Tag: University of Calgary Alumni

Interview with Photographer Tim Nguyen

Posted on by James Hutchison
The Drowning Girls – Vertigo Theatre – Photo Tim Nguyen

Tim Nguyen’s work is striking and vivid and the images remain with you long after you’ve seen them. He’s one of the most sought after performing art photographers in Calgary and his work ranges from capturing all the energy and emotion of live theatre to the intimate and personal process of portraiture. You can see more samples of his work and contact him through his website: Tim Nguyen

I sat down with Tim at his home office to talk with him about his theatre work, his award-winning fine art photography series Lumination, and his Rococo Punk project for the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary.

Photographer Tim Nguyen

JAMES HUTCHISON

So, before you became a photographer you were thinking of acting as a career and you went to the University of Calgary because you were bitten by the acting bug.

TIM NGUYEN

I was.

JAMES

What type of acting? Comedies? Dramas?

TIM

I discovered very early on that I’m not funny on stage. My comic timing is atrocious. I’m relatively amusing in conversation, I would like to think, but on stage, it’s the patter or the timing, the thinking on my feet – just doesn’t happen the same way. So, I made peace with that fairly early on, and I decided that I would try my hand at more dramatic roles. Angsty roles. Because I was twenty and I wanted to talk about my feelings on stage.

So, I got to the middle of third year and it became really clear to me that this was not the right path that I was on. I’d botched a couple of auditions that I thought I was a shoe-in for, and when the casting came out I was at the bottom of the list. So, I got handed a lesson. A harsh lesson. And it left me time to reflect and realize that this wasn’t the right thing for me. I felt like I was moving vaguely in the right direction, but the artistic direction was slightly askew of where it needed to be.

So, after having this very difficult conversation with a prof of mine, who’s now retired from the university, I realized that it was actually okay to change directions and to admit that I hadn’t been approaching things quite right and to move on to the next thing. And it was a breath of fresh air, and at the same time, it was a bit of a kick in the pants. But I was also sort of lost at sea. After I graduated, I worked in retail for a while. I sold cameras. I did construction. I travelled Europe for a little while. And when I got back from Europe a few photo jobs just landed on my desk and then snowballed into bigger and bigger things.

Sylvie Moquin – Lumination – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

When did you start to realize you had an eye for composition?

TIM

I have a really specific point in time that I can call back to. I think it was grade eleven where I had this little box camera. It was basically a reloadable disposable camera. And that was what I carried around in high school for the most part. And there was a day where my girlfriend at the time and myself were downtown in the Devonian gardens with the late afternoon sun spilling in through the windows and just beautiful shadows coming across the old Devonian gardens. They had those big angled skylights on the one side and this really stark tile. And for whatever reason, I asked her to go and sit over inside the shadow. Inside this specific area. And I took four pictures on this little box camera and when I got them back that was it. It was this lightning moment where I looked at what I had shot and what I was trying to do and I looked at the shapes – the forms – the shadows – the light and I knew that there was something there that I needed to keep investigating.

Brian Smith – Portrait – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

It’s interesting, you said you walked in there and you’re looking at the shadows. You’re looking at the light. You’re looking at the textures. You’re looking for that place where you can put the subject and something magical is going to happen. Because most people would not see that and so much of photography is understanding or being attuned to the light.

TIM

Once the camera-specific elements were muscle memory everything else just became about the composition. I don’t spend much time or energy on getting my settings dead on when I’m shooting theatre anymore because it’s just automatic for me.

JAMES

And when you’re doing production stills they’re running the show.

TIM

I get one crack at it. I have not read the script. I haven’t seen the set. And that is the only day of the production that I’m in house.

Crime Does Not Pay – Downstage – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

Why do you choose not to know the play before you go shoot it?

TIM

It didn’t start off as a conscious choice. It started off as a matter of opportunity. The first company that I shot for was Downstage when they first formed. Simon Mallett, who founded the company, was doing his masters at the same time I was an undergrad. So, we’d known each other in university and even in school I was the guy with the camera. And he started bringing me down to the Motel Theater to cover shows that he was producing. And these are shows that were being done with Home Depot lighting and bits of pipe and drape. There was no production value to them. They were just people trying to do politically motivated theatre, and they had a statement they needed to make.

JAMES

Right, because Downstage is based on conversation. We want to start a conversation about a particular subject, so they’d create a show.

TIM

Right from the get-go that was their mandate. So, I was given the freedom to just show up. I was given a couple of bucks for my time. It was the starting point, the foundation of learning how to tell a story through still imagery and finding my own aesthetic inside of that as a medium. Because it’s one thing to just document a production as it’s happening. I could stand in the middle of the house and point my camera at various corners of the stage, but it’s going to look like that’s the level of effort that I put in. When I go and I cover a production I am running the entire time. I’m sweating as much as the actors on stage are, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve been concerned with how much noise I’m making. If anything, I’m akin to phones going off, candy wrappers crinkling, or a baby crying in the house. But I’m the only person in the audience so it’s less problematic.

Mark Bellamy, Barbara Gates Wilson, and Tyrell Crews in the Vertigo Theatre Production of Death Trap by Ira Levin – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

And you’re capturing something that’s going to be here and then gone anyway – and yours is the record. It’s an extremely challenging thing to get good photographs of a stage performance because you’re trying to capture particular moments – particular connections between the characters – or particularly revelations of a character, and those are fleeting and fast. So, I imagine your time as an actor, has in some ways, informed your shooting of plays.

TIM

A hundred percent it has. One of the things that I noticed early on was my sense for where an actors blocking was going to go – where they were going to travel on stage. I was effectively predicting it a lot of the time. So, I’m trying to stay a step ahead of the actors and where they’re travelling, but then I have to have the right composition to complement their eyeline for their intention plus whoever they’re speaking to. It’s a hell of a challenge.

JAMES

It’s spontaneous, yet there’s a certain structure to it

TIM

Very much so.

Andy Curtis, Anna Cummer, and Tyrell Crews in the Vertigo Theatre Production of The 39 Steps – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

How would you summarize what you’re trying to capture in the frame when you shoot a play?

TIM

When I’m shooting a play I’m not really paying a ton of attention to the text. I don’t fully absorb the storylines most of the time. I’m looking for moments of heightened emotional responses from the actors. Moments of high intensity. High action where lighting effects or special effects are going to go off. Things like that. But at the same time, those are really particular moments. Eighty percent of the play is still covered beyond that.

When I’m looking at the rest of the show what I’ve realized is that I’m not really looking a hundred percent at what’s happening through the viewfinder either. I kind of relax my eyes – kind of like when you take your glasses off. I relax my eyes a bit and I look at forms, negative space, where the highlights are and how elements complement one another, and I’m composing around that for the most part. So, it’s a bit of experience based, and it’s a bit of a sense for how shape and form and colour should fit and interplay, and those I think are the main approaches that I’m using these days

Jesse Lynn Anderson and Graham Percy in the Vertigo Theatre Production of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep adapted by Aaron Bushkowsky – Photo Tim Nguyen

JAMES

In addition to doing production stills you’re also doing some advertising work for theatre companies with your photography. Let’s talk about the new season campaign you created for Vertigo.

TIM

This has really been a natural progression of what I’m doing in the performing arts community. I’ve been doing the production stills and headshots for ages and doing advertising and poster work for the arts isn’t completely brand new for me, but it’s relatively recent.

One of the conversations I had with Vertigo towards the end of last season was that they were getting a little tired with their existing imagery and style especially when Lunchbox and ATP and everybody else was refreshing their brand. So, I presented about eight different styles of artwork that I thought were potentials in one of the pitch meetings with Craig their artistic director and Evelyn and Kendra their marketing people and Darcy who was their graphic designer. The two winning concepts were the lighting style of my own Lumination work which Craig was aware of because I’d actually done a gallery show at Vertigo the season before and had about twenty of the Lumination prints on display there for most of the season.

The other part of this concept was influenced by True Detective, the TV series. The intro and theme has a ton of video compositing that’s done layer upon layer of faces with cityscapes that are sort of washed across them. They kind of look like projections that kind of look like they’re coming from inside the skin. And it’s this beautiful style of work that got copied over, and over, and over again by other people when it was popularized including us to some degree. So, what I ended up pitching to Craig was a combination of those two things. I wanted to do a floating shape and I wanted to create a composite that was tailored to each show.

Sherlock Holmes and the Ravin’s Curse at Vertigo Theatre – By Tim Nguyen

JAMES

So, there are little clues in your composition about the themes of the show about the subject matter of the show. And right now, we’re looking at the Sherlock Holmes image.

TIM

Sherlock Holmes and the Raven’s Curse. So going with fairly literal imagery to begin with we’ve got the bird’s wings. The raven wing shape moving upwards and then the raven sort of sitting over top of this particular part of the Isle of Skye. The Isle of Skye being one of the main backdrops for the show. And we’ve got Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in the image as well.

JAMES

And then a mysterious woman.

TIM

There’s a mysterious woman of Asian descent. That’s why there’s dragon imagery in the background. At the time of creating this that role hadn’t been cast. So, we were looking for a creative way to incorporate the knowledge that there was going to be a third primary figure without making them identifiable. So, I decided to have her looking out into the scenery and having her back to camera.

JAMES

The great thing about this image is that when I look at it I want to know what this play’s about. It makes me curious. It looks intriguing and interesting. It looks mysterious.

TIM

Yeah, I’m really, really satisfied with how this one came out.

JAMES

Is this type of work something you want to pursue more?

TIM

I think so. This was a lot more satisfying to do than some of the piecemeal stuff that I’ve been doing just to keep bills paid. With this project, I was able to sit down for a longer period of time and concentrate on it and really give it some critical thought about how I wanted the aesthetic to come across.

Mercy from Overwatch by Porzelain PNG – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

You mentioned your Lumination series. Tell me a little bit about that project and how it got started.

TIM

So, Lumination was born from theatre as well. It was inspired by a Downstage play called In the Wake that I documented at the Motel Theater in 2010 and then they took it on tour. The production was entirely presented on a platform. It was five actors on a platform that was about ten by ten and they performed on it for ninety minutes. It was a fairly large chunk of plexiglass with pockets of lights that were on dimmers underneath that they could control and they could colour. And these were all Home Depot lights at the time.

And they did something absolutely beautiful with it. There was shadow play. There was puppetry. There was contact improv and shape creation with their bodies. It was just beautiful to take in. And it led to this immediate thought when I was documenting the play that I wanted to see what I could do with it. I wanted to see what I could do with that style of lighting.

And so, I asked Simon Mallett to borrow that set for probably about a year and a half before he let me borrow it, and I showed up at the Motel theatre one night after they’d done a run, and I put my own lights inside their box, and I put a light overhead. And that was the very first time that I had ever done that look. And it was just called the lightbox project or something like that at the time. I had a dancer, and I had a nude that I had brought to the space, and we just experimented with shape and form and musculature to see how it worked. And it worked out beautifully. Those photos are as good as any of the things that I shot during the two years after that.

And then a couple of years later, I got my own studio space, and I had Anton deGroot who built the set for In the Wake rebuild that stage in my studio. And I had that for three and a half years. I’ve since replaced that with something more robust. Something that’s actually got an acrylic top and I stick lights underneath and point them upwards now.

Justin Dale, world Champion Cyr Wheel Performer – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

So, what was the evolution of the subject matter then in terms of what you were shooting?

TIM

It didn’t start off as theatre, I can tell you that much. I started off mostly with dancers. I had a fairly good in with Dancers Studio West and a couple of other companies at the time. I was really interested to see what this hard contrast lighting would do with musculature, particularly legs and movement and jumping and that sort of thing. So, dancers were a natural and for the first year that I was doing this project I was asking people to come as they were. I did have some styling on site, but I was mostly interested in seeing who these people were as I was having a brief conversation with them and finding out what made them tick.

JAMES

You were looking to capture something of the person and the personality?

TIM

Yep. So, I was shooting this with a 200-millimetre lens. I was 25 feet away from the set. So, there was a bit of shouting back and forth over music and that sort of thing. But what it did was – it isolated people in space.

So, I just rolled a blank sheet of paper down behind them. And the studio was thirty feet by twelve feet. So, I’m on one end and my crew is sitting behind me and the subjects – they’re on the far end totally by themselves. No props. No sense of background. The overhead lights were on because that was how I chose to shoot all these. So, they didn’t even really have a sense of what the lighting style was like.

Scorpio Theatre – Photo by Tim Nguyen

TIM

For a lot of these people it was it was a leap of faith and just assuming that I knew what I was doing. To start with I didn’t give people a ton of direction. I asked people not to bring a lot of props. For the most part, it was articles of clothing. It was wigs. Anything handheld was passable, but I wanted to look at people as they were. Or, who they wanted to present themselves as, and sort of play within that realm and see what I could extract from them. And I found that really fascinating. But about halfway into that process the theater stuff starting to creep in.

I had the entire crew from Scorpio Theatre come down to see me. They brought swords, shields, chain mail, and axes. They were doing a stage combat based show and there was a bunch of short scenes all stacked together, and each one of the scenes devolved into some kind of big fight. It was super amusing. I really enjoyed their show. And this ended up being their marketing material for it. We ended up creating these long panorama images that were a composite of this person fighting this person. With this person overhead. And this person down here.

Pan and Hook – Lumination – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

So, you would shoot people individually or two people at a time and then compose the whole image.

TIM

For the most part, all of these shoots have been two people at the most. In fact, in the Peter Pan one, those two people were photographed six months apart.

JAMES

That’s how Orson Welles used to shoot his films. We’ll do the close up now in Europe and I’ll get the guy in Hollywood six months later.

TIM

That’s a good comparison, I like that. So that actually touched off a really hard change in what my intention was. I suddenly had people showing up and they were putting on these full characters. For me, they weren’t showing up as themselves. That led to 2017 where all I did was photograph people in cosplay. I did a year’s worth of people in these high colour, cartoony type of outfits, and those were the characters that they wanted to present, and that I found incredibly fascinating. At one point I had nine Disney Princesses show up all at once. So, we spent an entire morning photographing Cinderellas and Ariels and Rapunzels.

The YYC – Princesses – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

And then you decided to make a book.

TIM

I did. The book doesn’t have any of the Cosplay work in it, unfortunately. The book is entirely black and white and it is the work that I did between 2012 and 2015. Since that time, I’ve been doing everything in colour.

JAMES

Some great portraits have been done in black and white.

TIM

Absolutely. Some of the best portraits have been done in black and white. For me, black and white changes the way somebody takes in the image. You are not focusing on blemishes, skin tone, bags under the eyes. You’re not focusing on nudity. You’re not focusing on anything other than the texture of an image and where the light is and the negative space. And those are all things that I gravitate towards, quite heavily.

Christina Robertson – Lumination – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

So, I’m curious when you’re going to do a portrait and you’re trying to capture somebody – how do you go about doing that?

TIM

It’s similar to how I approach doing headshots for people. And I think portraiture sort of evolved naturally out of my headshot business. When somebody comes for a professional headshot the first conversation I have with them is how uncomfortable are they being in the studio knowing that they’re about to be on camera? Because despite all of us being performers in one way or another, there is a heavy sect of people that really don’t want to be on camera. They would much rather be behind a keyboard. Behind the lens. Behind the scenes.

With portraiture, I put a lot of stock into putting people at ease before we even get started. And I feel like part of that is actually my personality. I present myself as very easygoing, very relaxed, low intensity, and that puts people at ease most of the time. So that’s a starting point and the portrait work I’ve been doing for the last year and a half has largely been conversational. So, I have a lot of outtakes, where people’s mouths are moving, or their eyes are darting around, and that sort of thing. And that’s something that I’ve had to teach myself to shoot around.

Erin Madill – Portrait – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

And so maybe you’re capturing the moment when they’re thinking about the question rather than answering the question.

TIM

Those pondering kinds of looks are quite popular.

JAMES

Because they drop the facade. They’re internally in their mind.

TIM

As soon as you get somebody really thinking about something all of the external stuff goes away.

So that is how a lot of my portrait work has been developing over the last year. I’ve been discussing, in advance, with people that are coming for a portrait what subject matter we should get into. And it’s led down some very curious paths including been given some really brutal trauma stories from people. And I’ve been let in on secrets from people that I will never – never redistribute. But it’s also led to this artistic wall that I’ve run into where I’m not totally sure how to present that work now, because of the context of how it was given to me. But I’m trying to find the right voice to put that into the world without exposing people in the wrong sense. The best that I’ve come up with so far is, I think, I’m going to discuss the questions that were asked more than the answers that were given. So, I’m sitting on about a year’s worth of portrait work that’s both beautiful and brutal.

Zac Savage – Portrait – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

Let’s talk a little bit about the project you did for the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary which is being unveiled this Saturday during Alumni weekend.

TIM

The Rococo Punk?

JAMES

Yeah. What exactly is Rococo Punk?

TIM

My interpretation of Rococo Punk – as an art style – is effectively the embodiment of Renaissance silliness.

JAMES

I like your definition better than what I read on Wikipedia. How did the project come about?

TIM

I had been developing a Renaissance style of lighting that I had been using mostly on nudes and on portraits, and I wanted to do something broader with that. The first thing I did was rent this dress from the university and I hired Natasha Strickey and we generated that photo. And after she graduated she ended up becoming a good friend of mine. And we’ve done a lot of creative work together like that, that has influenced to a heavy degree, the way that I’ve moved forward.

Natasha Strickey – Lumination – Photo by Tim Nguyen

TIM

And then I had a conversation about a year and a half ago about doing something like that with April Viczko, who directed a show called, The Learned Ladies at the University of Calgary three seasons ago. What I actually pitched to her was that I wanted to get the cast back together from that show and see if we could do a renaissance group portrait with everyone. Unfortunately for me, I hadn’t really considered that some of those actors aren’t in town anymore, or they’ve ceased acting, or they’ve just moved on to different parts of their lives. So that wasn’t really an option.

April counter-offered and suggested we try and see if there’s an event that we could wrap this inside of and get somebody to fund it. And the next time we sat down that was exactly what she had done. The Alumni Association was interested. Alumni Weekend was interested. So, let’s see if we can get some grad students and prominent alumni to come down for this rather than having to get these specific actors.

JAMES

This is a big project.

TIM

Humongous. I had the responsibility of the shooting days, and the post-production was entirely on my shoulders. But there was a team of about five people that did the initial groundwork and gathered the costumes and the casting and did all the fittings. And all of that took about a year and then on Alumni Weekend last year there was a team of 30 people that were working on this plus all the talent that came which for the most part are alumni, faculty and students and includeS 62 different people.

The camera was thirty feet back from the set. And I had it up on a platform on a tripod for the entire weekend. We photographed about two people at a time. It took two full days. It was about 20 hours of photography. And then it took all of October last year to put the image together.

So, this is going to end up as an enormous print that is going to be 60 inches wide that’s going to hang in the Reeve Theatre lobby. So right outside the space where we created it. And that’ll be a permanent installation that we’re revealing on the seventh of September and I’ve got wall space set aside at my studio, which I’ve just finished renovating, and I’m going to have my own copy of this made.

Rococo Punk – University of Calgary School of Creative and Performing Arts – Photo by Tim Nguyen

The grand reveal for the Rocco Punk was held on Saturday, September 7th in the Reeve Theatre Lobby during the University of Calgary’s Alumni Weekend. The photograph features University of Calgary alumni from the School of Creative and Performing Arts including: Anton deGroot, Michaella Haynes, Sarah Mitchell, Brad Mahon, Odessa Johnston, Julie Orton, Megan Koch, Cayley Wreggitt, Sadaf Ganji, Brittany Bryan, Jason Mehmel, Connor Pritchard, Marisa Roggeveen, Mark Bellamy, Emily Losier, Michèle Moss, Tim Nguyen, Natasha Strickey, Donovan Seidle, Pil Hansen, Allison Lynch, Tina Guthrie, Laurel Simonson, Jason Galeos, Meghann Mickalsky, Christopher Hunt, Vicky Storich, Clem Martini, Louisa Adria, Shondra Cromwell-Krywulak, Allan Bell, Allison Weninger, Kaili Che, Megan Stephan, Lisa Russell, Ana Santa Maria, Madeline Roberts, Myah Van Horm, Elizabeth Rajchel, Onika Henry, Val Campbell, Hailey McLeod, Taylor Ritchie, Liam Whitley, Adam Kostiuk, Bruce Barton, Zachary McKendrick, Simon Mallet, Braden Griffith, Laura Hynes, Lana Henchell.

Tim Nguyen – Behind the Scenes of Rococo Punk

Christopher Duthie, Julie Orton & Ayla Stephen: A Dinner Party

Posted on by James Hutchison
Allison Lynch is Darling, Ayla Stephen is Boo, Kiana Wu is Sweetie, and Geoffrey Simon Brown is Baby in A Dinner Party by Christopher Duthie. Directed by Julie Orton

We write songs about love. We tell stories about love. We long for love. We celebrate love. Love is all around us and yet we don’t always know what it means. If we did we wouldn’t need to keep discussing it and exploring it and talking about it. We are, it seems to me, bound by our heart’s desire. So, what is this thing called love? I think if I was to define love – I would simply call it absurd.

So, I’m really excited that Christopher Duthie, Julie Orton, and Ayla Stephen have joined forces to bring Calgary the premiere of Christopher Duthie’s new play, A Dinner Party, which just so happens to be an absurdist examination of love.

When Boo, Darling, Baby and Sweetie are unable to agree on a common definition of Love, their otherwise normal dinner party spirals into an absurd chaos of marriage proposals, identity crises, culinary emergency and polite cannibalism. Part absurdist meta-theatre, part romantic cringe comedy, A Dinner Party asks how we know our individual Selfs and understand our Love for one another in the fragmented social landscape of the 21st Century.

If that doesn’t sound like a fun night at the theatre I don’t know what does. I sat down with Christopher, Julie, and Ayla while they were in rehearsal to talk with them about the play and how it explores relationships and love.

JAMES HUTCHISON

We’re going to be talking about your play A Dinner Party which is an exploration of love and so I’m curious about what your favourite love song is and why?

CHRISTOPHER DUTHIE

I think my favourite love song is, Naïve Melody – This Must Be the Place by the Talking Heads because it’s so beautiful and also because it’s about what we think love will be and then we discover what it is.

JAMES

Are you checking Google music?

AYLA STEPHEN

Yeah. (Laughs) I can’t think of any. I love – love songs so much and they always hit me right in the heart but then I forget about them and find new ones.

JULIE ORTON

I have two. The first one is Little Person by Jon Brion and it’s from the movie Synecdoche, New York which is a Charlie Kaufman movie.

JAMES

It’s a strange movie.

JULIE

It’s a very strange movie but it’s a beautiful song and it’s very reminiscent of this play. It’s about going through the world in a disconnected way hoping that one day you’ll bump into that other person you’ve been waiting for and that you can just live a simple life together with that other person. And my other one is When you Get to Ashville by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell because it’s just a really pretty lovely yearning song.

Christopher Duthie – Playwright – A Dinner Party

JAMES

So, where did the inspiration for this play come from?

CHRISTOPHER

I was doing my MFA in creative writing from 2015 to 2016 in Guelph when I was living in Toronto and I needed to figure out what to do for my thesis, and I had literally written down this conversation that I’d woken up with in my head that was funny, and then I’d put it away and I had figured once I finish my thesis I will come back to it. And I think I was secretly intimidated by the pressure of writing a thesis play and having to write something serious and important. And as a way of psyching myself out of that kind of thinking I just said, “I’m going to write this ridiculous play and try to make myself laugh and give myself the freedom to make myself laugh and see if anything comes from it.” And that scene became the play and quite quickly the structure and setting of the play became very clear, and I found that as I started writing something emerged that would be funny at first and then it would stop being funny and it became kind of serious, and once it was serious something real would happen and it would become funny again.

JAMES

So, what is the play about?

CHRISTOPHER

A Dinner Party is an absurdist party about two couples whose evening is thrown off course into a kind of chaos of marriage proposals, heartbreak, culinary emergency, polite cannibalism…but essentially it’s about two young couples disagreeing on what love is.

JAMES

The definition of love.

AYLA

It’s a millennial viewpoint on love and relationships that’s absurdist and highly relatable and also very funny. And I say millennial in a good way. It’s not derogatory and it’s not a judgemental term. It’s just that’s where we are and that’s where these characters are living.

JULIE

And one of the great things about the way Christopher has written the play is that it can to be explored in an ungendered way. So, every character could be played by anyone and have any sexual orientation. And it’s funny because when you end up with your cast, just by virtue of the dynamics in the room, all of a sudden, you’re making a different comment on a love dynamic. And so you can tell many different versions of love and many different stories.

And so we have a couple in the play who have been together for a long time and in our version of the play, they’re being played by two female-identifying performers. And so all of a sudden, the dynamics of an older settled love between two women is a really interesting story to dig into compared to the younger love couple in the play being played by a male-identifying performer and a female-identifying performer. Suddenly the dynamic of the settled female couple becomes much more interesting when compared to the younger male and female couple.

And the first time I was introduced to the play was when we did a reading at Christopher’s house. So myself and Mike Tan, Graham Percy, and Brett Dahl, were invited to read the play. And so in that dynamic, I was the only female and there were different dynamics at play for sure. But it didn’t change the arc of the play, it didn’t change the relationships at the core and what their issues are. It was fascinating. Now we have the inverse of that where we have one male and three females, and it works just the same.

JAMES

Who have you cast in the show?

AYLA

I’m playing the character Boo, and Allison Lynch is playing Darling, who is my partner in the show. And we have Geoffrey Simon Brown playing Baby and Kiana Wu playing Sweetie.

JAMES

Did you make any interesting discoveries during the writing process in terms of love that you didn’t expect?

CHRISTOPHER

I think I confirmed ideas that I had always sort of operated with. Like, I don’t necessarily believe that everyone experiences love in the same way. I don’t necessarily believe that there’s one person for everyone. I don’t necessarily think that everyone wants as their ultimate fulfillment of self to be with another person. I think those sorts of ideas made themselves apparent.

JULIE

There are definitely parts of both couples that I can relate to. You have this young couple that are in the early stages of being together. Like six weeks of being together and everything is wonderful. Everything is new and fresh. And there’s definitely parts of that relationship where I go, “Oh, I remember what that was like.” And it was so perfect, right? “Why can’t we live there forever?”

And then there’s this more settled couple that I recognize immediately. And I think, okay, I love the intimacy of how well they know each other. And I love the comfortability between them, but I also see the traps of that. And I also see the disconnections that can happen after spending a lot of time with someone. And so, I think for me, same as Christopher, it just confirmed the things that had been swimming around in my head.

JAMES

Ayla, what about yourself? Have you discovered anything new in terms of your views of love and relationships?

AYLA

I haven’t been in relationships as long as my character has but there is that beautiful comfortability and knowing that even if you’re having a fight there’s still that underlying love, and support and commitment that’s there. And not to say that’s easy or that makes it okay when you are not nice to the person you love, but there is a kind of security built into that.

Julie Orton – Director – A Dinner Party

JAMES

Why do we do that? Why aren’t we nice to the people we love? As actors, you do dramas all the time, where people who are supposed to love each other are not nice to each other. Any insights on good old human nature?

JULIE 

I think in order to be in a long term committed relationship, you have to maintain a certain amount of vulnerability at all times. And I think it is human nature when you are feeling not as strong as you did yesterday or if you’re feeling a little insecure to occasionally swipe out in order to protect yourself. And sadly, it tends to be at the person that you love the most, because they know you the best. And it’s frustrating, and you wish it didn’t happen, but it does.

JAMES

Do you think in love we expect too much from our partner?

JULIE

Oh yes. And I think committing to one person is a really cuckoo experiment because you are an individual fully formed human with a much different experience leading up to the day you met them. And so, your way of interpreting things or looking at things or defining things is different than theirs. And so sometimes you come up against something that is just a conflict of experience and it’s really hard to say we’re two different people, but we’re going to continue on the same path, even though we don’t know where this is going.

JAMES

Is that a cultural thing or is it a human thing?

CHRISTOPHER

Without giving too much away I have right in the play that we have these two holy things in the West, in our culture. We have the dream of the perfect monogamous love, and then we have this dream of total personal freedom. And those ideas are at war constantly. Because I don’t really believe you can have both. Because I think how we define perfect love in our culture involves giving up a piece of yourself and surrendering to the fact that I’m with you on this road that we are creating together. And that is going to involve some of where you want to go, and that’s going to involve some of where I want to go, and we are going to disagree. And if our dream is to stay together, then we need to figure out a way to do that.

Ayla Stephen is Boo in A Dinner Party

JAMES

How much do you think we understand our partners and how does the play explore that?

AYLA

I think the play explores that quite a bit. I think that might be one of the thesis points. How are we communicating and what language are we using? Because if your timelines are different, and the way you’re talking about getting there is different – even if it might look the same – it’s not the same thing. And that can cause feelings of insecurity and vulnerability that can lead to those miscommunications and those anger points. So it’s like, “Oh, it sounds like we’re not working towards the same thing? Is this the right relationship for us to be in?”

JULIE

And I think another thing that the play explores is not just how well do we know our partners, but how well do we know ourselves in our partnerships, because I think we invest a lot in a dual identity and we end up losing a little bit of our individual identities. And so, at the end of the day, when you sit down with yourself and think how well do I know my partner – I think it’s actually who am I in this relationship?

JAMES

Julie, I want to ask how did you go from reading it in Chris’s home to now sitting in the director’s chair. At what point did you go, “I’m going to be the director?”

JULIE

Not one point did that happen. When I read it my gut reaction was I really want to be in this play because there are so few opportunities to do absurdist Theatre in Calgary these days. There’s been a little more this season with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Waiting for Godot which is great but not new absurd theatre. I don’t think I have seen a new absurdist play in years. And Christopher’s writing is so funny and quick and smart, and really profoundly beautiful.

So after reading it that first time, I just thought, “Oh, my God, I really hope he’s gathered us all here because he wants us to be in his play.” And then I didn’t hear a lot about it because he was working on his thesis. And then he reached out to me and said, “I want to talk to you about A Dinner Party,” and we met for coffee and he said, “I think you should direct it.” And it scared the poop out of me James, but I think I said yes immediately and then I went home and I was like, “What have I done? I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no idea the first thing about how to direct a play, how to lead a room, how to talk to actors. I just know how to be talked to as an actor.”

AYLA

See, and I disagreed. 

JULIE

Yeah, you did.

AYLA

Julie and I worked on Goodnight Desdemona Good Morning Juliet together. And that was the first time we’ve been actors in a room together since University. And I was like, Julie’s had so many opportunities to work as an actor in Calgary and outside of Calgary. She’s immensely skilled and the way that she’s able to communicate with a director about what she’s doing and what she’s doing with us as actors in the scene I was like, “Julie should move into directing.” 

CHRISTOPHER

You were the first person that said, “Julie could direct this.” 

JULIE

And I’m excited that I said yes because it’s been profoundly exciting in the room. It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, for sure. But there’s nothing I like more than sitting in a room and watching actors pull apart a script and invest in characters. And this is a character-rich play and so it hasn’t felt like I’m a total fish out of water. It feels like I can actually communicate what’s happening. And it’s been so joyful and I don’t know what happens next with me as a director, but right now, God, I love it!

Playwright/Producer Christopher Duthie; Sound Designer Thomas Geddes; Actors Kiana Wu, Geoffrey Simon Brown and Allison Lynch; Actor/Producer Ayla Stephen; Director Julie Orton; Fight Director Brianna Johnston; Set/Costume/Props Designer Deitra Kalyn – in rehearsal for A Dinner Party by Christopher Duthie

JAMES

So, you were all at the University of Calgary together and I understand that you’ve wanted to work together again for some time and now you’re finally making that happen. What was the process of bringing A Dinner Party to the stage?

AYLA

Chris did a lot of the legwork writing grants and finding opportunities and making partnerships and connecting with people in the community to get extra support. Like Vertigo came on board, once we had some grants, and they’re really doing a lot to support indie artists who are coming up.

CHRISTOPHER

They’re our venue sponsors.

AYLA

We had that support and we had people in our lives who were really excited about seeing us working together again because we’ve established ourselves as artists in the community now. And we raised additional funds through a Kickstarter campaign and it’s all for generating new work which I think hasn’t been happening as robustly as it had been in Calgary about five years ago. And we’re excited to be contributing to that. 

CHRISTOPHER

I will say too that, as much as we are friends we admire each other’s work. And what we’ve talked about is coming to each other with projects we’re interested in leading and trying to find a sustainable way of supporting each other and making theatre in the long term. And also to help each other build the skills that we have and can share with each other to develop our own practices and production abilities.

JAMES

So, just before we wrap up here what’s your favourite line from the play? Without giving too much away.

AYLA

“I could so be a shepherd.” I love that line.

CHRISTOPHER

It feels a bit like tooting my own horn but actually, I really like the line, “No, I knew you were behind me.”

JULIE

Yes, that’s a good one. I like, “Love isn’t just one feeling it’s an amalgamation of every feeling.”

JAMES

And final question, just curious, what is polite cannibalism?

CHRISTOPHER

Oh, you’ll have to find out.

AYLA

Come see the show.

JULIE

Pinkies up.

***

A Dinner Party runs from June 20 to June 29th in the Studio at Vertigo Theatre. Tickets are just $30.00 for adults and $25.00 for students and seniors and can be purchased by calling the Vertigo Box Office at 403.221.3708 or online at VertigoTheatre.com. Please note that the show does contain adult themes and nudity and is intended for a mature audience.

Calgary theatre artists Christopher Duthie, Julie Orton and Ayla Stephen are proud to present the independent premiere production of A Dinner Party by Christopher Duthie, directed by Julie Orton at the Vertigo Studio Theatre from June 20-29, 2019.

Written as Christopher Duthie’s MFA thesis in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, A Dinner Party is a comedy about true love for the post-truth era. This new take on the absurdist genre is hitting the stage for the first time in an independent production supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, a generous community of Kickstarter crowd funders, the venue sponsorship of Vertigo Theatre and the partnership of Inside Out Theatre’s Good Host Audience Inclusion Program.

A Dinner Party is the pilot project of an indie-producing collaboration between Duthie, Orton and Stephen. With over a decade of experience each onstage as actors and offstage as playwrights, theatre creators and/or producers, they are banding together to play a more active role in making exciting theatre happen in Calgary.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.