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click here to download the Song of This Place Study Guide

by ROBERT GARDINER
Department of Theatre, Film & Creative Writing

Where is "this place"?
What are its qualities?
How can we go there?

Below are most of the lines the actors will speak that refer to the present place of the onstage moment( s), in Song of This Place. The playwright has also added stage directions to describe the place where the play-actions transpire. "The stage should suggest a deep forest, etc...."

"... here's a marvelous convenient place for our rehearsal." (a reference, as you may know, to a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare)

"Will you look at those trees!"
" ... Lovely Emily Carr trees..."

"... we could be in the theatre doing a run-through... but we are not... we're here..."

"... in a clinic in England..."

"... hung her chairs from the ceiling" (describing Emily Carr's parlour) "... chairs on pulleys..."

"Outside my window is a fuscia bush..."

"Sure is peaceful in my graveyard..."

"I found this settlement on the edge of the forest... called Victoria."

"Victoria is such a small place..."

"Here in your forest your power is paramount..." (referring to Emily Carr's forest)

"... Deeper... To a place where dancing is possible." And, of course, the Song at the very end of the play describes a place.

So "this place" is a spot convenient for rehearsal, also clinical, with lovely Emily Carr trees, chairs hanging from the ceiling, a fuscia bush, perhaps a bed and a window, and which is a graveyard, and small Victoria, at the edge of a forest, where a painter's power is paramount. And it is another place, deeper, where dancing might happen.

But as you will see... all of these things - like the old trees that once stood where you sit tonight - are ephemera, that exist only in our imaginations - the "place between" the participants in tonight's revels, the place about which the Song is sung.

Preliminary set design by Robert Gardiner

Preliminary set design by Robert Gardiner

click here to download the Song of This Place Study Guide

 

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