June 10 2004
Greetings from Montreal,
Wow, much has happened since my last communique. First thing's first, the Prague Fringe. I spent the week leading up to the Fringe promoting myself in various strategic ways, which happened to include a lot of pubs and hiphop shows and restaurants and the like, you know, all of the places you might meet potential audience members. Also, I was joined by my grandmother Charlotte a few days into my stay in Prague, and was therefore in excellent company. She is on a post-retirement world tour, and managed to factor in a stop in Prague to correspond with the Fringe, allowing us to take in some local cultural events and ensuring that I was ridiculously well fed. This made for some interesting variety in my target audiences as well, since I would be at a grungy underground hiphop show handing out flyers to backpacking Czech homeboy one day, and going to a classical music concert with Grandma the next, passing flyers out to the well-dressed/to-do. She was an instant celebrity with the Fringe crowd as well, to the point where I would meet other performers and hear them ask repeatedly: "Oh, you're the Rap Canterbury Tales guy, so, where's this wonderful grandmother I've heard so much about?" I wasn't the slightest bit jealous about all the attention she got, however, since a bit of it did seem to rub off on me. I was also the only Canadian act at the Prague Fringe, and the Canadian Ambassador to the Czech Republic even came to my show with his son, a big hiphop fan.
My real challenge in Prague was not self-promotion as it had been in Brighton though, it was instead the incorporation of a new and exciting element into my otherwise no-frills show: the soundtrack. See, ever since I started performing Rap/Chaucer almost four years ago I have constantly been asked by audiences, "so, why not do it to music?" And my answer has ever been that I write the lyrics specifically to work with a rap beat, but that I'm no musician or producer, and to use the wrong music would severely detract from the natural flow of the words, and that I didn't have the skills, time or resources to put a soundtrack together, though it was my intention, eventually. I have experimented a few times with slapping beats together to perform to, but so far have not worked out anything I was happy with. This was also something that I hid behind, however, since I was afraid of losing the attention of my listeners as they zoned out nodding their heads to a beat, instead of following the story.
Well, before leaving on this tour I hired Lin Gardiner, who wrote and produced some of the beats for tracks on my album, including The Pardoner's Tale, to write beats for the rest of the show - we had less than two weeks to put this together. Ever talented under pressure, Lin came up with a number of loops tailored to the mood of each story and together we created a background track for each of the Tales. These tracks are perfectly timed to a guide vocal that I recorded for each one at a single pass in the studio, and that guide was to become the template for my live performance, to the second. So, the benefit was that the beat would strategically change to fit the narrative, intensifying and fading out at key moments, and in the background was a vocal array of my ad-libbed laughs, scoffs, groans, screams and various sound effects to fit the moment-to-moment progression of the story. The down-side, however, was that I now had very little freedom to strategically pause for effect, or to allow the audience to laugh, or to catch my breath, or improvise, since I had to hit each word exactly on its prescribed beat, or the laugh or grunt or sound effect would come too late or early and would be obviously out of place, ruining the effect. I carried this soundtrack with me the whole time in Brighton, and listened to it off and on to practice, but never felt confident enough to use it, besides which the Mad Hatter Cafe didn't exactly have a professional theatre sound system.
My theatre in Prague, however, did, and I was out of excuses. Ironically, they assigned me a venue with the baffling name of "divadelni stan", which I printed on my posters without knowing that it meant simply "theatre tent". This tent was set up in the gravel parking lot behind the main Fringe Club, and was the exact same size and shape and probably model as the cook-shacks I have spent most of my young life inhabiting in treeplanting camps. I felt right at home.
The only drawback of the tent was that anyone making any noise within a half kilometer of it sounded as if they were in there with you, due to the thin walls. My technical rehearsal was set for the afternoon of June 2nd, mere hours before my first show, and with trepidation I passed the soundtrack CD, of which I had only one copy, to the sound technician, and performed each tale twice, awkwardly, missing most of my cues. Halfway through the rehearsal the sixteen-piece bagpipe band commissioned by the fringe to grab attention struck up a rousing version of Auld Lang Syne right outside my thin canvas walls, to the point where I couldn't hear the beats or even my own shouting, so I had to stop and wait for them to march off, Fringe crowd in tow. Suffice to say, I didn't quite feel fully confident going into my first show of the Fringe.
Heaven intervened on my behalf however, and a torrential downpour struck Prague on the evening of the 2nd, collapsing one side of the tent and shorting out the sound system, which forced me to perform A Cappella one last time (and gave me one extra day to practice). Brushing off the apologies of the Fringe organizers at the state of the venue (though the wall was restored, the sound and lights were fried and the stage was pooled with water), I reassured them I had worked in much worse (treeplanting and all) and prepared to launch my show. Amazingly, eighteen people showed up out of the downpour, and the show was a hit, creating a nice buzz for the rest of the run, though I had to shout over the thunder of the rain on the tent roof - the bits in the Miller's Tale about God's decision to flood the earth again were given a new light - it was Fringe theatre at its best. The only truly unfortunate setback was my poor grandmother, who searched in vain for the venue during the deluge, arriving just as I was finishing, soaked and in strained spirits (she did catch the next night's show though).
The second night about twelve souls turned up, and I launched into the show with my soundtrack for the first time. The sound technician, perhaps confused by the bagpipers' interruption, mistook one of my cues and stopped the Knight's Tale beat after just six minutes, making it impossible for her to find the right spot again, so I had to improv something into the show about the Knight getting angry with the beat and calling for silence, then the Miller came back with the beat, but it wasn't perfect by a long shot.
Friday I was practicing to the soundtrack as I walked around Prague, getting funny stares from everyone I passed as I muttered to myself, but after a while I thought I'd take a break so I popped a copy of "Swordplay" into my discman instead, and put the soundtrack in the CD's jewel case. Then I went around on some promotional stops, talked to an underground CD store about selling my album, went to see a Spoken Word Fringe show called the Poetry Vandals, and finally made my way to the tent for my show. When I got there, however, I couldn't find the soundtrack, and instantly realized my blunder - I had sold it to someone earlier in the day, inside the "Swordplay" jewel case! So I was running around frantically right up until my show trying to figure out who it was I had sold my only copy of the soundtrack CD to, and finally tracked the person down, but it was too late, I had to start. Mid-way through the (A Cappella) Knight's Tale I saw the person creep into the back of the tent – it was one of the Poetry Vandals - so once I finished the first Tale I improvised the Miller making fun of the Knight for boring his audience with A Cappellas, and played with the beat from then on.
Saturday night the show was coming together, and although I only had about six audience members, I finally felt like I nailed the timing. After the show I went to see a rock group called Jonny Quality - a group of extremely talented rockers headed by a San Fran chiller named Shaun who moved to Brighton to start the band. Look for them to be featured on Fatboy Slim's upcoming album. We had a pretty big night after that show, with clubs and all, and me freestyling my head off for all the band members, "Dis me...sweet, now dis me again!" At one point the drummer's girlfriend didn't believe I was freestyling, so she pointed to her chest halfway through a rhyme about "things are gritty / in heart of the city... check this hippy / skeptic chick with her tie-died shirt / it makes my eyes hurt!" Vindicated. I don't know if anything will come of it, but there was some talk of a Babasword/Jonny Quality collabo track. Good guys to know. www.jonnyquality.com
Sunday I had two shows, and the entire Jonny Quality entourage came to the afternoon one, along with a few dozen others, for a packed show with over thirty people in the tent. This was by far the hottest of the Fringe for me, and after my initial fear about cues and timing I felt like I had it mastered - like I was saying before, it's something about big crowds and everyone having fun that loosens me up, but I nailed every punch-line and twist and earned a thunderous ovation. So the final show that night was child's play, and I guess I wont be performing without my soundtrack ever again if I can help it; it improves the show dramatically, that is, if I can manage not to sell it again by accident.
There was a big party at the Prague Fringe Club after the last shows and all of the performers got drunk together and bonded. That was one of the best things about Prague for me - the support among artists. I saw more people from other companies come to my show, and went and saw more shows myself, than at any other Fringe I have been to, and we were all paying full ticket prices for this, but since everyone was doing it no one complained. The Prague Fringe is a pretty new venture, so it isn't organized as tightly as some others, but it was definitely a great experience. Also, since they don't really have things running smoothly yet (it's only the third year), the price structure was pretty repressive for artists, with a big entry fee and a box office split. I definitely didn't make a profit there, and from talking to the other companies I don't think many of them did. Still, I would go again in a second - it was a great way to take in the city and make some sound connections.
When I got home from the final Fringe party on Sunday night at 3 a.m. I stopped in the Traveler's Hostel lobby to check my email and saw a message with the subject "Montreal Fringe Slot Open". My heart leapt up, until I read the message, which said "Mr. Brinkman, we have been phoning you for two days about this slot, and if you do not get in touch with us to accept by tonight at six p.m. we will be forced to offer it to the next company on the list". Panicking, I rushed to buy a phone card and call them, but could not get through, since it was already well after 6 p.m. Montreal time. I left several frantic messages "I'm coming, don't give my spot away!" and finally went to bed and spent a sleepless night worrying that I might have crept up the waiting list for six months only to lose my place by a matter of hours.
However, when I woke up in the morning I had an email confirming my participation, so I am now a part of the Montreal Fringe Festival! It was too late for me to get into the program, but I am on the website, under comedy. So I have been here since yesterday afternoon, frantically catching up for my late entry, (okay, and stopping for some poutine as well). I did my tech rehearsal an hour ago, and my show now has not only sound but also lighting cues for the different fades into night and day scenes. My first show of the Montreal Fringe is Friday night at 11:15 p.m. and I have so much to do between now and then it's dizzying, since practically no one even knows I'm here. Press releases go out poste haste. Still, I had to take the time to write this out now, lest I accumulate another ten pages of worthy stories before actually getting them sent off, and end up exceeding all of your storage limits with text alone.
I will be here in Montreal performing for the next two weeks, then off to the Toronto Fringe at the end of the month, and will then be back for some much-needed rest in B.C. for most of July. I will also have to use this time to prepare for Edinburgh, however, since that is the mother of all Fringes and I am scheduled to perform there everyday from the 6th until the 30th of August in a massive central theater venue. Thankfully, I will at that point have some back-up in the form of my counterpart/younger brother (ready Erik?). Hope this finds you all well and enjoying the sun, or break from it. Thank you for all the encouraging responses, suggestions and introductions - it reminds me that I am alone on this quest only in body. Okay, with that, onward and upward. All the best,
baba