Ottawa High School Drama Teacher Talks Arcade Fire Play, Shares Video

Most Arcade Fire fans are currently looking expectantly down the road toward the now-official Aug. 3 release date of the band’s new album, The Suburbs. (Listen to two new songs here.) But a select group of Ottawa high school students and perhaps the world’s coolest drama teacher—die-hard Arcade Fire fans, all—are looking three years back to a little album called Neon Bible. On Wednesday night, the senior drama students at Canterbury High School opened The Neon Bible Project, a collective theater piece inspired by and set to the 11 tracks on Arcade Fire’s 2007 record. Tomorrow is the final performance.

Last spring, Canterbury’s veteran drama teacher, Paul Griffin, received an invitation to bring his students and a performance piece of his choice to the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival, famous for its celebration of quirk and audacity in performance art. As the invitation was for the 2010 festival, Griffin had a year to come up with the perfect project, an unconventional dramatic pursuit that his most advanced students could connect and commit to, something they wouldn’t mind burying themselves in until it was perfect.

As fate would have it, he had something in his back pocket for just this sort of occasion. “I’ve always wanted to do a movement show based on the music of Arcade Fire, because I find their music really evocative,” Griffin says. “There are a lot of cautionary notes in Neon Bible…as joyous as the music is, the words are not as joyous. I found that thematically interesting.”

By “movement show,” Griffin means the employment of physical movement instead of words to tell a story. It’s an often-touted, but less-often attempted, form of theater, mainly because it’s so difficult to do well.

Fortuitously, Griffin felt the material on Neon Bible might nicely accommodate a theme he had pondered for many months: technology. “The speed at which things happen now, and how quickly we assimilate to that, is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he asks. “Not that I’m a Luddite. I don’t think we shouldn’t have technology, but I just think we should always be evaluating things.”

Of course, Griffin couldn’t actually do any of this without permission from the band. Here’s where most high school drama teachers would have tucked tail and retreated to a classic Neil Simon play. Then again, most high school drama teachers don’t have Arcade Fire member (and Canterbury alum) Richard Parry’s e-mail address.

Parry and his bandmates, who launched their Neon Bible Tour in the very cafeteria where Griffin slices his salisbury steak, seem to love Canterbury as much as Canterbury loves them. Within two days of Griffin asking, Arcade Fire gave him permission to use its music any way he pleased. “They’re interested in art moving forward,” Griffin says of the indie rockers. “The idea that we could find something in what they did that might be interesting to us, to them, I think it was like, ‘Fine, go ahead, see what you can discover.’ It was very nice.”

So Griffin had collected a method and muse without much of a fuss. Now all he needed was a story. Enter a collective of his twelfth grade drama students.

Starting in October and continuing even after they had already opened the show, Griffin and his advanced class became more familiar with, more deeply (maybe even disturbingly) engrossed in the music of Neon Bible than perhaps even the band’s members themselves could rightly claim to be. And eventually, under Griffin’s direction, the story came to life.

As Griffin describes it, The Neon Bible Project is about North America 20 years from now, a society in which technology has moved from obsession to addiction to deadly infection, slowly deteriorating the quality of life for its inhabitants. The plot follows one young woman as she takes on the Big Brother-esque Mercury Corporation (for which she was once a spokesperson), whose expressed desire to pull the continent out of its slump is a cover for its actual plan to suck people dry of their life force and use it for energy. Phew!

The storyline, the order and transitions of songs, and the movements took Griffin and his students around six months to create and perfect, mainly because they were determined that the process be truly collective. “I discovered early on that [the collective process] only works if everybody believes they’re an integral part of creation,” Griffin says. “At a lot of rehearsals, we might sit and argue for an hour, and I don’t mean argue in a childish way, I mean debate. Early on, it was crap. It was horrible. But you have to go through that to get to the good stuff.”

“He’s really given us the chance to come up with ideas and create our own work,” says senior and producer of the show, Sydney Haslam. “I think to have that opportunity for any high-school student is just great.”

Haslam, like most of her castmates, took on a creative job, a production job, and five or six characters to play in the show, logging more hours in the auditorium than many students log on homework in their high-school careers. Recent rehearsals ran from the end of school until 10 p.m. But Haslam says that’s just the name of the game if you want results, which, she and Griffin report, they’ve gotten so far. “I had one person say [after opening night], ‘The images with the music is like watching modern art,’” Griffin says. Even so, he and his students plan to continue tweaking and twisting until they find their product a suitable offering to their personal rock totems. In the meantime, they consider each day just one more opportunity to bask in music they say is so powerful, not even six months’ worth of repetition could strip it of its dynamism.

Arcade Fire has made no requests of the group, except that they send on a video of the production when it’s ready, which Griffin seems thrilled to oblige.

For more information, visit NeonBibleProject.com. Below, watch footage of the group’s adaptation of “Antichrist TV Blues,” during which the young woman feels the tension of her role as the evil Mercury Company’s figurehead. Below that, watch a time-lapse video of the group’s rehearsal process.

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