Workshop & Performance Dates

Part 1—March 9th: 11AM-5PM
The Arts Factory
281 Industrial Avenue
Vancouver

Part 2—March 10th: 4PM-6PM
Griffin Art Projects
1174 Welch Street
North Vancouver

Performance—March 10th: 7PM
Griffin Art Projects
1174 Welch Street
North Vancouver

Registration is $50 and includes a year-long subscription to TCR (if you’re already a subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription or sign up a friend on your behalf—send us an email at contact@thecapilanoreview.ca).

the poets have always preceded

In conjunction with the exhibition the poets have always preceded, Griffin Art Projects and The Capilano Review have teamed up to host a Poets Theatre Workshop with Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian.

San Francisco-based writers Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian will be in Vancouver for two days to lead a brief, but intensive workshop in Poets Theatre that will culminate in a live performance on Sunday, March 10 within the exhibition. Bellamy and Killian co-founded Poets Theatre, the poetry, stage and performance group in the Bay Area, and since the late 1980s have written nearly fifty plays in collaboration with poets Leslie Scalapino, Barbara Guest, Brian Kim Stefans, Norma Cole, and dozens of others.

The plan for the weekend is to generate a series of short ten-minute plays, rewrite them, cast them, stage them, direct them, panic about them, cut those terrible slow first ten minutes from them, and then on Sunday evening we’ll deliver a fully participatory, multimedia extravaganza like Peter Brook or Robert Wilson might do if they had only a tiny budget and actors better at being poets than stars. But as Aleister Crowley said, in Vancouver, “The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die.” All welcome to participate—every man and every woman is a star.

Dodie Bellamy is the 2018–19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts’ On Our Mind program, a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading-group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. Her most recent collection of writing is When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e), 2015). Her essay “The Beating of Our Hearts” was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian, she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017).

Kevin Killian, one of the original “New Narrative” writers, has written three novels, Shy (1989), Arctic Summer (1997), and Spreadeagle (2012), three books of stories, and four books of poetry, most recently Tweaky Village from Wonder Books.  New projects include a volume of memoirs, Fascination, edited by Andrew Durbin, from Semiotexte (December); and Stage Fright: Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater, from Kenning Editions in Chicago (in February 2019). He teaches writing to MFA students at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.