Society's monsters

This is not Ted Witzel.

​Q: What should we do with madness?

A: I think we should be exploring it. I don’t know what the answer is, but I see a problem, and I want to say something about it. Let’s open a dialogue. We should be trying to understand where madness comes from. Woyzeck is showing us that there are causes.

I interviewed Ted Witzel, co-director of the red light district, last week. rld is a small but mighty Toronto theatre company that's currently mounting his newly translated version of Karl Georg Büchner's famously unfinished Woyzeck (June 3-19 @ Lower Ossington Theatre). After speaking with Witzel (and having only seen a filmed version of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck), I'm very curious to see this production. Read the interview here.

More CONTACT

Brazilian Pentecostal Church, Toronto, 2009 (Ruth Kaplan)

Q: How has working with these subjects informed your beliefs? Have they changed since you began the project?

A: Sometimes I’m very moved when I go to a service, and I can understand what people get out of a sermon and the community. Other times I just want to take a shower afterward [laughs]. There’s always a line I can’t cross, and that hasn’t changed.

Interviewed documentary photographer Ruth Kaplan last week for MONDO. Check it out here. Her show, Some Kind of Divine, is at Ryerson Gallery until June 5.

Term: long song

Didn't expect to have another word/term to post this soon. Just returned from a show at the Music Gallery featuring Mongolian throat and long song singers, and several horsehair fiddles. Thanks to the likes of Björk and Tagaq, I've heard some throat singing, but wasn't aware of long song. These performers were amazing to hear, filling the room with sounds that felt like.. always. Deep in the ground, both preternatural and familiar. Folk music. (Could've done without the extraneous new age-y soundscapes, however.) From the long song wiki:

This genre is [so named] because each syllable of text is extended for a long duration. A four-minute song may only consist of ten words. The main feature of the long song is the prolonged, tenuto notes with deeply modulated vibrato on the vowels. These majestic vibrating notes called shuranhai give the song profound philosophical, meditational character and they often depict the spacious mountain valleys and the tranquility of the Mongolian soul.

The performance consisted of songs from Red Sky's Tono production—the group is taking part in the Cultural Olympiad for Vancouver 2010. Usually a dance piece accompanies the show, but I'm glad it was just musicians tonight.

IC wrote a review of the show for MONDO. Read it here.