#babettesfeast

Babette’s Feast

I first watched Babette's Feast running on fumes late one evening in 2004. To season it mildly, I was a starving artist (on paper I probably still am). My days dwindled on dishing out design for local bands. To supplement income, nights found me haunting the stairwells and low-lit halls of a hospital cleaning crew. The pay was a tablespoon above minimum wage but I was happy and creativity wasn't forfeited. The paycheck also helped scrape the overhead (when Kansas City was cheap) with enough loose change for day-old bread store snacks - an annual Saturday sugary morning scoot down the block.

My bevy of co-workers, a ragtag and hardworking crew, made the nights during this season far more memorable than I ever could've conjured while hunched at my art table. I don't aim to single out the subject of race here, but being the only person of non-color, I was the odd to this crew's even. Often I was quietly cuddled in the corner before official clock-in with a John Steinbeck novel, and naively asking such questions like, "What does CRUNKED mean, anyway?" Seriously. Despite a college education and a couple big city years under my belt, I was still considered fresh meat off the farm. Needless to say, I turned a lot of heads. Without ever mentioning my artistic aspirations, I quickly settled into a new routine and many friendships.

One evening a couple of employees spearheaded an event of fellowship I hadn't experienced since church in my youth - a potluck dinner! I excitedly pledged $10 (equivalent to $100 at the time) and a couple cans of Pringles. The share of cash helped purchase everything necessary to pull off the main course - several giant "Presidential Platters" of Gates Bar-B-Q, a Kansas City institution. (Side Note: I had previously smelled Gates daily for free when living down the street from their midtown location.) A Friday night date was set and I was already forward-licking my chops.

Hungrily I piddled too long after clocking out and ended up being the very last in line come meal time. With styrofoam plates bowed beneath piles of meat and sides, I had never seen food fly off a table so fast! I also overheard a complaint filed, "Not much meat on these trays! Someone made some money off this!" However, the buzz of fellowship and food in that deserted office air eclipsed any sour commentary. All that remained of the meat (and likely left behind out of pity per the last few before me) was a tiny scrap of mangled ham, half a rib and a nearly disintegrated slice of white bread (an apt metaphor of darker and desperate times and emotions on the path to making ends meet). I guess one could say a literal bone was thrown? Ah well. I was not deterred. I quickly snagged the meat and overloaded the plate with a ton of sides, rolls, pie and cookies to round out my appetite (and my $10). Far more content with this meal than the usual nightly cup of ramen noodles, I chowed down with the best seat in the house - standing right next to what was left of the spread. It was a successful feast, a powerful reminder of something joyful and sacred. We were alive and well. Sadly, for a cleaning crew we sure did make a mess.

Needless to say the next morning I kickstarted a day of design with Mountain Dew and near-expired cupcakes.

-djg, 2020

I recently closed my first semi-professional theatre experience with Fire Exit Theatre. It was quite a journey and a very rewarding and challenging one at that.

Back in August, I auditioned for “Babette’s Feast”, a play adaptation of the short story by Isak Dineson, conceived and developed by Abigail Killeen and written by Rose Courtney. It turned out to be a very unconventional audition as the venue was not open during my time slot. We auditioned in groups and my group ended up auditioning outside in a residential area. We worked on scenes from the script as well as doing group performance exercises for the director, Jeany Van Meltebeke, to see how we worked together as an ensemble.

Several days later I received an email from Artistic Director, Val Lieske, offering me a role in the ensemble, with the note that specific roles would be assigned at a later date. A couple of weeks later, another email was sent with assigned roles. I would be playing Babette as well as a little bit of ensemble work in the first part of the play before Babette makes her first entrance. 

Photo Credit: Andrea Cross Photography. With Kyla Ferrier and Sarah Haggeman.

“Babette’s Feast” is set in a small Norwegian town called Berlevaag and centres around two sisters, the children of a dean to a religious sect. The two sisters, Martine and Philippa, despite their beauty, offers of marriage, and for Philippa, a chance to be an opera singer, remain in Berlevaag as spinsters throughout their life, carrying on the work of the dean after his death. In their autumn years, they take in Babette, a French refugee from the Paris Commune, as a housekeeper. Babette was once a celebrated chef at the Café Anglais in Paris and had fought as a communard, alongside her husband and son, both of whom were killed in the civil war. The story culminates in Babette’s gift to the sisters and the community – a fabulous feast of French cuisine.

We had about a three-month rehearsal period before we moved into the Engineered Air Theatre at Arts Commons, throughout which, Jeany gently pushed us to “tell good story,” paying attention to the details and working on the subtext of the script. Looking back it was incredible how much we gleaned from between the lines of what at first appeared to be a simple script and story. Rachel Peacock, as well as being a part of the cast, was the composer and musical director for the production and her compositions enhanced the show no end, with the music performed with a harp, violin, glockenspiel, our vocals and even toy wooden blocks!

I made some personal discoveries as a performer during the process. Jeany would often tell me to work on being neutral emotionally at certain parts in the play. Well, people have always been able to read me like a book and I am a terrible liar as it simply shows too much on my face. Poker player I am not! For acting there is so much to work on within to achieve what the audience will eventually see. Part of that skill is learning to live in the present, moment by moment. What human doesn’t wander emotionally into the past or future? In the many years of doing theatre, I have learnt that this mental wandering out of the present can trip a performer up in a performance.

During the rehearsal process, imposter syndrome also raised its ugly head on occasion. This was my first production out of the community theatre world where most other fellow cast mates have other careers and acting is a hobby and a different way to socialize for a lot of people. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it is a fantastic hobby and there is nothing wrong with not wanting to pursue it as a career and a person can still strive for excellence in a pastime. From the day of the first read-through, I discovered that I was among kindred spirits. I was with people working in some capacity within the industry and who wore many hats like myself, often with many projects on the go at the same time. I felt at home, however often my anxiety would whisper negative things in my ear that I didn’t belong.

The biggest challenge for me was the fact that Babette was French. Whilst it wasn’t a goal of the production for the performers to have impeccable accents, I did not want Babette to sound English. I also did not want her to have a stereotypical French accent. There were also a few lines in French within the script which presented another challenge. During high school in Ottawa, probably in Grade 11 or 12 (I have moved from the UK the summer before I started Grade 11), I was kicked out of Grade 10 French for struggling with the work in the class. My mother is still angry about it and I realize now that it was probably more to do with the teacher wanting to keep her class averages up than my learning ability. I was a shy and self-conscious teenager who hated speaking aloud in class and had always been very self-conscious about the way I spoke even in English, let alone a foreign language, as we had moved around a lot and I always had a different dialect. Those early days in high school in Ottawa usually meant I had to repeat sentences about three times to my friends before they understood what I was saying! The result was that I no longer had confidence in my ability to even learn to speak a second language. I seem to recall that in the UK, I had quite enjoyed French and German classes, but in Ottawa, everyone was so far ahead in French. The last French course I took was in first year of university as a degree requirement. My inability to speak Canada’s other official language was one of the reasons I ended up moving to Alberta.

There is a section in the script where the ensemble repeat some of the French words spoken by Babette. At the first readthrough during which I most likely pronounced the French lines incorrectly and with limited understanding of the meaning, having the words repeated caught me by surprise and in a moment of self-consciousness, I honestly thought some of the others were correcting my pronunciation! This was not the case! Though certainly down the road, Caleb and John, other cast members (Caleb was also the assistant director), helped me with the pronunciation. Google Translate also became a good friend! I talked about my hang-ups with speaking French with Caleb about two weeks before we moved into the theatre. He asked me when I was going to let them go. Right now, was my reply! I had already upped the ante for myself by inviting French-speaking friends to the show and at this point it was time to really put in some work. I would record myself speaking Babette’s lines to ensure they sounded like Babette and not me.          

Photo Credit: Andrea Cross Photography

By the week of our final rehearsals, I felt that Babette had really arrived. I felt confident in my ability to portray her on stage. I was super-excited to be in a show at the Engineered Air Theatre. I had been in the venue once during the Festival of Animated Objects in March (I love the retro décor) and on the first day we were in the theatre, I remembered the intention I had set through a selfie on Facebook in May during the Bouffon workshop (held in the ATP rehearsal hall) that I hoped to again enter and exit the stage door of Arts Commons many, many times in the not too distant future. Well it came true! That is the power of manifestation, folks – I also manifested a free transit ticket that day.  

Opening night was on a Wednesday. Fire Exit has a tradition for everyone to wear red shoes on opening night (started by Val and her red boots). I found a really nice pair that day in the WINS thrift store and they went really well with my green Christmas leggings. We had a talk back after the performance, my first ever. There were a couple of complimentary comments about how humble Babette was. In the lobby after, a lady asked if I was French! All our performances went really well, despite sickness making its way around the cast (par for the course for a December show – I was lucky as I had been sick a few weeks prior). Once we had an audience, we discovered that what had seemed like a serious play for the most part, was actually quite whimsical and fun throughout. Our audiences were great, very loving and kind. My French-speaking friends told me that they understood every word and joked how they were going to converse with me in French now.

Photo Credit: Andrea Cross Photography. From left to right: John Moerschbacher, Kyla Ferrier, Daniel Kim, Caleb Gordon, me, Sarah Haggeman, Rachel Peacock, Kendra Hutchinson and Ainsley Daumler.

“My favourite film, with a sort of religious subtext, is Babette's Feast, and there's not very much doctrine in that, not very much overt religiosity, except the rather grim religiosity - the sort of thing you write about - of the old people of the village and their circle. It tells the story of a sort of secular saviour, who has spent all that she has on equipping the people of the village to have an elaborate, pointless, over-the-top feast, in the course of which, sins are confessed and reconciliation is achieved. It's a sort of bloated version of a short story. It's not a realistic depiction of rural life in Denmark, and it's not the film itself that's making a religious point. But watching it, and absorbing what I call the animated icon of it, gives me all sorts of things to reflect on in my own belief system. None of it's realistic, that's not what it's for.