Have You Seen The Whaler?

Observe how my hands, as I hold them thus,
or move them, so, before me,
my hands make the image of a ship.
I am the captain and I ply a sea of dreams
~Michael Green

There are conflicting reports as to when Michael Green first performed The Whaler.

A few different people told me they saw “the first” performance at a few different cabarets in Calgary’s Big Secret Theatre. A former producer on the other hand thought it was first done in Europe. Maybe Budapest? Maybe Glasgow?

The origin story I like to believe though comes from Michael’s One Yellow Rabbit Co-Artistic Director Blake Brooker. He remembers The Whaler premiering at a bar in Philadelphia during a hurricane. Maybe I like this one because the image is just so apt. The Whaler being unleashed on the world while rain and snow beat the roof of some hopefully dingy but hip theatre bar. With a storm raging outside I can imagine the tempest that was Michael raging on stage.

The Whaler was created and performed by Michael Green, co-founder of Calgary’s performance creation theatre company One Yellow Rabbit and curator of The High Performance Rodeo, an international performance festival.

Michael performed The Whaler all across the Western theatre world, and no matter the audience, by the third or fourth stanza the audience would join in the call, “I am a whaler,” a spontaneous and consistent bit of full-throated participation.

Michael performed The Whaler, a six-stanza cut-up poem he wrote, wearing nothing but rubber gloves and carrying nothing but a bucket of water. With a seductive mix of dignity and abandon, Michael would deliver this nautical text, punctuating each stanza with a silly dance before getting on all fours and dunking his head into the bucket. On whipping back upright, water flying, he would call out, “I Am The Whaler.” He performed it all across the Western theatre world, and no matter the audience, their reaction was the same. By the third or fourth stanza the audience would join in the call, a spontaneous and consistent bit of full-throated participation.

That, in a nutshell, was The Whaler. A much loved, well-heeled little thing Michael would pull out every now and then over the years.

Then The Whaler transformed into something else. Something quite important.

In February 2015, Michael Green died suddenly in a car accident. He was travelling with collaborators in Saskatchewan, doing mighty fine work on behalf of Making Treaty 7, which is a story all unto itself. Winter prairie roads are terrible and on that day, deadly, for him and for the three other artists he was travelling with. He was 58 years old.

Losing Michael compounded the grief that One Yellow Rabbit, the company he co-founded and co-led for thirty years, was already feeling after having lost another ensemble member, sound designer Richard McDowell. In just a few short and cold months, Calgary lost two of our original—and I mean that in both the chronological and singular sense—two of our original theatre voices.

The day after Michael passed away an informal wake was held at the Big Secret Theatre. And I noticed something.

The Whaler kept coming up.

I participated in, and overheard, conversations where people were talking about when they saw The Whaler.

At a certain point that day, Blake, Michael’s long time friend and co-artistic director, shouted out to the group, “I am the Whaler.”

Online people would simply post “The Whaler” in remembrance of Michael, much in the way that following David Bowie’s death people would write “Ziggy Stardust” with no other context needed.

At his funeral a few days later, in a concert hall of well over 1,500 people, a fellow ensemble member Andy Curtis performed a slightly drier, slightly more-clothed version of The Whaler.

And as the days passed I saw the importance of The Whaler grow.

That it was happening, that The Whaler was transforming into a shorthanded way of remembering and celebrating Michael was immediately obvious.

Why it was happening though is a question I’ve been asking for a year.

In January 2016, the first Post-Michael High Performance Rodeo was held in Calgary. During the festival my collaborators at The Deep Field Podcast and I took up a post as Listeners-in-Residence where we sought some answers to this question. Over four nights in a listening lounge across from the festival bar we talked to 38 people and invited them to share their memories of The Whaler. With these interviews, we produced a documentary called You Are Here Too: Recalling The Whaler. Being immersed in these memories a year after Michael’s passing has given me some of the answers, or at least ideas of answers, that I’ve been hunting for.

My hunter's eye searches. Where are you?
You're there as the cold sea heaves and you rise
through white foam and you blow off to starboard
and sparkle, like this.

So, in the immediate aftermath of Michael’s death The Whaler served a very constructive function of mourning: it was an icebreaker.

Talking about The Whaler, and when you saw it, was always a very funny story to tell. So joyful, the story of that performance became a little island that was big enough for all of us to rest on for a while.

Take the wake held at The Big Secret Theatre the day the news of his death spread. What do you say in moments like these? What can you say? You tell stories. And at a funeral, or a wake, you grab onto a funny story like a life raft. And talking about The Whaler, and when you saw it, was always a very funny story to tell. So joyful, the story of that performance became a little island that was big enough for all of us to rest on for a while.

And it was a story that many people shared. When someone passes away a natural hierarchy of relationships to that person emerges. I don’t think it’s conscious, but I do think it happens. And I think people intuitively place themselves in that hierarchy. You say to yourself “I was a big fan and I knew him a bit, but well they were collaborators, and they there were ensemble members for decades, and that’s his best friend since kindergarten, and those folks are his family, that’s his daughter.” You realize not everyone in that room can share in a story that happened in a dressing room in Edinburgh in the 90s, or that few saw what Michael was like on Christmas morning.

But that hierarchy doesn’t exist with The Whaler. With The Whaler there’s one relationship, Performer and Audience. It’s egalitarian, it’s inclusive. My memory of seeing The Whaler is equal to yours and hers and hers and his. It’s shared by many so we all shared the story that day. Blake Brooker described calling out “I Am The Whaler” to the crowd that day as an act of solidarity.

Underneath this solidarity though lay a deeper need our community was feeling, and that need has to do with where we as a theatre community are in this time and place. We’re a young community. You can count the decades of professional theatre in Calgary on one hand. Our relative newness means that by and large we enjoy having most of our founding artists still working or living in the city. A few months before Richard McDowell’s passing I was at a playwrights colony in Ontario chatting with some artists from Winnipeg who had recently gone through the loss of a number of their theatre luminaries. I said at the time, never thinking to knock on wood, that Calgary hadn’t really experienced such losses. A month after that though Richard suffered a heart attack, and then Michael’s crash happened.

What seemed at first like people taking solace in The Whaler while grieving strikes me now as a harbinger of a new phase in our theatre community’s life cycle. As time goes on we have to prepare ourselves to lose more and more of our senior artists, which is a morbid reality I don’t think many of us had confronted before.

What we have to confront is that when the artists that built our community pass away, we don’t just lose those people, we lose the living memory that they carry with them.

What we have to confront is that when the artists that built our community pass away, we don’t just lose those people, we lose the living memory that they carry with them. Two years ago, The Whaler didn’t need to be commemorated because we all thought, if we had even stopped to think about it, that is, that if you waited a couple of months you could probably catch it again. With Michael’s death that prospect evaporated. What I’ve been talking about is witnessing a moment where Living Memory passed into Oral History. Amidst the heartbreak, this evolution is quite a beautiful thing to witness. The creation of this Oral History, the stories that compound each other and that are refined by being held up against one another, help us as a community clarify for ourselves just what our history includes.

I’m wary to say this is the first time this has happened. I’ve been in Calgary about a decade and I don’t wish to assume that similar things hadn’t happened before now. What I am more confident in saying, sadly, is that this will happen more and more often in the coming years. And if by marking this moment now I hope that we, as a community, can think about what stories are important and how can we capture them before it’s too late. The Whaler was performed for thousands, and performed recently. What about some of our not-as-recent stories? I’ve heard snippets of a story of another one of Calgary’s founding artists, Joyce Doolittle, kicking in a boarded up window in a defunct riverside pump house and envisioning The Pump House Theatre complex. One of those theatres now carries her name, but who beyond Joyce is carrying that story?

The Whaler, now thoroughly burnished, is remembered as a gift Michael gave us. Our Mayor Naheed Nenshi talked about The Whaler creating space for artistic risk taking. Many younger artists told me it as an inspiration for them to get literally and metaphorically wet and wild with their work. And after his death, The Whaler gave us the gift of having, bizarrely, a fun way to mourn.

Maybe another gift that The Whaler has given us is a reminder to take stock of our community now, to rehear and share our great stories alongside their heroes, not just in memory of them.

…Each dream is danced
in your heart while I watch with one eye for a shot
unobstructed, a clean one,
to take you, like this.
I am The Whaler.