Fire in the streets: vancouver's Public Dreams makes communal magic

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Autumn, 2002 by Sarah B. Hood

"DOES ANYBODY KNOW HOW WHEAT GOES?"

That was the question that pulled me out of the ranks of the onlookers and into the cadre of creative artists at Public Dreams Society's Parade of Lost Souls in Vancouver some ten years ago. Before I knew it, I was sketching interlocking buds onto a sheet of corrugated cardboard; these would later be incorporated into a wheat crown worn by the red-gowned stiltwalking spirit of summer in a torchlit pageant about human capacity to triumph over fear, winter, death and darkness.

It's a magical transformation that Public Dreams has wrought countless times: opening a door through which people step unawares across the threshold of theatrical participation. Officially founded in 1985, the Public Dreams Society exists to create celebratory theatre in partnership with the community at large. Some other companies operate in similar ways (in Toronto one might name Clay and Paper or Shadowland), but Public Dreams has succeeded beyond most in bringing large numbers of community participants into their productions. Already by 1992 the Globe and Mail's Chris Dafoe reported that 7,000 people were being drawn to the annual summertime lantern procession known as Illuminares. This year the company estimates that some 200,000 people will watch or be part of a Public Dreams project.

Through the early 1980s the entity that would become Public Dreams was gestating in the minds of a few artists, including Paula Jardine, who was then working in Edmonton. Jardine had been exposed to pageant theatre in the early '80s, notably Shadowland's outdoor Tempest on Snake Island, created in Toronto in association with the renowned British company Welfare State.

"That's where I first saw torches and I thought 'Yah! said Jardine in a 1994 interview. She later worked in England with Welfare State, known for its capacity to create big, beautiful and exciting spectacles out of low-cost, often reclaimed materials, using artistic ingenuity and the work of many volunteer hands and hearts in place of "store-bought" effects. In Jardine's opinion, "The roots of the spectacle of Public Dreams were with Welfare State."

Britain's temperate climate lends itself to outdoor spectacle, but on her return to Canada Jardine fearlessly launched outdoor productions in Edmonton in the wintertime, such as A Wake for the Dead of Winter, produced in 1982. It was there that Jardine met Leslie Fiddler and Dolly Hopkins; who would found Public Dreams with her. They soon moved to Vancouver, and in 1986 they produced the company's first spectacle, Journey to the New World, two-day performance narrated in English and Chinese, replete with shadow screens, fireworks and First Nations dance.

The company's mandate fell upon fertile soil in a city that had just experienced the inspiration - and the upheaval - of Expo 86. In 1989 Public Dreams created the first illuminares, followed in 1992 by the popular Parade of Lost Souls, which falls on the Saturday closest to Hallowe'en. The latter event celebrated its eleventh incarnation on October 26 of this year with a public masquerade procession and giant shadow screens, music, torch spinners, "doubt eaters" and a fireworks finale.

In April 1997 Hopkins succeeded Jardine as artistic director. In that spring's issue of the company newsletter The Public Dreamer she wrote that "In a high tech world, we have discovered that people crave 'low tech magic' produced through paper lanterns, acoustic (and often home-made) musical instruments, and the unamplified human voice." Apparently Public Dreams barely manages to satisfy Vancouver's hunger for workshops in stiltwalking, fire dancing, percussion, gymnastics and the making of masks, headdresses, and lanterns.

And then there are the shrines. In the early years of the Parade of Lost Souls visual artist Marina Szijarto pioneered the idea of setting up a handmade papier mache shrine to honour the dead. Born, fittingly, on November 1 (which is celebrated in Mexico as the Day of the Dead), Szijarto told the Georgia Straight in 1993 that "Day of the Dead is a time when there's a crack in the veil between the living and the dead. Those who've died pass back into our world, where people offer them clothes and food. The main thing is that it's not supposed to be sad and macabre, but that it's supposed to be a celebration."

In that spirit Public Dreams decided to set up an outdoor shrine in Grandviw Park on Commercial Drive to accompany the Lost Souls performance component. In part inspired by the highly ornamental Day of the Dead imagery, the shrine was taken instantly into the hearts of people in the area. Some attended workshops to make little candle lanterns that illuminated the face of a dead ancestor - or occasionally a departed kittycat. Others contributed anonymously by visiting overnight to leave evocative tokens: flowers, pictures; even money and jewellry (landing the tech crew with the dilemma of how to dispose of valuable offerings that had been left for the dead, with both burial and burning under consideration.)