Of all the projects OTL has created, Car Stories is most certainly the longest-running, at times has been the most controversial and if it wasn’t for the infringement Festival, a true viral phenomenon, it would undoubtedly be the best known.

In a nutshell, Car Stories is a play containing several shorter plays, a piece of street performance that is at the same time visible and invisible and a challenge to how we see both theatre and the cityscape we walk through every day.  While a good chunk of any given show will be improvised, either along the lines of a story outline or completely out of the blue, parts of it can be and frequently have been scripted as well.

Car Stories '04: Obstruction of Justice

An audience, usually three spect-actors at a time, assembles in front of the show opener in a public place (a bar, a park, etc).  When that actor lowers his or her Optative Glasses (just a pair of ordinary sunglasses) over their eyes, it’s like the curtain going up.  The show begins and the audience is now in a different, theatrical world.  The opener establishes the show’s theme and sends the audience off on a mission with an Urban Guide who walks them, in character, down a street or an alleyway to a parked car.  There are more actors waiting in the front seat of the parked car with a 10-15 minute scene.  The audience sits in the back, watches and sometimes partakes.  Afterwards, another guide picks them up and usually brings them to another car.  The show continues until the audience is brought to the closer who finishes off the story and removes their Optative Glasses, sending the audience back to the world they recognize.

The individual car stories are self-contained pieces as are some of the guide routes, but they are generally incorporated into, add to or at the very least are related to the overall theme of the show.  The theme stays the same for a run of the show, while the individual parts of it will inevitably vary.  No two shows are ever the same. We will frequently keep a theme alive for an entire season but occasionally we will have a spur-of-the-moment theme for a particular run adopted to respond to something that is happening and very prevalent, as we did for our Buffalo run in 2007.

Car Stories '07 promo shot

We generally perform the show several times in a day for different groups of spect-actors who not only experience watching a show, but are also part of an invisible performance for everyone else on the street.  In fact, one of the thrills for the audience is not knowing who is part of the show and who isn’t.  Performers in the show get to experience dealing with unpredictable players such as the audience and people passing by who don’t know that there’s a show on.

In addition to being a jam on what is considered theatre and our perception of the often corporate-branded public space in a general context, Car Stories has also included some more specifically-targeted jams into it’s story’s matrix.  In Montreal, we have sent the show through the Pharmaprix on St-Laurent Boulevard on more than one occasion as a challenge to their violation of the historic character of the street with their glaring corporate signage.  In 2006, the Montreal opening of our show had the spect-actors play PartyPoker partiers in a jam on PartyPoker.net’s temporary ownership of the lower half of the Main.

Loosely inspired by Car Show, a production from the Corn Exchange in Dublin, which has the plays in cars element but not the guided tour through the Urban Wonderland or much of the ontological jolting our show is known for, Car Stories was first staged in 2001 at the St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival, where it was promptly ejected for theatrically playing with a theatre critic who didn’t quite get the joke.  The critic worked for a corporate sponsor of the festival, the festival got nervous and the rest, as they say, is history.

Car Stories ran for the next few years on its own and in 2004 helped to spark and took part in the first infringement Festival in Montreal.  That summer, it toured to Ottawa and Toronto.  In 2005, it played the Montreal infringement again, the first edition of the Buffalo infringement Festival as well as in New York City’s infringement.  The next year, it played in the first Regina infringement and inspired a version in Denmark.

Car Stories Denmark

In 2006, it also returned to play the Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Buffalo infringement Festivals with its “Church of Capitalism” theme.  The Toronto edition of this show was turned into a 30-minute video from Guerilla Video Productions that follows one group of spect-actors from start to finish.  Car Stories isn’t a stranger to video.  The close quarters of performers and audience make this theatre show a nice fit for film and our shows have been caught on camera since 2004.

Three other shows have been given similar video treatments as the Church of Capitalism, still following the story from start to finish but flipping between different groups of spect-actors.  They are 2007’s les journées de la culture outing entitled The Last Greenspace, dealing with the real causes and effects of construction on boulevard St-Laurent, the Halloween-themed sCARe Stories of the same year and 2008’s JDLC show entitled The Search for Pure Water.  The latter was staged the end of September and the video version premiers online tomorrow night as part of the infringement TV launch which begins at 7pm eastern time.

Car Stories doesn’t show signs of being put into park anytime soon.  While our Montreal group will surely mount it again for this year’s infringement Festival, there is no reason why other groups in different communities around the world can’t do the same thing.

To watch The Search for Pure Water on infringement TV, tune into www.infringementfestival.com/tv on Thursday, January 22nd at 7pm eastern.

For more on the show and to find out how to get involved, keep checking www.optative.net/carstories or contact carstories@optative.net

It’s New Year’s Eve, so what better time to look back on the past year and the year ahead.  2008 was a busy one for OTL on several fronts:

Sinking Neptune II: We adapted our verbatim theatre critique of Canada’s “first play” Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France and those remounting it, racism against Native peoples intact, for its 400th anniversary, to deal with another colonial celebration, the 400th anniversary of Quebec City.  We performed Sinking Neptune II twice at McGill University (including a show at the EGSS Conference), at CEGEP Montmorency in Laval, at the University of Guelph in Ontario and at the Maison de l’amitié as part of the infringement Festival.

rehearsal in Guelph (photo: Matthias Elsdörfer)

Our run culminated at co-op bar L’AgitéE in Quebec City in July, where we performed to a receptive audience which included members of the alternative 400e.  This was following a day of culture-jams, first of the ceremony where the Canadian military was given the keys to the city and later at the official Rencontres show, celebrating Samuel de Champlain and ignoring the genocide he was responsible for.

Stage III of the project is in the early planning stages, to get involved, please contact neptune@optative.net

Culture-Jams: In addition to our jam of le 400e anniversaire de Québec, we were busy theatrically thwarting the monoculture in Montreal this year.

Along with Uberculture Concordia, we brought our Zeus, Aphrodite and Gaïa to the Gillette Venus booth set up at Concordia University, protesting both the takeover of university space for corporate interests and corporate co-option of feminist messages coupled with the reinforcement of  body image as part of their goddess grams campaign.

In partnership with Kinetic Aesthetic, we brought a sweatshop into a Wal-Mart and managed to keep our scene going for a good ten minutes, even when security physically removed the table that the two sewing machines were resting on and tried to kick us out.

jamming Wal-Mart

In the lead-up to the federal election, we found out that Stephen Harper would be in town to give a speech.  We brought our own Harper along with a bunch of dissatisfied artists to the growing rally outside the Sandman Hotel.  In the scene, Harper stole from and generally attacked the artists, proving that art imitates life.

We also performed once again on Buy Nothing Day, this time sending Mr. Monopoly and his assistants out to four banks, the interconnected shopping malls that make up the underground city and the streets asking for some bailout money that he can use on the stock market.  Eventually, he realized that as long as people kept shopping, he’d get his money back anyways.

Not only did we do actions in Montreal and Quebec City, but we also managed to jam a Tim Hortons in Rimouski with the ZoPA.  While this is quite a bit of jamming, it doesn’t include the jams we did as part of our ongoing Reclaim The Main campaign.

Next year promises to be busier.  If you’d like to jam with OTL in 2009, please contact otl@optative.net

Reclaim The Main: With all the corporate spam flooding The Main, a heritage site and the heart of the Plateau community, during street fests and all summer long on billboard trucks, we thought things couldn’t get much worse.  In 2008, they did.  A giant billboard appeared at the corner of St-Laurent and Sherbrooke over a building that was supposedly under construction.

This “scaffolding wrap” monstrosity, put up by a company called Time2Ad, was supposed to cover the building until renovations could be complete.  It managed to stay up most of the year.  The ad came down occasionally, once when some debris fell off the building, but mostly just to change it for another ad.  Eventually, after a large public outcry and media coverage, the ad finally came down, but the building underneath was untouched.  Surprise, surprise!  We even got an after-the fact letter from the Ville-Marie borough, basically telling us what we already knew.

unrenovated building on St-Laurent and Sherbrooke aftet the giant billboard was removed

Throughout the year, we challenged this ad and all the (sadly) now-usual corporate intrusions by starting petitions, contacting public officials, contacting the media and of course by culture-jamming.  PubPartout made a few appearances in “support” of all this corporate influence and we inspired others to take action as well.

As corporate spam on the Main doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon, neither will Reclaim The Main.  If you’d like to get involved, please contact main@optative.net

Car Stories: Yes, this year we brought Montreal’s longest-running theatrical experiment back.  Car Stories, an interactive guided theatrical joyride through the Urban Wonderland for three spect-actors at a time was performed as part of  both the infringement Festival in June and les journées de la culture in September.

Car Stories during the Montreal infringement Festival (photo by Joanne Cosentino)

This year’s theme had the executives of a bottled water company sending a tainted peace offering to environmentalists with the help of the audience.  On their journey, they got a dental exam and danced in the alley with a couple of folks from down south, among other things.  This year’s show will be available in January 2009.

It’s never too early to start planning for the next edition.  If you’re interested, please contact carstories@optative.net

The infringement Festival: Although created by OTL, this event has truly taken on a life of its own.  For its fifth anniversary in Montreal, the festival ran almost the entire month of June and saw many theatrical, musical and street performances, not to mention culture-jams, visual arts shows, film screenings and spoken-word events, plus an increased Francophone portion.  The Buffalo infringement also ran its fourth edition this year and featured over 300 performances.

Plans are underway for the sixth Montreal edition, and the festival is currently looking for volunteer organizers and will be taking artist applications very soon.  For more, please visit the festival’s site.  Buffalo infringement is going into its fifth year and there is a new festival budding in Brooklyn, New York.  There’s even infringement TV on the horizon.  It’s still in test mode now, but will be broadcasting live very soon.

OTL Blog: We launched this blog back in November and it has been publishing consistently every Monday, Wednesday and Friday since then, with no plans of stopping or slowing down.  We’re even looking for more contributors to this and two other blogs.  If you’re interested, please contact media@infringementfestival.com

And now, the most important part of this message – a very happy new year to you and yours from Optative Theatrical Laboratories, see you in 2009 !!!

I’ve played in many culture-jams, but never as a videographer and never in a city I was visiting for the first time in my life.  That changed last spring, when I was part of a culture-jam at Tim Hortons in Rimouski.

Since 2002, OTL has offered a workshop called Revolutionary Theatre: Culture-Jamming and Theatrical Activism.  It had already been given in places like the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, the Ottawa, Toronto and Alberta Social Forums, at the Convergence in New Orleans and for THAW (Theaters Against War) in New York City.

A group called the ZoPa, which stands for Zone Piratus Autonomus, had invited us to bring the workshop to Rimouski, a community a little over two hours east of Quebec City by car.  This time it was my turn to give it along with Montreal infringement colleague Anne Boucard.

While I was familiar with all the material, I had never given this workshop before and neither had my colleague, so after seven hours on the road in two different cars (a carpool service to Quebec, then a lift from our hosts), hanging out in an old schoolbus converted into an environmentally-friendly mobile home and a good night’s sleep, we prepared.

I had been expecting a full room of people, as many of our workshops had seen in the past but was pleased to find out that while it was to take place in a classroom on the CEGEP de Rimouski campus, the attendance would be limited to the three members of the ZoPA: Stephanie, Denis and Julie.

Rimouski is a town by the St-Lawrence river, right where it is starting to expand to meet with the Atlantic Ocean, in fact the river at this point is half-ocean, complete with a high and low tide.  The scenery is breathtaking and the community is filled with activists and quite a few ex-pat Montrealers.  We were definitely in the right place.

On our way to the campus, we stopped off in an abandoned circus tent that was set up with chairs and a stage for some sort of conference that evening.  We went inside and took over the space, albeit temporarily, which really set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

us and the ZoPA

The workshop deals with some of the theories behind theatrical activism, historical examples and different types of culture jams.  It has a flexible format and we decided to incorporate performance elements to highlight some of what we were talking about.  After the break we showed videos of some previous OTL culture-jams and talked about some of the jams the ZoPA had performed in Rimouski, namely their sending Stephen Harper to the penalty box outside one of his speeches.

After sharing ideas and discussing techniques, we realized that what this weekend needed was a performance.  One of the easiest jams to put together that still has a strong theatrical element is our adaptation of Reverend Billy’s Death by Latte.  It involves different groups of people going into a Starbucks one at a time, each arguing a specific problem with Starbucks (unfair business practices, GMO milk, etc.).  Those arguing the anti-Starbucks side aren’t drinking lattes, those arguing pro-Starbucks are and end up simultaneously performing an over-the-top death scene.

Through the activists the ZoPA knew, we had enough players for the scene.  One thing Rimouski didn’t have was a Starbucks to jam (wow, somewhere in the world without a Starbucks!), but they did have a Tim Hortons.  They also have Canadian Armed Forces recruiting center, right on the town’s main street.  Tim Hortons profits off Canadian involvement in Afghanistan with an outlet in Kandahar.  Inspired by (or rather in protest of) this situation, we adapted the scene to the surroundings.

After all the fake dying, someone gets up and starts to explain why we did the jam and then Wendy, the mascot of Wendy’s Restaurants which owns Tim Hortons, rushes in, kicks the jammers out and then tells everyone to keep drinking their coffee and supporting war for profit.  She concludes by saying “du sang, toujours frais” playing on Tim Hortons slogan “always fresh” with a new slogan “always fresh blood.”

The scene went very well and got a reaction, pretty good considering not all of the players had jammed like this before.  The only thing that was a little sloppy was the camera work.  Since we didn’t have a real videographer or a real camera, I agreed to shoot it with my cellphone camera.  Technical glitches and getting too involved with the scene led to me only capturing the very last part:

While it might not have been the best first videography experience, it was a great first time for me giving this workshop and culture-jamming in Rimouski, a community that could clearly benefit from more such actions and already has the people there to do them.

Last night we played the first of two shows at The Bus Stop Theatre on Gottingen St. in Halifax. The crowd was lively and we had a very interesting talkback session with questions about the choice of images in our slide projections and what they meant for what we were hoping to accomplish with our show, as well as whether or not Lescarbot actually staged the show when, where and how it is said he did and effect anti-colonial deconstructionalist shows like this have on the discuurse and if they possibly take time away from groups like the Mi’kmaq telling their own stories.

We’ve got one more show in Halifax tonight at the Bus Stop at 8pm.