Soft goods
Post #12, 13 October 2022: Micheline Beauchemin, Amagatsu Ushio, Anthony Ibbotson, Donald MacSween, Michael Hagen
Micheline Beauchemin. Tapestry weaver. Governor General’s Visual Arts Awards at the National Gallery tonight. Conversing en français with Micheline Beauchemin about her monumental decorative curtain woven in 1968 for the NAC’s Opera hall. She described her months in Japan during the fabrication of the psychedelic tapestry composed of layered netting. Too slow for curtain calls, I disclosed that the massive drape was rarely seen by the public. That is, until head carpenter Bob Whelan and I selected an American firm to install new motors for both of the Opera’s two main curtains.
I described the rigger from Texas gripping ‘The Beauchemin’s’ box-truss between his knees, riding it up and down the fly tower. Forty-five feet each way in three-and-a-half seconds... the dark cavity barely wider than his Stetson... two tonnes of counterweight hurtling past in the opposite direction just inches behind him.
At two a.m., crouched on the adjacent lighting bridge, I may have spared the Texan’s life. Failing to dissuade him from riding on the truss, I insisted he hand me his toolbelt. Surely its splay of screwdrivers would snag. I told him: “you’ll be shredded!”
Tonight, nearly twenty years later, Madame Beauchemin listens carefully, leaning in, pleating her splendid gown, the reception echoing above us in the dome of the gallery’s Grand Hall, evidently unsure what to make of this anecdote. (March 2006, Ottawa)
Amagatsu Ushio. Choreographer. Just before Sankai Juku first introduced Butoh—Japan’s post-war ‘dance of darkness’—to Ottawa in 1983, Bob Whelan accompanied me to Toronto to plan how we’d rig the upside-down descent of the four nude male dancers. On the roof of Trinity Square, we observed locally-engaged mountaineers lowering them by their feet looped in thongs. Rather than the company’s hemp cordage, Toronto’s mountaineers trusted to their own fine-braid.
Artistic director Amagatsu Ushio leaned off a parapet sounding long notes on a conch shell. Blood-like pigment trickled from the dancers’ ears, sepulchral in white body make-up. Most difficult was their head-first launch. After that, they performed Jomon Sho, gradually unfolding from foetal positions as they were lowered to the ground.
Bob and I took the elevator. The audience assembled in the plaza below parted to form an alley. Expressionless, the danse macabre proceeded in slow motion to an idling van. We trailed them, carrying briefcases, piling into the back seat as the door slid closed. Amagatsu smiled when I fretted that our presence had detracted from his choreography.
A week later they’d be suspended from davits on the NAC’s north façade. Bob used our own rope stock. A burly man, he personally undertook a human load test. Bravely, rashly. The rope’s angle placed enormous stress on the davit as he was lowered ninety feet to safety.
Getting to know the dancers, I’d divined that monk-like discipline didn’t assuage their qualms regarding the perilous Jomon Sho. The precarity of their feat worked to bind us together. How my heart raced during those thirty minutes in the air. With flourish, Amagatsu inscribed a dedication to me in a delicate grey-rice-paper-lined book. Its black and white photos record their choreography in the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. They all signed it.
In Seattle several months later, a hemp line frayed. The mild, gentle Yoshiyuku Takada fell eighty feet to his death. In New York, afterwards, I found their no-nonsense tour manager Kristina shaken, wordless. Intrinsically hazardous, I consoled her. We all knew it.
After a hiatus, Amagatsu returned with Kinkan Shonen; making rapturous waves with a gossamer fabric, live peacocks strutting the stage.
As Head Carpenter, Bob Whelan seemed rooted in the NAC, respected as union president, career employee, family man. We’d advanced shows together in New York, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. He’d laugh when I’d point out that he was proof of the value of an English degree. Surprisingly, he resigned to travel the world rigging large musicals. And now, sorrow that equable capable Robert has passed away at fifty unexpectedly in Tokyo. (8 January 2010, Los Angeles.)
Anthony Ibbotson. Archivist. Tony’s tasteful high apartment on Rideau Terrace in Rockcliffe Park looked west on Parliament. Among other Ottawa luminaries Chief Justice Bora Laskin lived somewhere below him. The walls featured tapestries by Jean Lurçat, legendary Aubusson weaver, the subject of Tony’s Sorbonne doctorate. Plucked from the Queen’s French Department by CEO Donald MacSween to become the National Arts Centre’s founding Archivist, he adopted me as his protégé during summer off-seasons.
Recruiting Tony ensured that the NAC’s early years would be documented with artistic sensitivity well beyond any governmental norm. A rangy Rhodesian, he was openly gay when that took courage. He valued theatre people’s obliviousness to sexual orientation. A thoughtful mentor, his insightful letters discussed the productions and exhibitions he’d seen. It came as a shock during the first wave of the post-Pierre-Trudeau budget cuts that he was sacked, his beloved archives suspended.
We’d been herded in our hundreds to a hotel to be separated into two groups. Those of us destined to remain felt survivors’ guilt watching the others emerge from a separate banquet hall clutching separation slips. A situation made decidedly worse when Tony’s fluctuating health condition, attributed to stress, turned out to be HIV-AIDS.
Down-sizing with fortitude, the administration took no heed of his condition. In truth, the ‘mystery’ illness was treated as plague; most avoided even the slightest contact with an AIDS sufferer. Isolated but poised, Tony engaged in his final struggle. Hosting him at home for meals was a political statement.
When we gathered at the Friends House—Tony was a Quaker—it was his partner Barry who broke the long minutes of respectful quietude, followed by many of us grieving the loss of our noble friend. I exchanged letters with Tony’s elderly mother in Zimbabwe. A month later, I sat across the desk listening stonily to his erstwhile superior’s pangs of conscience: surely, he hadn’t somehow contributed to the archivist’s demise? (30 August 2019, Ottawa.)
Donald MacSween. CEO. The NAC’s Director General has a pet scheme to create a boutique in the main foyer’s deep narrow cloakroom. Sensing folly, his operations director has prevaricated. Exasperated, MacSween has summoned me, along with other direct enablers to his canal-facing office: Jean-Guy, architectural draughtsman, and Elizabeth, the boutique’s intended manager. Waving off my sketches for movable sales kiosks—a modest but practical alternative—he wants me to design the interior shop’s lighting and display elements, all to be implemented in-house.
...We visit two masons putting finishing touches on a fifty-foot interior cinder-block wall dividing the new boutique from the reduced cloakroom, its airless volume dank with the musk of wet mortar. Although MacSween has pored over Jean-Guy’s floor-plan, he hasn’t visualized the space until now. A shadow crosses the draughtsman’s face as the Director General deems the shop too narrow: the entire not-yet-dry wall must be moved.
“What do you mean ‘must be moved’?” the mason crouched beside the glistening wall looks up wide-eyed. “We’ve just finished it.”
Alas, all must be undone and rebuilt a full sixteen inches further into the coat room, thereby incrementally increasing the boutique’s volume. Mild-mannered Jean-Guy acquiesces, and then accepts a new position with a school board. Elizabeth soldiers on. The boutique will never recover its sunk costs. (n.d. ca. 1985; November 2006, Ottawa.)
Michael Hagen. Scenic Artist. Tonight, awaiting the curtain to rise in the NAC Opera, now known as Southam Hall, I’m thinking of Michael Hagen, the genial scenic artist from Montreal. Through the 1980s I enjoyed visiting his vast industrial space in the basse-ville with tennis-court-sized opera drops stretched out by his youthful team of assistants. The bearded German was a pragmatic businessman as well as an accomplished scenic painter. He told me in his heavy accent that should the Canada-US trade agreement pass he’d relocate to upstate New York.
Not long after he’d painted Peter Rice’s exquisite ‘palm-house’ drops and gauzes for the NAC’s Cosi fan tutte, NAFTA was ratified. Hagen departed Montreal, as promised. I flew to London to meet the suppliers of a new main curtain for the NAC’s opera house. They’d sewn Covent Garden’s lustrous main tab, comparable to ours in its festoon rigging. Expecting a Hagen-scaled operation, I betrayed my surprise at their postage-stamp sized studio in the East End. Too small to have laid flat even a fraction of the Royal Opera’s great front curtain.
The two principals shrugged and cleared a corner of their cluttered drafting table for three mugs of tea. I chose a beautiful mohair in dark vermillion from the sample book, detailing the fine leatherwork and rings required to draw open the festoon. Twenty-five years on that sweeping drape still is exquisite, even if showing a little wear. (September 19th, 2015, Ottawa.)