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Directed and Joked by
David Diamond
A Headlines Theatre
production in association with Check Your Head
photo: David Cooper
international connections:
foreground: Valerie Laub as Claire
background: Charlene Wee as sweatshop worker, Kevin Millsip as line manager
photo: David Cooper
Kevin Millsip as Andrew Hamilton
Cast Members
Valerie Laub is an actor, writer, playshop fa-silly-tator, and clown, returning to the stage after several years focusing on her art therapy practice. She was involved in many collaborative works as writer/actor, travelling throughout the Kootenays and Vancouver Island, and was a regular creator/performer at the Women in View Festival. Forum theatre unites her passions for theatre, the psychology of the human condition, and the grief and glory of the individual story.
Emme Lee is an actor and model. Her activist background includes organizing campus boycotts and supporting environmental campaigns. She is currently struggling with the dichotomy of being an anti-globalization activist and a model.
As co-cordinator of Check Your Head: the Youth Global Education Network, Kevin Millsip has given hundreds of workshops on globalization to high school and university students. He has worked as an educator with a number of organizations, including Axis Theatre Society, the Council of Canadians, and the Anglican Church. Kevin is a graduate of Langara College's Studio 58 theatre program.
Charlene Wee is a UBC Sociology graduate and social justice advocate who has spent the last seven years "tickling the cultural dilemma." Charlene volunteers at the UBC Women's Resource Centre and has worked with the popular theatre group the Rice Girls and with the UBC Women of Colour Network.
Firehall Arts Centre to become CORPORATE U
Headlines Theatre teams up with globalization activists Check Your Head
Headlines Theatre and cutting-edge anti-globalization educators Check Your Head present Corporate U, a corporate take-over of the Firehall Arts Centre. Created by 20 street-savvy activists, this theatre event will explore how corporations - richer and more powerful than most countries - influence our attitudes, relationships, economies and environment. The Firehall will be transformed into a corporate university campus, an immersion that will extend right out onto the street.
It has been almost a year since "the Battle in Seattle", which saw 50,000 citizens shut down the meetings of the World Trade Organization. It's an appropriate time to consider how corporate globalization erodes democracy, and what can be done about it, using the language of theatre. Headlines' forum theatre format means the audience is part of the action, joining the cast in experimenting with new ways to take power back from the faceless - but all too well-branded - transnationals.
Over its 20-year history Headlines Theatre has built a reputation for getting to the heart of issues. Last year's very successful Squeegee explored the lives of Vancouver's squeegee kids, starring a cast of street-involved youth. This year the cast are all activists - focussed on issues of feminism, social justice, environment - united in their concern about globalization. The production is directed by Headlines' Artistic and Managing Director David Diamond.
To create Corporate U Headlines has teamed up with Check Your Head, a youth-driven organization which counters corporate presence in high schools and universities by educating students on globalization. Check Your Head co-coordinator Kevin Millsip, a graduate of Langara's Studio 58 theatre program, is a Corporate U cast member. Millsip is joined by Charlene Wee, Emme Lee, and Valerie Laub. The cast is spending the week of November 6 through 11 with 15 additional activists, workshopping the issues and focussing them into compelling theatre. The corporate campus will be created by Designer and Technical Director Craig Hall, Stage Manager Kelly Creelman, Lighting Director Shane Droucker, and Costumer Christine Hackman.
The new anti-globalization resistance movement is well-versed in technological tools. Internet activism stopped the first round of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Demonstrators at key global gatherings, including the recent G20 summit in Montreal and the upcoming Biotech conference in Vancouver, stay one step ahead of ever-larger armies of law enforcement using cell phones and Palm Pilots. Media activists stream up-to-the-minute demonstration footage onto the internet, where its immediate global availability challenges the dominance of the mainstream press.
Headlines' is embracing the realtime revolution by taking Corporate U onto the internet for the world's first forum theatre webcast. Headlines' has done live telecasts with Rogers Cable 4 for over a decade: watchers can phone in and have a designated "TV intervenor" try out their ideas on stage. The addition of webcast technology will enable anyone with internet access anywhere in the world to participate in Corporate U's closing night. Appropriate technology for a production on globalization, the "totally wired" issue of our times.
photo: David Cooper
The cast and Director. Left to right: Charlene Wee, |
The TV Lives Kevin Millsip as the TV, |
Quotes from people and the press
"The THEATRE FOR LIVING workshop for Corporate U gave me some hope for the movement and the work I do. I had been feeling kind of disillusioned and this amazing group of folks and this amazing work just got me all fired up again."
Terra Poirer, Corporate U research workshop participant, Nov. 15, 2000
"Emme Lee delivers the night's most stunning performance, reminding the audience, in a single, heart- scorching monologue, just what live theatre is for. The superb company of actors on stage with her (Valerie Laub, Kevin Millsip, Charlene Wee and director David Diamond) all work well within the play's experimental structure. (Diamond) knows that there are, always, more questions than answers, and that real life drama is long on pain and short on simple heroes or villains. Headlines makes their difficult material dance. Corporate U offers an advanced course for the educated heart and an intelligent seminar on globalization in a single evening."
Tom Sandborn, The Globe and Mail, Dec. 11, 2000
"Corporate U is an emotionally explosive and analytical play that places us face to face with numerous aspects of our complex world. The audience is masterfully prompted to respond genuinely -- to run away from liberal tokenism and affected soul searching. The play is a mix of entertainment, information, and considered response, which stays with you long after you personally experience it."
Alicia Barsallo, Co-ordinator, BC Latin American Congress (Newsletter) Dec. 12, 2000
"I just got back from the performance (of Corporate U) tonight and I wanted to let you know how great it was. It was incredibly thought-provoking and gave me some great ideas about some other strategies that I can try to bring about awareness of the global nature of what on the surface appear to be domestic issues. It was great to see how you distilled these very large issues to some very personal vignettes and encouraged people to get up out of their chairs to do something."
Audience member, Dec. 12/00, asked to remain anonymous
"Headlines Theatre doesn't pretend to have all the answers but it sure knows how to ask the right questions. Better yet, it succeeds night after night in getting audiences to examine their own value systems and to join forces in making the world a better place. The most interesting part of (Corporate U) is the way Diamond asks the audience to look at the specific, personal story of a couple of people ....and then to extend that picture into the arena of foreign aid and treatment of Third World countries by countries like Canada. It was amazingly easy to do. Diamond puts the duracell bunny to shame: he just keeps going and going and going. And he's not just banging a stupid drum."
Jo Ledingham, Vancouver Courier, Dec. 13, 2000
"I want to congratulate you on the amazing work in Corporate U. I felt my body on the edge of my seat, riveted. Tonight, not only was a powerful, theatrical experience, but has helped me feel my feet on the ground again, and re-focus. Thank you for your work and inspiration. I can't tell you how much it has affected me."
E-mail from Samantha Fletcher, audience member, Dec. 16, 2000
"It was wonderful to be able to have such an event as Corporate U broadcast on the web, thus enabling the vast audience to participate. You are doing the job of David Diamond in Vancouver - but with such an event you are doing job of David Diamond on the planet Earth. Forum Theatre is such a powerful media to promote critical thinking and to help people become liberated and transformed, not only entertained and informed. Corporations are really in our heads, and Corporate U can help us to proceed further in our search for our authentic self without different labels which society puts on/in Our Heads. We very much appreciate that you are adjusting Theatre of the Oppressed techniques for the persons and not vice versa. Thank you."
E-mail from Sasa Janiska, Croatia, the first ever Forum web cast intervener, Dec. 22, 2000
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