Betroffenheit at the Playhouse

Betroffenheit, co-created by Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite and Electric Company Theatre's Jonathon Young, was first presented as part of the Panamania Festival accompanying Toronto's Pan Am and Para Pan Am Games back in the summer of 2015. It's been touring the world to acclaim ever since. Like most in Vancouver, I first saw the show when it was presented by DanceHouse at the Vancouver Playhouse in February 2016 (you can read my original impressions here). Now, just before it embarks on the final leg of its three-year world tour, DanceHouse has brought the show back to the same venue. I was there once again last night.

In part this was practical: I've updated an essay I've written about Pite and Kidd Pivot to include a discussion of Betroffenheit; and I'll also be speaking about the work at the University of Stockholm in May. So I wanted to ensure that I hadn't made any egregious errors in my representation of the work, particularly with respect to its complex distribution of the human voice. But really I just wanted to be swept up once again by the amazing on-stage world that Pite and Young have created, and to revel in the sublime movement of the performers. On both counts I was not disappointed. Christopher Hernandez, replacing Bryan Arias (who I think is premiering a new work of his own in New York), fits into the ensemble seamlessly. Hernandez is about double the size of Arias, and so this does change the partnering with Cindy Salgado somewhat; but his solo that opens Act 2 is still a marvel of off-axis lightness and grace. Otherwise, all of the other performers seem to have grown more deeply into and with their parts; none of the movement felt mechanical or marked, and there were new expressive details in the choreography that I had the pleasure of discovering--such as the little foot wiggles that Tiffany Tregarthen does at one point when she's turned upside down in her role as the devilish monkey on Young's character's back in Act 1. Ditto David Raymond's incredibly controlled staccato work with his arms and fingers during the therapist scene. And what I'll call Salgado's breathing solo in Act 2 was deeply affecting, the simple inflation and deflation of her shoulders speaking volumes about the bodily manifestations of grief.

As the blue silk suited co-hosts of our show-within-a-show, Young and Jermaine Spivey are by now expertly attuned to each other's rhythms, both in terms of the movement and the lipsynched dialogue that they share. I remain amazed by Young's technical facility with Pite's complex choreography, but it was Spivey whom I couldn't take my eyes off of. If anything, it seems like his body and limbs have grown even more elastic and liquid; the flipping of his legs backwards over the arm of Young, or later their wave-like rippling along the floor, seems absolutely of a piece with Young's floppy manipulations of his puppet stand-in. Likewise, the speed and precision of Spivey's turns and the air he catches while flipping his body through space seem to defy the laws of physics. Needless to say, the solo by Spivey that concludes the work remains a devastatingly gorgeous summation of the archive of grief and trauma that has been passed from body to body in the preceding two hours.

Of course there were aspects of the work that I'd forgotten about, mostly relating to the text and how personally self-accusatory it is. Betroffenheit both is and isn't Young's story, but in abstracting his and his family's tragedy onto this fictional world he hasn't spared himself a nightly real-time examination pertaining to his grief and guilt. Mostly this comes in the form of subtle repetitions of phrases that are inflected with telling pronouns ("Is he at fault?," "I know she...," "They're in there," "They're in this"). But there are also just incredibly raw and open displays of pain, and the failing of others that is a consequence of this pain--as with the phone call from Mom. Somehow I'd also forgotten the desperately uncomprehending solo that Tregarthen performs in Act 2, her final pose--arms bent in front of her, as if cradling an absent child--giving me new context as to why her character is Young's chief tormenter in Act 1.

For all of the very real sorrow upon which Betroffenheit is built, the work is also filled with joy. To me, the piece is the danced equivalent of one of my favourite poems, Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque." There Crane writes about how, in the wake of all the torment and unhappiness the world throws at us, no matter how the game of life smirks at us, "we make our meek adjustments," we find "our random consolations." Because "what blame to us if the heart live on"? And it does. That was clear last night during the curtain calls. The love on stage, in the audience, and between the two was physically palpable.

What's more, everyone gets to renew the affair next year when Pite, Young, the dancers, and virtually the entire Betroffenheit creative team return to the DanceHouse stage with the world premiere of a new work of dance-theatre, Revisor. I spoke briefly with composer Owen Belton while exiting the theatre, and he said they have already been workshopping the piece at Banff. It will apparently be something of a political satire. Given the new Cold War we suddenly find ourselves in, it should be timely.

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Fringe Festival 2016: Great Day for Up

The second Fringe Festival show I saw yesterday, also at the Waterfront, was Electric Company Theatre's production of Great Day for Up. Originally written and performed by ECT Artistic Director Jonathon Young in 1996 as his graduating project from Studio 58, the company has revived the piece on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.

Great Day is a short Beckettian exploration of the limits of language, the materiality of objects, the body's estrangement from itself and its environment, and the meta-ness of the theatre. It showcases Young's immense talents as a physical performer, as well as ECT's trademark sensitivity to total theatrical design (the lighting is by Adrian Muir and the terrific sound score is by Owen Belton). Young plays an unnamed striver who climbs on stage through what looks like a roof-top skylight of the sort one would find on an old tenement building. He has brought with him a plastic bag of junk and, literally willing his legs to move, he gradually explores his surroundings. The dilemma facing him is where does he go from here? Danger lurks in the wings and there appears no way out behind the safety curtain stage left. Our erstwhile hero is willing to take direction: from the objects around him; from the scraps of paper whose messages he initially receives as oracular pronouncements, only to subsequently revise the text; and from someone named Will to whom he occasionally directs an existential query. It would seem--especially given the immense second ladder positioned upstage left--that the only way forward for the character is to go further up. Except, we eventually learn, up is actually "in."

And, in this respect, an equally interesting aspect of attending this show is that Young includes, as part of the program, an inserted "Afterword," in which he lets audience members in on the original genesis of the piece's composition, as well as his thoughts on returning to it 20 years later. It's a most compelling--and quite moving--piece of writing: not least for the way it gives us more "texture and colour" to a show Young variously refers to as a "thing" or a "blob."

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Tara Cheyenne Performance and Kidd Pivot in Rehearsal

Yesterday was a pretty special day. I got to sit in on rehearsals by two amazing Vancouver dance artists who will be premiering new work in July. And while very different in scale and tone, it was interesting for me to note that both works are consciously being constructed as dance-theatre performances, not least in their combining of text and movement. The pieces also share the distinction of having well-known local actors move (quite literally) outside their traditional comfort zones on stage, partnering with professional dancers to tell a story via kinaesthetic as well as narrative means.

The first rehearsal was of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be, which will play the Firehall as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival in three weeks. TCP Artistic Director and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is working with the amazingly talented Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef on what will be her second group show after the highly successful Highgate. However, this current work--a scaled down excerpt of which Friedenberg showed as part of Boca del Lupo's Micro-Performance Series at the Anderson Street Space earlier this spring--eschews Highgate's overt theatricality in favour of a deliberately toned down, non-spectacular and process-oriented exploration of themes of subjectivity, authenticity and relationality. The performers, all playing versions of themselves, are modelling for us in their individual movement styles and ways of being in their very different bodies, as well as in the coming together--sometimes harmoniously, sometimes more fractiously--of those styles and bodies, how all of us as human subjects must move through this world at once singly and as part of a larger collective.

All of this makes for some amazing comic set pieces (which I won't spoil before the piece opens), but also moments of truly poignant intimacy and vulnerability--what Friedenberg described as "hilarious heartbreak." It was also such a privilege to watch Friendenberg, who is not dancing in this iteration of the piece, work with her performers, at one point trying out three different spatial configurations of a sequence with Poole before very naturally and organically landing on what felt like the right fit. And all of this while keeping up a steady stream of witty banter and trademark one-liners. I know from experience what a joy it is to work with Friendeberg, and this studio visit (to Stevenson's shiny new space, The Happening, on Fraser at 39th) only confirmed that fact. I look forward to the DOTE show, as well as the full-scale version of the piece at the Cultch that Friendeberg is working towards for April 2017.

The second rehearsal visit took place at Progress Lab 1422 on William Street, where Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite was working on a sequence from her new work-in-progress Betroffenheit. A co-production with PL 1422 co-tenants Electric Company Theatre, the piece will have its world premiere in Toronto at the end of July as part of the Panamania Festival that runs in conjunction with the PanAm and ParaPanAm Games. Vancouver audiences have to wait until next February to see the finished work; however, the presenters of that staging, DanceHouse, arranged yesterday's sneak peek as a perk for subscribers and donors. What we saw was an excerpt of a complex and highly physical duet between actor, ECT founding member and Betroffenheit co-creator Jonathon Young and dancer Tiffany Tregarthen. Betroffenheit is one of those composite German words that manages to encompass a complexity of meaning that seems inexpressible in anything other than a full sentence in English; in this case, it refers to the state of shock and bewilderment that befalls one in the wake of a disaster. It is, I am assuming, just such a state that Young's character finds himself in when he encounters the creature played by Tregarthen. It's not clear whether this creature is a magical being from another dimension or a product of Young's character's imagination; whatever the case, both Young and Tregarthen appear to be simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by each other, and the part of the duet we witnessed unfolds as at once a solicitous sharing of each other's bodily proximity and weight and as a desire to extricate oneself from the other's potentially threatening grip.

All of this results in some pretty acrobatic partnering, with Tregarthen at one point poised in the air over Young's prone body as she balances her knees on his raised hands and her own arms on his forehead. From this position she must then somersault backwards, while somehow also managing to pull herself and Young up to sitting position, so that they are both facing each other with legs extended and intertwined. It was fascinating to watch Pite work this particular bit over and over again, making minor adjustments (like having Tregarthen grab a bit of Young's shirt or getting Young to help out with momentum by giving Tregarthen a little shove) in order to refine the timing. Equally interesting to me was Young's running commentary as all of this was going on, bringing an actor's characterological "motivation" for his actions (e.g. "I have to get this thing off of me") to the specific physical tasks he needed to perform.

I couldn't stick around afterwards to mingle as I had to dash to the last of my Mountain View Solstice rehearsals. But a perfect day became even more special as I was exiting because I ran into Pite, who was ducking out to get a bit of air. I reminded her of who I was ("that annoying academic who wrote the article about your work"), and she was so gracious, saying how much she appreciated my interpretation of her work, and suggesting that we work together some day (!!!). Even if that never happens, it's enough of an ego-boost just thinking about the possibility. And all of Vancouver is richer for Pite's decision to pursue her career from here.

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Compagnie Käfig at the Playhouse

DanceHouse ended its 2014-15 season in a rousing fashion last night with the Vancouver premiere of Compagnie Käfig, a hybrid, polyglot evening of hip hop featuring a company of eleven amazing male dancers from Brazil, with artistic direction by the Algerian-French choreographer Mourad Merzouko (of Centre Choréographique de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne) and choreographic contributions by three other French and one other Brazilian artists. In this case, many cooks definitely makes for a steamy, sexy pot.

The piece opens with the dancers clumped together against a backlit scrim positioned upstage. Slowly a hand emerges, extends upwards, and spreads its fingers in a fluid sequence vaguely reminiscent of voguing. Eventually, as one of the members accompanies the rest of the company on what I took to be a traditional samba instrument, while also vocalizing a succession of beats, the men spread--or rather, glide--across the dance floor, toprocking in a fast and rhythmically compelling coordination of steps and arm waves before heading down to the floor to bust various individual power moves (back and shoulder spins, headstands, swipes, acrobatic flips) and freezes.

Indeed, what was so fascinating about last night's performance was the thoroughly intertwined mix of freestyle elements and clearly choreographed unison movement. These men are eminently watchable even when they are just bobbing their heads together. But add in differences in tempo, spatial configuration and lightning-quick changes in the quality of movement--in which the dancers switch from poeticism to power in the space of a few beats--and one sees just how much work has gone into this collaboration of styles.

Of course it helps that the company is very easy on the eyes. At the start of the piece the dancers are all properly--even somewhat formally--attired in dress shirts and ties. By the end, however, they are shirtless, their torsos glistening with sweat as they display their well-toned abs. That alone was worth the standing ovation they received--even before they treated us to a short freestylin' encore.

In his curtain speech before the show, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith announced next season's line-up, which includes a visit by another Brazilian company, Companhia Urbana de Dança. Also on tap is the Hofesh Schechter Company and the Vancouver premiere of Crytal Pite's newest work, Betroffenheit, a collaboration between her company Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre that will premiere later this summer in Toronto as part of the cultural component of the Pan Am Games. It's a shorter season that normal for DanceHouse (only three shows instead of the usual four), but with Schechter and Pite as part of the schedule, it should be memorable.

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Sublime Bard on the Beach (and Butoh)

In Kim Collier's digital-age Hamlet, part of this year's Bard on the Beach season, Jonathon Young gives a towering performance (deeply intelligent, refreshingly physical, intensely feeling) as the young prince interrupted, a rich West Van postgrad genuinely flummoxed by his father's sudden death and perhaps even more unmoored by his mother's quick remarriage. This is telegraphed in a wordless opening scene Collier inserts even before the curtain speech, with a tousled, barefoot Hamlet alone in the sleekly modern, all-white reception room of the royal compound (the stunning set is by Pam Johnson), staring past the ghostly sheeted furniture and out the sliding glass doors that yield onto the sublime vista that is the Bard mainstage's signature but that in this case truly does overwhelm and undo our focalizing subject (although the fact that for a moment at yesterday's matinee Young had to share the stage with a patron eager to capture the view on his iPhone somewhat marred the effect). Just as the lights dim and Torquil Campbell and Chris Dumont's original music fills the theatre, a scantily clad Ophelia (a wonderfully open and vulnerable Rachel Cairns) enters stage left and joins Hamlet in a post-coital embrace downstage; the move neatly establishes that the couple has a romantic past, thus making all the more powerful and shocking Hamlet's subsequent sacrificing of his girlfriend as part of the collateral damage of his revenge plot.

Of course, the play famously pivots on whether Hamlet is up to this task. However, in Collier's production this is something about which we are never in doubt. As soon as Hamlet joins Bernardo and Marcellus and Horatio (played here by Jennifer Lines, who again proves she is perhaps the crispest, most enunciative deliverer of Shakepeare's lines in the whole Bard company) on the heath of Elsinore and learns from the ghost of his father the truth about his murder and usurpation at the hands of Claudius, he is resolved to answer the foul deed in kind. And Young makes it clear that all of his subsequent actions--his feigned "antic disposition," for example, and his conscription of the visiting players into performing an amended version of "The Murder of Gonzago" as part of the Act 3 inset play (with the company here making the most of the stage technology and projecting in close-up the dumb show via a live video feed)--are in service of this goal. This, then, shifts the focus from psychology to ontology, with the bookish Hamlet's soliloquies collectively comprising a study in the discovery of being: and to be Hamlet in this case above all means to be his father's son, to live up to the inheritance that the young prince perhaps in his early college days wasn't so interested in acknowledging, but that now, seeing Claudius on the throne that should rightfully belong to him (and, as importantly, knowing the similarly-aged Fortinbras is on Denmark's doorstep with his army), he is belatedly reminded he might just want after all. Tellingly, in this respect, the play ends not with a blackout on the corpses that litter the stage at the end of Act 5, but with the cast exiting one by one as Hamlet picks himself up, climbs the upstage dais stairs and sits down purposefully in the the throne chair previously occupied by his uncle.

But if Hamlet is his father's son, he is equally his mother's, and another great pleasure in this production comes from soaking up the chemistry between Young and Barbara Pollard's Gertrude. Not that, as in so many stagings, they ratchet up the Oedipal business unduly. Instead, in their scenes together, Young and Pollard cannily and economically show how their former closeness has become such a gulf in part because of their misunderstandings of how each should manage their grief. For Hamlet, Gertrude's quick remarriage to Claudius is an unconscionable betrayal of what should have been her chaste honouring of her first husband's memory. But, as Gertrude's brief dance with her son to Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is" during the closet scene demonstrates, for her, part of the work of mourning is getting on with the business of living. And though it's not necessarily there in the relatively few lines that poor Getrude is given in the play, I've always felt that her marriage to Hamlet Sr. might not have been all it was cracked up to be (particularly in the bedroom), and that in the younger brother she is rediscovering her sexuality. This is something Pollard, grounded, earthy, sensual, and wearing a series of sexy outfits by costume designer Nancy Bryant, ably brings out in her terrific performance.

Other cast members also stand out: Richard Newman, who manages to find just the right note of dignity in Polonius' buffoonery; Bill Dow, who is a suitably oily and sleazy Claudius (again, Bryant's costume choices help out immeasurably here); and, once again, Cairns as an Ophelia triply undone by patriarchy (father, brother, boyfriend), and who somehow manages to turn her willow song into something contemporary and Feist-like. While I liked him as one of the gravediggers, I wasn't so taken with Duncan Fraser's channeling of the voice of doom for the ghost of Hamlet Sr. As Laertes, Todd Thomson confirmed what I didn't like about his performance as Orlando in As You Like It in 2011: he's always shouting his lines. Finally, while I appreciated the cross-gender casting of Naomi Wright as Rosencrantz, turning Hamlet's duplicitous college friends into a grasping, social-climbing couple, I thought her performance was somewhat too hopped-up (she is always rubbing her nose, like she's just done a line of coke) and Craig Erickson's Guildenstern too passive.

Finally,  a word on Collier's trademark use of new media and technology. While this certainly wasn't an Electric Company show (for that, we'll have to wait till next spring and the Arts Club premiere of Helen  Lawrence), there was an abundance of liquid crystal display monitors on stage: from the flat screen TV stage left upon which Fortinbras' mug briefly appears, and which otherwise showed CCTV images of other parts of the Elsinore compound, to the various iPads and smart phones toted around by characters. Mostly these worked, and were used in service of the action on stage. The one mildly distracting bit was Hamlet's constant turning on and off of the scene music, which, beyond establishing that almost all of the sound in this production is diegetic (as befits our constantly plugged-in generation), and that the folks in the tech booth were on their game with the cues, didn't really add anything dramatically.

These are minor quibbles, however. This is an invigorating production of a canonical play, one that makes it formally contemporary without gutting its thematic substance.

An early evening exit from the theatre at Kits Point was also a nice bookend to a day that began with an early morning visit to the tip of Point Grey for Kokoro Dance's annual "Wreck Beach Butoh." I can't believe that in all my years in Vancouver, this was the first time I'd made the trek out to our clothing optional beach to see Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi and company move between surf and sand clad only in white body paint. It was cold, but also--and quite literally--awe-inspiring.

Talk about the Vancouver sublime!

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In Brief

Last night, Richard and I did something we haven't done at the theatre in a long time, if ever: we walked out at intermission. The show was the Vancouver Playhouse production of Brief Encounter, Emma Rice's adaptation of the 1946 David Lean film, itself based on the one-act play, Still Life, by Noel Coward. Never mind that Max Reimer's production is as all-over-the-place and mish-mashy as his cast's accents; the play itself is a travesty of styles and tone, a burlesque of Lean's beautifully restrained film, which zeroed in with unflinching intensity on its two principals' willed suppression of their desire for each other. The train station tea shop was a perfect metaphor for the temporal fleetingness and what ifs that defined their relationship: but in another place, at another time, they might have been allowed to remain together.

By opening up the action to the supporting characters in the shop, Rice creates some additional stage business to be sure, but why clutter that up with so many theatrical tricks? Puppets, song and dance numbers, toy trains, a bicycle, and all the winking acknowledgements of the audience--and that was just the first act! Then there's the piece's integration of filmed sequences into the live action on stage, the element that seems most to have caught audiences' imaginations in the UK and on Broadway, where the show just closed after what I gather was a reasonably successful run. I don't know what all the hoopla is about--the effects were really quite pedestrian, to my mind, and made what The Electric Company did earlier this fall with Tear the Curtain! seem downright genius (which, as you may recall, I also had major caveats about).

There was a twinge, as we collected our coats, about not sticking around to see what the production does with Alec's fellow doctor-friend, Stephen Lynn, whose flat Alec borrows for an aborted rendez-vous with Laura in the film. As Richard Dyer has famously--and most convincingly--argued, Stephen is quite clearly coded as gay, and it would have been interesting to see what Rice does with this in our post-Wolfenden, post-queer, post-post era. However, after the butchering of Rachmaninoff to close Act 1, we decided it wasn't worth sticking around to find out.

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Torn Curtains

It was a gorgeous, sunny Thanksgiving Sunday yesterday, and I spent much of the afternoon in a darkened theatre. Not, as originally planned, at the Granville 7 watching another VIFF offering. Instead, I decided at the last minute to catch the final performance of The Electric Company's acclaimed play Tear the Curtain! at the Stanley, in a co-production with the Arts Club and the 2010 Cultural Olympiad.

My choice of live theatre over mediated film is of course the very subject of ECT's brilliant show. The piece is at once an historical exploration of the economics of entertainment specific to the Stanley's original construction--when vaudeville stages were being cast aside in favor of cinemas, which in turn had to be retrofitted to show the new talking pictures then eclipsing the theatricality of silent movies--and a philosophical meditation (mostly via Antonin Artaud) on both the power and the limits of each medium to awaken and engage its audience's senses. That the production itself, in form and content, seemed to make some very definitive choices of its own in terms of the prioritization of media surprised me.

First the praise: Vancouver audiences are unlikely to see anything so technically accomplished and intelligently conceived on local stages this fall (although I may eat my words after Brief Encounter at the Playhouse). The interplay between filmed and live sequences was literally seamless, and the sheer inventiveness by which the former were projected (on screens, scrims, and even David Roberts' magnificent set) kept astounding. Kim Collier's direction also drew out the site-specificity of the piece, using actors' entrances and exits, in particular, to play with the Stanley's proscenium, incorporating or excluding the live audience into the (mediated) mise-en-scène as the situation dictated. Finally, the entire company was in top form, equally comfortable on stage and on screen. Laura Mennell, as femme fatale Mila, and Dawn Petten, as loyal girl friday Mavis, were especially impressive.

Now the critique: Tear the Curtain! does not, it seems to me, challenge the binary between film and theatre (at least not in the way other ECT shows have, particularly No Exit). Rather it maintains, and even reinforces that binary--at times in some ideologically disturbing ways. Not only does the play's plot (which, for all the curve balls it throws us, is fairly conventional) resolve itself in favor of the soporific effects of Hollywood romanticism; its blending of filmic and live theatrical effects mostly unspools as a form of continuity editing, with progressivist and predominately linear match cuts between the two trumping those moments when their coming together was more engagingly juxtapositional (as when, in a favourite moment of mine, Mavis drives Jonathon Young's Alex across the stage in a makeshift Model T, while a projected rear screen backdrop moves behind them).

My bigger problem is that the case for the theatre--which, don't get me wrong, is there--is made almost as an inside joke, with winking references to Peter Brook (the Empty Space Society) and Philip Auslander (the television set's "liberation"/remediation of theatre in the end only a red herring) presented for the cognoscenti, but otherwise not fully elaborated in terms of a theory of either theatrical liveness or sensory and political "aliveness." A telling moment, in this regard, is when jaded theatre critic Alex, equal parts amanuensis and usurper of local artistic visionary Stanley Lee (James Fagan Tait), delivers his/Stanley's Artaud-inspired manifesto in favour of a new kind of total theatre. At the end of his oration, the house lights come up and Alex comes to the downstage lip, acknowledging the felt connection between audience and actor that can only come through live performance: "You are here," he says. "Here you are."

Too often, however, it felt like the audience's only available response to the material was "Where are they?," so relentlessly are we buffeted back and forth between virtual and embodied actors, not to mention the representational telos specific to each medium. For André Bazin, that telos in film has, ever since the camera began to move, been realism--but a realism that, in the words of another French film theorist (Christian Metz), is doubly imaginary (in the sense that what is imaginary masquerades as real). By contrast, even the "bourgeois" theatre that Mila and her revolutionary cronies in the ESS decry acknowledges its constructedness, makes visible in greasepaint and in costumes and in wires and in different-hued specials its status as a representation. For theorists from Plato to Michael Fried this very artificiality condemns the theatre to corrupting inauthenticity, and its audiences to slavish worshippers of false idols. But for artist-theorists like Brecht and Artaud, among other members of the European avant-garde who borrowed extensively from non-Western traditions, the theatre's codified and anti-mimetic properties also make it the ideal form to make an assault on representationality itself. (This included linguistic representationality, and a further irony of a play that takes Artaud, and his anti-textual bias, as a guiding light, is that it is incredibly wordy, Young and Kevin Kerr's script clocking in at well over 2.5 hours. I had the same complaint about Studies in Motion--it was just too long.) Moreover, they trusted their audiences enough not just to weather this assault, but to actually welcome it.

Would that ECT, in putting together Tear the Curtain!, placed more trust in their audiences to follow Alex beyond the threshold of the new theatrical experience he quite literally brings them to the very edge of. Instead, theatre is presented as a cordon sanitaire, a form of cultural capital that, as businessman and impresario Patrick Dugan (Gerard Plunkett) suggests, is meant to keep the riff-raff out. Whereas film emerges as the medium with which the masses can, again quite literally, most identify. Thus, the piece ends with Alex and Mavis, now a happy couple after the faithful secretary has helped the troubled critic find his "real" self, seating themselves amongst us in the audience, and then staring contentedly up at their screen surrogates.

Romantic, yes. Radical, no.

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Two Benefit Shows

By now most in Vancouver's tightly knit theatre community know of the terrible tragedy that befell Azra Young, daughter of Electric Company founders Kim Collier and Jonathon Young, and her cousins Fergus and Phoebe Conway--all three killed in a freak fire that broke out while they were sleeping in a family cabin on Shuswap Lake earlier this summer. An educational trust fund, the Collier Young Conway in Trust Fund, has been established in memory of the children and two benefit performances are taking place in support of it next week.

Julia Mackey will perform her solo show Jake's Gift at the newly reopened Cultch next Monday, September 14th. And Bard on the Beach has designated its performance of The Comedy of Errors the following day, September 15th, as a special benefit in support of the fund.

For more details, see the following item in The Georgia Straight.

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Theatre and Film, or, E-Motion

It’s the end of a long week, during which I’ve been rather consumed by various other writing projects. But I did want to post something here—in haste, alas—to urge local readers of this blog (are there any?) to attend Electric Company Theatre’s special presentation of Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, at the Vancouver Playhouse until the 18th of this month. The play was a hit in 2006, as part of a co-production between ECT, the PuSh Festival, and Theatre at UBC. It’s since been completely retooled, featuring a revised script by Kevin Kerr, direction by Kim Collier, choreography by Crystal Pite, and scenography by Robert Gardiner. Andrew Wheeler stars as Muybridge, and the always wonderful and eminently watchable Jonathon Young, a co-founder, along with Kerr and Collier, of ECT, appears in a variety of key roles, including Muybridge’s colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, the painter Thomas Eakins, and the man who cuckolds and is eventually killed by Muybridge, Henry Larkyns.

This last detail gives you a sense of the structure of the play, which weaves the story of Muybridge’s pioneering photographic investigations into animal locomotion—which began, at the behest of industrialist and California Governor Leland Stanford, as a way of settling a bet about whether all four hooves of a racehorse ever come off the ground at the same time (they do), and which eventually resulted in him completing an exhaustive catalogue of animal (including human) movement at U Penn—with the scandal of his earlier personal life in San Francisco that he is trying to leave behind. There he met and married the much younger, and previously divorced, Flora, whose subsequent affair with Larkyns (and, it’s suggested, Muybridge’s discovery that the son he thought his—the magnificently named Florado Helios—is actually his rival’s), prompted Muybridge to shoot and kill him. At the ensuing trial, Muybridge entered a plea of insanity, though in the end the jury acquitted him, labeling his crime justifiable homicide. However, Muybridge remained haunted by Flora (who died shortly thereafter) for the rest of his life, as well as by his decision to place Florado in an orphanage. The biography certainly contains a wealth of dramatic material, but at points in this production (which could be streamlined and faster-paced in sections) it felt that, as both psychological motivation and dramaturgical counterpoint, it overwhelmed the scenes of Muybridge’s photographic experiments that comprise the other half of the play.

This is where all of the collaborators in the piece are really allowed to take imaginative flight, with the process by which Muybridge used multiple cameras to “stop time” and “instantly” capture a range of movements—as well as how he “stage managed” the subjects who made those movements—wonderfully evoked in Pite’s movement sequences and especially Gardiner’s stunning projections and lighting decisions (I’m assuming Gardiner was in charge of these decisions, as no separate lighting designer is listed in the program). Here we have not just photography, but early cinema, come to life on the stage. (There’s a magnificent scene, for example, in which Muybridge demonstrates his invention of the zoopraxiscope, an early device for projecting “motion” pictures that predates the invention of celluloid film, to his young assistant, Blanche. It lasts but a flash, but it takes your breath away.) And we have it come to life in a way that reveals the beauty of all human and animal forms, the nudity that was an essential component of Muybridge’s published plates of male and female locomotion here rendered in a way that is the exact opposite of gratuitous. It is, rather, completely warranted.





Still, a part of me wished that Muybridge’s influence on the development of the new medium of film had been emphasized a bit more in the play. Not to detract in any way from the amazing theatricality and visuality of the piece as it currently exists. Rather, I say this for purely selfish reasons. I will be teaching a course in the fall that will deal partly with the relationship between film and theatre (including the use of film and video in contemporary theatre), and have programmed Studies in Motion as part of the syllabus. Not having seen the play, I had perhaps “projected” a bit too much of my own thinking in connection with the course’s various topics onto the play. That said, I still intend to teach the play, and hope that I can coax some of its creators into the classroom to discuss its development. Here, for those who might be interested, is the course description as I’ve currently conceived it:

Filmed Theatre, Theatre and Film, Film in Theatre

Since its invention, film has had a special relationship to theatre. The historical, theoretical, performative, and technological dimensions of that relationship are the subjects of this course. First, we will look at early international cinema, noting the extent to which it borrowed from theatre not only in terms of narrative content, but also in terms of aesthetic form, incorporating proscenium framing, pictorialist staging, and vaudeville attractions into its mise-en-scène. We will also discuss how advances in film technology (including the mobile camera, rear-screen projection, montage editing, and the introduction of sound) gradually altered the aesthetic and ideological relationship between film and theatre. We will then apply these preliminary findings, as well as readings by critics and artists like André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, Tom Gunning, Stanley Kauffmann, and Susan Sontag, to two cross-media case studies: a discussion of Samuel Beckett’s sole contribution to the cinema, Film (1966), starring Buster Keaton, alongside his contemporaneous theatrical short, Play, in a filmed version directed by Anthony Minghella; and a review of the historical trade between Broadway and Hollywood via the genre of the musical. Sticking momentarily with this narrower national focus, we will next examine the stage-to-screen collaborations and stage-versus-screen excoriations and exculpations of three giants of theatre and film in 1950s America: Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller. Closely analyzing A Streetcar Named Desire, The Crucible, and On the Waterfront, we will raise questions of authorship/auteurship, liveness and mediation, spectatorship and audience formation; we will also discuss style’s connection to politics via the new Muscovite acting “method” exported from New York to LA by Marlon Brando, and the taint of communism that inevitably followed. Finally, we will conclude by investigating how different avant-garde and experimental theatre companies such as The Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, and Vancouver’s own Electric Company Theatre have increasingly sought to incorporate film, video, and new media technologies into their dramaturgy. This will coincide with the local staging of a new work by one of the masters of this kind of intermediality, Robert Lepage.

And here is a promotional clip for Studies in Motion. Walk, run, or ride to the Playhouse to see it.

P.