On Sunday Jan 23, most of the 2011 DaPoPo Collective met at the new Casa DaPoPo on Kaye Street to discuss the immediate future of Café DaPoPo. How can we write the inherently unpredictable performance elements of Café DaPoPo more profoundly into the event? Unlike a traditional performance, there is no illusion of a repeatable Café performance. Every time a certain scene or song is ordered, the set necessarily changes. Often the costumes change. Props reveal themselves in performance: a beer glass; a patron's hat; a butter knife. Often the parameters shift: add a sock puppet; make it 'saucy', make it 'queer'; sing your Hamlet. By donning a pair of sun-glasses last-minute, the performer experiences a total transformation.
How can we devise more original material for Café performances without the monthly task becoming an overwhelming one? Each performer becomes a writer, a director and a dramaturge, if they choose. How do you use a picture frame, a shower cap and a rubber duckie effectively, in what is essentially an open rehearsal, performing a two-person song? In fact, the audience, who is at times almost indistinguishable from the actors, influences the performance, unknowingly. They laugh. They turn their heads away. The lean forward in their chair. These immediate cues bring about another total transformation in the performer. The entire theatrical moment disrobes and becomes naked, intimate dialogue.
What do you do with a theatrical form like Café DaPoPo, which relies heavily on audience interaction, non-traditional locations and an ever-changing cast (and therefore available performances); a form that doesn't fit into the conventional theatre model in terms of finding audiences, choosing venues and generating revenue? Again, the performer can find Café transformative. The reason for performing in Café DaPoPo is not the pay check. In fact, there usually in no pay check. It is to experience the performance, the audience and the impulse for art with an immediacy that is too often lost in the big theatres.
Our plans to perform once monthly from March through July (including performances at the MayWorks Festival, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic's Flagship Fridays series, as well as Halifax Pride) gave us an excuse to refocus our interests, and possibly effect a few transformations.
