Plank Magazine @ Magnetic North!
Sunday update: We're curious to know what you thought of the Festival. Were you excited by what you saw? Depressed, amused, aroused, angry or bored? If you want to comment on individual shows, please do so in the comment sections at the bottom of each review. If you'd like to drop us a line with your thoughts about the Festival as a whole, why don't you use our comment section here and let us know.
We can incorporate your feedback into our Festival Wrap-Up and also pass them on to Ann and Ken at Magnetic North. If you feel passionately about something that happened at Magnetic North, this is place to let it out!
Twenty reviews; ten plays; eight reviewers and one 11-day Festival: that’s what you’ll be getting here at Plank over the next two weeks. Plank has committed to producing a minimum of two reviews for all the productions featured in Vancouver’s edition of the Magnetic North Festival. Throw in the odd special feature – such as this week’s general overview and the piece on the industry series – and it’s going to be a wild ride.
We might not like the proposed changes to Bill C-10, but there is one piece of legislation we’ve come to respect here at Plank and that’s the law of unintended consequences.
This past January, as part of the PuSh Festival, four of our number participated in a workshop on reviewing run by the Australian arts magazine RealTime. As we gathered for that first morning, none of us anticipated what a transformative experience it would turn out to be. Nor did we imagine that four months later we would be launching our own online review magazine.
Led by Keith Gallasch and Gail Priest, we were put through a crash course in reviewing – RealTime style. RealTime’s philosophy is an antidote to the mainstream media: instead of quick summations they offer considered responses. They try to understand the intentions of the artists and use that as a starting point to judge the work. In addition, since most of their readers will not have a chance to see the work covered (RealTime is a national publication) they focus on evoking a sense of the experience, recreating a sense of a specific time and place.
The workshop also provided a chance to reflect on the role criticism can play in strengthening and deepening art practice. If a work of art is not fully evaluated or considered in an informed manner then it exists in a sort of vacuum. The artist will never have to defend or consider his or her decisions or approach to their craft. If the work is never treated seriously, there is a danger it will be marginalized. This can’t be healthy for the artist or the community.
We left the workshop fired with a desire to create a publication here. Not a replica of RealTime but something responsive to what we believe are the needs of the performing arts here in Vancouver. We quickly gathered other like-minded people to join us.
That this was the year that Magnetic North came to Vancouver was a blessing. Assisted by Ann-Marie Kerr, we entered into discussions with Ann Brophy and Ken Cameron about the possibility of reproducing what we did for PuSh at Magnetic North (minus the workshop and the Australians of course). We have been fortunate that both Ann and Ken understood what we were about and their support has been invaluable in launching Plank. The Festival will provide both a launching pad for us and, as you can see by the opening paragraph, a real testing ground for our ideas.
So, in a sense, Plank Magazine is a legacy of the visits of both Magnetic North and RealTime to our city. We are also indebted to PuSh for bringing RealTime here in the first place. I wonder if Norman Armour, Executive Director of PuSh, had something in the back of his mind when he agreed to host the original workshop.
Maybe the outcome wasn’t so unintended after all.
The Plank Collective
_The launch of Plank has been generously supported by Magnetic North._