Misc.

Friends and Workers

Comment by Wayne Tunison

"I loved to work with Michele. She was Rachel to my Jacob in Dialogues for Dan and Ma UBU to my Pere UBU in Alfred Jarry's UBU the King. I first met the Curtain Razors when I hired Paula Costain to teach my children some summer drama. That was enough to start a couple of decades of mutual support and collaboration with the dynamic dramatic impresario. Michele saw exciting new ways to include bells in some of her works. I recall a journey she made through the downtown of Regina from the Cornwall street park aid dressed as a toxic waste disposer.

Above her head she spun a speaker in a can system altering her rants with Doppler shifts. From my tower position in Knox Metropolitan United Church, I accompanied her with tunes such as a Harry Dacre's Bicycle Built for Two. She altered her costume as she advanced through the city ultimately ending the performance in city hall as like Eve in the Garden of Eden. Ultimately, we were both adventurous artists with pillars of classical training constantly washed by waves of the bizarre and avant-garde. I wrote the music for her production of Nicky Silver’s Fat Men in Skirts which I performed during the performance while wearing a hula skirt and a traditional nursing cap.

I documented her performing as a pioneer, a freezing woman or spirit, a feminist or lesbian, a lover, a clog in the machinery of feast and several traditional performances. In turn, Michele championed my drawings and traditions of the Regina bells. Our attachments were intellectual and spiritual. Often we would initiate a project together yet part ways as the teams formed sensing that the synergy was best left in the hands of just one of us. Often our eyes would meet and we both experienced the same absurdity but if Michele laughed that humour spread like the plague.

When Michele was widowed, she nurtured her grief with the bells and broadened her range artistically, geographically, culturally and spiritually. She became a widow of the world and an artist of no bounds except those of good taste and courage.

Written obituary by Kelley Jo Burke

"Michele Sereda is … huge. First of all, forget the past tense. There is no part tense with Michele. There is only IS, NOW, Forward, OH WELL. NEXT! So despite Hwy 6. Despite 5 dead. Despite-- I am absolutely not going to be talking about anything Michele was. Michele is. And she is huge. I’ve known Michele most of my adult life. She was my student, before anything. I tutored her in essay writing, for credit. Between edits, we talked about my previous life as a teen playwright—in an age before baby. She asked me to write a skit for her new company to take to the Edmonton Fringe. I did. We went as “Curtain Razors” though we agreed the name was kind of a placeholder.

She made me a playwright again. She made herself an impresaria. Just like that. She has been one ever since, and is responsible for a lot of the truly brave and necessary and glorious theatre art in Saskatchewan. Talk to any artist you meet today—ask if Michele was the start of something for them. You will be stunned how many say yes. Maybe you won’t. Not now.

But my stories about Mich are a tiny chapter in a huge book. They won’t say what I want to say. Maybe it’s better to talk about the hats. She wore insane hats. Absurd hats. Hats make of felt and moose hide and feathers and bark and candles and branches and twine. Michele has never seen an art space she didn’t want to fill. And the top of her head is clearly just that— a place to present art, airy and well-lit and easy to promote. It isn’t like she disregards the stares of those unprepared for her hats. She’s very aware of those staring. And she’s happy for them. Because they are getting an opportunity to encounter the unexpected. Michele in a country diner with something strongly resembling a beaver’s dam on her head is a chance for the other diners to encounter the new, to meet art, and she’s thrilled to offer it. See, some of us are working artists. Michele is a living artist. Every way she lives is art. The food on her plate. The incredible drape of her scarf. The hair. The entrance into a crowded room, chin up, hips square, shoulders back. Not a diva. A grande dame. An event. Michele is an event. An occasion of art.

Or maybe if I told you about the voice. I’m not going to start with the laughs, because that’s going to take some doing, and I need to save myself a little for that. I’m gonna sneak up on it, by starting with the sound of her. (striding towards you as you make a choice and she loves it) “Yah yah yah yah, yah yah yah.” “I knu----oooooohhhhh. Can you (from a face that cuts and shapes the sound precisely, emphatically) buh—lEEEve it?” (Staccato—a thumped drum)” i-mean-what-the-fuck…?” (right hand thrown up and back on the hard “uck”, like a maestro commanding the drums) And then a pause. A complete pause. A listening. A breathing in. A hugely active silence. And then she’s off again. (I’m not going to tell you what it’s like when she says my name, except that no one has ever made my “Jo” sound more like a conspiracy than Mich) And yah, the laughs. The alto burble.Her invitation to share amazement or incredulity jackal cackle.

And the deep belly laugh from the bottom of her magnificent singer’s belly—and further down too, her wide open woman laugh…sexy and round. The music of her—and her dancing to it. I think finally it’s going to come to the Smile. Everyone talks about it. Her beautiful smile. Large and generous. Offered especially to the young. A smile that can cut through bullshit as easily as it embraces anyone willing to be truly present. A constant gift to anyone trying. A half-sheathed blade to anyone in her face. Her ongoing “YES” to the world, drawn with painterly curve, from ear to ear. Maybe it’s something like that. The Is, and the hats and the sound and the smile and the ever-dancing creation, the Yes that is art, because art is always saying Yes, and it never rests and never stops singing and never stops trying and never stops looking a new way.

It is huge. It is Michele."