‘Welcome Home’: Teatro is back and live at the Varscona

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Belinda Cornish and Mark Meer. Photo by dbphotographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After catapulting its entire 2020 June to October season a year into the future, Teatro La Quindicina returns to their natural home, the Varscona Theatre stage, for the next three Fridays.

They’re back “with cautious aplomb and flamboyant vigilance” as billed (which sounds like a stage direction in a Teatro screwball). What’s on deck is an experimental live variety/concert/magazine show to celebrate the occasion. Welcome Home comes with all the festive trimmings — like singing, dancing, and a real live in-person audience (all with strict COVID protocols in place). Ah, and a “new non-contact playlet by resident playwright Stewart Lemoine.

Teatro, it must be said, has never really taken to Zoom and platforms of that ilk. When other theatres did online staged readings or live streamed events during these strangest of summers, Teatro sent out scripts of Lemoine comedies for its audiences to read.

“We’re trying to not let the building go silent,” says Lemoine modestly of the venture. The only theatrical event that’s happened in person at the Varscona so far is Plain Jane Theatre’s Scenes From The Sidewalk: An Inside Out Cabaret, which had us, the audience of 20 distanced, masked, theatre-hungry souls, in the lobby looking outside the main street window at the performers singing and dancing outside on 83rd Avenue. “Joyful and ingenious,” as Lemoine says.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

And now there’s a new Teatro variety venture for an audience of 45 or so (depending on the exact configuration of audience groups) inside the 200-seat steeply-raked theatre at the Varscona. Tickets are free; donations are encouraged.

The glamorous co-hosts are couple Belinda Cornish and Mark Meer. And the cast of physically distanced triple-threats are Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Steven Greenfield, and newcomer Chariz Faulmino, who would have been in the Teatro musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s this past summer had the world been different.

As for the new Lemoine playlet, Poking The Dragon – A Lockdown Experience, its theatrical premise, as the playwright describes, is epistolary, a perfect form for this pandemical epoch. It isn’t the first time Lemoine has ventured into correspondence for his theatrical storytelling. Love Litigants (1998), for example, is a series of letters spun from a one-night stand between a student and a cashier. The Hudson’s Bay Story, revived occasionally for Teatro New Year’s Eve shows, is an exchange of letters between head office and an increasingly disgruntled Bay employee who’s taken offence at Eydie Gormé’s version of Sleigh Ride, played every morning before store opening.

Welcome Home, made possible by EPCOR’s Heart and Soul fund, is “our opportunity to experiment with what’s possible,” says Lemoine simply. “We want to catch up with people…. To perform or to witness is a privilege.”

PREVIEW

Welcome Home

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Starring: Belinda Cornish, Mark Meer, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Chariz Faulmino, Steven Greenfield

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday, plus Oct. 30 and Nov. 6

Tickets and COVID protocol details: teatro.com

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on ‘Welcome Home’: Teatro is back and live at the Varscona

Hands across the border: the Citadel and a Chicago international new play festival

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Tonight at 6 p.m., Zoom brings us, live, an unusual collaboration, cross-border in both its production and subject matter.

A Distinct Society, by the Canadian-born New York-based playwright/director Kareem Fahmy, who’s of Egyptian extraction, represents Canada at the 11th annual International Voices Project in Chicago — an international new play festival happening in partnership with the Citadel Theatre, the Consulate General of Canada in Chicago, and Chicago’s Silk Road Rising. The cast includes three Chicago actors, plus two familiar to Citadel audiences: Nicole St. Martin (last seen at the Citadel in Sweat) and Will Brisbin (Matilda).

The play is set in a library poised on the border between Quebec and Vermont, and involves an Iranian family separated by the “Muslim ban.”

For this enterprise, St. Martin says she interviewed her mother, a Montreal anglophone, about the impact of the FLQ Crisis on life for her and her husband, a francophone. The play, she says, “is a cool piece of writing that explores a contentious part of our history that isn’t much talked about, while relating it to another, current, world crisis.”

After tonight’s performance you can ask St Martin to expand on a subject that doesn’t reach the world stage very often. She’ll be part of the post-performance Q&A along with the playwright.

A Distinct Society is available for streaming through Saturday at ivpchicago.org.

Posted in News/Views, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hands across the border: the Citadel and a Chicago international new play festival

A Brimful of Asha: the generation gap in living colour onstage at the Citadel

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Nimet Sanji in A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Janice Saxon.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Nobody knows better than your mom what you should be doing that you aren’t doing, or what you shouldn’t be doing that you are doing, or what you’re putting off doing (like getting married before it’s too late). Right?

Everyone in the world who’s ever had parents knows this.

In the charmer of a play that marks the Citadel’s return to a LIVE (socially distanced) fall season Saturday, the gap between generations and cultures, tradition and the contemporary world, opens between two characters, a mother and a son, and the real-life story they tell, each from their own perspective, over tea. A Brimful of Asha chronicles, in a hilarious double-optic (with a stream of tart maternal interjections), a parental quest across continents — under the camouflage of an India vacation — to arrange a marriage for a 30-ish son.

The hit play, which premiered at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2012 and toured internationally after that, was made together by a real-life mother and son, from their real-life story and conversations. And the comic dynamic of the characters onstage is enhanced by the fact that Jain is a Canadian theatre artist, and a much-awarded one (actor, director, playwright, creator and the artistic director of Toronto’s Why Not Theatre), and his 60-something mom Asha is not an actor. Not only that, she has her doubts whether theatre counts as a real job, much less a reasonable career. Four years of touring with her son apparently hasn’t altered that view materially.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

The Citadel production, coming to the Shoctor stage Saturday (it was originally slated for March 2021) is only the second in which the Jains themselves are not onstage. But the play has found a kindred spirit in director Mieko Ouchi and her cast, Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji.     

From the start Ouchi, a theatre and film artist with a distinguished archive in both fields, found A Brimful of Asha “such a nice fit” with her background and career. Her own family, with its complicated multi-ethnic multi-cultural history, has been a rich inspiration; her most recent play Burning Mom chronicles her mother’s trip to Burning Man the year after her father’s death. Says Ouchi, “Ravi and Asha have crafted conversations that really did happen: real events and a real story, told through a theatrical lens. I related!”

“I felt a real kinship to Ravi, and right away felt at home with the script, both in (its) connecting to family culture, and the verbatim route to storytelling.”

“I draw a lot on my family’s story in my work,” says Ouchi, artistic director of Concrete Theatre, a company specializing in theatre-for-young-audiences. “My first project out of theatre school (she graduated from the U of A in 1992) was a National Film Board documentary Shepherd’s Pie And Sushi about my family.” Mid-development she was cast as the lead in Anne Wheeler’s film The War Between Us, about the Japanese internment.

“My film became about going back to my own family saying ‘what happened to us during the war?’ I didn’t know the details. What had brought my parents together in an inter-racial marriage that in ‘60s Calgary wasn’t exactly a usual thing?” Ouchi’s mom is Irish/ German/ Scottish, her dad Japanese. There was a mystery waiting to be discovered. “What brought these two cultures together?”

“I have a biological brother, and an adopted brother who’s Cree, from the Sturgeon Lake band. So Indigenous culture is also part of my family,” says Ouchi. Her debut film became “a story of bringing together cultures and generations.”

Shepherd’s Pie And Sushi set off an empathetic reverb from a wide spectrum of multi-cultural Canadians. “Ukrainian-Canadian, Italian-Canadian … it’s so fascinating because it’s such a specific story and all kinds of people still felt themselves reflected,” says Ouchi. “Ravi’s play has that same appeal…. You don’t have to be South Asian to relate; we’ve all had battles with our parents, or our children, over what we think is best for them.”

This entry point to universality comes with an unexpected, even paradoxical, discovery: “one of the first lessons I learned as a writer,” Ouchi says, “was that you tell a very specific story to hit a universal truth. It’s not obvious when you start writing…. You learn by interacting with the audience and feeling them recognize and respond.”

With A Brimful of Asha, Jain, she says, “has found a really beautiful mix of hilarious moments, and the challenging dynamics between parents and kids…. There’s a heartwarming real-ness at the centre.”

A big part of the fun, says Ouchi, is “the meta-theatre of it.” The play is “a partnership between a theatre artist and a ‘real person’…. The Ravi character is working very hard, theatrically, to tell the story. He plays girls, uncles, grandparents, his friend Andrew, maybe 30 different characters, everyone they run into. And his mom gets to sit there, putting her two cents in.” Ouchi laughs. “As soon as you do documentary and verbatim work you realize that the ability to tell stories is (naturally) in so many people, part of many cultures.”

The two actors in the Citadel production are both professionals of course. “They’re so excited to be in a rehearsal, making a play about the culture they share,” says Ouchi, one of the Citadel’s three BIPOC associate artists who devised the summer’s Horizon Lab: Where Are Your Stories?. “We’re all so happy just to be part of theatre activity. In a theatre!” The first day of rehearsal it just seemed so miraculous, so emotional, to be here. And then as soon as you’re here it’s normal again. Home. Even if we take hand sanitizer breaks every hour.”

Originally the play was written with a parent and kid working things out across a kitchen table. And originally, Ouchi’s production was destined for the intimate Rice Theatre downstairs at the Citadel. COVID distancing has transplanted A Brimful of Asha upstairs to the 680-seat Shoctor, for a (masked) audience of 100. “Because we’re in such a big space, we’ve made it a dining room table,” says Ouchi of adjustments of scale, including projections, designed to “make the play feel at home in the Shoctor.” And, as she points out, “the distance, literal and figurative between the characters actually makes sense.… A Brimful of Asha is naturally socially distanced!”

And there’s this: “In COVID times, here’s a very sweet, funny, good-natured play. And that’s personally what I’m longing for right now…. warm, comforting, lots of fun.”

Check out an upcoming 12thnight.ca conversation with playwright Ravi Jain.

PREVIEW

A Brimful of Asha

Theatre: Citadel, as part of Horizon Series LIVE

Written by: Asha and Ravi Jain

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji

Running: Saturday through Nov. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Brimful of Asha: the generation gap in living colour onstage at the Citadel

Rapid Fire Theatre is back live, across the river

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Flexibility!” declares Matt Schuurman. “It’s all about being flexible, in a space that’s flexible….”

He’s talking about improv, to be sure, a theatrically acrobatic subject on which he is an expert practitioner, mentor, producer. But the artistic director of Rapid Fire Theatre might have been addressing the infrastructure of live theatre generally these days, and the ever-changing COVID-ian rules that govern performing and gathering an audience.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

Mid-pandemic Rapid Fire Theatre has up and moved, from Zeidler Hall at the Citadel downtown across the river to the Backstage Theatre at Fringe headquarters, the ATB Financial Arts Barn. So, in this three-month commitment, Edmonton’s 40-year-old improv comedy company has returned to their old stomping ground in Old Strathcona. And as of Friday they’re returning with live (and live streamed) shows that embrace their roots.

For RFT The big plus of the Backstage, the Fringe’s adaptable black box theatre, is that, unlike the Zeidler, “it’s  a big open room we can configure depending on the rules…. We can add more seats, or we can go into full internet mode,” says Schuurman. Rapid Fire has done both, as he explains. They’ve created a 30-seat socially distanced cabaret, with tables for cohorts, and table drink service. And they’ve made the space a viable live-streaming studio too, with multiple camera placements.

“Let’s not focus on what we can’t do,” says Schuurman, a notable video and projection designer in addition to his improv repertoire. “Let’s say Yes (the improv mantra) to the situation we’ve been given!” And the improvisers of the company have never seen a restriction they haven’t wanted to be playful about.

Theatresports, Rapid Fire Theatre.

RFT, long Edmonton’s most internet-savvy theatre company, has been teaching a range of improv workshops, and performing improv shows, online since March. And their live shows will be continue to be live-streamed. For the opening, says Schuurman, “we’re bringing back Theatresports,” a team competition that’s been on hold since March.

“We’ve surrounded the stage in a Plexiglass box, a glass cage, so the cast can perform without masks, very close to the audience.” In honour of these particularities, with a nod to professional wrestling matches, they’ve dubbed it Apocalypse Cage Match. As Schuurman says, “typically, Theatresports is a a big ensemble show” that includes improvisers who drop in, spontaneously, for an episode. Improvising a schedule and ad hoc teams isn’t possible, times being what they are. Instead there are teams, 16 of them, set in advance, including roommates and COVID couples. And the programming is set up tournament-style, with teams that advance and others who are bumped out.

Double Feature, Rapid Fire Theatre.

Theatresports happens every Friday and Saturday night at 10 p.m. Before that, at 8 p.m., those nights is The Double Feature Improv Show, featuring two improv troupes, each with a showcase specialty and, as Schuurman say, “presentation that’s more theatrical, more narrative” than the quicker hits of Theatresports.

Even online, improv relies on audience cues and feedback, via chat windows and the like. “This is so much more direct,” he says happily of the return to live. “We can have an international audience, and the performers, online as well as live, can hear the audience reaction!” As he points out, the trickiest feature of online performance is “thinking of ways to engage the audience.”

The future is uncertain, of course. Ditto the timelines. “We’re not sure what’s next for us. But Old Strathcona and Theatresports bring back an era, says Schuurman. “It’s where I first started going to shows. And there’s nostalgia about being back in the ‘hood.”

PREVIEW

Theatresports and The Double Feature Improv Show

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10332 84 Ave, and online

Running: Friday and Saturday nights

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com

   

Posted in News/Views, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rapid Fire Theatre is back live, across the river

Curio Shoppe: taking the nightmare home … to your place

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Colin Matty as Will, with Curio Shoppe co-creators Megan Dart and (right) Beth Dart, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For 12 years, the creators of Dead Centre of Town have invited us on nocturnal excursions into our own haunted past — the graveyard where our darkest local secrets lie buried. Which is why we’ve found ourselves on location at Fort Edmonton, peering through river valley mist as the undead, the unsavoury, the unrepentant come to life by flickering firelight.

2020 is the year Catch The Keys Productions brings the nightmares home. Your home, that is.

It’s an unnerving thought. With Curio Shoppe, the latest from the sisters Dart, specialists in immersive theatre and macabre storytellers par excellence, the haunted house is … your place. In this shivery season, when the veil between the present and the past is the thinnest, your link between worlds is your internet connection. Ah, and your cellphone.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

Given the restrictions of the COVID-ian era “we’d been hoping to create a distanced in-person experience,” says Beth Dart, the director half of Catch The Keys with her playwright sister Megan Dart. “But with the (ongoing) construction at Fort Edmonton, there just wasn’t the space.” They decided to come to you, and haunt your house instead with an “interactive online nightmare.”

They studied international experiments. And they enlisted the Fringe’s inventive systems analyst and online designer Bradley King (the Dart sisters call him “Bradley the Wizard King”) to “build a brand new platform.” Curio Shoppe is, says Dart, a melange of pre-recorded video and audio, with “mysterious live elements.” Hmm. There’s an intriguing phrase that sticks in the mind, especially given the show’s uniquely come-hither billing: “a brand new theatre-meets-internet-meets-‘the call is coming from inside the house’ interactive experience.”

Morgan Yamada as Marie, in Curio Shoppe, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“Instead of laying miles of cable through Fort Edmonton” and praying for a lack of snow, Dart has found herself poring over “spreadsheets of what audiences track, in their own homes.” You get a ticket, a login and a password. Nature takes care of the outdoor dimming of the lights; you turn off the lights inside. And Catch The Keys takes charge of the options will appear on your screen. Every evening of the run, which begins Wednesday, four households at a time will see (er, feel, er, experience) Curio Shoppe, with new intakes every 15 minutes. “All you need is a stable internet connection, and a cellphone,” says Dart. Not to mention a spirit of adventure.

And you’ll find yourself immersed in a story, loosely harvested from the surprisingly weird and twisted local history that Megan Dart has mined for editions of Dead Centre of Town.

The “interactive nightmare” includes cameos from Dead Centre regulars, including Colin Matty, Christine Lesiak, and Adam Keefe, with two principal characters played by Morgan Yamada and Jake Tkaczyk.

PREVIEW

Curio Shoppe

Theatre: Catch The Keys Productions and Fort Edmonton Park’s Dark 2020

Created by: Beth Dart and Megan Dart, Catch The Keys Productions

Running: Oct. 21 to 31

Tickets: eventbrite.ca

    

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Curio Shoppe: taking the nightmare home … to your place

A night walk through Strathcona: Workshop West launches season with ‘an adventure into the unknown’

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Here There Be Night, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Workshop West Playwrights Theatre is back in action next week — live, on its feet, and in motion. And it’s with an original promenade adventure that takes you on a nocturnal walk through Old Strathcona.

The logistics of Here There Be Night (since there is no live theatre without intricate logistics in this new world) amount to a tour: eight locations (outdoors or in found spaces), eight original five-minute plays, for a solo actor and an exclusive audience consisting of you (or you and a partner) and a cellphone.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

The great outdoors, the built-in distancing, the (very) small cast size and audience, not to mention the short attention span required … Here There Be Night could have been specially created for these COVID-ian times. Oh wait … it was.

As Workshop West’s new artistic producer Heather Inglis explains, Here There Be Night, the highlight of By Fire (Part 1 of the company’s 2020-2021 season), was designed, from the outset, “to use the restrictions of COVID as theatrical conventions.” And the idea was a theatrical adventure that showcased playwrights, as per the Workshop West writer-nurturing mandate. “The language has been pivoting to online experience. But theatre is live!” declares Inglis, who arrived at Workshop West last year from Theatre Yes, the indie company she founded and led. “It’s a different medium than anything recorded electronically. Artists who work in theatre specialize in creating experiences for people who are in the same space together….”

Alternative theatre, immersive “guerrilla” experiences that happen in unconventional spaces, have been something of an Inglis specialty. The Theatre Yes archive contains an assortment of off-centre initiatives, installations, immersive experiments in re-working the usual dynamic between performers and their audiences. Anxiety, for example, gathered original “performance installation” responses to the title epidemic from six of the country’s leading indie companies, and then bused audiences to a secret Edmonton warehouse location to experience them. The National Elevator Project redefined “intimate theatre” by commissioning original short plays performed in a succession of downtown Edmonton elevators.

“Like everyone else in the country, we spent a lot of time thinking how to move forward, what programming could be in a changing environment, with new information every day,” says Inglis of the extreme and unforeseen circumstances of her new gig at Workshop West. “There’s such a huge risk in conventional theatre production on a number of different levels, since the house capacity has to be very small.”

“All across the country we were having conversations about how to keep some energy pulsing through the theatre,” Inglis says. The immediate inspiration for Here There Be Night she credits to a conversation last May with actor/ director/ dramaturg Brian Dooley, a veteran Workshop West artist now Montreal-based. In his time as head of new play development at the Citadel, he’d experimented with Encounters, a series original playlets performed by one actor for an audience of one, the personal touch in theatre.

Inglis extrapolated. “If we were going to do this, now was the time to go forward…”  The performers would be spread out, outside or in intrinsically safe spaces, within a three-block radius in Old Strathcona. The audience would access them, guided by their cellphones.” That was the geographical proposition. And, says Inglis, it involved an element of surprise in the ‘where’; that was part of the fun.”

Here There Be Night, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre.

The dramaturgical proposition for 10 playwrights, of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds (and varying degrees of theatre experience from emerging to starry), started with the requirement to write for one actor performing for an audience of one or two, in a five-minute piece, strictly no longer. And “built right into the writing at the very beginning, was that each piece was created for the specific scenario of COVID and the environment they’d be performed in…. The idea was using the space between the audience and actors as an important component of the theatrical experience.”

“It felt important to engage a bunch of artists to create, to practise their craft at this time, as opposed to doing a longer work by one playwright for 15 people a night.” Two of the ten writers are a husband-and-wife team, Aksam Alyousef and Amena Shehab. Their fellow playwrights include Beth Graham, Josh Languedoc, Bevin Dooley, Mieko Ouchi, Jason Chinn, Harley Morison and Mūkonzi was Mūsyoki. The audio narrator you’ll hear on your cellphone is award-winning filmmaker and horror writer Susie Moloney.

Their “thematic prompt” to the writers, says Inglis, was “the potentiality of the un-seen: the things we can see, the things we can’t see , the potential to find something in the darkness.…” It takes its cue from these uncertain times, “when everyone has spent a lot of time wondering about next week, next month, don’t ask about Christmas, the what’s beyond our present.”

“It’s certainly not a haunted house,” Inglis laughs. “But it ties in with the spooky season … the connection with what might be on ‘the other side’.” She reports, happily, that the “responses from the playwrights have been as individual as they are…. The audience will be treated to a collection of short stories that reflect unique Edmonton visions.”

“The pieces all adhere to distancing rules we must enforce. But they also involve the audience in some way. Not with ‘audience participation’ but the storytelling happens with them.” Although most of the playwrights are themselves expert performers, only Amena Shehab appears in her own piece.

The four directors  — Inglis herself, Patricia Cerra, Lana Michelle Hughes and Trevor Schmidt — are provided by the participating theatres, Workshop West, Theatre Network, Catalyst, Northern Light, and Theatre Yes. It is likely to be the season’s only example of BYOD (bring your own director) theatre.

The logistics of preparing the production are intricate, as you might surmise. Zoom has been only marginally involved. Rehearsals have happened, masked, disinfected, and on an elaborate schedule of staggered start times in the large hall at Workshop West headquarters near NAIT.

COVID: it’s not an age that’s been kind to musicals or romances, as Inglis points out “What makes Here There Be Night viable is that, after a big first day on Zoom, we don’t all have to be together…The director, actor, and stage manager can be very spread out.”

For both the artists and the audience, “this is theatre as going on an expedition into the unknown.”

PREVIEW

Here There Be Night

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre (with participation from Theatre Network, Catalyst Theatre, Northern Light Theatre, Theatre Yes)

Written by: Aksam Alyousef and Amena Shehab, Jason Chinn, Bevin Dooley, Beth Graham, Josh Languedoc, Mieko Ouchi, Susie Moloney, Harley Morison, Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki

Directed by: Patricia Cerra, Heather Inglis, Lana Michelle Hughes, Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Helen Belay, Nadien Chu, Patricia Darbasie, Sheldon Elter, David Madawo, Jameela McNeil, Christina Nguyen, Amena Shehab, Melissa Thingelstad

Where: eight locations in Old Strathcona (meet at the Theatre Network at the Roxy box office 8529 Gateway Blvd.; wear warm clothes and bring a cellphone, at least iPhone 6 or Android 4, plus mask and earbuds.

Running: October 22 to Nov. 1, staggered start times

Tickets and schedule: workshopwest.org

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A night walk through Strathcona: Workshop West launches season with ‘an adventure into the unknown’

An Exceptional Night In With Lucy Darling: get Zoomed on magic and mixology

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Lucy Darling (aka Carisa Hendrix) at home. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For an awful moment, says Lucy Darling brightly, “I thought this was one of those terrible juice box events!”

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

No fear, my (socially distanced) friends. When you’re a guest at L.D.’s magic comedy show An Exceptional Night In With Lucy Darling (coming to the Citadel’s online theatre lineup Friday), the beverage of choice, not to mention the chief prop and improv cue, is the cocktail. Thanks to the ubiquitous magic of Zoom, gussied up for the occasion with the latest gallery features, you’ll find yourself at Lucy’s place, as I was, on Sunday afternoon. And along with your fellow party-goers and Lucy’s lovely assistants (Richard Lee Hsi and Miranda Allen), you’ll see cocktails of your choice magically appear from shakers, and arrive in the proper-shaped glasses. With garnish. You’ll even see them defy gravity, hang upside down, and freeze.

And the booze will be accompanied by a non-stop stream of funny, improvised chat from the retro-glam character in the golden age diva gown. Lucy Darling, the star with the ‘40s cadence, the kewpie charm, the shellacked bouffant hair, and the wicked glint, is one of the alter-egos of the Calgary-based magician Carisa Hendrix.

Henrix is also, incidentally, the Guinness record-holder for how long she can hold a lit torch in her mouth (witness the documentary Girl On Fire). Which would seem to have only a peripheral connection with her expertise in card tricks or cup-and-ball games. And none at all with Lucy’s uncanny ability, having asked an audience member for the name of their favourite book, to produce that very volume. Right then and there. 

It’s a startling array of skills, to say the least, that Hendrix brings to the table (hers, as it happens in these COVIDian times). And one of them, you’ll discover, in a live Zoom “meeting” that brings 36 of us together, along with Lucy’s assistants, is an uncanny knack for making magic “real,” which is to say convincing, online. 

As Lucy points out “there can be no magic without surprise.” And quite possibly there can be no magic without audience interaction. But being online makes the latter a very tricky achievement in spontaneity — hard work that needs to seem live, much less easeful — as we know now from a variety of theatrical experiments, on the spectrum from deadening to enlivening, that have happened on a variety of platforms in the last six months.  

“Wit,” declares Lucy, “is my favourite of the seven accessible forms of intelligence.” She combines it with charm, a flirtatious relationship with the X-rated, and a redeeming whiff of eau de self-mockery. Plus the gift of the gab . And suddenly, there are volunteers, in the Zoom “gallery view,” for the “virtual front row.”

Lucy is a great retainer of individual names, with running gags attached to each. And the show has segments. There’s Mixology with Lucy Darling (respond to the poll, and take notes). Ask Lucy has this dexterous personnage improvise answers to questions submitted by the audience in advance. What are Lucy’s quarantine activities? someone wondered. Raising potatoes, she says instantly. Since potatoes make vodka. And so it goes. 

Bonus: two impressive Edmonton theatre artists star in their own sequences:  Actor/dancer Lee Hsi and actor/escapologist Allen. There’s an impressive array of entertainment talent on display at Lucy’s party. And, yes (to anticipate your party thought), there are contests and prizes. Damn. Shoulda worn my sequinned vest.    

REVIEW

An Exceptional Evening In With Lucy Darling

Theatre: Ballyhoo Entertainment

Starring: Carissa Hendrix, Richard Lee Hsi, Miranda Allen

Where: online, live-streamed on Zoom

When: Friday and Saturday, and Oct. 16 and 17

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com

Posted in Previews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on An Exceptional Night In With Lucy Darling: get Zoomed on magic and mixology

Cool breath in, warm breath out: Catalyst’s ‘until the next breath’ in the great outdoors

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

until the next breath, Catalyst, Grand Acts of Theatre. Photo by Alan Kellogg.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

From the River Road at dusk, you catch a glimpse of something mysterious through the trees of Victoria Park. Rounded huts — hives? a village perhaps? — glowing from within, and strung with twinkling lights.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

We’ve arrived at until the next breath, Catalyst Theatre’s Grand Act of Theatre — “marking the moment,” as the National Arts Centre says of its initiative to engage live, outdoor, one-off (COVID-safe) shows from 11 of the country’s most innovative performing arts companies.

From the parking lot the site looks like an exotic base camp at the North Pole. “Welcome back to the theatre!” says the masked person with smiling eyes working the (distanced, ski-jacketed) queue with hand sanitizer and new masks in the park Sunday night.

And, yes, it’s a thrill to be out. How did I ever take it for granted? Why did I ever get all ironic about the ubiquitous over-use of the word “journey” by theatre people? The virus has stolen so much from us, touch and even breath included. What it can’t steal is the excitement of being with real live people in the great outdoors on a lovely fall night.

until the next breath, Catalyst Theatre, Grand Acts of Theatre. Photo by Alan Kellogg.

There are 100 of us (the free tickets gone in a second), spread out in a beautifully thought-out way in the Victoria Oval, a size-large clearing in the trees. Ghostly masked figures in white surgical suits glide through the park. And we’ll find ourselves, human chess pieces, on individual squares of a giant grid measured out on the grass, with our own personal lit blue balloon bobbing gently and tethered to out spot.

There’s a kind of other-worldly hum in the night air that’s nearly music. We surround an encampment of silvery balloons, a beautiful galaxy of glowing moons and planets of every size, including X-large, under a shimmering, gauzy veil. They seem to float, and with every gust of wind, to breathe. The whole set (designed and lighted by Catalyst’s Bretta Gerecke) seems ready to levitate.

“I invite you to consider … your breath,” says a hypnotic voice. The until the next breath book and music, by Catalyst director (and artistic director) Jonathan Christenson, are all about that. The prevailing artistic metaphor of the night, which has visual and aural reverb in Christenson’s production, certainly struck a chord with me. It started with the abrupt way we had to catch our breath six months ago. The news was literally breath-taking, a huge collective gasp. And there’s a sense we’ve been collectively holding our breath in fear ever since. 

What do we do now?

In a tense world where breath has become dangerous — we’re all masked because of it — the invisible voice, set to the yoga frequency, “invited” us to take another tack. Cool breath on the inhale, warm breath, heated by our own bodies, on the exhale. And the soothing voice persisted: breathe, to reach all the imprisoned parts of your body. It’s possibly the first time the word “buttocks” has ever floated through the night air in the Victoria Oval.

It’s the heart, however, that’s really engaged in Catalyst’s Grand Act, with its grand-sized cast of 50 actors, dancers, musicians, singers. The music has an incantatory quality, until the moment it turns to high-volume rock and chanting in an explosion of apocalyptic orange light, to evoke the instant the world changed … forever. Then, silence is deafening. Isolation is deadening. And (as we see) a simple physical embrace (by three cohort couples in the cast) is shocking. 

As its archive attests, the Catalyst team of creators, led by Christenson and Gerecke, with choreographer Laura Krewski and sound whiz Matthew Skopyk, have always gravitated to the highly theatrical intersection where bold visuals, music, and physicality meet for the purposes of storytelling. And until the next breath plays with the metaphor of breath and breathing in inventive ways. 

The present is uncertain. The future is unknown. But there’s hope in the exhale, a kind of rebirth as the cast emerge from their surgical suits and disappear into the darkness. At least that’s how I saw an open-ended finale that’s nothing if not enigmatic. The strings tethering the breath-filled planets to the ground extend in a multi-coloured palette of floating light as we leave. Is the earth exhaling too? 

And we take our blue balloons, each containing a tiny light and “a wish for the future from someone else who attended this evening — a message of hope as we step together into an unknown future.” Thank you to the anonymous person who contributed “I hope for greater empathy and understanding in our new world.” 

Posted in News/Views, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Cool breath in, warm breath out: Catalyst’s ‘until the next breath’ in the great outdoors

S.I.S.T.E.R. The Fox Den Collective brings you an online mystery to solve

Posted on October 2, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

S.I.S.T.E.R., The Fox Den Collective. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Alone and fretful? Weighed down by the unsolvable mysteries of the world?

The show that opens tonight online gives you the fun of wrapping your frayed wits around a mystery that actually can be solved. If you’re on the ball. When their house’s most valuable artifact disappears, the  sisters of Gamma Gamma Gamma, a venerable sorority on the University of Edmonton campus, have called in investigators from S.I.S.T.E.R. (Squadron for the Investigation of Sorority Transgressions, Evildoing, and Rapscallionism).

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

Enter, the audience. In groups of five, you sift through evidence, interrogate suspects on Zoom, ponder clues. S.I.S.T.E.R. even gives you back your friends (and relatives, if you think that’s a good idea) to work with you, no matter where they are in the world, so you can deduce together as a team. Or you can team up with like-minded strangers from here, there, and everywhere.

S.I.S.T.E.R. is the bright idea of The Fox Den Collective, an ingenious Edmonton-based indie theatre collective — Jessy Ardern, Sarah Feutl, Carmen Osahor — specializing in original, interactive, site-specific work. If you caught their Sterling Award-winning Fringe show Queen Lear Is Dead that took audiences to a church to attend the funeral of King Lear’s wife, you’ll have seen an intriguing example of their work.

“Think of S.I.S.T.E.R. as an interactive theatre piece,” says Ardern, TFDC’s resident playwright. “A cross between a theatrical show and a board game.”

“We email you links to physical evidence — a photo of vandalism that happened the week before the crime, a Gamma Gamma Gamma poster…” Then groups of five, from an audience of 25 per performance, repair to Zoom breakout rooms  to interview suspects that come to you and your pod there. “All the characters were at the sorority house when the artifact went missing,” says Ardern of the mystery that she, Feutl and Osahor created in collaboration. “To uncover the right solution, you have to ask the right questions,” says Ardern. “You have to be alert!”

Originally S.I.S.T.E.R. was going to happen live, with a live audience, at the John Walter Museum. COVID changed the plan. And the new online configuration has certain advantages, as Ardern points out. You can participate with people you long to see but can’t, in person. “One audience member has teamed up with his fiancée in England,” she reports. “So, it’s a matinee for her, and an evening performance for him. Three of our shows have already been bought out, all 25 tickets, by big extended families and big groups.” If you don’t have four available friends, TFDC will find you some amenable fellow-detectives at the outset.

The group of five — five interrogators, who question each of five suspects — is an ideal configuration for participation, TFDC has discovered. “Five means that everyone gets to participate.” They experimented with another interactive mystery, Off’d On Whyte, which sold out at the 2018 Found Festival. It gave audiences maps, and took them in limited groups into a variety of unexpected Strathcona locales — bar basements, hotel rooms, etc. — to find clues and make deductions. “Five was the sweet spot,” says Ardern. Audiences had a 70 to 75 per cent success rate at figuring out the mystery at the end, she reports.

Balancing the clue to red herring ratio, knowing what to reveal, and when … artful mysteries are tricky to create, onstage or online. “We had no idea how complicated it could be,” says Ardern. “Solvability” is a nuanced goal: “we want to make it manageable, but not easy.”

Because “we have no idea what questions the audience will ask … there’s a  a script but not in a traditional sense.” Instead, “each actor had pages about their characters and alibis. They know their characters inside and out. We’ve tried to prepare them for every possibility, a really shy audience, an aggressive audience…. And then it’s improv time!”

“In our dry run last week there wasn’t a single audience that couldn’t come up with questions…. Actually people get a bit competitive. Pride and prestige are at stake!”

PREVIEW

S.I.S.T.E.R.

Theatre: The Fox Den Collective

Created by: Jessy Ardern, Sarah Feutl, Carmen Osahor

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Michelle Diaz, Chariz Faulmino, Sarah Feutl, Marina Mair-Sanchez, Kristen Padayas

Where: online

Running: tonight through Oct. 10

Tickets: Eventbrite (singles, pairings and groups can be accommodated)

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on S.I.S.T.E.R. The Fox Den Collective brings you an online mystery to solve

Catalyst commits a Grand Act of Theatre: ‘until the next breath’ comes to a secret outdoor location Sunday

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“A grand act!” sighs Jonathan Christenson. “It’s everything I miss about theatre. I want to go to a big event. Where something happens. And it matters!”

“Grand!” declares Bretta Gerecke, lingering over an alluring word that’s dropped out of the arts lexicon of late. “Impactful! The idea of thrilling people, transporting people!”

No wonder Catalyst’s artistic director and resident designer found the proposition of Grand Acts Of Theatre irresistible. It came this summer from Jillian Keiley, artistic director of the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre. Says Christenson, she reached out “with the notion that right now one of the things we’re missing is the ability to create work on a large scale, something writ large, big metaphors. To invite audiences to a live experience that speaks to our collective experience, now….”

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here 

The Catalyst artistic duo was listening. In these micro-sized screen-bound times, it was music to their ears.

The Edmonton theatre with the archive full of original highly theatrical musicals was chosen by the NAC as one of 11 innovative companies from across Canada commissioned to create a Grand Act Of Theatre. Their creation until the next breath happens Sunday night, one time only, at a secret Edmonton location, performed outdoors by a cast of 50 for a masked, distanced audience of 100, under strict COVID precautions.

“Do you want to do this? And can you do it in two months max?” Those were the two questions posed to Christenson and Gerecke at the end of July. The answers: ‘Yes!’ and ‘Wow! What will we do?’

Christenson and Gerecke loved Keiley’s examples of Grand. The Newfoundland company that trundled a grand piano to the top of a cliff, and dropped it over the edge. Or the grand theatrical ‘happenings’ of the green movement Extinction Rebellion, with their m.o. “of creating an event that makes people stop and stare, and see the movement in a different way,” says Gerecke, chatting with Christenson (and 12thnight) on her first day out of quarantine after crossing the Atlantic from her London home base.

These are the sorts of experiences “that stay with you.… Surprise and imagination! The unexpected!”

BIG was a rare kind of draw. “We normally can’t do huge-cast shows,” as Christenson points out. “This is a chance to work with a lot of performers!” Says Gerecke happily, “we’ chose to max out. Maximum number of performers, maximum number of audience members — a two-to one ratio of audience to performer — in a big space. We’ve gone for it!”

On paper the single performance proviso sounds like a limitation. Au contraire. “Liberating!” says Gerecke. “An opportunity!” says Christenson. “Normally you have to be able to re-do it every night.” Gerecke thinks of Burning Man, where the design goes up in flames as the one-off finale. 

The majority of the $50,000 budget for under the breath goes to artists. The cast of 50 includes “a mini-orchestra” of eight, eight singers, and 34 actors and dancers, with a crew of 10. “No one’s busy right now. And everyone is like us, craving (expression),” says Gerecke.

Fifty people can’t rehearse indoors. So the scripts, the score, the choreography video (by Laura Krewski) are distributed this week. And there are four-hour on-site rehearsals Saturday, one for the actors and dancers, and one for the musicians. Everyone comes together for a final rehearsal Sunday afternoon. And then, show time! It might be a new speed record for a company that normally develops work over months, sometimes years.  

What was the inspiration for Sunday’s event? “The idea of the liminal space,” says Christenson, of these strange, isolating pandemical times where certainties, both past and future, seem to have vanished into thin air. “The in-between period. In coming-of-age rituals it marks the moment between what you were and what you will be….”

“We felt it spoke to the time we’re in, that feeling of being in-between. We don’t have what we had, and it’s unclear if we’ll have it again. And do we even want to have it again?.… The experience of resistance, that part of you that desperately wants everything to change, and the part of you that doesn’t, the fear and anxiety about what comes next.” 

As admired and successful theatre artists whose careers had come to an abrupt and indefinite stop-work, he and Gerecke, continents apart, spent the summer musing on the threshold moment when certainties seem to have evaporated. “We wanted to give expression to this feeling….” The tone was liminal too. “We didn’t want under the breath to be a dark statement but at the same time it couldn’t be glibly upbeat,” he says.”What mattered to me was creating an experience that gave expression to that feeling….” 

He thinks that’s what Grand Acts of Theatre is getting at, “the ability of theatre to make a big statement, where you recognize (something of) yourself. That’s one of the things art can do, validate your own feelings….” 

“And it’s something that can only be done now,” says Gerecke, who was in the final tech rehearsal for a production at Birmingham Rep when theatre suddenly, completely, stopped. “How we are now is, I’m certain, very different than how we will be six months from now.”

A Grand Act is a chance to think about “how do we mark the time artistically when the doors are shut to our normal access point for storytelling? How do we create something that you look back on and say ‘Wow! That’s how we were!’.”

The process of creating under the breath “paralleled our own experiences trying to work through where we were at in our own journeys,” says Christenson. “We’re trying to figure out, in different ways and different places, how to move past. How do you get to the place where you step into the ‘what’s next’?” ”

Gerecke echoes the thought. “What do you want to change? What do you want to hang on to? We’re all being tested across the board…. If you build something that crumbles, how do you find a way to re-imagine your future? How do I reinvent my career” She notes that two of her four upcoming theatre projects are “digital, augmented reality.… You help define what comes next.”

“What we landed on was the idea of breath,” she says of the experience Edmonton audiences will have Sunday. Breath is dangerous, times being what they are, and precious too. Nature, at risk in the world along with humans, has breath. “We’re in a state of inhale, of holding our breath….”

But you can’t hold your breath forever. Says Christenson “We’ve all been shut down. And now we have to move forward.”

12thnight talked to NAC artistic director Jillian Keiley about Grand Acts of Theatre. Check out the PREVIEW HERE.

PREVIEW

Grand Acts of Theatre: “The NAC Foundation wishes to thank the RBC Foundation as Presenting Partner of Grand Acts of Theatre. Also made possible by support from The Jenepher Hooper Fund for Theatre.“

until the next breath

Theatre: Catalyst, as part of the National Arts Centre’s Grand Acts of Theatre

Created by: Jonathan Christenson (book, music, lyrics) , Bretta Gerecke (design), Laura Krewski (choreography), Matthew Skopyk (sound)

Directed by: Jonathan Christenson

Where: a secret urban location in Edmonton

Running: Sunday, 8 p.m.

Information and free tickets (now a waiting list): catalysttheatre.ca. A five-minute video version will be posted by the National Arts Centre when Grand Acts of Theatre is complete. 

 

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Catalyst commits a Grand Act of Theatre: ‘until the next breath’ comes to a secret outdoor location Sunday