One Yellow Rabbit Confronts Life's Messy Relationships
One Yellow Rabbit’s beautifulyoungartists are ready to peel back the façade of propriety and reveal the messy innerworkings of relationships with their new production She Sat Down and Wept.
This year's group of beautifulyoungartists brings together Lauren Brady, Donna Ng, Grace Fedorchuck, Arash Minhas, Maezy Dennie, and Sarah Ord to explore the passionate underbelly of dirty, messy love as it relates to the life of poet Elizabeth Smart, most famously chronicled in her 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Smart's semi-autobiographical study captured the excruciating heartbreak of a young woman caught within the snares of an intense love affair that both served as an artistic muse and source of emotional agony. Her love life was, as they say, complicated.
“It’s a very interesting piece to me,” says Denise Clarke, Associate Artist with One Yellow Rabbit and Director of the OYR Summer Lab Intensive, which the beautifulyoungartists are a part of. She suggests that Smart’s life was anything but typical. “She’s an Ottawa girl from a diplomatic family who makes her way to Britain in the ‘30s to be a fabulous debutante.” The journey didn’t stop there. Smart eventually moved to California where she joined a community of avant-garde artists and sparked a life-long affair with poet George Barker, who was living overseas and married at the time. “When I read this book, it surprises me because it’s wild. It’s a wild piece of work. You just can’t believe you are reading something from that era,” Clarke says.
Groundbreaking for its centering of the female experience and forthright feminine agency, Smart’s work still has import for today’s audiences, as does her commitment to chasing her muse with full determination. But her life was nothing less than confrontational and engaging with Smart means to be provoked on a philosophical level. Is she a young woman breaking free of societal expectations and exercising her artistic vision through her relationships, or is she something more sinister—a carefree villain whose fixation on her lover brought chaos to those around her?
Those are questions that gnaw at the beautifulyoungartists, as they work their way through the novel. “We’re going ‘Wow, you don’t steal someone else’s guy. You don’t have a wild, incredibly insane love affair with someone’s husband if you’re a decent person.’” Clarke says, noting that things aren’t so simple; we also have to consider Smart’s perspective at the time, which included a personal quest for unimpeded truth. In this context, she suggests, the lines between good behaviour and bad behaviour begin to blur. “It is a really exciting investigation of what is truth to oneself and one’s creative passion and obsession and what does it mean now and how do we judge it?”
For the beautifulyoungartists, being able to let loose with a piece like this helps them tap into that creative urge, the one that marries interpersonal longing with artistic creation. How much of Smart’s devil-may-care ethos will rub off on them? We’ll have to wait and see. “It’s interesting to watch younger artists investigate with open hearts,” Clarke says, noting their willingness to dive into the novel’s more challenging themes. She is hopeful that the piece has opened up the group to new possibilities and that they'll be able to interrogate Smart’s world beyond the show’s initial run in June. “It’s really fun territory to be sitting in...I’m really jazzed by continuing the exploration and they are too.”
Learn more about One Yellow Rabbit’s upcoming presentation of She Sat Down and Wept at oyr.org.
