Tag Archives: found festival

Summer theatre events – ephemeral and done

Leave a reply

In July I attended two great local theatre events that I meant to post about. But in both cases, I thought … oh, I still have one more performance to see later, I can wait until I see that one last thing. And then the event was over so my recommendations wouldn’t have any immediate value, and the summer rushed on with other adventures – a trip to Jasper just before the evacuations, rehearsals for a new Fringe musical – and I haven’t written about any of the performances. So here’s a quick overview.

Found Festival, the small festival of “art in unexpected places” again included an interesting collection of hard-to-classify experiences, in corners of the neighbourhood and city that I don’t always pay attention to.

Madness and other Ghost Stories was an eerie and yet affirming evening of spooky and spirit-infused stories involving mental illness, neurodiversity, and the unexplored territory of inside one’s head. Philip Hackborn curated and hosted, in ways that clearly supported their artists’ safety and comfort. I found Calla Wright’s poetic tale particularly effective.

The Nature of Us was an installation in Queen Elizabeth Park, with sounds playing from unseen speakers, while people used the park paths on foot, on bicycles, on scooters, etc. Kevin Jesuino, Cass Bessette, and Jean Louis Bleau were the credited artists.

Lucky Charm was a progress showing for the FreshAiR artist Louise Casemore’s ongoing project, an invitation to a small audience group to attend a seance led by Harry Houdini’s widow (Casemore) and hosted by her friend/promoter (Jake Tkaczyk). I’m looking forward to seeing the full version next year.

Brick Shithouse was as close as Found Festival gets to a “mainstage” theatre presentation. It was held in a perfect space for this story, a dingy warehouse with a few rows of audience seats along one long wall, and the rest of the space configured as a rough fighting gym with camera/recording setup. Ashleigh Hicks was the author, Sarah J Culkin directed, and the performers were a stellar lineup of Mohamed Ahmed, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Alexandra Dawkins, Sophie May Healey, Jasmine Hopfe, Moses Kouyaté, and Gabriel Richardson. I loved the high energy of the piece and the way in which it quickly set up the scenario of this group of friends streaming their bouts to make money. Sam Jeffery was credited with the fight direction and intimacy direction, both of which were essential to create the intense-feeling experience for audiences while keeping the performers safe. The performances easily convinced me of the premise that the characters of various genders and sizes could fight each other effectively. And like the characters in Liam Salmon’s Subscribe or Like (WWPT, 2023), it was easy to see how they didn’t/couldn’t anticipate some of the things that might go wrong. Alex Dawkins was particularly effective and heartbreaking as a character without much to lose. In the high-energy loud performance, there were several times where I couldn’t see/hear all of the conversations and I felt like I was missing important information. Was that intentional? Maybe, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to see it again, but it was such a hot ticket I was lucky to see it once.

The other event I was looking forward to this July was Thou Art Here Theatre’s site-specific performance Civil Blood: A Treaty Story at the old fort at Fort Edmonton Park. Playwright Josh Languedoc, Thou Art Here principal Neil Kuefler, and others have been developing this concept since 2016 – telling the story of the Treaty 6 peoples through the lens of a Romeo&Juliet narrative. At Found Festival 2021, I heard a staged reading of a previous version at the River Lot 11 Indigenous Art Park off Queen Elizabeth Park Drive, and I was fascinated. This year’s production is told in and around the old fort. The company struggled with smoke and heat during rehearsal and ended up cancelling several performances. I count myself very lucky to have been able to see it twice, so I got to follow both “tracks” of the intertwining roving performance. I am always impressed when multiple-tracked roving shows are done with smooth timing and seamless stage management (Everyone We Know Will Be There: A House Party in One Act, Queen Lear is Dead), so I’m applauding stage managers Andrea Murphy and Isabelle Martinez. The audience was divided into two groups, one to follow the European characters and particularly the governor’s daughter Lily (Christina Nguyen), while the other followed the indigenous characters, especially hunter Ekah (Emily Berard). In each track, there was one character who acknowledged the presence of the audience, narrated to us, and directed us – Elena Porter as the governor’s wife Agatha Sampson, and Maria Buffalo as Takaw, an ancestor and possibly the chief’s grandmother. Eventually I realized that both these intercessors were no longer alive in the story’s timeline, so the choice made a lot of sense and also allowed smooth navigation, with the main characters never needing to cue the audience to follow.

Other performers in the 11-person company included Rebecca Bissonnette, Ivy Degagné (who was great as the young settler embracing the local culture and language – one glimpse of hope and how things could be), Doug Mertz, Cody Porter, Colby Stockdale, and Dylan Thomas-Bouchier.

The details of Civil Blood don’t match exactly with the details of Romeo and Juliet – they did match more in the 2021 version. The general concept of two houses alike in dignity, escalating tensions leading to tragedy and worse outcomes, and the passionate young person torn between the expected/appropriate romantic match and a more complicated attachment (Gabriel Richardson), were still there. I saw the two tracks more than a week apart, and I was intensely curious about the parts of the story that hadn’t been sufficiently explained on first viewing. When I attended the second time, I picked up a program and read the directors’ notes (Neil Kuefler and Mark Vetsch are credited as co-Directors this time), in which they encourage viewers to meet up at the community gathering/market after the performance and compare notes with people who saw the other track, since you can’t get the whole story from hearing one side. And – of course – what a brilliant illustration of how key this understanding is to working towards reconciliation, particularly in our Treaty relationships.

And now it’s August, and Fringe is starting in a few days. I’m stage managing the new satirical musical Regression, at the Playhouse performance space on 80th Avenue. And I’ll be volunteering in the beer tents, hosting visiting artists, and watching lots of performances. Watch this blog for notes on what I’ve seen!

Follies performers dancing, 1941 and 1971 characters

Follies, and other celebrations of theatre

Leave a reply

Walterdale Theatre’s production of Follies, the 1971 Sondheim musical, opens tonight.  I was able to see a preview last night, and I found it touching, sometimes sad, and sometimes so funny that I couldn’t stop giggling.   As suits a show about retired showgirls, it has interesting music (under the direction of Michael Clark) a large ensemble cast, production dance numbers (choreography by Barb Mah and Alyssa Paterson), sparkly festive costumes with headpieces (Karin Lauderdale), and some beautiful solos.

The premise of the show seemed not unusual to me, the idea of middle-aged former performers reuniting before an old theatre is torn down, and reminiscing about past life.  What seemed more original about this story is the concept of the characters having shadows or ghosts or echoes of their former selves, living their 1941 lives around and in between the returnees living their 1971 lives.  In 1941, there were eight showgirls and a couple of young sailors, each identified as the earlier self of one of the 1971 characters.  As the reunion visitors catch up with each other about their lives and play out current conflicts, we see the shadows of their past selves dancing and singing and speaking about their dreams and romances and ambitions in 1941.

I can’t readily say what was my favourite part of this show.  I loved the song “Who’s That Woman”, led by Stella (Joyanne Rudiak), in which the 1971 women make it look hard to reproduce a tap number of their youth, blended with the 1941 women making it look easy.  I loved how the blue-grey playsuits of the 1941 dancers and the cold blue-tinged lighting (Brad Melrose) showed them to be memories, while the warmer palettes for the 1971 characters were often present at the same time.  I laughed hard at the over-the-top costumes for the fantasy sequences starting with “Loveland”.  I was moved by Carlotta Campion’s (Kristen M Finlay’s) triumphant solo about her existence and persistence, “I’m Still Here”.  And I was deeply disconcerted watching Ben’s (Gavin Belik’s) brash confidence in “Live, Laugh, Love” gradually crumble into a complete breakdown, while the spirits of chorus dancers flutter gaily around him as if nothing is wrong or he is a figure of fun.  Leslie Caffaro is a strong actor in the lead role of Sally and Aaron Schaan has an amusing cameo as Kevin the Waiter.

Same-day tickets are available at the door, and advance tickets through Tix on the Square.  Follies plays until Saturday July 15th.

follies 2

Monica Roberts and Leslie Caffaro play Phyllis and Sally, former roommates and rivals and friends.  Photo credit Barb Mah.

 

Last week the Edmonton theatre community celebrated the 2016-2017 season at the Sterling Awards Gala.  Productions taking home multiple awards included the Citadel’s Crazy for You, Edmonton Actors’ Theatre’s Stupid Fucking Bird, Theatre Network’s Irma Voth, and Impossible Mongoose’s The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Story.  But as usual, the night reminded me of the wide breadth of talents and passions and visions in the Edmonton theatre scene, amateur as well as professional, and I look forward to watching and discussing many more delightful and challenging performances in the future.   As usual at the Sterlings, the script was entertaining and the tech and stage-management invisible, making the evening go quickly and amusingly.

After Found Festival was over, I was still thinking about some of the productions I’d seen, and wanted to make some additional notes.

In the Admit One show In Shoes, the viewer is guided on a quick walk around a popular block of Old Strathcona, encountering various characters who all connect in ways that become clear.  Although I had seen all the performers in other roles in the past, I was never aware of any of them until the moment at which they figuratively stepped on stage to take over from the previous actor.  It was as if they were non-playing characters on Whyte Avenue, part of the streetscape, until that moment.  This fascinated me.  It reminded me of the TV show Being Erica, and how Erica often encountered the therapist Dr. Tom on the street, appearing as a hot dog vendor or bartender or pedestrian just as she needed him.  It also reminded me of some video game – I don’t know if it’s World of Warcraft or if it’s a common custom – where everything in the environment that the player can interact with has a sort of halo outline that’s lacking in other parts of the background.

On the last day of Found Festival, I was able to attend a performance of Before The River, a roving performance along the pathways by Mill Creek. Colin Matty, Shannon Hunt, Katrusia Pohoreski, Jameela McNeil, and Liam Coady performed an eerie folkloric tale from Ukrainian tradition.

And now it’s summer!  Time for Freewill Shakespeare and the rest of the summer festivals and looking forward to Fringe.  Enjoy!

 

The festivals of summer, part 1.

1 Reply

When I was a little kid, the calendar was divided in two parts:  the school year, in which all the scheduled activities happened week by week and wrapped up in June, and the summer, which started with a parade in June for Flag Day (a local invention) and continued with drive-in movies, ice cream from the local Dairy, camping trips and time at the cottage, and being put to bed with the windows open while my parents and aunts and uncles talked quietly outside with beers, until the evenings started to get cool and the days started to get shorter and it was time to put on leather shoes again and head back to school.

Edmonton theatre life is kind of like that.  The professional companies mostly wrapped up their seasons in time for Sterling Award nomination deadlines, and are on to planning for next winter’s productions.  The awards get announced at a gala Monday night, and the summer celebrations, special treats, and traditions are already in action. Teatro, of course, has already had one play in its summer season, Salon of the Talking Turk, and has opened the second, Jana O’Connor’s Going Going Gone.   The Freewill Shakespeare Festival‘s just started.

The emerging-artists’ festival Nextfest happened earlier in June.  I took in a few performances – the spoken-word poetry night Speak! hosted by Nasra Adem and Liam Cody, a reading of new work Shadowlands by Savanna Harvey (thoughtful, provocative, and amusing even as a reading – definitely watch for it at this year’s Edmonton Fringe (or at Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, or Vancouver Fringe), and the site-specific piece Everyone We Know Will Be There: A House Party in One Act, by Elena Belyea, directed by Andrew Ritchie.  This was a very cleverly managed piece of roving theatre, with small groups of audience members each invisibly shadowing a specific party-guest character, around the house and yard.  I didn’t know the whole story after one viewing, just the parts that our character (played by Eva Foote) was part of, and some other tantalizing bits we overheard while our character was storming through rooms or having meltdowns in bathrooms.  The piece was so skilfully directed and stage-managed that any adjustments of timing and traffic direction were completely invisible to me, which added to the feeling of eavesdropping on a real story.

Opera Nuova‘s festival of opera and musical theatre continues, with Carousel and The Cunning Little Vixen playing this weekend and next.  Rapid Fire Theatre’s biggest event of the year, Improvaganza, wraps up tonight with four shows.  And Found Festival continues today and tomorrow around McIntyre Park and Old Strathcona.

Found Festival is a small festival of site-specific and found-space performance, currently under the leadership of Beth Dart, multi-talented local theatre maker and event producer.  So if the description of Everyone We Know Will Be There made you curious, or intrigued, or skeptical, then you can come to Found Festival this weekend and see more performances created or curated for unexpected spaces.  McIntyre Park, the little green space with the gazebo in front of the library, is currently set up with a box office tent, live music in the gazebo for free, and a small friendly shaded beer-garden with the best of the Fringe’s furniture and Alley Kat products like Session Ale and Main Squeeze.  (Almost like my parents’ backyard in the old days, except that now I’m old enough to drink and the music is better!)

So far I’ve attended Julie Ferguson’s powerful and thought-provoking solo piece Glass Washrooms, which explores a journey to non-binary gender identity and concepts of spaces one belongs in.  Although originally created for the public-washroom building at the corner of Whyte Avenue and Gateway, the later performances have been moved to the washrooms at the Backstage Theatre in order to reduce disruption to the people needing that essential community infrastructure on Whyte Ave.  There are two more performances today and one tomorrow, and I recommend it highly.

Another intriguing part of the Found Festival is the Admit One performances, short shows of various kinds performed for one audience member at a time.  I’ve seen four of them and I hope to catch the fifth.  They’re all different enough that I find myself delighted and intrigued by each one.   In Shoes and One Man’s Junk explore concepts of memory as the audience member experiences aspects of the neighbourhood space along with the performers.  The character in One Man’s Junk works in the antique store Junque Cellar, and the store background blends smoothly into the apparently-rambling thoughts of the employee on break, performer/creator Jake Tkaczyk.  In Shoes takes the audience member on a short walk around the immediate neighbourhood, on which performers portrayed various people important in a young woman’s life.  I won’t tell you who all was in it, because I liked it better being surprised.  Strife, by Matthew McKenzie and performed by Russell Keewatin, portrays a young man trying to decide on his response to a heartbreaking loss by violence, a loss shared by the audience member.  The Booth: Offerings is a set of improvised responses cascading from an audience member prompt, with Leif Ingebrigtsen’s original piano-playing inspiring Tim Mikula’s visual art and Rebecca Sadowski’s expressive contemporary dance.  Particular care was taken to create safe anonymous space for audience members, and I was glad to have a few minutes of quiet in their decompression space before exiting to a quieter side of the building.

None of the performances made me uncomfortable in that “are we done now?” “where am I supposed to go?” “am I supposed to say something or not?” way that is always a risk with performances abandoning the conventions of stage performance (you know, get a program, sit down on risers with everyone else, chat with background music til the lights go down, watch quietly until the lights come up, applaud, leave).  The performers, directors, and producers had anticipated what guidance each audience member would need, so I could let myself experience each performance in the moment without wondering what to do next or worrying that my responses would throw them off.

It’s the start of a wonderful summer of entertainment celebrations of all kinds in Edmonton, Interstellar Rodeo and Edmonton Folkfest, Street Performers Festival, K-Days, Heritage Days, and Taste of Edmonton, culminating for me at the Fringe, August 17-27.  Summer’s here!