Steppenwolf, on at the Russian Hall in Strathcona through this afternoon as part of the PuSh Festival, is the debut production of Fight with a Stick, a new local company formed by my SFU colleague and former Leaky Heaven artistic director Steven Hill and veteran theatre artist Alex Lazaridis Ferguson. The work is an adaptation of Herman Hesse's 1927 novel of the same name, about a lone wolf writer, Harry Haller, who feels out of step with his times. (My lazy punning notwithstanding, the title of Hesse's book comes from the manuscript within the manuscript within the novel that Harry is given by a hawker on the street--and from which Ferguson reads in the show.) Ferguson and Hill also adapt, with this production, a design conceit from an earlier Leaky Heaven show, project x (faust), a take on Goethe by way of Rosemary's Baby that positioned the audience in front of a bank of mirrors, so that we became part of the action and also the object of our own categorical (and categorizing) gaze--you can bet that Hill has read up on his Lacan.
However, unlike in project x (faust), all of the action in Steppenwolf happens behind the audience, which we then see projected in reverse through the mirrors. And herein lies my chief problem with the piece: much of it was just plain hard to see. This became immediately obvious at the top of the show, when the performers hold up a bank of laptops, each cued to a series of interior images (rehearsal footage, I'm assuming). Besides the occasional hand that gets in the way and the rather clumsy choreography as the performers begin to move side to side with the laptops, the display screens were simply too small to be meaningful in any capacity other than as a nifty lighting effect; instead, I concentrated on the plinks of sound (street traffic, birds chirping) introduced during this sequence by the ever-talented Nancy Tam. Other video projections (by Josh Hite, working with Parjad Sharifi) were more effective, especially when combined with live bodies, as when Hill suddenly appears from behind a digital image of himself pacing the length of the Russian Hall stage, the image itself being "wheeled" back and forth by another performer in front of the red curtains.
As for the story by Hesse, Ferguson plays Harry, narrating a good portion of the text (and the aforementioned "Treatise on the Steppenwolf," in particular) from inside what I took to be a mini broadcast booth--or maybe it was supposed to be a television screen. I could listen to Ferguson read the phone book and be seduced by his voice, and the effect of what appears to be the actor reading the book backward is initially uncanny. However, this is also the part of Hesse's novel that rails against all the pleasure-seeking bourgeois folks with whom Harry feels at odds and I didn't really need this point driven home by the hand-held spotlight positioned above the mirrors that illuminates individual members of the audience in turn; the desired épater effect comes across more as biting the hand that feeds.
Things pick up when we enter the dance hall--via a whirling wooden house with multiple doors (the set is by Natalie Purschwitz, who has certainly been kept busy by PuSh shows this winter). There we meet the super-sexy trio of Hermine (Nneka Croal), Maria (Brette Little) and the saxophonist Pablo (Sean Marshall Jr.). They turn our Harry onto sex, drugs and other illicit pleasures, which culminates in a riotous orgy of onstage violence involving, among other things, several mannequin limbs (Nazli Akhtari, who danced with me in Le Grand Continental, and the wonderfully named Anais West round out the cast). This, one assumes, is the Magic Theatre that Harry has been searching for throughout Hesse's novel, and that Pablo finally introduces him to at its end. It is a space of reflective fantasy, a corridor of the mind with a row of doors on one side and, of course, a long mirror on the other.
I'm not sure that one needs to know this detail to "get" Fight with a Stick's take on Hesse's novel. However, it does help to understand that, as the creators note in their credit sheet, that this version of Steppenwolf is "a design driven theatre installation"--rather than, say, a devised play. It's also interesting to note that in the description printed in the PuSh program guide, the show is described as being "staged for" rather than in the Russian Hall. This is one of the things I have always loved about Hill's practice, including his previous collaborations with Ferguson on Der Wink and To Wear a Heart So White: how the specific material space of the Russian Hall has always been co-constitutive of the work.
I just wish, in this instance, that the audience didn't seem so superfluous to the process.
P.
Showing posts with label Leaky Heaven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leaky Heaven. Show all posts
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Friday, August 2, 2013
Leaky Heaven's der Wink
Leaky Heaven's latest performance work, der Wink, is a thrilling immersive experience, a multi-sensory exploration of space and how that influences the sense we make of our own embodied encounters in and with that space. Working with performers Alex Ferguson, Nneka Croal, Sean Marshall, Jr., and Kiki Al Rahmani, and with designers Lee Su-Feh (movement), Jesse Garlick (architect), Parjad Sharifi (scenography), and Nancy Tam (sound), for the rest of this weekend director Steven Hill transforms the Russian Hall on Campbell Avenue in Strathcona into what he calls, in his program notes, "a contemplation of co-occupancy and co-presence."
That transformation starts (and maybe ends) with where the audience sits upon entering the hall. Wooden chairs have been arranged on the floor into a square grid, but not all facing in the same direction, so that depending on when and with whom we arrive, we might find ourselves at a diagonal from the person we came with and/or staring directly at a stranger. Already familiar bonds of intimacy are shifting and re-aligning. The sounds of water lapping at a shore gradually give way to more industrialized sounds as shafts of harsh white light bisect the hall from the front and back and warmer orange shins illuminate the floor from the sides. The performers begin arranging a series of vertical cardboard panels--some with square openings cut into them--around the perimeters of the audience, using simple concrete blocks to weight them. Projections turn these panels into the facades of buildings, and as Ferguson takes a seat among the audience and begins to speak into his head mic about matters at once soulful and soulless we might be forgiven for thinking initially that the evening will be about urban anomie and our collective alienation from our built environment.
The piece definitely plays with such sentiments, but in ways that challenge the passivity and safe distance of traditional theatrical spectatorship. To this end, the cardboard panels do not remain on the outside edges of the audience; rather, over the course of the next hour, they are constantly being moved up and down and across our various rows, arranged into different configurations that, depending on where we are sitting, give us a front or side or rear window onto a series of mini social dramas enacted by the performers. Tam's referencing of Bernard Herrmann, the composer who scored so many of Alfred Hitchcock's films, implicates us directly in the voyeuristic roles we habitually assume within the scopic regimes of both the theatrescape and the cityscape, as, in this case, we spy through those cut-out squares in the cardboard a disturbing encounter between one couple at a private bathroom mirror, a flirtatious encounter between another at a public one, and a mother's rather perverse schooling of her son in the ways of discipline and punishment.
But we are not just watching the performers. We are also watching each other watching the performers. And, in doing so, we are not just part of the performance installation; we are the installation. This is underscored most materially when, near the end of the piece, the cardboard panels are rearranged to wall off different sections of the audience from others. It induces a moment of reverse agoraphobic panic (at least it did in me), as, suddenly separated from my community, my public, I no longer have any sense (quite literally) of my place within it.
Mercifully, the walls erected between us are only temporary. As Tam strums a tune on her ukulele and sings with perfect pitch about connection (is there anything this woman can't do?), the performers turn the cardboard panels on their sides, creating a maze, which they then move about, now seeking out direct encounters with individual audience members in order to offer us forgiveness. If, as the somewhat embarrassed recipient of one such performative absolution, I was reminded momentarily, in looking across a piece of horizontal cardboard at my partner, of the adage about good fences making good neighbours, I was also grateful to the always intelligent Hill and his extraordinarily talented collaborators for reminding me that theatre is precisely the collective public trespass we need upon our individual privacy.
Go see this show.
P.
That transformation starts (and maybe ends) with where the audience sits upon entering the hall. Wooden chairs have been arranged on the floor into a square grid, but not all facing in the same direction, so that depending on when and with whom we arrive, we might find ourselves at a diagonal from the person we came with and/or staring directly at a stranger. Already familiar bonds of intimacy are shifting and re-aligning. The sounds of water lapping at a shore gradually give way to more industrialized sounds as shafts of harsh white light bisect the hall from the front and back and warmer orange shins illuminate the floor from the sides. The performers begin arranging a series of vertical cardboard panels--some with square openings cut into them--around the perimeters of the audience, using simple concrete blocks to weight them. Projections turn these panels into the facades of buildings, and as Ferguson takes a seat among the audience and begins to speak into his head mic about matters at once soulful and soulless we might be forgiven for thinking initially that the evening will be about urban anomie and our collective alienation from our built environment.
The piece definitely plays with such sentiments, but in ways that challenge the passivity and safe distance of traditional theatrical spectatorship. To this end, the cardboard panels do not remain on the outside edges of the audience; rather, over the course of the next hour, they are constantly being moved up and down and across our various rows, arranged into different configurations that, depending on where we are sitting, give us a front or side or rear window onto a series of mini social dramas enacted by the performers. Tam's referencing of Bernard Herrmann, the composer who scored so many of Alfred Hitchcock's films, implicates us directly in the voyeuristic roles we habitually assume within the scopic regimes of both the theatrescape and the cityscape, as, in this case, we spy through those cut-out squares in the cardboard a disturbing encounter between one couple at a private bathroom mirror, a flirtatious encounter between another at a public one, and a mother's rather perverse schooling of her son in the ways of discipline and punishment.
But we are not just watching the performers. We are also watching each other watching the performers. And, in doing so, we are not just part of the performance installation; we are the installation. This is underscored most materially when, near the end of the piece, the cardboard panels are rearranged to wall off different sections of the audience from others. It induces a moment of reverse agoraphobic panic (at least it did in me), as, suddenly separated from my community, my public, I no longer have any sense (quite literally) of my place within it.
Mercifully, the walls erected between us are only temporary. As Tam strums a tune on her ukulele and sings with perfect pitch about connection (is there anything this woman can't do?), the performers turn the cardboard panels on their sides, creating a maze, which they then move about, now seeking out direct encounters with individual audience members in order to offer us forgiveness. If, as the somewhat embarrassed recipient of one such performative absolution, I was reminded momentarily, in looking across a piece of horizontal cardboard at my partner, of the adage about good fences making good neighbours, I was also grateful to the always intelligent Hill and his extraordinarily talented collaborators for reminding me that theatre is precisely the collective public trespass we need upon our individual privacy.
Go see this show.
P.
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