content

Patrick Keating

Maiko Bae Yamamoto

Andreas Kahre

Noah Drew

Adrienne Wong

Barbara Clayden

Alex Ferguson

Ilena Lee Cramer

Erin Wells

James Long

what we do

Whither Rumble?

Having gotten onboard the all-terrain vehicle when it was but a humble pickup truck, and looking through the glove compartment, as it were, to see what I might find among the faded business cards, the dog-eared maps that lead to destinations no longer visited, the traffic tickets, and the little air fresheners, I am amazed how far we have traveled. To stick with the metaphor, it has been quite a ride, despite the potholes and the oft-hostile terrain.

So much of us goes into the making, and even more the maintaining, of an artistic company that it is never an easy thing to describe, even at the beginning. After fifteen years, a company has become a collection of stories, some of which are told too often, some which are forgotten, and some of which are still unfinished.

As told from the back seat, Rumble is the story of two men—Norman, of course, and Chris Gerrard-Pinker, who is now seen mostly in the rear view mirror, but without whom Rumble would have taken an entirely different route. His vision of theatre still determines much of the company's direction—the commitment to formal experimentation, the interdisciplinary emphasis, the range of subject matter, and the desire to create collaboratively. It was the combination of Norman and Chris that gave Rumble the will to succeed, and the courage to fail, and that is a large part of the story of its success.

Rumble is also a story of two cities; both Chris and Norman are refugees from Toronto, and while the boys had been taken out of Ontario, the reverse was only partly true. Some have quipped that Rumble began as a Toronto theatre company that operated in Vancouver. It certainly was keenly interested in spanning the distance, in a way that other companies of those days seemed less driven to, and a number of works that emerged have shown a political attitude more pronounced in the East than here. But making political theatre in Canada is a hard sell, and the price of gas was rising even then…

Finding its audience was just one of the forks in the road, however. Rumble is also the story of two kinds of theatre, and of somewhat competing visions of how form and content should meet. It seems difficult to remember now how radically 'devised' Rumble's work was in the beginning, how much it reflected the SFU manner of performance, and how large a part collective authorship, formal exploration and movement played. Fascinating stuff, but in a city whose arts funding was provincial in vision and pathetic in volume, the box office remained the final arbiter, and the type of rehearsal process that such work demanded was beyond the range of the all-terrain vehicle. To its credit, Rumble has been willing to travel nearer the edge of the precipice than most companies, but it remains frustrating to see so many roads remain closed to us for lack of nothing more meaningful than money.