As of January 7, 2013, this website will serve as an archive site only. For news, reviews and a connection with audience and creators of theatre all over the country, please go to The Charlebois Post - Canada.

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Wednesday, February 6, 2013

IMPORTANT NOTICE. 
This site is no longer an active part of CharPo. It is kept merely as an archival site. For current reviews and news from across Canada go to CharPo-Canada.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Sunday Feature: Dying is Easy... (from stand-up to theatre)

Staying Alive
by Martha Chaves

Staying alive, besides being the title of  that Bee-Gees tune and the John Travolta movie, has been one of the main motifs of my existence. Not only because I'm from Nicaragua, a war-torn country plagued with poverty and social injustice. Not only because I was born in the midst of a fundamentalist Christian family, in a macho-oriented society and I am a lesbian. Not only because I am an uprooted immigrant who was sent away to Canada by her parents, all alone, at the ripe age of 17. But staying alive has been my quest also because I am a stand-up comedian dammit! To stay alive is the name of the game in stand-up comedy as much as it is in bullfighting. 

The stand-up comedian is like a matador: every audience is a different bull that has to be  slaughtered. It's no coincidence that the main terms associated with stand-up have to do with either killing or dying. If you make the audience eat out of the palm of your hand, you KILL, you SLAY, you DESTROY; but if the audience gives you nothing but silence - the  silence that resonates with the strength of a thousand explosions in the epicenter of  your crumbling ego - you DIE, you BOMB  you get ANIHILATED. Granted: Nobody ever said  that it would be easy. There's even that famous quote, “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” But nevertheless, I have been doing it for almost 18 years and if I were to die tomorrow...I would still be very pissed off about being mortal and  about not dying as a famous millionaire (like, say, Jerry Seinfeld) but I would die with the satisfaction of knowing I was one of the few lucky people in the world who spent most of her life doing a job she loved.