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click here to download the Song of This Place Study Guide

by JERRY WASSERMAN
Department of English and Theatre

In Joy Coghill's Song of This Place the painter Millie Carr believes that each place and each being has its own song: "Each thing with its own rhythm, each centre saying, 'I am, I am ... look at me. '" To capture its essence on her canvas the artist needs sufficient imaginative empathy, as Millie says, to "feel the song," put herself in synch with its rhythms, and translate it into the medium of her own art. Coghill's alter ego in the play, the actress/ playwright Frieda, struggles in turn to capture the essence of Emily Carr, to find her rhythm and her centre, to achieve perfect sympathy with the song of Carr's "I am," woman to woman and artist to artist, and translate her life into theatrical art. In doing so Coghill takes her place in a rich Canadian dramatic tradition.

Portraits of the artist abound on the Canadian stage, perhaps because, as Canadian playwrights have long complained, art and artists have traditionally been undervalued here. In Robertson Davies' Fortune, My Foe (1949) an immigrant European puppet-master is told that Canadian philistinism "will freeze your heart with folly and ignorance." (He vows to stick it out anyway, proclaiming that "a real artist is very, very tough.") In David French's backstage comedy Jitters (1979), a Canadian actor dreams of going to the U. S. where they embrace artistic success, whereas "up here it's like stepping out of line." The theatrical biography validates the artist and valorizes the art.

Sometimes the affinities between the playwright and the artist-subject seem immediately evident. Sally Clark, herself a painter, explores the life of her artistic foremother, 17th century female painter Artemisia Gentileschi, in Life Without Instruction. Raised in the Maritimes, John Gray crafts a musical about a Maritime musician (Don Messer's Jubilee). Gay playwright Sky Gilbert takes as his subject gay playwright Tennessee Williams (My Night with Tennessee). Transplanted New Yorker Sheldon Rosen, whose middle name is Edward, writes about a New York playwright named Edward Sheldon (Ned and Jack). Already knowing some of the song maybe makes it easier to sing.

In other cases the connections seem even deeper. Among the many theatrical interpreters of Emily Carr's life and art, Cree-Québécoise writer Jovette Marchessault is equally well known as a sculptor. Marchessault counts among her signature works of sculpture female figures resembling totem poles. In her play Le voyage magnifique d'Emily Carr, she interprets Carr's paintings of west coast totems as attempts to access the power of female spirituality contained within them. The "magnificent voyage" of Carr's

 

 

"Forest Interior" by Emily Carr, 1932

spiritual artistry also resonates with Marchessault's own multi-volume autobiography which is filled with journeys figured as spiritual quests. Similarly, Linda Griffiths' one-woman play about Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, Alien Creature, represents a kind of channeling of the one artist by the other, a solo for two voices. Griffiths claims to have felt possessed by the spirit of the dead poet while working on the script, inspiring her to write her own poems which she wove into the play among MacEwen's. In the program Griffiths wrote: "She and I are doing this play, and only both of us can speak."

The metatheatrical strategies Coghill employs to construct her imagined version of Emily Carr include the use of masks and puppets, puppet manipulators, actors and a musician, all playing multiple roles in what resembles a complex symphony more than a simple song. Other playwrights utilize equally elaborate dramaturgical devices to reflect the multifaceted nature of the artist and his/ her art. In Glenn, David Young's psychodramatic portrait of pianist Glenn Gould, Gould is played by four different actors simultaneously. Three actresses portray Canadian silent film actress/ director Nell Shipman in Sharon Pollock's Moving Pictures. In having the actress Frieda re-play Millie's life under Carr's own direction, Coghill pays homage to Pollock's most famous play, Blood Relations, in which the notorious Lizzie Borden helps direct her actress friend in reconstructing the events of Lizzie's life leading up to the infamous axe-murders. The song of that place has a rather more violent tune.

click here to download the Song of This Place Study Guide

 

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