The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  A few years ago, some people thought it would be a good idea to improve Kensington by getting rid of cars. As a first step, they worked with the City to organize a series of Pedestrian Sundays, which were large, car-free street festivals every Sunday of the summer.

  I was out one day and I ran into the first one of these. And it just felt awful to me. The neighborhood on a regular Sunday is a really great and remarkable place. The festival replaced that.

  It seemed to me at the time that there are a million things wrong with the idea of pedestrianizing the Market. One problem is that it’s simplistic, in that it fails to understand that different things are interconnected in a city. People imagine that if they took the cars out of Kensington Market, what they would be left with is Kensington Market as it is now, but just with no cars. But that’s wrong. A neighborhood is like an ecosystem. If you take out one component, especially a component as important and influential as cars, it changes things completely. Like with an ecosystem, it’s very, very hard to predict what actually will happen, but you can take some pretty good guesses here.

  Some businesses really depend on cars. In Kensington, those businesses are places like the butchers that sell large orders to restaurants and to immigrant families who now live in the suburbs but still come to the old neighborhood to do their shopping—and stores that sell fruits and spices which do a lot of deliveries and moving of goods in and out. These are the stores that are the traditional backbone of the neighborhood.

  Then there are stores that don’t rely as much on cars and that rely more on pedestrian traffic, along with businesses which are entertainment destinations: cafés, bistros, shops that cater to tourists who come to walk around, used-clothing stores.

  In terms of the ecosystem of the Market, something one might predict if you eliminate cars is that you’ll accelerate a trend which is already happening to some degree, which is that the Market becomes more of an entertainment destination than a functional neighborhood.

  There’s also a kind of class blindness in this. Some activists talk about cars and bikes as if cyclists and pedestrians are the oppressed underdogs. But in a lot of ways, the ability to get around the city by foot and bike represents something of a position of privilege. It means you live close to downtown, and you don’t have a crappy job that you have to commute to. So the reality of who actually cycles in the city is that it tends to be a somewhat privileged class of able-bodied people who can afford to live a certain kind of life in a dense downtown core. That’s great, but to make motorists into the enemy, you have to understand that in a lot of cases you’re talking about working-class people who don’t get to live downtown, who have families to support. It’s not like Kensington Market is full of sports cars and Mercedeses.

  So while they may not have realized it, what it seemed to me the pedestrian activists were really advocating was taking the most interesting, organic neighborhood in the whole city and turning it into an entertainment destination.

  I would say, There’s a real chance you’ll turn this into a tourist destination, and some people would say, No—it’ll always be Kensington. They’d say, It’s not like it’s going to turn into Yorkville. Because it’s unimaginable to them that a neighborhood like Kensington could turn into a neighborhood like Yorkville—which is the most upscale neighborhood in Toronto—yet Yorkville was a neighborhood like Kensington not long ago! People sometimes have a really hard time imagining these transformations.

  Neighborhoods that are really good, I think, are places that feel like people live there. When you throw a huge, noisy street party every Sunday, it really creates the impression that people don’t live there, because who in the world would choose to have this outside their window? Who would think that what their own neighborhood needs is to have a drum circle and an amplified performance poet outside their own home every single Sunday all summer? So a festival like that creates the message that the neighborhood belongs to the people who come there as an entertainment destination, not to the people who live there.

  I started talking to people to do research for an article I wanted to write about this. It was the first and only time in my adult life that I felt like I wanted to write an editorial for the newspaper. There had been lots of press about people who supported the project but hardly any about people who objected, and it turned out that there was a lot of objection. Many businesses were opposed because they felt it would be very damaging to their business not to have access by car. Lots of neighbors were opposed because they found it disruptive and noisy and it took away what they loved about Kensington Market. On Sunday afternoons in the summer, Kensington as a neighborhood was no longer accessible to them.

  In terms of the shopkeepers, some of them didn’t speak English. A lot of them were from places where individual input into public decision isn’t exactly encouraged—where you can get into trouble for speaking your mind about things and dissenting. So it was pretty easy for them to feel like they couldn’t protest or that their opinions would be overlooked in favor of the opinions of a bunch of enthusiastic, educated young environmentalists.

  * * *

  My position was that Kensington Market is an area worth preserving. There’s an argument against my position, which is a fair argument, which is to say that neighborhoods change, it’s silly to try to preserve things, and you don’t want to turn Kensington into a museum of itself. I think that’s a coherent position. But what’s not a coherent position is to imagine that you can make Kensington completely pedestrian without radically changing it. If you advocate pedestrianization, you have to understand that you’re accelerating certain existing trends. You can’t pretend you’re just allowing change to happen—you’re pushing things in a specific direction, and, in this case, you need to be honest with yourself about what the likely consequences of that are.

  There’s also a question of what’s fair and what’s democratic. In the case of Kensington, the people whose voices were most being ignored were tenants and immigrant shopkeepers. So you have to be careful, I think, and be on the lookout that the change you’re proposing is not just for the benefit of the most vocal groups and businesses while being damaging to the people who aren’t as easily heard from.

  * * *

  All this was a few years ago, and a lot has changed. Most notably, I think that even among the people who are big fans of Pedestrian Sundays, a lot of them are now of the opinion that fully pedestrianizing the Market would be a bad thing. I think I may have contributed to that shift in opinion, which feels good. My sense is that the event organizers are now doing a good job of getting more members of the neighborhood involved in decision making, including people who initially disliked the event.

  In some ways it’s sad for me to see the transformation of the neighborhood continue, but I suspect that that is the sort of change you do have to put up with if you don’t want to be a crazy person.

  39. Keeping People Quiet

  At the beginning of every Trampoline Hall show, I give the audience instructions on how best to enjoy the show. I tell them to sit, and to sit as close to the stage as possible. I tell them what the show will entail, so that they don’t become antsy. People always think I’m joking when I tell them—from the stage, speaking through the mike—that the show will be starting in three minutes, then two minutes. But I’m not. I tell them how many acts there will be and around how long they will be, and when there will be breaks. Really, all these things are there to make it easier for people in the audience to pay attention; to know what’s expected of them and what they can expect. I think it’s much easier to pay attention if you know you’re going to have to pay attention for half an hour. In a way, it’s a kind of contract.

  One of the very last things I do when I give people instructions on how to enjoy the show is that I encourage them to shush other people if they are talking. I give them some different techniques for doing this. I tell them if they want to be direct and aggressive, they can turn around and shush the person angrily, or
if they prefer a more passive-aggressive style, they can cover their mouths with their hands so no one will know who did the shushing.

  When I say all this stuff at the beginning of the show, again, I think people mostly think I’m joking, but inevitably during any show in a bar, people eventually do talk, and instead of me having to reprimand them from the stage in some authoritarian way, when someone talks a number of people in the audience do the shushing. Then the people talking understand that the desire for quiet during the show is a collective desire, and they tend to stop talking. As a performer on the stage, this saves you the terrible indignity of having to ask the audience every five minutes to simmer down and listen to you.

  40. Feeling Like a Fraud

  The feeling I have before taking on any interesting project, especially teaching classes, is pretty much a feeling of terror and sickness. I think that’s really not evident to people involved in my projects, because so much of what the projects are about is taking crazy risks and doing ridiculous things and, on the surface, not caring so much about outcomes. But maybe in part because of all that, I have such a fear that these projects will be bad or that they’re terrible ideas or that I’m being a fraud in some way.

  So before every series, and sometimes before every class, the main thing that often goes through my head is, I have nothing to offer these people—they will realize that I am a fraud—I have nothing to say about this.

  I think it’s worthwhile for people to know that. I think a lot of art is about creating the illusion of ease, and I think it’s great to enjoy that illusion, but I think it’s great to know that it’s an illusion, and I suspect—in my experience—the process of creating anything involves quite a lot of fear and difficulty, and it also involves covering up quite a lot of that fear and difficulty.

  So, for example, you get an email from me announcing that I’m teaching a class in how to play charades, and you think, What a crazy idea, and what a delightful happy-go-lucky person who’s doing something as impractical as teaching a class in charades. But in fact I’m waking up in the middle of the night having panic attacks. About a fucking charades class.

  I don’t know. I just think it’s important for people to know these things.

  41. Negotiation

  That final Residents’ Association meeting with the city councillor really stuck with me a long time. I thought often about how amazing it was to find common interest among people who seemed like they were at war with one another. A while later, I was really excited when I discovered that there was a whole area of study around this. I started to read a lot of smart, good books about negotiation that captured my imagination in a way in which almost nothing else had. I also started reading in related fields in the social sciences—looking into game theory and subjects like that—and I started working with people who taught negotiation classes, which I found really amazing. The field is such a tremendous combination of intellectual, analytical problem-solving skills, mixed in with very personal stuff about people’s feelings.

  I remember hearing a talk about the environment given by, I think it was Justin Trudeau, the son of Pierre Trudeau. He said the only issue anyone should be working on is the environment. He said, You might disagree with me. You might have some other issue that you think is more important, like hunger, but whatever issue it is, if we don’t solve the problem of global warming, your other issue doesn’t matter, because everyone’s going to be destroyed.

  From my point of view, you’re not going to solve the problem of the environment without getting to a better understanding of how people can cooperate with each other. No matter how much science you do on atmospheric changes and weather patterns, the fact is that any solution will require a combined worldwide effort between a huge number of individuals, and governments, and corporations. And that cooperation—that’s where the biggest challenge lies. It’s true for climate change and it’s true for most of the huge issues facing the world. So the most important thing is figuring out how people can get better at coming to agreement.

  42. Fighting Games

  A lot of the games I do involve fighting. When I do a theater class, about half of it is fighting. When I do a music class, about half of it is fighting. Some people really take to the fighting and like it, and some people are a little bit offended or upset by it. But I think pretend fighting is a fundamental component of what play is. When you look at play behavior in young animals, a lot of what they do when they play is pretend to fight. And a game is a pretend competition, or a pretend battle between people.

  So when people say, Why aren’t your games more positive? I think it’s funny, because niceness doesn’t have to happen in a game. You should be nice in real life. You don’t have to play at niceness. You can just do it. Fighting is something to be minimized in real life. A good way to know that you’re playing is if you’re doing something you would never do in real life—like having a ridiculous fight.

  I have a series of fighting games where I have people pair up and have them do arguments in gibberish, using language-like sounds but no actual language. I teach a series of forms or styles of fighting, kind of like a martial art for ridiculous arguments.

  FORM 1

  In form 1, there’s only one person “speaking” at one time: there are no pauses, and there are never two people speaking at once. You absolutely must speak until someone interrupts you, and when the other person interrupts you, you absolutely must stop. You can interrupt them right back a microsecond later, but you have to let them interrupt you.

  FORM 2

  Like in form 1, there’s always exactly only one person speaking at once, but the difference here is that you may never interrupt the other person. Instead, when the other person stops, you must start speaking.

  FORM 3

  In form 3, both people speak at the same time, all the time. No one ever stops. A challenge in this form—though it’s one that comes pretty naturally to people—is to be able to speak and listen at once, to respond even though you’re never actually stopping to listen.

  FORM 4

  At any given moment, either both people are speaking, as in form 3, or both people are silent. However, in the moments when both people are silent, they must both be in motion. During the silence, the argument continues, but wordlessly. The fighters circle each other around the room and make gestures and so on.

  FORM 5

  Here, both players are silent all the time and are always in motion.

  * * *

  Usually after I teach these five forms, I’ll introduce a sixth form, called “freestyle,” which is to say that after learning all these forms, students are allowed to invoke any of the forms and do whatever they want at any time. It can seem like a joke—like I’ve taught all these rules just to take them away—but it’s not a joke, and the rules aren’t really taken away. What I genuinely want is for people to feel free to do what they want to do within this range of options, but to be really aware of what they’re doing.

  I’m very interested in the combination of abandon and structure in improvisation, and fighting games combine tremendous abandon with a very tight structure. People are typically very good at losing themselves in fighting games, because anger is a pretty easy emotion to tap into, and because people are not being asked to come up with words or a story.

  VARIATION 1

  I’ll sometimes introduce the concept of winners and losers into freestyle arguments. Instead of lasting forever, each argument has an ending. One possible ending is this: at any given moment, one of the players must start to cry and collapse onto the floor, at which point the other player must do a victory dance.

  People have very different responses to this variation. Some people have trouble making themselves the crier. Some people have trouble doing the victory dance. But usually people get over these difficulties pretty quickly.

  VARIATION 2

  In this variation, the battle for victory becomes more intense. At any moment in the fight, one of the players can
raise their hands and cower, as if being physically threatened by the other player. This means that the other player now has a weapon. As the cowering player backs up, the other player has to threaten them. Then the player with the weapon can throw their hands up, thereby indicating that the other player has a bigger weapon, and the roles reverse. This exchange can go back and forth as long as the players like. At any given moment, the player being threatened can choose to end the arms race by refusing to cower, and by yelling back instead, at which point the fight reverts to normal arguing.

  * * *

  What I like about these variations is that the power in the exercise is put into the hands of the person who’s powerless in the story. So you can’t choose to have a gun—you can only choose for the other person to have a gun. You can’t make the other person start to cry to end the fight, but you can cry and end the fight. When I teach a variation in which someone cries to end a fight, I’ll say that the person who cries is declared the winner of the game. No one ever takes that seriously but it’s an idea I like.

  It helps if people understand that they are not their character. In theater improv, people often make the mistake of trying to protect their character—keeping their character out of trouble, making their character win the fight—but you have to remember that you are not your character. You are the author of your character.

  Sometimes in improv actors find themselves actually competing—fighting against each other to “win” a scene. These variations are a good way to train them out of that by jumbling up the definitions of what constitutes victory and what constitutes defeat.

  I think these games teach you that victory and defeat within a scene don’t constitute your own victory and defeat; that you as an actor can win the game by having you as a character lose the fight.