Death in Reverse: Project Baroness

The physicist Stephen Hawking once hosted a party for time travellers, only sending out the invitations after the date had already passed.

Nobody came.

Ryan and I have been working onDeath in Reverse: Project Baronesssince 2017. It’s been plagued with problems: lack of funding; various collaborators hit with calamities. Is it a cursed play?

We have also felt magic: artists committing to it; workshop audiences coming to give feedback; support from regional funders (EC3, Public Energy, Theatre Trent, and 4th Line Theatre through OAC Theatre Recommender funds). Trent Radio’s enthusiastic YES!!! when approached about a live-to-radio broadcast and recording. Sadleir House’s YES!!! to the related show by wonderful visual artist Gary Blundell (paintings of some of TTOK’s DADA shows. It’s up now – and please come to the reception and artist talk on June 20).

A multi-disciplinary, live, staged radio drama based on radical art? It's the kind of project that would only happen at TTOK.

When Ryan founded the theatre twelve years ago, our friendship had been a fact over 20 years old. Our romantic relationship was much newer, more fragile, and I didn’t want to fuck it up. But I wanted into TTOK with a longing almost feral in intensity. Gradually (was it gradual?) I infiltrated myself: designing costumes, sets, choreographing, directing, making my own performances. Grander visions like the Precarious Festivals. Stupid small things that almost nobody saw. NONE of this programming could have happened anywhere else, for so many reasons: financial accessibility, for sure. But perhaps even more fundamentally, Ryan never said no (except to hate). He never tried to tell anybody what to do at TTOK, or establish a “brand,” or be appealing to funders. Anybody can do anything, with the caveat that there is (almost) never any money. He has not been able to do as much of his own art as I think he hoped. But when he has, it’s come in a direct line from DADA and punk. And that means DIY. It means fuck things up. It means non-conforming. Everything is political.

What keeps striking me as we struggle to getDeath in Reverseon the stage are the many parallels between now, and DADA New York a hundred years ago: wars, mass displacement, the rise of totalitarianism, censorship; brutal suppression of movements fighting racist injustice, feminism, LGBTQ2IA+ rights. In the face of that, the artists portrayed in this play may have been shattered, despairing, and self-destructive, but they also kept making art.

Who cares? In the face of whatever “this” is, is art relevant?

One of Trump’s first acts was to catastrophically restrict artistic freedoms. One of DoFo’s first acts was to cut $5 million from the OAC (as well as more than $2 million to the Indigenous Culture Fund). Our own City has been recommending that a “code of conduct” be added to grant guidelines, while slashing arts support with an attitude of smug contempt. The only reason PP doesn’t talk much about how he’s going to axe the Canada Council is that he knows that almost nobody knows what it is. It’s almost a compliment. These people want to suppress artistic freedom because they think art matters.

Do we?

History has comforted and inspired me. Brave, strong, shattered artists show what is possible: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Claude McKay, Djuna Barnes, Marcel Duchamp, William Carlos Williams, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and more. I want to live in a world whereart matters. Where people talk about art, argue, give it everything they have. Artists as time travellers. Art as the vehicle. Politics, writing, and performance work as intertwined, embodied processes.

Is that so beyond us? Did the DADA attempt to inoculate art against capitalism fail completely? Have huge social media platforms rendered the challenge of art irrelevant? We have been so baffled by bullshit, forced repeatedly to explain why art matters – cajoling, begging, brandishing statistics. And now all the generational activism toward justice is critically endangered by a bunch of sneering, giggling, dangerous cretins.

Is the gulf between the artists in this play and ourselves too wide to cross?

I don’t know.

But I do know that the past shows me a way to move forward. Sometimes I find it hard to escape the notion that maybe all artists are time travellers: the good ones, anyway. Or, in the words of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven:

“I loved world –because I could do love in it

I love world –because I can do art in it

I loveworld behind world

I still care to live on

To prove Godbeauty

Since

Art

Is!”

Please come and join us. Please be in the audience at this fantastic space called TTOK for one more ephemeral, fragile, bone-tough, time-travelling work.

Welcome to the past. Welcome to the future. Welcome to now.

• Kate

Host or Publisher The Theatre on King