Known best for her comedy work with This Hour has 22 Minutes and CodCo, Mary Walsh was in Guelph Thursday to discuss using improvisation for creating social change.
Walsh was the headline speaker at the Derry Dialogues panel discussion at the University of Guelph.
The Derry Dialogues champion interdisciplinary approaches to major issues, particularly those where the university has research expertise.
Walsh said in 1993, during the early planning stages of the Canadian political comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, then-cast mate Rick Mercer brought forth the idea of ambushing politicians and holding them to account, which has been a hallmark of the long-lived series.
Walsh herself famously hijacked interviews with countless politicians in the character of Marg Delahunty, Warrior Princess.
She told the audience on Thursday that the cast thought they would change the world, but something unexpected happened.
“At some point while I was still at This Hour Has 22 Minutes, politicians were calling us asking us to ambush them, which we never did, of course,” said Walsh.
She said those improvised comedy bits made the politicians seem more human.
“Of course when Stephen Harper and them were in, they would never do it, because the horrible thing is, they’re not human,” she quipped.
The panel for Thursday’s talk also included Ajay Heble, U of G School of English and Theatre Studies professor and jazz musician, as well as Elizabeth Jackson, associate director of U of G's Community Engaged Scholarship Institute. The talk was moderated by Daniel Fischlin, professor for the School of English and Theatre Studies.
Local improv players from The Making-Box improvised a performance at the close of the event, reflecting the panel speakers' own words against them.
Early in her career, Walsh was touring Newfoundland with a comedy collective called the Mummers. The group would go from town to town and create an improvisational performance that reflected the community they were in.
At the same time, the government of Canada was creating Gros Morne National Park on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula.
“The government was trying to shut down the communities of Cow Head, Sally’s Cove and all of the small communities to turn them into a park. They were going about it in a very underhanded way. They weren’t bringing people together to talk about what was going to happen,” said Walsh.
The problem, said Walsh, is nobody in Sally’s Cove were speaking to each other about it.
“We went around and talked to every single member of the community,” said Walsh. “And then we improvised around the material we had gotten.”
The Mummers broke the silence by reflecting the words of the community members right back to them, in effect creating a town hall meeting by proxy.
“Everyone from the community was there, so we used the real names of the people who had spoken to us,” said Walsh. “We were mirroring back to this community what they had told us but were too anxious to tell each other.”
“Out of that came a huge protest — huge for Sally’s Cove, there’s 20 people there now,” said Walsh. “Instead of all of those communities being shut down, the communities were allowed to stay and prosecute their livelihoods, they were allowed to pass on their land.”
Walsh said she uses improvisation extensively in her writing process. She and cast mates Cathy Jones, Greg Malone and Tommy Sexton would improvise a scene over and over again, choosing the best lines over multiple takes before writing the final scene.
The intention of CodCo was to fight the negative stereotypes some people had about Newfoundland by reflecting them back at them.
“We decided we were tired of being seen as Britain’s doormat and now Canada’s laughing stock and we made fun of how Newfoundlanders were seen by the rest of the country — we did a satire,” said Walsh.
Improvisation can be part of the big toolbox for theatre and for social change, said Walsh.
“What we have used improvisation for is not to travel to outer space, or not to create dream-like worlds, but what I have always done in my work is to use improvisation to deal with things are going on — just like the people losing their land to that park,” said Walsh.
“And things have changed, haven’t they?” said Walsh. “We can’t take credit for it. People do still call us goofy Newfies — and some people don’t mind that. I do, by the way, if you’re going to talk to me after.”
The key to improvisation is listening and collaborating, said Walsh.
“Whatever your ideas, someone will have — not a better one — but will have more to add, which will cause somebody else to have something else to add,” said Walsh.
