Tag Archives: canoe festival

One-man weekend

Leave a reply

This weekend I saw two great solo performances.  At Canoe Festival I saw Alan Williams in The Girl with Two Voices, and at the Citadel I saw Shawn Smyth in Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story.  I could also have seen Jon Lachlan Stewart’s Lavinia, which I had been looking forward to, but I didn’t end up seeing it.  I will definitely watch for another opportunity to see that though.

Alan Williams’ story was told to small groups of twenty at a time, sitting around a meeting-room table in Knox Evangelical Free Church, across the walkway from the Arts Barns.  The performer took a seat at the end of the table and started telling his story without introduction, explanation, a pause, or even much eye contact with the audience, as if we had walked in while he was telling a longer story to someone else.  He talked for more than an hour and a half while we listened, sometimes chuckling, and the passage of time was only noticeable because the room was too cold.  He used no notes, and his narration was so well prepared that it felt off-the-cuff.

He told the story of moving to London without much money or prospects, finding a place to live, making the Kew Gardens neighbourhood home, and trying to get acting work, in the late 1990s.  The story was partly chronological, with interruptions explaining the background of friendships and choices, and it was full of odd characters that he described both pointedly and affectionately.  I particularly enjoyed the scenes with his friends Janet and Jim.  Jim, he told us, who was about two years old at the time – rather than treat the child as an adjunct of his friend, the narrator kept talking about Jim as an individual with some odd behaviours.

There was some symbolism, some repetition of theme, and some conclusion, but all of them very subtle.  He is one of the best pure storytellers I have ever seen in person.  One of the festival announcements compared him to Spaulding Grey, whose recorded narrative Swimming to Cambodia about making the film The Killing Fields was my first exposure to first-person storytelling as a performance option, many years ago.

Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story is currently running at the Maclab stage in the Citadel Theatre complex, as a co-production with Prairie Theatre Exchange of Winnipeg.  Ron Jenkins directed. The script is credited to Kirstie McLellan Day, co-author of Theoren Fleury’s autobiography of the same name.  Shaun Smyth originated the role of Theo Fleury in the premiere production at Alberta Theatre Projects in 2012.

For this show, the staging and effects were a big part of the fun and the mood creation.  The performer spends the whole performance on skates and in hockey equipment, skating and shooting on a small artificial skating surface with a realistic-looking backdrop of hockey arena boards and bench, which worked for all the settings from the small-town arena of his childhood to the NHL and Olympic games.  The seats at the far edges of the Maclab were blocked off, possibly due to blocked views but also possibly as a precaution in case any of the performer’s shots missed the nets.  (But none of them did!  Shaun Smith’s skating, stickhandling, and wristshot/snapshot abilities were impressive enough to be convincing and to allow him to move smoothly on the small cluttered surface and create excitement.)   The sound effects and the projected video images provided additional content and made the Maclab feel so much like a hockey rink that I kept thinking I felt a draft.

Most of the performance involved the actor speaking directly to the audience as the player Theo Fleury telling the story of his life and career, from his first skating steps around age 5 to his senior-league games after a comeback in his 40s.  I found it a difficult story to hear, because of what the performer wryly called “the part about the molestation” (Theoren Fleury having been one of the players who was sexually abused as a teenager by coach Graham James).  He told that part of the story while sitting down on the front edge of the stage, with painful credible directness and the self-awareness of adult hindsight.

Milestones of his career and hockey events that I remembered included the bench-clearing brawl at the World Juniors in 1987, the Flames Stanley Cup win in his rookie season in 1989, the Olympic championship in Salt Lake City in 2002.  He told the key parts of these stories with the help of scoreboards and hockey cards on the video screen – and as an interesting touch, the hockey cards all had an A-Tee-Pee logo in the style of the real O-Pee-Chee one (ATP being Alberta Theatre Projects, the production company of the premiere).  The foreshadowing in the first act – the abuse that he tried to forget, the first taste of alcohol, the first experience with cocaine, the affairs with strippers and the failed relationships – then escalated as his life got more out of control and his playing career fell apart.  The sports water-bottles sitting on the nets were used as props for tales of binge-drinking, and projection of a craps table onto the stage floor/ice surface backed up the episodes of transferring his addiction to gambling.

Except for the convicted child abuser Graham James, and possibly the player’s flawed parents, the narrative doesn’t name names to criticize anyone else, consistent with AA testimony custom of taking responsibility but also convenient for anyone worried about liability issues.   Various other team officials and family members were mentioned as supporting him and challenging him to get his life under control.  The only other player whose personality came through was Wayne Gretzky, in two flattering anecdotes, one where he is playing on the opposing team and hauls Fleury out of a fight after he’s injured, and another when he recruits Fleury to the 2002 Olympic squad.   This narrative choice also emphasized the solitary nature of Fleury’s personal struggles.

Playing With Fire continues at the Citadel until February 15th.  Tickets are available here.

 

Two flavours of playful dance

Leave a reply

In the last week or so I’ve seen two dance performances – both talented and creative, and neither of them taking themselves too seriously, but still very different.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is the New York City-based all-male company that’s been around since the 1970s, doing the repertoire of a classical ballet company but with all the roles played by men.  I had wanted to see them since I first read about them in the Globe and Mail sometime in the 1980s.  When I heard that the Alberta Ballet was hosting them for a few days in Edmonton, I was excited.

I enjoyed the performance.  I think I would have liked it more if I was more knowledgeable about ballet, because I don’t think I picked up on all the inside-joke-y parody bits.  They performed part of Swan Lake, a piece from Les Corsairs, a Balanchine-esque piece called Go for Berocco,  a dying swan solo, and a Spanish-themed piece called Paquita, with variations.  The twelve performers were costumed suitably for male or female dancers for each piece (simple flowing dresses for the Balanchine piece, pancake tutus with Spanish-dancer decorations or matador-type jackets with white hose for the Paquita, classical outfits for the Swan Lake).  The performers dancing female parts danced competently en pointe and their male-dressed partners executed graceful lifts,  and they were all graceful and strong enough that it was clear we were watching talented dancers.  But they were also very funny, with facial expressions and little bits of stage business adding what the characters were really thinking about each other, and with all the dance gestures just dialed up to parody.  The scene-stealing curtain-calls were a good example of that.

Then at Canoe Festival this weekend, I enjoyed a dance/movement performance created by Jake Hastey of Toy Guns Theatre, called “Fortuitous Endings (What to do when you wake up drunk in a BBQ cover in your neighbour’s backyard)”.  This one had an ensemble of nine performers: Christine Lesiak, Celeste Tikal, Mark Sinongco, Robert Halley, Dario Charles, Richelle Thoreson, Rachel Gleiberman, Krista Posyniak, and Cory Christensen, along with singer Must Be Tuesday. It had a similar playfulness and natural sexiness to the Toy Guns pieces at the 2014 Fringe.  It was longer, running almost two hours with an intermission, but the pacing was good and it did not feel too long.   Between movements, various members of the ensemble read aloud the last paragraph of a variety of books, from Existentialism for Dummies to Le Petit Prince and Where the Wild Things Are. Couples connected, struggled, and parted, with regret, wistfulness, resentment, or anger. They made use of the aisles in the Westbury Theatre and sometimes slipped between rows of seats and engaged audience members directly.  The musical score included both Wonderwall and Nessun Dorma.   Costumes seemed both natural and beautiful, and good use was made of occasional nudity.  And parts of it were hilarious.

Several of the dancers performed compelling solo pieces.  As in the summer I was struck by Robert Halley’s grace and control making him stand out as a technically skilled dancer.

The closing piece involved each of the twelve performers setting up some solitary comfort on the stage and then engaging with it oblivious to the others, as if getting on with post-breakup life – making and drinking elaborate coffee drinks, working out, creating origami, sunbathing on a beach, and so on.

In the Ballets Trockadero show, the choreography responded to traditional expectations of rigid gender in dance by sending them up in an over-the-top way.  Although the performers were all male, they were performing as exaggerated versions of ballet character male and female, makeup, costume, and all.  Amusingly, the program contained not only twelve performer biographies under the performers’ real names, but twelve bios of the female personae and twelve of the male personae, with delightful pun-filled names like Nadia Doumiafeyva and Sergei Legupski.  Fortuitous Endings basically just ignored those traditional expectations, with couples of various genders and age differences expressing fluid sexuality in a natural way, and with female performers sometimes lifting male performers as well as vice versa.  And in 2015, I found myself preferring that treatment to the parodic stereotype-breaking of Les Trocks, which would have blown my mind in an earlier era.

Sapientia, a disturbing tale of child martyrs and a fascinating portrayal with puppets

1 Reply

The author credited for this play was Roswitha of Gandersheim, a 10th century playwright, poet, and (according to the Canoe Festival program and Wikipedia) secular canoness.  A Wikipedia link explains that this referred to a woman who lived in a monastery but did not take religious vows, so it might have been a handy way for a woman of the aristocracy to pursue a single scholarly life.

This adaptation as object theatre was made by Joseph Shragge of Montreal.  Mia van Leeuwen of out of line theatre was credited with direction and design.  Object theatre is a sort of puppetry using found objects.  The four puppet performers were David Barnet, Kara Chamberlain, Nancy McAlear, and Brendan Nearey.  The objects were simple and ordinary (a kettle for the emperor, teacups of diminishing size for the three little girls, a mirror for the mother), but the small gestures of the puppeteers and their voices made it easy to picture the characters as the story unfolded.

The subject matter of the tale was a Christian woman and her three young daughters, defying the Roman emperor Hadrian to the extent of torture and martyrdom.  It was a classic martyr story, with the satisfying ending being death without surrender leading to frustration and loss of authority of the murderer.  I imagine that in the 10th century it might have been particularly radical to have the woman and her young daughters being strong and determined and logical, while the male emperor and his advisor/executioner appear ineffective, emotional, and flailing.   The stories of my 20th century childhood might have found beauty in sacrifice and justice in choosing the right belief, but the responses from my 21st-century heart as a parent and aunt and leader of young people are so strongly opposed to the idea of encouraging children to die for a belief or ideal that I couldn’t finish this blog post last night.  I can admire the courage and honour the choice of Aitzaz Hasan, the 15-year-old Pakistani who tackled a suicide bomber to save his classmates, but I feel really uncomfortable about the idea of a parent encouraging his or her children to choose a principle or belief over staying alive.   And I don’t think I’m the only modern person who feels this way, or we wouldn’t have discussions about whether Christian-Scientist or Jehovah’s-Witness parents should be prevented by a just society from refusing their children conventional life-saving medical treatments or whether small children are able to make those decisions themselves.  Anyway, it’s upsetting, but the play made me think, and I’m glad of that.

I’ve also been interested to notice how the genre of the storytelling, with the simple symbols representing the characters and their fates, allowed some graphic but elliptical imagery to address the horror of the tortures and deaths more closely than would have been bearable for a more conventional acting genre.  For example, the executioner broke a teacup, or crushed a ripe pomegranate, and the audience gasped in shock for the brutal murder of a child represented.   I won’t record any more of the details because I need to be able to sleep – but it was fascinatingly well-done.

Canoe Festival 2014 continues this week with showings of National Elevator Project Part 2 Tuesday through Sunday, and Tanya Tagaq’s Nanook of the North with one performance Wednesday.   Twitter hashtag #canoe2014 and a series of guest bloggers posting at http://canoetheatrefest.tumblr.com continue the conversations about performances and performers, theatre and life.

Static Electric

Leave a reply

I’d seen mention of Mile Zero Dance and Gerry Morita around the Edmonton entertainment scene for some time, but I’d never attended a performance before.  Having now seen Static Electric, the Mile Zero Dance piece at Canoe Festival, I’d definitely seek them out again.

The two dancers, Gerry Morita of Mile Zero and Farley Johansson of Science Friction and Coastal City Ballet in Vancouver, explore a cluttered living space full of lamps, televisions, recordings, transmissions, a piano being played by Viktoria Reiswich-Dapp, a jukebox, and other electric apparatus.  At first, the two characters seem completely unaware of each other, although they overlap in space to the extent of tumbling over and around each other on an easy chair and a carpet.  Later, they come to interact more consciously, but eye contact is fleeting.  Sometimes they have normal-sounding conversation and exchange reminiscences through family-band radio walkie-talkies.  There is also some dialogue in German and, I think, in Russian (though it might have been Ukrainian or another similar-sounding language).  Morita plays with a cassette recorder, speaking into it and then playing it back, and she also disassembles a cassette tape, constructing streamers on a fan and then becoming tangled in a mass of tape.  Lighting designer Patrick Ares-Pilon moves intentionally through the space towing and adjusting carts of electrical gadgets.

The program says that the performance is improvised.  It works fascinatingly well.  Morita and Johansson are both powerfully athletic and expressive artists who are thrilling to watch.   My favourite bits were the ones with “Volare”, “Riders on the Storm”, and hockey play-by-play as the soundtrack.  The last bit of the show sounded as if Johansson was dancing in a box of broken glass, and the sound effects were so disturbing I could hardly bear it.

Their last show is in about half an hour (Saturday afternoon) but there’s lots of other good stuff to see and hear and think about at Canoe Festival.

Testament

Leave a reply

Friday night I described the two Canoe Festival performances that evening to a friend as “six naked people, and then Mary the mother of Jesus”.  My friend laughed.

But of course that superficial description didn’t do either of the plays justice.  Body 13 had interesting things to say about sexuality, ethnicity, assumptions, and failed connections.  And Testament was a powerful one-woman show about a determined woman preserving her self and her sanity while surrounded by tragedy, personal danger, and wishful thinking and revisionism.

The story is based on Colm Tóibín’s novella The Testament of Mary, which I have not read yet but now I want to.  (I also left the theatre thinking “I want to read the book!” but I didn’t say that to anyone because I thought they might misunderstand.  I have actually read the, um, more primary source materials, just in English but in more than one translation.)   It was adapted for the stage by Guido Tondino, and this Théâtre Archéologique production is the world premiere.

The actor, Isabelle Rousseau, has a compelling controlled stillness and deliberation to her movements.  Whether she was narrating the story while sitting in a chair, or moving about the set of her house arrest / protection lighting candles while the story continued with her recorded voice playing, I focused mostly on the spoken words.  Interestingly, I found it more difficult to dismiss her or assume she was equivalent to the iconic Mary because the actor did not have long hair.  Her short haircut with bangs was one of the first reminders to hear the story fresh.

The viewpoint ascribed to her by the author and dramaturge is compelling and moving, completely consistent with the sparse written versions provided by the original unreliable narrators.   Referring to the disciples, Mary talks about “the enormity of their actions and the innocence of their belief”.  She also used a concise expression that I didn’t write down for their urge to shrink the story to a more consistent narrative of symbols – and I could see how her version wouldn’t fit with the conventional one.  For example, she tells the audience that she was not present for her son’s death and burial, because she had fled the hill fearing for her safety, and by the time that the play is set (maybe a few months later? years?) the accepted version is that she had been there for all of it.

In the play she alludes to the story of her pregnancy and the one of misplacing her son as a child, but mostly sticks to a few important scenes – the raising of Lazarus, the wedding at Cana, the arrest, the crucifixion, a vision afterwards.  Her stage business with the hammer while narrating the crucifixion was a powerful and disturbing underlining of the horror of the scene she is describing, although I may have been missing some explanation for the details of the symbolism as I was expecting her to do something more obvious (form a cross-shape, lie in the canonical posture herself, etc).

Testament has two more performances in the Canoe Festival, 9 pm on Saturday (today) and 7 pm on Sunday at C103.  Tickets are available from Workshop West or at the door.

Body 13 – “One moment you’re waiting, the next you’re 89”

Leave a reply

Body 13 is the Canoe Festival offering from the company MT Space (Multicultural Theatre Space), of Kitchener, Ontario.   It was created by the ensemble and director Majdi Bou-Matar, and they started working on it about four years ago.

It’s an intriguing piece that kept shaking up my expectations, about what kind of story it was going to be, how the story was going to be told, and who the characters were.   The seven characters all spend time on a Canadian beach over the course of a cool-weather day, arriving as strangers but gradually interacting and making various connections.  The impression of shared public space is created early on, first in one vignette where all the performers are representing funeral attendees and then in a set of glimpses where the beach seems crowded with different odd solitary people each doing his or her own thing.  Later, the narrative focuses more on one or two people at a time, while one or two others might be still on another part of the stage.  And “doing her own thing” reminds me that one of my favourite characters in the story was Iman, played by Nada Humsi, a middle-aged woman refugee claimant from Syria.  Those phrases might evoke a picture for you, as they did for me, but I was delighted to have my assumptions shattered, as this character took off not only her headscarf (a kerchief like my mother used to wear on windy days) but her red lace brassiere, told funny stories, made fun of Canadian custom (“So we’ll talk of nothing.  Like Canadians”), and was outspoken and determined.  I was delighted by Humsi’s way of acting out her cat.

Jessalyn Broadfoot was Rae, Iman’s immigration officer, caught between her affection for Iman and her professional duty not to get involved.  Her expressions and body language showed a careful self-contained woman uncomfortable with personal disruptions on the quiet day off she’d been anticipating, and the occasional awkward moments of of a self-conscious white person dealing with neighbours of different cultures were endearing, such as her clumsy Namaste gesture at the Gujarati funeral.

While the narrative pacing of the play was fairly linear, it was often interrupted by movement and music.  Rae did a wonderful dance of helpless rage, accompanied by the composers and musicians (Nick Storring, Colin Fisher, Germaine Liu) as she thrashed her blue beach throw in defiance.  Tristan, a young man from Newfoundland, (Trevor Copp) confided that he had been subject to anxiety attacks since he was a boy at hockey camp, and this launched the two most powerful movement portions of the performance, the first an expression of Tristan’s response to a homophobic epithet on the beach, turning into his sense that he is surrounded by people picking at him, prodding him, and pointing at him while he cowers trying to get the lid off his medication.  Lighting changes and music add to the tension and anguish, and on my second viewing I found myself wincing in anticipation.  In a later part of the performance, Tristan’s anxious response first manifests in all the performers playing hockey, and a gradual shift into a set of physically intimate and blatantly-sexual encounters between and among various characters.

Assaf from Lebanon (Badih Abou Chakra), Rita from India (Pam Patel), Thomas a white Canadian (John Havens),  and Ato from Ghana (Tawiah Ben M’Carthy) turn out to be similarly intriguing characters, and not everyone turns out to be likeable.  Quirks of movement and expression – Assaf’s laugh and his wiping-a-tear gesture, Thomas’s slicking his hair back, Rita’s bearing of the chest containing her father’s ashes, Ato’s stylised jogging – helped to distinguish the individuals quickly.  The one who came to annoy me through the course of the story ended up alone, while the rest of them all found some resolution, as predicted by Ato’s early comment to Thomas trying to find a cufflink on the beach “You will find something, but you will not find what you look for.”  And then the rest of them all shed their clothes, ran behind a screen, and were seen and heard giggling and shrieking the way you do when you’re wading into cold water in the dark with your friends.

The musicians played a variety of instruments, also behind the screen, and I could not identify all of them.  Some of the lighting revealed that all the costuming was in hues of solid clear colours, each distinct.  Also, as an easily-distracted mechanical engineer, I was fascinated to observe the pattern formed when the chest of ashes (visually fine sand) was poured slowly onto a smooth surface.  In water that pattern is called “hydraulic jump“, and you can recreate it easily in a flat-bottomed sink like a stainless steel kitchen sink.  I don’t think the sand formation has the same explanation, but I don’t yet know what the explanation is.

Joel Crichton tweeted a challenge to count biblical references in the performance, and I actually didn’t notice any.  So I guess I lose the challenge, but as the character predicted, I found other things in the performance which I didn’t expect and which pleased me a lot.

Body 13 has one more performance at Canoe Festival, 1:30 Sunday at C103.  Tickets are available through Workshop West and at the door.

January speeds up

Leave a reply

After the end-of-year break and an unrushed start to the theatre year, the calendar fills up starting this weekend.  In the meantime I’ve enjoyed watching some improv with Rapid Fire Theatre (Fridays and Saturdays at Ziedler Hall) and with Die-Nasty (Monday nights at the Varscona).

Watch this space for more about Canoe Festival:

  •  Body 13, by MT Space from Kitchener
  • Static Electric, by Mile High Dance
  • Sapientia, by out of line theatre
  • Testament, by Théâtre Archéologique
  • and some of the National Elevator Project (Theatre YES)

Also I’ll have some thoughts on Clybourne Park at the Citadel (previews start Saturday), Closer (opens Wednesday), die Fledermaus (opens next Friday), and the Josh Ritter concert next Friday in St. Albert.

And then we get into February, where there’s so much going on that  have some hard decisions of what I most want to see, and I’ll be getting into rehearsals for the Walterdale Theatre show that I’ll be helping out as ASM.  I guess I should probably do my laundry and my dishes and get some rest now!