Courage...

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anaïs Nin, 1903 - 1977

I think Captain Jack Harkness would agree with this.

TARDIS and Fat Tuesday's...

Two wonderful things happened yesterday.

The first was that my friend duncanmac dropped off a gift for me at the theatre. he'd got it at Con*Cept - a metallic pin shaped liked the TARDIS. I already had one like that - a Dalek pin - bought at either last year's Con*Cept or Ad Astra, I forget which.

I love it. I'm thinking of staging TARDIS vs. Dalek battles on my shirt collars.

Then, later in the evening, a friend took me and other members of the theatre staff out to dinner. He's someone we know from his long involvement with our theatre, and it's his idea of fun to occasionally take us out for a nice meal - an excellent idea! We went this time to Fat Tuesday's, a place on York St. in the market. The place was nicely decorated with New Orleans posts, hanging beads around the bar, and their best stab at a Cajun ambiance. There was a singer with a guitar, and a singer with a piano.

They had the best coconut shrimp I've ever tasted. We shared appetizers: the shrimp, mussels with garlic sauce, alligator, peppered tuna, and chicken with satay sauce. My main course: pork tenderloin. There were four desserts on the menu. Three were irrelevant. The fourth was crème brulée. I was happy, and not just because I'd drunk a New Orleans Sweet Tart followed by red wine.

A great time was had by all.

The Ark...

I went to see the National Arts Centre production of The Ark with auriaephiala and commodorified. We started with dinner at the Bay Bistro; my stomach was upset (something I am thankful to say rarely happens to me), so I opted for their soup and salad bar, and a soft drink. The soup was actually rather good, but I've seldom had less appetite.

While eating, we discussed cultural and religious diversity in a multicultural setting, and approaches to handling this with fairness. I found myself confronting a central dilemma of my own sense of morality: my own strong feelings about what is right and wrong for myself, contrasted with my belief for others to make the same choices. Despite feeling not at my best, I enjoyed the topic. I often don't, but commodorified and auriaephiala are good people for this sort of talk.

We then walked over to St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, which is significant in my life (even though I've never been to a service there) because it is the place where I almost got married. It's a lovely big church; in design and style you'd think it was Anglican, with its Victorian neo-Gothic arches and leafy carvings. A nice setting for a medieval theatre piece.

The presentation was entitled The Ark: The Passion, the mystery and the light of the Dark Ages. They seemed to think the Dark Ages lasted until 1485; or maybe the Dark Ages are with us still, who knows?

It was a workshop presentation in association with the National Theatre School of Canada, the narrator being the man responsible for it all, Peter Hinton, Artistic Director of the English Theatre at the NAC. There was a certain sense of love of the material. Hinton wrote in the programme: "What at first felt so foreign and far away, now feels shockingly close." In the show, he referred to the middle ages as "lusher, more vibrant, full of incredible pain".

Most of the works were ecclesiastical: one got the impression that the secular side of medieval literature (the Arthurian cycle, the troubadour tradition, Marie de France, the fabliaux, oral poetry, and s on) did not exist. The show used Hildegard of Bingen to place the theme, perhaps because they had an academic on hand who has made a study of Hildegard.

Once upon a time I had a book called A Medieval Miscellany, and it was an anthology of excerpts and songs and poems and odds and ends of medieval literature. This show felt like reading that books: a bit here, a bit there, never the whole story, but the flavour of the times - or part of the times. We had a few excepts from Hildegard's plays, a bit of Canterbury Tales, Mankind, Everyman, and Ezra Pound. The programme implied that we'd get a bit of T.S. Eliot, too, and we were looking for ward to it - but we didn't get it. I guess they could only fit in so much. They ended with the Agincourt Carol.

The pièce de résistance was sections of two Mystery plays (The Nativity and Noah' Ark - hence the title of the show) and a good chunk of a Passion Play. These were in translation, while the parts they did of Canterbury Tales were not. And even though I've read Chaucer, and was fairly familiar with the passages they used, I had trouble following it: they made the most of the Great Vowel Shift, and that, combined with church acoustics and the face that they were often turned away from us, made it difficult. That, and the fact that I find it difficult to follow Chaucer orally anyway - I have to read it and take it slowly to get the sense. The words aren't all that different from modern English, but the sound is very different, and even just following someone with a heavy accent on stage is difficult. That was pretty much what it sounded like.

All in all, it wasn't my favourite face of the middle ages, but interesting all the same.