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In choosing to adapt the works of poets for the stage, ee cummings isn’t the first name that comes to mind. In fact, the American poet’s work, considered impenetrable and outright weird by many, is one of the writers whose work might be avoided. And yet Toronto-based actor/musician Mike Ross is diving headlong into the challenge, presenting an evening of works inspired by cummings’ canon.
The Young Centre’s second annual Cabaret Series takes places October 29th through November 1st, and features an array of concerts and tributes throughout the glass and stone Distillery district building. Along with a diverse array of concerts by some of Canada’s most prominent musicians (including Molly Johnson, David Buchbinder, and Patricia O’Callaghan) there are tributes to Canadians Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and American R&B master Stevie Wonder. There’s also (re)birth: ee cummings in song. Saluting a poet amidst the musical mayhem might seem odd, yet Ross says it’s entirely fitting.

“What makes cabaret is, it is a concert but has theatrical elements to it,” he explains, prior to a rehearsal. “We certainly have that, but a big part of the exploration here is, how do we present this?”

Widely considered to be among the most important of twentieth-century poets, ee cummings was also a painter, essayist, author and playwright. His poems were influenced by both high culture and pop culture, with traces of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, blues and sonnet forms all mixing with the sometime-avant-garde, sometime-romantic style cummings employed. Visits to Paris, and subsequent exposure to the Dada and surrealist movements, left a strong impression on his works as well.

Many of the 2,900 poems he wrote (including popular favourites “anyone lived in a pretty town how.” and “in-Just”) have a distinct, idiosyncratic style of syntax, some being entirely devoid of any punctuation or grammar, which puts the onus the reader to ponder deeper meanings and intent. If there’s one poet whose work would be impossible to stage, it might be ee cummings.

Ross, however, wasn’t daunted by the prospect. That might be owing to his musical ear. As well as acting in Soulpepper productions of Ring Round the Moon, As You Like It, and Three Sisters (among others), Ross is a professional musician who has donned the hats of composer, musical director, and sound designer for productions across Canada, including stints with the Charlottetown Festival, Theatre Calgary, Toronto’s Tarragon and London’s Grand Theatre, in addition to extensive work with Soulpepper and the Young Centre. He won a Dora Mavor Moore (Toronto theatre) award in 2008 for sound design/composition of the Soulpepper production of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and has won two East Coast Music Awards. Ross, a graduate of Soulpepper Theatre Company’s two-year-long Academy program, is a current Associate Artist with Soulpepper. He’s working with designer (and fellow Academy grad) Lorenzo Savoini on Civil Elegies, a theatrical work based on the poetry of Dennis Lee, opening in December.

His experience transferring Lee’s writings to the stage lead him to choose a poet’s work for the Cabaret series that, as he puts it, “lends itself well to both song-writing in a traditional sense, and also avant-garde exploration and improvisation.”

Working with current Academy members, Ross and his team developed ways of presenting and interpreting cummings’ work in a theatrical sense, incorporating music, dance, movement, in addition to words. Because of the visual nature of the poems, a certain emphasis was placed on the spatial arrangement of performers, so as to imitate, or at least complement, the works. This gives a sense of the chaos on the page and makes it real for audiences; thus, a more intimate, immediate sense of ee cummings’ poetry is given within the context of a larger celebration of the diversity of arts and musical presentation.

“When it came to making pictures, we definitely have thought of the exploratory manner in which (cummings) wrote down his poems,” Ross notes, “so it affects the stage pictures. He actually had a ton of elements that were very useful to us. And that’s why we picked him.”

He offers an example that clarifies the equation between theatricality and cummings’ poetry. The poem “grasshopper” is considered one of cummings’ most unusual. “It’s like somebody fell on a typewriter,” Ross comments with a laugh, “but as an exercise, we staged ourselves presenting that poem, moving down the stage as we’re doing it in groups of three and four, and each person is a letter. It became this ultra avant-garde movement piece. It really evokes images and pictures and depth onstage.”

Physicalizing ideas wasn’t always easy, however. “It had ups and downs,”Ross admits. “For the most part, it was a pretty … easy isn’t the word, but one of the guys, a designer in the Academy described it as having a lot of integrity. I feel like what he meant by that was … we have been very true our process in working was that we called kernels.”

These “kernels” began with a simple assignment. Academy members were asked to find a cummings poem they liked, and then develop a sonic idea based around that poem; it could take the shape of a traditional song, or be composed of a single chord. Ideas and poems were brought back into the group, and performance ideas were developed collectively. “So it would not be their thing anymore,” notes Ross, highlighting the communal nature of the show’s creation, “but just a starting place. We’d develop these kernels, so it had a sense of everybody being on board. We did extensive work on what the poem meant as well. We weren’t just haphazardly putting in crazy sound or movement just because it was impulse. We were working from a place of connection to whatever it was we was trying to evoke. That was a little painstaking at times.”

Ross says all the hard work is paying off, and says the experience is “one of the most stunning things I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s an entirely musical collective creation –not one person could ever compose this. It’s a fusion of ten different brains. These are a smart bunch of people that are amazingly theatrically minded and musically minded. The fusion has really created something like you’ve never seen before.”