Tag: Sniffing for Stories

1. first steps

I borrowed a mic from a friend who has a one-year-old

the kid kept grabbing the mic so we gave him a toy mic

then we gave him a toy ball

we rolled the ball down the hall and he chased it

when we tried to record our dog running in the alley

the dog thought the mic was a stick with a ball on the end

he grabbed the foam wind guard and ran off with it

in the early stages, children and dog are quite alike

2. by my calculations

if our dog is eight-and-a-half

than we’ve lived in our five-and-a-half for a dog’s age

we walk our dog other places besides our alley but let’s say we don’t

eight-and-a-half years of three times a day up and three times a day down

that’s eighteen thousand six hundred and fifteen lengths of alley

writing for one length of alley is harder than I thought it would be

it takes five minutes to walk from Fairmount to Saint Viateur

six if you walk slowly

seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent

eight-and-a-half years if you walk as if sniffing for stories

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This summer I’ve been working on an audio narrative walking tour project that will be presented by the Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal during Les Journées de la Culture, September 30 – October 1, 2006. Here’s what the PWM website says:

PWM is proud to present In-situ Cité, five short original environmental theatre pieces, organized as an audio walking tour of the Mile End. Directed by Stephen Lawson, In-situ Cité will showcase the works of of J.R. Carpenter, Nathalie Derome, Skidmore, Geeta Nadkarni, and Rosella Tursi.

From the outset I’ve thought of my piece as a continuation of Entre Ville, with our neighbours as characters and the back alleyway as the terrain. The alleyways of Mile End are a world known and shown to us by our dog. The week we thought Isaac the Wonder Dog was dying (see August posts) I had a massive anxiety attack about In-situ Cité. In the long hours spent sitting and waiting on the concrete floors of vets and animal clinics my whole idea of neighbourhood and community and humanity underwent some major revisions.

Isaac walks us up and down the alleyway three times a day. He introduces us to our neighbours and befriends children – things we would never do of our own volition. We’re not crazy about our neighbours. We’re dog people, not children people. But we make the best of things. We try and look at things from the dog’s eye point of view. Which is how I am now aproaching my In-situ Cité piece.
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