-

JASMINE

ways just making small talk with people, or these are just one-time contacts, but I’ve met people from politicians, to business owners, to musicians. Part of the job of being a bartender is really communicating with the patrons that come in.

“A lot of the time, if you’re someone that’s very curious about other peoples’ lives, you can learn a lot about people’s successes, not just their day-to-day lives, but how their companies run… That was something that really interested me and that was why I stayed in that atmosphere, because I was learning so many different things about so many different people.”

As a bartender, Jasmine explains, much of the job consists of socializing and filling different roles for the different people who come in. In particular, people seem inclined to reveal personal information about themselves in an environment that they perceive as safe; as a result, Jasmine finds she often plays the part of a therapist at work.

“You do find people that just need someone to share their lives with,” she admits. “It’s funny because when you’re walking down the street you don’t know anything about the people you see around you… In a bar atmosphere, you learn so much about people’s lives and they open up so much… It’s like you’re the bearer of secrets, and you’re there to listen and you hear all this gossip.”

Jasmine tells me that politicians and musicians may come into the bar and divulge details not disclosed to the public. People typically, however, come in to discuss regular conversational topics like “sports, relationships, and people that are pissing them off.”

“A lot of people come in and talk about their own relationships, or want advice from a younger person or just from an outsider. A lot of times, you can give that advice. I’ve rarely had a situation where it was a risk to give advice. It comes with common sense — you know when it’s the time to bring in help, but a lot of the time they have the answers and they need someone to just listen because there just isn’t anyone to hear them, and sometimes just someone to lift up their spirits. Sometimes, we’re the jester.”

With regulars who come in a few times a day, Jasmine says her role involves more than acting as a therapist or a random person to chat with. “In bars where I’ve been able to converse with regulars, you become more than a bartender; you become a friend for some people.”

Jasmine chooses to limit that relationship, however. “A lot of other bartenders and servers make good friends with regulars and maybe share drinks or go out with them. I’ve always left work at work, but that’s my own comfort zone. There’s been maybe one or two exceptions to that, but I do find a lot of instances where regulars cross that line. It’s best to just be friends in the moment.”

Regulars don’t always, however, establish relationships with staff. “There are no rules with regulars; sometimes they come in and just always keep to themselves.”

While Jasmine often finds that she is able to get a complete picture of the lives of customers, at other times, her interaction with them is more discrete.

She simply assists them in a small episode of their lives, be it a first date, or a minor conflict. She sometimes acts as Cupid, providing couples with a discounted dessert, or a secluded corner of the bar in which to sit.

Jasmine’s cordial relationships with customers have been known to shift over the course of an evening at work, sometimes negatively, when situations have escalated as patrons became disruptive, agitated, or excessively inebriated. “The worst kind of customer is one that doesn’t have any regard for the people around them, so that puts me in the position that I have to take care of the problem myself.

If I have someone being too loud, I have to tell them to keep it down. Five minutes ago, we were friends.

We were chatting and laughing… Now I have to take that authoritative position and tell them that they’re going to have to leave.

“Sometimes if you’re a woman or young, it may not work in your favour, which is when I have to contact management or kitchen staff or maybe even regulars, or in extreme cases even the police.”

Jasmine does not want to be a bartender forever, but she has found the experience inspirational, and it has impacted her future plans. “This is just a part-time job since I’m still a student at the University of Toronto, and I hope to be graduating at the end of the semester. This is a great job to do in between careers, or if you need fast cash, or if you want to go traveling.

“I don’t see it as a career because I have a degree and I want to do something with my studies, but I have thought about, with all my experience, that I have a chance at opening my own restaurant, or my own bar, or something of that nature.”

It’s the conversations that she engages in at work that truly breathe life into the job, Jasmine emphasizes. “I think, no matter who you talk to, you can learn something. That’s something I really like about bartending. You can get advice, or hear cool stories. There’s always something you can learn, and there’s always something you can give back. I think the more exchanges you can have with more different kinds of people, the more you can grow from it.

“I feel like I thrive the most with a varied group of people and that keeps me coming back. I love to hear what people have gone through and what they experience with their life.”

JANUARY 28, 2013

9

LIKE WHAT YOU’VE READ? HAVE QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS? WANT TO RESPOND?

“SAFE SPACES” CONTINUED FROM PG 7

WRITE TO US! SEND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR TO

“It’s great that Canada exists, that it provides a model in some respects to other countries,” he began, and then trailed off to recover his thoughts. “But it’s… It might seem like a false complaint that ‘Canada gives you labels,’ but it’s a real problem.”

Ayyaz identifies as queer, not gay. Doug identifies as gay. For Ayyaz, the emphasis here on labels and how they’re used to define someone is worrisome; for Doug, it’s less of a problem.

There’s not much of a point in taking the matter further. Both have valid and incontestable reasons for feeling the way they do.

But I kept coming back to the differences between the two, differences of identity.

‘Identity’ is forced to play double-duty as both a personal idea and a public expression. There’s some undissipated tension here, some that recognition maybe the problem will never go away — it’s structural, in a way, when you think about all the meanings a word like ‘identity’ can have.

Maybe there isn’t a solution, or maybe there is. Maybe the only way around the problem is to just keep talking, to just keep gabbing on with friends and strangers, offering confidences sure to be broken in the morning, to just keep up the conversations about what it’s like for you, what it’s like for me, and just talk talk talk until the sun comes out in the morning.

comment@thevarsity.ca

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*** TV: How has lgbtout been for you?

DOUG: It has been so rewarding.

AYYAZ: I think lgbtout has had a huge impact on my self-discovery; it’s shaped it in a more positive way.

TV: I kinda need to shoehorn in a quote about dialogue here — what can you say about lgbtout and dialogue?

DOUG: [Laughing] We’re all very talkative and opinionated in different ways. It’s great. All the dialogue at lgbtout has made me realize the world of sexuality and gender in a much deeper way.

AYYAZ: My hope for lgbtout — for its future — is that some of the discourses and discussions I’ve started with the community continue, especially those that look at the intersection of queerness, race, and gender; where all those things collide, and where those differences need to be highlighted. *** Later in the night, the execs are able to relax. The gift bags, free to the first 40 upstairs, nearly flew off the tables. Doug, liberated from hosting duties at last, is dancing. Natalie’s texting, Rochelle’s out for another smoke, and Ayyaz is manning the tables.

“Having a good time so far?” he shout-asks over the music, and I nod. There isn’t much more

to say right now, it’s too loud for that, and so we both turn and watch the dancing for a while.

Looking over the crowd, I’m still wondering about Ayyaz’s comments about the ‘gay identity.’ Sure, there are a few common sartorial touchstones here, some shared reference points, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, is it? I can’t make up my mind, and decide maybe I can spend tomorrow thinking and talking about it again, but for now, it’s nearly midnight and the dance floor beckons.

Soon, it’s midnight, and then one. The crowd swells, surges, and subsides in time with the music.

“Starships” by Nicki Minaj comes on, and then a Spanish-language club hit we can’t place, and then the music blurs and blends into one great, hours-long track. The crowd is still alive and moving well into the night, enough empty glasses adorn enough tables to feel hope that maybe the money situation’s not all bad, and then, all of a sudden.

The air is clearing, the floor is clearing, and it’s not only twothirty, but last call, and suddenly it’s the last song, and upstairs it’s back to where it began: a couple dozen people huddled close together on the dance floor. This time though, they’re in motion to the last fading chorus of a song, and when it ends, as it must, the lights come up, the music dies, and there’s nothing left here but groups of people talking, already talking and talking about tonight and today and tomorrow.

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10

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LOYALIST

Creepin’ conversations How a playwright makes the most out of everyday exchanges

AURORA STEWART DE PEÑA

Article by ASSUNTA ALEGIANI | Photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC

A

few months ago my friend and I were hanging out in Trinity-Bellwoods.

She was telling me a dramatic story about a tough family situation, when I noticed a middle-aged man, about an arm’s length away from us, listening intently. I shot him a few disapproving looks but he didn’t even try to mask his curiosity. Finally we moved to another spot. On my way home, thoroughly appalled at his shameless creeping, I was suddenly distracted by a couple walking ahead of me, clearly having an argument of some sort. I upped my pace to hear what the problem was, and then it hit me: I had just become that man!

And I do it all the time, everybody does. It’s the reason why reality TV exists.

A testament to the intriguing nature of strangers’ dialogues is the Toronto Standard column Creepin’, “a series of mini-dramas based on public conversations, as overheard and rewritten by local playwright/director Aurora Stewart de Peña.” A Stratford native, Stewart de Peña runs the theatre company Birdtown & Swanville with her friend Nika Mistruzzi. They went to theatre school together and began putting on their own plays in 2006. “I have tried acting but it’s not really my thing,” she says. “Writing is where I’m most comfortable.” The idea for Creepin’ came after the company put on a bunch of short plays that made her more aware of the short time span in which stories can happen.

For about a year now, Stewart de Peña has entertainingly captured the kinds of mundane exchanges we hear all the time living in a big city. They take place on the subway, at Ideal Coffee on Ossington, the Metro at College and Crawford, or in the entertainment district: places all over the city that most of the Standard’s readership frequent or would at least have visited. She says her mini-dramas are half direct transcription and half made up. “Sometimes I won’t be able to be near people or hear all of what they’re saying, so I’ll hear four lines and have to extrapolate something from that.

But the craziest ones are those that are pretty much verbatim.”

Nonetheless, Stewart de Peña maintains that they are rewritten because “there are times when somebody will say something really interesting and then they’ll talk about what they had for lunch for five hours. You have to make little tweaks.” When she does have to add something, she tries to stay away from drawing on personal experience or people she knows. Instead she tries to turn an attribute of that person into a sort of character development. “I don’t want to impose a story or my own values on it,” she says.

What makes Creepin’ so enjoyable is how relatable the strangers’ dialogues are. It’s almost as if by glimpsing into their lives we can take a broader look at ourselves and what it means to live in Toronto. Following

the places she writes from week after week creates a trajectory through the city’s many distinct neighbourhoods, tracing the set conversations and emerging “types” that are very much tied to the character of each area. However, Stewart de Peña stays away from generalizing the people she observes.

“People come in types I guess, but at the same time I’m always surprised to realize how wrong sometimes you are about someone. You think you know them from one instant, but you don’t.”

A personal favourite of mine is the installment of Creepin’ “Doom of Cyclists,” in which two women sit on a porch at the corner of Dufferin and Davenport and watch cyclists repeatedly get off their bikes and look around in shame because of the steep incline there. I have cursed that hill many times and bonded over this with various people; it’s a Toronto thing.

When Stewart de Peña started Creepin’, she would try to write as she overheard a conversation, but creepees always caught on. “People look out for girls with notebooks, I swear. I had to modify [my approach] and I think it actually resulted in better stuff, just keeping my ears open all the time while trying to listen for a tidbit.

It’s made me a better listener for sure,” she says. What makes her “creep” are moments where something switches, when an individual has some kind of realization

during a conversation, whether internal or external, and noticing how quickly that can happen. She says “it’s neat to see those turning points that happen so frequently all over the city.”

After consciously listening in on Torontonians exchanging words and stares for a year, what are some things she has noticed about how we interact? “It’s hard to make generalizations but something that I’ve noticed about Torontonians is that they’re very careful with each other.” This isn’t surprising, given that Toronto is always portrayed as being the least friendly city in Canada. “I also think that people lie a lot. I don’t know them, so I can’t be sure, but people aren’t, in public anyway, really speaking from the heart.”

You would think Stewart de Peña hears from people who recognize themselves in her articles all the time, but this has yet to happen. She awaits her discovery in dread; observing and fictionalizing those around her has made her more aware of her own image in public. “I live in fear that people are going to recognize me from the column and then say ‘she’s really dumb, she shouldn’t be a writer. No wonder she’s just an empty vessel, filled up with other people’s words.’” However, it’s undeniable that Stewart de Peña has created something unique from the material the city presents her.

JANUARY 28, 2013

11

Behind the scenes, beneath the pages

How do ghostwriters capture the essence of their subjects without getting in the way?

Article by MURAD HEMMADI | Illustration by JENNY KIM

U

ncovering international conspiracies, solving murders, watching a former British Prime Minister get shot right in front of him — these are just some of the things that Ewan McGregor’s titular character does in Roman Polanski’s 2010 movie The Ghost Writer. The real world of ghostwriting, as frequent Readers’ Digest contributor and former Toronto Life columnist David Hayes describes it, seems a little tame by contrast.

True ghostwriting, as Hayes explains, is working “from scratch, with somebody who can’t write at all.” And just like Pierce Brosnan’s character in Polanski’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel The Ghost, the figures Hayes and other writers like him work with are looking to tell their stories.

“One way or the other, it always is about legacy, whoever it is.”

Discretion is a significant part of the job description, so Hayes won’t tell me about all the subjects he’s worked with. But it’s clear from our conversation at his Toronto home that he has ghosted for some prominent figures, and some real characters.

“We had a discussion with the publisher of how many ‘fucks’ would I liberally sprinkle through this [book],” he says of

12

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

one particular attempt to capture the personality of a subject. “You couldn’t possibly do this and not have a couple. So we discussed where there were a couple of good spots where it was particularly effective, the context was really good, so we put two or three in there.

“They had to be there — if you knew this guy at all, and you read something that was supposedly him talking and [the word] ‘fuck’ didn’t happen once, you’d think ‘What?’ That would be like it was laundered.”

Ghosting an autobiography means writing it the way the subject would have written it, if they had been able to write it themselves. “The autobiography has to be written in the voice of the subject,” Hayes stresses. “A biography is going to be written in my voice as a writer, telling their story. I want to capture their voice maybe in quotes and things, but that book would be written in my voice. That’s the difference — [when] you’re capturing in a memoir or autobiography, you’re capturing the voice of the person.”

That ‘voice’ or style is often very different from the way Hayes writes under his own name — a repertoire that includes

three books and feature articles for publications like The Walrus and Report on Business. “If I was writing for Toronto Life, I’d have much more freedom with the voice [than with ghostwriting],” he explains. “I could be a little more experimental, there could be more personality to the voice.”

Contrast that with the style used for On Equal Terms, a book by Hong Kong businessman Zheng Mingxun that Hayes worked on last year. “With On Equal Terms, I did not write it the way I would have written a book,” he admits. “I had to write it the way this 70-year-old Hong Kong-Chinese CEO, corporate-guy would have written it.

He has no voice as a writer. If he had a voice as a writer, it would be a little bit dry, [an] academic type of voice, like what might be an Atlantic Monthly essay.”

THE ECONOMICS On Equal Terms was published by Wiley, a prominent international publishing house, and is available at an Indigo near you.

“He paid to have that book done,” Hayes explains. “And Wiley’s got it out there all over the world. Most people wouldn’t know that it’s a book that the author paid

for. I don’t know if they’d care — it’s by the author. I don’t think most people care how the book got written.”

Hayes doesn’t receive any money from sales of the book. “I get a fee, I don’t get any royalties. The royalties go to the author,” he says. Still, the nature of many ghostwriting projects means that a fee up front is often better than a cut of royalties.

“A lot of them are vanity in a sense, or the company is using them for promotion.

So they’re not selling them, they’re giving them to clients and prospective clients, and to employees as a Christmas present,” Hayes says. “They’re not actually selling them and making money. So you’re actually not going to make that much of royalties from those kinds of books.”

Samantha Reynolds, the founder of Echo Memoirs, says that the books her custompublishing house produces don’t often find their way onto shelves. “Most of our clients come to us and don’t want their book in bookstores — that’s not at all their interest. They have their audience, whether it’s family or employees, so it’s not about whether it hits bookstores.”

If a client does want to see his or her book on sale, Reynolds and her team have

to believe the book will appeal to the average reader. “We don’t take that project unless we have complete confidence that it will be bookstore-appropriate and that bookstores will want to buy it.”

The modern world of custom publishing and ghostwriters is markedly different from the early days of the business. “It’s what used to be called ‘vanity publishing,’” Hayes explains. “It’s come up a lot in quality. It used to be very low quality, because nobody serious did it, nobody spent very much getting it done. They used to be crummy little books, and it didn’t tend to be the best writers doing it.

“And today, top writers are doing this kind of work, so the quality of the books is higher, and in some cases some of them go into the store.”

Reynolds mentions a project that seems to confirm the newfound respectability of custom publishing. “We’re doing a book with a client in Los Angeles right now, and we’re working with a New York Times number-one bestselling author. So they’re getting great authors.”

That kind of quality does not come cheap. “We’re fee-for-service,” says Reynolds. “Most families and individuals invest in the range of $150,000 and most companies invest in the range of $250,000.” But, she points out, that sum buys a lot of expertise. “They’re mobilizing a team of about 12 publishing professionals that are going to incubate their story for two years — that’s where they see their investment go.”

Echo Memoirs produces about 20 books a year. “These days we do about three-quarters of our work for organizations and companies, so non-profits, large global companies, and many different types of organizations in between.

The balance is families and individuals.”

Hayes admits that the financial considerations motivate his ghostwriting.

“It’s a money job — I do it for income.

It’s part of my living as a writer. Unless you’re one of the stars, it’s very hard to make your living just from doing your own writing.”

It’s better than the alternative, though. “If I wasn’t doing this I’d be doing — well I wouldn’t be doing it — for a woman’s magazine, the sort of ‘what colours of lipsticks are coming up this season,’ service journalism.

“People grind that stuff out, and you can make a decent living grinding that stuff out. It’s not wonderful prose you’re going to labour over — it’s service journalism. So that’s one way to make income, but to me [that’s] harder.”

SCREENWRITING

WHOSE STORY IS IT ANYWAY?

Ghostwriters are hired for their writing abilities. Natasha Master used her expertise in a slightly different area of the custompublishing business.

“The company specialized in working with people who were self-published authors,” she explains. “So they offered them various services and one of them was that you could have your book turned into a film treatment or a script.”

Hayes, like Master, follows the lead of his clients. “You’re working for that person.

Whether you’re doing it through a publisher or not, you’re doing it for that person, so they will decide how they want to put it and whether they want to put it in, and what they want to put in.”

There’s room for a ghostwriter to improve or re-work a story to make the resulting book more readable. “I can make

MOST PEOPLE WOULDN’T KNOW THAT IT’S A BOOK THAT THE AUTHOR PAID FOR. I DON’T KNOW IF THEY’D CARE — IT’S BY THE AUTHOR. I DON’T THINK MOST PEOPLE CARE HOW THE BOOK GOT WRITTEN. — DAVID HAYES Master wrote those scripts, using the books of the commissioning authors as source material. “[Screenwriting] is a different way of structuring a story,” she explains. “There’s a whole different approach to telling a story; you have a lot less space to do it in. If you’re writing in a book format, you can make it as long as you want, but you’re pretty restricted in terms of length with a screenplay.”

How much the script deviated from the source text depended on the client. “That was one of the first things I would establish in that initial call was how much leeway did I have to change things around, how much creative license were they willing to give me. “There’s a little bit of back-and-forth in the editing stage. They’re either comfortable with the changes you’ve made, or they want you to stick mostly to their original text. That’s an ongoing negotiation.”

Like Hayes, Master doesn’t have a financial stake in the scripts she produced. “I don’t own the rights to any of that work, so once I hand in my final edit, it’s out of my hands. I have no idea what’s happened to any of them.”

Master hasn’t seen anything to suggest that any of her scripts have made it to the silver screen. But, she explains, that’s not surprising. “Some of them were just curious to see what [their books] would look like in script form, and maybe not as serious about developing it for production.”

suggestions that I think will improve the story. I’ll say, ‘This will really improve the book, and here’s why, and here’s an example of what it will look like.’ And often they’ll say, ‘That’s great. Fine, I like that, I understand what you’re saying.’ But sometimes they won’t.”

One client in particular, Hayes notes, was particularly easy to work with. Hayes’ first book as a ghostwriter (or co-writer, since his name appeared on the cover of the final product) was Canadian figure skater and choreographer Sandra Bezic’s The Passion to Skate.

“Sandra was incredibly reasonable,” Hayes remembers. “She thought about anything I was suggesting we do, and most of the time they were sensible ideas, and she thought they were great ideas.”

Other subjects have been more challenging. “I think in some ways it was harder, or one might say more boring, with [On Equal Terms] because I didn’t spend much time with [Zheng]. I tried to do Skype interviews with him, and it didn’t work too well over the phone. He worked better actually with email. He just didn’t give me as much as I needed, so it was a little bit of a struggle working on that one.”

Hayes notes that ghostwriters don’t necessarily have a deeper insight into their subjects than the average reader. “It’s funny, sometimes you learn less than you would if you were a journalist doing a pro-

file. With [one of his subjects] it wasn’t my job to dig into everything about who he was. I wasn’t interviewing a dozen or 15 people who he’s worked with in the past, who still work with him, who were influential at some point in his career, friends, enemies, critics and supporters.

You’d be getting this full picture because you’d be going outside the subject himself or herself.

“With this kind of book… The person’s going to give you the side or sides that they want to put in the book, and as you’re talking you pick up on things, so you do ask questions a certain way and try to bring other things out to some degree. But basically, it’s pretty much you and the subject.”

The access that the ghostwriter-subject relationship provides can sometimes mean a less well-rounded story, Hayes admits. “There are lots of profiles done where the person never spoke to the profile subject at all,” he says, citing Gay Talese’s famous 1966 Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.”

“You can sometimes do a better profile than the ones where you actually talk to the individual, because you talk to so many other people that you actually get a picture [of the subject]. Often when we do have great access to the main subject, we don’t do as many interviews around the person. You don’t need to go quite as far afield, and some of those people far afield may be incredibly great people to talk to.”

Certain subjects, like Bezic, choose to acknowledge their ghostwriters on the covers of their books. Others are more reticent to credit their co-creators. Still, Hayes explains, it’s not hard to find a ghostwriter’s name.

“Look at the acknowledgements — if it isn’t explicit, sometimes it’ll just say, ‘Thank you for the valuable help given to me by my editors,’ and it’ll name two or three people,” he explains. “Google their names — one of them will be the publisher and editor-in-chief of that publishing house, the other one will be a senior editor at that publishing house, and the third person will be a writer.

“As soon as you see that, [you know] that’s the person who wrote the book.”

In the end though, the book is the property and responsibility of the person whose name is front and centre on the cover.

“You’re interpreting to a degree in ghost- or co-writing and in authorized biographies sometimes, but the subject has control,” Hayes says. “Ultimately, I am only putting in what each of these people wanted to put in.”

JANUARY 28, 2013

13

Digital dialog How communicating with fans online has changed the creative process

I

n an age of self-expression, where many of us treat access to the web as an informal go-ahead for the title of part-time critic, audiences have more power than ever to share opinions on the culture they consume. But it’s still not common for fans to engage with an artist’s work on its own terms. There is a certain expectation that artists will lead the way by distinguishing their work within today’s morass of digital channels. Fan validation is still a crucial component for artists seeking meaningful exposure, especially since record labels are no longer the ultimate arbiters of good taste, at least not to the same degree that they were a decade ago. Spectators are now the ones who sort through what’s available, tying the success of every artist to their subjective tastes. For this reason, it’s worth re-examining the relationship between artists and their audience. How does this new distribution of power affect the role of dialogue between an artist and their audience? We took our queries about this new transparency to a few tastemakers who are exposed to audience interaction on a daily basis. Our panel includes two Toronto musicians, Digits (Alt Altman) and Kontravoid (Cam Findlay), Vienna-based photographer Klaus Pichler, and London instrumentalist/producer, Urulu (Taylor Freels).

URULU Social platforms and digital platforms are an obvious point of intersection for artists and fans. We asked the artists about the role these conduits of connection play in their careers: DIGITS: Social media is absolutely essential to everything I do, every single day, every hour of every day even. It’s how I’m able to reach the people that listen to me and how I’m able to promote anything that might happen.

KONTRAVOID: As an artist starting off, it’s pretty crucial… Putting music online in the past five to six years has given new artists the upper hand — they have their music out there for people to listen to. Essentially, what new musicians want to do is have their music be heard, attract a fan base immediately, start playing shows, and get on with their project.

And as soon as you pick up a fan base, it directs your project. At least from my experience, it’s a good insight into who’s listening to your music and where they’re coming from.

KLAUS PICHLER: In the beginning social media played a very important role in my career, since Facebook was a great tool to get an overview of who was active in the photo scene, and what the most important platforms were. I used it less to promote myself, and more to get an overview of online discussions that would help me start my career as an exhibiting artist.

URULU: I would say that it’s almost as important as the musical

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process itself. About 40 per cent of what I do is devoted to actual studio time, and 60 per cent is used for networking, promotion, etc. The music industry is a game played through both spectrums.

— Although its’ now an essential component for day-to-day business, it’s still not completely conceivable for an artist to tweet, blog, and profile their way to success. Our panel broke down their experiences interacting on various social networks.

DIGITS: Facebook is the most useful, but Facebook has recently introduced a lot of limitations in terms of how artists can reach their fans, so it’s not the best. Fewer people will receive your updates now and they’ve implemented a system by which you have to pay in order to ensure that all your fans see a given update. They’re just doing what they do. Facebook is still useful, but I feel like they could be a much better friend to artists. So the best way for me to reach my fans is actually still via email. If someone signs up for my email list, I find most people will see the updates, and most likely read them.

KONTRAVOID: Facebook is probably the main one I use for everything. I get the most responses from anything I post on Facebook. Instagram as well, if you’re documenting a tour for example or a recording session, that’s very strong too, and it’s fairly new. For me, Twitter’s not

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

ARTISTS ARE ALMOST REQUIRED NOW TO HAVE A DIFFERENT SET OF SKILS THAN THEY HAD BEFORE, AND THEY’RE EXPECTED TO [HAVE THEM] IF THEY WANT TO CONTINUE MAKING MUSIC. I THINK THIS FREEDOM IS ONLY GOOD. — DIGITS very responsive. I don’t post things every single day; I try to only do posts when it’s relevant.

PICHLER: In my case, Facebook was the tool of choice. There are definitely other platforms, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, that have their own communities and also their own rules, their own pros and cons. Facebook works best for me with its mixture of profiles, fan pages, groups, and the opportunity to promote events.

One aspect I dislike about Facebook is its strange copyright and privacy rules when it comes to sharing pictures.

Something which is characteristic of social networks… is the economy of attention. The one who screams the loudest wins, it doesn’t matter if the quality of his or her work is high or low, either way this person gets attention.

URULU: It’s all strategy I guess. I would say Facebook gives the most reach, while Twitter is kind of the informal step-child for belting out random thoughts. SoundCloud is also a big one, but more geared towards streaming than the type of blog posts accustomed to Facebook or Twitter.

— We often want a song or a piece of art to do something for us — it could be as simple as framing a previously meaningless object in a new light, or as therapeutic as a soundtrack for a heavy heart. But our interpretations can clash with an artist’s intentions. We wanted to know how these artists handle misinterpretation of their artistic goals, and if they feel a responsibility to direct the discourse around their work.

KONTRAVOID: People take music very personally and look at it their

DIGITS own way. Coming from a creator’s perspective, there are fans I see eye to eye with when talking about inspiration, and whatever else is behind my music. I just naturally feel a connection to other artists in the same realm I’m in, but in general, it’s out there for people to interpret on their own.

PICHLER: If a discourse around your work is happening, it can be extremely thrilling to just listen in without actively taking part in it, because there is the opportunity for new aspects of your work to be discussed that you’ve never thought about… On the other hand, if you discover that a controversy is rising around your work and you feel the danger of it being misinterpreted on a large scale, you definitely have to enter the discourse and explain yourself and your project.

gue Article by DAMANJIT LAMBA | Illustrations by MINHEE BAE

URULU: You kind of have to set people up with a story behind an EP or single first, sort of like holding their hand.

— An audience’s fickleness can be a source of insecurity. Musicians no longer work through traditional gatekeepers like record labels to access a huge audience and a relatively stable income. Freelance work has become the norm for many photographers.

However, this limitless potential can be both liberating and terrifying.

DIGITS: Artists are almost required now to have a different set of skills than they had before, and they’re expected to [have them] if they want to continue making music. I think this freedom is only good. Although, maybe now if a band that makes really good music doesn’t get it heard by anyone, it’s their own fault. But I don’t want to put it so harshly as that.

PICHLER: These ‘opportunities’ you are talking about of course bring more freedom in terms of creating your own jobs… But at the same time, it brings a lack of security too. You have to steadily work on yourself and your career. Otherwise you will stand still and literally get overrun by a bunch of other people.

URULU: I’m no pop sensation, so it’s not like I have a massive label backing me, or a PR team. It’s just myself, my manager and a booking agency. The easiest way to think of it is that you get out what you put in. Everything is proportionate.

— Growing up in a world of unlimited access, artists today can relate to

fans who are experiencing a similar acceleration of awareness and consumption. Their dual role as consumers and creators helps bridge the gap between their output and their audience.

DIGITS: I made music in high school… The Internet was around, but it wasn’t the way it is today. So I wasn’t really being influenced by everything I could be. Later, when I started joining bands again, it was a whole different musical world and I thought, ‘I’m going to devour all music ever made,’ which I think is most people’s reaction to the availability of music on the Internet.

— Yet this accelerated rate of consumption translates into singles that become old news in a week and art blogs copy and paste dozens of pictures each hour.

An awareness of this reality shapes artists’ approaches.

KONTRAVOID: Stuff is out there to be discovered whenever people pick up on it. It’s always new to them, even if it’s a year since it’s been released. I feel there’s no real wave of anything anymore. Maybe a couple of years ago there was a wave of a certain kind of music, then six months later, another form of music would be popular. Now it’s all kind of meshed together and music isn’t really digested like that anymore. There’s no real scene that’s dominant. I put my debut album out in February of last year, and not really having anything prior to that, I knew that it was just going to be the starting point of my project.

I went on tour with Crystal Castles in October and that’s where I got a lot of new fans, because it was all new to them. They need to be

KONTRAVOID exposed to it, they need to have it in front of them.

URULU: I started off like I’m sure everyone else did, digging through blogs. I wasn’t old enough in the ’90s to even comprehend collecting vinyl, so I sort of missed that whole sweep. Although digital consumption isn’t always the most profitable outlet, it does however, correspond directly to touring. I guess, in theory, I could give every piece of music I’ve made out for free, and still be able to tour. I doubt this would be the same for a larger market, like pop music, but for house music specifically, people want to see you live after hearing your music online.

— At the end of the day, dialogue with an audience is vital for an artist’s development, be it online or in person. Each artist relates differently to feedback, and creative decisions can be influenced by fans’ reactions. The choice is still ultimately theirs.

KLAUS PICHLER

DIGITS: Playing live is amazing.

You can take this very abstract

interaction with people on social networks and email, and all of a sudden it’s their faces and you’re playing for them. It’s a great way to see how people react to new songs, just seeing what works, what might need a slight adjustment. If people are looking at their feet, shuffling, and they don’t know what to do, and they seem confused, that section probably isn’t good.

KONTRAVOID: I’m working on a second album and I don’t want to redo a lot of the stuff that’s in the first one, I want to build on it, that’s what I’m always looking to do. For example, for some of my tracks, people said ‘I can’t hear the lyrics, I don’t know what he’s saying.’ Some of them are muttered, a lot of them are run through effects, pedals, and so they’re not very audible because of the processing that goes on. So I kind of took that into account and a lot of the stuff I’m working on now has cleaner vocals and more audible lyrics. It’s not really messing with the theme necessarily, but there are certain elements you can

always improve on. When I started this, I didn’t really think it would be pop music, for lack of a better term. There was the option to go more experimental so I did lots of vocal processing, so there’s a lot of noise and over-driven synths. But I find that when I look back at it, it’s like yeah, these tracks are structured in a pop format and people who listen to that music want to be able to hear what I’m saying and know what the lyrics are so they get stuck in their head[s].

PICHLER: Making decisions is a very personal thing for me, and thinking about possible reactions is excluded 100 per cent — well, let’s say 95 per cent, because five per cent is the pleasant anticipation of how people will react to it.

I do these [photo series] basically for myself, to satisfy my lust of creating something new, to renew my photography with every series.

I will never stop working with this approach, since it would make me unhappy if I started producing art for someone other than myself.

JANUARY 28, 2013

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Recording a scene Offerings Magazine looks inward to discover a network for Toronto’s fringe music OFFERINGS’ RECOMMENDED TORONTO BANDS

DEIRDRE O’SULLIVAN

RYAN DRIVER myspace.com/ryandriver

MAN MADE HILL myspace.com/llihedamnam

BRIAN RURYK soundcloud.com/brian-ruryk

TENDERNESS tendernessmusic.com

NOT THE WIND NOT THE FLAG notthewindnottheflag.bandcamp.com

U.S GIRLS usgirls.bandcamp.com

SLIM TWIG slimtwig.bandcamp.com

THIGHS thighs.bandcamp.com

THE SOUPCANS thesoupcans.bandcamp.com

PETRA GLYNT petraglynt.bandcamp.com

find out where to get a copy at offerings.ca

Article by MADELINE MALCZEWSKA | Photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC

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Offerings is a free monthly music magazine distributed through Toronto’s record stores, bookshops, and cafés. The Varsity sat down with editor-in-chief Deirdre O’Sullivan and layout designer Andrew Zukerman to discuss their philosophy and their process.

THE VARSITY: What are you doing and how is it unique in Toronto?

AZ: We both come from a background of having our own record labels so I kind of felt like it was an extension of that. It was kind of a resistance to the digital side of things. We have all kinds of art.

TV: Is there an audience that you particularly look to get in the city, or are you really just trying to get a huge number of artists out to a huge number of people and have people find their audiences?

TV: You do lots of interviews too, right? How do you choose who to interview?

DO: Have people find their audiences, for sure. As many people as we can reach is our audience for sure. When we were kids, if we had known about all of the amazing things that were going on in secret clubs all over the city we would have been there and we would have been supportive, but because there was no access to that information, it was lost to us. Our goal is to make that information more accessible.

ANDREW ZUKERMAN: I guess if someone has something going on that month.

TV: How do you think the music community in Toronto can be improved?

DO: It’s largely based on promoting events in the city. So often times things like electroacoustic music or even folk music, or anything that would be considered experimental or avant garde. There’s a pretty thriving experimental jazz scene in the city that we feel is pretty underlooked by media so our goal is to cover those events, and the aspiration is to get people to go out to the shows by informing them about what’s going on.

DO: I think that improvement comes from closer networks. In places like New York and London there are large groups of people who think that what they are doing is the best thing in the universe, and so I think there are a lot of people who look to those cities to try to find out what to enjoy and where to be, but in every metropolis and every small town people can look inside themselves to find what they seek.

TV: How do you feel that having your magazine in print affects what you’re doing, and why do you feel that print is a necessary platform as opposed to online?

TV: What are some current goals for Offerings?

DEIRDRE O’SULLIVAN: What we’re doing is trying to create a catalogue or archive of all the experimental music and arts that go on in Toronto.

DO: For me, I feel that that’s more reflective of our personalities and the people working on this paper. We’re generally very object-focused people — collectors. The idea of something being on the Internet makes it kind of ephemeral. With printed paper, the goal would be not just today and tomorrow, but in 20 years people can look back and have a catalogue of what was going on in the city in 2013.

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

DO: Our initiatives are subscriptions and once we get those in order we’ll see where things go, but there are a lot of challenges because it’s all volunteer-run. We’ve got lots and lots of people involved. February will be our twenty-first issue. The whole point of the paper is to promote a dialogue between potential audiences and artists, and the artists themselves trying to find their community for collaborations or connections that come as a result of a paper. That’s what would make us feel successful.

Food for thought Bloorcourt restauranteurs talk about the art of collaboration in Toronto’s food scene Article by ALANNA LIPSON | Photos by BERNARDA GOSPIC

DISGRACELAND WHO: Shawn MacDonald, owner of Disgraceland.

WHAT: Disgraceland is a musicbased bar that offers, in addition to the usual meat-based pub fare, a bevy of vegetarian and vegan options.

CLAIM TO FAME: The “accommodating comfort food,” which includes extensive options for both vegetarians and vegans, and the $14 pitchers of PBR. FOODSPEAK: As a vegan, MacDonald knows how difficult it can be to find hearty vegan and vegetarian meals in Toronto. “You know when you go to a restaurant with a group of people and there’s always somebody who can’t [eat meat], so they only get to eat appetizers all night? Well they don’t have to worry about that here.

We have lots of vegan options, vegetarian, and meat.”

MacDonald maintains a healthy scepticism about the food scene that’s been emerging in Toronto over the last few years. “I think there’s maybe

too much of a [discussion] going on,” he says. “Because you get all of the Food Network followers and it turns everyone into a ‘foodie.’ Everyone thinks they’re one of those guys who critiques food, that they know more because they take whatever they see on TV and use it as their own vocabulary and their own sensibility or their own experience.”

“So they talk about things ‘finishing well’ or ‘pairing with this’ and about 10 years ago — no, two years ago — ask anyone what that was about and they wouldn’t have a clue.”

He says this with a laugh, though, and adds that one advantage is that more than ever people are starting to consider what’s going into their food.

“I think people are talking about fresh ingredients when they want to ‘eat better,’ so I think it’s maybe teaching people to watch what they eat or to at least investigate what the ingredients are maybe, and I think that’s good.”

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WHO: Claudia Bianchi and Justin Cournoyer, co-owners of Actinolite.

WHAT: Actinolite is a cozy, 30seat restaurant inspired by European cooking, specializing in fresh ingredients with a seasonally rotating menu.

CLAIM TO FAME: Certain items (such as the pavlova) get reintroduced by popular demand, but the menu is probably best known for its novelty — it changes frequently to accommodate what’s fresh and in season, so it’s rare to see the same item twice.

WHO: Rosanne Pezzelli and Christopher Stopa, co-owners of Bakerbots Baking.

WHAT: Bakerbots Baking began as a specialty cake shop that grew into the local go-to spot for quality homestyle baked goods and ice cream.

CLAIM TO FAME: Special-order custom sculpted cakes, and their ice cream sandwiches, which are made from their homemade cookies and ice cream, and are available year-round.

FOODSPEAK: Pezzelli and Stopa love that people in Toronto are talking about food — especially if the food is theirs. “We haven’t spent one penny on advertising,” Pezzelli says. “We don’t even have a business card, but word about what we do, and the quality of our product has spread rapidly, in a very organic way.”

Both owners credit their customers for the fact that pictures of their food, a few of their recipes, and numerous reviews of their store exist on the Internet. Pezzelli adds: “People know we care very much about what we offer. They aren’t afraid to ask questions, or to push us on an issue, or to share their own personal experiences. I have a sacred collection of recipes that I’ve built up through customers who wanted us to re-create their grandma’s walnut cake, sugar pie,

butter tarts — stuff that made them giggle growing up.”

When asked about her collaborations with Sam James Coffee Bar, Bellwoods Brewery, and her brother Arthur (who creates the ice creams), Pezzelli says: “When you admire and respect what someone else has created, and you know they’ve put themselves into what they’re sharing, you want to get involved. We’re all similar in that we depend on word-of-mouth and the quality of our products to sustain and grow our businesses.

It’s always great to sit with Sam and Luke [from Bellwoods Brewery] and dream up food ideas, to get excited about what will get people talking.”

FOODSPEAK: For Bianchi and Cournoyer, it’s all about communication and collaboration. As head chef, Cournoyer often tries to open up the dialogue about food to people who don’t work in the industry. As Cournoyer says: “You can learn from anyone. That’s my biggest thing.”

Recently, he asked his Sicilian neighbours whether they’d eaten bottarga (a dried, cured fish roe), and how it was prepared. They told him about being served bottarga “with grapes and bread when we were working in the fields,” so he developed a menu based on that response.

Bianchi tells me how much she and Cournoyer enjoy using their food expertise to collaborate with other industries. For example, they recently worked with Fuze Reps (a Toronto-based agency representing photographers and other artists) to

host a ‘Bang’ themed event at the event space Metropolis Factory. “We had to work with Metropolis and the decor of this warehouse, and we had to then collaborate with the photographers and all of their works so that the food worked for all of their pieces,” she says. “‘Bang’ and ‘Rock’ were, I think, the two themes, so the food had to ‘bang’ as well. We did some things with pop rocks.”

Thanks to Bianchi’s experience with the Top Chef television series, she was able to create a pop-up kitchen in a couple of days that included satellite ovens and refrigerators. She describes the experience as “an amazing collaboration of an agency, reps, photographers, interior designers — it was a lot of fun!”

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Conducting conversations David Briskin and Eve Egoyan weigh in on dialogue in music Article by ASSUNTA ALEGIANI What qualifies as dialogue? We refer to many things as dialogue: a conversation between two people, two nations signalling willingness to work together, or something more abstract, an exchange of ideas or spirits. Yet dialogue also exists in concert music, from how a score opens up a conversation between multiple subjects — composer, musician, conductor, and audience. To explore where and how this exchange happens in concert music, I spoke to conductor David Briskin and pianist Eve Egoyan.

Briskin is currently the music director and principal conductor of The National Ballet of Canada, as well as the director of orchestral studies and assistant professor at the university’s Faculty of Music. He has worked with orchestral ensembles all over the world and spent 23 years conducting and teaching in New York before moving to Toronto. Though trained in standard classical repertoire, Egoyan specializes in contemporary music and has vast experience improvising and collaborating with other artists. Their interviews took place separately and are presented together below.

photos courtesy david briskin and eve egoyan

EVE EGOYAN

THE VARSITY: In the documentary The Art of Conducting, one person says that the conductor has a desired outcome in his head while he conducts, and he listens whether this matches up with what is being delivered. Is the orchestra ultimately a tool for the composer’s artistic vision? Or is there some kind of dialogue?

DAVID BRISKIN

n

Students’ Unio University of Toronto of Students Federation

TV: How is it for you as a pianist?

EVE EGOYAN: It depends on the composer, it depends on the work. In contemporary music practices, especially when a work has been written with me in mind, that person has an idea of my sound and my imagination. It’s like something custom-fitted. Rather than buying a piece of clothing from a regular store, this piece of clothing has been made for you. There’s also more flexibility in the dialogue between the living composer and the living performer. Often within a score there will be room for the performer to actually make decisions for themselves and be more of a creative partner… I’ll have something in mind, it’s a combination of what I see and what I imagine and what I hear that my instrument is capable of. And in live performance that changes, which is wonderful, because you prepare yourself to a certain point

G IN R P S 2013

e c i t o N s n o i t c e l E Local 98 • Canadian

DAVID BRISKIN: I think that description is very good. One of the roles of the conductor is to come to a point of view, to convey that point

of view to the orchestra and to essentially build consensus. That is what we’re ultimately trying to do, we’re trying to get 90 people on the same page in service to the music. But I think that the idea of dialogue goes beyond the kind of mediation by the conductor, because what happens in the orchestra is, and this isn’t talked about as much, there is constant communication amongst members of the orchestra, [mostly] non-verbal, it’s in the eyes. The conductor needs to know when to speak and when to listen, if you will. Musicians sometimes will come up and say, ‘Thank you for letting us play,’ which means getting out of the way and letting them communicate and guiding the certain terms where necessary.

rgraduates at St. resents all full-time unde ortant services such rep ion Un ’ nts de Stu T vides imp The U of ted TTC ga campuses. UTSU pro George and Mississau ns, book bursaries, clubs funding and discouncentral U of the Pla to nts de stu s ent as Health & Dental res connects dents’ Union also rep Metropasses. Your Stu vernment, advocates for students’ rights, and social and s go ign pa and n cam , atio als T administr rk on common go wo to ses pu cam all students across programming.

The University of Toronto Students’Union is holding its Spring 2013 Elections to fill the following positions: Position

Seat(s)

Division I Victoria College University College Innis College St. Michael’s College New College Trinity College Woodsworth College At-Large Arts & Science

2 2 1 3 3 1 3 2

Toronto School of Theology

1

Faculty of Music Faculty of Dentistry Faculty of Nursing Faculty of Medicine Faculty of Pharmacy Faculty of Law Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design (pending approval at General Meeting) Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) At-Large Professional Faculty

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Election Nominations (All Positions) Election Campaign Period Election Voting Period Unofficial Election Results

Important 2013 Dates:

Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 10:00 to Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 16:00 Monday, March 4, 2013 to Thursday, March 14, 2013 March 12, 13, 14, 2013 Times TBA Monday, March 18, 2013

Nomination Pick-up and Drop-off Locations: St. George campus: UTSU Office 12 Hart House Circle Hours: Monday - Friday, 09:00 to 18:00

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To run for a position, pick up a nomination package during the nomination period at the UTSU or UTMSU office.

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For more information, visit our Students’Union website at www.utsu.ca or contact cro@utsu.ca Please note that, at the time of this publication, “University of Toronto Students’ Union” and/or “UTSU” refers to the Students’ Administrative Council of the University of Toronto, Inc. (“SAC”).

but then you’re in a hall with a different piano, different acoustic space, and your audience. So the audience is interacting, too — their listening informs my listening. And it does feel like a different type of collaboration at that point.

TV: My next question was going to be whether the audience adds anything to the dialogue you have created with the composer at that point, so I guess it does.

EE: Yes, for me, I invite that, because I enjoy that feeling of connection with my audience and I like to feel that that moment is that moment and it’s a communal thing. And it’s actually a very sacred place. The thing about concert music is you’re expecting your audience to be there, sitting there quietly and receiving, in a way. That’s very important as a performer, that what is being shared is a positive energy because it is just something moving through time. It’s not tangible, so I feel that I need to respect that, their openness.

TV: David, you have to communicate the idea you have of another person’s composition to the orchestra so that they can communicate this mediated idea to an audience of listeners.

Do you find that challenging?

DB: It’s very challenging but it’s incredibly rewarding. It’s a great privilege to have a life in music, you know. The reward comes through a beautiful performance and to be able to touch other people and to inspire them and to engage

them. That’s what we’re trying to do. An orchestra can play in a rehearsal without an audience and it’s all fine, but when you have the audience it completely changes the way you approach it.

TV: Musical notation directs a piece but there is room for interpretation. Is this space the realm in which you enter a dialogue with the composer?

EE: Well, you have to think or imagine if you’re a composer why would you want to give up a certain amount of control? A composer uses notation only as a medium. I mean, if they didn’t want to risk the translation they wouldn’t be doing that as an art form. The score is not an exact map. It’s a map, but it’s not finished and it can’t be because you can’t notate every single detail. It is actually the play on the score that is an invitation for that live moment. So you’re inviting the personality of your interpreter; the personality of their instrument; where this thing is going to be performed; whether it’s outside versus a hall versus a café; and an audience, whether they’re attentive.

TV: I never thought that a composer would want to give up control at some point. I think of a composer as having an exact idea of what it is they want to hear and just writing that down, and in the process of somebody taking that on it inevitably changes.

EE: I think that would make for a very bad composer, actually. I suppose it’s similar to writing a play. You know, somebody writes these words

but every time it’s being read it’s being interpreted differently. You’d say that’s fixed, but there are so many variables and nothing is exact.

DB: There’s a wonderful book by a conductor, Erich Leinsdorf, and he wrote The Composer’s Advocate, a book about conducting. You have to advocate for the composer through what he or she has left behind. It’s different when you have a living composer and working together on something. The composer has an idea and imagines sounds, especially in orchestral music, musical ideas that are spread on a large group of instruments. When you really put things together it’s almost like cooking; you’re putting things together, you’re mixing things up.

TV: Many people think all there is to conducting is dressing up in a suit and wiggling a stick to tell the orchestra what the composer wants them to do.

DB: That is exactly what it looks like. It really does [laughs]. I think that a conductor is more like a lexical conductor. It’s a piece of circuitry connecting every member of the orchestra with every member of the audience. It’s like electricity, if one electrical conductor is not working then it stops, right? So that’s what a conductor really does. It’s interesting because [beyond] the rehearsal process of teaching the orchestra about my own idea of the musical work representing the composer’s intentions, which everyone has in front of them on the music, ultimately a per-

formance is a completely non-verbal art form.

You mostly communicate through gesture and through the eyes what you’d like to hear. What’s remarkable is how much things can change by not saying anything, but just by just moving in a different way.

TV: Eve, once you take on a piece, how do you enter a dialogue with the composer? Do you choose it by feeling a connection to it?

EE: Or a composer who I’m connecting to, who I would like to work with, or they come to me and I decide I would like that to happen. It depends, there can be a dialogue. Usually what happens is I’ll learn the piece and if they’re not in town I will send a recording of my rehearsal process and then one before it goes into performance. So there’s a discussion.

TV: Do you prefer to work with a living composer, as opposed to taking on a piece that was written decades or centuries ago?

DB: I think that’s the most exciting thing. The liturgy of our repertoire comes from the past. With orchestral music it forms kind of a canon of classical music. So the opportunity to do new music, especially to work with the composer, is great.

EE: Part of the reason why I play contemporary music is that I have the freedom to feel I’m close to the original idea. I’m not guessing. And I’m not superimposing.

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KARISSA BARNES

Salon culture Hairstylist Karissa Barnes keeps the conversation going Article and photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC A haircut is about more than style or manageability. Whether you’re going to a corner barbershop for a quick trim, or getting your hair done at a fashionable salon, there’s also a social aspect to the experience. People chat, linger, and relax. The Varsity spoke to Karissa Barnes, a stylist at Blonde Salon (82 Power St.) to find out what it’s like to cut and converse at the same time.

then if you remember, you ask about [it] and I definitely have clients who come back to me after four weeks, and they want to know about a certain thing they knew was coming up in my life.

THE VARSITY: How do you start off a conversation with a client?

KB: I would say close relationships, just because it does make it that much better for both of you. I mean, there’s just more to talk about when you are in the salon, and makes them feel more comfortable, more at home.

They like coming back because they know that you have a friend as well as [a hairstylist].

KARISSA BARNES: I guess you just start with the basics because you haven’t met them before, right?

So I guess you start asking them about what they do, if they live in the city, different things like that, maybe about their family or their friends. And you just kind of take it as it comes, you just kind of feed off of their answers… And then with existing clients, it depends. If there’s something you knew they were having in their life going on or there was something special like an event coming up, then you could just ask them that…

TV: How many of your conversations carry from visit to visit?

KB: Quite a bit. If you can’t remember what’s going on they’ll usually let you know if there’s something exciting, like you would with anyone in your life, right? You tell them that there’s something going on [in your life]. So

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TV: That being said, what kind of relationships do you prefer, close relationships or relationships with more distance?

TV: How do you relax a client who feels uneasy about something, whether that’s their hair or life?

KB: I guess for their hair, you would just do a thorough consultation, make sure that you ask a lot of questions about what they want done, what they want as an end result so that you’re covering all of your grounds, and then just be sure that you show confidence… And with their life, I guess you just talk them through whatever they’re having an issue with, I mean people do come to you for advice.

TV: Do hairdressers talk to avoid boredom or to make their jobs easier?

KB: I would say neither of those, really. I would say that they talk just because they enjoy the company of their clients. I mean, it is really the clients that make your day when you’re working, and it’s the conversation.

TV: What about the days where you’re not in the mood to talk?

How do you deal with that?

KB: I guess everyone has those days where you don’t really want to talk a lot, but once you get into the salon like, I feel… I wake up, I kind of have a quiet morning to myself and then once you get to the salon you just kind of feed off of the vibe that the salon gives. I mean, you come in here and it’s nice and bright, and everyone is talking, and chatty, and the music’s going and it just kind of lifts your spirits if they’re a little bit down.

TV: What’s the craziest story you’ve ever heard?

KB: The craziest story I’ve ever heard … well … I’m actually not allowed to share that with you, because we believe that everything a client says, we [should] keep in confidence, and we don’t go around telling all the client’s stories and happenings, and what’s going on in their life. Hairstylists, the good ones, don’t typically cut, colour, and tell.

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DO YOU THINK WE’RE HART HOUSE THEATRE AND THE U OF T DRAMA COALITION PRESENT THE 21ST ANNUAL

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Native tradition, new theatre Discussing community, ceremony, and cacao with director Dr. Jill Carter Article by ISHITA PETKAR Photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC

DR. JILL CARTER

C

omfortably perched in her desk chair, Dr. Jill Carter laughs as she huddles around the warmth of the large Second Cup coffee that she holds in her hands. “Sorry about that!” she says smiling, having just been bombarded with a myriad of questions from eager students waiting outside her office.

Carter, who identifies herself as Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi, is a faculty member in the Aboriginal Studies department at U of T. She also describes herself as an actor, a writer, a playwright, a student, and a mentor. While lecturing is her full-time job, she makes sure to include time for her greatest passion, the theatre, and for the stories that can be created on stage.

As an integral part of Native Earth Performing Arts’ newest production, Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, Carter knows all about stories. The play incorporates creation stories of different groups of indigenous peoples from all over the Americas — specifically the Haudenosaunee (Great Lakes region), Rappahannock (Virginia), and Guna (Panama) peoples — in an attempt to reclaim indigenous cultures through art. Focusing on the elemental females portrayed in these stories, the play is centred on Chocolate Woman, a Guna feminine spirit associated with the cacao plant.

Carter, who recently received her Ph.D. from the Drama Centre at U of T, is the remount director of Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, and has been involved with the play since the beginning of its production. Nestled in the warmth of her office on a blisteringly cold day, she spoke to The Varsity about Native Earth Performing Arts, and the role of theatre in the reclaiming of indigenous cultures.

THE VARSITY: How did you become involved with Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional native theatre company?

DR. JILL CARTER: I suppose being a young native woman, I was drawn to them… My first experience with Native Earth was seeing Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters, and I remember very clearly how it galvanized me. I came up in a time when a lot of Native artists came up — you know, people who wanted to be theatre professionals [but were] not seeing their role models and… Not seeing ourselves at all on stage. And if we did see ourselves on stage… or saw what purported to be us on stage, we often saw some very ugly pictures, so it wasn’t something to be proud of. Seeing The Rez Sisters changed everything, and it changed everything for a lot of native artists, but also for mainstream [theatres]… It really put Native Earth on the map.

TV: So you think Native Earth Performing Arts has been instrumental in jump-starting Native theatre?

JC: Oh I would say so… Although it had its financial struggles, it has been the cornerstone, I think, of native theatre in Canada. It’s been the place where artists got a voice, and where artists could become developed. They have a Young Voices program, and in that program they invite young people who are interested in playwriting … to work with professional dramaturgists … and they do a lot. I mean, they help young native artists through every stage in their careers. It is really ground zero, so to speak, still today.

TV: One of the mandates of Native Earth is to encourage the use of theatre as a form of communication and dialogue. How or why do you see this as being especially important in communicating experiences unique to native peoples in contemporary society?

JC: Oh, that’s such a layered question! Twenty years ago, Canadians did not know who [natives] were. Canadians had an image of us, [but] they knew nothing of us… So having our artists come out and speak to Canada in our voice, about our concerns and through our lens was and is still crucially important today… To be the one who tells your story, that’s important. It’s interesting though because the issue has changed.

Yvette Nolan [former artistic director of Native Earth] said, and I think quite rightly so, [that] at one point, the struggle — or the question — was, ‘Who gets to speak?’ Now the question is, ‘Who is listening?’ Is anybody listening? It gets awfully exhausting, educating the main populace… And many [artists] are pushing back against that and their plays are not necessarily for mainstream Canadians. Mainstream Canadians are

welcome to come, to receive, to be affected, to learn, but their plays are for their own people.

I often think of theatre as urban ceremony, in the sense that it unites a scattered body politic. The best of it creates communitas; it creates that sense that we in the audience are connected to each other… The best of it offers real healing, and permanent transformations, in that we can come away knowing something we didn’t know before… I mean, I’m not saying, ‘Go see a play’ and you’re fine! But, go see this play and something begins to work within you, that medicine begins to work within you. I think it can also be a gateway to our culture. So many of us have been separated from our communities, our languages, and a venue like this can be a gateway in. It can get us understanding a little more about ourselves and [make us] curious, eager to push further and go further.

TV: There is a lot of silence surrounding the native community in Canada, especially for the average citizen who doesn’t go out of his or her way to become informed. Do you see Native Earth playing a role in filling that silence?

JC: I think it is, but it’s one piece of the puzzle. We don’t necessarily live in a theatre-going nation… So there are those that love the live experience and who come to see the theatre. But there are many who don’t, and we know that, and that’s certainly been an issue with Native Earth, an issue that is shared by theatres across Canada. The one thing you hear from [Canadian theatres] is the struggle, dare I be crude, to get bums in seats, and to bring people out… So there is always that struggle and certainly Native Earth has not been immune to that. But when we think of how many people in Toronto will be touched and educated by a piece, [it’s] not many. So Native Earth is part of something that must be larger. However, the thing

about Native Earth is that in its support of plays and artists… it allows that work [to maintain] life after the production… These plays are published texts, they have a life in remounts and on tour, other theatres take it up, and I think this can all be traced back to the ministrations of companies like Native Earth.

TV: Can you tell us a little bit about the idea behind Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, and how it goes about reclaiming Indigenous cultures through art?

JC: I’ve been involved with Chocolate Woman since its inception in 2007… It began before that however as a drive, or a need that Monique Mojica [the play’s author] had. Monique was going through a very serious… Time in her life. [She] required healing, required something to get up and go on, and began to look back at Creation stories, and the elemental females of Creation. And I say Creation stories and elemental females, because Monique is Guna and Rappahannock… She is also by marriage and adoption Haudenosaunee. Since she has all of this cultural material to draw on, the show is an interweave.

Chocolate Woman is a Guna figure, an elemental female, I hesitate to use the word goddess because it’s not the same thing, but she is this feminine spirit that is associated with the cacao. Cacao for Guna people is a medicine… But it can also work at you from the outside in, can shield you from your enemies. So this cacao is really important. [Mojica met] with a Guna consultant and traditional teacher, who taught her these songs and stories. Rather than adopting Western theatrical form, she went back to tradition and ceremony to figure out how to … tell an ancient story to a contemporary audience, with contemporary expectations, in a contemporary venue, but to be able to affect the audience as an original rendering of the story would have affected traditional people.

JANUARY 28, 2013

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AGENDA 1. Call to Order 2. Executive Update 3. Old Business 2012 AGM-01: Approval of Minutes 2012 AGM-02: Receipt of Audited Financial Statements 2012 AGM-03: Approval of UTSU Bylaw Changes

• By-Law I – Interpretation

• By-Law II – Membership

• By-Law V – Board of Directors

• By-Law VII – Duties of the Board

• By-Law VIII – Executive Responsibilities

• Bylaw XI – Commissions and Committees 4. New Business - Consideration of Motions Duly Served

2013 SGM-01: Oppose Unpaid Internships 2013 SGM-02: Examine Winter Residence Fees

2013 SGM-03: Investigate Additional Multifaith Space

2013 SGM-04: Condemn “A Voice for Men”

2013 SGM-05: Clubs Town Hall & Box Office 2013 SGM-06: Eliminate Styrofoam Container Use

2013 SGM-07: Presidents’ Address & Forum at AGM

2013 SGM-08: Endorse Idle No More 2013 SGM-09: Extend AGM Notice Requirements

2013 SGM-10: Provide Notice & Deadline for AGM items 2013 SGM-11: Student Representation in Governance

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2013 SGM-12: Include International Students on GC 2013 SGM-13: Reduce AGM proxies to a maximum of 5 2013 SGM-14: Reduce Nominations for Candidacy 2013 SGM-15: Create Anti-War Coalition 2013 SGM-16: Implement Electoral Reform Recommendations 2013 SGM-17: Redefine Clubs’ Recognition 2013 SGM-18: Lobby for Discounted GTA-Wide Transit 2013 SGM-19: Build Mental Health Campaign 2013 SGM-20: Investigate UPASS Transit System

5. Adjournment

To see the full agenda, audited statements and motions served, visit www.utsu.ca Wheelchair accessible.

If you have any accessibility or childminding requests or other inquiries, please contact Corey Scott, Vice-President Internal & Services at vpinternal@utsu.ca

Cross-cultural Christmas Bilingual dialogue in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Article by EMMA FOX Illustrations by JANICE LIU

Director Nagisa Oshima, who passed away this January, is known to have said, “My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it.” Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, made in 1983, was his first “English” film, but it isn’t completely English — the story is the experience of British prisoners of war in a Japanese camp during World War II. Two of the central characters, Captain Yonoi and Sergeant Hara, are Japanese, and the other two, Lieutenant Lawrence and Major Celliers, are British (Celliers, played by David Bowie, is supposed to have a faded Australian accent, but we don’t really notice, thanks to Bowie’s understated approach to everything). The film incorporates both languages, but we hear English spoken the most by both sides.

The way the characters interact in English involves more than just a verbal exchange. Captain Yonoi, the highest authority of the camp, speaks in English and has a great technical command over the language, but his expression of it is unnatural. In a courtroom scene, we see the dramatic articulations of Major Celliers’ face against Captain Yonoi’s, which makes only the slightest movements. Celliers’ drawnout, musical voice contrasts with the tight speeches of Yonoi, who speaks like he’s hitting something (which he frequently does throughout the film).

The nature of the spoken dialogue reveals a greater cultural dialogue between the East and the West, which is one of the world’s fundamental discussions. The film presents a number of divergences: each culture’s in-

terpretation of war, how men on the same side treat each other, and the best method of punishing transgression. The Englishness of the film’s perspective puts more focus on a few extreme Japanese customs; for instance, the prisoners are made to watch a soldier being punished for a homosexual act commit seppuku, a suicide ritual fulfilled by stabbing one’s own abdomen. In Yonoi’s mind, this is a privilege to the guilty soldier, because in the war it is better to die by one’s own hand, and generally it is less shameful to die in the war than to survive.

The only Englishman to speak Japanese in the film is Lawrence, who is familiar with Japan and has great respect for its culture. He is called upon to mediate violent situations several times throughout the film. As Hara says to the non-Japanese-speaking British

commander in Japanese, “You don’t understand. Only Lawrence understands.”

But Lawrence doesn’t understand. Despite knowing the language, he appears to be more tormented and confused by the brutality of the Japanese officers than any other British prisoner. Criticizing Yonoi’s ideas of justice, he says, “You think that if there’s a crime, then it must be punished, and it doesn’t matter who is punished.” These punishments, such as seppuku, are easier for the rest of the British soldiers to accept, because they assume the practices of this strange, alien culture to be as foreign as the Japanese language itself. They know that the war itself makes so little sense.

It is Lawrence’s unique relationship to Japan, his human experience of it, which causes him to expect the Japanese soldiers to transcend the role of enemy.

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Intellectual theft, disco, and Bollywood Bappi Lahiri and music’s winding international networks Article by SIMON FRANK | Illustration by William Ahn You may not realize it, but you’ve probably heard a Bappi Lahiri song. Regardless, the melodies of some of his biggest songs will sound familiar — more than a few of them lift sections of American pop hits. Lahiri, an Indian soundtrack composer who hit his peak during the 1980s, is responsible for some of the music now automatically associated in the West with Bollywood.

Kitschy synthesizers, lush string arrangements clashing with Hindi vocals recorded loud and distorted, drum machines competing with traditional percussion, and blaring horn sections, danced out in front of glittery backdrops — all Bappi Lahiri hallmarks.

Even if Lahiri’s popularity at home and the lyrics of his music make it somehow representative of India, to think of it as intrinsically tied to India’s classical traditions would be a mistake. His songs are a complete fusion, injecting 1970s and 1980s Western pop into the Indian film industry. Lahiri’s biggests hits, like the soundtrack to 1982’s Disco Dancer and 1984’s Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki, were released in an era when socialist India was still mostly closed to outside business and investment. By referencing or even directly plagiarizing foreign music, Lahiri brought new genres and instrumentation into India at a time when they might otherwise not have made it in.

In this one-sided conversation, Lahiri took elements from pedestrian pop and disco songs, and put them to use in completely different settings. The brilliance in Lahiri’s theft was his ability to create new songs from trashy old material by stretching playtimes, adding new layers, and radically changing mood and energy. “Mere Jaisa Mehbooba” from 1984’s Baadal adds female vocals to Herbie Hancock’s robotic hip hop song “Rockit” to build it into something seductive and creepy at the same time. “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja” from Disco

Dancer steals its structure from a piece by French disco duo Ottawan, but strings, plaintive vocals, and a more propulsive drum machine groove take the song far beyond its inspiration. “Everybody Dance With Me” (from a 1978 B-movie named College Girl) tears the riff from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” and lands it in a glammy stomp, complete with wildly echoing boy-girl vocals.

Lahiri’s more original songs are equally thrilling, from the infectious call and response of “I Am A Disco Dancer,” to the relentless bass line and out-of-control synthetic tones of “O Beraham Tune Kiye.”

If Lahiri’s songs had only been popular in India, his story would simply be that of a few good songs and an amusing anecdote on plagiarism. His soundtrack to Disco Dancer, however, was massively popular in Russia and China, indirectly bringing traces of Western culture to the Communist world. Since then, Lahiri’s songs have looped back into North America and Europe. While Lahiri was originally the one taking from foreign music, hip hop producers are now sampling his songs, and songwriters are adopting his aesthetic. M.I.A. repurposed “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja” into the track “Jimmy” on her 2007 album Kala, and in 2011 Lahiri claimed that Jennifer Lopez had plagiarized elements of “On the Floor” from his 1990 song “Sochana Kya Jo Bhi Hoga Dekha Jayega.”

Today, Lahiri is an over-the-top, chubby figure, and appreciation of his music can unfortunately focus on its novelty factor. Below layers of flash and outmoded production values, however, the back-and-forth at the heart of his music remains captivating for the way in which he took sounds from the West, presented them back to the world as Indian, and kick-started a global exchange of songs and styles.

Stepping on stage The communal joys of karaoke Article by SOFIA LUU | Illustration by NANCY JI Growing up, I learned that you could not have a proper party without breaking out the karaoke machine. As someone who was and has always been somewhat timid, I didn’t quite understand the entertainment value of karaoke. It seemed natural that I wanted nothing to do with karaoke — until recently.

Some people would never consider the idea of singing in a bar full of strangers without first having some liquid courage. But once you get over the initial fear of singing, you might find that karaoke is an experience that extends beyond the individual. You might be alone in your wholehearted attempt to belt out Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia.” But you should do so in full confidence, knowing that everyone who knows the song will either be mouthing the lyrics along with you or assuming the role of backup singer.

Recently, I decided to explore Toronto’s karaoke scene by visiting a College Street bar that has its own established karaoke night. I spent a bit of time poring over the bar’s expansive songbook, entertaining the idea of doing a Smiths song. Before I could even make up my mind, my friend was quick to chime in, reminding me that I “wouldn’t want to be that person who sang the Smiths.”

He was telling me that if I went ahead with any song from the Smiths’ catalogue, I would be the buzzkill of the bar. I realized that the point of karaoke is to have fun. To many, this often means singing songs that are upbeat and catchy. But to me, this means choosing a song that makes me happy and that I will have fun singing. Even if it means singing the Smiths, Joy Division, or the Cure — all of which I’ve sung in the past and I would sing again if given the opportunity to.

I never gave song choice much thought. I picked my songs according to how I felt.

Sometimes my friends influenced my choices, but most of the time they didn’t. The key to enjoying karaoke is to simply not care. No one is going to judge you for doing “Call Me Maybe” because deep down inside, they, along with everyone else, will regret not choosing that song. One night, I did a duet of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Shortly after I was done, someone by the name of — I kid you not — Jude approached me to thank me for choosing that particular song. It’s surprising to see how such interactions can stem from something as simple as a popular Beatles song.

Ultimately, you will come to realize that there is no point in arguing with your friends over which song you should sing next. Karaoke isn’t supposed to be as taxing as selecting courses for next year. You’re not supposed to overthink song selection because then it becomes a burden. If you’re putting too much thought into karaoke, then you’re doing it wrong. The essence of karaoke is simple. It’s to have shameless fun, and lots of it too.

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Follow my lead Social cues on the dancefloor

Article by ALEX ROSS | Illustration by WENDY GU Why do people dance? Some do it for the sake of art; others for ceremonial and traditional reasons. Most of us dance because it’s a good way to lose some of our inhibitions and just have a good time. But a lot of people dance because it’s simply one of the best ways of connecting and communicating with another person.

I probably wouldn’t have given that answer a few months ago, mostly because dancing was something that I didn’t really care much about. In fact, I generally considered dancing somewhat distasteful, and even a little crude. Of course, this opinion was based mostly on ignorance and inexperience.

Social dancing — especially swing and blues — has completely changed my perspective.

Social dancing is essentially any partnered dancing with a leader and a follower. Ballroom dances such as the waltz, and the tango and jazz dances such as the Charleston or lindy hop are all types of social dancing. The leader often guides the dance, and the follower mirrors their actions. All social dance forms have a series of basic steps that must be known by the leader and the follower, which are then converted into moves that the dancers can embellish as much as they want. The success of these dances hinge on the ability of a pair to communicate with each other, which is often done through touch and subtle movements.

Partnered dancing was first treated as a high art form during the Renaissance (at least in Western culture). Noble courts took folk dance forms and formalized them — even adding codes of etiquette for each dance. Despite the formal attributes and high social status of such dances (which would continue into the nineteenth century), social dancing has still managed to remain relatively informal and naturalistic. Later dance genres like ragtime, blues, and swing jazz all have a freedom of expression and level of accessibility that ensures that they remain popular today.

In fact, it is these social dance forms that first evolved in black communities throughout the United States in the early twentieth century that best illustrate dancing’s power as a form of dialogue. Ragtime, blues, and jazz dances have cut across social, economic, religious, and even racial barriers. You continually switch partners during social dances, which means you get to meet a diverse group of people in a friendly atmosphere. The power of social dancing to completely disintegrate ideas of superior social status has often made it a catalyst for change. This is identified by Mark Knowles in his informative (and hilarious) book The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances as one of the reasons why political and moral authori-

ties have been so opposed to dancing throughout history. For example, the Charleston — which became a national fad in Canada and the United States in 1925 — was often criticized as crude, lewd, and even bad for your health. Naysayers worried about the kind of openness a dance like the Charleston was able to foster. As a big fan of the Charleston myself, I have to say its critics just didn’t know how to have a good time.

A good case in point for the power of social dancing can be found in my paternal grandparents, who met each other through social dance. My grandfather was a recent Scottish immigrant who came to Halifax after serving in the Royal Air Force in World War II. My grandmother was a Mik’maq who grew up on the Millbrook reserve outside Truro. My grandfather took elocution lessons after an embarrassing incident trying to order ice cream with his thick Scottish accent. My grandmother briefly called herself Mary Picton rather than her actual name of Marie Pictou, fearful of potential prejudice from the other nurses she worked with. But such worries or distinctions completely vanished when they met each other on the dance floor. They were just two young people out having a good time. I’d like to think they were on to something special.

JANUARY 28, 2013

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