Noori Gill, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mel Bahniuk in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

Dayna Lea Hoffman (aloft) in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The new Beth Graham play premiering Feb. 29 as the mainstage centrepiece of this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival, has the best, most evocative, most intriguing, title of the season.

Mermaid Legs, commissioned by the theatre and multi-disciplinary festival devoted to celebrating the work of women, woman-identifying, and non-binary artists, lands on its toes Friday at the Gateway Theatre, directed by Annette Loiselle. And, as Graham explains, the play, subtitled “a surreal theatre dance fantasia,” sends a cast of three actors and four dancers onto the stage to tell a story of three sisters in crisis.

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One has vanished, leaving an apartment in disarray and a mysterious note. The other two are at a loss, struggling to understand, excavating and piecing together a history that includes mental illness. Graham describes Mermaid Legs as an experiment in marrying “movement and text,” dance and theatre — her first foray in an award-studded career. “I’m really excited about what we’re discovering,” she says of rehearsals that include theatrical collaborators at the top of their game: director Loiselle, an actor herself,  choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, and a design team that includes Narda McCarroll (set design), Binaifer Kapadia (music composition), Aaron Macri (sound design), Whittyn Jason (lighting design), and Rebecca Cypher (costume design).

“It moves around in memory and time; some scenes are abstract and repeat…. I tried to write a lot of images. And I had a lot of fun with stage directions — metaphors … that would inspire movement instead of being literal. Playwriting can be quite literal (laughter). That was a challenge!”

playwright Beth Graham

Any new play by Graham (Pretty Goblins, Weasel, The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble), who’s adventurous about trying something new every time out, is a theatre event, to be sure. And the special occasion of Mermaid Legs is enhanced by the fact that the production is  directed by the outgoing SkirtsAfire artistic director Annette Loiselle, her finale and au revoir after this 12th edition of the ever-expanding annual festivities she started in 2012. It turned out to be a bright idea that grew and grew.

Graham credits the origin of Mermaid Legs to Loiselle, and her proposition: “the idea of writing a play with movement, and also the idea of exploring mental illness…. We did a lot of interviews of people living with it, people who cared for them, loved them, were close to them.”

“The original impetus,” says Loiselle, one of the founders of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, was doubled-headed. In 2021, she was struck by a live-streamed Ballet Edmonton performance choreographed by artistic director Wen Wei Wang. “I had not done well watching live theatre on video,” a COVID staple, she says. “Some people got it and I never could…. And yet, this one reached through the screen and grabbed my heart!”

SkirtsAfire’s outgoing artistic director Annette Loiselle. Photo supplied

A close relative had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And the image that spoke to Loiselle most eloquently was “a clump of dancers, and one who didn’t fit in but couldn’t quite get out. Heartbreaking….” It was a direct route to what she was feeling. “It put me right there.”

“I wanted to do a show that centres on mental illness … there was so much of it happening all around us” as we struggled to emerge from the pandemic. “And dance had to be a big part of the storytelling, in some way, shape, or form.”

In thinking about the right playwright to approach, Graham was always the one, says Loiselle, a great admirer of her writing. It was only after Graham was enlisted that she discovered the playwright had done dramaturgical work with choreographers Brian Webb and Laura Krewski.

“We had no idea what it would look like,” Loiselle says of the play-in-progress, for which Hillyard, an experimenter herself in theatre/dance fusions, collaborated on puzzling out the movement-scape and its theatrical and narrative implications.

“It was hard to imagine till we got it up on its feet in rehearsal,” agrees Graham. “The workshops were really inspiring.…’OK, I can see how this works’. And that changed my writing quite a bit.”

“It’s still very much a play, and a story, with characters. People are talking, there’s dialogues, and scenes. A story certainly. But there was space for movement in telling it.” And the movement wasn’t just an illustration of what’s already happened.”

Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire. Photo by Brianne Jang

Both Graham and Loiselle found that the subject matter, a story exploring mental illness, lent itself in apt and exciting ways to movement. “A lot of things that can’t be described, or defined in words, the interior life of the characters, can be brought to life through movement,” Graham says. “And that bumps up the tension:  you’re watching what’s happening and what’s happening underneath.”

“The other challenge” of Mermaid Legs, she’s found was “how do we keep up the mystery…. One sister, Billie, has disappeared, and the where, the why and the ‘what’s happened’ is an exploration by the other two.”  The play, she says, “travels around in time. At times they know Billie’s diagnosis and at times they’re discovering it…. And they don’t fully understand the impact or the extent of it until Billie takes off.”

The stigma attached to mental illness comes from fear, Loiselle thinks. “It’s all around us, somewhere in the room. And we still don’t talk about it; Billie could be my sister, my employee, my friend…. And there’s been a lot of it in the performing industries,” generated in the punishing pandemic years.

“I started writing it as a play, with the idea of movement in mind,” says Graham. “And once we got into the (rehearsal) room with dancers, the sparks really started to fly….”

It’s been a lesson in artistic creation as she describes. “It’s fun to see how different brains work. And it makes me think differently.” Graham laughs. While actors are sitting around asking questions about their character’s motivation and back stories, “dancers are ‘let’s just get on our feet and try something’.”

Dancers, she proposes, “tend think in more abstract forms; they attach themselves to images or emotions…. They’re almost like visual artists that way. And Ainsley choreographs in a way that leaves a lot of space for the individual dancer to move the way their body moves, and make offers.”

Dayna Lea Hoffmann (centre), Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianna Jang

Dancers often solve the dramaturgical problems of a memory play just by being there, Loiselle has found. “Movement makes you feel something immediately…. Ainsley and I worked side by side building movement as we went along.”

Graham and Vlaskalic, whose theatre partnership includes Mules, Comrades and Dora Maar: The Wicked One, are working on a new play, inspired by the Greeks. And Graham returns to acting to star in Teatro Live’s next production, a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s 2015 comedy The Oculist’s Holiday in June. Loiselle is returning to her actor’s roots, too, and in a female-centric show. From June to September you’ll find her in Rosebud AB as Aunt March in Little Women the musical.

Creating new work is exhilarating, says Loiselle, who has the resumé to prove it. “But there’s something nice about not being in charge!”

Find out what else is on at SkirtsAfire 2024, in a companion 12thnight piece where you’ll meet the festival’s incoming artistic producer Amanda Goldberg. 

PREVIEW

Mermaid Legs

Theatre: SkirtsAfire Festival 2024

Written by: Beth Graham

Directed and dramaturged by: Annette Loiselle

Starring: Noori Gill, Mel Bahniuk. Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mpoe Mogale, Alida Kendell, Max Hanic, Tia Ashley Kushniruk

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Feb. 29 to March 10

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca