Fringe Character

TJ Dawe mugging for the camera at the Saskatoon Fringe Festival.

One of the country’s best-known theatre personalities, TJ Dawe has authored six shows (including Labrador, The Doctor Is Sick and The Curse of the Trickster) and a handful of adaptations of literary works. The script to his original show The Slip-Knot was recently nominated for a Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

In addition to being a prolific writer, Dawe is also a tireless performer — he devotes a good chunk of every year touring his plays. He’s been on stage at everything from the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal to the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina and is a mainstay of the Canadian Fringe theatre festivals. Dawe is currently on a cross-Canada tour of the Fringe circuit, which takes him to Toronto (July 6-16), Winnipeg (July 20-30), Saskatoon (August 5-14), Victoria (August 25-September 5) and Vancouver (September 8-18). His diary of this year’s Fringe circuit will be updated throughout the summer.

Part 2

Finding cardboard boxes for my show turned out to be harder than I thought. I looked in the phone book for box factories. They’re all far away. I only know one neighbourhood in this city anyway; in any Fringe city, pretty much. My billet drove me to a Mail Boxes, Etc. outlet and I bought some there, but they didn’t have enough. I brought ’em to the venue and then scrounged through recycling bins in the alleys nearby. I got what I needed. And I ran through the script all the while, getting up to speed on this hour-long monologue I haven’t done in two months, which on the Fringe tour seems like two years. So I was a guy rooting purposefully through back-alley dumpsters, talking to himself. The service clerks from the grocery store out back for a smoke break eyed me and said nothing.

Opened The TJ Dawe Box Set with the first performance — Tired Cliches — last night. It was good. Smallish crowd, but into it. And I was into it. I haven’t had so much fun with that show in years. Sometimes you can’t explain why, but things just work. My venue tech got all sixty lighting cues perfect.

In the book No Logo, Naomi Klein describes the Reclaim the Streets movement in England, where a group would suddenly take over a major intersection or a piece of highway and have a dance party, sometimes for hours. It’s public space. It belongs to all of us. Why not reinvent the way we use it? That’s kind of what happens at the Saskatoon Fringe, but with the full sanction of the city. Five blocks of Broadway — a major street — get closed off to car traffic all evening on weekdays and all day on weekends. The buses are rerouted. Cars go another way. Restaurants and businesses spill out onto the sidewalk. People spread blankets and sell whatever they want. A guy does twisty balloons; another guy does magic tricks. Buskers busk. The intersections become street-performing pitches, and crowds of hundreds watch someone escape from a straitjacket or juggle machetes or eat fire. The beer tent is set up on an adjacent street, with free live music. There are food stalls, psychic readings, caricatures. Mostly, people walk up and down these reinvented strips of road, having a good time. They look forward to it. They choose to leave their homes and come walk up and down this street, listening to music, laughing, eating and drinking. And some of them see plays, too.

The Fringe rents out sandwich boards to performers. Ten bucks apiece. They get laid out on the strip, and people walk up and down and glance at them, or even read them in full. I got one. Stuck my show times on it, and my reviews. Put it up there with all the other sandwich boards. If a single person sees it and decides to come and see my show, I’ll have made my money back.