The Province
May 29, 1968

Intermedia - Workshop plants seeds for involvement

by JAMES BARBER

There were as many people backstage as there were in the Vancouver Art Gallery's main room Tuesday night for the public performance which concluded the Deborah Hay composition workshop.

Which almost validates the fact that this column was written backstage instead of from a cushion among the audience. For the last two weeks, in a spirit of interest and inquiry, I have been participating in the workshop. Twice a week we have been meeting — in intermedia, in private houses, in the Art Gallery, and at the UBC Armories—anywhere, in fact where there is space to work.

And to work at what— what is a composition workshop? First of all, I think it is an exercise in loosening the mind muscles, a sort of limbering up process for anybody interested in exhibiting the products of his imagination to the public. The participants in this particular workshop included photographers, painters, sculptors, dancers, choreographers, students, a couple of secretaries and a poet.

And Deborah Hay's function was first to encourage them into a liaison, and then, after a two week pregnancy, midwife the results of the affair into a smooth efficient delivery. The workshop, in effect, encouraged artists and would-be artists to extend their thinking into areas out side their usual discipline, and then crystalize the product of this thinking into a performable shape.

To put it simply— intellectual charades in drag. And it is enormously enjoyable, a process which was very popular in the 19th century, only dying out because of a feeling of self consciousness in the participants who felt that their personal efforts had little value by comparison with the newly developing mechanical home entertainments such as player pianos and wind-up gramophones.

Now, the electronic gimmicks are becoming an accepted part of everybody's life— tape recorders, lights, pocket radios, and we are starting to feel as much at ease with them as great grandfather felt with beaded table cloths he used to play desert sheik with in his parlor games.

And out of it all will come not only the village concept of community self entertainment, but many seeds for planting in other fields—ideas for the legitimate theater, for kinetic dance / movement / sound art forms, for momentary sculptures— but above all an involvement.

And that's what we are all looking for.