The tough transition from one-man show to collaborative type

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This article was published 17/07/2015 (4049 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For most of his 15 years on the Canadian fringe festival circuit, TJ Dawe was a solo act onstage and off, preferring to focus on his own work and avoid the camaraderie of colleagues relaxing in the beer tent.

He can laugh about it now, but despite appearing as a big name in more than 100 fringe festivals, the Vancouver monologist felt like he was an outsider.

“Strangers would come up to me on sidewalks to tell me they liked my show,” he remembers. “Peers slapped me on the back and invited me to their shows. My ego would spin it into the thought, ‘You don’t belong. Everyone else can go to the King’s Head or beer tent but that’s not for you.’ That was a belief, but not actually the truth.

“Of course I was welcome at those places. And when I went I had a great time.”

Eliminating those feelings of social inadequacy — what he calls his huge personal blind spot — has been an aim of his self-improvement initiatives over the last five years. His progress is evident as he returns to the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, for the first time since 2012, with Marathon, in which he spins a 75-minute tale about his social awkwardness and mediocre long-distance running in high school.

“Now I’m starting to get past it, collaborating more and hanging out more with the company of others,” he says. “I used to justify the fact I was an individual and I didn’t hang out. It was a badge of honour that proved how much better I was than everyone else. Now I can see that for the defence mechanism that it really was. It was masking the deep desire to belong that I couldn’t see, much less admit it to myself.”

The loner has become the collaborator, the go-to script doctor to fringe participants with ailing plot lines or nauseating dialogue.

“More and more people are reaching out to me wanting that and it’s something I really enjoy doing,” he says from his Vancouver home near the beach. “It happens pretty frequently. Sometimes it comes from total strangers. In fact, I have a script from someone sitting in the download folder of my laptop I need to read today. It’s becoming more and more part of what I do. It’s an interesting part of my career now.”

Dawe directed both of Charlie Ross’s fringe blockbusters, One Man Star Wars Trilogy and One Man Lord of the Rings, and will be working with him in Winnipeg on his new One Man Batman.

Dawe has also collaborated on 6 Guitars, the musical Chase Padgett has brought back to the Winnipeg fringe. It’s been a strong ticket-seller, but the Portland, Ore., performer was anxious to make it better, so the two worked together on giving the half-dozen guitarists in the show stronger character arcs.

The playwright was also sought out by Eleanor O’Brien, another Portland performer who engaged him to act as a dramaturge for her one-woman show, Lust & Marriage, presented this year at Son of Warehouse. They have been working long-distance on her story of a woman with a soulmate who is perfect, apart from his aversion to monogamy.

He served as the dramaturge for The Great Canadian Tire Money Caper by Toronto raconteur Corin Raymond. For years, Dawe urged him to tell his stories but Raymond didn’t know how, until he was coached, coerced and cajoled into writing his debut show, Bookworm, in 2012. He is also especially pleased to be helping Calgary’s Alice Nelson with Ms. Sugarcoat, a clown show about a teacher.

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It’s all satisfying work for the son of a teacher who never wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps, partially out of a fear of becoming them.

“Working one-on-one is very much like teaching,” he says. “It’s helping someone bring out something that is inside them that they may not even realize they have.”

Dawe will formalize that help when he begins teaching a course on solo shows at Vancouver’s Langara College in the fall. It’s a natural extension of the workshops he and his girlfriend have been leading about creative practice. They recently returned from leading one in Indianapolis and have another planned for Winnipeg in the fall.

“It’s about having something creative in your life,” he says. “It’s for those who always wanted to — fill in the blank — play guitar, dance or write a novel. It’s a talk about activating your creativity.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca