Jennifer Dale, an award-winning Canadian actor, producer and writer, has written her first book: Her Light Endures. It’s a powerful collection of monologues which gives voice to famous and infamous women of history. Dale has acted for decades in numerous films, television shows, and on stage. One of her most recent feature performances was in the film, The Shrouds, written and directed by David Cronenberg. You can see her latest short films at unrepentantseries.com. This book, and these monologue films, showcase Jennifer Dale’s commitment and mastery of craft which comes through so powerfully behind every word and every frame, demanding your full attention.
Why did you write this book?
Even though I have been very fortunate, blessed really, by some of the wonderful roles that I have been able to play throughout a more than fifty-year career as an actress, I still feel that I had to write these monologues to be able to get to a next higher level of engagement with taking on a character. A lot of the writing that I’ve encountered and played in television and films has left a lot to be desired in terms of being fully developed. A lot of roles feel like stereotypes and are too often not reflective of the complexity of a full person. I hope the monologues I’ve created, and still want to write more of, demand as wide a spectrum as may be imagined for an actress to take on. In that sense, they may be considered as somewhat more theatrical in tone, but they are nevertheless intended to be realised as short films.
My friend and colleague, Antonio D’Alfonso, had been trying to persuade me to publish these monologues for some time. I’m not sure why I was reluctant for a while, except that it can be a personal pattern. I’ve had to acknowledge that I sometimes resist things before coming to see that something is in my better interest. The wider project aim was never originally intended to be a book, but rather a collection of texts for performance. The story of the initial inspiration and evolution of the creation of these monologues was something that began to develop from a very specific synchronicity that occurred a few years ago. I was given, within weeks of each other, two different books by two different people who did not know each other. As it happened, both books were about the same woman of history whom I had not known of before and became intrigued to have discovered through such an interesting “coincidence.”
The Empress Theodora of Byzantium had an extraordinary rise to power. Starting out, if we may believe the accounts, as an exploited over-sexualised child performer with her sisters in the Hippodrome of 6th Century Constantinople. Um, whoa. Relatable, anyone? Well, to me, anyway. Learning of Theodora’s story, however unlikely, was the spark. It led me on a quest to search for more iconic women of history. Women who had somehow, against both bizarre and fated odds, been able to attain some remarkable, and in some cases, unprecedented accomplishments.
I began to compile a list and to embark on some deep dive research into the lives of some truly phenomenal women. In the beginning, I thought for a while that I might want to develop a theatre play, but at this stage of my acting development, I’m more interested in creating monologues and two-person dialogues specifically for performance on film. The aim of the exercise has always been about having meaty and challenging monologues to be able to perform.
Since I began with this film series project, which is called Unrepentant, I have to date, written sixteen pieces. There are also some other monologues for the series that have been written by other Canadian women writers and actresses. Nine that we have filmed are available to watch on the website at unrepentantseries.com and we have shot another four that are in various editing stages, and we’ve plans to make several more, some of which I will act in and some that will be performed by other actresses.
You have had an amazing career in acting. How does it feel to have written your first book?
To have published the book of monologues now feels like a natural step in the process. It’s very satisfying to have done it. Even though I still marvel at how the whole project has consumed me and continues to inspire me. Five or six years ago I would never have believed or even imagined that I would be as creatively engaged in something like this that I would have initiated. I hope to be able to just continue writing these texts and making these films indefinitely, as long as my energy and inspiration can sustain it and last. There is always another fabulous woman’s story to discover and each character that I’ve chosen to explore and portray has been an inspiration to me. The filmed shorts are obviously not “bio-pics.” Rather, they are very impressionistic pieces that reflect how I feel these women speak to me. It feels like they are speaking through me to women of modern times. It has been continually shocking and amazing to me to realise how few modern women know of or have even heard of most of the women I’ve been profiling… Which is a deeply motivating factor in the desire to keep at it.
Why did you choose these particular women to showcase in each monologue?
I have always been inspired by fabulous women who have achieved remarkable things in their respective fields. In my thirties I became passionately interested in, and frankly obsessed by, the story of the Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who was in her time, the rival to Sarah Bernhardt, and considered by many to be the first “modern” actor. I researched and studied her life for many, many years, even traveled to Italy in pursuit of learning more about her, went several times to the magical town of Asolo in the foothills of the Dolomites where she lived and is buried. I found a one-woman Italian theatre play there which I subsequently had translated by Antonio D’Alfonso. That’s how we met, actually, twenty-five years ago, and then I adapted that play with Nick Mancuso who directed me in it, and in 2004 I performed that one woman show, DUSE, in Toronto at the Tarragon Theatre. Then when I decided to initiate the Unrepentant project, Eleonora Duse was still a long-time love of mine, so I condensed that original ninety-minute monologue into a much shorter one to do as a film of sixteen minutes. It was the first one we shot: Illuminata You Called Me, and it is on the website.
I have also for many years been drawn to studying ancient Egypt and the gods of the Egyptian pantheon. I feel an affinity with the archetypal energies of the creator god Ptah and the goddesses, Hathor and Bast. Hatshepsut, one of the only female Pharaohs of the old kingdom, 18th dynasty was fascinating to explore and the monologue that we’ve filmed for her is a kind of elegiac invocation to the lion headed goddess, Sekhmet. Each of the women profiled in the monologues is compelling to me as a uniquely complex character and also for the rigorous challenges that each of them faced in order to accomplish what they did. Every one of their stories, however modern or ancient, make me feel like they’re my sisters. As if I know them and can relate intimately to not only what compelled them but also to what tried to judge and inhibit them. I embrace them and hold them with great affection, as if their legacies are ever present. And in the filmed interpretations, we frequently find ways to contextualise these women of history within a quasi-modern situation, so that we are in some ways making a statement about their ever presence and the ways that they have all spoken in this present and timely way to me. Whether they are an artist, a painter, an actress, a poet, a writer, a sculptor, an astronomer, a leader, a psychoanalyst, a scientist, a philosopher, a composer, a courtesan, a lover, a monster, a muse or a goddess, studying them and meditating on their lives has had a profoundly invigorating effect on me. In numerous ways, taking them on has helped me to grow bigger, which I think is always the aim, isn’t it?
Which one is your favourite?
Asking which one is my favourite is a bit of an unfair question, kind of like asking a mother which one is her favourite child. I love them all.
Some schools of acting say that the monologue is not a speech delivered at an audience but rather an active struggle to achieve a specific goal. Did you have to struggle with these monologues?
Of course, there is creative “struggle” in both the writing and the performance of these monologues. Each is a different challenge. And yet, on the other hand, I derive so much joy in every stage of the work, the processes of researching, writing and the playing of each, that “struggle” does not feel like the right word. After all of the research work, and the note taking, and the gathering and the culling of ideas and personality colours and flavours and tones… all of that distillation begins to shape itself into what the text wants to be and something gives it its own energy and rhythm. And then there is all the struggle of fine tuning it and putting it into one’s own mouth and voice and heart. And the memorisation of it, the saying of the words, over and over again, for weeks on end, in preparation for performance, to get the thing deep inside you, so that you have the freedom and facility with it to be able to play, and discover new things to do with it in the moment, and create the space to be surprised by what it may become that you may not have even seen when first crafting it on the page.
Which monologue was the most challenging to perform or to write?
The most absorbing challenges have been in trying to imagine and envision how bringing the monologues to life in performance will unfold. We’re not really used to watching a single actress speak alone for fifteen to twenty minutes on film, so it does require a certain kind of attention, and a concentration and engagement on the part of the actress to draw you in and hold the viewer in that particular kind of intimacy. To invite the viewer to reflect with me on the passionate broad strokes of a life fully lived as interpreted and performed by mostly a solo actress. I do realise that it’s a fairly out of the box challenge to any audience. I know that we’re supposed to be taking into consideration the apparent fact that the current modern attention span is not conducive to paying attention or to listening to anyone or anything for more than a minute. However, I’m committed to the concept as I’ve envisioned it, while also trying to evolve it and remain open and alert to unexpected and invigorating ways to interpret what these women’s stories might evoke creatively.
To me, all of the women chosen to be profiled, still exist in some timeless durative realm and their legacies and their gifts still resonate and speak if we care to listen. Because we are not making documentary films for teaching purposes, for example, I cannot, for copyright’s sake, use an artist’s painting or music, or show photos of their work, but instead the choice is quite specific to focus solely on performance by the actress to use just the subject’s words to tell her story. One of the more difficult monologues to shape for me was of the amazing surrealist artist, Dorothea Tanning. We have yet to film that one, and I continue to imagine how we’ll do it as I begin to memorise it.
You end the book with Emily Carr stating, “I chose to paint as I liked and died happy.” Have you been able to choose what you liked in your career?
One of the things I’ve grown over the years to love best about being an actor is the element of surprise. The ways things appear as opportunities. Every actor is terribly intimate with frequent and repeated disappointment and rejection. So many times, in an actor’s career, we find ourselves wondering if that is all there is, and have to endure the recurring fear that we’ll never work again. We can go through very long periods of unemployment and drought, especially if we are relying on what others are going to offer us or choose us for. I am all about smashing the stereotypes of ageism and actively continue to work to show that actresses get better and more interesting as we mature. At my age, I’ve had some of the best years of my career in the last five. And if I may be so blessed, I’ve no intention of slowing down. Maybe partly because I’m a Capricorn. We’re known to grow younger as we get older!
Of course, actors who write or try to create their own projects may also be up against the near impossible odds of securing the means to get things made. But I would always want to be conjuring and contriving and dreaming things into being even if they never will be made. Because that’s ultimately soul work more than anything else. It’s rare to be in a position to choose and we all know sometimes we’ve had to do projects that are less creatively fulfilling than we’d hoped, just to be able to work at anything. But on the other hand, things can come so thrillingly and unexpectedly out of the blue that one never might have imagined or seen coming. And that reality has always been so for me.
With this Unrepentant project, my intention and desire and aim is to just do them. Not to line up and pitch and wait for anyone to tell me if or how or when I may be allowed to exercise my own creativity. Sustained passion and faith in the path, trust in the process, and the timing, and refusal to be deterred by setbacks, all these, I believe, seduce and empower the angels of serendipity to collaborate on our behalf.
Has your Italian background had any influence on your work in any way?
My Italian-ness has inspired some of my work for sure. Certainly the whole Eleonora Duse inspiration was a combination of both being Italian and being an actress. It was in the years that the Duse interest was developing that I also found my way into Italian language lessons which I kept at for over twenty years, and am even now a member of an Italian book club! I’ve portrayed three Italians in the book and film series. I was inspired to include the courtesan poet, Veronica Franco, after discovering her poetry in Italian. That film, called An Imperfect Rose, is one of my favourites that we’ve done. I’ve also portrayed in a monologue for the series, the Baroque Italian painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. That piece, Becoming Artemisia, was written by another Canadian Italian writer. And I’m currently researching yet another Italian and at work writing a new piece in the voice of the Friulian photographer and revolutionary communist activist, Tina Modotti.
What advice do you have for other actors looking to write?
I think that any actor who wants to write will discover so much about themselves in the process and that even the act of just trying to write can also make you a better actor. Not every actor is necessarily going to be a natural writer, but to me writing is so naturally related to acting, the love of words and expression, communication of emotions and relationships and nuanced transformations, these are already the actor’s currency and tool kit. It’s very empowering to use each skill to enhance the other. For sure one can spend years, as I have, writing things, collaborating on writing things that will never see the light of day. But I don’t regret a second of the time spent doing that. And then, miraculously, eight years ago, I had a film that I co-wrote and played the lead in, produced, Into Invisible Light. I’ve also written a romantic comedy script called, A Heart For A Snark, that has been optioned by a producer and I would love to see that get made.
What are you working on now? Will there be another book?
I hope that there will be two more books in this series. Besides the monologues included in this first one, I’ve written five pieces that are dialogues for two actresses, and I am at work developing more dialogues as well and I hope we’ll be able to publish those too. One of them I have shot with the actress Katherine East portraying the first female psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas Salome. Another on the website, in which I portray Theodora of Byzantium is also a two-person dialogue called The Bear Keeper’s Daughter. The next piece we are going to shoot is called If Zaza Lived, a dialogue led by the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir who will be portrayed by the wonderful actress, Nicky Guadagni. Also, before the end of the year, we hope to shoot the piece Fire From the Heavens with the actress Ann Pirvu as Harriet Hosmer. We’ve also shot a version, still in editing stages, of my take on Guinevere, a three-way love story patterned on the Arthurian legend but set in a modern context.
I’ve presented a couple of fun reading evenings as fundraisers with groups of actresses presenting an ensemble dialogue of twelve women characters from the series speaking to each other across time. We’re hoping to do more of those presentations and I would like to have that group piece also included in the second volume, along with a new monologue in the voice of the Austrian composer, Alma Mahler and the developing one on Tina Modotti. Then for the third book, I would like to publish an anthology, a collection of the additional monologues that have been written for the series by eight other Canadian women writers.
A couple more provocative and very challenging concepts for the series have been percolating. There never seems to be a dearth of ideas and amazing iconic women to explore whose stories and legacies have been obscured. My task is to try to find ways to make their timeless voices fresh and relevant. Some of my wildly ambitious ideas I admit I’m not even sure I am capable of fulfilling, but that feels like an intriguing and fulsome place to begin. So much to grapple with. But I’ve begun the research and am game to try. I may be crazy. I hope so.
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