Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 42: Cowboys, Mermaids, and Interdisciplinary Art — with Barbara Adler
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Barbara Adler, Andrew Petter
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Paige Smith 0:05
Hello listeners. I'm Paige Smith with Below the Radar, a knowledge mobilization podcast. Below the Radar is created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar. Our host Am Johal is joined by Barbara Adler, interdisciplinary artist, programmer, and SFU School for Contemporary Art's Professional Development Coordinator. Am and Barbara sit down to talk about her art making and programming here in Vancouver, Canada.
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Am Johal 0:41
Welcome to Below the Radar, really happy to have Barbara Adler here and our special guest, Maybe the dog welcome, Barbara.
Barbara Adler 0:49
Thank you and on behalf of Maybe as well.
[laughs]
Am Johal 0:52
Barbara, you've been involved with Sawdust Collector here in Vancouver for a number of years, wondering if you can describe what it is as a project.
Barbara Adler 1:00
Yeah, Sawdust Collector is a programming collective that myself and two other artists work on mainly, that's Cole Schmidt who's a composer and a musician, and James Meger, who's also a composer and a musician. And what the three of us and our friends do mainly, is we run a weekly series out of the Gold Saucer Studio, where we program what we call interdisciplinary performance. That's, you know, interdisciplinary is always the question, but we program different kinds of performance there on a regular basis. And then we also do field trips to other venues around town. So a weekly series and then special events.
Am Johal 1:34
Yeah, I've been able to attend a couple of times at the Dominion Building. And I think one of the challenges in Vancouver in a general sense for artists is that there isn't public space or spaces for people to be able to experiment and try new things. And I'm wondering in trying to start off a project like that that's intended to be interdisciplinary. And in conversation.
[laughs]
Barbara Adler 2:01
This dog is in conversation with wanting to be closer to your lab.
[laughs]
Am Johal 2:05
Wondering how it came to be that you decided to do this project, was it partially the result of venues not being available for artists, particularly emerging artists in the city?
Barbara Adler 2:16
Oh, I'm sure that was part of it. Actually, we had the opportunity to join The Gold Saucer, because we were connected to Remy Siu, who runs the main collective and Paul Parisi who's part of that collective through our SFU connections. And initially, when we got into it, we thought we'd be programming our own work, we thought," Oh, we need a space to put on our own shows. And it would be great to have a little experimental space." And then we realized how narcissistic that would be, and also kind of, I don't know, selfish, and not moving things forward to only be programming ourselves and only be using the resource to support our own thing. And it's evolved to actually be a thing that is almost entirely about supporting other people's work and supporting what we hope to happen in our community of artists more than supporting our own artistic practice. But that flip of thinking, "Oh, we need to help ourselves" to "We actually want to be part of helping a bigger scene" was, it was a transformation. It wasn't something that we started out with.
Am Johal 3:13
Yeah, for some of our audience members who may not have been to a show at Sawdust Collector or an evening, I'm wondering if you can describe kind of the types of artists you have coming in what is an evening look like when you put on programming?
Barbara Adler 3:25
It's a big mix. What we're trying to do is make connections between different communities of artists and different communities of audiences. So we really try to have some variety in our bookings. If a night happens to be all music, we'll try to make sure that it's a span of genres. So you might have a songwriter you might have someone doing improvised music, someone doing sound art, other nights are a mix of disciplines. So you might see some dance performance, you might see small theater work. And what we try to do is make the space really welcoming and easy to be in as an audience. So you know, it's an informal venue, it's the kind of place where you can show up and and get up and leave to go to the bathroom if you need to, you know, it's not like a strict concert kind of experience. There's also some of that show making that makes it feel like a special event. So we have a host, we do an introduction, we have we take little breaks, we sometimes have lights, you know, like there's there's a mix of the things that you would expect at a living room kind of event and what you might expect at a conference uh sorry conference event, a concert event. So, the sets are typically short, 25 to 30 minutes. It's on a Tuesday night. So we're usually out of there by 11:30. And ideally it's this kind of opportunity to see something that you knew you wanted to see and then see a couple of other things that surprised you.
Am Johal 4:44
The night that I went, this is obviously several years ago, I can't remember, there was like some piano performance going on with the back part open. A lot of people doing interesting experimental work. I hadn't seen Brady Cranfield perform for quite a while. Other people know from SFU. And I imagine that you, also besides getting recent graduates to be doing it, you have some people in the MFA program that have also been a part of it as well.
Barbara Adler 5:13
Yeah, so I did both my degrees at SFU and I work there now. So there's definitely a close connection to SFU where we get some emerging artists who either recently graduated from the BFA program or the MFA program, we seem to book a fair bit of faculty and staff as well. But it's really not just an emerging artist series, we booked people who might play with us one night and then play with the, the symphony orchestra the other night, like we have um some local internationally touring people, and we have people who come on tour from other places. And it's really that mix where ideally, somebody who might not have as much of a draw gets to benefit from performing with somebody who has a bit of a fan base, and also maybe meet an artist who they might be interested in knowing further. I don't like the word networking for the kind of like sleazy cocktail party connotations. But that is what we're trying to do in a way.
Am Johal 6:02
And when you go off site from the main venue you're at what are other places that you've gone?
Barbara Adler 6:07
We've done things at the Wise Hall, Red Gate, Piatt Hall was one of the shows that we did, that was a bit challenging. But anyway, we've done things at Piatt Hall, China Cloud, I think we've done something under our name, at 8EAST, Western Front is coming up. So a lot of them are also artists run spaces, or spaces that are a little bit more a cabaret feel. But yeah, we've dipped our fingers into the civic theatres as well.
Am Johal 6:32
In terms of your own artistic practice. So you did your masters at the School of Contemporary Arts. What did you work on in your own work?
Barbara Adler 6:41
So my graduating project was a musical about Czech cowboys, and Canadian rodeo queens, and it was based on research I did about a Czech cultural practice called trapping where, since about World War One Czech people have liked to dress up in costumes inspired by archetypes of North American kind of wild west mythologies, and go camping. And it's very politically complicated thing to transplant here. But for people in the Czech Republic, it was kind of a way to carve out sites of temporary freedom under an oppressive communist regime. It meant things at different times in the history obviously. So we kind of adapted the idea of carving out temporary spaces of solidarity and friendship and made an experimental musical about it.
Am Johal 7:31
Wow. So can you tell us more about it? It sounds fascinating.
Barbara Adler 7:36
Yeah, it was, I think it was kind of a classic graduate project where we took on a lot, and it was probably about 100 things. And maybe it should have been about one thing. And so what happened in my research was I was walking around forests in the Czech Republic dressed a little bit like a cowboy. I had cowboy boots, I had a hat. I had kind of um, a paisley shirt that my collaborator, Kyla Gardner had picked out for me. And because I was going to these tramping events where people were also kind of doing that and singing there's this, so they're tramping music is a pretty significant cultural practice. And one of the things that they do is they translate American songs into Czech. So there, you'll be hearing all these really familiar melodies and with new Czech lyrics. So I was at one of these events, and the only other young person at the event was dressed a lot like me. And it turned out that he was a documentary filmmaker, also dressed in costume for research to get material for his film. So I ended up being in his documentary about Czech tramping culture, playing something like myself and making a film with him there, called America. I grimaced because it's like hilarious that was sort of playing someone fascinated by America because I'm totally not. And then that weird experience of being made into a documentary ended up being material for my musical.
Am Johal 8:57
I don't even know where to go with that. It's amazing.
Barbara Adler 9:00
I know. I mean, either. My thesis defenses was like a Gong Show because of all of that.
Am Johal 9:06
You've also collaborated with Kyla on a project related to mermaids.
Barbara Adler 9:10
We're working on that now. Yeah, it's called Mermaid Spring. And it's inspired by another strange cultural practice in a place that I'm not from. Sorry, I have checked backgrounds, I should mention that. But what I don't have is Floridian mermaid background and that's what Mermaid Spring is inspired by. So there's a real tourist attraction in in Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, where since the 1940s, women have been dressing up as mermaids and doing underwater shows in this kind of submerged theater that has been built in a natural clear water spring. So, what we're interested in exploring is how this natural spectacle that seems to be all about mermaids actually could draw our attention to the environment, to the spring that they're performing. And so the show is called Mermaid Spring. But what we're really trying to think through is our relationships to the places that we perform in or that we live in, and how maybe our needs to have them as backdrops to our lives can be damaging.
Am Johal 10:16
And where will it be performed when it, when it opens?
Barbara Adler 10:19
Oh, right now we're looking at probably at SFU. And we're in that grant writing process. So we've done little workshops, we have some music written. The music's being composed by Peggy Lee, Lee Abramson, and Alicia Hanson. So it's beautiful. We've had little workshop showings of that and we're just kind of in the process of waiting for the next round of grant results to see what happens next.
Am Johal 10:41
Cool, and you know, you having graduated from the school, working with artists doing different work with these types of projects, you also in your work at SFU are helping to place undergraduate students with organizations and all of that. I'm wondering what kind of questions come up for you know, for someone who's thinking about being an artist today, there's always you know, the stuff in the media, artists don't make very much money to all of these types of things. But clearly, there are drives and passions that drive people into art school to make work in different disciplines. And obviously, there's differences and nuances with dance, visual arts, composition, and these types of things. But you having, you know, being really immersed in this work, having studied but also now with undergraduate students and graduate students that you interact with how you think that through?
Barbara Adler 11:29
Yeah, it's so interesting that the questions are a mix of really pragmatic things like how do you even do taxes as an artist? People have a lot of questions about that. And I direct them to workshops taught by professionals in that. But then there are also just a really general questions of how do I be a curator? How do I get my work presented? How do I put my own work into the world? And I also think there's maybe a general kind of angst about how do I even keep going after I leave school? I lead a workshop today that was all about imagining life after graduation. And yeah, we sat together and kind of talked through some of it. It's... No career I would say is a simple line of steps that you you access, and you like, unlock the next level and go to the next one, like careers don't work like that. But careers in the art scene, especially zigzaggy and prone to, to chance and transformation. So it's almost like learning some practices or concepts for how to move through the world are more useful than imagining a path.
Am Johal 12:33
So Barb, you are involved in the spoken word scene for quite a while. Can you tell us about that part of your life?
Barbara Adler 12:39
Yeah, this is where you dig up my past?
Am Johal 12:41
Yeah, of course, I'm investigative, journalism.
Barbara Adler 12:44
Nardwuar kind of thing.
Am Johal 12:46
Yeah, yeah.
Barbara Adler 12:47
Yeah. So when I was 18, I started performing at poetry slams, and that was kind of the first time that I had really performed. I was in a, you know, a grade nine play typecast as an anxious mathematician so that you know that that didn't count. So starting in poetry slams, was the first time I was kind of performing in the real world. And I did that for a long time, I was on slam teams and represented Canada at stuff and then that kind of transitioned into a band that mixed spoken word and music and toured Canada and Europe and did things
[laughs]
that spoken word music bands do they're actually kind in this circuit and then stopped doing spoken word in in that context. And it's something that I still feel is like a very big part of where I'm from, but not as a practice a participate in.
Am Johal 13:43
What motivated you leaving that work?
Barbara Adler 13:47
I think curiosity for something else, because when I was in the spoken word music band, my initial role in it was to say spoken word really enthusiastically, often at the same time as another spoken word artists. So like our, our party trick was that we'd speak at the same time in perfect unison, and then we get really excited and our voices go like this at the same time. Everyone's like, yes, that's amazing. And we did that for years. And, you know, I was like, "Is this amazing? Is there a good reason to be speaking excitedly at the same time, I don't really feel it anymore." And as that was happening, I was learning how to play instruments. So I took piano lessons as a kid, which meant that in the band, my default instrument was the melodica, which is for people who don't know the melodica's proud history in reggae music. It's for, it's also like the music that the hipster in the band who can't really play an instrument plays. It's like a piano on a stick that you blow through comes in bright colors. You can play it with like a very intense facial expression. So I did that for a bunch of years. And then I transitioned from that to the accordion, and playing an accordion, an accordion and playing an instrument publicly got me more excited about writing songs and making music so it wasn't like a, you know, "Slam the door on spoken word." But I did get uncomfortable with the competitive world of poetry slams pretty quickly.
Am Johal 15:10
In terms of the work that you're doing now besides the project with Kyla around mermaids, what else are you thinking about working on?
Barbara Adler 15:18
I have an ongoing collaboration with a choreographer named Leslie Telford. And she makes amazing choreography and comes up with concepts that she wants words for so I provide the words and then she makes choreography based on that and then we kind of work together shaping the structures of the piece. So what that looks like probably sounds like me doing spoken word um, but to me there's something in there that's a little bit deeper about getting to know how a dance artist thinks and writing specifically for that. I'm working with another dance artist, Stephanie Cyr, who I met through Leslie Telford on a little project she wants, to she wants to speak and dance so I'm writing a monologue for her.
Am Johal 16:02
Cool, thank you so much for joining us.
Barbara Adler 16:04
Well, thanks so much for letting me talk about myself, how fun.
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Paige Smith 16:10
Thank you again to Barbara Adler for joining us on Below the Radar. In the next episode, we are joined by Simon Fraser University's President Andrew Petter.
Andrew Petter 16:18
We are an institution that's doing things differently and I'll confess it, I'm in love with, I have a love affair with this university. [laughs] I have colleagues at other universities who can move from university to university from presidency to presidency I just can't imagine it. Simon Fraser University and I are kind of hitched.
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Paige Smith 16:36
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