Tag Archives: steve pirot

Various remixes on Day Two

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Image: Fringe 2024 poster designed by Yu-Chen (Tseng) Beliveau – drawing including universal aspects of Fringe and specifics of many previous festival themes. (You might not see the image on some phones – you might see my usual blog header of ticket stubs and the contents of my pockets.)

I fitted three more performances into a busy Friday – two productions hard to describe and also worth seeing, and one new incarnation of a Fringe tradition.

Unkl Stiv’s Looping Machine was on the program last Fringe – I saw an intriguing sample at Late Night Cabaret, but couldn’t fit it into my schedule. So I was happy to see it in the list of Fringe-lottery choices for this year, scheduled into the Yardbird Suite, venue 7. The performer, Steve Pirot, explained that before the start of the pandemic he had been performing several short spoken-word poetry pieces, and then rather than create new pieces for digital performance he decided to work on stitching together his extant work into something longer. Which is now a live non-stop piece almost an hour long. It was fascinating to listen to and watch, but very hard for me to remember details. Pirot uses rhyme and sounds as deftly as a rapper, and plays with words and meanings in ways memorable of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which he refers to once or twice). For some of it, I let my mind drift as the echoes and reverberations washed over me. For other parts, I loved the way the sounds and concepts fitted together and tried to remember them – particularly the part about the 24-hour cat cafe – but I can’t. When I first started exploring the local theatre scene, early in the previous decade, I figured out quickly that if Steve Pirot was credited on a project, it was going to be what I called “weird theatre” – and I meant that in a good way! Steve Pirot expanded my appreciation of live performance in 2013, and this Fringe show did that again. If this might be your thing – if you’re even curious about it – try it. He also has a show for kids at this Fringe, called The Empire of Sand.

I think I was probably in the middle of the target audience for Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh?, the Clevername Theatre production playing at venue 18: The FOH Pro Stage, a Lutheran-church hall across the avenue from Grindstone Theatre’s main performance space. A printed program distributed before the show provided a bit of context about the Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne’s life, in particular the way his real-life son Christopher Robin Milne responded to being immortalized in his father’s books as the quintessential imaginative solitary child endowing his stuffed animals with life. I had read about that history previously, but it did help to have it top-of-mind during the show.

I was also quite familiar with the tropes and plot points of both source material of this strangest of adaptations. I’d savoured the Winnie-the-Pooh short stories and poems from having them read to me, touching the Ernest Shepard pencil drawings, through watching the Disney animations with younger siblings and reading aloud with the next generation. And I’d worked on a Walterdale Theatre production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, so I’d heard the venomous barbs and unfolding awful secrets of that script many times while operating the lighting cues, and then watched another production in the Citadel audience.

I have no idea how the Minneapolis theatre artist Alexander Gerchak ever came up with the idea of casting the storybook characters Winnie and Piglet (Thomas Buan and Stephanie Johnson) as the viciously-bonded couple like George and Martha, entertaining a young couple named Hunny (Victoria Jones, costumed as a Pooh-story honey-pot and echoing the naivete of Albee’s Honey) and Christopher (“he looks like a Mormon who collided with a haberdashery shop”, Nick Hill) who seemed to be the analogue of Nick. But it worked. Later on, references were made to other Pooh-universe characters like Eeyore, Rabbit, Owl, and Kanga. The narrative on stage had callbacks to many plot points in both canon stories, and included both absurd physical humour (instead of the many alcoholic drinks of George’s hospitality, Winnie licks out a honey jar with his hands and serves up “nectar” and “condensed milk”) and a lot of what I remember as increasing horror as I came to realize the history behind the intolerable present, highlighted by cringey lighting effects (maybe I just noticed those because of how I first encountered Albee’s work?)

After the performance, I looked them up – and found out that it’s been well received at Fringe festivals in the US. If you are familiar with both sides of the source material – whether or not you actually like either of them – you should definitely see this. It would probably also be worth seeing if you just have a rough awareness of both stories as cultural phenomena – but it was recognizing the specifics and then realizing how the stories were going to dovetail that really sold me.

Late Night Cabaret has moved, this year, from its longtime home in the Backstage Theatre (do you remember when that space acted as storage the rest of the year but was tidied up as a performance space for the few weeks of Fringe?) to a new venue offsite, the Granite Curling Club on 107 Street. The new venue is about twice the size, and the new arrangements include extra late-night trips of the historic streetcars through Old Strathcona from the Fringe grounds, and an earlier house-opening that might be serving to spread out the loud energy of the old queue that would form along the north wall of the Arts Barns every night with ticketholders vying for front-table seats and artists hoping to get free tickets. I was hesitant about whether the larger offsite space could re-create the happy community feel of the old LNC, a place where I felt completely included and safe as a solo patron but at the same time felt like I was in a dark nightclub of pulsating music at midnight, where I kept running into people I knew.

Late Night Cabaret 2024’s first show was last night. And I will definitely go back. Enough of it is the same, and a lot of it is fun. I didn’t know ahead of time that there’s a kitchen selling nachos and tacos, so I had picked up fast food – but what I saw looked awfully good. There were no risers around the edges filled with single seats, but I was able to see and hear well enough from a cabaret table partway back, and didn’t need to plan ahead about who to sit with because I ran into so many friends. As usual, there are high-energy hosts (Kelly Turner and Kevin Gillese last night), an amazing 7-piece house band and a musical guest (last night Arlo Maverick the rapper) and an assortment of guest performers and repeating features. As in previous years, Lindsay Walker curates the music, Jake Tkaczyk curates the guests, the hosts are affiliated with Rapid Fire Theatre, and the Next Act family of restaurants sponsors things.

Other Fringe checklist notes from Friday: first green onion cake, first volunteer shift in the beer tent, first time mis-remembering a schedule and getting to a venue far too early. And I spent some time trying to find an ATM on site and failing – does nobody need cash for outdoor performers any more?

Today I’m hoping to see Rob & Chris / Bobby & Tina, the Matt Graham musical adaptation of Collin Doyle’s brilliant script Let the Light of Day Through, NachoPals Theatre’s Dick Piston Hotel Detective in Prague-Nosis, as well as the newest Guys in Disguise comedy Microwave Coven and Trevor Schmidt’s musical Mass Debating. The black-comedy musical I’m working on, Regression, has a performance at 4 pm at venue 30, the Playhouse. Hope your Fringe weekend is great! Say hi if you see me!

Ukelelia, echolalia, wordplay

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After picking up my Sunworks turkey at the Strathcona Market, I took in another Snow Globe Festival performance this afternoon, this time Brother Platypus & Sister SuKat Go To The Sea, by Spirot with Khiara Quigley, directed by Murray Utas.

It was poetic, funny, musical, allegorical, and kind of free-associational in a similar way to other Steve Pirot/Murray Utas work, but at the same time appropriate for young audiences.  There was a story with problem and resolution, but it was not entirely plot-driven.   So, it was pretty much what I expected but at the same time enjoyably surprising.

Both performers, Sydney Gross and Steve Pirot, were playing ukeleles and singing. I’ve seen Sydney Gross behind the lights/sound boards lots of times but I don’t think I’d ever seen her on stage, but in this role she was enchantingly childlike but not childish, easy to identify with.  There was a little bit of dance, a little bit of audience participation, and wordplay for both kids (that name rings a bell!  Literally, and every time!) and adults (random apposite quotation from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)  There was also fantastical Matt Schuurman background video.

I’m not going to be able to catch the third show in the Snow Globe Festival, but each of the three plays has one more performance tonight.  One suggestion for Promise Productions:  next year, it would be great if people could find your schedule with fewer clicks – your website has the 2012 schedule and your Facebook event requires a bit of scrolling-down.

snout – even weirder theatre

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My next experience with weird theatre was an Azimuth Theatre / Catch the Keys production called Snout, in the little playing space at the Arts Barns.  I believe it was written by Megan Dart and directed by Beth Dart, but that is from memory because there weren’t any paper programs.  As people entered the theatre, we saw a small tented space, draped with sheets and decorated with living room furniture, which also seemed to be where we should sit.  Atmospheric music was playing, and mysterious video images (Matt Schuurman’s work of course) were projected on the sheets.  An awkwardly-hunched character in bare feet and a burlap poncho (Ben Stevens) welcomed the theatregoers to his house and directed us to the couches, chairs, and cushions on the floor, while steering people away from a kitchen-table set at one end of the room.

We had lots of opportunity to study the space, especially those of us who were a little bit uncomfortable about engaging with the unpredictable character scuttling around.  The draped sheets made a football-shaped space, with openings at either end and at a few other places in the perimeter.  After a while I became aware of a looming bearded presence watching us from the various rents in the draping, but again I kind of averted my attention so as not to engage.  (As I’ve probably already said here, I love weird theatre – but I’m still awkward about being dragged in to participate.)

The main character turned out to be named Ori, and this was his home.  He also introduced us to a Wolf (Steve Pirot), as a friend that he played with and fought with.  The wolf stalked on his hands and feet, hair covering his face, and snarled convincingly enough that my neck got shivers.  The character felt dangerous in that form.  Later, he walked upright and delivered a monologue about possessions, theft, and exchanging valuables, while returning to people various objects of theirs that he had somehow pilfered earlier – in my case, a book about improv theatre that I’d borrowed from one of my teachers.  I was probably easy to steal from because of having tried so hard to ignore him!

The other two characters in the play were an ordinary couple, (Ainsley Hilliard and Mat Simpson), who had been together long enough to remember happier more romantic times, but unsure how and whether to try recapturing those feelings.

And the rest of the performance (I was going to say “story”, but that would suggest something more linear and less lyrical and cryptic) was just those characters interacting with each other and rebounding off each other and hurting each other.  I probably missed a lot – the box-office flyer suggested some resonance with an Isis and Osiris myth, for one thing – but I didn’t mind, because I liked it.

Azimuth Theatre’s Free-man on the Land – better than its blurb!

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Free-man on the Land, playing at the Roxy Theatre on 124 Street, is the most unconventional or postmodern performance I have seen since the Fringe Festival.  And it’s fun!  It was both more playful and more provocative than I expected, and less of a humourless rant (or to keep the alliteration, I could say polemic).   The handbill description really doesn’t make it sound as interesting as it is.

I saw a preview show, with the theatre not very full, so I sat in the second row with nobody in the first row.  When I realised at the start that the narrator was ignoring the fourth wall and other conventions of theatre, I suddenly wondered if I would regret being so visible – and of course they called on me, but I think I responded well (all this improv training is coming in handy!)

I’ve read a bit about the Free-man on the Land movement and some of its proponents.  This Edmonton Journal article is one of the more entertaining bits.  I have a lot of sympathy for many people who call themselves anarchists whom I might describe as grassroots activists, but the FOTL thing has me sort of scratching my head and backing away, in general.

In the play, there’s enough story shown and hinted to make the main character (the man commonly known as Richard Svoboda, played by Des Parenteau) interesting and to suggest how he developed his views.  His attitudes bring him into conflict with his partner, played by Dale Ladouceur, who also sings several original songs during the show while accompanying herself on a Chapman Stick.  Her character isn’t quite as interesting as Richard, but more than a foil.  Other parts (a narrator and his chorus or counterfoil, a taxman, a court-appointed defence lawyer, a former employer, etc) were played by director Murray Utas and playwright Steve Pirot.

The Azimuth Theatre production of Free-man on the Land is playing at the Roxy until Sunday January 27th.  If you like weird theatre, you should go see it.