And they’re back live in 2022: Shadow announces a live season for January

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Shadow Theatre 2022 season.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Seasons announced and un-announced and re-announced (with modifications); shows scheduled and delayed, cancelled and pivoted…. The story of Edmonton theatres for the last 14 months is a narrative of optimism up against caution.

As the Shadow knows. As announced this week by artistic director John Hudson, Shadow will be back in the light, so to speak, next January, onstage at the Varscona Theatre with a season of three plays, two of them originally announced for 2020-2021. “It’s an important time to be focussing on diversity,” says Hudson.

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The Mountaintop, a 2009 play by the young American playwright Katori Hall (who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for The Hot Wing King), opens the Shadow series Jan. 20, 2022. The two-hander, named for one of Martin Luther King’s most celebrated speeches, had humble origins (in a London fringe theatre). Its Broadway premiere (starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett) brought it to prominence. It’s set at a seminal moment in American civil rights history: 1968 in a cheap Memphis motel room the night before King’s assassination, an encounter between the great man and a mysterious housekeeper.

The Shadow production, to be directed by Patricia Darbasie, stars Ray Strachan and Patricia Cerra.

In March 2022, Shadow will produce Cottagers and Indians, a recent play by the all-star Ojibway playwright/ storyteller/ humourist/ journalist Drew Hayden Taylor. It’s inspired by a real-life dispute about water between Ontario cottagers and Indigenous locals trying to revive old traditions by planting wild rice on a lakeshore.

Taylor’s gusty sense of humour, sharp satirical gifts, and sense of the absurd are brought to bear on insights into “the colonial nature of our relationships with Indigenous people,” as Hudson puts it. The Shadow production, which runs March 9 to 27, 2022, will star Trevor Duplessis and Davina Stewart.

The last of the 30th season trio is Bloomsday, a love story of missed chances by the much-produced American playwright Steven Dietz, in which an older couple retraces their steps to rediscover their younger selves. “It hits me in a personal way,” says Hudson. “It’s all about life choices.” The production, which runs April 27 to May 15, 2022, reunites Shadow favourites John Sproule and Coralie Cairns (who doubles as Shadow’s general manager). The younger versions of the leading couple are played by Alexandra Dawkins and Chris Pereira.

Shadow Theatre artistic director John Hudson

The delay in opening live beyond fall, says Hudson, “is just to make sure.” He’s referring to the acceleration of vaccinations and return of audience confidence in live gatherings. “Our subscribers (who now number about 640), are cautious; they’ve  told us (in surveys) that they won’t be back till more people have been vaccinated.”

“It’s been such a complicated dance, for all the performing arts,” he says. “We’ve paid out $40,000 to artists for cancelled shows.”

Shadow was two shows into its four-show 2020-2021 lineup when the shutdown happened last March. Eventually the company cancelled all its planned live performances for 2021. Audiences had seen the premiere of Happy Birthday Baby J, and Heisenberg was but three performances into its run.

Meanwhile, Heisenberg is available free at Broadway On Demand, June 18 to 20. Shadow still plans, at some future date, to produce three new plays by Edmonton writers in which the theatre has shared development: Conni Massing’s Fresh Hell, Darrin Hagen’s 10 Funerals, and Reed McColm’s The Wrong People Have Money.   

    

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A rollercoaster year for high school theatre (with productions to match)

Posted on June 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Ride the Cyclone, Scona Theatre. Photo by Linette Smith.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s been a rollercoaster year.” — Everybody

In a strange year-plus that’s all but stolen theatre’s go-to all-purpose show descriptor, the rollercoaster, there’s something witty (not to say unnervingly à propos) about the macabre little indie Canadian musical that comes our way Wednesday via Broadway On Demand.

In Ride the Cyclone the members of a high school glee club from the dying prairie town of Uranium, Sask. have themselves died — in a freak rollercoaster accident at a travelling carnival. The musical, by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, is one of three shows from Scona Theatre — Strathcona High School’s theatre department led by Linette Smith — that run online this week.

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The seven characters are singing from “the weird world of limbo,” as Smith puts it. They’re exploring the might-have-beens, the identities they haven’t fully been able to live. “When you’re between worlds, between realities, what happens to you physically, spiritually emotionally? This felt like a great thing to investigate. This year.”

Concord Floral, Scona Theatre. Photo by Linette Smith.

Simultaneously, Scona is also presenting two plays, on the invaluable FringeTV platform. Smith chose both for their particular resonance for her high school charges. In Jordan Tannahill’s Concord Floral, a mystery, a ghost story, and an exorcism in one, “there’s a secret that no one can talk about,” says Smith. “A sense of weight the world is carrying.” It’s a plague of sorts, in a framework inspired by Boccaccio’s  14th century Decameron. And its teenage characters have selves they want the world to see, and selves they want to be hidden.

“Inside all the protocols, how do you find your own voice?” It’s a question for this moment.

Metamorphoses, Scona Theatre. Photo by Linette Smith.

A cohort cast of 12 is in the third, Metamorphoses, adapted by the American playwright Mary Zimmerman from Ovid’s poem. And, as the name suggests, it’s about change, transformation, which could hardly be more timely.

Smith opted for the extreme complication of three simultaneous productions instead of the usual big-cast Scona musical of the year, because pandemical times called for small groups. “And so many people auditioned, we couldn’t just do one show with seven people….”

Speaking as we are of rollercoasters and metamorphoses, producing theatre in a pandemic year, as every theatre company and school has discovered, amply qualifies, on both countrs. Since singing, proscribed for much of the year, is involved, musicals have been especially tricky. The students, who were sometimes at school sometimes online at home, were valiantly flexible, Smith reports. In a world of constantly changing restrictions, “They really believed that whatever the project had to become ‘we’re doing it!’.”

For Metamorphoses, with its pungent mix of gods and mortals, “we had actually built a pool, and we were going to film (the show) in it…. Then everything got shut down,” says Smith. “We were going to do Concord Floral in the parking lot at school. Then everything got shut down.”

For the musical, “which had to be recorded a voice at a time,” Smith and crew built a sound booth. “Then the cast of seven came in one at a time over a few weekends, and sang through the entire show…. Then we had to mix it together.”

Rehearsed online, it was filmed outside, on the weekend before a second big shutdown would push a cast of seven plus crew over the 10-person outdoor limit. That’s authentic precipitation in the Ride The Cyclone footage. “That weekend it poured the entire time; it never stopped.” They used the track and field tent, and the school’s mechanic bay. They took breaks so the students could warm up, ‘spread out six feet apart in a hallway.”

And rules, and the numbers, kept changing. The two plays were rehearsed in person, then online when the schools closed in December, then back live, then back to online again. “We dropped off garment bags full of costumes and props” to students at home, along with laptops from the school library, “to get better and more consistent film quality.”

For Concord Floral, “I wanted everyone to have a black backdrop, so we cut up black cloth, and drove it to everyone’s home, along with a light source,” says Smith. For Metamorphoses, they scoured the inter-web for backdrops. Green screen? Parents raided their linen closets for blue or green bedsheets. Garages got reconfigured; so did kids’ bedrooms, to make space for choreography.

“After this year I feel like doing a big musical live for in-person audiences will be way less of an Everest climb,” Smith laughs, thinking of the logistics, and the workshops on outdoor sound or lighting she signed up for in her own time.

In Metamorphoses, as she points out, one character says “you mean this has a happy ending? It almost never has a happy ending.”

“These students do get a happy ending because they get to tell these stories, and share them. They’ve been able to learn from each other, learn to do theatre in different ways…. All of us are longing for next year, the moments when you can feel the audience breathe with you, hear a sniffle.” Smith pauses to reflect on the three productions. “Change is necessary. Growth is necessary. Sometimes we have stones in our pockets that weigh us down. We can let them go.”

“But we really lamented the loss of our pool.’

See Scona Theatre’s Metamorphoses and Concord Floral Wednesday through Saturday on Fringe TV. Tickets here. See Ride the Cyclone on Broadway On Demand’s Showshare here.

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The call of the wild: Night is live ‘drive-by’ theatre from Major Matt Mason

Posted on June 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Zoë Glassman in Night, Major Matt Mason Collective. Photo by Elise CM Jason.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Dusk is shading into dark, the break-out time. And the wilderness is encroaching.

The solo play that opens late twilight Thursday in Rundle Park invites us into the mind of a person who feels themself straining at the human leash, transforming in the darkness. Into a wolf.

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Night, “a drive-by play by Geoffrey Simon Brown,” is an invitation, as well, into the mind of the Major Matt Mason Collective, an innovative artist-run troupe of theatrical provocateurs with Calgary roots, named for a Mattel action figure. They’re known nationally for their inventiveness, and connectedness with youthful artists and audiences. From your car you’ll be there in person (!), watching a real live actor (!), Zoë Glassman, and tuning in to a character’s thoughts on your radio, tuned to FM.

Night isn’t exactly an Edmonton debut, live and against the odds as it is, for Major Matt Mason. But sightings here have been few and far between. MMMC’s Air, which toured the Fringe circuit, was at the 2015 Found Festival, as Glassman describes it “a small and explosive four-hander, in a house, very hot and crowded, 30 people crammed into Patrick Lundeen’s living room.” Another MMMC production, David Gagnon Walker’s Premium Content, was slated for a November run at the Backstage Theatre — until it wasn’t, times being what they are.

Zoë Glassman in Night, Major Matt Mason Collectivel Photo by Elise CM Jason.

Glassman herself, a 2014 U of A theatre school grad who frequently takes on MMMC’s  producer role, is Edmonton-based. So, from time to time (when he isn’t in Toronto or Montreal), is playwright Brown. “One of my goals: I finally get to introduce this company to my community!” laughs Glassman, an actor whose sensibility and skill set easily erases the border between dance and theatre. Her stage work has mostly happened in Calgary. Edmonton audiences will remember a rare Glassman performance here in Dave Horak’s Sterling Award-winning 2017 production of Stupid Fucking Bird.

“I still don’t feel it’s real,” she says of Night. “It’s a weird stress but I’ve kinda let it go…. Whatever ends up happening is perfect.” If regulations at the moment permit 10 people in outdoor seats (in addition to the one-household in-auto audience in 15 cars) at each performance of Night, so much the better. “I’m safe; everyone else is safe. And we actually get to see each other.”

Zoë Glassman in Night, Major Matt Mason Photo by Geoffrey Simon Brown

Night seems so perfectly custom-made for our pandemic moment, the feeling of emerging changed, less human, from this strange and isolating bubble of time, that it’s hard to imagine Brown didn’t create it as a COVID allegory. Not so. Glassman says he started writing it seven years ago. And it was workshopped in 2017 at Calgary’s Verb Theatre.  “At its core,” says Glassman, “Night is a story about a person convinced they’re turning into a wolf…. It’s also about anxiety, claustrophobia, relapse. It’s very easy to watch this play as an allegory for addiction, an allegory for mental health (in jeopardy).”

The character we meet has moved back in with their parents after living alone, and an unspecified crisis. “They’re trying to get better, but they’re drawn to the moon, to animals, to animalistic freedom, to running….”

The agoraphobia, the claustrophobia, the attempts to follow the rules and ‘don’t come anywhere close to me!’ that’s part of our shared experience…. “I’d love to give people the opportunity for a catharsis,” says Glassman. “No one really wants to watch a play about COVID, I think. We all have COVID fatigue.” Instead, Night charts its strange parallel course. “There’s something weirdly mythical about this play.”

Physical movement and dance are built into the premise, says Glassman. She toured in the Punctuate! Theatre production of Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears, another play where there’s animal transformation and the storytelling happens crucially in dance. “Matt and I talked about the way dance goes below language, the way it ducks language, and hits emotions without people realizing it.”

Zoë Glassman in Night, Major Matt Mason Collective. Photo by Geoffrey Simon Brown

In case you’re tempted, you should know that becoming a wild animal — “the running, a lot of it on all fours” — is a real physical test. “It was literally impossible to speak and move as intensely as required,” Glassman found. So the spoken text was pre-recorded, and that’s what you’ll hear on your car radio: a direct channel into the character’s mind. “You’re getting a soundtrack of this person’s thoughts.”

“An image that keeps coming to me,” says Glassman, “is the classic horror movie moment where a couple drives into a secluded wooded area for some privacy. And suddenly there’s a wolf there…. In Rundle Park the city disappears. It’s one of the places in Edmonton where you can forget where you are, and feel you’re in another world. And it’s getting dark.” It’s a scenario that puts Major Matt Mason in synch with Beth Dart, the artistic director of Common Ground Arts (Night’s host) and a specialist in site-specific theatre that experiments with new ways of connecting audiences and artists.

Major Matt Mason has found its spot. “The common thread in our work is doing things we’ve never done before, a paradox of an answer,” Glassman laughs. “New work and working with young artists we’ve never worked with before” are also in the MMMC playbook.

“The reason we started in the first place was so we could hire ourselves to do the work we wanted to do…. Now that we’re 30, we’re re-evaluating what it means to tell young stories. And part of that has been making relationships with young artists.” Artists like Night director Yousuf Liepert (“he’s 21, and he’s kooky and incredible!”).

It’s a company talent-scouting model based, not on internships or assistant gigs but handing over “power, creative agency, in a project that has support,” as Glassman puts it. “Here are the reins; if you need to make mistakes, fine, we’re here for you.”

“I’m proud of being able to pay our artists…. It’s the rewarding thing about being a producer. I remember how significant it was for me,” says Glassman. Stupid Fucking Bird was the first time, outside Major Matt Mason, that I was paid to do (theatre), and the trust of that is so transforming….”

And as for audiences, “my focus is ‘how do I make plays for people who don’t go to see plays?’…. The classist rituals of theatre are very unappealing to me.” She’s drawn to make theatre in “inner city public access spaces.”  Even when MMMC puts on a play in an actual theatre, as in the case for Little Red, their visceral modern re-telling of Red Riding Hood (in collaboration with Ghost River Theatre) at the Calgary’s West Village Theatre, the experience is far from formal. “We want the audience to feel included … whether feeling complicit or having to fight afterward about What The Fuck Just Happened There!”

Zoë Glassman in Night, Major Matt Mason Collective. Photo by Elise CM Jason.

The collective is looking to tour Night after its Edmonton premiere. And Glassman, Brown et al are pondering possible locales and spaces. What about a big platform surrounded by … trampolines? (Glassman’s idea). “I don’t want to do anything twice,” she laughs.

Meanwhile the return to rehearsing live instead of online has been a transforming experience. Glassman has been rehearsing in her back yard, trying to avoid the holes her puppy has been digging. “Now, suddenly everything makes sense to me in a new way,” she says of this return to live theatre that’s live. “I feel like a different human in front of eyes. I’m not self-conscious in the way I was before; I’m just so glad to be doing it….”

“I’ll never say No to karaoke again!”

PREVIEW

Night (a drive-in play)

Theatre: Major Matt Mason Collective, presented by Common Ground Arts Society

Written by: Geoffrey Simon Brown

Directed by: Yousuf Liepert

Starring: Zoë Glassman

Where: Rundle Park

Running: Thursday through Sunday and June 24 to 26

Tickets: Common Ground Arts Society 

  

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Grab your headphones and go for a walk: Would You Wander, a nature/ storytelling podcast at Nextfest

Posted on June 9, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You’ve come to the right place. Exactly where you are…. So c’mon.” – Episode 0, Would You Wander

Yesterday I went on a stroll by the river. And there was a friendly voice in my ear.

It wasn’t frantic instructions, peppy exhortations to step faster, stride longer, sweat more (I’m pretty resistant to those anyhow). The voice didn’t ask me to conjugate verbs in French, follow a map, or even pick my route. Nothing happened, and it was strangely calming.

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In Nature Nurture, episode 6 of Would You Wander, Sam Jeffery’s highly unusual podcast series at Nextfest, actor/director Emma Ryan simply invited me to be aware of my world and what I was seeing, and hearing, and touching. It felt easeful, so I kept going….

In episode 1, Lito the Rusalka, Sofia Lukie told me a story, inspired by a Ukrainian tale of love sought, lost, gained. In five fleeting parts, it was all about our relationship to water, and floated our pandemic sadness in “a year of disconnectedness,” our magnetic attraction to what lies under the surface. The river valley seemed like the right place to listen to that, too. So I kept going….

“Part storytelling part nature exploration,” Would You Wander is, in this initial Nextfest incarnation, six episodes, each with a different storyteller who wrote and performed their own stories.

The six debut “Wanders” came about as a pandemic project, says Jeffery, a U of A acting grad with a multi-faceted career in fight direction and intimacy coordination/direction.“I joined the Canadian Conservation Corps and spent a few months volunteering in Ontario. And the third stage (of that) is ‘a self-directed community service project that includes education and outreach’.” As an artist, she wanted her project to have a theatre/storytelling aspect.

For us in our year-plus of isolation — a lot of it stuck inside, paralyzed or fuming depending on the day — Nature has had a cathartic, almost mystical, allure. “I was looking for a way for people to share their stories and their connection with Nature,” says Jeffery. Her invitation wasn’t confining or prescriptive. She put the call out to “people who wanted to tell stories about Nature…. I left it up to the storytellers to decide how they wanted to share.”

And there was a striking variety of responses, as Jeffery describes. Witness the range of “Wanders,” from “an educational meditation on mushrooms, and how humanity deals with conservation to a Ukrainian folk tale that looks at water…. Another is a meditative walk that invites you to be present in your surroundings: what do you see? what do you feel? Another talks about trees, and invites you to sit somewhere and listen to some poetry for a bit….”     

“The idea is put headphones on, go outside, and take a walk. And share a story while you walk,” says Jeffery. The results are ‘educational’ in that “storytelling has a lot of power. As Indigenous cultures know, a story isn’t just a story; it’s a way to pass knowledge down.”

If there hadn’t been a pandemic, Jeffery “would have wanted a storyteller to pick up people and take them on a guided walk” in person. But podcasts and their voice in your ear have a particular kind of intimacy. “And a broad reach,” as she’s discovered. Only 30 per cent of people listening to the trailer and the introductory Episode 0 live in Canada.

“I’m planning to continue,” Jeffery says of Would You Wander. “I’m excited about the potential of the project going forward; Nextfest is a springboard.” In this first round “the performers are mostly theatre artists,” but that could change in the future.

Her time in Ontario as part of the Nature Conservancy’s “invasive species project” was a life-changer, Jeffery muses. “Four months cutting invasive grasses on the Saugeen Peninsula helped me realize how good it is to just be outside!”

Would You Wander is available as part of Nextfest (which runs through Sunday). The storytellers are Sarah Emslie, Emma Ryan, Sophie Gareau-Brennan, Sofia Lukie, Gabriel Richardson, Dean Stockdale.

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Storytelling on film: Artists & Love (The Instagram Miniseries) at Nextfest

Posted on June 7, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Episode 2, Artists & Love (The Instagram Miniseries) by Emily Anne Corcoran, Nextfest 2021.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The “let’s see if…” impulse finds a natural home at Nextfest, Edmonton’s 26-year-old festival of artists emerging into professional careers.

By personality it’s  a veritable convention of natural multi-disciplinary experimenters. Have a look at the festival’s mainstage “theatre performance” lineup, and you’ll see what I mean.

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Meet Emily Anne Corcoran, a U of A theatre school grad (BFA class of 2020), who’s brought to the all-digital Nextfest an experimental three-part miniseries that takes on the technical and aesthetic challenges of bringing short films to a social media site. Artists & Love rolls on Instagram, the story function.

She describes the connective tissue of her trio as “artists and moments in their lives, the complicated relationships they have with loved ones…. Each episode has its own story. The first (stars) an actor, the second a musician. And the third, our comedy, is four roommates, each with a different artistic discipline, living in a house together.”

Corcoran left Paradise to be here. To be more precise, she arrived in the West from her little home town of Paradise Nfld. 20 minutes from St John’s, with theatre on her mind, and a surprising list of film credentials on her resumé. “I got my start (acting) in film at 15,” she says of a piece called Home. “Newfoundland has a very vibrant film industry for its size. Very welcoming and nurturing.” When she got the urge to write and direct from time to time, the film industry there made that happen too.

Why theatre school? Says Corcoran “I got to the point when I wanted an education, somewhere I could fail and not cost a project its moment, somewhere to learn freely….” She loves theatre and film, “for very different reasons, for what they are,” and can’t now imagine giving up either.

“I love the liveness and the energy in the room,” Corcoran says of theatre. As for film, “if we’re going digital, let’s go all the way!” was her mantra as new (which is to say new new) pandemic restrictions came into effect in April. “Mere days from shooting” the original series she’d pitched had to be scrapped. So, pivoting on the pandemic dime, her Nextfest project had to be executed within a bubble that included her three room-mates, all fellow actors from theatre school.

“I looked at what I had at my disposal: a house, three actor roommates, and a script I’d had on the shelf for a couple years.” Ah, and a Panasonic camera on loan for the year from a school.

episode 3 of Artists & Love (the Instagram Miniseries) by Emily Anne Corcoran, Nextfest 2021.

That script became episode 2, which happens in a musician’s dressing room after a concert. And Corcoran figured”OK, this is a story I’ve always wanted to make, this is an opportunity: how can I make it fit into a greater series?” Artists & Love was born in that question, and Corcoran’s interest in exploring artists as vulnerable creatures haunted by the past and its persistent ghosts. “It’s the way as artists the people we meet never really leave us; they seep into our work and our beings.”

In the three episodes, the familiar spaces inhabited by the artist-characters are invaded by their own personal ghosts. Episode 1, which happens during  the intermission of a play, an actor is visited by a former lover. A muse, his first love, arrives in the musician’s backstage dressing room in episode 2. Jackson Card, who plays the musician, has been learning the guitar during lockdown, as Corcoran reports. “He arranged, and played, the cover of an old Irish song The Wild Rover.” Episode 3 happens in and out of a house shared by artists who, in their own ways, are chafing at an impasse, a creator’s block in lockdown. The cathartic group dance and scream at the climax is something you’ll welcome in your bones.

Instagram was Corcoran’s app of choice, “my favourite at the moment,” she says. “I feel it’s intuitive, user-friendly and I hope that will help bring people to the project. You just click, and the whole thing plays through; the only choice you have to make is to continue watching.”

As film-making tools and distribution methods, Instagram and its fellow sites, YouTube or Vimeo among them, are an antidote to the inaccessible expensive-ness of film. “For people like me, making films with friends,” the cost of applying to individual festivals in order to build a circuit is instantly beyond reach.

Corcoran opted for a series of shorts rather than one extended piece because each episode “felt like a moment…. It’s glimpses into their lives You don’t get the rest of the the story, the whole picture…. We’re just peeking in for a moment. I really like that!” Besides, our attention span for stories unspooling on phones isn’t exactly unlimited.

“That’s one thing I really love about short films,” says Corcoran. “To tell your story and make you fall in love with your characters in under 10 minutes” is a particular, and considerable, achievement.

And that wasn’t the only challenge in Corcoran’s experiment in translating storytelling and filmmaking onto Instagram. “All my learning in film-making is how to compose a shot horizontally.” The “aspect ratios” for social media sites like Instagram are vertical, for the benefit of phone-users. She laughs. Using “a frame that’s so tall was a little more complicated than I thought it would be.”

Meanwhile, the house of artists that Corcoran, her partner, and their two best friends (the stars of Artists & Love) share has become a film studio. “And it’s been in disarray since April!” That might be a whole Nextfest sitcom series in the making.

Artists & Love (The Instagram Miniseries)

Nextfest 2021

Theatre: shefromthesea productions

Written and directed by: Emily Anne Corcoran

Starring: Braden Butler, Kael Wynn, Jackson Card, Emily Anne Corcoran

When: every day of the festival through June 13

Where: Instagram page

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Arkangel: piecing together the mysteries of the past in a small town, sci-fi/horror from Liam Salmon at Nextfest.

Posted on June 4, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Arkangel by Liam Salmon, Nextfest 2021. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hello? Hello, can you hear me?” — Arkangel by Liam Salmon

The “sci-fi/ horror play that premieres on the Nextfest virtual MainStage Saturday revels in the elusive, the unknown, the mysterious. Which in a way makes Liam Salmon’s Arkangel a natural for these uncertain times.

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“I love ghosts, weird stuff, the paranormal,” says Salmon, whose new play rolls as a series of interviews — “by someone, or something, an organization” — of people talking about strange things that happened in a creepy small town. “I love the not-knowing what the reality of what’s happening is….”  The Arkangel trailer (check it out on YouTube) is a barrage of mysterious cutaways, shadowy imagery, echoing voices, fragments of interviews that look “real,” that dissolve into static. And it comes with an intriguing assortment of warnings: “adult content, death/dying, kidnapping/abduction, religious content.”

In the absence of certainty “you imagine things,” says Salmon. “The audience fills in the blanks. To me, that’s prime for horror.” And that appetite has filtered his way into a playwriting career that has taken off since his return from the National Theatre School in Montreal to his home town.

Arkangel by Liam Salmon, Nextfest 2021. Photo supplied.

The pandemic has been hard on creative urgency, as many of  Salmon’s fellow artists will attest. After months struggling with the pandemic-induced “feeling of paralysis” after his podcast play Local Diva premiered as part of The Alberta Queer Calendar Project last winter, Salmon returned to writing with “half of Arkangel.”

“It was a weird idea and the first thing I was able to explore!”

Nextfest’s call for theatrical projects designed for digital presentation, “made a shift in my brain,” says the playwright, who’d originally thought of the play with an onstage chorus of character/storytellers. He changed tack knowing Arkangel was going to be online.

Arkangel by Liam Salmon, Nextfest 2021. Photo supplied.

The “interview format,” recorded in monologues, fit the unnerving subject matter (“very much of the genre of horror videos on YouTube), both in the rehearsing and the performing. And he tapped the creative talents of a pal, Ontario-based video designer James McCoy, a horror fan, too who instantly signed on. The feeling of webcam interviews with people in their bedrooms has atmosphere and narrative implications in Arkangel. With a cast of eight (including two voice-over actors), playing characters with “code names” — Father (a priest), Grandmother, Girlfriend, Doctor, Daughter, Customer, Waitress, among them — “it’s a big show that feels like a small show.”

The production was rehearsed on Zoom and so could gather collaborators from here and Calgary, Quebec and Ontario.” That “cross-province” access was  one silver lining pandemic discovery. And so was the way the online format, so dramatically meaningful in Arkangel, proved an antidote to the “the weird pain, the sad feeling of watching theatre over Zoom; it’s so not theatre.”

Salmon has a history with Nextfest, a festival that finds multiple ways to launch and nurture arts careers. His play Silence of the Machine, “about A.I. and female body autonomy and all those questions,” has sci-fi resonances too. An A.I. is forced to get pregnant to validate her female credentials. “At the core of sci-fi, Salmon thinks, is metaphor, with societal vibe. Arkangel is “about faith and loss, I would say.”

Two years ago (“it feels like 15!”) he was part of Nextfest’s “Collaboration Project”: “I ‘acted’, in quotation marks, in that.” And he’s taken part in the festival’s queer cabarets and Nite Clubs. But his Nextfest history, which includes his play All That’s Left, has been mostly about writing.

The Alberta Queer Calendar Project was “a cool opportunity to see how sound design can tell a story,” says Salmon. Arkangel is a chance to explore film. “In theatre we’re guests in other mediums at the moment. This is still theatre, but we’ve plunged into the possibilities of film: close-ups, cutaways, establishing shots and all that stuff.”

After this, when the pandemic gong show is finally over, “I’d love to write a comedy,” he says. “A dysfunctional comedy: garage sales, where no one really buys anything and everything keeps getting recycled…. I think it’s a perfect metaphor for family.”

PREVIEW

Nextfest, the festival of emerging artists

Arkangel

Theatre: Hypothetical Bad Idea

Written and directed by: Liam Salmon

Design, editing and post production: James McCoy

Starring: Jacob Margaret Archer, James McCoy, Eleanor Neylon, Meryl Ochoa, Liam Salmon, Tucker, Kiana Woo, Alana Wrenshall

Running: Saturday 7:40 p.m.

Where: nextfest

    

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Hansel and Gretel go solo in a new digital Alberta Musical Theatre production

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Bhey Pastolero in Hansel and Gretel, Alberta Musical Theatre Company. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

They’re the most famous brother-sister act in the fairy tale canon, joint stars of a cautionary tale about injudicious junk food consumption in the woods.     

Now Hansel and Gretel are back together again. Closer than ever since this time out they’re being played by the same actor. And in this Alberta Musical Theatre Company digital reinvention of their original 2009 musical, Bhey Pastolero not only plays the song-and-dance siblings, but also the Witch, the Father, the Step-Mother, and Heinrich, a character the Brothers Grimm never quite got around to writing, who’s been lost in the Black Forest for his entire life.

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Safe it certainly is. “Above and beyond safe,” says Farren Timoteo, Alberta Musical Theatre’s artistic director since 2007, of their first venture into the world of digital and digital “touring.” We’re talking about a one-person production, rehearsed and performed upstairs at The Playhouse, in the board room-turned studio space three walls and two doors away from the stage manager, and performed in isolation. “Designed to be COVID restriction-proof,” it’s ready for delivery to screens in school classrooms or at home, for kids (and their grown-up associates).

The company specialty is reimagining fairy tales for kids (and adults), with contemporary and often feminist sass and irony, as the archive of Timoteo collaborations with the late great musical theatre composer Jeff Unger will attest. Musicals for kids, yes, but with grown-up wit to them, and Unger scores of unusual (and very adult) complexity. Timoteo and Unger shared a love of Sondheim; Sweeney Todd, as they often said, was their favourite musical, which explains the sophisticated rhythms and rhyming of many of their shows. Still, there’s something amusingly counter-intuitive about choosing Hansel and Gretel of all the Grimm possibilities for solo treatment. It is, after all, “essentially a two-hander,” as Timoteo concedes, laughing.

Bhey Pastolero in Hansel and Gretel, Alberta Musical Theatre Company. Photo supplied.

“But it had a very direct address narrative style I thought would translate well,” Timoteo says, thinking back to the three-actor 2009 original (revived in 2017). Hansel and Gretel did their own narration, then stepped nimbly back into the action (and the third actor played everyone else in the story).  And Timoteo (who made his own professional debut in an Alberta Musical Theatre touring production of Jack and the Beanstalk, is thinking, too, of the dynamic of his own solo show Made In Italy, “a story about two people, a father and a son, where it’s the storyteller’s responsibility to inhabit all the characters.”

“Jeff had to sell me on Hansel and Gretel,” says Timoteo. “I hadn’t connected to it at all, and I said no many times.” He credits Unger with the narrative premise of hunger: “a family, two kids and their dad, starving in a blighted forest.” The addition to the family unit of a step-mother, that fairy tale classic, makes hunger worse. No wonder the Witch is keen to lure kids to her place, and up the protein content in her diet.

For the new digital one-person version of Hansen and Gretel “I was drawing on the experience I had as a kid in elementary school in the west end of Edmonton, at St. Martha’s,” says Timoteo. “We’d have guest authors reading from their books, and we’d be sitting on the floor in a semi-circle around them.” The goal was that kind of confidential storyteller’s intimacy; “the filming frames the actor from the waist up.”

In 2009 Hansel and Gretel was one of the earliest collaborations of the Timoteo-Unger musical-writing team, “our second piece together,” as Timoteo says. “We’d done Little Red Riding Hood the year before…. We were trying to find our collaborative voice, and we hadn’t found it yet.”

This artistic quest “was informed by how much space we had in the (touring) van, actually,” he says, a smile in his voice.  “So how do we put a candy house in the back of the van? How do we design that? Then we stumbled on (an insight): we were fools to try and bring the full scope of a theatrical set into a school gym…. Here we were, trying to show kids what a candy house looked like, and we had an audience with infinite imagination. We were actually restricting them!”

At the time Timoteo had just seen Catalyst Theatre’s original musical Frankenstein, with its bold stylized physicality and visuals, and the way the actors share the narration while playing all the characters. “I was SO inspired by the atmosphere and storytelling structure and devices, and thought maybe we could do a similar thing for kids…. We’ll use word to paint the images; each of the three actors will be a narrator as well as multiple characters within that world.” An aesthetic was born in that thought.

Costume designer Deanna Finnman, who still works with the company, made spectacular work of the Witch, with “arms that could extend and be inhumanly long.” This time, with the characters visible in torso only, the keynote of Finnman’s costume design is hats, lots and lots of them. For the Witch she used badminton racquets with hair built into them.

“The idea is a shooting gallery of pop-up characters,” says director Timoteo. Pastolero “grabs hats from off the rack, puts them on, takes them, and becomes another character.”

The action happens framed by a little proscenium arch (set designer: Brianna Kolybaba), a deliberately theatrical choice. Timoteo sighs. “I miss theatre; we all do…. Ultimately we opted for painted drops, to feel the texture of theatre. In a theatre-preventing pandemic I feel a sense of comfort when I hear curtain rings (pull) across the pipes.”

“As a director of a digital event I really want it to feel live.”

Hansel and Gretel, starring Bhey Pastolero, is happening on YouTube Live. Information about streaming passes, both for school and home, is available by email (bookings@albertamusicaltheatre.ca), by phone (780-422-3161) or on the website.

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Nextfest at 26: catching the drift of the new wave of artists, online again for a second year

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

It’s the eve of Nextfest, the freewheeling multi-disciplinary Edmonton festival that for more than a quarter of a century has sought out, showcased, and celebrated the original creative ideas of the next generation of emerging artists. You’ll meet some of them in upcoming 12thnight posts. But first, meet Nextfest Director Ellen Chorley and survey the festivities with her. 

Nextfest 2021 image by Taylor Danielle. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What’s happening? What’s next? Those are the very questions that are Nextfest’s raison d’être, both for its artists and for us. The idea dreamed up at Theatre Network in 1996 has been a way of connecting with creative minds and possible answers.

That has never seemed more crucial. In a year of grinding devastation in the arts, when the past seems mythical and the future has never seemed less knowable, Nextfest’s coterie of 400-plus artists have taken up the festival’s invitation to collaborate and experiment — online. And come Thursday for 11 days (through June 13) we’ll find them on you computer screen playing with others across the wide spectrum of theatre, dance, clowning, burlesque, comedy, music, film, poetry, spoken word, visual arts.…

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“Just to see the diversity, how many ways artists have gone about telling their stories … it’s really beautiful!” says Ellen Chorley, director of Nextfest and — as playwright/ actor/ director/ dramaturg/ mentor/ curator/ artistic director — an artist of prodigious versatility herself.       

Nextfest turned 25 last June by taking its multi-limbed self entirely online, an impressively transformational high-speed two-month pivot of a whole festival of live performances to the digital realm. “‘It’s April 1; can you come up with something digital?’ we asked our artists,” says Chorley. “And they all said yes.”

Year 26 is different. “There were so many factors at play we decided in December to go all online,” she says of this year’s edition, restriction-proof in an unpredictable world. “Right from the start, with every submission, we asked ‘how is your idea going to be an online digital project?’ And we partnered with GIFT (Girls in Film and TV, an organization devoted to providing tools and instruction in film-making) who supplied free equipment and mentorship…. Quality is definitely enhanced!”

Submissions for the January deadline came from all over the world, says Chorley. “In theatre (alone) 120 scripts arrived in my inbox,” at least as many as usual, maybe more. Which is also a sign of theatre deprivation, “a comment on the situation of people eager to practice their art during the pandemic.”

If you’re in “whither theatre?” pondering mode, tune in to Nextfest’s range of “mainstage” offerings. As Chorley surveys, the new generation of theatre artists are inventive in the ways they go about connecting digitally with an audience. There is, for example, “a short play that’s completely animated” (Butterflies: A Broadcast From The Digital Neon Jungle by Caitlin Kelly). Emily Anne Corcoran’s Artists & Love: the Instagram Miniseries is “a three-part series designed specially to be watched on Instagram’s “story” function. There’s even “a nature podcast,” Sam Jefferey’s Would You Wander, six stories to be experienced while you’re walking outdoors in nature.

And there are plays (Liam Salmon’s sci/fi horror production Arkangel) and solo performances (among them Lebogang Disele’s The Space Between, a movement and poetry meditation on “being Black, African, and a Woman”).

Chorley, a theatre artist by experience who discovered her career more than half a lifetime ago at Nextfest, has been particularly fascinated to see how other art forms imagine virtual performance. “I don’t know as much about dance and film,” she says of the lineup curated by Rebecca Sadowski. “And dance films are blowing my mind! So artfully done…. I love the way that art form makes you zero in on specific movement, on what they want you to look at. The lighting choices! Fascinating. It’s made me fall in love with that form.”

Because the Nextfest offerings were rehearsed and filmed in socially distanced ways during the pandemic — mostly since January and mostly outdoors, an achievement in fortitude, to say the least — and “the regulations changed so often,” the cast sizes are smaller than other years. And the projects are shorter. “People have learned more about digital storytelling,” says Chorley, “more efficient storytelling.”

A celebration of innovators it may be, but Nextfest has always had its  traditions. Arts industry mentoring workshops for artists crossing the fateful theshold into the professional world — on everything from voice acting to audio engineering to decolonizing the arts, are back. Chorley herself coaches ‘playwriting basics’.

Back, too, are the signature Nextfest performance Nite Clubs. The spontaneous intermingling on the dance floor of audience and performance artists is a fantastical impossibility at the moment. But the nite clubs have been reinvented for the times as online “variety shows, hosted live,” as Chorley describes. The Pride edition of the three, June 12, is Hot Mustard, a veritable extravaganza of fast food allusions presented by Hot Girl Accounting. Party-ers are encouraged to “dress to impress” (sequins are appreciated).

And, yes, for the sixth year, Nextfest contributes an original wall mural to the scene: look for Haylee Fortin’s work on the Backstage Theatre shop doors.

Nextfest is one of those festivals that eludes easy quantification. But in all, there are about 90 events, six or so more projects than last year. After a 2020 edition in which they weren’t included, the visual arts are back. As Chorley explains, the work of 10 artists is  showcased in three festival galleries: the windows at the defunct Strathcona Army and Navy (for street viewing), the Next Act Pub (restrictions permitting, six in-person viewers at a time may be allowed in), and Lowlands Project Space in Highlands (single-household groups, by appointment only). And curator Rebecca Pickard has created a film round-up (available June 11 and 13).

Nextfest (ASL-captioned in every particular) is free for the watching; you don’t need a ticket — thanks to the continuing support of Theatre Network, funders, the adopt-an-artist program, and your welcome donations. All you need to ride the next wave is your wi-fi connection.

PREVIEW

Nextfest 2021

Theatre: Nextfest Arts Company

Where to watch: free online

Running: Thursday through June 13

Full schedule and program: nextfest.ca

   

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Lost sock? Ghost in the garage? Investigators from the Ministry of Mundane Mysteries to the rescue, by phone

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries, Outside the March. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What on earth could have happened to my copy of Alice in Wonderland? I’ve looked everywhere. And while we’re on the subject of missing, my polka-dot frame cheap-o sunglasses have been AWOL for 18 months? And what is that odd ticking sound on the side of the shed?

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Existence is mysterious in the largest sense, true, and the future is one big unknown. But there’s this: life is riddled with minor, mundane bafflements, nagging little mysteries that might not strike society as a whole as urgent but …   

They are meat and drink for the intrepid Investigators from The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries. In a series of five phone calls to you (and your family) in the course of an hour, these alert private detectives will unleash their powers of deduction and undertake to solve your own particular case. it happens here as part of  the International Children’s Festival of the Arts for 10 performances Saturday and Sunday.

The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries, Outside the March. Photo supplied.

Custom-tailored on a case-by-case basis, The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries is an immersive theatre adventure, telephonic in delivery, by Toronto’s innovative Outside The March. Since its premiere in March of 2020, it’s played in more than 210 cities across the country and around the world, including Lima, Peru and Mumbai, India, two places hardest hit by the pandemic (you can check out the global map on the Outside The March website).

It was created 14 months ago to reimagine live theatre for a time when live performance was abruptly shut down, says Mitchell Cushman, Outside the March co-artistic director along with Simon Bloom. “It was devised largely to replace a couple of projects we had lined up,” including “a walk-about immersive production of Sweeney Todd that was all set to open.”

Outside the March is that kind of company. There are award-winning productions of hot existing plays, The Flick and Jerusalem among them, in the company archive. But OTM is  particularly known for inventive site-specific immersive productions that take audiences out of traditional “theatres” and into unexpected theatrical encounters. A Toronto native who came west to get a master’s degree in directing at the U of A, Cushman went back to his home town in 2011 with an Edmonton collaborator (Amy Keating) and a company named for a line from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, “one of my favourite playwrights and one of my favourite plays,” as he says. “It appealed to us; we wanted to do things that were out of the ordinary.”

Their second production Mr. Marmalade, about a kid and her very flawed imaginary friend, was promenade-style, and happened in an actual kindergarten classroom where the audience mingled with the actors.

In his time in Edmonton Cushman says he’d been most inspired by a site-specific piece he’s caught at the 2010 Fringe here: Theatre Yes’s production of Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/ Get Treasure/ Repeat, which took audiences on a “tour” of highly disturbing theatrical experiences in four startling locations, including a Strathcona parking garage. “That piece stayed with me,” Cushman says, “the proximity, the unexpected journey of it.”

Since then Outside The March has gathered audiences and multiple awards in taking audiences into such non-traditional venues as a funeral home, an abandoned movie theatre, a video store. In one way, the company has specialized in “intimate proximity, when we cram people into small spaces,” an aesthetic that comes with queasy overtones in this world of ours. In another, though, “we’re into theatre that re-imagines what the theatre experience can be, and that has been very useful in this time,” Cushman says. And it’s been a bonus to be a company that doesn’t run a venue, as he points out.

Zoom was a possible choice for The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries, of course. Much of theatre has scrambled to find a footing on that platform in the last year. “But we began from the premise that Zoom was what we didn’t want it to be,” Cushman says. Instead, its venue, a retro one, is the phone. “There’s an intimacy and a focus about the phone,” he thinks. “By phone you can enlist the audience imagination. Which theatre is very good at doing.” And there’s an unmistakeable liveness about having an actor talk to you, converse with you, improvise from your responses.

In the interests of wider accessibility, when the phone isn’t viable, Cushman and co-director Griffin McInnes have adapted the show as a video call for an ASL version that played the Sound Off Festival of Deaf Theatre here in March. That adaptation has “other fun elements to it; the actors are in costume….”

For theatre the silver lining to the very dark cloud that is the pandemic, is “that you can cross borders.” as Cushman points out citing OTM’s new world-wide connections. “It’s a way of creating opportunities for actors and other theatre companies to produce work in this time…. I’ve never felt like geographical borders and boundaries have mattered less!”

Originally the production was designed as a series of daily 10-minute phone calls for a week. “That felt right when everyone was really stuck at home and life had even less structure…. But now, as people have found ways to return to their work lives, that no longer felt feasible, for the actors, too.”

Outside the March got funding last fall to adapt the work of the Ministry for front-line workers at a Toronto hospital “and it was just too hard to figure out their schedules.  So we adapted it for an hour, and that ended up feeling more conducive to the time,” says Cushman. “A power hour.”

When you buy a ticket to The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries, you fill out a small questionnaire. “It gives the audience members a bit of a sense of the experience. And it gives our team (of actor/improvisers) a couple of key details about the person, including the real mystery from your life you’d like solved … so we can create a personalized story.”

Very occasionally, the cast gets prompts that might be too dark or heavy to work as well (“very rare”), in an experience designed to be “light and fun.” Co-directors Cushman and McInnes have an “all-service help line for actors” in stories that “require a bit of extra attention.”

“Kids often use their imaginations to invent things, and that works well for them. We encourage adults not to make things up. But that’s flexible too,” says Cushman. “What I love about this is that there is no external audience; the only people in the audience are the ones receiving the call. There’s no other audience (the actors) need to please…. It’s custom-made and the calls are very different.”

As the pandemic grinds on and in-person restrictions change, “like everyone in the industry we’re always planning and re-planning,” he says. “We’ve reinvented a previously produced musical (yet to be announced) as an audio broadcast that we’re also hoping to play on people’s porches and in backyards this summer.” And since a pandemic side-effect is the favouring of more spacious venues over intimate spaces, Outside the March “is putting a lot of energy into a large-scale project for the summer of 2022.”

Look for Cushman’s film version of Lessons in Temperament, James Smith’s solo hit from the SummerWorks of 2016, shot in shuttered theatres around Toronto. Originally, they’d planned to bring this very intimate live piece, performed around a piano, to the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary. “If we’d called it theatre we wouldn’t have been able to shoot it, but it’s a film,” Cushman sighs.

Meanwhile, the Investigators from the Ministry are prepared to solve your personal mystery for you over the phone. “Last March we thought we’d do this piece for a couple of weeks until the the pandemic blew over. And here we are! Wonderful and unexpected all the places it’s happening.”

PREVIEW

International Children’s Festival of the Arts

The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries

Theatre: Outside The March

Created and directed by: Mitchel Cushman and Griffin McInnes

Running: June 5 and 6, various times

Tickets: $30 per household, stalbert.ca

  

    

   

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Solving a mystery, being Hamlet, streaming a play, climbing a mountain, and other theatrical pursuits this weekend

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a puzzling world where much has gone way wrong, cause and effect have gone their separate ways, and logic has gone AWOL, there’s satisfaction to be had in collaborating with others to consider evidence and solve a mystery.

And, yes, among the possibilities for your weekend entertainment in this theatre town, there’s a theatre ‘experience’ for that. S.I.S.T.E.R., an interactive online mystery presented by The Fox Den Collective, is back after an sold-out run last fall. It’s one possibility, and there are others — streamed plays, an audio theatre participation adventures (no kidding), digital solo interpretations of classics, an audio song cycle…. Here’s a selection.

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•Trust theatre artists, whose ingenuity has been taxed beyond all reasonable limits by the pandemic, to come up with a virtual “play” — part-improv, part-game — that you (stuck at home, possibly alone, feeling your powers of deduction atrophy by the minute) get to be in. And not only that, you get to discuss this “play” as it’s happening, with your team-mates (a nightly audience of 25 is divided into five five-person teams).

S.I.S.T.E.R. is named for the investigative team (Squadron for the Investigation of Sorority Transgressions, Evil-Doing, and Rapscallionism) you join when the most valuable artifact belonging to Gamma Gamma Gamma vanishes from that sorority house on the University of Edmonton campus one night.

Who stole the ceremonial mace? Thursday night I had the fun of meeting up with people I didn’t know to try and find that out, and nail the culprit. We got to sift through links emailed to us earlier in the day. When show-time came, each team repaired to a Zoom break-out room, and we were visited in turn by the suspects. We got to ask questions, listen, discuss our reactions and our deductions, discuss what we thought was being revealed and what concealed by the characters, sort the clues from the red herrings, devise more questions to ask….

I was lucky to be with quick-witted, smart people who reacted in different ways to the suspects’ answers and evasions. One thing I did deduce was just how much the pandemic has robbed us of the fun and liveliness of unexpected, improvised encounters.

Another deduction: mysteries are devilishly tricky to construct — layers of information, what to let slip when, what to hold back, what to leave to actors to hint at, as alternative possibilities. S.I.S.T.E.R. is cleverly done.

Directed by Carmen Osahor, the production stars Jessy Ardern, Michelle Diaz, Chariz Faulmino, Sara Feutl, Marina Mair-Sanchez and Kristen Padayas. This return run lasts through June 5. And since this is an entirely online investigation, you can team up with friends and relatives from afar, or you can do what I did, meet some quick-witted strangers. Tickets: eventbrite.ca. Check out the 12thnight interview with Jessy Ardern last October here.      

•This is the night Kiana Woo, the second of Thou Art Here’s weekly series of six Hamlets, appears (on your screen) to reveal to you the Prince of Denmark’s existential anxieties, solitary self-doubts, ruminations on mortality and meaning. All very Of This Moment, don’t you think? Hamlet in Isolation, an experimental mini-series from the “site-sympathetic” Shakespeare company, starring diverse Alberta performers who have never been Hamlet before, runs through June 25 on Friday nights.  Tickets: fringetheatre.ca (pay-what-you-will). 12thnight talked to Thou Art Here’s Andrew Ritchie about the series here.

Lora Brovold in The Ugly Duchess, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

•This is the finale weekend for Northern Light Theatre’s streamed production of Janet Munsil’s The Ugly Duchess. So … your last chances (through Sunday) to catch a smart, confidential, and affecting performance from Lora Brovold in creating a multi-dimensional portrait of the intrepid 14th century Countess of Tyrol  reputed to be the ugliest woman in history. Trevor Schmidt’s production, beautifully designed and lighted, lingers in close-ups on “the goddess of ugliness,” an outsider in a man’s world where her wealth and strategic location make her an eligible catch. Give Darrin Hagen’s original soundscape a particular listen; it has narrative implications. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com. Check out the 12thnight preview interview with Lora Brovold here, and the review here.

Helen Belay, Like This, Transformations Project, Concrete Theatre. Photo supplied.

•The national Transformations Project hosted online by the National Arts Centre offers two new short videos by Edmonton artists, commissioned by Concrete Theatre, to address the question of what it would take to change the world.

Actor/dancer/choreographer Richard Lee, a witty skeptic, wonders about the question in Side Shave: “a reflection on collective experiences, hope at the end(s) of the world, and dancing like an idiot.” In the light of the distorted pseudo-universality founded on  colonialism, able-ism, late-stage capitalism, etc. what in the end do people share as common experience — except “gravity, the passage of time, and a body”? It is enough to work with, he says. “It is a lot.”

Richard Lee, Side Shave, Transformations Project, Concrete Theatre. Photo supplied.

Helen Belay’s lyrical Like This is inspired by an immigrant inheritance, and finds in the beauty of the natural environment, the seasons, the feeling of being enclosed but open to the world, a continuity that crosses all backgrounds. “It’s like this,” she says “It’s just like this.”

You can catch the videos on the NAC website through Tuesday, and after that at Concrete Theatre. Catalyst’s trio of commissioned Transformations videos (from Chris Dodd, Kristi Hansen and Rebecca Sadowski) continues too. 12thnight talked to the three here.

Mountain Goat Mountain, Theshold. Photo by Lakshal Perera.

•The Australian innovators from Theshold have contributed an ingenious piece of “audio theatre” to this year’s virtual MainStage lineup at the 40th anniversary International Children’s Festival of the Arts, which starts next week. You and your family at home are the cast of Mountain Goat Mountain; the digital prompts set you forth on an adventure. “You can work up a sweat!” promises co-creator Tahli Corin, in a 12thnight preview. Tickets: now available here till June 6 and good for 30 days.

•Have you seen Asha and Ravi Jain’s A Brimful of Asha or Tai Amy Grauman’s Métis version of Mary’s Wedding yet? The Citadel productions continue streaming, the former through Monday and the latter through November 30. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com. 12thnight has reviewed both: A Brimful of Asha and Mary’s Wedding. Tickets: citadel theatre.   

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