I have been following the evolution of plastic orchid factory's Digital Folk for the past three years: first as initial concept showing during the company's residency at the Cultch in 2014; then as an adapted micro-performance at the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island in 2015; and finally as a test run of version 3.0 last month at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby (you can check out past writing on the piece here, here, and here). Now the show arrives, in all its immersive glory, at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, where it opened last night, welcoming members of the paying public for the first time. During its long gestative journey (the metaphor seems appropriate given that two core collaborators on the show are now pregnant), Digital Folk has never lost sight of some key ideas it wished to probe through the research and creation process: how interactive media technologies have fundamentally altered patterns (cognitive and kinetic/physical) of group socialization; and how to transfer and interrupt such patterns within a live performance environment.
The first idea plays out through a proliferation of mirroring techniques in the piece. There are, for example, the myriad screens with which performers and spectators interact: the television monitors that play the Xbox dance and music games with which we are invited to interface, mimicking the grooves of various cross-species avatars; the larger screens upon which the record of these efforts is sometimes streamed; even the screens of performers' smart phones, which they take out at one point in order to attempt a hilarious real-time reenactment of a group folk dance posted to YouTube. But Digital Folk complicates this particular feedback loop of connectivity by including other kinds of mirroring, including that which takes place all the time in a studio between dancers practicing their technique or learning new choreography. At various points throughout the piece, one performer will begin following another, attempting to reproduce the other's improvised movement as their partner wends this way or that way throughout the space; after a while, however, it becomes difficult to tell who is following whom. Then there is the outstretched palm used to start up the video games that in one powerful moment of stillness magically becomes a gestural hail to all the performers. Mirroring is also transferred to the grain of the voice, with the deliberately awful vocal mimicry of The Sally Field Project house band to classic tunes called up through software memory contrasting with the virtuosic display of human memory as Jane Osborne and James Gnam take turns echoing each other during a shared recitation and riff on a scientific article dealing with perceptual and spatial recall. The event of the echo, a vocal delay, returns sound to one altered, changed, so that the singular voice becomes double, something also neatly captured in this performance through the polyphonic--and polyglot--telling of a folk tale in multiple languages by Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, Diego Romero, Shion Carter, and Vanessa Goodman.
In Digital Folk the audience becomes a fundamental part of the tale being told. Invited to don various bits of costume as we enter the performance space--an immersive installation built within the Wong Theatre--we are then free to roam about the wonderful set designed by Natalie Purschwitz and lit by James Proudfoot, taking a seat on the stacked blocks in the centre, lying down on a bit of indoor-outdoor carpet, joining the performers and fellow audience members in a group dance to one of the videos, or just standing and watching in the corner. And while there are certainly moments in the piece--for example, at the end when Romero and Bevin Poole Leinweber perform a duet of David Bowie's Starman on the ukulele--where the audience is prompted to adopt the spectating habits of a traditional proscenium setting, becoming silent and still and directionally attentive, what struck me in this version of the show is how much I wanted to participate: twice getting up to shake it, shake it alongside Goodman and Lexi Vajda and others to different dance videos; and accepting without hesitation a slow dance to Freebird with fellow audience member Walter. And it is in these unscripted--or rather, unprogrammed--bodily encounters that Digital Folk as a live performance interrupts the one-way circuitry of human-computer interaction. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in that space of free play that occurs between the end of one nightly iteration of the performance and the start of another. To explain: Digital Folk, which is about an hour long, runs on a loop at 7, 8 and 9 pm over the course of an evening. Audience members are free to come in and out and to stay for as long as they like. While Richard and I, having both had long days, chose to leave after an hour, in ceding our show garments to new arrivals we were able to pass on a bit of recently acquired folk wisdom about how to be with others in this truly amazing performance space.
It has been fascinating to watch the development of Digital Folk. Just in the month since its penultimate test run at the Shadbolt the piece has undergone a superb edit in both content and form--though I do wish The Sally Field Project were still ethnomusicologists from the future. Transitions between different bits have tightened and all the performers have become freer and looser in improvising with the always shifting rules of this particular game. This includes the student interns from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, who in a unique arrangement facilitated through SFU Woodward's Cultural Programs (a co-presenting partner on the show) have gained valuable artistic experience through this project. Carter, Kayla DeVos, Rachel Helten, Hannah Jackson and Rachel Silver have all proven their chops alongside the more seasoned professional performers mentioned above. That three of them also got to see their former professor lamely execute a familiar repertoire of pop choreography (pelvic thrusts and finger points included) is something I'm more than happy to live with.
Digital Folk continues tonight through Sunday. I highly recommend checking it out. It's the first great dance party of the fall.
P
Showing posts with label Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. Show all posts
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Saturday, February 13, 2016
887 at SFU Woodward's
Robert Lepage is back in residence at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, following earlier visits in 2010 with The Blue Dragon (somewhat misleadingly represented in the program as inaugurating the Wong space--that would have been PuSh's presentation of The Show Must Go On) and in 2012 with Far Side of the Moon. This time he brings his latest solo show, 887, which might be said to be the patrilineal counterpoint to Far Side; like the earlier work, 887 is structured around Lepage's personal memories of growing up in Quebec City, with his father rather than his mother emerging as the main animating force of his nostalgia, and with the politics of the piece both more overt and more local. For 887, we learn near the top of the show, is the number of the apartment building on Murray Avenue in Upper Town that Lepage grew up in, the street having been named after the British general who, after the death of James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, presided over the surrender of the French.
A scale model of the apartment building serves as the central design feature of the piece. We are introduced in turn to each of the eight tenant families, Lepage's discourse on the residents' particularities accompanied by a miniature rear projection video that we glimpse through the corresponding living room window. It's a canny trick, for the act of voyeurism condenses both a general principle of theatrical spectatorship and Lepage's inimitable scenographic mix of the intimate and the industrial. Lepage, who delivers his own curtain speech, may be alone on stage having a conversation with us, but there is an army of unseen hands backstage (and in the tech booth) ensuring that the wonderful bits of stage magic he conjures for us unfold without a hitch--although to his credit, and in what has become something of a signature of the shows in which he performs, Lepage does welcome said technicians out to take a bow at the end of the performance. Then, too, Lepage has always been extremely adept at harnessing technology in ways that eliminate rather than expand the distance between performer and audience. So it is with the smart phone that the actor takes out as part of his curtain speech, a double mnemonic that he brandishes as a reminder for us to turn off our own digital devices but that also stands in for self-agency in the act of remembering that we are wont to cede to someone or something else, be it the software in one's iPhone or the hardware of built monuments to official history. At various moments in the piece Lepage uses his phone to insert himself and his memories back into this history, creating a live selfie feed of himself at his uncle's house during Christmas in the 1950s, or delivering newspapers during the FLQ crisis.
The illuminated model apartment building of Lepage's youth also opens up to reveal the well-appointed kitchen of his current Quebec City condo. Here we glimpse scenes of Lepage conversing with Fred, a former friend from the Conservatoire, whom Lepage has sought out to help him memorize Michèle Lalonde's iconic poem, Speak White, which Lepage has been asked to recite at a special 40th anniversary ceremony. Both the responsibility and the burden of Quebec's national memory as a linguistic minority within English Canada thus becomes the refrain against which Lepage excavates his complicated relationship with his taxi-driving father, a working-class man who fought in World War II and claimed to be a federalist, and who wished his children to go to an English-speaking school. The force of Lepage's indignation for the colonial inferiority he suggests his father was made to internalize is palpable in this work, which especially during the climactic scene during which Lepage forcefully recites Lalonde's poem likewise reads as a response to some of the slights against Lepage's previous work as being too apolitical. At the same time, the collective national memory against which Lepage is juxtaposing his personal family reminiscences--encapsulated in the final scene during which Lepage becomes his father, mourning the death of his own mother in his cab on the night of Pierre Laporte's murder--strikes me as somewhat conveniently frozen in time. As with the weaving of past and present in Lepage's film Le confessionnal (with which 887 has a lot of thematic and imagistic parallels), the retrospective temporality of the piece risks performing its own colonial whitewashing of the narrative of Quebec nationalism, which in the aftermath of Oka, of Parizeau's "argent et le vote ethnique," of recent debates over the niqab is anything but memorially pure.
P.
A scale model of the apartment building serves as the central design feature of the piece. We are introduced in turn to each of the eight tenant families, Lepage's discourse on the residents' particularities accompanied by a miniature rear projection video that we glimpse through the corresponding living room window. It's a canny trick, for the act of voyeurism condenses both a general principle of theatrical spectatorship and Lepage's inimitable scenographic mix of the intimate and the industrial. Lepage, who delivers his own curtain speech, may be alone on stage having a conversation with us, but there is an army of unseen hands backstage (and in the tech booth) ensuring that the wonderful bits of stage magic he conjures for us unfold without a hitch--although to his credit, and in what has become something of a signature of the shows in which he performs, Lepage does welcome said technicians out to take a bow at the end of the performance. Then, too, Lepage has always been extremely adept at harnessing technology in ways that eliminate rather than expand the distance between performer and audience. So it is with the smart phone that the actor takes out as part of his curtain speech, a double mnemonic that he brandishes as a reminder for us to turn off our own digital devices but that also stands in for self-agency in the act of remembering that we are wont to cede to someone or something else, be it the software in one's iPhone or the hardware of built monuments to official history. At various moments in the piece Lepage uses his phone to insert himself and his memories back into this history, creating a live selfie feed of himself at his uncle's house during Christmas in the 1950s, or delivering newspapers during the FLQ crisis.
The illuminated model apartment building of Lepage's youth also opens up to reveal the well-appointed kitchen of his current Quebec City condo. Here we glimpse scenes of Lepage conversing with Fred, a former friend from the Conservatoire, whom Lepage has sought out to help him memorize Michèle Lalonde's iconic poem, Speak White, which Lepage has been asked to recite at a special 40th anniversary ceremony. Both the responsibility and the burden of Quebec's national memory as a linguistic minority within English Canada thus becomes the refrain against which Lepage excavates his complicated relationship with his taxi-driving father, a working-class man who fought in World War II and claimed to be a federalist, and who wished his children to go to an English-speaking school. The force of Lepage's indignation for the colonial inferiority he suggests his father was made to internalize is palpable in this work, which especially during the climactic scene during which Lepage forcefully recites Lalonde's poem likewise reads as a response to some of the slights against Lepage's previous work as being too apolitical. At the same time, the collective national memory against which Lepage is juxtaposing his personal family reminiscences--encapsulated in the final scene during which Lepage becomes his father, mourning the death of his own mother in his cab on the night of Pierre Laporte's murder--strikes me as somewhat conveniently frozen in time. As with the weaving of past and present in Lepage's film Le confessionnal (with which 887 has a lot of thematic and imagistic parallels), the retrospective temporality of the piece risks performing its own colonial whitewashing of the narrative of Quebec nationalism, which in the aftermath of Oka, of Parizeau's "argent et le vote ethnique," of recent debates over the niqab is anything but memorially pure.
P.
Saturday, January 23, 2016
PuSh 2016: Jack Charles v. The Crown
Burglar, heroin addict, serial convict, potter, actor: these are just some of the identities Jack Charles has tried on during his lifetime, many of them simultaneously. In Jack Charles v. The Crown, brought to the PuSh Festival by Australia's Ilbijerri Theatre Company, and playing at SFU Woodward's Wong Theatre through this evening, we hear directly from the man himself as he dispassionately--and with an abundance of humour and grace--states rather than pleads his case before us and an implied, but no less omnipotently disciplining, state apparatus.
Accompanied by a three-man backing band, Uncle Jack, who has appeared in films ranging from Fred Schepsi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith to the recent Hugh Jackman blockbuster Pan, and who founded Australia's first Aboriginal theatre company in 1972, tells us what it was like to grow up as a member of Australia's Stolen Generation. Like thousands of other Aboriginal children born in the 1940s and 50s, Jack was forcibly removed from his family and reserve and raised a ward of the state in a religious-run institution (the equivalent of Canada's residential schools, which Jack cited as a direct parallel in one of his many local asides during the evening). Surviving physical and sexual abuse, and growing up with virtually no knowledge of his immediate family and ancestors, Jack forged a successful career as a singer and actor. Parallel to this, he was robbing homes in wealthy enclaves of Melbourne in order to finance a growing heroin addiction.
The story Jack tells is loosely structured around the revolving door of his incarcerations, one that replaced his name with a number: 3944. At first being "in the nick" isn't so bad; it gets Jack off the street and it is there that he takes up pottery, moulding clay with his hands in a way that reconnects him with his ancestral territories, and also allowing him to pass on his skills to his fellow inmates. A potting wheel is actually a key part of this work's otherwise simple set; it sits upstage left, and at various moments over the course of the show's 75 minutes Jack sits at it and shapes a lumpy bit of clay into a bowl or vase. The moment in the play when, sitting at his wheel, Jack talks about the intimacy of sharing this act with one of his fellow convicts, their hands touching as together they work the clay, their hair and breath intermingling as they stand over the wheel, is intensely moving. Jack is a born storyteller, and he has both the life and the voice to match this vocation.
Another dramaturgical feature of the piece is the use of projections and video clips, most of them drawn from a 2009 film, Bastardy, documenting Jack's improbable life shooting smack (which we actually see), burgling homes, and treading the boards. When in that film (which screened as part of PuSh's film series this past Wednesday), Jack is confronted with the prospect of another long visit to the nick, one that will almost surely break him, he decides to go clean. With the success of the film, Jack becomes a celebrity and among the fan mail he begins to receive are notes and photographs that start to fill in the missing pieces of his stolen childhood. This gift of getting his life back in his late 60s is what in turn inspires Jack's climactic post hoc appeal to the invisible magistrates of Australia's highest court; if the temporal fallacy of colonialism can construct the land upon which Aboriginal peoples have been living for millennia as terra nullius, and can likewise read Jack's stolen black body as a blank canvas, a tabula rasa, upon which to rewrite his history, then why can't the judicial system begat by colonialism expunge the equally specious causality of his criminal record?
While for me the play had, overall, a bit too much talk, Jack's concluding speech before the courts is a moment of undeniable rhetorical power. Referencing both his great-grandfather's act of political protest and the Fanonian colonial psychosis that has marked white settler Australians as much as Aborigines, Jack names what has made him both the sum of and infinitely more than a criminal justice system's anonymizing numbers.
P.
Accompanied by a three-man backing band, Uncle Jack, who has appeared in films ranging from Fred Schepsi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith to the recent Hugh Jackman blockbuster Pan, and who founded Australia's first Aboriginal theatre company in 1972, tells us what it was like to grow up as a member of Australia's Stolen Generation. Like thousands of other Aboriginal children born in the 1940s and 50s, Jack was forcibly removed from his family and reserve and raised a ward of the state in a religious-run institution (the equivalent of Canada's residential schools, which Jack cited as a direct parallel in one of his many local asides during the evening). Surviving physical and sexual abuse, and growing up with virtually no knowledge of his immediate family and ancestors, Jack forged a successful career as a singer and actor. Parallel to this, he was robbing homes in wealthy enclaves of Melbourne in order to finance a growing heroin addiction.
The story Jack tells is loosely structured around the revolving door of his incarcerations, one that replaced his name with a number: 3944. At first being "in the nick" isn't so bad; it gets Jack off the street and it is there that he takes up pottery, moulding clay with his hands in a way that reconnects him with his ancestral territories, and also allowing him to pass on his skills to his fellow inmates. A potting wheel is actually a key part of this work's otherwise simple set; it sits upstage left, and at various moments over the course of the show's 75 minutes Jack sits at it and shapes a lumpy bit of clay into a bowl or vase. The moment in the play when, sitting at his wheel, Jack talks about the intimacy of sharing this act with one of his fellow convicts, their hands touching as together they work the clay, their hair and breath intermingling as they stand over the wheel, is intensely moving. Jack is a born storyteller, and he has both the life and the voice to match this vocation.
Another dramaturgical feature of the piece is the use of projections and video clips, most of them drawn from a 2009 film, Bastardy, documenting Jack's improbable life shooting smack (which we actually see), burgling homes, and treading the boards. When in that film (which screened as part of PuSh's film series this past Wednesday), Jack is confronted with the prospect of another long visit to the nick, one that will almost surely break him, he decides to go clean. With the success of the film, Jack becomes a celebrity and among the fan mail he begins to receive are notes and photographs that start to fill in the missing pieces of his stolen childhood. This gift of getting his life back in his late 60s is what in turn inspires Jack's climactic post hoc appeal to the invisible magistrates of Australia's highest court; if the temporal fallacy of colonialism can construct the land upon which Aboriginal peoples have been living for millennia as terra nullius, and can likewise read Jack's stolen black body as a blank canvas, a tabula rasa, upon which to rewrite his history, then why can't the judicial system begat by colonialism expunge the equally specious causality of his criminal record?
While for me the play had, overall, a bit too much talk, Jack's concluding speech before the courts is a moment of undeniable rhetorical power. Referencing both his great-grandfather's act of political protest and the Fanonian colonial psychosis that has marked white settler Australians as much as Aborigines, Jack names what has made him both the sum of and infinitely more than a criminal justice system's anonymizing numbers.
P.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Klasika at SFU Woodward's
Klasika, on at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's through this evening, is unlike any musical you've ever seen. First off, there is the subject matter: it concerns the strange Czech pastime of "tramping," in which citizens of the Czech Republic dress up as cowboys--or rather, their romanticized version of American cowboys--and hang out in the forest drinking Pilsner and swapping stories around the campfire. Barbara Adler, who is of Czech heritage, stumbled upon the phenomenon while doing research for her MFA in SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, of which Klasika serves as her graduating project. But that's only the beginning of the story. While doing fieldwork for her project in the Czech Republic in 2014, Adler met the Czech film director Jan Foukal, who was shooting a documentary for HBO on the tramping subculture; Adler soon found herself playing a fictionalized version of herself alongside Foukal in his film, the two of them toting around their musical instruments (he on guitar, she on accordion) as they improvised awkward conversations with themselves and the tramps they met.
In Klasika, Adler ramps the representational layers up an additional meta-level, introducing us to Bara (a winningly open and sincere Megan Stewart), a sound artist from Vancouver who wants to head to the Czech Republic to record the sounds of folks just before they put their arms around each other's shoulders. Once there, however, she falls in with Honza (Paul Paroczai), a stealth ethnographer who finds traditional interviews boring and so fashions a recording device out of his guitar so that he can capture what the tramps--and Bara herself--say in unguarded moments. We hear these recordings played back to us as part of the work's complex sound design, which also includes a framing device of Adler and her fellow MFA student Robert Leveroos (excellent as the musical's Narrator) looping their own complicit unreliability as storytellers in a radio broadcast booth.
But mostly this work is about the songs, with Adler rocking things out with her band, Ten Thousand Wolves, and drawing on her spoken word artistry to craft lyrics that are unconventionally "musical theatre-y" in the way that they elevate the conversational to the poetic--as when Bara sings to Honza about how she's just a little bit afraid of the dark. Not that we aren't also privy to some big numbers for even bigger voices--chief among them Ashley Aron's as Barb the Bootfitter. Not only does Barb give Bara some important advice about the need to grow into her cowboy boots, but she and her fellow Rodeo Queens (Dominique Wakeland and Julie Hammond) also teach Bara a lesson about the feminist fierceness of high hair, bedazzled jeans, and bluegrass--in whose lonesome sounds, just like Bara's field recordings of birdsong and sheep bleating, there is nevertheless community.
For more behind-the-scenes insight into the Rodeo Queens, as well as the composition and documentation of the musical as a whole, check out the digital archive Adler and director Kyla Gardiner have been building on the local online arts and culture magazine Vandocument.
P.
In Klasika, Adler ramps the representational layers up an additional meta-level, introducing us to Bara (a winningly open and sincere Megan Stewart), a sound artist from Vancouver who wants to head to the Czech Republic to record the sounds of folks just before they put their arms around each other's shoulders. Once there, however, she falls in with Honza (Paul Paroczai), a stealth ethnographer who finds traditional interviews boring and so fashions a recording device out of his guitar so that he can capture what the tramps--and Bara herself--say in unguarded moments. We hear these recordings played back to us as part of the work's complex sound design, which also includes a framing device of Adler and her fellow MFA student Robert Leveroos (excellent as the musical's Narrator) looping their own complicit unreliability as storytellers in a radio broadcast booth.
But mostly this work is about the songs, with Adler rocking things out with her band, Ten Thousand Wolves, and drawing on her spoken word artistry to craft lyrics that are unconventionally "musical theatre-y" in the way that they elevate the conversational to the poetic--as when Bara sings to Honza about how she's just a little bit afraid of the dark. Not that we aren't also privy to some big numbers for even bigger voices--chief among them Ashley Aron's as Barb the Bootfitter. Not only does Barb give Bara some important advice about the need to grow into her cowboy boots, but she and her fellow Rodeo Queens (Dominique Wakeland and Julie Hammond) also teach Bara a lesson about the feminist fierceness of high hair, bedazzled jeans, and bluegrass--in whose lonesome sounds, just like Bara's field recordings of birdsong and sheep bleating, there is nevertheless community.
For more behind-the-scenes insight into the Rodeo Queens, as well as the composition and documentation of the musical as a whole, check out the digital archive Adler and director Kyla Gardiner have been building on the local online arts and culture magazine Vandocument.
P.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Tempest Replica Redux
Last night, at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, was a chance to revisit Crystal Pite's Tempest Replica, the most recent of her works for her company Kidd Pivot. I had first seen the piece in 2012 when it was staged at the Playhouse by DanceHouse. After touring the work to the US and Europe, Pite took a year's sabbatical; now she is back, relaunching Kidd Pivot with another mini-tour of The Tempest Replica, one that will take her to Sadler's Wells in London, where Pite has just been appointed an Associate Artist, and for whom she will be choreographing a large-scale work later this year.
The good news, however, is that despite such high-profile commissions--and multiple offers to lead major companies elsewhere--Pite has made the decision to remain in Vancouver and to use the city (and, I gather from SFU Cultural Programs Director Michael Boucher, SFU Woodward's) as her base to make new work for Kidd Pivot. That work will now have to be project-to-project based, as the stable multi-year funding she enjoyed from Frankfurt between 2010-2012 is not possible here (the latest tour has been partially subvented by an Indiegogo campaign). Still, Pite seems determined to make a go of it, and we are the luckier for it. To have such an internationally renowned dance artist making work here, in Vancouver, and mentoring local performers and choreographers is extraordinary.
As I have already blogged at length about the 2012 Vancouver production of The Tempest Replica, I won't elaborate on too much more here. I mostly wanted to see if the archive of my memory of that earlier performance matched Pite's repertory re-enactment of the piece--not least as I have an article coming out shortly in Dance Research Journal (46.1) on Pite's work and so wanted to ensure that my description of the piece was more or less accurate. As far as I can tell, Pite has made only minor adjustments, tightening up a movement transition here, tweaking a sound or light cue there. I don't recall there being as much projected text from Shakespeare's play in the second half as I witnessed last night, but that may just be a trick of memory. Ironically, it is Pite's use of text (projected, narrated, etc.) that is partly the focus of my article.
The movement is as compelling and complex as ever, and it is always a pleasure to see how Pite's amazingly gifted dancers incarnate that balance--or pivot--between technical precision and fluid organicity that her choreography requires. This remains most kinesthetically affecting to me in the duets that structure the second half--with the lush and ethereal pairings between Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia), and Ferdinand (Peter Chu, filling in for Jermaine Spivey) and Miranda (Cindy Salgado), a counter-weight (quite literally) to the more tough and muscular ones between Antonio (Yannick Matthon) and Sebastian (David Raymond, replacing Jiří Pokorný), and Prospero and Caliban (Bryan Arias).
The Tempest Replica is Pite's most fully realized Gesamtkuntswerk to date, a piece in which movement and text and sound and visual design are seamlessly integrated. The contributions of Pite's Vancouver collaborators (composer Owen Belton, sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, lighting designer Robert Sondergaard, set designer Jay Gower Taylor, projection maestro Jamie Nesbitt, and costumers Nancy Bryant and Linda Chow) are central to this. That Pite has made the decision to continue working with this local community of virtuosic talent is her gift to this city. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
The good news, however, is that despite such high-profile commissions--and multiple offers to lead major companies elsewhere--Pite has made the decision to remain in Vancouver and to use the city (and, I gather from SFU Cultural Programs Director Michael Boucher, SFU Woodward's) as her base to make new work for Kidd Pivot. That work will now have to be project-to-project based, as the stable multi-year funding she enjoyed from Frankfurt between 2010-2012 is not possible here (the latest tour has been partially subvented by an Indiegogo campaign). Still, Pite seems determined to make a go of it, and we are the luckier for it. To have such an internationally renowned dance artist making work here, in Vancouver, and mentoring local performers and choreographers is extraordinary.
As I have already blogged at length about the 2012 Vancouver production of The Tempest Replica, I won't elaborate on too much more here. I mostly wanted to see if the archive of my memory of that earlier performance matched Pite's repertory re-enactment of the piece--not least as I have an article coming out shortly in Dance Research Journal (46.1) on Pite's work and so wanted to ensure that my description of the piece was more or less accurate. As far as I can tell, Pite has made only minor adjustments, tightening up a movement transition here, tweaking a sound or light cue there. I don't recall there being as much projected text from Shakespeare's play in the second half as I witnessed last night, but that may just be a trick of memory. Ironically, it is Pite's use of text (projected, narrated, etc.) that is partly the focus of my article.
The movement is as compelling and complex as ever, and it is always a pleasure to see how Pite's amazingly gifted dancers incarnate that balance--or pivot--between technical precision and fluid organicity that her choreography requires. This remains most kinesthetically affecting to me in the duets that structure the second half--with the lush and ethereal pairings between Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia), and Ferdinand (Peter Chu, filling in for Jermaine Spivey) and Miranda (Cindy Salgado), a counter-weight (quite literally) to the more tough and muscular ones between Antonio (Yannick Matthon) and Sebastian (David Raymond, replacing Jiří Pokorný), and Prospero and Caliban (Bryan Arias).
The Tempest Replica is Pite's most fully realized Gesamtkuntswerk to date, a piece in which movement and text and sound and visual design are seamlessly integrated. The contributions of Pite's Vancouver collaborators (composer Owen Belton, sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, lighting designer Robert Sondergaard, set designer Jay Gower Taylor, projection maestro Jamie Nesbitt, and costumers Nancy Bryant and Linda Chow) are central to this. That Pite has made the decision to continue working with this local community of virtuosic talent is her gift to this city. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
War: Requiem at SFU Woodward's
Things are bustling at SFU Woodward's, where several year-end shows highlight the immense talent and creativity of Contemporary Arts students across the disciplines. Last night I got a chance to see the senior repertory dance students shine in War: Requiem, an intense, athletic, and visually stunning show overseen and co-created by Rob Kitsos, and featuring additional choreography by the 605 Collective, Shauna Elton, and Vanessa Goodman.
The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.
Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).
It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.
Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.
War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.
P.
The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.
Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).
It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.
Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.
War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.
P.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Picnic at SFU Woodward's
William Inge's Picnic, recently revived on Broadway, is also the School for the Contemporary Arts' spring mainstage production at SFU Woodward's, directed by Bill Dow. The first thing you notice upon entering the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre is how Dow has radically reconfigured the playing space.
While the play is still technically staged proscenium-style, rather than using the well (and its hidden wings and flyspace) at the west end of the theatre normally reserved for such proceedings, Dow has shifted the axis 90 degrees, configuring his set horizontally along the south side wall, with its exposed brick, blond wood, and steel stairs leading to the balcony. This provides the perfect backdrop to Carmen Alatorre's stunning set, a see-through plywood and steel-framed scaffolding of the Potts and Owens houses, complete with swinging porch doors and a second-story window on the latter through which the men of the town spy upon local beauty Madge Owens (a quietly coiled Amanda Williamson). A row of chairs, in a range of mid-century styles, sits in the space behind and between the two houses; here members of the cast will take turns sitting when not on stage, watching the proceedings like a Greek chorus, their positioning opposite the audience providing a nice visual metaphor for the sense of enclosure, judgment, and stifling small-town surveillance felt by many of the characters in the play, not least the two Owens sisters (Kiki Al Rahmani plays the younger, bookish Millie with a perfect mixture of frustrated longing and youthful impatience). Finally, between the set and the audience risers is a long strip of astroturf, a picnic table positioned on it centre stage, between the two houses. Much of the action will take place on or around this table. But the green carpet also extends past the set, to the Wong Theatre's normal playing space. Which, we learn at the top of the play, is not empty; rather, it contains a grand piano. Here composer Janelle Reid will sit throughout the play, punctuating its action at key moments with soaring original musical arrangements of the poetry of Sappho, the perfect librettist of unfulfilled want (which, in fact, provides the play with its closing acapella refrain).
In his directorial notes, Dow says that he sees in Picnic shades of Euripides' Bacchae, with the drifter Hal Carter (a languid Sean Marshall Jr.) the sexy stranger who comes to town and unleashes in the womenfolk hitherto suppressed passions and desires. It's a persuasive reading, not least in terms of the play's strict adherence to the classical unities of time, space and action (the plot of Picnic unfolds over the course of a single Labour Day). And the female members of the cast, most playing well above their actual ages, are collectively superb in capturing the desperation and resentment that festers in women (young and old) suffocating--in different ways--under the oppressiveness of 1950s gender conventions. (Likewise, the men in the cast together embody a social obtuseness to this oppression, which they ignore at their own peril--as the bachelor Howard Bevans, played with just the right mixture of confounded humour by the lanky Jesse Meredith, discovers when he finds himself suddenly engaged to the spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney [a terrific Keely O'Brien].)
And yet this production is by no means a period piece. In preparation for attending it, Richard and I recently rented the 1955 film, starring William Holden and Kim Stanley. It seemed hopelessly dated, and watching a rather long-in-the-tooth Holden spout all those "Hey baby's" was positively cringe-worthy. But under the able direction of Dow, this young cast finds their characters' inner core of "want," and in the process they make this play exciting and new.
Picnic has one more performance tonight, at 8 pm.
P.
While the play is still technically staged proscenium-style, rather than using the well (and its hidden wings and flyspace) at the west end of the theatre normally reserved for such proceedings, Dow has shifted the axis 90 degrees, configuring his set horizontally along the south side wall, with its exposed brick, blond wood, and steel stairs leading to the balcony. This provides the perfect backdrop to Carmen Alatorre's stunning set, a see-through plywood and steel-framed scaffolding of the Potts and Owens houses, complete with swinging porch doors and a second-story window on the latter through which the men of the town spy upon local beauty Madge Owens (a quietly coiled Amanda Williamson). A row of chairs, in a range of mid-century styles, sits in the space behind and between the two houses; here members of the cast will take turns sitting when not on stage, watching the proceedings like a Greek chorus, their positioning opposite the audience providing a nice visual metaphor for the sense of enclosure, judgment, and stifling small-town surveillance felt by many of the characters in the play, not least the two Owens sisters (Kiki Al Rahmani plays the younger, bookish Millie with a perfect mixture of frustrated longing and youthful impatience). Finally, between the set and the audience risers is a long strip of astroturf, a picnic table positioned on it centre stage, between the two houses. Much of the action will take place on or around this table. But the green carpet also extends past the set, to the Wong Theatre's normal playing space. Which, we learn at the top of the play, is not empty; rather, it contains a grand piano. Here composer Janelle Reid will sit throughout the play, punctuating its action at key moments with soaring original musical arrangements of the poetry of Sappho, the perfect librettist of unfulfilled want (which, in fact, provides the play with its closing acapella refrain).
In his directorial notes, Dow says that he sees in Picnic shades of Euripides' Bacchae, with the drifter Hal Carter (a languid Sean Marshall Jr.) the sexy stranger who comes to town and unleashes in the womenfolk hitherto suppressed passions and desires. It's a persuasive reading, not least in terms of the play's strict adherence to the classical unities of time, space and action (the plot of Picnic unfolds over the course of a single Labour Day). And the female members of the cast, most playing well above their actual ages, are collectively superb in capturing the desperation and resentment that festers in women (young and old) suffocating--in different ways--under the oppressiveness of 1950s gender conventions. (Likewise, the men in the cast together embody a social obtuseness to this oppression, which they ignore at their own peril--as the bachelor Howard Bevans, played with just the right mixture of confounded humour by the lanky Jesse Meredith, discovers when he finds himself suddenly engaged to the spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney [a terrific Keely O'Brien].)
And yet this production is by no means a period piece. In preparation for attending it, Richard and I recently rented the 1955 film, starring William Holden and Kim Stanley. It seemed hopelessly dated, and watching a rather long-in-the-tooth Holden spout all those "Hey baby's" was positively cringe-worthy. But under the able direction of Dow, this young cast finds their characters' inner core of "want," and in the process they make this play exciting and new.
Picnic has one more performance tonight, at 8 pm.
P.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Push 2012 Review #12: El Pasado at SFU Woodward's
The Argentinean writer and director Mariano Pensotti borrows from film an aesthetic of seriality and simultaneity for his large-scale theatrical creations. Both were on display in La Marea, a site-specific work that unfolded in the storefronts of the 100-block of Water Street in Gastown during last year's PuSh Festival. And both are also on display in his latest offering for PuSh, El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal), now on at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's through tomorrow. However, Pensotti is also deeply wedded to telling stories, and for all the industrial staging and spectacle that go into his pieces, at their heart they remain about the desire for, and the drama of, human connection.
El pasado takes place on a large revolving stage divided into four quadrants, and from which we are introduced in turn (ha, ha!) to four twentysomethings living in Buenos Aires and struggling to shape a future for themselves at the start of the twenty-first century. Mario is a would-be filmmaker who has just started a relationship with a girl named Dana. Vicky is a veterinarian's assistant obsessed with her father's double life. Pablo is an upwardly-mobile advertising executive who stumbles upon a severed hand in an unmarked package left outside his apartment door. And Laura is a poor woman from the provinces who absconds to Paris with her family's life savings in order to remake herself, only to be dragged back home, broken and defeated. Indeed, this theme of attempted escape and unavoidable return plays out for all the characters, as each at one point or another over the decade chronicled in the play moves to another country with grand ambitions of starting a new life, before eventually succumbing to the weight of the past that stalks them so mercilessly.
The added conceit of the piece is that each of the character's stories is narrated to us in serial fashion by one of the other actors, who pass a wireless microphone amongst themselves to recount the different vignettes we are observing in the revolving quadrants, with their remarks then translated into English surtitles via two video monitors suspended stage left and right. Oddly, this does not reduce the drama in any way; if anything, it heightens it, and I was compelled not just by how much humour and physical action (especially involving Pablo and the severed hand he becomes obsessed with) was on offer last night, but also by the deeply affecting turns of all the actors, who in scene after scene must compete for our real-time attention, for an emotional connection, against the torrent of words that is constantly abstracting the present-tense, flesh and blood materiality of their lives into a bunch of dated calendar entries that can then be conveniently archived as part of our collective theatrical memory (the significance of all those file boxes brought out by the supernumerary stage manager over the course of the evening?).
Indeed, what Pensotti shows with this work is not just how our personal pasts, like voracious animals, are always threatening to overtake and consume us, but also how avidly we ourselves cannibalize those pasts: turning them into films (Mario) or ceding them to a friend's theatrical project (Laura); rewriting them in our own (Vicky) or, quite literally, another's (Pablo) hand.
P.
Monday, January 30, 2012
PuSh 2012 Review #9: Turning Point's Colourful World at SFU Woodward's
These are some of the colours I heard last night at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's, where the magnificent Turning Point Ensemble performed a full evening of music as part of the PuSh Festival.
Morton Feldman's "Short Trumpet Piece," a solo overture played by Marcus Goddard from the back of the auditorium, heralded bright sunbursts in advance of "Rain Coming," a short orchestral work by Toru Takemitsu that was as changeable in its tonality as Vancouver weather, and that put me in mind of the way the German painter Gerhard Richter is able to capture the complexity and startling vibrancy of so many shades of grey.
Next up was a 1915 cello sonata by Claude Debussy. In this intimate and playful work in three movements, the call and response between Ariel Barnes on cello and Jane Hayes on piano, particularly in the middle movement when both set about plucking their instruments in striking ways, conjured a dance of light and shadow, as when late afternoon sun filters through a leafy tree on a windy day and dapples the sidewalk in constantly shifting patterns.
Then came the centrepiece of the evening, the world premiere of Rodney Sharman's Chamber Symphony. Written in two movements, the first was a weird and wonderful jangle of dissonant sounds, like silvery icicles crackling in a wintry landscape that can't decide if it's warming up or getting colder. Things definitely get hotter in the second movement, a rousing take on the scherzo form, the strings now alighting a red flame beneath the other instruments.
After intermission there were two more works by Takemitsu and Debussy. Takemitsu's "Archipelago S." positioned the ensemble in five separate instrumental groups--including clarinetists François Houle and Caroline Gauthier in the upper balconies stage left and right--lonely islands connected by a deep blue sea of sound. And finally we heard Debussy's "Jeux," newly arranged by Michael Bushnell. Listening to its bright tempo changes (and influenced no doubt by the original Ballet Russes commission), I couldn't help seeing tennis whites, albeit requisitely dotted with strategic grass stains.
A most enjoyable evening of music, and a fitting tribute to Milton Wong, to whom the concert was dedicated.
P.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Margie Gillis' Thread at SFU Woodward's
Last night's premiere of Margie Gillis' Thread at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's was dedicated to the citizens of Libya and Japan. Amid all the media images showing the mounting devastation in both countries, it's reassuring to have an artist like Gillis remind us that what binds us most to one another, to our nameless other, is first and foremost our bodily vulnerability.
Thread is a meditation on the fabric--the lengthways warp and the crossways weft--of human connection, and it is structured as a journey. The piece opens with Margie attached at the waist to a cable suspended from the upstage left rafters--an umbilical cord?--and framed within a diagonal of light. It ends with her bent and crumbled on the floor in a tiny spot, a long white cloth spiraling around her body like a winding sheet.
Gillis has always been a gorgeous upper-body mover, her undulating arms frequently arcing and tracing and extending still further into the air via the striking costumes she wears--here designed by Vandal. Such was the case in a captivating middle section when a white dress with longs sleeves that extended well beyond Gillis' hands, in a manner akin to a straitjacket, occasioned some of the evening's most rending choreography. However, an earlier section in the piece also reminded me of both the subtlety and the complexity of Gillis' footwork. In this section, Gillis works with an elastic string pinned to the floor (see the photo above), threading her ankles and calves and thighs (and eventually her arms) in and around and under the string in such a way as to recall those games of elastic I watched my female classmates play at recess as a young kid--and which I always longed to join.
Thread also features co-performers Eleanor Duckworth (a nimble mover well into her 70s) and Marc Daigle, lighting design by Pierre Lavoie, and original music by Larsen Lupin. The show continues tonight at 8 p.m.
P.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Imprint and In Print
Turning Point Ensemble, Vancouver's fantastic new music collective co-directed by my SFU colleague Owen Underhill, has a new show up at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, with performances continuing this afternoon and tomorrow evening.
The program features three world premieres: Minx, a short orchestral work by Vancouver Island composer Rudolf Komorous; Cut Flowers, by Linda Caitlin Smith, a lush setting of 44 lines taken from the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for orchestra and soprano (the superb Phoebe MacRae); and Imprint II, an ambitious collaboration between Underhill and choreographer Henry Daniel (also a colleague at SFU) that combines music, dance, film, and multi-media installation, and that in putting all of these elements together makes fantastic use of this terrific new theatrical space.
Read David Gordon Duke's review of the evening in the Vancouver Sun here.
Meanwhile, in today's Globe and Mail we learn that the Victoria Fringe Festival, like Vancouver's event, is the latest community arts festival in the province to be denied a gaming grant this year. But not because they're a "commercial enterprise," as was claimed earlier by Rich Coleman in justifying the freezing out of festivals from eligibility for such grants. No, in the government's latest Kafkaesque (not to mention, tautological) logic, they have written (in an unsigned letter, no less) to Victoria Fringe Director Ian Case that the hugely popular 23 year-old festival does "not reflect the community, regional or cultural characteristics of [its] community," and is thus ineligible for a grant. Clearly, as with grants to municipal school boards and social programs across the province, Campbell and his band of philistines are just making their arts policy up as they go along.
In between trying to get their stories straight for the Basi-Virk trial, no doubt.
P.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Robert Lepage at SFU Woodward's
Tai Wei Foo in Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud's The Blue Dragon
This past Thursday night Richard and I were back at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward’s to take in the English-language Vancouver premiere of Robert Lepage’s The Blue Dragon, a special theatrical event that is being co-sponsored by my university, the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and Théâtre la Seizième (there will be a few performances in French). The Blue Dragon, which Lepage wrote with his co-star Marie Michaud (the English translation is by Michael Mackenzie), is both a sequel and a coda to The Dragon’s Trilogy, Lepage’s first great theatrical success. A six-hour extravaganza that premiered in 1985, The Dragon’s Trilogy tells the stories of childhood friends Jeanne and Françoise, giving us, in the process, glimpses of three different Canadian Chinatowns over the course of the twentieth century, beginning in Quebec City from 1910-35 (the green dragon), moving to Toronto during the 40s and 50s (the red dragon), and ending in Vancouver in 1985 (the white dragon), where we are introduced to Françoise’s son, Pierre Lamontagne, who runs an art gallery and dreams of visiting the real China. The Blue Dragon picks up the story twenty years later. Pierre (played by Lepage) has indeed made it to China, where he now runs a gallery in Shanghai, benefiting from a red-hot Chinese art market but also having to contend with multiple layers of government bureaucracy, corruption and censorship. Pierre’s personal life is just as complicated: embroiled in a tempestuous affair with a younger Chinese artist, Xia Ling (the dancer Tai Wei Foo), whom he has gotten pregnant just as her career is about to take off, he also comes face to face with a ghost from his past in the form of former lover Claire (Michaud), who has come to China in part because she wants to adopt a baby. On top of all this, during the course of the play Pierre learns that his father has died back in Quebec, prompting some intense soul-searching about whether or not he should return home for good.
In Connecting Flights, a collection of interviews with journalist Rémy Charest, Lepage has described the character of Pierre Lamontagne as his “alter ego,” a “linking character” who makes connections between the various threads of Lepage’s theatrical and cinematic narratives, and between those narratives and the audience: “He’s all-purpose because he is relatively young and an artist, which allows us to place him almost anywhere, in almost any circumstances. He’s a very flexible, very mobile character—a blank character, in a way. He provides the link between the story and the audience. His naïve approach towards the events he encounters reflects the spectator’s position.” However, Lepage also admits that “over the course of his incarnations, the character [of Pierre] developed a few inconsistencies.” Not the least of which are the narrative gaps in an ever-expanding and ever-more complicated fictional biography subject to the temporal discontinuities and spatial contiguities that are a hallmark of Lepage’s theatre and cinema in equal measure. But then narrative has arguably never been Lepage’s strong suit, and it should come as no surprise that Pierre, as a passing-through character more acted upon than acting, a cipher in flight from a past that nevertheless has a strange and persistent way of catching up with him, should, like his creator, spend so much time in airports, where all sense of time and space collapses in on itself in an endless succession of arrivals and departures. To this end, those readers familiar with Lepage’s first film, Le confessionnal, will likely have registered a degree of confusion about the plot of The Blue Dragon, and particularly the bit about Pierre’s father, as in the earlier film it is Pierre returning from Beijing in 1989 to bury his dad that sets in motion the unraveling of a long suppressed family mystery concerning unacknowledged paternity and abject maternity.
Feckless fathers and morbid mothers are a recurring theme in Lepage’s work, and we get them in abundance in The Blue Dragon, which presents us with three different endings concerning who among the three main characters assumes primary responsibility for Xia Ling’s baby. That none of these endings is particularly affecting—nor, in one case, even remotely plausible—stems from characters so sketchily drawn and for the most part emotionally lifeless that we never form strong connections with them or their stories. Combined with almost torpid pacing, it made for one of the more unsatisfying theatrical experiences of a Lepage show in recent memory. All of his trademark visual effects were featured in abundance (the projected calligraphy and falling snow being the most stunning), but owing perhaps to its hybrid status between his more well-known solo shows and large-cast, multi-hour epics, The Blue Dragon left me mostly cold.
P.
In Connecting Flights, a collection of interviews with journalist Rémy Charest, Lepage has described the character of Pierre Lamontagne as his “alter ego,” a “linking character” who makes connections between the various threads of Lepage’s theatrical and cinematic narratives, and between those narratives and the audience: “He’s all-purpose because he is relatively young and an artist, which allows us to place him almost anywhere, in almost any circumstances. He’s a very flexible, very mobile character—a blank character, in a way. He provides the link between the story and the audience. His naïve approach towards the events he encounters reflects the spectator’s position.” However, Lepage also admits that “over the course of his incarnations, the character [of Pierre] developed a few inconsistencies.” Not the least of which are the narrative gaps in an ever-expanding and ever-more complicated fictional biography subject to the temporal discontinuities and spatial contiguities that are a hallmark of Lepage’s theatre and cinema in equal measure. But then narrative has arguably never been Lepage’s strong suit, and it should come as no surprise that Pierre, as a passing-through character more acted upon than acting, a cipher in flight from a past that nevertheless has a strange and persistent way of catching up with him, should, like his creator, spend so much time in airports, where all sense of time and space collapses in on itself in an endless succession of arrivals and departures. To this end, those readers familiar with Lepage’s first film, Le confessionnal, will likely have registered a degree of confusion about the plot of The Blue Dragon, and particularly the bit about Pierre’s father, as in the earlier film it is Pierre returning from Beijing in 1989 to bury his dad that sets in motion the unraveling of a long suppressed family mystery concerning unacknowledged paternity and abject maternity.
Feckless fathers and morbid mothers are a recurring theme in Lepage’s work, and we get them in abundance in The Blue Dragon, which presents us with three different endings concerning who among the three main characters assumes primary responsibility for Xia Ling’s baby. That none of these endings is particularly affecting—nor, in one case, even remotely plausible—stems from characters so sketchily drawn and for the most part emotionally lifeless that we never form strong connections with them or their stories. Combined with almost torpid pacing, it made for one of the more unsatisfying theatrical experiences of a Lepage show in recent memory. All of his trademark visual effects were featured in abundance (the projected calligraphy and falling snow being the most stunning), but owing perhaps to its hybrid status between his more well-known solo shows and large-cast, multi-hour epics, The Blue Dragon left me mostly cold.
P.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Show Went On!
According to my sources at PuSh and SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, it was touch and go, with chairs for the audience to sit on being assembled and installed up until 5:30 pm. But last evening's launch of the 6th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival at the new Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's went off without a hitch.
In fact, the buzz was amazing. It started in the courtyard, where people assembled to gaze upon Stan Douglas's stunning new photographic mural, a massive reversible C-print that looks like stained glass, and that lends the revivifying project that is the entire Woodward's complex a distinctly sacred air. The buzz continued into the atrium of the theatre, where a line-up snaked around the room to collect tickets, and where le tout Vancouver arts scene was in attendance giving each other spontaneous hugs and shout-outs. The theatre itself is a stunning space, like no other in the city in terms of size and design, and I look forward to seeing many many more shows there over the years to come.
As for the show itself, Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On, what can I say? Not much, as it turns out, or else I will spoil the surprise for future attendees. What I can say is that as a concept piece, it was the perfect show to launch this year's PuSh Festival--in that space, in the heart of that community. Because the whole show is about producing an audience.
And last night's audience responded with enthusiasm and generosity and lots and lots of love to that call.
On with the rest of the Festival shows--starting with Nevermore tonight at the Arts Club on Granville Island. Hope to see you there.
P.
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