RUBIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-11 published
Creator of Savage God
Theatre director was a Canadian nationalist, a fan of the avant
garde and a champion of playwright George Ryga. He was also seen
as a kook, a dilettante and a street fighter
By Tom HAWTHORN
Special to The Globe and Mail Saturday, October
11, 2003 - Page F9
John JULIANI was a provocateur in life as on stage. A man passionate
about the possibilities of theatre, he roused reverence in some,
antipathy in others.
His most infamous act was to challenge the Stratford Festival's
newly hired artistic director to a duel. Robin
PHILLIPS's offence
was that he is British when Mr.
JULIANI and others were certain
a land as grand as Canada was capable of producing a director
for its Shakespearean theatre.
What he called a "romantic gesture with tongue in cheek" earned
cheers from Canadian theatre directors and sneers from much of
the theatre establishment.
Mr. JULIANI, who has died at the age of 63, was an unabashed
Canadian nationalist, a dedicated fan of the avant garde, an
ardent defender of the right of actors to a decent living, a
champion of playwright George Ryga and a tireless figure so commanding
as to develop an intense loyalty among acolytes.
At the same time, he was seen as a kook, a dilettante and a street
fighter. One critic called him "the Tiger Williams of Canadian
theatre," his pugnacious approach earning him comparison to a
notorious hockey goon. In his defence, Mr.
JULIANI explained
that he was merely a "true believer" with opinions on controversial
subjects.
Mr. JULIANI's credits were long and varied, including spontaneous
Sixties street happenings such as the staging of his own wedding
as a theatrical performance and brief appearances on such 1990s
television dramas as The X-Files.
From 1982 until 1997, Mr.
JULIANI was executive producer of radio
drama for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio in Vancouver.
He helped to bring to air many celebrated productions, including
the brilliant and provocative Dim Sum Diaries by playwright Mark
LEIREN-
YOUNG.
Mr. JULIANI also possessed a head-turning beauty, with a profile
as striking as a Roman bust. Radio host Bill
RICHARDSON commented
on his handsomeness at a raucous memorial after his death, calling
him a "hunka hunka burnin' love." Some said he had the looks
and bearing of a Shakespearean king.
John Charles
JULIANI was born in Montreal on March 24, 1940.
Raised in a working-class neighbourhood, he attended Loyola College
and was an early graduate from the fledgling National Theatre
School.
He spent two seasons as an actor at Stratford before being hired
as a theatre teacher at Simon Fraser University in 1966. The
new university atop Burnaby Mountain east of Vancouver was a
hotbed of radicalism in politics and the arts. Mr.
JULIANI bristled
at an imposed curriculum and so infuriated the administration
that he was banned from the campus in 1969.
Mr. JULIANI was heavily influenced by the writing of Antonin
Artaud, a Surrealist who championed a theatre based on the imagination.
He long sought to erase the barrier between scripted text and
sensory impression, between performer and audience, to mixed
success.
After moving to the West Coast, Mr.
JULIANI launched a series
of experiments in theatre. He credited these productions to Savage
God, which was less a troupe in the traditional sense than a
title granted to any performance involving Mr.
JULIANI.
The name
came from William Butler Yeats's awestruck reaction to Alfred
Jarry's Ubu Roi: "After us, the Savage God?"
Savage God defied explanation, though many tried and even Mr.
JULIANI offered suggestions. Savage God was "an anthology of
question marks," he once said. (It was, after all, the 1960s.)
"Savage God is simply the Imagination," he told the Vancouver
Sun, "insatiable, unrelenting, fiercely energetic, wary of categorization,
fond of contradiction and inveterately iconoclastic."
In January, 1970, Mr.
JULIANI married dancer Donna
WONG, a ceremony
conducted as a Savage God performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
He repeated the process at the christening of his son. Ms.
WONG-
JULIANI
would be his domestic and drama partner for more than three decades.
In 1971, the streets of Vancouver were the scene of several spontaneous
and sometimes incomprehensible -- performances under the aegis
of PACET ("pilot alternative complement to existing theatre.")
The $18,000 project, funded by the federal government, incorporated
Gestalt therapy sessions in street performances.
Theatrical events took place willy-nilly across the city, including
malls, the airport, the library and Stanley Park. Admission was
not charged, nor did all spectators appreciate their role as
audience to avant-garde performance. A scene in which bicyclists
wearing gas masks pedalled along city streets left many scratching
their heads in puzzlement.
In 1974, Mr.
JULIANI moved to Toronto to set up a graduate theatre-studies
program at York University.
He called the program
PEAK ("
Performance,
Example,
Animation,
Katharsis") and perhaps should have found an acronym for
PEEK,
as the instructor and his class stripped naked to protest against
a lack of classroom space.
The challenge to the new Stratford artistic director in 1974
was written on a piece of parchment and delivered in London by
Don RUBIN, a York colleague. Alas, Mr.
RUBIN could not find a
proper gauntlet and wound up ceremoniously striking Mr.
PHILLIPS
with a red rubber glove, an absurd note to a theatrical protest.
In 1978, Mr.
JULIANI took the stage in a Toronto production of
Children of Night, portraying Janusz Korczak, a doctor and teacher
who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. The critics were appalled.
Gina MALLET of the Toronto Star said Mr.
JULIANI's performance
sullied Dr. Korczak's memory. Jay
SCOTT of The Globe and Mail,
noting "the dreadfulness" of Mr.
JULIANI's acting, said the production
robbed the dead of their dignity.
From the stage, Mr.
JULIANI challenged the Star's critic to a
public debate on the aesthetics of theatre. He also wrote a letter
to the editor, noting that Holocaust survivors in the audience
had wholeheartedly embraced the production.
Mr. JULIANI wound up in Edmonton, where he continued to condemn
the "exorbitance, elitism and museum theatre" of the establishment.
In 1982, he directed and co-wrote Latitude 55°, a feature film
with just two characters -- a slick woman from the city and a
Polish potato farmer -- set in a snowbound cabin. "It is filled
with a passionate conviction that evaporates in pretentious pronouncements,"
The
Globe's
Carole
CORBEIL wrote, "filled with truthful moments
that evaporate in the desire to use every narcissistic trick
in the book."
In a 1983 book examining the alternative theatre movement in
Canada, author Renate
USMIANI devoted most of a chapter to Mr.
JULIANI, a decision that got her a scathing rebuke from a reviewer
who considered him worthy of little more than a footnote.
"His works are curiosities; at best, they are worthy experiments
in Artaudian theory," Boyd
NEIL wrote in a Globe review. "But
they are neither popular... nor influential."
Mr. JULIANI's years at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio
in Vancouver were both productive and successful. Among the many
projects he directed was a three-part adaptation of Margaret
Laurence's
The
Diviners; King Lear, starring John
COLICOS; a
13-part series titled, Disaster! Acts of God or Acts of Man?"
and, famously, Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, with Leonard
GEORGE
portraying a role once assumed on stage by his late father, Chief
Dan GEORGE.
The surprise selection of Mr.
GEORGE was typical
of Mr. JULIANI's often brilliant casting.
Mr. JULIANI directed a 1989 production of The Glass Menagerie
at the Vancouver Playhouse with Jennifer Phipps and Morris Panych.
Globe reviewer Liam
LACEY praised a production that "opens up
the play like an old treasure chest, and lets in some fresh air
without rearranging or disturbing the work's original grandeurs
and caprices."
Four years later, Mr.
JULIANI was directing a production of the
mystery thriller Sleepwalker when actor Peter
HAWORTH took sick
shortly before opening night. The director suddenly found himself
as the male lead. "Not even the most colossal egotist would want
to do this," he said.
Dim Sum Diaries, a series of monologues written by Mr.
LEIREN-
YOUNG,
received protests when aired by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Radio in 1991. One episode, entitled The Sequoia, in which the
white vendor of a luxury home launches a tirade against the Hong
Kong immigrant who cuts down two rare and spectacular trees on
the property, was accused of being racist. The playwright's well-intentioned
exploration of stereotyping was charged with fostering those
very prejudices.
After directing Dim Sum Diaries, Mr.
JULIANI urged the playwright
to tackle an issue that was dividing his church. Mr.
LEIREN-
YOUNG
remembers replying: "You're talking same-sex marriage in the
Anglican church and you want a straight Jewish guy to write this?"
The resulting play, titled Articles of Faith: The Battle of St.
Alban's, was staged at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver
to great acclaim.
The collaborations between young playwright and veteran director
succeeded in achieving Mr.
JULIANI's goal of inspiring dialogue
through theatre.
Mr. JULIANI had a reputation as a demanding taskmaster for novice
and veteran actors alike. Rehearsals were jokingly called "Savage
God Boot Camp."
He maintained a breakneck pace, both in the theatre and in the
boardroom. He was artistic co-director of Opera Breve, a small
company dedicated to nurturing young singers; president of the
Union of British Columbia Performers (Alliance of Canadian Cinema,
Television and Radio Artists); and, a former national president
of the Directors Guild of Canada, among many boards on which
he served.
Feeling fatigued in early August, Mr.
JULIANI was diagnosed with
liver cancer. The end came swiftly. He died on August 21 at Lions
Gate Hospital in North Vancouver.
He leaves his wife of 33 years, Donna
WONG-
JULIANI, and a son,
Alessandro
JULIANI, an actor. He also leaves brothers Richard
and Norman.
(Wit was long a part of the
JULIANI mystique. The family pet,
a canine named Beau Beau, was referred to in the family's paid
obituary notice as a Savage Dog.)
For one who roused such passions, Mr.
JULIANI felt that he led
a conservative life. "I have always been a square," he once said.
A theatrical farewell to Mr.
JULIANI attracted hundreds to St.
Andrew's Wesley Church in Vancouver on Labour Day, a Monday and
traditionally a quiet date on the theatre calendar. Those in
attendance were encouraged to write remembrances on Post-It notes,
which were then stuck to the church's pillars.
The City of Vancouver has declared next March 24, which would
have been Mr.
JULIANI's 64th birthday, to be Savage God Day.
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RUBIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-11 published
GELBER,
Sylva
Malka, OC, LL.D.
93 years old, Sylva Malka
GELBER, whose years of activism in
pre-Israel Palestine eventually propelled her to be the first
director of the Canadian Department of Labour's Women's Bureau,
died on December 9th, 2003, of complications from a stroke. She
was 93 and lived in Ottawa.
During the heady years of pioneering in gains for women's rights
and Medicare in Canada during the 1960s and 70s, she travelled
the country, never shrill and always reasoned in her campaign
for equality for women in the country's labour force. She took
this pragmatic approach to the United Nations where she represented
Canada on the United Nations Commission for the Status of Women
between 1970 - 74.
A social and industrial activist at heart, she never lost her
zest for a good argument on those issues which had been part
of her adult life since she left her comfortable Toronto home
in the early 1930s for the turmoil of Jerusalem and Palestine.
There she became the first graduate of the Va'ad Leumi School
of Social Work - now the Faculty of Social Work of the Hebrew
University - and took on jobs incongruous with her upbringing
which had included schooling at Havergal College, a private girl's
school.
She worked in Palestine during the Mandate as a family counsellor,
a probation officer and medical social worker at Hadassah Hospital,
and then with the Palestine Department of Labour from 1942 -
48 when she returned to Canada. The adventuresome 15 years Sylva
GELBER lived in the turmoil of Palestine are chronicled with
affection, awe and frankness in ''No Balm in Gilead: A Personal
Retrospective of Mandate Days in Palestine'' published in 1989.
By the time she moved back to Canada, she could switch effortlessly
among Hebrew and Arabic and English which impressed no one in
bureaucratic Ottawa, but did startle the Capital's stuffy side,
she often noted mischievously.
Her deep red lipstick and nail polish when paired with her fast
sports cars belied the image of the traditional Ottawa civil
servant she could never be, despite distinguished and proud accomplishments
in promoting federal health insurance and Medicare until they
became the law of the land.
Along the way, she accepted many appointments to serve Canada
at International Labour Organization conferences, the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development and the United Nations
General Assembly. She was a member of the Order of Canada and
was awarded honorary degrees from several universities including
Queen's, Memorial, Trent, Guelph and Mount St. Vincent.
Sylva Malka
GELBER was born in 1910 in Toronto to Sara
(MORRIS)
and Louis GELBER.
Her father, a survivor of pogroms in Eastern
Europe, was determined that her four brothers, all of whom attended
Upper Canada College, and she, all receive worldly educations
beyond their specific Jewish community. She always admired her
father for this farsightedness in encouraging his children to
become part of a broader society.
At the University of Toronto, she produced plays. She sang spirituals
on a Toronto radio station, but her parents would have none of
a show business career. She was packed off to Columbia University
in New York; but even that did not satisfy her rambunctious spirit
and soon she was on her way to distant Palestine.
Never domesticated as women of her day usually were, she paid
little attention to her kitchen pantry when she finally settled
in Ottawa; but always gregarious, she loved to entertain around
the piano which she played by ear and with great gusto. Her library
of records and Compact Disks, was always in use as music filled
her life; and she has endowed an important annual prize through
The Sylva Gelber Music Foundation, which is granted to an outstanding
young Canadian musician at the early stage of his or her career.
In retirement, she energetically participated in the Canadian
Institute of International Affairs and the Wednesday Luncheon
Club of former cabinet ministers and civil servants, such as
her neighbour, Jack
PICKERSGILL, who thrashed over current political
issues.
Sylva GELBER was predeceased by her four brothers, Lionel, Marvin,
Arthur and Shalome Michael. She is survived by her four nieces
and their husbands, Nance
GELBER and Dan
BJARNASON,
Patty and
David RUBIN,
Judith
GELBER and Dan
PRESLEY, and Sara and Richard
CHARNEY, all of Toronto; her sister-in-law, Marianne
GELBER of
New York; four great nephews and a great niece, Gerald and Noah
RUBIN, and Adam, Andrew and Laura
CHARNEY; as well as cousins
Ruth JEWEL and David
EISEN; David
ALEXANDOR, and Ruth
GELBER
all of Toronto; and Ivan
CHORNEY and Betsy
RIGAL, both of Ottawa.
At Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel, 2401 Steeles Avenue West
(1 light west of Dufferin) for service on Thursday, December
11, 2003 at 12: 00 noon. Interment Beth Tzedec Memorial Park.
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