Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away: Fags in Space, a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Braden Butler and Sheldon Stockdale in Fags in Space, Low Hanging Fruits. Photo supplied.

Fags in Space (Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, two gays messaged each other…. 

In this charmer of a rom-com by Liam Salmon, Luca and Todd (Sheldon Stockdale and Braden Butler, both excellent) are reviewing the cosmic forces that have brought them together across a vast universe. They’ve just moved in together, the final frontier. And they’re hosting a Christmas housewarming, a double-barrelled couple stress, fielding the inevitable question from their guests (that would be us): So how did you two meet?

And since Todd and Luca are reviewing their narrative — “our trilogy, boxed set, limited edition” — for our benefit, revising and rewriting memory, amending and confirming as they go, Fags in Space starts in the sheer randomness and breadth of deep screen gay space — Grindr, SCRUFF and the rest — and a frisson of gravitational attraction between distant stars. And it includes their own takes on such classic get-to-know-you gambits as “what was your worst date ever?” and “where do you see yourself in five years?”

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Todd,  sweetly earnest and awkward in Butler’s performance, is an astronomy post-grad who doesn’t know Star Wars from Star Trek. Luca, an expert on the nerdier reaches of pop culture, works for a company that creates exotic new cereals for upmarket hipsters. His wry and easeful sense of humour is winningly captured by Stockdale, Can Todd and Luca find happiness together?

Rom-coms are built on friction, obstacles to overcome, apparent incompatibilities, setbacks and separations, doubts, improbabilities that are actually romantic inevitabilities to everyone (except the participants). Salmon, a skilled writer of natural, funny romantic dialogue, moulds the form artfully. And Owen Holloway’s production is lit with the romantic chemistry between the actors; Salmon’s characters are amusing and amused with each other, a little wary, very aware of the odds stacked in this world against gay love stories with happy endings. We want them to succeed. 

Did I mention that it was a fun party at Todd and Luca’s place?  And we all had a very good time?

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Oh no! Bots have invaded theatre and they can do it: Plays By Bots, a Fringe review

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Plays By Bots. Photo by bots.

Plays By Bots (Stage 7, Yardbird Suite)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Welcome to the future. Crazy: Why did I choose to believe that, OK, bots might be able to do neurosurgery, repair Maseratis, host TV morning shows, but there are limits. Bots would NEVER be able to write plays. C’mon, theatre is, like, special. You know, reserved for humans.

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What was I thinking? 

True, the improvisers of Rapid Fire Theatre (a corps that includes a couple of brainiacs like Kory Mathewson who specialize in A.I.) have created scenes with A.I.’s before now. Now, RFT has enlisted Dramatron, a bot brainchild of the research scientists at DeepMind, to write scripts for theatre, including locations, stage directions, characters, dialogue. And, OH NO!, Dramatron has actually delivered. It’s just that the bot script just stops part-way through (I mean the bot doesn’t get a Canada Council grant or anything). And it’s for the RFT cast to improvise what happens and how it all ends. 

Plays By Bots presents one Dramatron play per Fringe performance. Friday night’s script was The Man At The Bar, set in a dive bar called The Pool Pit with (as specified in the stage directions) a dirty floor and an atmosphere full of smoke and the smell of beer. 

At the outset the four-member human cast each got a sealed envelope with script and  their role descriptions, and a bag of props and costume pieces. Teddy (Jacob Banigan) is “an orphan and gifted lounge singer,” Gerald (Michael Johnson) is “quite wealthy.” His wife Rosie (Tyra Banda) is “a regular.” Gordie Lucius in a fetching blond wig is Lolo the road-weary bartender. 

And if there’s a certain flatness in the dialogue, which runs to declarations, that in itself is amusing since it turned out to be perfectly suited to the deadpan comic talents of Friday night’s improvisers. Banigan, for example, knows exactly what to do with “I’m putting down a song. A special song. I’m gonna sing the song.” He returns, as instructed, to the mic to deliver lounge-y songs extempore (“this is a helluva town…”).  Rosie declares “I have a new hat…. I look beautiful in it.” Gerald says to Teddy “I want my money…. I’ll sue you.” 

The surprising thing (surprising to me, anyhow) is that the whole Dramatron play does hang together and create a world. About half-way through, the alert human actors start improvising,  from the groundwork of the first part. They run with the characters; they reprise particularly funny laugh lines. Things happen, but Lola keeps pouring the drinks, and the human actors continue to capture the playwright bot’s tone. 

It’s a genuinely funny entertainment. Uh-oh. 

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Putting the grit into dark comedy: Mules, a Fringe review

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Kyra Gusdal and Miracle Mopera in Mules, Edmonton Fringe 2022. Photo supplied.

Mules (Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Mules, a tense and suspenseful two-hander by the actor/playwright team of Beth Graham and Daniela Vlaskalic (who starred in the 2006 premiere), puts the grit back into dark comedy.

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Its entry-level mystery, so to speak, is a mysterious odd-couple sitcom encounter, at first comic, between two women, high school classmates who haven’t seen each other in a decade — in the women’s can at Vancouver airport. And it just keeps escalating in a farcical high-stakes way that leaves “it seemed like a good idea at the time” in the dust. 

One character, Cindy (Kyra Gusdal), is a stripper, a hard-edged chick, on a fuse that isn’t long and gets a whole lot shorter in the course of Mules. The other,  Crystal (Miracle Mopera), a single mother with a cheery air of normalcy about her, has a germ phobia about using public washrooms, which certainly puts a damper on the urgent task at hand. Her erstwhile classmate has sent her on a drug smuggling mission to Bogota, and retrieval of the illegal import, as the title tips off, is at hand, assisted by Ex-Lax.  

“Life is going to get a lot better for both of us,” Cindy insists. As one thing after another goes way wrong, this will start to seem, well, ill-advised, crazy, and probably doomed, a bit like the unravelling heist that David Mamet’s inept lowlifes in American Buffalo are plotting. 

What sticks with you about Mules, as Kevin Sutley’s production confirms, is that it frames a story that emerges, in bits and pieces, little exchanges, revelations and silences, of girlhood hopes shut down, dreams delayed indefinitely, friendships abandoned and betrayed, the sense that life somehow just isn’t as good as it should be, and still could be — if only. 

Kevin Sutley’s production is both supple in its rhythms and intense in momentum, between moments of comedy. And two very watchable young actors, newcomers to the scene, bite into this demanding material in compelling ways. Gusdal convincingly charts the rocky two-way route between tension, panic and desperation. Mopera is entirely convincing as the struggling single mom who has dared to reimagine a future beyond the scramble of the present. 

 

     

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Epic in scale (and complication). Horror, mythology, folk tale, social satire in a new musical… The Erlking, a Fringe review

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

The Erlking, Scona Alumni Theatre Co. Photo supplied

The Erlking (Stage 23, Strathcona High School)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a fascinating ambition about the mélange of horror, mythology, folk tale and social satire in this new musical (book, music, lyrics) by Chris Scott.

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In a small town outside a city, children have been disappearing, right at harvest time. The mayor is a fascist who hates poor people and the lower classes generally, the Catholic priest is creepy, and there’s a peculiar stranger in town with a grievance and a proposition for kids. Ah, and everyone has stopped believing in magic. 

No, my friends, we’re not in Brigadoon any more. We’re not even in that midwestern town in Footloose where the mayor is dead set against rock n’ roll and dancing. 

The Erlking is an original, and it’s epic (a Fringe rarity) — not only in conception, in cast size (12 performers), in sound (big electronic orchestral tracks that, alas, in the opening performance’s sound mix tended to drown out the lyrics), but in plot complications. 

The opening scenes of the Scona Alumni Theatre production, which review the fateful events of the year before, set forth a rigid class system where the poor kid outcasts sing and dance in rambunctious fashion, and the compliant upper-class kids form prim quartets and sing like church choirs. Scott’s music, which includes a kind of operatic recitative to propel the narrative, is unfailingly inventive.

The mayor (Annette Loiselle) talks the talk: children are our future, children are the preservers of our way of life, etc. etc. she says on more than one occasion. But as for walking the walk … well, we meet her own children. Michael is a conflicted young man since his best friend is lower-class. Michael’s sister is a steely-eyed upholder of the maternal orthodoxy, without her mother’s beaming smile and fake charm.

The stranger in town (Natalie Czar), as you quickly glean (not a spoiler), is the Erlking, After a lot of teasers to everyone onstage, it transpires they’ve come to correct a myth maladjustment in which they are routinely maligned as an evil elf who lures kids to their deaths. Their goal is to restore the lustre of their ancient reputation and make life better for everyone, by reinstating magic. But they’re unwilling (unable?) to use their powers right away. Why? Possibly it’s because they rely on faith and belief, and both have atrophied, as the characters reveal in a somewhat repetitive sequence of scenes. 

Anyhow, the Erlking, who prefers to go incognito, uses a variety of aliases (“just another grain inspector,” they say, “making her way through the void of capitalism”). The story unfolds in a series of repeated musical argument scenes to reinforce the set-up — between Michael and the other kids, the Erlking and skeptical kids, the mayor and the kids, the kids amongst themselves, the mayor and the mayor’s empathetic maid.… 

There’s no shortage of juicy ideas and vivid characters here. But since the Erlking, who’s high-spirited, recruits one kid at a time, with lots of scenes devoted to second thoughts and re-tries, the serial, looping nature of the storytelling makes the whole thing feel a bit over-extended, in truth. It takes quite a while to build — there are a lot of entrances and exits — and might fruitfully be condensed. And there are big rewards to be had in doing that, I think.

You’ll enjoy the spoken dialogue of the script with its barbed comments about education cuts, pedophile priests, the inequities of the economic status quo. There’s an unusual and impressive musical here in the making, a couple of drafts from its final form. Hey, that’s the magic of the Fringe. 

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A smart, fun, dark new ‘relationship’ musical: Conjoined, a Fringe review

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Seth Gilfillan and Josh Travnik in Conjoined: A New Musical. Photo supplied.

Conjoined: A New Musical (Stage 13, Servus Theatre, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s always someone to block your sun. And, be honest, wouldn’t your heart feel lighter, your spirits rise, your life be just better without that someone weighing you down, smudging your prospects, thwarting your dreams, clouding your blue skies?

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This clever, darkly funny little original rock musical by Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan, is about that. Unfortunately, for Pat (Josh Travnik), the someone who’s casting a perpetual shadow over him is his handsome, buff, conceited, bossy, smug twin brother Braxton (Seth Gilfillan). And worse, they’re attached, permanently. Which certainly ups the ante on sibling rivalry and the classic struggle for self-discovery.  

Braxton and Pat are not a two-man democracy. The former, whose self-esteem knows no bounds, is a gung-ho achiever, a repository of up-and-at-‘em aphorisms, who makes all the decisions — when they get up, when they go to sleep, when they brush their teeth and do cross-fit. By his own admission Braxton is “popular, successful, and everyone loves me.” 

Well, not quite everyone. Pat is simmering with exasperation and resentment; he was shortchanged on everything, including his name. “Look at him, look at me,” he laments in one of the show’s witty, cleverly rhymed songs. And resentment, as set forth in song, is gradually turning into murderous fantasies as Travnik conveys in a captivating junior Sweeney Todd escalation. “What if the source of all your problems just disappeared?”

How do you grow up, discover your sexuality, find love, make your own choices, when I is we? Now there’s a pronoun problem for you. Could they be separated? Braxton is devoted to the dying wishes of their mother, who was religious (“she marched against gun control,” says Pat) and prescribed eternal togetherness. Medicine offers a way out. Will ‘they’ take it?

There’s a kind of macabre hilarity to the storytelling, and the graphic way, heartfelt but amusingly unsentimental, that it twists a universal coming-of-age and relationship problem into a new shape.  

The tricky bare-stage stagecraft and choreography by Allred in this Straight Edge Theatre production is ingenious. And Gilfillan and Travnik, strong singers both, are real firecrackers onstage. 

The music, accompanied by a live onstage three-piece band with chops,  propels the story in an accomplished and catchy mix of  musical theatre-type dreamer songs (“If I were me, just me …”), pop ballads, driving rock numbers…. Conjoined is startling, smart, and fun — a brand new musical it’s exciting to find at the Fringe. You’ll leave smiling.

 

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Creating ‘the impossible, mysterious sound’: The Hunchback Variations, a Fringe review

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

The Hunchback Variations. Poster photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The Hunchback Variations (Stage 3, Studio Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A curious pair arrives onstage at the start of this smart, touching, genuinely odd, sometimes trying two-hander comedy. “Good evening and welcome …” says the brisk, professionally genial guy in the business-casual suit at the outset, evidently a veteran of such occasions. “I am Ludwig Van Beethoven, composer, and on my left is Quasimodo,  hunchback and former bell ringer for Notre Dame de Paris.”

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The absurdist premise of The Hunchback Variations, an enigmatic 2002 comedy by  Chicago playwright Mickle Maher stops you in your tracks: it’s a panel discussion on sound delivered by two of history’s most famous Deaf artists.

Unlikely collaborators, they’ve been working to create the “impossible, mysterious sound” demanded by Chekhov’s famously elusive stage direction at the end of Act II, and again the final scene, of The Cherry Orchard: “Suddenly a distant sound is heard, coming as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away.”

Ian Leung and Dave Clarke, The Hunchback Variations. Photo supplied.

Directed by Davina Stewart originally for the Northern Light Theatre season just past (a COVID cancellation), the piece unspools in 11 variations, with minor adjustments. The grotesquely masked Quasimodo (actor Dave Clarke, ironically a sound designer himself) presides over a table of assorted noise-makers — rolls of cellotape, a melodica, a bell, finger harp, coconut shells … — and sounds them at random intervals. 

In each case Beethoven — veering between abrupt dismissal, condescension, bemusement, and enforced affability in Leung’s perfectly pitched performance — says “that is not the sound.” Sometimes Quasimodo, an earnest and lyrical participant once he starts to roll reads from prepared statements about artistic failure — the types of it, the ways to make it more pleasant (“I believe everything would’ve gone a lot better if we had not rehearsed at my house”), the inevitability of it. Would it have mattered if Beethoven had actually read The Cherry Orchard? Possibly. Nah, not really. “Our collaboration was doomed,” says Quasimodo.

Art about the intricacies of failing to create art: there’s a certain dry origami wit to that sort of rueful, nagging artistic introspection. Is all artistic creation, in a sense, absurd, since it can never arrive fully at the capture of feeling beyond the human capacity to express it? The Hunchback Variations persists with questions like that, and leaves you with them. .

Not every audience will have the patience for it, in truth. But the insights are moving. And so is the portrait of the artist as perpetual quester, imprisoned by a crazy need, in the face of inevitable failure, to “express the inexpressible,” as Beethoven puts it, or “solve the impossible problem,” as Quasimodo says. You keep trying, knowing “that is not the sound.”  

Where do all the failures go? wonders Quasimodo. “Where is the place for the uncreated?” This elliptical set of variations is all about building it. And in its strange way, that’s a fascinating project. 

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Weird and wonderful, a human vaudeville under the skin: Epidermis Circus, a Fringe review

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ingrid Hansen in Epidermis Circus, SNAFU. Photo by Jam Hamidi.

Epidermis Circus (Stage 18, The Luther Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a nutty and ingenious self-reliance built into this “spicy puppet cabaret” from Victoria’s SNAFU Society of Unexpected Spectacles (Little Orange Man, The Merkin Sisters). Let’s just say that the relationship between puppet and puppeteer has never been closer.  

In the course of it, both live and magnified onscreen, in cunningly angled cameras and mirror images, we see Ingrid Hansen, presiding from a table of simple found objects, create characters from her own hands, fingers, tongue, and (as in the case of razzmatazz stand-up comic Lenny the Boob) other body parts. And she sets them in motion in a saucy and jostling vaudeville of ‘stars’ who are related under the skin, very literally. 

Florence McFingernails, an earthy stage-struck ancient with an insatiable appetite for the limelight and a taste for old-school bad jokes, is the M.C. who can barely bring herself to introduce the talent. “Up next … not me!”

The precise physicality attached to Hansen’s imagination (the show is co-created with director Britt Small) is mesmerizing. We get the fun of sudden recognition as characters emerge into miniature worlds from a palm and its fleshy attachments. 

Epidermis Circus, SNAFU. Photo by Ingrid Hansen,

We meet a pair of mismatched dogs doing doggie things in a dog park. We watch a sinister, worldly baby pay unsettling homage to vintage vaudeville by taking a bubble bath on stage. Florence, incidentally, a veritable repository of grievances, is unimpressed. “So, the baby took a bath. Who am I to judge what is art?” 

The tone is sassy; Epidermis Circus is full of Fringe jokes for your enjoyment (lordie, it’s good to be back and hear the hallowed name TJ Dawe from the stage!). The sense of humour runs to dark and macabre. There’s a whole Romeo and Juliet ballet with vampiric top notes, and a post-apocalyptic vision that emerges from the puppeteer’s mouth. It’s 2022 and we know that world; Epidermis Circus steps up and finds a way to be playful about it. There’s a kooky, energizing joy about rediscovering the human potential right there, just under the skin, and populating worlds with it.    

The human body, says Florence, is “a big ol’ bag of meat.’ Epidermis Circus gives it the finger; it’s a post-pandemic celebration of our own weird possibilities. 

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Be very pumped: further thoughts on a big Fringe opening night

Posted on August 11, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ten: The Show. The Little Red Ball Company. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Tonight’s the night: the biggest opening night in town, by a considerable margin. Come 8 p.m. Destination Fringe, with its 164 shows on 27 venues (artfully scaled down from the gargantuan 2019 edition) is up and playing. The great thing about the Fringe is that you can devise a logistically sound, viable plan to see shows (without roller-skates, I need hardly add), sure, or you can improvise.

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Don’t be overwhelmed; be pumped. 12thnight.ca has already posted a selection of promising prospects for your consideration. Have a peek here. And a further cluster of shows I’ve enjoyed at previous Fringes, or even in the season. Have a look here.  

Here are some further thoughts for finding yourself a route to your Destination Fringe. 

The Fringe’s only … circus show. That would be Ten: The Circus Show, the work of Calgary-based The Little Red Ball Company. Kate Ryan (not the Edmonton Kate Ryan we know, the artistic director of the Plain Jane Theatre Company) explains that, in a reverse of the usual migration of theatre onto film, the show is the stage premiere of an award-winning 35-minute digital film. 

The rigging in the Westbury Theatre (Stage 1) is up, with its 4,000 pounds of weights, for a cast of six performers with impossible  virtuoso skills. “We challenge ourselves,” says Ryan, who’s worked with Edmonton’s Firefly Circus Theatre before now and regards Annie Dugan as a mentor. 

The show is a way, she says, to channel “the pain and negativity of (the last two years) into an opportunity for growth and creativity…. We’ve all been suffering through some kind of grief.” 

Ah yes, grief. In March of 2020 The Little Red Ball Company went from doing 250 shows a year to … two. “I didn’t experience it in seven stage, but 10.” Hence the name of the show. Ryan gave each of her ensemble a word, with the challenge “make something, create something, put it out there…. Move through it; play with it. And they did, beautiful pieces.” They are, she says, “a tribute to human resilience…. The audience leaves feeling empowered.” 

Each performer has two acts. Ryan herself opens and closes the show. Ryan herself, a specialist with hula hoops: she has somehow mastered the rarefied skill of balancing a hula hoop on her face while other performers dive through it.  

The Fringe’s only … controversial very tough-minded solo polemical play. My Name Is Rachel Corrie is fashioned from the diaries and emails of the astonishingly committed young idealist activist killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003. Emma Ryan, a theatre veteran who’s just graduated from U of A theatre school, stars. 

Fags in Space, Low Hanging Fruits. Photo supplied.

The Fringe’s only … hybrid of sci-fi and gay rom-com. That would be Liam Salmon’s Fags in Space. The workings of intergalactic romance are as yet mysterious. 

Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls, Send in the Girls Burlesque/ House of Hush. Photo supplied.

The Fringe’s only … marriage of burlesque and ghost stories, Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls by Send In The Girls Burlesque and House of Hush. Like so many shows how can that even work? Guess you have to be there to find out. 

Rebecca Merkley in Jesus Teaches us Things, Play The Fool Festival. Photo supplied

The Fringe’s only … opportunity to actually see Jesus, substitute-teaching a Sunday School class. Jesus Teaches Us Things is the inspiration of Rebecca Merkley, the winner of this year’s Gerald Osborn playwriting award. It started out as a short entry in the Play The Fool physical comedy festival. Now it’s a full show. 

 

      

   

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Be a patron, please support theatre coverage!

Posted on August 11, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Hello theatre friends!

Did we just imagine the last two years? Suddenly, magically, it’s the opening day of the Fringe. Edmonton’s mighty summer theatre festival, the oldest on the continent, is back — not epic in size but BIG. 

 And with it, the unmistakeable sign that the live theatre experience, with live audiences, in person — hey, a concept with legs! — is happening. It’s the right moment to thank you, dear readers of 12thnight.ca, for your support and encouragement, for sticking with me through a time of devastation, the toughest of challenges for the performing arts. It’s been inspiring to see the ingenuity and persistence our valiant theatre artists in this exciting theatre town have brought to meeting them. And it’s been my joy and privilege to write about it.

Covering theatre, independently, outside the vagaries of the mainstream media, is what 12thnight.ca is for. I hope you’ve been enjoying the content which has been, so far, free. And I’m hoping that you’ll be up for chipping in a monthly amount to my Patreon campaign to enable 12thnight.ca coverage of Edmonton exciting theatre scene to continue. That support from readers is, solely, what makes it possible. Here’s the link (www.patreon.com/12thnight). Spread the word. 

If you’re already signed on as a 12thnight.ca patron, I’m so grateful. 12thnight can’t continue without it. 

Meanwhile, we’re off to the Fringe, in the place where that name became a verb. We’ll see each other, in person, in a theatre soon. 

gratefully, Liz 

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‘A space of possibility’: The Péhonán Series at the Fringe

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Dallas Arcand Jr. in the Fringe’s péhonán series. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The TeePee: there it stands, a striking 16-footer right in the heart of the Fringe, a tangible symbol of Indigenous presence at our summer festival of artists.

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Péhonán (Cree for gathering place, waiting place), last year’s initiative in dedicating a venue to Indigenous programming, was a grand success, says Josh Languedoc, the Fringe’s director of Indigenous Strategic Planning. For this year’s 41st annual edition of the Fringe, péhonán expands its reach outdoors, and weaves its way through the festival. It’s an eight-show series with performances on the ATB Outdoor Stage, the péhonán TeePee, the KidsFringe stage — all featuring local Treaty 6 artists.

Josh Languedoc in Rocko and Nakota: Tales From The Land. Photo supplied.

For Languedoc, an Anishinaabe playwright/ performer whose own hit Rocko and Nakota: Tales From The Land arrives back at the Fringe (Stage 16) from dates across the country, péhonán “is a space of possibility.” He thinks of it as “an incubator” for Indigenous artists, “a showcase to highlight them and let try out their ideas.”  

That’s what happened last year, in the series of one-off performances at the Roxy on Gateway (this year, the Gateway Theatre). Bear Grease, for example, a 10-actor Indigenous adaptation of the famous musical, “was an immediate sell-out, every performance,” says Languedoc. And the show has since played to sold-out houses on both sides of the border. “And now he’s taken the next step,” says Languedoc. A new solo play from its creator MC RedCloud, Evandalism, inspired by his own story — “he’s a charismatic, natural storyteller,” says Languedoc — will premiere in the upcoming Fringe Theatre season of curated productions.

Poet Naomi McIlwraith’s part in The Sash-Maker, with Rebecca Sadowski, at péhonán in 2021,  “has taken on a life of its own, too,” says Languedoc. This time the poet brings a performance of her own, The Language of Silence, a poetry collection which touches on reconciliation and is as current as the Pope’s recent visit, is at ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ Aug. 19 at 9 p.m. 

The series opens Friday on the ATB Outdoor Stage with a performance by Chubby Cree, a four-member family drumming group, followed by singer-songwriter Kaeley Jade and her band. Sampler Cafe has “a drop-in jam” at the TeePee Saturday afternoon, with a concert in the evening on the ATB Outdoor Stage. 

Omisimawiw by Shyanne Duquette, Péhonán Series, Fringe 2022. Poster image supplied.

Shyanne Duqette’s Omisimawiw (Cree for elder sister), which got a staged reading at Nextfest in June, gathers an audience to hear the second draft ( River Lot Aug. 19). Her play about Indigenous identity tells the remarkable true-life story of how she met her sister for the first time — in a chance encounter on the LRT. 

The series also includes a matinee performance Aug. 20 on the Kids’ Stage by Dallas Arcand Jr., a world-champion hoop dancer and musician who has just produced a kids’ album. And the grand finale Aug. 20 is a 12-performer spectacular from Indig-Hauz of Beaver Hills, an Indigi-queer collective of 2Spirit and drag performance artists, featuring  Indigenous “kings, queens, and everything in between.”

Seelee Matreese, a member of Indigi-Hauz of Beaver Hills, Péhonán Series at the Fringe. Photo supplied.

Each Friday and Saturday of the Fringe (6 p.m.) there’s a gathering at the TeePee, with smudging, bannock, and a sharing circle. “We’ll gather,” says Languedoc, “and travel together to the (evening’s) performances. 

All péhonán performances are pay-what-you-will, with gifts welcome in lieu of financial contributions. “It’s more about an exchange between audience and artists,” as Languedoc puts it. “It’s a softening” of the Fringe free-enterprise marketplace. “No, a kind-ening.” 

More information about the péhonán series, and a full schedule: fringetheatre.ca.  “Tatawaw. Welcome. There is room.” 

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