Christine is an Edmonton / amiskwacîwâskahikan-based theatre artist, teacher, director, and artistic director of Small Matters Productions. She holds a BSc in Physics, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Drama. She is co-creator of and performer in Small Matters’ eight full-length shows, including the interactive comedy hit, “For Science!” (2018-23), she has just premiered her new show “The Space Between Stars”, a radical adaption of “The Little Prince”. Watch for the forthcoming western inter-provincial collaboration, “The Spinsters” (premièring 2023/24). She is a frequent collaborator with the Edmonton-based companies Catch the Keys Productions, artistic associate with Toy Guns Dance Theatre, and director of the Play the Fool Festival of clown-theatre and physical comedy. She specializes in integrated & collaborative creation, audience experience design, interactive comedy, and physical storytelling.
www.smallmatters.ca
www.christinelesiak.com
Instagram: @smallmattersp
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Transcript
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Phil Rickaby
I’m Phil Rickaby, and I’ve been a writer and performer for almost 30 years. But I’ve realised that I don’t really know as much as I should about the theatre scene outside of my particular Toronto bubble.
Now, I’m on a quest to learn as much as I can about the theatre scene across Canada. So join me as I talk with mainstream theatre creators, you may have heard of an indie artist you really should know, as we find out just what it takes to be Stageworthy.
If you value the work that I do want Stageworthy please consider leaving a donation either as a one time thing or on a recurring monthly basis. Stageworthy is created entirely by me and I give it to you free of charge with no advertising or other sponsored messages. your continuing support helps me to cover the cost of producing and distributing the show. Just for people donating $5 A month would help me cover the cost of podcast hosting alone. Help me continue to bring you this podcast, you can find a link to donate in the show notes which you can find in your podcast app or the website at stageworthy.ca. Now, onto the show.
Christine Lesniak is an Edmonton based theatre artists teacher, Director, clown and artistic director of small matters productions. She joined me to talk about coming to theatre and clown to science being a fringe mainstay, and her passion for immersive and site specific work. Here’s our conversation.
Christine, thank you for joining me to get started. A lot of the people that I speak to on this podcast, they’ve been in theatre or interested in theatre since childhood. Now, that’s not the case with you, you were not a theatre kid.
Christine Lesiak
I was not.
Phil Rickaby
You’re a Science Kid. So how did a Science Kid find their way to theatre?
Christine Lesiak
Well, I mean, arguably, I was a theatre kid who didn’t know they were a theatre kid. Because where I grew up in New Brunswick in Fredericton, at the time, there just wasn’t much opportunity for that. Right. So in retrospect, I think I always was a theatre kid.
But that’s not something I ever really acted upon in any kind of serious way until I became an adult. And I was able to do science and I came from a background of a mom who was in pre med herself in school, so I just didn’t like the family culture of yes, you should go into science. So that’s what I did. That was great. I really enjoyed it. I got a physics degree at the University of New Brunswick and moved out to here to Alberta to go to school at the University of Alberta for graduate studies and physics. And it was fine. But I discovered that really, a physics as a calling. It is. I was fine. But I wasn’t great at it. And I didn’t love it. So I didn’t really see the point. For me, personally,
Phil Rickaby
the see that’s an important distinction, because I know I we all know somebody who didn’t love what they did, but they spent so much money on it. So they stuck with it. And then many, many years later, they’re very miserable, but because they did the whole, like I went to university for this thing, they stuck with it, which is never really a good choice. So how did you come to the realisation that that you are going to do this? Theatre clowny thing rather than science?
Christine Lesiak
Well, I left the thing about physics is much like the arts, you have to be super passionate about it to go anywhere and be develop a career be any good at it. And so without that passion and drive, I didn’t really see it. It’s not like an engineering degree, or a doctor becoming a doctor MD or anything is you don’t automatically fall into a job. You have to work really, really hard to craft a spot for your self in that field. And I just did not. So I ended up stopping like leaving that doing a few other things. In the meantime had babies. That was a great time in my life to have kids. I’d been married a few years at that point. And then when my earliest thirty’s, when my kids got a little bit older old enough to leave the house on occasion, I just needed to do something. And I’ve always been interested in performing. You know, I’ve been doing some, a little bit of singing lessons and attempting to learn guitar, which I never did. Very, very bad. And I decided to take an improv class here in Edmonton with rapid fire theatre, a very well known improv company. And I realised oh my god, this is, this is the dream I love. I’m a performer. And I realised all that, historically, everything I’ve always done has kind of taken me there. And then then I discovered clown through studying with John Henderson. And that’s like app, this is the thing. It’s the elements I love from improv, the spontaneity, the presence, the being in the moment that not knowing the authentic reaction in the moment, without, but with more structure. So I could You could tell deeper stories, you could have more of an arc, you could refer something that you knew the bones of it were very solid, but then when I hit the stage, be something that lived in a different place than a lot of other standard forms of theatre for me, and also the physical element of it. I really liked.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Cloud gives you the freedom to interact with an audience in the way that sketch doesn’t. Or, or in most forms of theatre, because you have to stick with with your script, but a clown is allowed to react and to you know, if somebody in the audience has a weird laugh, you can react to that in a way that you really can’t and you’re doing a play. Yeah,
Christine Lesiak
exactly. And I love it. I love the constant surprised, I get bored easily. So I love being in shows where I never exactly know what’s going to happen. I mean, arguably, one could say one never knows exactly what’s going to happen in any live performance. But let’s be honest, and Samia no more than others.
Phil Rickaby
That’s very true. That’s very true. Now, you’ve managed to combine clown and theatre and science in it, I think. Have you always done that? Or is that a relatively recent thing that you’ve you’ve done shows like for science and the space between stars, like, how, when did that come about for you?
Christine Lesiak
I think it really became integrated around 2015. I went back to school and did my MFA in theatre practice at the University of Alberta. And part of what I was really interested and looking at as a part of my own personal journey at that time was integrating what felt like different elements of myself, I had my theatre clowning self, I had my history as a scientist and being still a science nerd self and, and then I had my being a mom, a parent, self. And I felt like these were disparate forms, separate elements of my life. And I wondered, I was really curious about how to integrate that. So that I spent a lot of time doing that. The medically I would say, during my master’s degree, which is kind of the thing that produced the this work, I think, is just acknowledging that, in my heart, I am still the nerd in the lab, to a certain extent, and take that practice that philosophy and put that into my art. I also really wanted to speak to that audience of people who are practising scientists who love it and respect it, but who also love art because I know so many people who are like that.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, in terms of, of that, you were talking about this, this, this last that that last study that you were doing, as far as the intersection of clown, like, all of that sort of stuff, like how does, how do you see the similarity between say, what we were considered two separate things of cloud and theatre, even though they’re very closely related. In terms of of putting those together? How do you create a how do you think of those as as similar yet different?
Christine Lesiak
Cloud and theatre? Yeah.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah,
Christine Lesiak
tricky question, isn’t it? I. For me, it’s about the liveness of the moment. It’s about the ability to react in real time to what is happening in the room, I do do what we call sort of more traditional fourthwall theatre at times. But even then, the use of the clown technique of being in the moment I think, is just good acting as well. I would say that with my mentor Jen Henderson, one of the things that she would say is that with a clown, the emotion has never legislated. You feel what you feel on the night authentically and that is it and in a in a Play, obviously, you’re likely to be sad at a moment or happy, no moment of joyful in a moment, but you can’t really ever be but never attempt to fake the emotion. So for me, that’s a bit different. I think there’s a lot of blurred lines between it, it’s a hard, it’s a hard thing to say I would say in terms of style, though, I have come to believe that clowning is a pattern of behaviour rather than an aesthetic. And that is what I now teach personally. So the clown behaves in a certain way, whether or not they’re wearing a nose or not wearing a nose, whether they’re speaking or they’re not speaking. And that pattern of behaviour is one of discovery, and wonder and constant surprise and finding novel solutions to things. And being present with the audience.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that’s, that’s one of the interesting things about it is that, to me, there is so much freedom in being in a cloud like to, to, to discover, to, to even just like, see the audience in a way that you that you don’t, which in a theatrical experience can be a terrifying thing to do is to, to, to, you know, see the audience and to, to really take them in which, and a lot of cases of theatre artists don’t always enjoy, because it’s, it’s like, you’re going to look somebody in the face, and they’re going to like, I don’t know, not be enjoying themselves or something. But it’s like the, that that risk of like, of seeing them and taking them in. It’s, it’s terrifying, and yet also, so exciting and beautiful.
Christine Lesiak
Absolutely for so for me, that’s where a lot of the risk lies is putting a thing out that you don’t know what the thing is. And the thing is, the audience will always tell you what the thing is, you can think you know what you’re doing, but you will not know until they tell you. And the act of audience listening, no matter what kind of theatre you’re doing, because most plays will have a laugh here or there, you need to learn to be able to hear that and listen to that and, and take them on board. Super interesting what you say about the what happens when you see your audience. Because for me, when I see an audience for the first time, in a show with a lot of text, I will forget my work like my head, because I am now so interested in being with them that I will forget. And I’m so in that particular moment that I am not thinking about the next moment. So for me, it takes extra extra rehearsal time with audience in order to be able to live that moment and be the wisdom at the same time. When I
Phil Rickaby
was creating my solo show that commandment, my director Richard bones said to me, Well, of course, you’re going to like, make eye contact with audience members. As you’re performing this. They’re your scene partner. And he said that, and I never considered the idea of that I would have to actually, you know, talk to people. But he was right. But it was terrifying. And the firt, I will admit that the first time I performed that show in front of an audience, I did not make eye contact, I faked it, I like looked between people. But that’s because I was too terrified. But eventually I was able to do it. And it’s still terrifying. But it’s also so like, bringing them into this thing I’m going to do in this thing, we’re going to this journey we’re going to go through together. And it’s often then that I decide, okay, so you I’m going to tell this story to and you Oh, you’re going to get this part. Like, it’s like, you see who’s reacting to you and that sort of way. One of the things that that I found interesting in what you were saying just a second ago, though, was about how you don’t know what something is until the audience tells you. Yeah, or I remember performing when, when I was working with with Keystone theatre, we perform these plays that are in silent film, we’re doing, say the last man on earth, and people would come up to us afterwards. And they would tell us their favourite moments, they would tell us what they thought the play was about. And at the beginning of our tour, we used to be like, no, no, that’s not what was happening. But after a while, it was like, oh, no, no, no, no, tell me what you think was happening. Because I, everybody gets something different out of it. And so I want to know what your experience of this show was. It was so exciting to learn what what this audience and these people thought we were doing and what was behind it, because they all filled it in. And for them, they were right. And that’s really what mattered.
Christine Lesiak
That is the magic. I think of a well crafted show is different people will interpret it differently. And no one’s wrong. One person wants told me the last person to know anything about the play as the playwright. And certainly in this last show, I did the space between stars which I started writing in 2016. And finally when up, you know, we just closed it a little over a week ago. I went from playwright to actor and that I’m all of a sudden on like what The hell that I mean when I wrote this, like, on an asshole winder, right. And this is after having revised it, I don’t know how many times. And once again, the audience ultimately told us what it was certainly our show for science, which is if you go to my website, small matters.ca, you can find some clips of it. It’s a nonverbal clown show where we get a lot of audience members on stage to do very silly experiments. When we first opened that in 2008, teen, it was such a radical experiment, I told my performing partner, we’re just opening at the Edmonton fringe. This could be the longest 10 Days of Our Lives, they might hate us. This could be a total train wreck of a run. Fortunately, that was not the case. It did incredibly well. And we’ve been able to do it a few times. Few, quite a few runs ever since. But again, you have to just trust that they will tell you what the thing is, especially if it’s something novel that’s never been done.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I found every show that I’ve ever created the first time an audience sees it. I don’t know, like, I think I know what they’re going to do. But like we would do the Keystone stuff. We know we would be laughing in the rehearsal hall. But we also know that once an audit like we’re laughing, but will an audience find this funny. And so we would if we weren’t on stage at the beginning, there’d always be this like, this tension the first time you perform it like, Okay, this is where we think the first laugh is, is that isn’t actually going to happen. And then they would do and you be like, okay, oh, we were right. We’re not dead for the next like 10 days or whatever.
Christine Lesiak
Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, I know that so well, I and also great shows those Keystone shows. Love those shows, so beautifully crafted, would love to see him again, just saying.
Phil Rickaby
We’d love to do them.
Christine Lesiak
Yes. All that all that. But your people are a bit scattered. Now. I know.
Phil Rickaby
We have scattered to the wind. Our piano player, for example, is now conducting the tour of Hamilton. So well. Oh, come in. I mean, he’s a little real job. I don’t like yeah, no, come on. Come on. Really? Hamilton as if that’s going to be a thing.
Christine Lesiak
Never heard of it. Yeah. I, but to build on what you were just saying. I think that is the part that so excites me about theatre is is the not knowing. And also, you learn so much about your audiences. Once you’ve done a show about where that first laugh comes. Like. I don’t know if you’ve had that experience of of going. Okay, this is where the first laugh usually happens. Didn’t happen. It’s okay. It’s a little bit quiet. This is where the second laugh usually had. Oh, no, that didn’t happen either. Oh, good. It’d be a long one.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah. I mean, I’ve had shows where we were so certain where the laughs were, that it just wasn’t funny for the audience. Like, we were like, set, it was almost like we were setting it up and like, and then nobody would laugh. And that was like, our opening night was nobody laughed. And then after was you, we were like, okay, so we have to forget about laughter. We have to forget about it. Because we let them figure it out. And, you know, similarly with stone stuff sometimes, because we were silent, the audience would forget that they didn’t have to be silent. And so sometimes it would take a while for them to surge a laugh because we weren’t saying anything. We’re like, a really tiny laughs, if at all. But if you could see them, they were smiling. You just you had to have some way of teaching them that it was okay. Because they react to how what you’re doing on stage so intensely?
Christine Lesiak
Absolutely, absolutely. We certainly found that in our show for science, because although we don’t speak, there were some tasks that are cooperative for audience members. And it’s really interesting to see during a show whether or not they figure out they’re allowed to talk or not.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, no, absolutely. Like, we would have audiences that didn’t know they weren’t meant to laugh. I think there are shows like, you know, you can look at something like Blue Man Group, when they don’t talk, but they have an announcer that in some ways in you know, they have the announcer who sort of let the audience know that it’s okay to make noise because there’s some talking and you need something I think sometimes to to let people know that it’s okay.
Christine Lesiak
Yes, you absolutely have to teach your audience what the expectations are, especially if you’re doing something unusual. We see this all the time and site specific and immersive work. You’re renegotiating the rules of engagement for your audience. You have to you have to take responsibility for teaching them.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, I want to talk about about site specific and immersive work, especially the immersive work. What What draws you I mean, I know I’m fascinated by the I’ve heard about like Sleep No More in New York. I haven’t been able to see again, things like that, but like being able to construct some thinking into space and to sort of like throw an audience into the middle of it is really an exciting prospect for you what, what draws you to immersive theatre? And how do you? How does it inform what you do?
Christine Lesiak
I, I get bored easily. So I love for me, it’s an extension of the cloud work, you get audience in a space and you don’t know exactly what they’re going to do. So it forces me to be incredibly present in that moment. It’s fun for me, it’s fun. And to give people offer them an experience that is different from the ordinary, and to go with them on that journey in a way where they are maybe not affecting the actual action of the play or the piece. But they are affecting the mood and the emotion and the movement of what’s happening. They are affecting it on a really on some kind of level. And more so than one can with a seated audience. So I find that super interesting. It’s one of the things I studied in my master’s degree was really the application of clown technique, to immersive experiences. And it really again, it comes down to the listening, it’s all the clown technique.
Phil Rickaby
It’s funny about listening, isn’t it? I mean, I remember, almost in every show I’ve ever done, there’s a reminder from the director, you’re not listening to each other. You think that you’re like going at it and then you’re, you’re not it doesn’t work because you’re not listening and listening. For in clown you have to listen to the audience to your partner, if there is one to everything. And I think that that by studying clown, you can get a greater appreciation and a little, maybe it becomes a little easier to drop into listening both to your scene partner to the audience in a way that that is really necessary.
Christine Lesiak
I agree. And improv training is also really good for that. I think what I like about clown training is it takes the pressure, uh, weirdly takes the pressure of being funny off for me because you don’t have to be witty. So the pressure to be witty, often comes in improv, or at least we put on ourselves, even if you’re with an instructor who’s not interested in that the great Keith Johnstone, who just passed away last week actually, once wrote said I don’t I’ve heard him say anyway, just be more boring. Just be more boring. Another brilliant cloud instructor once said, be interested. Not interesting.
Phil Rickaby
That is, that’s really fascinating. Because I think that shows like, Saturday Night Live Kids in the Hall. Although sometimes they’re weird enough to not necessarily be funny, but just weird. They get it into your head that you have to be funny. And even it’s so like, Whose Line Is It Anyway, which is a big entryway for some people to learn about what improv might look like, the pressure to be funny is something that I think comes in and it is an intimidating thing for a lot of people absolutely to go into it because they’re thinking I’m not funny. How can I do this, when it doesn’t have to be well,
Christine Lesiak
and I also I think we are funny when we’re being ourselves. And that is that is the clown like we are, we are all funny when we just be and express who we are. Now that isn’t to say that I don’t write jokes into my work. I do that all the time. But the joke is in the text, or at least I hope it is. Whereas most of the laughs actually come from the behaviour. Right? This show I did the space between stars is actually it’s very, it’s quite sad and dramatic. It’s it’s definitely not a comedy. But at the top of the show, I get tonnes of laughs because I was this quirky clown character who just got super excited about science in a nerdy way. And it was just, she was funny. She wasn’t saying anything funny, but she was. And I think that’s where that’s how we fall in love with characters. That’s how we fall in love with them. personalities.
Phil Rickaby
Mm hmm. Absolutely. Oh, you know, one of the things that you mentioned earlier about about having written a show and then turning into an actor was about how, like, learning the lines and like dealing with like what you wrote. I when I again, when I wrote the commandment, I thought it was going to be so easy to learn, because I wrote it right? It’s going to be such a breeze. I feel like every time I come back to it, I’m all over again. I’m like I don’t know how I’m gonna learn this because I guess it i different parts of the brain. I don’t I don’t know who is this person who wrote this thing? Yeah. And like how can I say these lines? So hard because I don’t think it’s intuitive that you write from one part of the brain and you learn the lines from another part of the brain. And they don’t connect as well as you think
Christine Lesiak
they do not they absolutely do not. And I saw the commandment when Richard did it here at the Edmonton fringe last year is great play. Congratulations. Just use them just wonderful. Yeah, exactly. You think people say that to me all the time? Well, you wrote it, how hard can it be like you would be surprised? The other thing is, as the writer, you’re constantly editing and changing all the words all the time. It’s like, what version Am I do supposed to be doing now? On the plus side? You don’t usually piss off the playwright when you change something or make them
Phil Rickaby
see that is that is 100% the plus side? Because I mean, I have tried every time I’ve done it, I don’t revise, while I’m an actor. Mostly sometimes, sometimes near the beginning, I’ll be like, No, I don’t like this anymore, things like that. But when I’m fully an actor mode, I don’t revise But afterwards, I do. And I have added in performance, which is bad, but also playwrights, it’s
Christine Lesiak
mine. Also, I am a person who usually develops my stuff in front of an audience. So if it’s not being tweaked, because of the audience reaction, I just did some edits to the show, we just closed and little ones, nothing big. But I’m like, this word does not belong here. These two are in the wrong order. This needs another beat here, I need to give the other boy character like just a tiny line in this moment. And just because you don’t know the rhythms until you’re doing it.
Phil Rickaby
Well, the audience teaches you so much about the thing that you’re performing. Like, it’s like we were just saying, like, not just about, like, what is the play about but like, how do these relationships work? You learn so much from the audience that it would be foolish to not finish a run, and then frantically like, okay, what are the things that I learned from this audience? And how can that improve this show?
Christine Lesiak
I think it’s one of the places we tend to fall down. In terms of creating new work in Canada, we don’t really allow ourselves the time to do the process, the way it needs to be done. On there’s a lot of you know, workshopping of a play with actors, various actors for a long time. And that’s amazing, I got to enjoy some of that process as a playwright. But at the end of the day, you need that first run to know what the thing is. So that’s,
Phil Rickaby
that’s so true. But in so many cases, the plays that we create in Canada don’t get another Right. Exactly, exactly. We we’re so disposable with the theatre that we create, we’ll throw money at it, to create it to workshop and to do it, and then we perform it once. And then if you’re lucky, 20 years later, there might be a revival in a theatre somewhere. But it almost never gets done, again, with a couple of notable exceptions, but for the most part, we never see them again. And I think that’s really, I think it’s really sad for our theatre.
Christine Lesiak
Yeah, and one part of that is the way we develop we tend to do small scale, part of that is the I love fringe. Fringe is a very important part of our experimental ecosystem in the in Canada, I think, I think much of the work that I have produced and where it has evolved to more of a soft cedar creation process. It would not exist without the fringe network. But what it does though, is it makes you think, in a very small scale, so we in Canada, we have a real issue with creating anything with scale with, you know, larger casts or a larger vision are anything experimental or anything that really tries to innovate or innovate on a form. I think that’s a very difficult for thing for it almost impossible for an indie independent theatre creator to do.
Phil Rickaby
Absolutely. And also a lot most of the theatre companies are not looking for players that are large are things like that
Christine Lesiak
no one can afford them.
Phil Rickaby
No. So the plays that get done at friends and then go on or they go on because a theatre can afford it. They’re not, they’re not going to put money into a big cast accepted unless they’re one of the massive festivals to share of course, yeah, we can do a big cash but they’re rare. And they have million dollar budgets, which smaller theatres, especially indie theatres don’t
Christine Lesiak
Yeah, exactly.
Phil Rickaby
Tell me about this horror show. You’ve been working on I, I feel like, like, genre is is something that is so often ignored. In our theatre landscape, especially in Canada. We don’t touch it very often. And there are some theatres that are popping up and they’re doing horror. They’re doing sci fi, they’re doing some weird, some could meeting weird stuff. But it’s indie theatres. And it’s it. We just don’t see it as I think viable very often. So I like the idea that there’s this horror play that you’re working on. Tell me about that.
Christine Lesiak
So that centre of town has been going for 13 years now it is an annual site specific horror show based on Edmonton true history produced and created by catch the keys productions who are Beth and Megan Dart. Megan writes the plays based on eminence history bethard directs them. I have cut my teeth on immersive theatre and audience movement and understanding blow and site specificity on this show because it’s I think, a year 11 For me now. It is draws a completely different audience from theatre. So right now, though, we have a partnership with Fort Edmonton Park, which is a historical park. And so we will before Yeah, we’ll do like 20 ish nights of performance, which is pretty good. Small audiences, usually, you know, 50 ish, 30 to 70 depends on the year on the space to new show new space every year. What’s fascinating about it is they are very interested generally in hiring people with Cloud training. Because they know those are the people who can guide the audience through the experience in a way that’s going to be satisfying. They know how to communicate non verbally, they know how to move people. It’s very campy. And we like to say I think Beth said this once we are the we tricked people into coming to see theatre, they think they’re going to a haunted house. Surprise, you’re in a theatre show. And it does melt people’s minds.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, yeah, I fit. One of the the theatre companies in Toronto that does does horror stuff. They combine puppets and magic and horror, and create these beautifully weird shows eldritch theatre, but they’re, they have a very strong core audience. None of whom are regular theatre go?
Christine Lesiak
Yeah, I would say it’s very similar. Yeah.
Phil Rickaby
It’s fascinating to see that like, bye, bye, bye. by delving into some genre, you can bring in people that normally don’t go to theatre, and yet, the bigger theatres rarely touch it and are still having that that whole, like, where’s our audience going? What’s the why? Where’s the audience? How do we get a bigger audience? And it’s kind of like, you could be willing to get a little weird now and then and maybe the audience will come in? Yeah,
Christine Lesiak
it’s an interesting, interesting question, isn’t it because every theatre company kind of has that thing they do. And the people that go see their shows and buy their season tickets, like the thing they do, and I’ve seen it happen, where theatre companies are like, I’m going to take a bold choice, I’m going to programme the show, and I’m going to programme this show, and those shows were brilliant. But their audit core audience was confused and to not understand what was happening. So they are now scared of programming anything like that, especially post pandemic as we try to recover. Yeah, yeah, I don’t know, the cause of the is the hunger there. But the thing is, you have to commit to it for a period of time so people can find out about you, right? It’s almost like a brand building thing.
Phil Rickaby
Yes. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can understand why theatres are especially theatres that rely on say subscriptions, for example, they both wants to bring in a new audience, but they don’t want to any alienate their subscriber audience. Which means it’s, there’s this this pole between those two things where they don’t want to do some of their subscribers don’t want to see what they also need to bring in the people who don’t normally go. There have been a couple of theatres that have done I remember years ago when Katie and stage did the Rocky Horror Show. And of course, every every fear that does like the Rocky Horror Show ends up like Bringing Down the House, they make more money than they’ve ever made before because everybody all the all the Rocky Horror people come out, but they would have signs in the lobby for the subscriber saying, This is not your usual show. Please don’t get upset and people yell at the actors, if they happen to bring some props. This is all part of it and just sort of like this whole, like, like, it’s okay if people are doing something weird, but the subscribers were uncomfortable. So it’s not something you do very often, which I think it’s limiting. But I understand it, because if you rely on the subscribers, you can’t piss them off.
Christine Lesiak
I think it’s a very challenging place because we train our audiences with what to expect. And I don’t know how well we train our audiences. Well, honestly, now with dead centre of town because it’s such a weird format. In the first couple of years, we’re doing it in this new venue. We would have bizarre things happening with audience members, but now that our audience has found us our job is quite easy, because they kind of know the rules of the world already. Most of them. We usually can tell whether or not you There’s a crowd with a bunch of people we call we refer to fresh fish newbies or fresh fish, or old fish who are the people who’ve seen the show before. And they because it’s the same characters, I play one of the characters that moves audience, one of the reoccurring ones, most of the characters don’t reoccur. The people get to know me. And they’re like, Oh, when I see this character, Alice, I know, at some point, she’s going to tell me to go there. And I’m just going to go and I’m not going to worry about it, I will do what she says. So it’s a question of what expectations are we building in our audiences? And what are they. And I think when they begin to trust us, we can begin to incrementally take them on different rides. And that’s true, of course, within the confines of a clown show, if you think of a clown show, you start off in a really specific way, you know, usually a little bit of distance between you and the audience, you let the audience come to you. But by the end of the show, you can have them doing all sorts of crazy things if you build it properly.
Phil Rickaby
I remember years ago at the Toronto fringe seeing or hearing, I never saw it because it was sold out, it was red bastard doing doing their show. And I remember somebody at the fringe tent afterwards, raving about the fact that at some point, he was standing over her shouting sing in my mouth with his mouth, like wide over, and how she was just so excited to be like, shouting into his mouth, which is such a weird thing to ask an audience member to do. But again, clown can get people to do strange things
Christine Lesiak
with joy. With complete joy and abandon, it invites you to play and that’s I think, something we miss a lot as adults is the ability to play.
Phil Rickaby
Absolutely. Remember, you know, when you see a show, I know a lot of times the show will say audience participation. And there’s a certain kind of person who’s like, I don’t want to do audience participation, I’m not gonna do that. So because they think it’s going to be like you in the middle of who doesn’t want to be seen come up here. And then they’re forced to do his thing. And yet, I remember one of the remember the show, little orange man. That show at the end had audience participation. I’ve never seen an audience clamour so hard to be part of this moment near the end of the show, but it was so earned, that people just wanted to be part of it. I think that, that earning the participation is some of the you have to do. And I think clowns do that. And Ingrid did that, with that show. Just to make people want to participate. Yeah. And to bring them in in a way that that puts them in a position where they sort of they want to do
Christine Lesiak
that’s just said it’s about issuing the invitation in a way that people will respond with enthusiastic consent. And I have seen a lot of clown that doesn’t do that. And I think that’s where we get our bad reputation. Sometimes. I’m not sure how well we educate sometimes our our performers on audience interaction, I’ve certainly had people, instructors, who I otherwise respect to say things like, well, you know, see what you can get away with, and like, I, you know, maybe not, and that part of that is, you know, being a person female identified in a female body and just, I’ve been in uncomfortable situations, I’ve seen very uncomfortable situations where the status of the performer allows them to manipulate a situation to their own advantage. And I’m not sure we always train our people well, but to that point, when we do train our people, well, it can create euphoria in the room. Yeah, a sense of joy and wonder unparalleled to any kind of art form.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, I wonder about that in terms of the training because all the any of the training that I’ve ever participated in for clown was all about the performance of the club, like creating a clown and doing the clown and doing the thing, but never about how to create something that brings an audience in. I think that’s something that I don’t know if maybe there are art classes and courses that do that. Or if that’s something that is just is, depending on the teacher is omitted entirely.
Christine Lesiak
I’m sure. Maybe I’ve certainly taught classes on how to engage with audience because it’s something I’m very passionate about.
I had a pre pandemic, I created a curriculum called creating amazing audience interactions. A lot of the stuff I learned I think I learned from a combination of Michael canard and Jed Henderson
different, slightly different approaches, but at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. You want to create that magical circle where they want to come to you and it’s almost by withholding your affection initially. That you can create that want. You just can’t see one you just can’t see needy you see nearly everyone’s going to be like nananananana No, no, I think it comes down to again, that be interested. Not interesting. If you’re interested in what they’re doing, they will be completely interested in watching you be interested who doesn’t like to talk about themselves?
Phil Rickaby
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Tell me about and I don’t know how much you can talk about the spinsters but it’s written down here. So I wanted to ask you about it because you’ve mentioned that it’s interprovincial collaboration so please tell me about about that because I think it your provincial is not something that we we get to do much in this country.
Christine Lesiak
No, we do not because I can tell you I’ve been working on budgets for a week. It is expensive. I met brilliant performer Tara Travis on the fringe circuit many years ago. And we I don’t know you probably know Travis trout Tara terrorists.
Phil Rickaby
Tara does the she’s the that the sub the wives of Henry the eighth?
Christine Lesiak
She absolutely yeah. Worked with Monster theatre. Ryan Gladstone, I believe, room that show probably with her collaboration, and she performed a phenomenal performer. We either wind or do a show together forever. So we were walking one day after a fringe back in like 2017 or something. And my partner Ian, who’s a brilliant mechanical designer just imagined us on these giant wheelie dresses. And we’re like, what a great image. Taryn, I would love to be on giant wheelie dresses. I don’t know what to do with that. Then come 2020 And it’s pandemic but we met up in a cabin and BC and spent some time together just hanging out and we and it occurred to us. Wait a minute. What if we were Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters, then beyond wheeling dresses. So what is the story? The Untold Story of Cinderella stepsisters, if we meet them in middle age, what would they have to say? What dish would they what dirt would they have to dish what would they say what is their POV on what happened back in the day? So that was our launching point. And now we have been working on it now for years. We’ve been through two workshop creation periods where I’m about to go into a third one for a month long residency at the Burnaby Centre for the Arts very generously as an artist in residence programme. And I can tell you, it is visually spectacular. We are incorporating these will dress frames with extravagant dress design with drag reveals in it ridiculous wigs. It’s very boufal asked at the top of the show I would say in terms of this really heightened drag Buffon clown characters at TROSA and tour Mencia just being with you, welcoming you to the ball. shadow puppetry, most of the storytelling is done through shadow puppetry, some really innovative uses some classic, some shadow puppets found in sneaky parts of our bodies that I don’t want to talk too much about because it’s unique and magical. And I can tell you, there is a very dark twist that is revealed later in the play. But the team that has been assembled is magical. Our costume designer is one of the designers for the Arisia brand. Oh, yeah. Adam knows Adam knows fashion. Adam Dixon, he knows his fashion. It will be in the Burnaby centre of the arts this fall. It’s going to be in Edmonton, although I can’t see exactly where yet. In January 2024. And I fully expect it to be all over the place.
Phil Rickaby
Wow. That’s great. That’s amazing. I hope so.
Christine Lesiak
A lot of people want to see it. A lot of people don’t see
Phil Rickaby
as you’re describing it. I’m like, Okay, I need to see this on a big stage somewhere. You mentioned you mentioned you mentioned a few times you mentioned fringe. And, you know, we met on the fringe circuit as we started as we just shared it. And I remember when when we got to Edmonton, I remember you as both a performer and a person in the arts in Edmonton were like this, this amazing ambassador for the fringe. You were very friendly and warm to all the people from out of out of town. How long were you? Like how How long have you been a fringe participant goer? Um, how long have you been involved with fringe in Edmonton and like, say specifically Edmonton?
Christine Lesiak
Um, I think I did my first show in 2008. And I would say I’ve been involved in some capacity. Most years ever since if not doing my own show directing something. I’m doing more directing now as well. It’s It is the largest fringe in North America. It’s big, it isn’t very big. It is an amazing training ground, I’ve been able to do an experiment with things that I otherwise never would be able to do.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, I want things that I really appreciate, but appreciate about the Edmonton fringe is unlike the certain other fringes, it still really celebrates the the, the the experimentation. Although it’s an expensive place to fail, it is like you can, as long as you’re trying something really wild, you can probably still do I’ll do all right. There’s something really intimidating and also super exciting about about that festival being the largest. It’s such a great training ground for just like both, like getting in front of an audience. And also, like just getting your feet on the ground and exploring a place and finding out what the audience wants to see just this magical thing.
Christine Lesiak
And our audiences are very dedicated at the fringe and very, very sophisticated. Like, you can get away with get away with here, I’m using my own language, you just kind of really experiment with some weird shit. And people will find it interesting. Often they’ll find it interesting. As it grows, it can be sometimes harder to get your show known. But one of the things I do love about it is the the artists community, it is so busy. It’s so busy. We’re so busy during the whole festival. It’s hard to do that. But I do think it’s a very welcoming festival. I think that people from out of town, have a great time here. It may be even if they don’t their shows don’t always do well, I think I hope that they feel welcomed and embraced and valued, at least for what they are bringing. I hope that it’s such an
Phil Rickaby
it’s such an interesting because because it is so so large. You don’t expect it to be warm. You don’t expect it to be as as as warm as it is but arriving in Edmonton and like sort of meeting people and there’s always somebody who can give you advice like, like, where the artists hang out as you’ve you’re from Toronto, you’re like, Okay, so we go to the fringe tent, and somebody’s like, we don’t go to the fringe tent. And they, you know, somebody will take you where you need to go to find the other artists and it’s is this this this wonderful. It’s this artistic fellowship that happens for these 1014 days, however long it is that that I don’t think you find in other places,
Christine Lesiak
and also, very specifically, the clown community gets incredibly tight knit around that time. It’s like, it’s like there’s a pilgrimage for all the clowns from Canada and who are doing shows and some from the states come together. And we all kind of learn each about each other. It’s incredibly important networking experience and time, I think for people practising that form, because it’s one of the few places where people who are specifically doing clown theatre, or something that maybe doesn’t look like it, but is actually can do incredibly well, because those shows are very difficult to get programmed in a regular season. But they do very well at the fringe. I mean,
Phil Rickaby
this is the thing about fringe is that is that it’s the opportunity to get something a little weird that might not be programmed at a at a major theatre in front of an audience that can fall in love with it. And after that might be willing to come to see what you do every year after that. Absolutely.
Christine Lesiak
I I have, I would I believe I have developed a little bit of a following now in Edmonton. So when I do something people there are a certain number of people who are very curious about whatever that thing will be. And certainly without having my time at the fringe, fighting around figuring things out, try experimenting with new things constantly trying to surprise myself and I think that’s part of it. I’m trying to surprise myself, which then of course, surprises other people. Without that, that doesn’t happen, right.
Phil Rickaby
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Christine, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great conversation and great to chat with you again.
Christine Lesiak
It has been a pleasure and I can’t wait to see you out here at the Edmonton fringe again doing something hopefully.
Phil Rickaby
This has been an episode of Stageworthy Stageworthy is produced, hosted and edited by Phil Rickaby. That’s me. If you enjoyed this podcast and you listen on Apple podcasts or Spotify, you can leave a five star rating. And if you’re listening on Apple podcast you can also leave a review those reviews and ratings helps new people find the show. If you want to keep up with what’s going on with Stageworthy end my other projects you can subscribe to my newsletter by going to philrickaby.com/subscribe. And remember, if you want to leave a tip you’ll find a link to the virtual tip jar in the show notes are on the website. You can find Stageworthy on Twitter and Instagram at @stageworthypod. And you can find the website with the complete archive of all episodes at stageworthy.ca. If you want to find me, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at @PhilRickaby And as I mentioned, my website is philrickaby.com. See you next week for another episode of Stageworthy