Acting, just not in TV, on stage or on film

Auroras, Atom Egoyan’s art installation now on display at the Artcore gallery in the Distillery District, features seven actresses who, in turn, read lines from the memoir of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. It’s a moving portrayal of one horrifying moment of the Twentieth Century’s first genocide.

Sarah Casselman may be the most memorable of those seven actresses — during the course of the recitation, she is the only one directed by Egoyan to visibly react with any emotion to the material. While the other actresses read in a staid and stoic voice (perhaps with an occasional note of anger), Casselman breaks down into tears during her performance, spending much of the last half of the recitation sobbing into a scarf.

Casselman knew little of the Armenian Genocide before signing on to the project; when she learned that as many as a million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1917, she counted herself lucky to be able to give such a performance.

“How can you not cry?” she asked.

While the opportunity to work with an Academy Award-nominated director didn’t go unwelcome, the real gift, she said, was in getting to work in a milieu that speaks so directly to the viewer.

“I like the intimacy of this,” Casselman said. “You have complete control over your own performance.”

Auroras is open daily, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., until June 10.

Atom Egoyan, Aurora Mardiganian and the Armenian Genocide

When Aurora Mardiganian went to the United States to look for her missing brother after the Armenian Genocide, she had no idea she’d be the subject of a major Hollywood movie. Nor did she know her story would be told again, more than 90 years later, in the form of a video art installation.

Filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s goal in retelling Mardiganian’s story — first told in the 1919 film Auction of Souls — was to present the story of the Genocide in a way that would challlenge the viewer in ways that most modern filmed narratives fail to do. So instead of one screen, he used seven.

When the 1919 film, which starred Mardiganian and told the story of the Genocide from her perspective, became a hit, its producer planned to launch Aurora on a speaking tour across the US. But the twin strains of tragedy and fame took their toll on her, and she had a nervous breakdown the night before the tour was to begin. The produced responded by hiring seven look-alikes to speak in her place. Their goal, Egoyan said, was to “pretend to be traumatized.”

His own piece takes a similar approach that is still worlds apart from the original: Seven actresses on seven screens, each portraying Aurora Mardiganian, and each telling a piece of her story in turn. The audience, standing in the middle of the room, must look from side to side to see who is speaking at any given moment. Instead of hiring look-alikes, Egoyan hired an ethnically diverse range of actresses.

The wide accessibility of the moving image has changed the way we relate to it, he said Sunday, and one of his goals in telling the story in the manner he chose was to shed light on that change.

“We have tremendous accessibility, but since we don’t have that pilgrimage anymore, we read and absorb the narrative in a different way,” he said. Though six of the seven actresses were directed to recite the narrative as stoically as possible, he added, each has her own distinctive emotional response to the material.

One of the best ways to percieve that response, he said, is to stare only at one screen for the duration of the piece. The installation runs continuously.

Auroras and its companion piece, Testimonies, are at the Artcore Gallery in the Distillery District through June 10.

Auroras/Testimony

Atom Egoyan was born to Armenian parents in Egypt and raised in Canada. As such, he has some personal investment in keeping alive the memory of the Armenian Genocide.

The Academy Award-nominated director joined forces with Turkish artist Kutug Ataman to create Arouras and Testimony, a pair of video works memorializing the Genocide, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed or forcibly relocated by the rulers of the dying Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917.

“It’s sort of a dialogue on a very loaded subject,” Egoyan said this week. The exhibit asks the question, he says, of how the testimony of survivors can be used to “keep retelling the story.”

“If we don’t make an effort to remember this issue, it might go away,” he said.

Auroras/Testimony will be on display at the Artcore Gallery in the Distillery District through June 10, daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.