Alex Eddington: composer, musician, writer, actor, &tc.

knit one pelican

I didn't see a single show today. I just tried to see Dead Like Steve but I failed, utterly and totally. Even trying to get a password comp. Massive failure. Oh well, I'm not feeling too care-full right now.

I took the day off of Fringe and went away, far far away with Tracy (who I met in my fringing) to the shores of Lake Manitoba, an hour west and a half north, where her friend has a cottage. But Tracy didn't have the keys, so we sat on their little beach and went to the Delta Marsh and the U of M bird research station and generally looked at pelicans and ducks and swallows and goldfinches and fed strawberries to deer. Deer, apparently, like strawberries. Deer, apparently, live in an enclosed area on "the island" (actually a peninsula) in Portage la Prairie. Tracy grew up in P-la-P. She knows this stuff.

I am exhausted and I ate too many Miss Vickies today. 11:30 (PM!) show tonight - I hope I get a crowd. It'll be like... a campfire. My penultimate show in the big W.

Pelicanultimate.

Good night.

the woven one

I was surprised at the outset of my show yesterday, or rather in the pre-show where I now get really friendly with my crowds. And yesterday, it *was* a crowd - of about 50-something 50-somethings. Not so bad for a 2:30 when Chris Gibbs is lining 'em up around the block around the block. And I was surprised, see - to have a woman in the front row with a man beside her ask to take my picture. Next to Kilda - the bike - she took a picture of me standing there, surprised to have my picture taken, and said - as I reacted in some funny way - that she would send the picture to my parents. My parents! Then, it clicked - she and her husband didn't look familiar because I had seen them around the Fringe grounds, but because I had seen them, many many times, at my family's church in Toronto. They were out here for the Special Olympics (in Brandon) and caught some Fringe on the way back. Not that they're driving, probably. Well, maybe. I told them not to tell mom and dad about everything in the show. *yikes*. kidding. Gosh, I'm hyper now.

Anyway, after the show I was surprised, again, by a darkly beareded young man in a torn red t-shirt, who turns out to be someone I have known since my earliest knowings - the younger son of good family friends. I had no idea that he was living in Winnipeg. We went for beer, and someone who had seen the show bought me another beer. Good times.

I continue to get hugs from strangers at the end of the show, even though I am soaking wet.

Today I saw two shows that deserve more audience than they've been getting: Smartha Skewheart, and The Top 10,000 Of All Time. Both excellently performed, one funny, one spooky.

'til the next,

the Ackster

want five, get three

What makes a five-star show?  Really.

Today I got a four-star review trapped in a three-star review's body.  The format of such reviews - familiar to all of us - runs something like the following:

- adjectival praise

- name of show, by company

- string of glowing, useful quotes, somewhat repetitive

- a turn toward more careful language

- the word "marred"

- attention drawn to an obvious feature of the show, interpreted here as a flaw

- "we're going to have to dock you for that", in different words

- three stars occupying the place of four

I wonder, if I didn't actually use the words "I am not trained as an actor" right off the top of my show, whether I would have been docked.  Whether the reviewer would even have noticed.

In another review I was docked for other elements of carefully considered theatrical transparency.  Feh.  My audiences consider to dig it.  I got more hugs today, and a few handshakes from the less physical set.  Still - handshakes from strangers.  I'm on to something.

I went to see Reinventing Miss Exciting last night, and wanted to give Chris Neufeld a big hug too.  People-being-themselves-on-stage is my new favourite genre.

Also saw Candy From a Baby - a violent show with two ruthless child stars, the actual kids of the criminal dad character.  How do you rehearse a show like that? A show with swearing and guns, with your own children? It worked, whatever they did.

I'm going to spend an hour at The Exquisite Hour now.  It had better be exactly 60 minutes.  Maybe I'll sleep properly tonight.

Goodnight, moon.

crochet

Gotta write fast, gotta go see Reinventing Miss Exciting.

My 7:30 show tonight really turned a corner.  I was there, they were there, we were all together, pacing worked, text articulation worked, and I FELT it, and they GOT it, and a bunch of people hugged me at the end.  That's new.  Now I suggest that the audience hugs me after the show and they did.  The performers, and the strangers.  Wicked wicked wicked.

I've hit my stride, halfway through this run.

STILL WAITING FOR A FREE PRESS REVIEW!! I'm NOT SHOUTing.  Sorry.

knit the knit knit knit

Had my third show o' eight this aft, and now I'm at that time when I've JUST missed a bunch of shows that I wanted to see, and a few shows that I hadn't considered seeing until I noticed that I had missed them.  I might or might not be able to get tickets for The Power of Ignorance.

Fringe is like this.  Somedays, no shows seem to happen.

I went to Audible today, though, riding on the reputation of the Saucy Fops and the very niceness of them all.  Incredi-frickin-bibble.  There is a section of choreographed sign language that is abso-fuerk-lutely gorgeous.  It's funny how I keep seeing shows with themes that I have been explicitly thinking would make good shows, like sound (Audible), or theoretica physics (sort-of Fill the Void, but more a show that I saw at the Ottawa Fringe when I happened to be out there for a program at the National Arts Centre last month).

My show today was relaxed.  Maybe too relaxed.  Naturally, I am at risk of becoming over-familiar with my material.  Oh well, another day, another head-dunk.  (If you don't understand that...come to see the show!)

Now to the great Gibbs lineup.

And I might see Burden of Poof AGAIN.

July 23, the second

Saw Fill the Void as my late show.  Fantastic style - it flowed like standup comedy, but had so much more depth, and so much more of Phil than if he had a standup persona.  Jonah von Spreecken of The Excursitionists afterward said that he learned so much about Phil watching Fill the Void, it's like we were at a party, late, and Phil was doing most of the talking, sounding off about everything he feels he has a right to sound off about.  This makes me think of what Amy Salloway (Herschel Gertz) said about my show, that it's (and I paraphrase here) like I have written myself a place where I can be myself, in all my eccentricity.  Like I have written myself an island to live on, for 70 minutes at least.  5:15 tomorrow, I get to visit there again.

This is very much the headspace that I'm in.  I keep seeing one-human shows in which someone reveals part of themself, or the the little core of themself (this is, I think, the essence of clown), but I keep wanting them to go that one step further and just be themselves, on stage.  But that's just where I'm at, I think.  Last year I wanted to see more comedies about musicology (long story).

Got my first review, and took it more personally (the good *and* the bad) than I would if my show weren't me playing me.

Lator

knit none purl none

July 23, the first

Today I got a great plug from Amy Salloway at the 12:45er of So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz.  A plug from a clear master of the one-human storytell!  I followed up with handbills in smirky silence.  Still no reviews, though.  And I cannot chalk another sidewalk, not until tomorrow.

I realised something, sitting in Herschel Gertz.  I don't know why I realized it exactly there, but I realised that I feel vulnerable.  And not just because that show and those three I metioned yesterday kind of cut through in the way that good theatre should, but because - I realized about that realization - my show IS vulnerable.  I am being ME on stage, me playing me, telling you - some of whom I know, and those who I know I barely know - about one of the very strangest times of my life.  And every hand I bill with a handbill, every walk beside my sidewalk chalk, is invited to come and look at me, being me, vulnerable for another 70 minutes.  I didn't expect this.  This isn't the same as composing.  It's not BY me, it IS me.

More later.  Going to see Burden of Poof.

Ackster.

knit eight purl twelve

I have yet to be reviewed.  Rumour is (from where - flyering is a blur) that I'll have one in the Free Press tomorrow.  This rumour came from somewhere in the beer tent.  Then I mentioned my non-reviewed state while flyering a lineup for Criteria (which I then saw, and liked) and one young guy receiving my glossy four-by-six declared himself to be "the enemy".  When my friends joined me in the line I introduced them to this new acquaintance as such, but only in the theatre when the guy whipped out a coil-bound notebook did they figure out what I meant.

Keep your eyes on the Free Press.

I have been flyering - a lot.  It took me an hour to go through one beer tent this aft because I talk to EVERYONE.  My spiel is getting smooth.  Today it was:

"WOOL is a one-man, one-bicycle show about a time that the bike and I lived nearly alone for six months on a Scottish island".  They like that.  I get smiles.  Sometimes they assume it's a comedy, because of my hi-larious poster image.  I tell them, it's a mega-story: a story made of fragments of other stories, true stories that like all true stories don't always have a point.  The point is that I am telling them.

I have been chalking WOOL all over the ground.  Today a few other companies hit the chalk pretty hard too, most notably D.A.V.E.  I will have to find another way to stand out.  I wish Kilda (the bike) weren't locked in the theatre, I could do stunt things.  Like riding on the streets.  And home.  Instead of taking the bus.

I had my second performance.  A nooner.  Not a bad crowd - 29 I think - and somewhere not far from the palm of my hand, at times.  I felt a bit more in control than with the first show.  I am no longer nervous, just... there.  During my second scene on the bicycle I thought exactly that: I thought, "I am here."  And the show kept going, just fine.  Today the show was 71 minutes long.

I have been seeing lots and lots of shows.  Like, twelve?  Still going, I plan on an 11:45-er tonight.  Yesterday I saw three shows in a row that hit closer to home than expected: Josie With the Toes, Can't Get Started, and For the Love of God. Especially the middle one, which, exactly as promised on the poster, make unendurable loneliness funnier than previously experienced.  FTLOG needs more people to see it!  Go!  Go!  The show I went to was half occupied by friends and family of the two writer/actors.  They kept thanking me for having come.  Josie needs more crowds too.  Cindy-Loo Who has grown up to be as jaded as me.

But everywhere I looked yesterday, I saw whats and hows but not enough whys.  I think that was just where I was at.

Today I saw...  I forget.  Criteria; Kathryn: Starring as Herself, at Last; 2112; Scratch.  Tomorrow?  Another day off, and then I've got my 6-day run of shows.

Keep on keeping on.  Oh, and go see WOOL

Purled.

July 20, post-show

I opened tonight.  I had maybe 60 people in the audience - a good, friendly, engaged half-house.  The show was clearly grabbing them.  The show breathed, and yet it was exactly the intended length.  There was one sound miscue and a group of three lighting miscues, but I covered for them.  My chalk drawings were little haphazard.  My little lines representing disused farm fields crossed over the river.  But it was fine.

This is a really good start.

I had a long long chat with Amy from So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz about my show afterward, as we ate food truck food on a postered picnic table in the triangle of Market Square.  It is so so nice to be taken so seriously.  This is what I hoped - to have the show be a departure point for me and whoever to *keep talking*.

I'm beat.  But I'm going to see the nice young'uns in Stuck anyhow.  My days now start at 11:00 a.m. and go 'til 2:00 a.m.  If I get enough sleep, it's okay if it's shifted.

I feel like I've been carrying a sheep around.  My new expression is that I'm "zonied out".

I have no clue what shows I'm seeing tomorrow.  I'll report back.

            goo-night

knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit

I open tonight I open tonight I open tonight I open tonight I open tonight
I slept in.  I ate at a Vietnamese buffet.  I breathed - a lot.  I did a long vocal warmup.  I read the script, I spoke the script.  I took a bus.  I have been flyering like a banshee, sometimes chatting with a potential audient for a while.  In my mind, a 10-minute conversation is worth a ticket sold.  I met the director of the Orlando Fringe.  I continued to get no attention from newspapers.  I wrote "WOOL" in white chalk, all over the Fringe grounds, on bricks, on sidewalk, on walls.  Sometimes, I said what it meant.

Now...? 

I get into the theatre in 55 minutes.
              Wish my leg broken.
                            Acky

knit eight, purl none

Free for All!  Free for Alls are strange: we all ("all") do two-minute scenes from or plugs for ("for") our shows, outdoors ("free"), and... let's just say it's hard to get across the zeitgeist of a show, the gestalt if you will, in two minutes.  A two-minute excerpt can come across as somewhat inconsequential, without any of the dramatic arc around it.  I also have a theory that humour only transmits over so large a radius.  I developed this theory in a tent at the [cigarette company] Jazz Festival in Toronto one year, standing at the back of the tent.  I could clearly hear the offhanded jokes made by the bandleader between tunes.  The amplification was fine, but - none of the jokes meant anything by the time they got to me.  I heard words in sequences that were funny *analytically*, but I could not laugh.  The same thing happened today, because I was mostly postering around the back of Market Square during the Free-for-All.  I just heard words, for the most part.  Maybe I have to have my brain tuned.

I told a story from WOOL, from near the end of the show, about going to the loneliest island I have ever seen: Gometra, population 8, off of Ulva, population 25, off of Mull, population 2,400, off of mainland Scotland.  Sitting on a beach there, I found a bottle with a message in it - but if you want to know what that message said, you'll have to come see the show!

Then I lost about [unknown] hours to postering.  I have no idea what time it is.  I'd better...    [unknown].

I open tomorrow at 7:45.  Tonight I'm going to see JOE: The Perfect Human, The Excursionists, and Art's Heart.  Good times.

Oh yeah, JOE totally transmitted humour across Market Square.  So did "So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz".  I would go see that show just based on the poster!

Lator.
Acky.

knit three, purl two

It might be worth mentioning that I don't knit.  My poster image, the "WOOL" made of wool that is suspended across my head, was made possible by the help of a certain knitting motorcyclist within my circle of friends, and it was actually crocheted.  There is no knitting in my show - it is metaphorical. 

In the sense that: a story is knit from words, and a play is knit from stories, and I knit yarns about sheep, and bicycles, and loneliness, that, together, like life, make a cloth of all emotional colours.  Um...the play itself explains that less awkwardly. 

If I knew how to knit, I would probably know that the pattern "knit three purl two" produces a repulsive, off-balanced fabric - or else a woolen fractal.  As it is, I assume that it knits me a...thneed.

I teched today, July 18, in my venue (#2, "MTC Up the Alley") and worked out some pretty awesome, subtle lighting cues.  Most of them are naturally inspired, subtle like the passing of the months.  April to June steadily brightens, warmly; from August to October, it dims coldly.  There are some...unnatural interruptions, where the lighting goes more psychological.  I'm very happy with it, BUT the problem with being so subtle is that I didn't get to run the play in the space.  I ran...chunks.  I researched angles.  Angles.  Don't sit in row two.

knit three, purl one

Afterthought.

I promised to tell you about WPEG's* appearances in my dream world.  There is a strange reversal here, verging on the uncanny - or verging away from the canny, as it may be.

The first time I visited this fair city was in the August of 2000, and I took the train, from Toronto.  That trip takes thirty hours, twenty-eight of which are in Ontario.  And then, it's suddenly flattish, but forested, and then it's flattish and not forested, and then it's FLAT and open, and then, there's Winnipeg, wee in the way distance, and then, an hour or so later, you're there.  As I mentioned yesterday, I was fascinated at that time that you can see a metropolis - of sorts - in a glance.

Then, in 2002/03, during my year-and-ten-day solo European trip, I suddenly started thinking about the Canadian west.  In daydreams, thought-flashes, full fledged dreams.

I had a dream about Calgary, where I had never been (it was...windy.  And empty.  The Calgary tower was...awkward.); I had flashbacks from Regina.  Then, on the night before my job at the Druimnacroish Hotel on the Isle of Mull (the setting for WOOL) was to start, I had a vivid dream about WPEG in which I revisited everything I had seen in the summer of 2000: Osborne Village, Little Italy, the museum, the HI hostel.  Work was to start at 10:00 a.m. the next day, and I woke up AT 10:00 a.m., exactly, and stumbled through the back door of the hotel, my enormous bootlaces dragging behind me.  It was fine.  Unfortunately I had to cut this anecdote from the show.  I also cut a reference to Colonsay, Saskatchewan ("The Isle of the Prairies") that would have played well in SKTOON. 

And THEN, now, I'm opening my show, about Scotland, in WPEG - a show that could have opened with WPEG opening my time on Mull.

Freaky.

* "Winnipeg"

knit two, purl two

Well, I'm here.  In Winnipeg - a 14-hour solo drive from Edmonton.  I broke the trip clean in half with the help of a swift kick by Regina.  If I had thought to jot notebook entries (of the sort that pepper my show) throughout the 2 days of my journey, they would have gone something a little like this:

July 15

- 9:30 a.m. loaded up the car, big bin in the back, bike on the rack, mops in the back seat.  This was a poor choice.  My mop heads, all three of them, smell like a potent combination of Mr. Clean and mildew.  If that is at all possible.  The collective smell is something like, or IS, ammonia.  Ammonia may or may not be the smell of Clean and Dirty fighting it out in my back seat.

- 1:00 p.m. peed in prairie shrubbery.  Gorged - a bit - on Ryvita, salt toffee and apples.  Prairies are nicer when they don't go by at 110 kph.

- 2:30 p.m. arr. Saskatoon.  Attempt to figure out exactly *how* problematic the venue layout is to my show.  Failure.  Attempt to infiltrate the Broadway Theatre to get a visual on the theatre.  Failure.  Broadway has a lot of nice places to eat.  Too nice.  I retreat with a Subway sandwich.

- 4:00 p.m. the smell of "ammonia" threatens to overwhelm me.  I open the windows, drowning the sound of Mozart's Requiem.

- 6:00 p.m. arr. Regina, later than expected.  I stay with a modern dancer.  I observe a three-person fire dance in a garden with an outdoor fireplace.  Not a firepit - a fireplace.  With a chimney.  We go to Bushwakker brewpub and I drink a pint of Honey Thistle Wit and a take a 12-pack of 650mls to join me in the long Winnipeg evenings.  Life gets better by precisely two degrees.

July 16

- 10:00 a.m. I set my car clock to Winnipeg time.  11:00 a.m.  I will not get to Winnipeg at the time expected.  The mopheads have been relegated to the trunk.  I can STILL SMELL THEM.

- 2:30p.m./3:30p.m.  I find a fine, locally-run fried chicken take-out just past the Manitoba border.  Virden, MB.  Do it!

- 4:00/5:00 p.m. I pass a truck on a two-lane stretch and Kilda (the bike) swishes up and out, back and down.  Kilda remembers the long road from Toronto to Edmonton, two summers ago, and the turbulence along this same stretch of road.

knit one, purl two

Well, as soon as I get Acky the Volvo Sedan loaded up, I can hit the road for Winnipeg - me and three mops and a big Tupperware bin and 8 bike lights and my wee home office and Kilda, my bike.  Normally, I would be bringing Kilda with me so that we could ride around together, but this time, she has a special function: Kilda is most of my set.  Kilda is also nearing retirement, I fear.  Now that I have been really looking at her closely, under stage lights, she appears to be losing functionality as a ride-bike, just as she is gaining stardom as a stage-bike.

Kilda, so you know, is the very bike that served as my only mode of transportation on the Isle of Mull, in the summer of 2003.  I bought her the day before I left Edinburgh to spend six months on that island, and I planned to sell her before I returned to Canada.  But, we became...entwined.  There's something special about Kilda.  Other than her twin in the bikeshop, I have never seen a bike with similar handlebars: a loop on each side.  Not ram's horns: moose ears.  The loops make essentially two levels of handlebar on each side: one for leaning down, and braking if need be, one for sitting up tall along roads where the need to brake is less likely.  In Scotland, the lower handlebars were for the downhills, the upper handlebars for the uphills.  50% and 50%.  No, that's wrong.  I lived near-ish sea level.  Everything was above me.

I don't know what Kilda and I clocked on Mull, but it was a LOT of mileage.  We had one 100-mile trip down to the Isle of Iona, and around it, and back by a different route.  Miles are different on Mull, too.  Longer.  Like they were measured from the air, not taking account of bumps in the road.  One mile forward, but 200 meters up.

So at the end, I couldn't leave her behind.  By ridiculous chance, the cheapest flights home (on Globespan) also had free bike stowage!  They didn't pack her up or anything.  They walked her onto the plane, and presumably rested her on her kickstand for 7 hours, and then the Toronto ground crew walked her back off the plane.  With a fragile sticker across her handlebars like a red bow on a baby bunny.

Kilda isn't much like a baby bunny anymore.  We've been through some hard times together.  Some falls (one iPod-induced, as I always feared would happen), and we rode together through much of last winter in Edmonton, me in ski goggles and she in studded tires, a half-hour each way between school and home, across the High Level Bridge.

Probably, in the fall, I will get have to get a new bike - or have enough work done on Kilda that it won't really be her anymore.  I think this show is Kilda's final hoorah.

Well, I'd better corral the props & etc.  I'm off to Regina tonight, to stay with a dancer friend and stock up the microbrew supplies, and then I'll be hitting Winnipeg with the force of a thousand bikes on Sunday.

'til the next,    

Alex

knit one, purl one

July 13

Just had my last of four preview shows of WOOL in Edmonton before I hit the road for Winnipeg.  Yes, *four*.  Why so many?  Clearly, I am taking this tour very seriously.  This is, of course, my first Fringe tour, but it is also my playwriting and solo show debut.  And, as the show states very clearly right off the top, I am not trained as an actor.  I am not as consistent as a trained actor, in terms of levels of theatrical energy and commitment.  And it takes me longer, I suspect, than a trained actor to figure out what works and what doesn't.  I have to shake my sillies out now, before I get to Winnipeg (henceforth referred to as WPEG), so that I can hit the beginning of my run of *twenty* shows with the same force as the middle bunch, and the last bunch.

The other reason is that I rented a REAL theatre space, lights and all, to rehearse the show, so I thought I'd might as well get some public (not that much of it) in to see the thing while I was in an appropriate venue.  I had to rehearse on a real theatre floor, with real lighting, because so much of the show depends on chalk drawing on the floor.  I needed to know if it would work.  It works!

There's a trick, though.  Angles.  They will keep changing.  From my 120 seat venue in WPEG to my 220 seater in SKTOON to the 170-bum 200-degree swoop in EDMO, the angles of the show will keep changing.  Much as they change from night to night.  I am not trained as a floor artist...  But I'm learning quickly.

So, my rehearsal period is officially over.  Tomorrow I pack, Saturday and Sunday I drive.  I'm over-nighting in Regina for the sake of the beer.  My rehearsal period is over but the show doesn't open for a WEEK. For a week, the show goes internal - line runs, mind-staging, concept-lighting, SFX theorems, and periods of intense staring at the WPEG theatre plan, until I actually get into the space on the 18th.  Then... angles.

As must be clear to you by now, my head is more full of logistics right now than it is of artistic things.  Perhaps my other task for this week is to refocus my emotions about the material.  It is, after all, a play about me - and yet, I've discovered that in bringing a time of my life (from three years ago) into a one-man play, I have had to step quite far away from the subjective feelings of those memories at times, so that I can judge what works on the stage.  But, of course, the subjectivity seeps back in, and I have found myself returning to some of the habits that I had when I lived in Scotland three years ago - habits of the Alone - talking to myself out loud, getting snippets of language or music caught in my brain for entire days, talking to animals out loud (in Scotland, sheep; here, robins and rabbits), intense interest in things that are small and slow and simple.  I wonder if this is me revisiting my aloneness on the Isle of Mull, or if this is my aloneness NOW.  What, after all, is more alone than a one-man play, self-directed, on solo tour, ABOUT the most alone time in my life?

Alone, but not necessarily lonely.  I am absolutely stoked about all the cool Fringers that I will meet on this tour - both the audience, and the performers who do this *every year*.  Last year I did a show only in one fringe (Edmonton) and I was so inspired by the touring Fringers that I met in the evenings that... here I am.  Doing it myself.  Making the Fringe my summer job.  Maybe, or maybe not being able to LIVE (in the financial sense) off of something that I would do out of love alone, and getting to travel while doing it.  I can think of no better way to spend a summer...

'til the next,
Alex