S2S: Director's note | S2S: Playwright's note | S2S: Who was Ashley Smith? | S2S: Research | S2S: Videos | S2S: Exhibition | S2S: Symposium | S2S: Media coverage | S2S: Relevant links | S2S: Feedback from Ashley Smith's last lawyer | S2S: Excerpted jury recommendations | S2S: Anonymous stories
Speech given by playwright Melanie Bennett on March 18, 2014, opening night of
From Solitary to Solidarity: Unravelling the Ligatures of Ashley Smith
A recent survey investigating the state of mental health of Canadian university students found that one in ten undergrads has seriously considered taking their life over the past year.
A few days ago, I was standing on the subway platform on my way to teach a class at the campus where I work. I had this thought, “Jump. Just jump. This is all there is.” I could hear the faint clicking of the subway approaching the station and see the light of its headlights getting brighter in the tunnel, ironically appearing just as I was thinking that there is no light at the end of this futile PhD. The last five years has been fraught with financial stress that led to my husband and I losing our house; a competitive and bleak job market, especially for someone completing their doctorate in mid-life; feelings of displacement caused by not knowing how to perform among the elite and privileged community of academia since the majority of my life has been spent in working class structures whose values clash with the progressive, clever, and enlightened enclaves of artists and scholars; and, emotional hardship that included an advisor who died from overdosing on prescription medication midway through my studies. Jump!
A half an hour later, I was standing in front of my 80-plus students sporting the last dregs of designer lipstick purchased before my scholarship funding dried up. All confidence and good humour, I cracked some jokes, asked them about their weekends, and opened my lecture with a YouTube clip of an English bulldog puppy rolling down a hill. Academia with its Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mantra, frowns upon scholars who reveal their vulnerabilities. It shows weakness and opens you up to risks of not being taken seriously, which is career suicide in a job market in crisis. (So does showing YouTube videos of rolling puppies, I suspect).
I didn’t feel this kind of dehumanizing pressure to wear masks during my undergraduate degree in the Drama department here at uWaterloo. Part of the reason was that the program attracted a great group of supportive generous students…something I’m delighted is still happening as witnessed in the wonderful students who worked on this project. The nature of the liberal arts program resists a one-size-fits-all theatre student and hierarchical structures found in conservatory programs. The potential of liberal arts is that it creates a demographic from varied backgrounds and disciplines, something that Andy Houston nurtures in the courses and performances he facilitates. In 2002, I enrolled in a couple of drama courses as a way to learn how to overcome my shyness and insecurity. I had no plans to declare it my major. I was a first generation university student who was 10+ years older than my cohort, a six-foot tall awkward moose with a big nose and feeble high-pitched voice, so I had NO delusions of being worthy of the stage and in truth, I didn’t really know anything about theatre. In any other drama program in Canada, I would have been excluded.
During my 4 years here, I worked on many projects with Andy. His approach to directing is to take students outside the Ivory tower to investigate contested spaces or controversial and complex current events. We had to get our hands dirty. Literally, in some circumstances, such as when our acting space was a dirt hill outside a disused brick factory in rural Saskatchewan. Andy included his students in ALL of his practice-as-research endeavors, something that is very rare in Canadian theatre academia where professors isolate their prestigious research initiatives from their undergraduate teaching. He would also invite students to international theatre conferences in order to expose us to the scholarship potential of theatre.
The artistic projects he directed had an organic reflexive component. Performing in a vacant legion hall had us thinking about war memorial in Canada. A disused tannery factory invited us to contemplate the physically taxing, unsafe conditions of factory work, something that especially resonated with me having a husband who was a steelworker at the time. A fading French catholic community with its abandoned grain silos in a remote part of Saskatchewan reminded us of the ephemerality of family-run farming in Canada that are being absorbed by large-scale agriculture corporations. You can’t perform in a catholic church with its potent iconography without contemplating your own tortured relationship with religion. Or cover yourself in clay in once sacred indigenous land that had been appropriated by European ambitions without considering your family’s part in colonization that displaced First Nations communities. And you can’t create a show on a young woman like Ashley Smith who tragically harmed herself to death in a local corrections facility and not remember your own experiences with despair caused by institutionalization.
Armed with our toolbox of artist-scholar methods, production knowledge from tech courses, and confidence gleaned from being hailed as capable practitioners during our first year, the Drama faculty encouraged us to go forth and create our own projects independently during the department’s annual UpStart festival. Something myself and fellow students took advantage of during our fourth year, where we created a devised performance that’s focus was our fellow collaborator’s brother’s suicide from bipolar disorder.
With this context, it’s no surprise that upon graduation I found myself seeking graduate advisors with a background in anthropology, nor is it a stretch that I made the leap to auto-ethnography a methodology I learned from my Masters advisor Brian Rusted at University of Calgary. Auto-ethnography is a style of writing and research that connects the personal to the cultural. It merges the autobiographic (artist/researcher) with the analysis of culture. In taking up a subjective perspective, auto-ethnography challenges accepted views of silent authorship as practiced in conventional academic scholarship.
In today’s current era of social media, viral amateur videos, and reality television, this mode of making the personal public and political isn’t really very innovative or transgressive. While auto-ethnography has become a little more prevalent in academic discourses, in theatre creation, a traditional approach to acting – where the actor disappears inside a carefully crafted character – still dominates the stage. Andy has always rebelled against this genre of performance that tries to camouflage a performer’s identity, their body’s idiosyncrasies, and speech patterns. My dissertation argues that auto-ethnography can be utilized outside qualitative research and can be applied to theatre as a way to dismantle the silent authorship of performance creation. Andy thought that my practice of applying auto-ethnography to devised theatre and performance art was complementary to his own preoccupations, so he invited me to write the script for “From Solitary to Solidarity” utilizing the methodology with the student actors.
Ashley Smith didn’t have a choice but to be scrutinized by the media – observed, analyzed under a microscope, often misunderstood and stripped of her dignity, much like the cultures observed in traditional anthropology. So it made ethical sense to turn the microscope back on ourselves throughout this process and its saturated archive of information. Weaving autobiographical material into a culturally and politically motivated script is an accessible concept for 21st century university students, as they are already attuned to their own subjectivity as it relates to broader society. So, the auto-ethnographic moments in the script were written by the students. They were generated from various writing prompts I concocted based on a combination of the evolving scope of the inquest and Ashley’s short life; the course’s final projects; assignments from Andy; and poignant patterns and parallels I’d witnessed during my visits to the Fall class.
“From Solitary to Solidarity” exposes our judgments, biases, gaps in information, contradictory gleanings, and emotional baggage. The students’ courage and commitment to sharing their complex lives and challenges with mental health has been inspiring to someone like me who has been socialized by the academic institution to wear protective masks that hide my chronic self-doubt and inadequacies. The students were fearless, brutally honest, compassionate, and open-hearted. Many of them are beautiful wordsmiths as well to the point where I was thinking they didn’t really need my writing prompts. Their courage and vulnerability is a gesture of solidarity towards those many victims like Ashley Smith who continue to be abused and misunderstood in our correctional facilities. I hope their boldness inspires you as they have me to take off our masks and to no longer stay silent or complacent towards the mistreatment that is occurring towards the marginalized and disenfranchised in our country.
My thanks to everyone who invited me to return to a department that has been critical in shaping me into the individual I am today both personally and professionally. I feel that there’s many of us alumni in this room tonight who wouldn’t have pursued post-graduate work or gone on to be teachers or artists if we were in any other theatre program. During my graduating year, I gave Andy a magnet that states, “Disturb the comfortable. Comfort the disturbed,” which encapsulates the kind of performances he creates. 8 years later, it’s warming to see that the Drama department still has a supportive community of students from varying backgrounds and that students are still being lured outside the university bubble.