Connor Yuzwenko-Martin in Carbon Movements, SOUND OFF Festival of Deaf Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

To say that I’ve never seen anything remotely like Carbon Movements doesn’t really tell you anything about the fascinating theatre/dance performance/experience that opened the 7th annual SOUND OFF festival of deaf theatre Tuesday night.

It’s out-of-body, and also, quite literally, in-body. It’s silent and it’s loud. It’s visual and it’s “vibrotactile.” It operates powerfully on the metaphorical plain, but you can run it through your fingers. It’s groundbreaking in the sense that the ground actually does shake, rattle, and fly apart.

Intriguing? Very. How often do you have the chance to go to the theatre without having any idea of what will happen onstage, or in the house seats?

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The production, running at Mile Zero Dance’s new headquarters in Strathcona this week, is the work of the Deaf arts collective The Invisible Practice, billed as an experiment in creating a performance that hearing and Deaf audiences experience in the same way.

The concept for the show is the inspiration of the ever-adventurous choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, the co-founder of Good Women Dance (and poised to be artistic director of the Brian Webb Dance Company). And it stars Deaf performer Connor Yuzwenko-Martin.

Two years of research and experimentation in the making, Carbon Movements enlists the technological ingenuity of David Bobier and Jim Ruxton of the VibraFusionLab in Ontario. We of the audience wear Woojer vibrotactile belts, high-tech seatbelts wired to the central score. At dramatic moments in the production, in sync with loud industrial buzzing sounds, your ribcage vibrates, in a rhythm linked to the unfolding visuals on the stage.

Meanwhile, on little tables scattered among us — “our playground,” Hillyard tells us at the outset — we’re invited to touch and rearrange and fool around with a shallow layer of black particles that dance and vibrate. And the tabletops light up from time to time.

So, it’s a non-verbal theatre of connections: we’re connected in a very physical way, by vibration, to the explorations of the character on a stage. Played by the physically expressive Yuzwenko-Martin (his After Faust was a RISER production this year), he seems to arrived unexpectedly in a strange lunar landscape.

The surface reads like asphalt at first. But, as lighted by Hillyard, it turns out to consist of  black particles — carbon on a molecular level? —  that vibrate and move, swarming like alien ants. Our protagonist is in discovery mode first, tentatively testing their weight and density. And then he tries to control this post-apocalyptic new strip-mined world. But as he reconfigures the particles with increasing desperation, heaping them or flinging them, they always elude his grasp. Will he resist? Will he assimilate?

Carbon Movements registers, in a fascinating way, as a metaphor for our complicated relationship with the environment. And the title invites us — well, propels us — to think about carbon, fossil fuels, the enormous bleakness of the landscape in a world we try in vain to control. I can’t of course speak for the Deaf experience of the show. But for a hearing person, it felt engaging in an unfamiliar way, at a visceral level shared throughout the audience. Theatrical possibilities await.

Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW of SOUND OFF 2023.

Carbon Movements runs at Mile Zero Dance (9931 78 Ave.) Thursday through Saturday. Tickets: soundofffestival.com/tickets.