The Voice in the Closet

An adaptation of Raymond Federman’s novella, The Voice in the Closet

Director & Project Coordinator – Piet Defraeye 
Stage Manager – Justine Moelker
Sound Design & Music – Scott Smallwood
Lighting Design – Patrick Arés-Pilon
Film/Art Conceptualization - Gordana Zivkovic
Visual Designer & Technical Assistant – Marko Zivkovic
Arts Contributor - Sylvia Grist

Performers
Gerry Morita
Kristine Nutting
Zachary Polis
Jake Hastey

Raymond Federman’s Voice in the Closet is an incredibly intimate text, which at the same time continuously eludes and undercuts the subjective. His desperate effort to narrate an earth-shattering experience from the author’s youth – the sudden arrest and subsequent disappearance of both his parents and his two sisters by the Nazis, in Paris during WWII – is a project doomed to fail. The world conjured by the text is one of fragmentation, ellipsis, obfuscation, repetition, resistance, redundancy and excess, false starts, without ending. As we are trained in our cultural practice to look for recognition, signification and meaning, we also deflect and reject failure – though it remains overwhelmingly a structuring principle in our interactions and certainly in our iterations. Federman’s text embraces failure as its main aesthetic.

This production is part of a larger research project that looks at the representation and iteration of genocide, and is funded by a KIAS grant.  Dr. Donia Mounsef and Dr. Marko Zivkovic are collaborators in the research.

Length: 45-50 minutes.

Performance Times:
Monday, August 27th, 4:30pm
Tuesday, August 28th, 7:00pm
Wednesday, August 29th, 4:30pm
Friday, August 31st, 7:00pm

Admission Cost: FREE

Location: Props/Furniture Storage (via Loading Dock), Timms Centre for the Arts

Generously supported by:
Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS)
The President’s Fund for the Creative and Performing Creative Arts.

Company Bios:

Piet Defraeye is a Professor in the Dept. of Drama, where he teaches Theory, Criticism, and Directing. He does extensive research and publishes on contemporary theatre practice and directs for the stage. He is a graduate of the University of Louvain (Lic, and Dipl. of Education), U.C. Dublin (MA), and University of Toronto (PhD). Before coming to UofA in 1999, he was Associate Prof. at St. Thomas University, Fredericton. He also was a Guest Professor for extensive periods of time at the University of Innsbruck, Ludwig Maximilian Universität – Munich, Kath.  Universiteit Leuven, and the Universiteit Antwerpen.  The Voice in the Closet was first conceptualized as a course workshop production in DR 357. The students’ enthusiastic exploration has been tremendously helpful in building the project.

Justine Moelker holds a BA in Theatre Arts: Acting/Directing from Dordt College and has recently directed several short films in Hamilton, Ontario. Justine is a current graduate student at the University of Alberta. Her thesis focuses on staging the unrepresentable and a critical analysis of performing genocide.

Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and performer/improvisor who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, field recording, and sonic improvisation.  He also designs experimental electronic instruments and software, as well as sound installations and site-specific performance scenarios.  He performs as one-half of the laptop/electronic duo Evidence (with Stephan Moore) and has performed with Seth Cluett, Curtis Bahn, Mark Dresser, Cor Fuhler, John Butcher, Pauline Oliveros, and many others.  He has written acoustic and electroacoustic works for a variety of ensembles, most recently for the Catch Electric Guitar quartet, the New York Virtuoso Singers, the Nash Ensemble of London, and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.  Smallwood currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where he teaches Composition, Improvisation, and Electroacoustic music at the University of Alberta.

Patrick Arés-Pilon: Natif de la belle ville d’Edmonton, Patrick Arès-Pilon aime se promener dans les rues en contemplant la beauté innée du bruit, de la lumière et du mouvement des choses. Amant du film, il s’intéresse à sa préservation, à sa désintégration et à sa projection.

 

Gordana Zivkovic holds BFA and MFA degrees from the Belgrade University OF Fine Arts. Classically trained in painting and specializing in mosaic as a painting technique, she has moved to video art and multi-media installations and is currently exploring resonances between painting, cinema and theatre. She has exhibited in Belgrade, Tokyo, Portland, OR, Edmonton, and New York. She taught at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland, OR and is currently teaching at the University of Alberta Department of Art and Design.

Marko Zivkovic graduated in Clinical Psychology at the University of Belgrade. After receiving his PhD in anthropology from The University of Chicago he spent five years in Portland, OR teaching at Reed College. He studied national imaginary in the 1990s Serbia and is now researching the intersections of art and neuroscience. His other interests include cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of dreams, anthropology of art, time and space, tropes and narratives, Japanese intellectual history, and the landscape of disciplines. He is currently teaching at the University of Alberta Anthropology Department.

Gordana and Marko have been collaborating on art projects and exhibiting together since 2003.

Sylvia Grist was born in Nice, France. Her parents’ love of painting, music, antiques and gardening influenced her greatly as a young girl. At a very young age the use of bright colours and of naive art gave her great pleasure. She started to cut out paper dolls from magazines at 8 years of age.

After a trip through North America she decided to set up house in Canada in 1983. One day in the winter, at home with a young child, likely suffering from cabin fever and not having any paint with her, she acted on a whim and made a naive painting, with plenty of green and colours to beat back the cold a bit. She fabricated a landscape scene with colors cut from magazines. Sylvia continues to make art for her pleasure and for her friends, with regular exhibitions in Edmonton. Sylvia also now paints in acrylic often adding ink and or encaustic. She is enrolled in the Faculty of Extension to get her art certificate, and is very excited to be working on this challenging theatre project.

Gerry Morita is originally from a farm in Saskatchewan. She graduated from Simon Fraser University’s dance program, and has since worked in Vancouver, Montreal, Tokyo, and Edmonton as a dancer, choreographer, performance artist and teacher. Her body of work involves continuous inquiry into new ways of seeing movement, the body, and the spaces between us. She studies and teaches contact improvisation, Noguchi Taiso and other somatic-based techniques in order to find non-performative, natural ways of being in the body. Recently, she has become very interested in sound/movement connections in herwork with Ian Crutchley and Shawn Pinchbeck. As Artistic Director of Edmonton-based Mile Zero Dance, (www.milezerodance.com) she has created a prolific body of work and collaborates widely, performing in various found locations as well as in theatres. She is  completing an MFA in Theatre Practice at the University of Alberta under the tutelage of Lin Snelling, exploring the weight and sound in improvised dance.

Kristine Nutting n/a

Zachary Polis is a performer, sound composer, and writer of poetry and fiction. He holds a BA degree in Drama and Creative Writing from the University of Alberta and is from Edmonton, Alberta. Most recently he designed the sound for “Rigor Mortis”, a dance piece outside a funeral home, which is to his knowledge the first dance piece in Edmonton that has coordinated live radio broadcasting with audience participation in a found space. Under the facilitation of Lin Snelling he developed a dance piece exploring masculinity and femininity in the body.

He enjoys the Baroque and dense, thick passages of text that are difficult to navigate. His writing has been referred to as dark, comic, and obscene. He has read for the Edmonton Poetry Festival on the CBC Centre Stage and the Poetry Project in New York City. He loves improv and has trained with Rapid Fire Theatre (Edmonton) and the Magnet Theatre (NYC).

He will be a certified yoga teacher in the fall.

Jake Hastey n/a