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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.1 (2000) 65-71



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Quiet Apocalypses: The Textual Theatre of Clare Coulter

Beth Herst

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Art and Performance Notes

Clare Coulter in Margaret Atwood's Good Bones, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, February 1999.

IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= Awoman is alone on stage. There is a chair, some sound cues, the occasional lighting effect. And even they will increasingly seem superfluous. This is the theatre of Clare Coulter, a theatre of pure language, of words that make and unmake worlds. Coulter has long been acknowledged as one of Canada's leading actresses. She is a member of that founding generation of writers, performers, and directors who, in the late 1960s, worked to create a self-consciously Canadian not-for-profit theatre movement. Now, in the third decade of her career, she is emerging as one of that theatre's most troubling artists. At fifty-six, Coulter is reinventing herself and her form, challenging the tradition she helped create.

Coulter's most recent performance piece, Good Bones, was produced at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto early in 1999. Based on the writings of novelist Margaret Atwood, the ninety-minute solo work ranges from meditations on human violence by a reincarnated bat, through consideration of Barbie dolls and female objectification, to visions of a future laid waste by environmental catastrophe. The logic of the piece is associative, its structure a web of recurring images and verbal echoes. Its core is the drama of Atwood's words.

This is solo performance with a difference. It is not, emphatically, a "one man show" in the old-fashioned sense, a bravura display of ego, technique, and stamina in nominal service of a larger-than-life "character." Nor does it belong to the more recent genre of performance art or stand-up comedy inspired hybrids, dramas of confession and exposure whose text is always the performer herself. Coulter's formal concerns and allegiances resist easy definition. She rejects illusionist dramatization, "narrowing the imagination by the intrusion of the real," in her words. Yet she is equally uninterested in the textual deconstruction favored by post-modern performance. What Coulter does is dramatize the pure generative power of text. She enacts language itself, in all its mysterious resonance and elusiveness. [End Page 65]

For Coulter, unlike many alternative theatre artists, text remains the condition of creative possibility. It is both the ground and source of her art. Hers is a theatrical vision committed absolutely to the written word. "I have a prejudice, leading up to an obsession with authors," she readily admits. "The playwright is my God." Her most important artistic association is with a theatre no less committed to the authority of texts and writers and to the illusionist ideology that authority underpins. More and more, however, Coulter is producing work that puts both in question. Hers is not a theatre of shock or assault. The apocalypses that now regularly feature in it always come quietly. Yet it is profoundly subversive, in ways that noisier "cutting edge" exercises often fail to be.

Coulter began performing in Toronto in the late 1960s, as a member of the influential Theatre Passe Muraille collective. Ironically, given her present preoccupations, Passe Muraille's combination of political commitment ("a very demanding socialism") and improvised group creation quickly led her to artistic crisis. "I was blocked all the time," she remembers. "There was this enormous humiliation of not being able to create as well as the other members of the collective."

By the early 70s, Coulter left Passe Muraille to work at the Tarragon Theatre at the invitation of founding Artistic Director Bill Glassco. The change could not have been more complete. Tarragon was, and remains, a self-styled "writer's theatre." Dedicated to the dramatic text and its literary values, it continues to produce a careful mix of current American and British imports, nineteenth-and twentieth-century "classics," and, most influentially, new work by Canadian playwrights. Coulter herself quickly became identified with Tarragon's nationalist literary project, appearing in numerous premieres, including important work by such...

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