From physical comedy to zombies, the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) held its second monthly chapter of the Double Major lecture series on Oct. 23.
After its successful inception on Sept. 25, education and outreach co-ordinator Fiona Wright who facilitates Double Major was very pleased with the high level of intrigue and engagement of both the speakers and the audience.
“It’s kind of a kooky concept pairing two unrelated topics together and then asking the audience to make something of it, but everyone — the audience and the speakers — were both really game and enthusiastic during the first Double Major,” she said.
Pairing two well-versed speakers together, one from Carleton and another from the Ottawa or Gatineau region, this month’s event featured the accomplished Ottawa actor, director, and teacher Andy Massingham and a Carleton sociology and legal studies instructor, Craig McFarlane.
McFarlane, an instructor for “Power and Violence” and “Sociology of the Weird and Apocalyptic,” began the lecture by stating that the zombie apocalypse is something to be welcomed and is something we can’t imagine losing.
McFarlane compared the inevitability of extinction and the apocalypse to a metaphor of removing a Band-Aid. It must be removed eventually and a decision must be made as to how to take it off, he said. Humans can either remove it quickly to experience sharp but short-lived pain, or remove it slowly and endure a prolonged sense of pain.
“It would be best if the apocalypse or extinction came sooner rather than later and it would be preferable if it were planned,” McFarlane said.
“Suffering is the only game in town and the rules are rigged against us,” he said.
“The rational solution is to plan the extinction of humans to do so in the least painful way possible.”
“It is routine to associate the cause of the zombie outbreak with uncontrolled capitalist manipulation of basic life processes,” McFarlane said in his second statement.
He said that capitalism reflects the potential harbinger of the apocalypse as people are still unwilling to find an alternative to replace the ideology and instead continue to be ensnared by it.
Massingham currently teaches at the Ottawa Theatre School where he is head of the acting program.
When asked to describe art in one word, Massingham said, “movement” which epitomized his lecture on physical comedy.
“Gravity is my main inspiration as a physical comic,” he said. “It’s the dance that we perform every day, every night, and how we deal with gravity is how we get through our lives.”
Massingham, who was awarded with a Dora Mavor Moore award for his highly acclaimed non-verbal performance called Rough House at the National Arts Centre in 2007, took the audience through his personal silent film heroes such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy.
He said that the body has an extraordinary potential to elicit more truth and reliability than words can. This, he said, is why silent film, dance, and theatre have always thrived.
“As long as people communicate through non-verbal cues, physical comedy will always have a place,” he said.
