Metamorphoses -- Say Nothing, Saw Wood and Recent Works

Say Nothing, Saw Wood by Joel Thomas Hynes
and Recent Works at Gordon Laurin
at the Resource Centre for the Arts, LSPU Hall

The beauty of live theatre is its very risk. Real people not too far from you, with real people’s flaws. Lines might be lost. Lights might fall from the ceiling. Language might alienate. Or, the story before you might compel you utterly, drawing you out of your own life and into someone else’s.
These risks are magnified with a one-person show.

Say Nothing, Saw Wood achieves more than the seamless intimacy you’re hoping for at the theatre. You’re brought into the guts of a terrible story – "terrible" with its root in"terror" – until you wind down to a truly powerless individual’s repellent violence.

And yet – the script and the performance build empathy. You understand precisely why Jude Traynor does what he does. This understanding goes beyond mere sympathy, which is tinged with noblesse oblige, pity and narcissism, with "I only like and approve of characters who are like me." Any progress humanity might make will depend on compassion and the willingness to listen, to try to understand what it’s like to be someone else, regardless of whether you like or identify with him. That’s the beauty and the risk of live theatre, and part of what’s happening in Hynes’s play.

Recent Work is an exhibition by Gordon Laurin. When I saw the 27 identically-sized panels on the walls at the RCA Gallery, I had my usual shithead reaction, one that comes out of fear: Great, abstract art, I won’t get any of it.

But.

From Gordon Laurin’s Exhibition Statement:

"My interest is to create a forum where our relationships to the natural world can be considered through forms that are inspired by the earth’s natural events and cycles like rising tides and eroded shorelines."

His panels are crushed mica and resin. At first it seems only the colours change from panel to panel. But these abstractions, like stacks of book, beg time and thought. The colours wave and after a moment, move. The mica is grit ... or rocks ... or broken beer bottles on the beach. Or.

I need to go back.
LINK TO RCA