Tatiana Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the opening scene of Ecos, a woman arrives onstage to build, piece by piece, an altar of tiny objects — bottles, a wine glass, flowers, a little cake, picture frames, salt, a dead plant.…

A funeral tribute collection? A shrine? We wonder about that. “I need this to work,” says Amaya (Tatiana Duque). “I am so lost…. I don’t know who I am.”

As we learn in this lyrical bilingual (English and Spanish) dance/theatre piece by Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez, Amaya is an immigrant who left her home and her family of immigrants 15 years before, and hasn’t returned. And she hopes to “open the doors to the past,” ever-receding in time and memory: “how hard it is to remember everything; how hard it is to remember anything.”

And “la ofrenda,” the offering she’s assembled, is her way of conjuring her past, her immigrant parents and their immigrant parents worlds away — and their dreams, motives, and regrets about changing their lives. “Coming to Canada was easy,” says Amaya. “Now I don’t know if it was the right thing to do.” The question that haunts her, and propels Ecos forward, dead plant included, is “Can I still grow if I have no roots?”

Tatiana Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts. Photo by Mat Simpson

Ecos, a bilingual word if ever there was one, is a ghost story of sorts. And the first to arrive on the scene through the curtains that separate present and past (designers: Even Gilchrist and Whittyn Jason) is Eli (Alexandra Lainfiesta), a bright bold-outlined figure from Amaya’s childhood, demanding to know “why we are here.” Whether she’s a sibling, a friend, a young version of Amaya, an incarnation of the playwright, is up for grabs. But Eli is here to challenge Amaya to confront her motives and doubts full-on.

After that, the multi-generational stories come to life, in the play first developed at Common Ground Arts’ Found Festival (as El Funeral). Amaya and Eli host a sort of memory pageant. In Andrés F. Moreno’s evocative Diaspora Diaries Collective production, the finale of Common Ground Arts’ new Prairie Mainstage Series, characters appear and disappear through sliding curtains at either end of the stage, in atmospheric scenes. And sometimes they’re shadows in motion, visible echoes of the past. The lighting is evocative.

Fernando Garcia Reyes and Phany Peña, Tatian Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos. Photo by Mat Simpson.

The grandparents on one side of the family, who moved from the U.K. to Mexico (Phany Peña and Victor Snaith Hernandez), glide into view dancing, a love story that becomes a triangle. The grandparents on the other side (Ana Mulino and Fernando Garcia Reyes), who moved from Spain to Argentina, are a love story, too — one that begins to bend and crack under the stresses. Amaya’s parents (Reyes and Peña), who left Argentina for a life in Mexico, arrive too. As choreographed by Jason Romero and costumed in a time-travelling way by Gilchrist and Jason, they are vivid ghosts who seem to slide in and out of memory. The clarity of the storytelling, and Moreno’s production, are bona fide achievements.

The scenes are framed by a chorus of much-repeated self-doubting questions from Amaya — “was leaving the right thing to do?” or “what am I supposed to do?.” And they come to seem rather long on self-analysis, and grow unnecessary, not least because Duque is such an appealing, expressive actor, eminently able to convey doubt without words. And her counterpart, Lainfiesta as Eli, is charismatic, too. The look is beautiful; Nano Uribe’s  soundscore, after suspenseful opening riffs, seems a bit generically melancholy.

This six-actor indie production by a playwright mining her own past as a immigrant, is a welcome insight. It’s a rich and fulsome reminder, in this country of immigrants, that new Canadians move here for many reasons, bravely setting forth, leaving lives-in-progress, and bringing with them fascinating, dramatic pasts. They gain something, as we’re fond of reminding everyone, but they give up things too. They make big changes in their lives; they adapt; they regret; they sacrifice for love.

REVIEW

Ecos

Theatre: Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts Society

Written by: Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez

Directed by Andrés F. Moreno

Starring: Tatiana Duque, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Ana Mulino, Victor Snaith Hernandez, Phany Peña, Fernando Garcia Reyes

Where: Mile Zero Dance, 9931, 78 Ave. 

Running: through Nov. 9

Tickets: commongroundarts.ca