[Photo: The 4th Line Farm Show, 1996]

What I like about "The Farm Show," which I've been thinking about lately, is the simplicity of the idea combined with the excruciatingly difficult openness the project requires. It's one thing to get a grant and head off into a place you've never been and write -- as yourself, for your habitual audience. It's quite another thing to break from your set -- in the case of Theatre Passe Muraille, the Toronto 'cutting-edge' arts scene of the 1970s -- and head off to a community that is totally different, where all of your skills (including social) are almost irrelevant and useless, and struggle to produce something that those same people will appreciate and enjoy.


Now, the actors were good, polite, and gracious young folk (to quote some of the farmers quoted in Ondaatje's excellent documentary film of the play), so the people of Clinton welcomed them in as they would anybody willing to work. I have spent some time in farm culture, and it always amazes me how many people have long-term guests visiting/working. I'm not sure there's an equivalent in city life -- most professions certainly wouldn't allow you to take a guest into work in a similar manner. Still, these big city folks set out with a kind of conscious ambition that could have been pretty problematic: they were going to produce a theatre for the people and of the people (but not by the people) that would at once document the lives involved in Canadian farm culture, mythologize them through art, but also break the colonial habit of "watching Kings and Queen's on TV" or "American advertising." In the process of their work, though, and as a testament to their openness, the actors bonded with the farming community and became friends -- became, to a certain extent, the "people" they hoped to mythologize. The show itself has since been mythologized as a special and original moment in Canadian theatre -- a turning point.


Theatre in Canada has always meant more to Canadians en masse than poetry, perhaps naturally given the different media, so this fusion of experimental theatre, collective creation, and community theatre shouldn't be too much of a surprise. It is interesting to consider the gesture, though, in relation to how art and especially writing relates to its context -- not just to the place, but to the people of the place. Since the 1920s, with the advent of Denison's satires and the rise of Hart House (not to mention the Dominion Festival and all the little theatre movement that fanned out across the country) theatre has been much more successful than poetry at courting and establishing mass appeal. Maybe this has to do with the tendency to mythologize (albeit intelligently and with nuance) in theatre, such as in Billy Bishop, versus the tendency in writing to undermine and question those mythologies. That's just speculation, of course, and even at that doesn't begin to address why poetry has gravitated in that direction rather than towards a greater attachment to those otuside of its community. It certainly wasn't inevitable. The model that the gesture of The Farm Show offers, though, is really intriguing.

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Maybe Poetry in the Classroom is related, in various ways, to the Farm Show model. I wonder, though, and this is an open question, how many writers go into the classroom and encounter it as the place in which to create their own art -- rather than a place in which to (re)present their art & methods? It would be exceedingly difficult, I think.