Tag Archives: julie ferguson

The festivals of summer, part 1.

Leave a 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!

Silence is powerful

Leave a reply

Punctuate! Theatre‘s The Silence Project is an original work of theatre that takes place in almost complete silence.   There was no music before the show started, just the hushed talk of patrons getting seated in the darkened room of the TACOS space.  After a prologue with several characters chattering over top of each other and one playing a singing bowl, there were no sounds at all other than the unavoidable sounds of breathing and movement.  This made me very aware of those incidental sounds.

The five performers and creators, Julie Ferguson, Elizabeth Hobbs, Elliott James, Andréa Jorawsky, and Sheiny Satanove, combined to portray about twelve distinct characters.  The main character was wearing a silver mask with some peripheral decoration which made me think of an alien.  The others appeared with various stylized costume elements (an apron, a raggedy overcoat, a cleanroom suit, a sparkly bra) and props (a hipflask, a twinkly ball, a pocketwatch) allowing them to be distinguished.  There was also some effective use of lengths of shiny fabric to hide faces or turn bodies into non-human shapes.  It was the kind of setup which I would have classified as a modern dance piece if there had been background music … but there wasn’t.  Instead there was the rhythm of breath, and heightened awareness of the main character’s anxious and uncertain body language.

Like a modern dance piece, I started by just enjoying the shapes and wondering what I was missing, but gradually I was able to tell myself a consistent enough story that I felt as if I understood.  The repetition and patterns of encounters helped in this.  The confused isolated traveller is first unable to communicate with each of the strangers she encounters, although they all try to connect with her.  (I say “she” and “her” because the performer appeared to be female, but the character did not seem to be strongly gendered.) After the traveller receives a gift enabling her to share a language of gesture with each stranger, she encounters each of them again, learns from each of them, and communicates using the collection of gestures acquired, moving towards a climax involving the triumph of community over despair or death.

The program notes say

We follow our main character, a traveler, as she enters into a dream world in order to escape the isolation of her everyday life.  Through the use of a dream mask, she enters the world of her imagination.  On her journey she encounters a myriad of characters that represent psyche, her hopes and fears.  What will the outcome of this expedition be?  Will our traveler be able to recognize herself in each character and connect honestly in order [to] return as a whole being to her world of reality?

So I was close.

Since attending this performance, I’ve been interested to see some of its techniques echoed in my Rapid Fire Theatre improvisational theatre workshop, where we worked on the skills needed to create an environment without props, miming objects and maintaining consistency with the definitions created by our fellow players.  Similarly, in my Foote Theatre School acting class this week we produced some tableaux, moments frozen in time that could tell a story to our classmates from our facial expressions, body position, and interactions.  Both classroom experiences made me aware of how effectively the performers and show creators of The Silence Project had communicated their emotions and narrative to the audience, without dialogue, scenery, musical background, or sound effects to help them.  It worked.

One measure of how well it worked was that during the performance, I kept forgetting that the silver-faced character was wearing a neutral-expression mask, and thinking I’d seen changing expressions on a painted face.  But it was a mask, supported by very expressive eyes, head position, shoulder movement, and convincing story.  It really worked.