Minor Expletives

I like genre pieces. which shouldn’t be surprising.
I learned to read and imagine in the worlds of pulp fantasy and slightly better science fiction. Even now, when I read fiction, it is usually some clear genre – sci-fi and fantasy have been joined by mysteries (the harder boiled the better), spy novels and historical fiction.

I’m not an expert in any of these genres, which is maybe why I don’t identify them as influences as much as maybe I should. But writing about up-coming work recently, there were two science fiction projects (Upper Toronto and Perhaps in a Hundred Years [opening at Summerworks on Thursday]), one ghost story and I had just received an email about a hard-boiled radio show I had done 10 years ago. Dedicated to the Revolutions is a science vaudville – not a common genre, but I think still a genre.

Genre obviously gives a frame and some distance that allows for different stories to be told, for a different kind of thought experiment or “what-if.” This observation is nothing new, but in theatre it’s less talked about.

It’s certainly not part of the critical discourse or “legitimate art”* theatre.

Why is that?

*I’m not even show what I mean by that, but I still think it holds true.

More coming on this subject. I would love to hear thoughts or get links.

A few pieces of Upper Toronto news –
first
Tim Maly and I (and you?)
will do the first of our community consultations
at the Rhubarb Festival on Sunday February 22nd.
We’ll present some about the project
and then there will be a working dinner
to talk about ideas for a new city.

second
a blog from the future – io9 –
posted about the project.
exciting.
trying to decided if I/we should respond in comments
or maybe collect a bunch of questions
and respond here

advice?

more Upper Toronto soon…

Getting to the Bottom of Upper Toronto – Torontoist.

You know how when you were a kid, sometimes you would get an idea in your head, and you wouldn’t let the fact that it didn’t make sense or that it didn’t play by the rules of logic and physics or even that it was actually a terrible idea stop you from just imagining the shit out of it? The world could be guided by the principle of “What if…?” and the answer could be “…then everything.”

Jacob Zimmer, creative director of performance company Small Wooden Shoe, is bringing something of the magical thinking of kid logic back in style. Zimmer’s latest project-in-the-making asks the question “What if we took Toronto and built a new city on top of it and called it Upper Toronto and moved everybody up there?” The project is in its infancy stages, but the folks at Small Wooden Shoe think that it will take a village to raise a city to the sky, and they want your help.

spreading the word about Upper Toronto – a project that we’re getting underway…

Upper Toronto is an ambitious performance project to design and propose to the public the building of a new Toronto above the current one: the CN restaurant might be ground level, or imagine a city sitting on top of Bay Street towers. When Upper Toronto is finished, all residents of Lower Toronto will move up and Lower Toronto transformed into some combination of intentional ruin, national park, and farmland.

This is, of course, a terrible idea. But it is a terrible idea that might let us imagine and perform possibilities and questions about what kind of world we might want if we could start fresh.

more from the Small Wooden Shoe website | Join in on our new Conversation Starters bulletin board

A working list of values:

• the city has to be one we want to live in.
• The city has to be diverse – economically, culturally, geographically. It can’t be a city for-and-by the downtown-highly-educated-culturally-privileged.* 4 million people don’t live the same way. Suburbs are important to think about. We need help finding the right people to talk to – please post a reply on the bulletin board, or email uppertoronto at smallwoodenshoe.org dot org
• radical shifts from current trends are possible and probably necessary. e.g.: RFID may be all the rage, but maybe we don’t want them to be in the future. Maybe we think that in 75 years we will not want the world to know where we are.
• No techno utopias/dystopias.
• having said the above – technology is not the enemy.
• Infrastructure must be publicly owned. There will be no “Big Bank Highway.”
• The city must be flexible and modifiable by the people who live there.
• The people who live in Forest Hill will have less space. And less influence.

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- What else?
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* Those folk (of which I am certainly one) are important and might make up a fair number of the teams – we are the ones with Shirky’s cognitive surplus [TEDtalk] to work on thought experiments about floating cities. But we can’t be the only ones.