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Andrea House in Chasing Willie Nelson. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the romantic evening that comes to Fort Edmonton’s vintage Capitol Theatre this weekend in honour of Valentine’s Day, the mysteriously supple talent of Andrea House wraps itself around a musical icon you might not expect — at first.

Chasing Willie Nelson is the latest of the “storytelling concerts” that have become something of a House specialty, after such hit shows as Forget Me Not, Valentine’s Train, and Song of the Martingale. Says director Davina Stewart, the singer-songwriter (cum actor/ playwright) was a little surprised herself at the start to realize how many of the same songs she and Willie Nelson covered. How could that be?

The logic of it began to form, as titles flashed by and House and Stewart considered the multi-faceted career and repertoire of the legendary Texan songwriter who’s still touring at 83. Nelson sang Texas swing tunes, like San Antonio Rose. He sang country classics like Fred Rose’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. He sang Hoagy Carmichael’s Georgia On My Mind and Stardust, the now-jazz standard that gave his 1978 album its name. He sang Blue Skies by the musical theatre tunesmith Irving Berlin.

Musically, “Willie Nelson crossed boundaries; he can’t be pigeonholed,” as Stewart puts it. And his is a resilient six-decade left-leaning career that has never stopped turning corners. In his ‘40s, for example, fed up with the confines of the music industry, he up and left Nashville and moved to Austin. He’s acted in movies; he’s written memoirs (Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die). He’s embraced activist causes (Farm Aid).

“It’s so inspiring,” says Stewart of the life and works that frame the new House tribute. “And Andrea married it with her own life,” as she often does in her shows. House, after all, is not only a musician and composer, she’s an actor and playwright.

In Chasing Willie Nelson, the man comes to her in a dream, Stewart explains, of a show that wonders how songs get embedded in our minds. The cast includes Dana Andersen as the spirit of Willie Nelson. Mat Busby plays his son. And House leads a five-piece band on the dreamy musical journey.

PREVIEW

Chasing Willie Nelson: A Tribute By Andrea House

Directed by: Davina Stewart

Starring: Andrea House, Dana Andersen, Mat Busby, Andrew Scott, Harley Symington, Bob Blair, Chris Andrew

Where: Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: Saturday (7:30 p.m.), Sunday (2 p.m.), Tuesday (7:30 p.m.).

Tickets: eventbrite.ca or at the door. Dinner and a night at the Selkirk Hotel are possible add-ons.

Footloose at MacEwan University, directed by Dave Horak. Photo by Steven Stefaniuk.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Two of the country’s most inventive directors, award-winners both, take on classics of their kind with student casts this week, at MacEwan University and the University of Alberta’s Studio Theatre.

At MacEwan University, Dave Horak of Edmonton Actors Theatre (Burning Bluebeard) directs a production of an irresistibly dance-y and celebratory 1998 stage musical that advises us to “cut loose, footloose, kick off your Sunday shoes.” Which, you have to admit, sounds like advice for these parlous, regressive times.

It’s Footloose (as if you didn’t know) based on the ‘80s movie. And it runs (well, dances and generally rocks) through Feb. 18 at the John L. Haar Theatre, Centre for the Arts and Communications (10045 156 St.). Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

The Government Inspector directed by Ron Jenkins at the U of A’s Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

At the U of A, Ron Jenkins returns to Studio Theatre — Mary Mooney Distinguished Visting Artist — to direct Nikolai Gogol’s wicked blue-chip 1836 political satire The Government Inspector. What happens when an underling civil servant is mistaken for a high-ranking government inspector? An outbreak of farcical panic and terror amongst the corrupt and venal officials of a small provincial Russian town.

Hmm, perennial applications seem even more acute at the moment, for this evergreen comedy. Jenkins’ production runs on the Timm’s Centre for the Arts stage (87th Ave and 112th St.) through Feb. 18. Tickets: 780-492-2495 or ualberta.ca/artshows.

Moon at Midnight, photo by Marc J. Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Expanse has amply lived up to its name.

In the 12 years since Amber Borotsik and Murray Utas first imagined a movement arts festival, something that “started small and local,” as Azimuth Theatre’s Kristi Hansen puts it, has expanded. Exponentially. “Across the country and beyond.” With partnerships to match.

“Small and local”? Expanse was designed for a space that pretty much defined intimate, Azimuth Theatre’s late lamented Living Room Playhouse, where elbows regularly met. The festivities moved to C103 and the Roxy before finding a home at the ATB Financial Arts Barns’s various spaces as part of the Chinook Series.

So, welcome to the newer, wider Expanse, opening Thursday. This year’s four-program incarnation of Azimuth’s annual movement arts festival has a star performer from Italy, Dasa Grgic, for example. In the program Body Parts, she’s partnered her show BodyunTitled with  Re:Pairing by Montreal’s Parts and Labour Danse.

POLKA(dots) by Rosanna Terracciano. Photo by Reynard Li.

Coast to Coast, another of Expanse’s four programs, curated by Edmonton’s Good Women Dance, assembles creations from three provinces. From Calgary comes Rosanna Terracciano’s POLKA(dots), intriguingly billed as flamenco-meets-polka. From Toronto, There she was, created and performed by Jane Alison McKinney. From Vancouver, Submission to Entropy pairs contemporary dancer Karissa Barry with Elya Grant.

The Alberta Grown program has two pieces, including the premiere of vulnerable and soft and strange and stomping by Edmonton choreographer/dancer Aimee Rushton, who received Good Women Dance’ 2016 New Work Award, with its cash, mentorship and rehearsal space, to develop the piece during the past year.

Ainsley Hillyard, Good Women Dance’s muse extraordinaire, has been hugely influential in Expanse, says Hansen. The choreographer/ dancer/ movement designer moves freely between the worlds of dance and theatre, smudging the frontiers whenever she can. And Expanse has followed suit. “Chinook gives us access to the (much larger) theatre audience,” says Hansen.

The largest scale work at Expanse, running Feb. 17 and 18, is the much-awaited Moon At Midnight, a dance/theatre/sound installation with a monster movie inspiration, co-created by Amber Borotsik and Jesse Gervais. The eight performers encompass a range of skill sets, ages, experience, body types. And sound designer Aaron Macri mixes sound live onstage. 

“It’s dance it’s music it’s theatre,” says Hansen of the piece, which has been touring since the fall. “Fun and touching!”

And there are even performances between performances: The Lobbyists are a coterie of Edmonton’s emerging interdisciplinary artists who haunt the spaces between the spaces.

 PREVIEW

Expanse Movement Arts Festival

Theatre: Azimuth

Where: ATB Financial Arts Barns, various spaces

Running: Thursday through Feb. 19

Tickets: chinookseries.ca or at the door (pay-what-you-will tickets available two hours in advance of performance, first come first served.

multi-instrumentalist Brett Miles

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It started with a lack, and a need.

“I needed it to be a festival that I would be excited to go to!” says the excited curator of Black Arts Matter (BAM!), a new  multidisciplinary celebration of Edmonton’s large and growing talent pool of black artists. And if you don’t know who they are — yet — well, that’s the point.   

BAM!, opening Thursday under the Chinook Series umbrella, is the brainchild of Nasra Adem, a 22-year-old activist dynamo who’s Edmonton’s Youth Poet Laureate, a multidisciplinary artist herself, and a repository of bright ideas for nurturing talent, encouraging  cultural diversity, and inspiring community participation.   

When Workshop West’s Vern Thiessen decided that this year’s edition of the annual Canoe Festival would be devoted to international black artists, he reached out to Adem to create a local black showcase to run in parallel. “He recognized that there was a local of visibility, of people of colour, in our artistic spaces.… He left it up to me, so we dreamt up BAM!” says Adem, a MacEwan University theatre grad who grew up in Ontario and spent her summers in New York, “checking out the poetry scene, hanging out, soaking up the vibe….”

“I wanted to bring back that high energy to Edmonton; I knew we were craving it!” says the effervescent Adem, who talks in exclamation marks, fast!.

Nextfest audiences know Adem, now an associate artist at Workshop West, from her contributions to the “night clubs,” performance parties assembled by Catch The Keys Productions. She still considers Catch the Keys’ Megan and Beth Dart “my alt-theatre moms!”

Adem’s ideas tend to operate on the centifugal principle. Sister 2 Sister, the expansible monthly showcase for and by women artists of colour she launched a couple of years ago, started with poetry, music and dance; now it has workshops, a book club, a DJ collective, with more to come. “It’s all about community-building,” Adem says. 

So it is with BAM! Adem wants it to be “a hub for the community of black artists to see each other, to feel the excitement of being in the same room with people who look like them! I want to help them know what it feels like to belong, to stoke that up!”

It’s a contagious idea. When the word went out, applications came flooding in, she reports, more submissions than she could accommodate. Calgary artists applied, but Adem kept BAM! local. “I knew this would happen, she says happily of the response. “All we needed was an avenue.”

“I knew that Canoe had the theatre side covered”; that festival has solo shows, from Toronto, New York, and Senegal. “So I was thinking music and dance; I knew poetry, spoken word, would be a big part,” says Adem who started out as a dancer (“hip hop predominantly, and jazz in high school”) before she went into musical theatre or took up spoken word performance.

Musical theatre has fallen off her radar, at least for now, the result, she thinks of “me not seeing musicals that have my story in mind. More artists of colour!”

BAM! didn’t start small or tentative. The cast list includes dozens of artists, and each event “is centred around a theme or an idea,” explains its creator. 

Mustafa Rafiq, experimental artist and promoter

Poemcees Cipher, Friday night’s show, for example, is dedicated to poets who are also MCs and hip hop artists, and features Brett Miles. Saturday’s Young Lungs: Speak The Word is devoted to spoken word. Adem herself is part of Black Girl Magic Feb. 16, a large-cast all-female showcase of diverse talents.

spoken word poet Timiro Mohamed

Monday is devoted to workshops and panel discussions on everything from marketing to anti-oppression to media relations. Adem describes them as “the back story of the art, the ‘life part’.”

spoken word poet Althea Cunningham

“It’s why we celebrate…. We get to the root of things; we look at the core issues, the conditions under which our art is created and our voices are heard; the social and political conditions we’ve grown up in.” There’s even a playwriting masterclass with Canadian award-winner Cheryl Foggo.

BAM! opens Thursday, with a showcase that combines hip hop and West African dance, drumming, hip hop artist Selassie. And, of course, there’s a closing night party Feb. 19! Bring your own exclamation points. 

The full BAM! schedule of events is at chinookseries.ca.

PREVIEW

Black Arts Matter (BAM!)

Where: ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 19

Tickets: chinookseries.ca or in person at the Arts Barns box office where pay-what-you-will tickets are available two hours before each show, first come first served

Louise Lambert and Lora Brovold in Bust by Matthew MacKenzie, at Theatre Network. Photo by: Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

OK, you’re at a gathering in Vancouver or Toronto, somewhere in Canada that isn’t Alberta. Inevitably there’s the moment when you get asked where you’re from. 

The range of reactions? Pick one: the eye squint? the nuanced flinch? the pained smile of ironic sympathy? the expression that looks a lot like the person has just eaten a bad cashew? “Alberta” is never the good answer for this brand of sniffy encounter. Worse is “Fort McMurray.”

Playwright Matthew MacKenzie, who grew up here, knows a lot about those moments, thanks to his double theatre life in Edmonton and Toronto. He’s a veritable connoisseur of negative reactions — which is one of the inspirations of Bust, his new “dark comedy” Bust, premiering Thursday at Theatre Network.

“Alberta gets talked about a lot,” he sighs. “Stephen Harper’s from here. And the oil industry, well….”

The playwright, a thoughtful, engagingly boyish sort with a history of mining personal experience for his theatre, remembers being in Toronto last winter for a production of The Other, the third of his third-person plays about outsiders, the people who watch themselves watching themselves. “I was talking to someone working on a Fort Mac play, so she seemed like a safe person for me to say ‘hey, I’m from Alberta too!’” 

The reaction? “Euwww.” MacKenzie grins his rueful grin.  

And that was before the terrible Fort McMurray fire of last May. MacKenzie was back in the east, noting both the fund-raising initiatives for the fire victims who lost so much, and “the boiling hatred for oil and Fort Mac.”

There was a discernible motif of moral retribution (social media eats that stuff up): “You heard ‘Fort McMurray had it coming’,” sighs MacKenzie, who has friends and relatives who work in the oil patch. “‘Karma’ was a common sentiment; ‘Fort Mac and the evil oil companies deserved to burn’.”

This scenario finds its way into Bust, whose four characters, says MacKenzie, “are the most like me of any characters I’ve ever written.” Which is why he eschewed his usual method of interviews and research: “I was wanting to write a story in the realm of fiction, to relate on an Alberta culture level.”

A scant three months after the devastating fire, two Fort Mac couples are struggling with terrible loss and upheaval in their lives.  And, just to up the ante, they’ve been at a Peewee hockey championship game to cheer on their kids, and a bad call has robbed them of victory. 

Bust is one of the few plays in the repertoire to actually be set in Fort McMurray (the plays I’ve seen are peopled by the arrivals on the scene from elsewhere). Not only that, but it’s the immediately post-fire Fort Mac of this past August, when the ground has barely cooled.   

MacKenzie appreciates the unusual bravery of the theatre company where Bust is getting its world premiere. In its own way, Theatre Network knows something about fire and loss; their vintage theatre burned to the ground in the winter of 2015.

“Brad (Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss) signed on, right away, to something that could very easily have blown up in his face,” says MacKenzie, impressed. “Fort McMurray, fire, and ‘comedy’?!” He smiles.

The first day of rehearsal, he reports, the first question from the actors and the production team was whether MacKenzie was planning a sequel. “A sequel! You’ve gotta do a sequel!”

“The opportunity to write about something so current! It’s very now, not even a year!” The playwright sighs, “Theatre has the ability to be current and then … it mostly isn’t.”

Currency equals risk. And Mackenzie isn’t a playwright who’s shied away from that equation. Take his 2015 Bears, for example. It’s  a highly imaginative “multi-disciplinary comedy about the Northern Gateway Pipeline” in which a Métis protagonist in flight from the city through the mountains to the sea, gradually, magically, turns into a bear. SIA, his award-winning child soldier/hostage drama, was inspired by his own experiences as a naive Canuck student on a helping mission in Liberia.

In a double-header MacKenzie season, The Bone Wars, a multi-disciplinary extravaganza (premiering at Punctuate! Theatre in April) set on a fossil quest in the Badlands, investigates our fatally insatiable appetite for fossil fuels.”

By contrast Bust, says MacKenzie, is about “the people who call Fort McMurray home, the families…. I focus on the people, not the public policy.”

Christopher Schulz and Brandon Coffey in Bust, at Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The assumption that Bust will be an anti-oil manifesto is something he’s encountered before, most recently at his brother’s birthday party. MacKenzie remains skeptical about “the Naomi Klein-type declarations of the latte left…. You want to say ‘wonderful!, but what are your plans for the working people?’.”

“And these are thinking, feeling, critically aware people. You’re not telling them something they’re oblivious to,” says MacKenzie.“This is a look at the people. Not a sympathetic look or a hostile look. Just a look.”

Louise Lambert in Bust. Photo by Aaron Pedersen

MacKenzie’s grandma thinks there’s too much swearing in Bust. Brandon Coffey, one of Moss’s quartet of actors, who grew up in Fort Mac, advised ramping it up. 

Which brings us to the always operatically fraught question of hockey. Getting your hockey references wrong in Edmonton would be a form of self-immolation no one sane would advise, even on the grounds of creativity.

MacKenzie and hockey have a close personal relationship. “I’m a massive Oilers fan, definitely,” he says. “My first little play, Bench Banter, at the very first Playwrights Garage with Ron Jenkins and Vern Thiessen, was two hockey dads burying a dead referee.”

PREVIEW

Bust

Theatre: Theatre Network

Written by: Matthew MacKenzie

Directed by: Bradley Moss

Starring: Brandon Coffey, Lora Brovold, Louise Lambert, Christopher Schulz

Where: The Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 26

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca or 780-453-2440.

Nilaja Sun in Pike St., at Canoe 2017. Photo supplied by Chinook Series

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Forecast: Breezy. An adventuresome wind — full of diverse sounds, sights, cultural ideas, challenges — is set to blow through the winter theatre season again this week. 

Yes, Chinook is on its way to becoming an Edmonton verb (it’s like “fringe” that way), with the return of last year’s debut bright idea. The Chinook Series, Feb. 9 to 19, combines the offerings of three snow-melting performing arts companies — Workshop West and its Canoe Festival, Azimuth Theatre and its innovative Expanse Movement Arts Festival, and Fringe Theatre Adventures whose ever-breezy summer festivities entered the common parlance as a verb decades ago.

Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman in Countries Shaped Like Stars. Photo supplied by Chinook Series.

The latter is returning to us an irresistible charmer of a show that enchanted audiences in its 2013 run at the Fringe. Countries Shaped Like Stars is a once-upon-a-time musical love story fairy tale — there’s an under-represented category of theatrical experience — by Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman of Ottawa’s Mi Casa Theatre.

It’s an imaginative gambit not to be missed, utterly unclassifiable. “Once upon a time words were understood by the spaces between them, and anticipation grew on trees….”

“What are we not seeing here?” As Workshop West’s Vern Thiessen puts it, that’s the question that inspires Canoe’s annual adventure into experimental performance theatre. This year’s edition of Canoe is devoted entirely to black artists, as he explains, introducing the trio of acclaimed visiting solo shows from the big wide world that arrive by Canoe, so to speak.

That leading “what are we missing here?” question has inspired, as well, a partnership with a new multidisciplinary festival, designed to showcase Edmonton’s black artists: BAM! (Black Arts Matter).

And it’s inspired another Chinook collaboration, a groundbreaking Canadian first. Sound Off, created and curated by Edmonton’ deaf artist Chris Dodd, is the first deaf theatre festival in the country’s history. It presents work from work from Regina, Toronto, Montreal, as well as an improv night with Rapid Fire Theatre.

First up, Tuesday, two days before the rest of Canoe paddles into view, the Senegalese artist Patricia Gomis arrives with her acclaimed and globally-travelled solo show Moi, Monsieur, Moi. The Dakar/Paris/Brussels co-production is jointly presented by Canoe and L’UniThéâtre. “A friend of mine saw the show in Mali, and was so impressed!” says Brian Dooley, the ebullient artistic director of Edmonton’s francophone theatre. “And the franco-African community here is huge, and growing. So I seized on the idea. Let’s do this!”

Moi, Monsieur, Moi, which unfolds in a variety of theatrical techniques, chronicles the trials and tribulations of a young Senegalese girl growing up, shunted from household to household, chore to chore. “It’s about the challenge of being a woman in West Africa,” says Dooley. “But it’s done with a great smile…. There’s a real openness to the artist.”

That’s the light touch which the title captures, with its eager gust of “pick me, sir! pick me!”

“It’s important to display diversity,” says Dooley of theatre’s responsibility to engage its community, in all its variety including “the wave of new immigrants.” He’s currently planning an upcoming L’UniThéätre season that includes a Congolese writer.

“Storytelling is such a big part of African culture,” he says of the show’s appeal. And as its protagonist overcomes a series of challenges, “it empowers the woman’s voice in African storytelling!” Like Thiessen, Dooley is keen to bring Edmonton audiences at large experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have, he says.

Moi, Monsieur, Moi, starring Patricia Gomis. Photo supplied

Moi, Monsieur, Moi is in French. But never fear if your tenses aren’t up to scratch; there are English subtitles for every performance in the Tuesday through Saturday run at La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.).

Not only does Pike St. bring to town Nilaji Sun, a well-known New York artist, star of stage and small screen, but the show is a reunion for Thiessen with an old friend. In his six years making theatre in New York before he got his Workshop West job, Thiessen and Sun both worked for Epic Theatre.

“She’s acted in some of my plays,” says Thiessen happily. And her director Ron Russell has directed three Thiessens, Einstein’s Gift and The Parables (in which Sun appeared) and A More Perfect Union, which had an Off-Broadway run.

“And she’s never been to Canada before! We’re her Canadian debut!”

Thiessen describes Pike St., culled from Sun’s memories of growing up in the Lower East Side, as “really funny, very moving…. It’s the story of a community, and what happens to it when a hurricane is coming. It’s the story of a struggling family, a mother, a father, the people in the ‘hood,” all played by Sun.

Sébastien Heins in Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera. Photo supplied by Chinook Series.

Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera (Feb. 17 to 19, Backstage Theatre), a solo show created by and starring Toronto’s Sébastien Heins, is “a kind of live hip hop concert, geared especially for the 16 to 30 crowd,” says Thiessen. “And Heins is such a great performer!”

As Thiessen explains, the story, which unfolds in music, movement, and rap (the show is entirely rhymed) tells of two twin brother hip hop artists, both played by Heins amongst a gallery of 11 characters. “There’s a great underlying story of family kinship and tension, backed up by the music,” says Thiessen.   

“All three soloists are “magnificent performers, world-class,” says Thiessen of his Canoe trio. “These shows are clinics on how to a one-person show!”

Chinook is testing the breeze of audience expansion with a new ticketing venture: 25 per cent of tickets for every show are pay-what-you-can (available in person two hours before at the ATB Financial Arts Barns box office). “It’s a big financial risk for us,” says Thiessen. “But we’re just trying to make Chinook more accessible, …. We’re flinging open the doors. Money should be no object for you!”  

PREVIEW

Chinook Series, Feb. 9 to 19, various theatres at ATB Financial Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.) plus La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.).

 Canoe

Moi, Monsieur, Moi created by Patricia Gomis and Marcia de Castro, starring Patricia Gomis: Tuesday through Saturday, La Cité francophone.

Pike St. created by and starring Nilaja Sun. Feb. 14 and 15,  Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera created by and starring Sébastien Heins, Feb. 17 to 19, The Backstage Theatre

Black Arts Matter (BAM!), Thursday through Feb. 19, ATB Financial Arts Barns locations (Backstage Theatre, Westbury Theatre, Westbury lobby)

Sound Off, Feb. 13 to 19, ATB Financial Arts Barns

Fringe Theatre Adventures: Countries Shaped Like Stars, by and starring Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman. Thursday through Feb. 19, Studio C, ATB Financial Arts Barns

Azimuth Theatre: Expanse Movement Festival, Thursday through Feb. 19, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

Tickets: chinookseries.ca or in person at Fringe Theatre Adventures box office, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

playwright Collin Doyle

By Liz Nicholls, 12night.ca

He’s back. Theatres (and audiences) take note. 

If you saw Collin Doyle’s wonderful Let The Light Of Day Through, in Theatre Network’s top-drawer 2013 premiere production, you already know something important about the work of this award-winning playwright. It’s funny. And it’s moving. At the same time, and in a complex and startling way.

“People look at dark stuff more easily through comedy,” Doyle has said.

The Doyle play that gets a staged reading Sunday at Script Salon (an Edmonton theatre success story in itself), has all the signs of that signature combination. Slumberland Motel, billed as “a road-weary comedy,” gives us two ‘70s era underachievers, a couple of vacuum salesman,  Ed and Edward, sharing a room in a seedy roadside motel on Christmas Eve. Their flat landscape of disappointment and disillusion, a world of diminishing prospects — vacuum sales can suck — is transformed by the arrival of a mysterious woman from the next room.

I think we can safely call Slumberland Motel “long-awaited,” a term that applies to many of Doyle’s plays. It won the Alberta Playwriting Competition 11 years ago. Long lead times seem to be a Doyle specialty, a test of patience that would have made other artists implode. Doyle’s The Mighty Carlins, the raucous black comedy of family dysfunction which won the Alberta Playwriting Competition in 2004, was the most famous un-produced play in Alberta, before its Workshop West premiere four years later.

For Sunday’s reading, Robert Benz and Reed McColm are Ed and Edward, with April Banigan as the mystery woman. It happens in the Upper Arts Space at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (10037 84 Avenue) at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free; donations are welcome.

The genial playwright will be on hand to answer questions. I have one: when will it get fully produced by an Edmonton theatre? A Doyle play is always an event. And that long lead time business can wear thin.

Flying Canoë Volant 2016, in Mill Creek Ravine. Photo by Flying Canoē Volant

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you go out in the woods tonight….

It’s a strange form of civic enchantment. Every year about this time, the good burghers of Edmonton, thousands of them, find themselves irresistibly drawn to follow a trail of light and music through the a snowy ravine at night. 

They sing and dance in Mill Creek Ravine by the light of cunningly wrought light sources, in a stunning series of installations. They arrive at a First Nations Camp, and learn drumming from the experts. They find themselves doing jigs and reels with the Dave Cunningham Family Band at the Métis Camp — or making bannock. They meet up with a French-Canadian storyteller/musician (Roger Dallaire) in a Trapper’s Cabin.

It’s Flying Canoë Volante, the five-year-old winter festival where our three founding cultural traditions, First Nations, Métis, and French-Canadian, meet to play in the snow. Then everyone ascends to a city of light — a.k.a. La Cité francophone, the elegant curvilinear French cultural centre — to continue the party, indoors and out-, in a mixture of languages (and beverages).

The 2016 festival. Photo by: Flying Canoë Volant

And the people love it. Daniel Cournoyer, La Cité francophone’s amiable, and supremely bilingual, executive director, reports that in the five years since Flying Canoe became the heir to the defunct Winter Light Festival, attendance has grown from 3,000 to 30,000 last time out. And Cournoyer has enhanced the festivities by partnering with other festivals, Rubaboo for example, and Native Counselling Services.

Illuminating a dark ravine without a power source is no task for conventional thinkers. Flying Canoë Volante‘s ingenious lighting whiz Dylan Toymaker, has assembled 11 artists to create light installations along the snowy way, with contributions by theatre designer Marissa Kochanski and a variety of actors.

The adventures even have a narrative, and it’s an alluringly eerie one. The flying canoe, in different variations, is part of both French-Canadian and First Nations tradition. The 19th century legend recorded by Honoré Beaugrand — “a great piece of French-Canadian literature” as Cournoyer puts it — stars voyageurs who make a deal with the Devil to fly them home to their sweethearts on New Year’s Eve. One catch: they can’t drink or swear or crash into church steeples. Ooops, they do all of the above. “They made a deal, and they suffered the consequences,” laughs Cournoyer.

The 2016 edition of the festival. Photo by Flying Canoë Volant

Cournoyer loves the festival’s “fusion of francophone and indigenous cultural traditions, a pow-wow of talent!” And Flying Canoë Volant isn’t a spectator sport. “I don’t want you to come here and just watch!” declares Cournoyer, with his usual exuberance. “I want people to partake. I’ve encouraged all our partners to engage the audience, to have interaction!”

 When you emerge from the ravine, Flying Canoë Volant turns more contemporary. The Rubaboo Festival is in charge of programming the theatre at La Cité francophone. Expect performance poetry, music, video, storytelling (Dallaire joins Elder Jerry Saddleback).

Out in the hall, it’s a cabaret, with three bands — one indigenous, one francophone, one anglo-Canadian — each night. There’s outdoor DJ-ed entertainment in the basin that the building encloses. And there’s “a big old dance party” at the end of Saturday night’s festivities, too.

“In the five years we’ve been doing it, I’ve learned so much,” says Cournoyer feelingly. “The partnerships! The knowledge I’ve gained! The cultures are so rich!”

The idea is “to create dialogue (between cultures) without imposing it. That’s what happens when you engage people…. It’s a journey of discovery.”

PREVIEW

Flying Canoë Volant

Where: Mill Creek Ravine, Rutherford School, La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.)

Running: Friday and Saturday. In the ravine, 6 to 10 p.m., at La Cité francophone, 6 p.m. to midnight.

Admission: free