Dayna Lea Hoffman (aloft) in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Design by Narda McCarroll (set), Whittyn Jason (lighting) and Rebecca Cypher (costumes). Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the very last moment on the weekend I finally got the chance to see Mermaid Legs, the theatrical centrepiece of this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival.

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And there was magic to it. Not only was Sunday the final performance of Beth Graham’s new “surreal theatre dance fantasia,” it was the finale of an annual multidisciplinary celebration of female artists that, from birth, has always been resourceful, adaptable, experimental in spirit and light on its feet.

And the closing performance of Annette Loiselle’s production of Mermaid Legs was, too, a celebration of the dozen years of her artist-led artistic directorship since the festival she and her actor friends started was born.

Since 2013’s debut edition, a small, but not that small, bright idea has grown roots in this theatre town, and expanded. It’s worked to acquire audiences, profile, venues, grants, sponsors, multi-disciplinary branches. It’s re-calibrated itself, in agile live and online ways, through a pandemic shutdown. Like another festival (Freewill Shakespeare) of which Loiselle was a co-founding parent, the SkirtsAfire that its new artistic producer Amanda Goldberg inherits have become a venerable and elastic-sided cultural institution.

A lively post-show video paid tribute, with testimonials of all sorts, to Loiselle’s sunny temperament, a chronic tendency to say yes and why not?,  and present a welcoming demeanour to new ideas from artists of every stripe at every stage of development.

A veteran actor turned playwright and director who habitually uses the pronoun “we” instead of “I”, Loiselle bids not farewell but au revoir to SkirtsAfire with her premiere production of Graham’s Mermaid Legs, a festival commission. And, fittingly, its intricate vivid theatrical conjuring of the great mystery of mental illness, is a veritable testimonial to the possibilities of multidisciplinary collaboration.

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

The text from Graham, a witty and clever writer with a sharp ear for minute adjustments in family chemistry, gives us verbal exchanges along fracture lines that widen dangerously, like cracks in the ice you aren’t sure are weight-bearing, over a bottomless lake. The movement script, a collaboration between choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, playwright Graham, and director Loiselle for cast of three actors and four dancers takes us into the realm of feeling that explores an illness where words are beached on the shore. The title of the play, after all, conjures a hybrid creature who is neither entirely committed or fully suited to water or land, and must adapt to life in both.

At the centre is a trio of jostling sisters, responding in high contrast ways to the continuing series of crises ignited by the unpredictable behaviour of one of them. “How are you feeling?” the unseen therapist asks Billie (Dayna Lea Hoffmann, who’s terrific), the “problematic” sister whose unexpected disappearance from an apartment left in disastrous disarray prompts the sibling red-alert.

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

How are you feeling? There’s the crux of Mermaid Legs in one unanswerable question. And the way Billie’s inner disorder triggers an existential conundrum for all three sisters, beautifully played by Hoffmann, Mel Bahniuk and Noori Gill, is the beauty of this insightful and moving piece. Ava (Bahniuk) is inclined to cheery optimism; she has faith in the salutary bonds of sisterly support. Scarlet (Gill), the sardonic seething one, is a powerful portrait of weary frustration at the chaos Billie’s illness creates for the people around her. Both sisters are up against the endless delays in finding the right health professional, not to mention the elusive mix of medication and dose that might help Billie find some sort of equilibrium between wild fluctuations in order and impulse, calm and chaos.

In the opening moments, we see Billie struggling to join an ensemble in which she is ever so slightly out of alignment if not actively contrary to the group momentum. And Mermaid Legs captures a pattern in which Billie, imprisoned in fathomless despair within and without, sometimes bursts free of her chains in escapades of pure joy — conjured in ecstatic physicality and liberating bursts of colours and light (expressive lighting designed by Whittyn Jason) that play across the white drapery of Narda McCarroll’s graceful set design.

That whiteness of design, reflected in Rebecca Cypher’s costumes, is sometimes clinical, the bleached metaphorical straitjacket of mental illness. And sometimes the stage is in motion like the dancers, billowing like wind-moved sails. Binaifer Kapadia’s original score grasps both harsh solitude and warm harmony.

Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang.

As Loiselle’s captivating production conveys theatrically, Mermaid Legs is a story of life lived precariously, in a stormy world of extremes. Hoffmann memorably captures, the way Billie ricochets between them in a jagged rhythm, struggling for footing, or for air, or for survival, grasping at moments of sheer raw unedited happiness that don’t seem sustainable. Her sisters, on the other hand, plant their feet on terra firma, and find the map dissolving and the ground splintering beneath them.

The play is billed as “a fantasia” rather than a story. Narratives drift toward resolution, but in Mermaid Legs, the truisms about human connection and the human journey toward meaning are constantly subverted by an isolating illness without a “cure” in the usual sense. It’s a tricky challenge, in life and in art, to embrace tension without trying to eliminate it. And this insight has moved a top-flight ensemble of artists, led by playwright Graham, to shine light on a mystery terrain in a mix of words and images and sounds.

If the Skirt fits, is a holdover out of the question?