Mophead Peter Discovers America

The following article about The Gros Morne Project appeared in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 14, 2006. Translation to English thanks to Gordon Monahan. The complete original review, in German, is available as a PDF file.

Mophead Peter Discovers America

(Struwwelpeter Entdeckt Amerika - Struwwelpeter is a 19th century tale intended to discipline German kids)

The island of Newfoundland, which joined Canada in 1949, is a magical world for nature lovers, adventurers, artists, and of late, also for tourists. As large as the old Federal Republic of West Germany, it is a dreamland of forests, fjords, sea and moor. Pure landscape, empty of people, and awe-inspiring. Surprisingly, in the middle of this God-given seclusion, a multifaceted theatre life is taking place - though not in the secluded villages which haven't yet built up an amateur theatre with tender-loving care. Enthusiasm for art can sometimes be greater than the art itself, but there is something heart warming to see the pride and admiration with which local residents idolize their theatre troop. Maybe it's because of the long cold winters, and the darkness - there is a similar phenomenon in Finland - in any case, a very alert and curious audience has accumulated here.

And everyone talks about the story from Cow Head - in this little fishing village there is a motel that ran into hard times, and had to close its general store. Then a theatre group showed up and persuaded the owner to transform the unoccupied building into a theatre. They have performed every summer since then, and so many people have come that the motel had to expand to double the number of rooms - investing in culture really does pay off - Think Outside the Box.

(in the middle of the article there are several paragraphs reviewing the Magnetic North Festival in St. John's)

Newfoundland possesses the first site on the UNESCO registry of world cultural sites: L'Anse aux Meadows, an archaeological excavation on the far northwestern tip of the island. Evidence that Nordic seafarers discovered North America a good 500 years before Columbus. The Norwegian couple Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad landed there at the remains of the colony in the 1960s, by deducing, on the basis of old Norse sagas, the location of the mysterious Vinland. The Vikings sailed there around the year 1000, presumably from Greenland, heading west and encountering Labrador (Markland), Newfoundland, and perhaps even the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Also on the UNESCO list is Gros Morne National Park, a grand landscape of ocean, forest, and mountains, teeming with moose, bears, and salmon. Also here, in the middle of untouched nature, there is an artist in residence program, and this summer, an exceptional dance spectacle took place. The Coleman-Lemieux Company of Montreal used the peninsula at Green Point for a large scale "site specific project". Out of the old fishing sheds flowed music by John Cage and Gordon Monahan, scenic installations told of loneliness, austerity, and danger. The windharp howled, the water tattled on the stones, and 500 spectators, both locals and tourists, wandered along the beach, observing a captured wriggling mermaid as she was carried like booty from a boat, then breaking free from a net, and returning to her element.

Choreographed animal and landscape studies, among them birds and jellyfish-like creatures in human forms, emerged from between the stones and then vanished. Gray shapes, like lizards, blended and fused with the craggy rocks. Bill Coleman created an exceptionally harmonious performance from nature and dance, mystical, unpretentious, and full of wonder.

Later the event carried on at Cow Head, where there was a "traditional Newfoundland supper" in the church hall, with all sorts of dances taking place at the hockey rink and in the theatre. Margie Gillis performed several solos, among them "Bloom", about the last chapter of Joyce's little piece "Ulysses". The exceptional dancer Peter Chin from Toronto, who could effortlessly win every European solo competition, narrated and danced through various states of mind and soul in "Everything". The mixture of high culture and folksiness reminds one of the long gone heydays of the Bread and Puppet Resurrection Circus in Vermont. That such famous artists as Gillis and Chin would get involved, performing on a rough timber stage in the sun and the wind, speaks for them and for the project. Perhaps it requires the openness and love of nature of Canadians, to produce such a thing without it being obsessively overdone, and without smarminess. "Feel the Earth Move" was the name of the event--and we sure did!

Renate Klett