Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, premiering at Studio Theatre, directed by Jan Selman in 2017. Photo by Ed Ellis.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
You could call it “retirement.”
After a quarter century at the U of A, in which she has directed every sort of play, taught acting and directing, encouraged young playwrights, commissioned new Canadian plays, sat on countless academic committees, instigated theatre research projects, chaired the drama department for a decade, Jan Selman is exiting her university office.
But retirement? It was revealing last week that Selman was en route to a rehearsal hall. She made time for a lunch en route to Theatre Network, and rehearsals for This Is Canada, Too, the production she’s directing at the Jabulani Festival in its second year of celebrating and showcasing Edmonton’s Caribbean, African, and Black Albertan artists.
director Jan Selman
“I’m retiring from the university; I’m not retiring from the theatre,” says the director emphatically. “I want to do more!” And Edmonton theatre — of every aesthetic stripe, large and small-scale, in formal theatres and found spaces — is in luck: now Selman has the time to do exactly that.
This Is Canada, Too (running tonight through Sunday on the Roxy mainstage) is “interactive storytelling.” As Selman describes, it’s an intricate, elastic way of theatre-making that listens on the spot to the community and its diversity of voices and stories. The audience gets to talk to the characters, “some newcomers to Canada and some who’ve lived here for a long time, as they face some new challenge.”
“The characters get into situations, have dilemmas, and get to a crisis point where they say to the audience ‘what the hell can I do? What are my options?’.” The characters work it out, with the audience. “And that’s “part of the show, not just the post-show discussion….”
Ogboingba Tries To Change Her Fate, Jabulani Arts Festival. Photo by Beshel Francis.
“Using theatre as a way to build conversation. And keeping it theatrical. That’s my thing!” Last year’s Jabulani Festival theatrical centrepiece Oboingba Tries To Change Her Fate, was Selman’s thing too, a play collectively created by a multi-cultural ensemble that found contemporary relevance in a traditional Nigerian tale. Selman’s decade-long (and continuing) theatre research project, “Old Stories in New Ways, “has gathered creative partners both in Canada and Africa.
“Working with the Black community of artists on projects that need doing, so they can tell the stories they’re dreaming, and finding a place to showcase them” has taken her back to her roots, she says. Both Jabulani shows, in different ways, return Selman to early days of a theatre career that started in Victoria, her original hometown, and a BFA degree in theatre in 1974. “I made my living as an actor for a year after school, a big long school tour in B.C. in Alberta…. But it was never ‘I have to be on the stage; I just never saw myself that way. Directing was always where I wanted to go.”
A vague plan to go into urban planning didn’t stand a chance when she met the late great Tom Peacocke, the charismatic and influential U of A drama prof who became one of her cherished mentors. “I came here to do an MFA in directing. And this was THE place in the country to do that; I’m a Canadianist.”
Like Gerry Potter and Stephen Heatley, who arrived here as directing students and stayed to launch theatre companies (Workshop West and Theatre Network respectively), Selman was “very interested in the Canadian voice, and how to get our plays, our stories, onto the stage.” The Farm Show, the legendary 1972 play, collectively created at Toronto’s Theatre Passe-Muraille (director Paul Thompson sent actors out to research farm life on location) was a big influence, she says.
Another was David Barnet, a collective creation specialist at the U of A who founded Catalyst Theatre, a project-to-project operation at the time, with a social action mandate. Selman was Catalyst’s first full-time artistic director (1978 to 1985). It was a total immersion gig: under Selman the company, whose first headquarters was Barnet’s basement, became a professional year-round theatre, with an amazing output of 15 shows and popular projects a year.
“I learned on the job,” Selman says. And she had the lineage to match. “I came from a family of people interested in adult education, and community development initiatives. So it fit.”
“Theatre happens on major stages, and people have to come to you. Or theatre goes out to the community, on the road, in church halls, basements … We need both of those for theatre to stay really relevant to the community,” Selman thinks. “Theatre is an art form that wants to be live, to be communal.”
As you will glean, “community” is a Selman mantra. And it hovers over a long, distinguished (and continuing) resumé that leans heavily, though not exclusively, into the contemporary Canadian repertoire. In a striking way the trajectory of her career is an insight into the story of Edmonton theatre, the flowering of an art form authentically attached to its creators in this mid-sized city in the middle of the prairies. The question for her, and she’s passionate about it, has always been “how do we stay porous and really engaged with the places we’re in?…. We Canadians built a Canadian theatre, and it’s happened in our lifetime, since the late ‘60s, (the urge) to tell our own stories…. People were hungry for it.”
Creeps by David Freeman, directed by Jan Selman 1981. Photo from Workshop West archives.
She’s directed some of the seminal plays in the Canadian repertoire. Frank Moher’s 1985 Odd Jobs, for example, a Catalyst commission that premiered at Theatre Network in a Selman production, holds a place of honour in her list of favourite directing experiences. In 1981 she directed a Catalyst-Workshop West co-production of David Freeman’s Creeps, a Canadian theatre groundbreaker with its disabled characters in a sheltered workshop. She directed Jane Heather’s landmark interactive play about teen sexuality for young audiences Are We There Yet?, which has toured extensively under the Concrete Theatre banner (Selman was “principal investigator”). For the U of A’s Studio Theatre and its graduating classes of actors, Selman commissioned, and directed plays by Canadian stars Colleen Murphy (Bright Burning, 2017) and Greg MacArthur (Missionary Position, 2013).
Penguins by Michael McKinlay, directed by Jan Selman, 1987. Photo from the Theatre Network archives.
It’s a record of stepping up to complicated theatrical challenges. In one of the earliest Catalyst shows Selman directed, an interactive piece called Project Immigration in the late ’70s,, the actors played a diverse assortment of people hoping to emigrate to Canada, and the audiences made the decisions. It’s had multiple iterations since.
This Baby Belongs To All Of Us, Kwe Kalyet: an Old Story In A New Way. Photo credit: Ignite Afrika
And her work in using theatre as a means of community engagement and multi-cultural outreach has extended across the sea: Selman is a co-founder of Ignite Afrika, an umbrella organization for arts creation and development in western Kenya, with a festival to match.
Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions, directed by Jan Selman. Photo by Ian Walker.
Although she’s published extensively — on feminist and popular theatre, theatre for social change, interactive theatre — there’s never been anything ivory tower about Selman. In academia “the teachers I most admired were out there, doing it,” as she puts it. And as a freelance director, for example, she’s taken on such off-centre directing assignments as The Spinsters, a high-style physical clown show by Small Matters Productions.
[Blank], U of A Studio theatre, directed by Jan Selman. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography
Selman’s grand finale show at the U of A’s Studio Theatre in March points to the future. [Blank] by the English playwright Alice Birch “gives you 100 scenes, and you pick from them to make them into a play,” as she describes. “It’s a work-out. The characters are not named; there’s no indication which scenes are linked together. You’re making the play from a world (women and youth involved in the social justice system). And I really responded to that.”
What especially appealed to her was “the way (the playwright) trusts other artists, people she doesn’t even know, as collaborators; ‘do what you will’….” Selman says she worked on it every day from last August through December.”
“That invitation to collaborate on something new, and more traditional theatre … it’s all a continuum. I need all of it to do any of it well!” she says. Indie theatre, mainstage theatre, creation theatre … “let’s have it all.”
When asked about her theatre dreams, Selman remembers her younger self always answering “when I’m older I’m going to direct direct Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden. “It’s about middle-aged characters and I was young…. Now that I am older, it doesn’t have the same appeal,” she laughs. Now Selman is up for anything, but leans more into the contemporary, the new. And untethered from the organizational and leadership work at the university of teaching and coordinating acting and directing programs, Selman will be exploring the theatrical spectrum as a freelance director.
“I’m in theatre because it uses the most of me,” she says. “There are really smart people, bright sharp minds, at every echelon of theatre. And I feel lucky to be part of that.”
And in an age “when it’s so easy to stop seeing people” and stay glued to screens, theatre crucially is “a live exchange. With human beings…. If we’re going to get through this divisive, unfair, unjust world we seem to have built, we’ve got to be in rooms together. Talking and feeling and witnessing together. Live theatre fits with all that.”
