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Echoes of a Senseless Death

Reprinted from the Globe & Mail
By ALEXANDRA GILL
Tuesday, September 25, 2001 ­ Page R3

Yous not the
Reena, they'll pay
Reena, they'll pay

from the song Reena, by the Vancouver group Pariah Project

As the world mourns the thousands who perished in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it may be difficult to focus on the single tragedy of a 14-year-old girl from Victoria, who four years ago this November was savagely beaten by a gang of her peers and drowned in the Gorge Waterway.

But on stages and studios all over Vancouver and British Columbia's Lower Mainland, there is a current flowering of artistic projects that were planted by the seeds of Reena Virk's horrifying death -- one which, though small when compared to the events of Sept. 11, shocked the sleepy city of Victoria out of its peaceful slumber in much the same way that Americans have been shaken out of theirs.

The terrorism in New York "is just an example of international bullying," says Danielle Ow, a 19-year-old cast member and dance captain of Outcasts and Angels, a riveting play that roves from Richmond's Gateway Theatre to various locations around the city where teens hang out -- incorporating dance, hip-hop, three yellow school buses, street language and a bold teenage perspective.

Ow, who plays an angel representing the spirits of Reena Virk and all teens who have been bullied to death, doesn't pretend to understand the complexities of events in the U.S. -- any more than she understood the reasons behind Virk's death when she joined the eight-month community project, which has been filmed for an upcoming documentary. "I just hope we send out a very clear message," Ow says, pointing to the bullying of Muslim children in Richmond schoolyards shortly after the terrorist attacks, and to a Muslim school that closed down upon receiving a phone threat. "We have to deal with the little things first."

The play, which wrapped up its two-weekend run on Sunday, was spearheaded by artistic director Elaine Carol, who says she believes artists have a collective responsibility to pursue socially significant work. Hers is a perspective that is gaining momentum.

"There's so much art out there right now that's just wanker art," says Carol. "How can we not address these issues? We're the social consciousness of the world."

Carol is a feminist activist, and her politics reverberate throughout this extremely professional play. But what is surprising is how the teens have successfully lifted the rhetoric above the theoretical. In the process, they strike at the heart of their own reality with a script that rings more honestly than any media report could hope to do.

When the audience is led through a field at night by mouthy guides ("Come on you stupid retard, hurry up," one prods) to watch a gracefully choreographed scrap unfold to the backdrop of rap music and a CBC Radio broadcast recounting the medical causes of Virk's death, the audience is left stunned by the power of the moment. "What are you going to do about it?" the play's narrator shouts at the audience. "It's everyone's responsibility."

Outcasts and Angels is not the first project to spring from the well of emotion stirred by Virk's murder and the trials that followed. First out of the gate was Required Reading by Heather Spears, a Canadian courtroom artist who lives in Denmark. She attended the trial of Kelly Ellard, one of the teens convicted of second-degree murder, in the spring of 2000, and dashed off a book of drawings and poems the very same year.

Rebecca Godfrey, a journalist who grew up in Victoria and now lives in New York, is currently writing a true-crime story about the murder, titled . In the meantime, she has just released t, a novel about a bored teenager who wanders among the street kids, drunks, selfish parents and petty criminals who populate Victoria's underbelly.

Chris Cleator of the band Pariah Project certainly knows those streets. The engineer/guitarist/keyboardist for the Vancouver-based electronic group had just moved from Victoria two months before the Virk murder. "It didn't really surprise me. It just pissed me off," says Cleator, who wrote a 10-minute guitar piece immediately upon hearing the news. Months later, he wrote the lyrics for , a single that has been mixed with a melancholy cello and haunting vocals by his partner, Taryn Laronge. Recorded for the group's first demo EP, it was released this month with a flash-animation video on the CBC Web site, 120seconds.com.

And next month, l, a one-woman play written by Joan MacLeod and produced by Green Thumb Theatre, which premiered at the PlayRites Festival in Calgary last winter, will be mounted at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre before travelling to 10 cities later this year. It's the story of a young girl in Victoria who becomes obsessed with media reports about Virk's murder as she tries to come to terms with her own bad behaviour.

"I never thought for a minute that I'd be the only one to write about this case," says MacLeod. "We're all trying to make sense of what happened. I'm 47 and it certainly is a different world than when I grew up. But a lot of it felt like the same old stuff. I think there's going to be a lot more work about this before it's figured out."
agill@globeandmail.ca