SOUND OFF gathers Deaf artists from across the country and beyond for its online 2021 edition

Posted on March 29, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In an age of probing questions about inclusivity in theatre, here’s a model of accessibility — forged in the fire of experience, years of it,  of being marginalized, and finding alternate pathways to communicating.

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SOUND OFF, Canada’s unique and influential national Deaf theatre festival, born in Edmonton five winters ago, returns Wednesday, bigger and brighter than ever, for a five-day 2021 edition (in collaboration with the Chinook Series and Fringe Theatre) that’s exclusively online.

Deaf and hearing audiences are both welcome at a multi-disciplinary multilingual (ASL and English) showcase dedicated to Deaf artists and their stories. And there’s nothing circumscribed about a 22-event lineup that includes seven mainstage performances from here and across the country, seven live workshops; two staged readings; one Q&A, two panels, two digital “lobbies,” and one big wrap party.

Chris Dodd, founder and artistic director of SOUND OFF Festival. Photo by Jade Dodd.

The “pivot” into the digital realm that has engaged the creative wits of our theatre artists in these pandemic times, isn’t really an exile into foreign territory for the Deaf performing arts, says founder and artistic director Chris Dodd, a playwright/actor/activist, who became the U of A’s first Deaf drama grad in 1998. “The Deaf community was already well positioned at the start of the pandemic to shift their work into the digital realm,” he says. “We were already making use of video logs, video platforms for communication, and creating digital performances for many years….”

“The pandemic has been especially interesting for me as a Deaf artist because it’s opened up many opportunities for participation…. Going digital means that we truly reach a national (and beyond) audience for the first time ever after previously being a local event. That in itself brings new energy to the scene.”

Chisato Minamimura in Scored In Silence, SOUND OFF Festival. Photo by Mark Pickthall.

The mainstage guest artist at this year’s festivities, which gather Deaf artists from here, across the country, and beyond, is Chisato Minamimura from the U.K. Her work Scored in Silence, which explores the perspectives of deaf people who survived the atomic bomb atrocity over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, brings another language into the SOUND OFF mix. BSL (British sign language). And the production unspools, as Dodd describes, in three formats: in BSL with English voice-over, audio-described, and English voice-over with captions. Your ticket includes access-on-demand to all three versions.

The five years since the first SOUND OFF have seen “a growing engagement between Deaf artists and mainstream theatre companies as they (the latter) turn their focus to diversity,” Dodd thinks. “Increasingly theatre companies are providing ASL interpretation and captioning…. There are often more events each week than I have time to participate in. Which is something that never happened pre-COVID. I hope that going forward we are able to strike a balance, that the theatre community retains some digital events as they transition back to live theatre.”

Having said that, though, Dodd adds that “people across the country who are Deaf, artists or not, are still marginalized and misunderstood.” Which is one reason, he says, that “I feel it’s important to (bring) my own lived experience to the stage.”

As a theatre artist, Dodd, a wry and insightful sort in conversation and in his writing, has often explored the experience of the Other, the outsider looking in. He finds the Deaf characters in the popular theatre repertoire, as written by hearing authors (Tribes or Children of a Lesser God, for example), are “pretty good” but lack authenticity. By contrast, one of his “favourite experiences onstage” was playing half a married Deaf couple (who communicate in ASL) in a 2016 Toronto production of Ultrasound, by the Saskatoon-based Deaf playwright Adam Pottle.

Please Remain Behind The Shield, by and starring Chris Dodd, SOUND OFF Festival. Photo supplied

Dodd’s own solo show Deafy, a tragicomedy (in ASL, spoken English, and captions) about belonging, will become Playwrights Canada Press’s first published script by a Deaf author in October. It’s been grounded by the pandemic. But Dodd says he’ll return to the stage in it, when theatre is back live.

Meanwhile, his new play Please Remain Behind The Shield premieres at SOUND OFF, in a production (in “English, ASL and integrated subtitles”) by Follow The Signs Theatre, the company he shares with Ashley Wright, who directs. Originally commissioned by Canadian Stage and SummerWorks, it could hardly be more topical; it explores, as billed, “Deaf identity in the age of masks.”

ComMUTE, Deaf Spirit Theatre at SOUND OFF Festival. Photo supplied.

Other MainStage offerings include ComMUTE from Kingston’s Deaf Spirit Theatre, a collection (performed in ASL)  of diverse short pieces created by Deaf artists across the country.    

Gaetrie Persaud and Natasha Bacchus in The Two Natashas: Visiting Aunt Natasha, SOUND OFF Festival. Photo supplied.

Gaitrie Persaud and Natasha Bachus, the high-contrast Deaf pair that brought last year’s SOUND OFF the original comedy The Two Natashas: Our Life in Guyana, are back with a sequel, a new comic adventure called The Two Natashas: Visiting Aunt Natasha.

And, yes, to anticipate your festival question (we are, after all, in Edmonton!) there’s improv. Toronto’s enterprising Outside The March has custom-made an ASL version of The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries, especially for SOUND OFF. In the original version of their intriguing, much-travelled immersive mystery hit (200 cities, every continent), an “inspector” solves an actual  “mundane mystery” from a single participant’s own life — in a series of personalized phone calls at a pre-arranged time every day for a week. The SOUND OFF edition, starring Connor Yuzwenko-Martin and Thurga Kanagasekarampillai (Miranda in the Citadel deaf-hearing production of The Tempest)  happens on Zoom, in the course of an hour, for a general audience.

The six-member troupe Deaf Antlers Improv brings an ASL show, cued live by the audience, to the festivities.

From its debut edition SOUND OFF has partnered with Rapid Fire Theatre on an improv show that’s invariably one of the festival hits, with both Deaf and hearing audiences. It mixes Deaf performers from festival offerings and hearing improvisers from RFT. “It’s been a process in evolution but the results have always been hilarious,” says Dodd, a quick-on-the-uptake improviser himself. “Our first two years we separated into Deaf and hearing teams. After that, we mixed up the teams with equal numbers of hearing and Deaf performers on each. This year we’re using the Maestro format … which eliminates teams and pits performers against one another for points.”

“The one constant,” Dodd says, is the rule that the performers can’t use sign language or speech…. It forces them to express themselves solely through their bodies and gestures.”

“It’s the great equalizer…. Humour has become our shared language.”

PREVIEW

SOUND OFF Festival

Where: online, fringetheatre.ca

Running: March 31 through April 4

Complete schedule of events: soundofffestival.com

Tickets: pay-what-you can, tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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Expanse 2021, the festival of bodies in motion, moves online

Posted on March 25, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Expanse Festival 2021. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Creating more space.” It’s a phrase that recurs like a mantra, and an invitation, when Azimuth Theatre’s two new co-artistic producers Sue Goberdhan and Morgan Yamada talk about this year’s Expanse Festival, opening tonight on an internet near you.

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Expanse, the ever-expanding “celebration of the body in motion,” is a mainstay, along with the SOUND OFF Festival, of the Chinook Series, the two-week cross-company curated showcase of innovative multi-disciplinary art — productions, salons, panel discussions, lobby interludes and gatherings, interactive “dance parties” — that breezes back into town this very night. The sixth annual edition, through April 4, is exclusively online, in an adventurous array of forms, a cross-hatching of live-streamed and video.

There’s a diversity of on-demand content to stream at your own pace. Or you can “go” to Expanse for a festival evening and let the Chinook blow over you as a sort of extended Chinook watch party. You put yourself in the hands of a curated “playlist,”different every day, that includes a selection of streamed performances, and hanging out “live” in the virtual lobby before and after each, to see choreographed performances by The Lobbyists, and/or chat with your fellow festival-goers. The idea, says Goberdhan, is “how to make it as interactive as we can….”

“Sharing” and “different ways of connecting” — both challenging  notions in the isolating pandemic world of 2021 — are key motifs in the Azimuth lexicon. And Goberdhan and Yamada apply them to both the movement arts festival dreamed up 16 years ago by Murray Utas and Amber Borotsik (and re-imagined beyond narrow frontiers of “dance” ever since), and to their new partnership.

After all, times being what they are — a logistical nightmare and/or a rallying cry to innovate, on any given day — the Azimuth co-producing pair making their debut with Expanse have never been able to work together in person in the theatre’s new Strathcona office. “It’s like having a really cool room-mate,” laughs Goberdhan, of the perpetual screen presence of Yamada in her apartment as they make, and re-make Azimuth plans on Zoom.   

“We inherited a lot of programming, originally designed to be live,” says Yamada of Expanse offerings planned by their Azimuth predecessors. “They gave us the machine; we set it in motion.” Vanessa Sabourin and Kristi Hansen exited last year to “make space,” as they said at the time, for a new diverse generation of theatre artists.

The artistic glue in the Expanse 2021 lineup, beyond even its elastic-sided founding idea of the body in motion, is “experience-based” creation, as Yamada puts it. Which is to say artists mining their own personal experience directly, and finding a way to share it onstage.

At its most unfiltered, there’s Moon Speakers, a free closed-space open stage for Inuit, First Nations, Métis female/ femme/ two-spirit artists to “share their experience, their art, their heart,” says Yamada. Its Expanse session Saturday (curated by Sissy Thiessen Kootenayoo) is the launch of a continuing monthly series.

There is a fully produced play in the lineup, too. Deer Woman by the Calgary-based Indigenous playwright Tara Beagan, the winner of the 2020 Siminovitch Prize, is explosive in a way that will stop you in your tracks.

Cherish Violet Blood in Deer Woman, Article 11. Photo by Prudence Upton.

Once seen never forgotten, I can vouch for that; I saw the Article 11/ Downstage Theatre production last fall. It’s a visceral, heart-stopping account of an escalating personal quest for vengeance and justice in this world of murderous violence for Indigenous women. And there is nothing timid or elliptical about its attack on white hypocrisy. Cherish Violet Blood stars as the avenging warrior, and she is riveting.

“It’s an important show,” says Goberdhan, “a show that spoke to us as individuals, in bringing visibility to everything Deer Woman is about.” And Andy Moro’s vivid production, which takes the play off the page and stage at crucial moments, and into the woods, “does an amazing job of bridging the gap between theatre and film, digital theatre and physical theatre,” Yamada adds. And that, for live theatre, is one of the crucial artistic identity crises of our time.

The World Made Itself by and starring Miwa Matreyek. Image by Miwa Matreyek.

If the world had different, two offerings by the highly original L.A.-based artist Miwa Matreyek would have arrived at Expanse on tour, live. Instead, we’ll see her work — she interacts as a shadow-play presence in her intricately layered projection designs and collages — in digital captures. Infinitely Yours is an exploration of climate change grief;  The World Made Itself includes panoptic views of the earth through airplane windows.

With The Guardian: Return of the Princess, the adventurous Lady Vanessa Cardona and the Remix the Ritual collective address, in fairy tale form, personal migration survival stories inspired by real life. In this, a sequel to the first instalment seen earlier this year, a princess and a dragon struggle to find a way through the pandemic in Latin America. “This time it’s with bodies not shadow puppets,” as Goberdhan describes “a cool and interesting piece, with important subject matter.”

The Good Women Dance Collective, five collaborators with a long and distinguished history of infiltrating dance into theatre, and vice versa, have curated three offerings, under the banner rooted — here and now. 

By tradition, the winner of the Good Women Dance Collective New Work Award the previous year, premieres a new piece at the following edition of Expanse. So we get to see Dnaplay: ORB, filmed in the Good Women dance studio at a moment when that was allowed. It’s the creation of Nasra, a multi-faceted artist known to Edmonton audiences primarily as a spoken word poet, actor, and Black Arts Matter producer. As billed, intriguingly, it’s “an opening ceremony, yet a story within its own….”

“The movement part of their artistic process will be interesting to see…. We were excited about giving them the opportunity,” says Good Women’s Ainsley Hillyard who has long cleaved to the notion that “everyone is a dancer.”

“The older we get, the more thoughtful and creative we get,” she laughs. “We’re a contemporary dance company, yes, but we’re always trying to expand further out, to see what else dance can be, and celebrate cross-culturally. And Nasra has a foot in a bunch of different door(ways).”

Blood Memory, by Indigenous artists Ayla Modeste and Tarene Thomas, explores ancestry, the land, and sexuality in a piece that includes spoken word, song and drumming. And the third of the rooted — here and now offerings is The Power of the Drum by the Edmonton-based Cuban Movements Dance Academy, led by Leo Gonzalez. As Hillyard describes, it’s inspired by the African roots of Cuban dance, an amalgam of dance, drumming, and spoken narration.

Goberdhan and Yamada have brought in two collaborators to guide The Lobbyists, an ensemble featured in the original movement pieces that happen before, after, and between streamed shows. One is Duty, by Andrés Moreno, an expansive exploration of our collective and individual responsibilities, was filmed at the Legislature (which can’t possibly be a coincidence).  The other, with an equally resonant title, is Natércia Napoleāo’s Threshold, filmed in a theatre at a moment when restrictions permitted that.

As Yamada says, “the stamp Sue and I want to (put) on Expanse is in mentorship opportunities…. How can we create them, at every layer of the company?” The keynote of Azimuth has been sounded.

Where: The Chinook Series runs March 25 to April 4, online. Check out the full Expanse Festival line-up, and its schedule of salons, workshops, and parties, plus curated playlists, at Azimuth Theatre. Unless otherwise indicated, all tickets are pay-what-you-will, available at fringe theatre.ca.

  

  

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An ancient vision, a new cosmology: Makram Ayache’s The Hooves Belonged To The Deer

Posted on March 24, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The Hooves Belonged to the Deer by Makram Ayache, part of The Alberta Queer Calendar Project. Poster image by Makram Ayache.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A year of dizzying optics. The walls have both closed in on us — an audience of one wrapped in our own pandemic carapaces in front of our own personal screens — and they’ve blown wide open. Onto theatrical vistas on the big wide world, across not just time zones, but cultures, mythologies, the well-fortified frontiers of past, present, and future.

Here’s a wildly ambitious new play that captures something of that sense of being flung out of our time-honoured flight paths into a world that’s both acutely of the moment and ancient. The Hooves That Belonged To The Deer is by Makram Ayache, an actor/ playwright/ theatre-maker (and U of A theatre school grad) Edmonton audiences know from the 2018 Fringe premiere of his play Harun.  More recently we’ve seen his work in contributions, both on- and offstage, to Azimuth Theatre’s All That Binds Us last fall, a meditation on Canadian multiculturalism and its self-deluding complacency by a diverse gallery of “outsiders.”

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The Hooves That Belonged To The Deer exists in its debut incarnation, till the end of the month, as a two-act podcast (directed by Peter Hinton) that’s part of The Alberta Queer Calendar Project.

Ambitious?  Ayache evidently has no fear of complication and scale. In Harun, the title character, a gay Arab first-generation Canadian immigrant, is caught between generational guilt, cultures, languages, ethnicities, and an intricate nexus of arguments and conflicts, an experience of both overt brutality in his home country and passive-aggressive exclusion in his new.

There is nothing pinched or cautious about the theatrical vision at play in The Hooves That Belonged To The Deer. It has a kind of cosmic expansiveness in its vistas, its theatricality, and its counterpoint of scenes. In a small conservative Christian prairie town, supremely white in palette and power structure, a young Arab Muslim boy, the quintessential outsider, enters the sin/salvation/damnation orbit of a Christian pastor who holds out the temptation of “belonging.” At the same moment, Izzy’s world acquires a fraught, risky erotic dimension; he’s gradually discovering his queerness.

In alternating scenes, “beyond space and time,” we fly into a disorienting, mapless desert, beyond the prairie horizon, into the vision of an ancient Edenic paradise in “the middle of the middle of the middle of the Middle East,” where the tree of forbidden knowledge grows under guard, but the view from the top is irresistible.

It amounts to a cosmology, a new origin mythology no less. And the play, I think, is about how competing mythologies collide, run parallel, and play out, in a love story infiltrated by tradition, and by the toxic inheritance of white colonization.

Based on this first listen, this is a challenging piece, of grand scope, where the five words “I’ll give it some thought” (words to live by in theatre, as I well know) have a kind of fateful momentum. The characters transform into resonating alternative versions of themselves. Everything about Ayache’s vision of inheritance, love, fate, salvation, the divine, the erotic and the religious, and what it means to be an outcast, is large. There’s a contemporary reverb to the play’s provocations. The title and the sound of hooves are a track that takes us back, past whiteness, onto the land, and into the realm of the Indigenous knowledge-keepers.

I’ll be thinking about this more. Meanwhile, one of the thrills of the podcast, artfully assembled by Hinton and sound editor Chris Pereira, is imagining, and not knowing, how on earth the play will be staged, when the fates (and science and the benighted fringes of our fellow citizenry) allow our return to live theatre-going. We can find out: the hope, according to the playwright, is for joint stage premieres in Edmonton and Toronto in 2022.

The Hooves The Belonged To The Deer runs in podcast form as part of The Alberta Queer Calendar Project through March 31.

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Making indie theatre just got less lonely: RISER goes national and comes to Edmonton

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava in Mouthpiece, RISER Toronto 2015. Photo by Joel Clifton.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Even at the best of times (which I think we can all agree this is not) It’s hard, high-risk work producing indie theatre.

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Bright creative innovative ideas that find their natural habitat in independent theatre arrive onstage, if they do, trailing an exhausting to-do list: raising money, finding rehearsal space and a venue for the show, marketing, publicity, gathering an audience…. Every indie project starts from ground zero, at the bottom of a very high hill.

So here’s news to gladden the heart (and there’s a certain buoyancy attached to its name): RISER Edmonton. This theatre town will be the launch for a planned national expansion of a visionary 2014 initiative by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre. It’s “a collaborative producing model,” designed to address the daunting challenges of producing independent theatre.

Beth Dart, of Common Ground Arts Society, RISER’s host company in Edmonton, describes it as “helping to support independent artists and companies by reducing production costs and proving them with ongoing specialized mentorship throughout the process…. It collects, in a centralized place, the resources that already exist in our community.”

Which brings us to the crucial arts relationships that the program brokers. RISER is a tangible example of artists helping artists. RISER Edmonton has four very different inaugural senior theatre partners, leaders all in the Edmonton scene: Fringe Theatre, the Citadel, Catalyst, and Azimuth. So the relationships will be custom-tailored to the project.

“It’s all about bringing a community together and sharing resources the lighten the risk that’s incurred by producing independently,” says Dart.  In Toronto, the metric RISER uses is that the program reduces indie production costs by, on the average, a third. “The whole purpose is to give artists the opportunity to experiment, to take their project beyond …” beyond that first workshop or Fringe production, and into the future on a broader stage.

The world of theatre is full of indie shows that took an arduous year to produce, excited an audience once, and were never seen again. RISER is all about stepping up to that chilly truth. As Dart puts it, the gist is “seeing the work have a life, and be financially supported, outside of just the first production.”

A show like Mouthpiece, a witty and insightful two-hander from Toronto’s Quote Unquote Collective, by and starring Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken, is an example. Originally a RISER Toronto project, it played the inaugural Chinook Series here in 2016, and has travelled widely ever since.

The well-named Why Not Theatre came to Edmonton in late 2019 to consult with the community, explains Dart. “They met with a whole bunch of companies, big and small, to assess whether Edmonton would be a good place to launch RISER National, and to develop relationships with some of our senior partners.” Given its presenter cred, a network of connections with both indie experimenters and established companies, Common Ground Arts (home of the Found Festival) was a natural choice for host.

1111, RISER Toronto 2019. Photo by Brett Haynes.

And as for Edmonton, where theatre is the leading arts industry,  “there’s so much incredible work that comes out of the community here, and doesn’t go on to be shared with the rest of the country… We’re hoping RISER bridges that gap!” Dart says.

“Emerging, emerged … that doesn’t really apply here. This is about indie artists at any stage of their careers,” she says. “Experimental and new work is really the focus, but nothing is off-limits either…. We’re putting together a jury of folks dedicated to the Edmonton community to assess the submissions.” The deadline for those is April 16.

There are four main criteria, Dart explains, starting with need. “Will RISER be essential to the show’s trajectory? We’re open to projects at any stage of development. It doesn’t have to be a brand new idea, or a rehearsal-ready draft.”

Diversity is the second criterion, “identity and cultural, as well as form and content.” The third is “feasibility, financial and logistical.” In the current age, feasibility is a multi-faceted question for theatre. As Dart says, “we’re at an interesting moment in theatre creation when many artists are leaping into the digital hybrid…. how can that move forward even when we’re able to have (live) audiences in the seats?”  And the fourth criterion is experience, “what are you bringing to the table?”

The inaugural RISER Edmonton will support the development of four Edmonton shows this year, with productions slated for February  2022. It’s a win-win for artists and us audiences; the Backstage Theatre is already booked for all four, two running in rep for two weeks starting Feb. 4, the other two after that.

And there’s this: “it’s a huge positive for us, in national visibility,” says Dart. “We’ll be inviting artistic directors and presenters from across the country to come and see our RISER productions,” with marketing to match.

“What we wouldn’t have given for a program like this when we were starting out,” sighs Dart, who’s half (along with her sister Megan Dart) of Catch The Keys Productions, creators of Dead Centre of Town and other immersive indie ventures.

The loneliness of the long-distance indie theatre artists just got less lonely.

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Real people reporting from the real world: COVID Collections, a short film online at SkirtsAfire

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Carol Powder, COVID Collections, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

As the pandemic grinds on, don’t you find it becomes harder and harder to imagine watching the inevitable outbreak of solo confessional COVID-inspired monologue shows in our collective future? You can conjure them in your mind’s eye. My Personal Lockdown Diary And How I Got Really Depressed: The Play. My Downer Relationship With Zoom: The One-Person Musical.  365 Endless Days And Nights In My Apartment: An Exploration (in detail) Of The Inner Pandemic Labyrinth.

God give us theatre audiences fortitude. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the inspirational Guardian piece on 25 artists who learned to play an instrument during the pandemic. And it was probably quite upbeat.

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INSTEAD, have a peek at the short (25-minute) film that premiered at the  SkirtsAfire Festival, and remains online there through March 31. It’s called COVID Collections, directed by Annette Loiselle. In it, a diverse quartet of “story collectors” have gathered a fascinating  ethnically and professionally diverse assortment of real-life people, all but one non-artists, who relate something of their experiences of a trying year.

Videographer Katie Hudson captures them in their homes, without their masks on, so to speak. And there’s something movingly unfiltered, and in that sense un-artful, in what they have to say about their lives. They don’t muse; they don’t annotate. They simply report.

“This is some sort of test, right?” says one. “Of humanity, right?”

What is it like to be them, day to day? We don’t usually get to meet them, much less find out. There’s a front-line health worker who comes home after every shift and throws all her clothes in the laundry. An empathetic immigrant who works in a long-term care home (“it felt like a tsunami!”), and her daughter, yearning for romance and venturing into online dating. To see them dancing in their living room will warm your heart.

There’s an Indigenous Elder who talks about being surrounded by tragedy and death on the Maskawacis reserve, where the pandemic toll is disproportionately high, related as it is to poverty and crowding. There’s an overworked respiratory therapist, and an empathetic high school teacher who leads her school’s GSA (gay-straight alliance). The kind of online sharing and bonding that supports us can be too risky for the kids who need it most, kids with a secret.

Indigenous drummer Carol Powder, COVID Collections, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by BB Collective.

There’s a queer artist whose new life bloomed when they sewed original masks for their friends;  it’s blossomed into a creative career they can’t wait to share during market season. There are thoughts about what is means to be a racialized young person in Edmonton, “an innocence lost.” There’s an Indigenous drummer by an outdoor fire wearing a T-shirt that says “The Best Things In Life Are Cree.”

One vignette is powerfully cautionary. Loiselle’s sister Rachel O’Brien “came through” COVID in the fall, only to discover she hasn’t come through it at all. Every day she feels OK is a day of hope, quickly followed by setback days when she can scarcely breathe. She’s had to quit her job. Complacent people, take note.

One, the only vignette from a theatre artist, is a story of astonishing resilience from actor/writer Lebogang Disele. On a trip home to Botswana with her husband and kids last March, she became separated from them because of sudden travel restrictions. She’s still there; they are still here. Meanwhile, visas have run out. What will she do? She doesn’t know.

The segues between vignettes are works of visual art, assembled by SkirtsAfire curator Stephanie Florence. And there’s original music by Binaifer Kapadia.

None of the people we meet have found the time easy. But all of them have found it a kind of limbo, “an in-between place” that will end. And since they are spokespersons reporting from the real world, this powerful belief feels cheering, and full of possibility.

Find Covid Collections at skirtsafire.com.

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Dressing the stars: a star designer. Leona Brausen creates stroll-by theatre in a costume installation at the Varscona

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The figure of Viola Desmond in Hero Material, a Leona Brausen costume installation at the Varscona Theatre. Photo by Davina Stewart

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

So what do wealthy socialites wear to dinner parties in ‘30s Budapest anyhow? Or to auctions in ’20s upstate New York?

Breezy playboys in ‘50s Manhattan with their pleated trousers, worn high and sharp like their wits? Meat-packing magnates and their spoiled offspring in ‘80s Edmonton? Earnest graduates of the Southern Ontario Business College For Women, on mind-broadening trips abroad in the ‘30s?

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Leona Brausen has dressed them. For nearly four decades, she has been designing impeccable vintage costumes for theatre, and especially for Teatro La Quindicina, purveyors par excellence of original period comedy. Costumes that — in motion, with characters inside them — identify a time and a place with as much precision and wit as any set piece, or shard of exposition, or stage direction.

Now, when we can’t actually go into theatres, you can see Brausen’s work in a stroll-by theatrical experience. She has dipped into her vast personal hoard of vintage costumes, wigs, and accessories to create the costume installation that now occupies the Varscona Theatre front windows on 83 Ave. Hero Material, which opened on International Women’s Day (produced by fellow actor/improv partner Davina Stewart), is an homage to four inspiring and influential Canadian women, each with a distinctive story and look.

First to be conjured, till the end of the month, is black activist/entrepreneur Viola Desmond, who fought racial segregation in the ‘40s. After that, Emily Carr, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and k.d. lang in three-week runs.

The Viola Desmond accessory display, Hero Material, a Leona Brausen costume installation at the Varscona Theatre. Photo by Davina Stewart.

The Viola Desmond mannequin, whose hair is a coiffed mauve roll of a ‘do, dominates one window in a splendidly cut ‘40s suit, with covered buttons and big ‘40s shoulders. She’s clutching gloves, with a coat slung over one arm. Stewart wore that suit as the redoubtable theatre pioneer Mrs. Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, after whom Edmonton’s theatre awards are named, in Darrin Hagen’s play Witch Hunt at the Strand. Cathleen Rootsaert wore it as Mrs. Elvsted in a Teatro production of Hedda Gabler (Stewart was in the title role).

Another window showcases a collage of accessories, including a ‘40s perfume bottle, and various cosmetic accoutrements (Desmond was the proprietor of a beauty product line designed for black women).

“Leona doesn’t build, she finds,” says Teatro’s Stewart Lemoine, her admiring old friend from high school, and the playwright with whom Brausen has most often worked as an actor and designer. Their shows together date back to Teatro’s birth at the very first Fringe with a new comedy, All These Heels. Brausen played, as she has described it succinctly, “a lady spy who smoked.”

Where does she do the finding? Deep-diving into her own inventory. The astonishing Brausen collection of suits, coats, hats, frocks, shoes, wigs, purses is crammed into her north-end house (the shoe department is in the basement) and backyard shed. In the period Brausen (and Teatro) loves, the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, Teatro actors don’t wear replicas; they wear originals, acquired by Brausen pre-emptively shopping here and there, especially New York and London vintage shops.

Mother of the Year, Teatro La Quindicina (an ’80s comedy spun from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus). Costumes by Leona Brausen. Photo supplied.

“She’s pretty uncompromising in terms of accuracy. The costumes are perfectly of the period,” says Lemoine. “But they suddenly become something the actors would wear… Everybody wears the clothes of the time; they look right. But everybody has a sense of themselves too. As well as the character.”

Andrea House in Skirts On Fire, set in ’50s Manhattan. Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

And there’s a kind of genius in that. “Leona is particular about the look … and here’s how to make it look good on you!” No wonder actors really enjoy costume fittings with Brausen. “They have the most laughs in the country because Leona is hilarious,” says actor/director Ron Pederson, whose long list of Teatro starring roles goes back to his 14-year-old self (he often calls Teatro his education). Lemoine’s Shocker’s Delight is his favourite play ever; he was in the 2004 revival and directed a production of it in 2017.   

“The word is VIVID,” he says on the subject of Brausen costumes. “When you put a Leona costume on you suddenly know what to do as an actor; it gives you the who, what, when and the where instantly. She’s put me in lederhosen, smoking jackets tuxedos, pyjamas, wigs, tights, hats, all Stratford quality and usually divined and found like magic…. It’s also a miracle how things fit just from her eyeballing it.”

“Leona’s work always does half the actors job; and often most of the scenery’s job too.”

For a small company with a taste for period comedy in exotic locations (like Venice in the ‘50s or Providence Rhode Island 1931, or the Eaton’s cafeteria in Winnipeg c. 1966), Brausen’s costumes are indispensable, says Lemoine. “They fill in gaps in place and time.”

How do you convey Jasper National Park in the ‘50s, the setting for Lemoine’s 2011 comedy Mrs. Lindeman Proposes, without a bunch of mountains or a chalet? “Leona did a major plaid dump,” says Lemoine. “So many plaids onstage that … supplied a rustic kind of quality, and evoked the era, kind of an elegant outdoorsy look.”

Shannon Blanchet, centre, in Mrs. Lindeman Proposes, Teatro La Quindicina. Costumes by Leona Brausen. Photo supplied.

In that comedy Shannon Blanchet wore “costume I would live in if I could,” she says. “A full swishy purple skirt with a plaid shirt, fantastic wide poodle-studded belt (with matching red shoes), plaid blouse with wide brim hat. I have never felt prettier onstage that I did in that costume. Appropriate because my character Margot Mitchinson, was in pursuit of beauty and romance, to a fault.”

For the fast-talker character Dominica D’Eath Blanchet played in The Salon of the Talking Turk, set in ’20s New York, Brausen arrived  “with this insanely perfect wig” à la Louise Brooks. And she even brought perfume so Louise Lambert and I could smell our characters. Come on, how amazing is that!?”

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in yellow shoes (left), in The Scent of Compulsion, Teatro La Quindicina. Costume designer Leona Brausen. Photo supplied.

Teatro star Andrew MacDonald-Smith, the company’s new co-artistic producer (with Belinda Cornish), has a favourite Brausen costume piece. For The Scent of Compulsion, a Lemoine screwball set in the early 70s, “Leona found these incredible yellow shoes for my character,” he says. “They were by far the most uncomfortable shoes I’ve ever worn, but I couldn’t let them go. I wouldn’t take them off when I wasn’t on stage to relieve my poor feet for even a brief moment ….Every costume in that show was a revelation, but those shoes still appear in my dreams for eternity.”

Blanchet has one of those fixations, too. For The Infinite Shiver, “the script had me enter in a Rosie the Riveter look. Leona found these amazing jeans that, as with many pieces over the years, I offered to buy from her after the run…. Unfortunately for me, they were so unique that Leona wanted to keep them in her collection long-term.”

“Had I been thinking clearly at the time I would have murdered her for them,” she jokes. “This is the power of Leona Brausen. Her work inspires you to push yourself to new places….”

Footnote: Brausen once kitted me out for a Halloween foray as “a salad person.” It’s not easy to imagine how to transform someone into lettuce for a night out, but she did: green leafy everything, including hair. The wooden tongs around my neck were a nice touch.

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Here’s welcome news: EPCOR boosts Heart + Soul Fund with an additional $1 million`

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a devastating year for the city’s performing arts, EPCOR has again stepped up with welcome news and a boost. At a press conference Monday the Edmonton utility announced an additional $1 million infusion to its $1.25 million Heart + Soul Fund.

That community recovery fund was launched last August to support Edmonton’s hard-hit arts, cultural and charitable organizations through the bleak pandemic time. It was designed, as EPCOR CEO Stuart Lee put it at the time, to “re-energize” a city whose vibrancy and identity are so inextricably linked, heart and soul, to the very sectors hardest hit by the pandemic.

And as we found out, artists and audiences alike, Heart + Soul grants have made a big difference in this theatre town. They were put to a wide variety of uses, by theatre companies of every size and shape. Some grants were used to transform in-person to virtual experiences, or to modify venues for changing pandemic restrictions and closures. Streaming equipment was acquired; production costs or artist fees were covered, along with losses in ticket revenue; programming was re-thought, new marketing initiatives launched, safety measures implemented.

A Christmas Carol, the digital version of the Citadel Theatre production, assisted by a Heart + Soul grant. Photo by Raoul Bhatt.

In all, some 47 arts, culture, and charitable organization received Heart + Soul funding in 2020. One hundred and eight new works were produced by 13 Edmonton theatres; 440 artists had Heart + Soul support; six festivals were able to offer virtual and in-person experiences; seven performance programs featured Indigenous art.

The $1 million second round of one-time only Heart + Soul grants, varying in size from $5,000 to $100,000, is at hand. And resourceful arts companies can use them in a multiplicity of ways.

Theatres, this means you! And if you were successful in the last round, you can apply again, with a new idea or initiative for negotiating the challenges of the time. 

Again, capital projects are not eligible. Applications (available, with further details, at epcor.com/heartandsoul) are accepted starting now, until the additional $1 million is used up.

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Live theatre. It’s been a year, and Act II awaits

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Glenn Nelson, Amber Borotsik in Heisenberg, Shadow Theatre, March 2020. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hard to believe. But it’s been a year.

One year ago (or a lifetime) this very weekend our lives changed. In  ways that don’t feel temporary.

I went to the opening of Heisenberg at Shadow Theatre on the evening of March 12, and The Children, a Wild Side production, the next night. That was the evening the Citadel premiere production of The Garneau Block had its final dress rehearsal. And everything ended.

Or  did it?

It’s unquestionably been a year of overwhelming damage for theatre artists, indeed for the entire performing arts industry. Jobs, livelihoods vanished overnight, whole companies alongside creative projects still in the dreaming stage. The raison d’être of live theatre as a connection, exciting, surprising, and kinetic, between real people — artists and their audiences — sharing a room, seemed untenably dangerous, if not suddenly obsolete at very least on hold indefinitely. A close-to-the-bone operation at the best of times, theatre and its chief investors, its artists, have never sat on margins to cushion that fracturing fall.

If this year has been a long and devastating intermission, with irreplaceable losses, Act II promises to be very different from Act I. Not least its because our theatre practitioners, in sudden forced exile from their usual habitat, stepped up, with inspiring resourcefulness and invention, to learn and devise ways to connect with audiences when the video screen is a venue and not just a plus.

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Little did I know that breaking the fourth wall, the mantra of immersive theatre, would be simplicity itself compared to breaking all the other walls that are built into digital technology.  And since March 13 2020 our resilient theatre practitioners have gotten more and more ingenious in their experiments. They’re quick learners. And they, along with their audiences, have had a chance to appreciate the work and spirit of companies from the Great Elsewhere too.

Act II, and the return to live theatre that’s live and not just a reminder (however imaginative a simulation) of what live is like, won’t be a mere continuation. Theatre has had to re-assess its own industry power structures, moved by the socio-cultural currents of the year towards greater diversity and a wider ethnic embrace of creative talent and audiences that reflect that.

Live theatre will be, must be, back after this terrible year. However gradually after so much loss, we will be together again. That much feels certain now. Its dimensions, its connection with a broader audience, its creative impulses … those remain to be discovered. Art will happen that helps us do just that.

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Finding a path forward for the Edmonton Fringe: Adam Mitchell has thoughts about that as he leaves the festival

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Adam Mitchel, Executive Director of Edmonton Fringe Theatre, Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In 25 years at the Fringe, he’s been the production manager, the technical director, the operations manager for a 33,000 square foot multi-theatre complex that started out as a bus barn. He’s been a Fringe venue technician, a show operator, a stage carpenter. He’s made theatres out of spaces that used to be greasy spoons, storage units, community halls; he’s built sets for indie theatres with big ideas and teeny budgets.

On March 26, after five years as the executive director of  Edmonton Fringe Theatre, Adam Mitchell officially steps away from the administrative job at the head of the theatre company that produces the continent’s oldest and largest fringe festival. A job poised delicately between artists, audiences, volunteers, infrastructure that is epically complicated, by any standards. And it just  got more tangled and demanding in the course of the most difficult, damaging, and trying 12 months that live theatre could possibly have.

Is that a wisp of the wistful in his voice? “It’s no doubt,” says Mitchell, who was born in Edmonton and grew up in Winnipeg, “that I’m leaving a place I love more than any other I’ve worked at….”

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He tried to leave the Fringe once before, last year about this time. “I needed to re-charge my batteries,” Mitchell says simply. But it was “on the precipice of the pandemic,” so he was persuaded to stay. “Actually,” he laughs ruefully, “the challenge and chaos of the past year was quite rejuvenating … for all the wrong reasons. And it’s better to walk out feeling amazing about what we’d accomplished.”

That “challenge and chaos of the past year” have been, at heart, what exactly to do, times being what they are, with a festival that is the grassroots quintessence of the forbidden: live shoulder-to-rib gathering in intimate spaces. In the golden Before Time, the Fringe of 2019 had 258 shows from here, across the country and around the globe, in 50 venues, sold 147,358 tickets, and attracted a crowd surpassing three-quarters of a million. In the strange and uncertain world into which we were flung last spring, when the world still thought that pandemics had closing nights, the Fringe of 2020, aka “The Fringe That Never Was,” went from building stages to building platforms.

The festival figured out on the fly how to live-stream, create a video-streaming platform, support artist shows displaced by the pandemic into the ether, and generally be there in some fashion for a town where the mighty Fringe organizes the summer calendar.

A thoughtful sort of leader who seems to have a remarkable resistance to panic, Mitchell says “the Fringe, its community engagement, its relationship with artists, volunteers, patrons, have evolved in the last five or six years … and the way we have really focussed on supporting independent artists in their creative journeys” past August and into the theatre season.

The “re-envisioning of the Arts Barn as a community cultural hub” that was in progress at the Fringe in February 2020, “taking the essence of what the festival is, and applying it to the building — are now the building blocks with which we can help the community rebuild.”

“What can we do? What should we do right now?” Those were the critical questions for the Fringe in March 2020, “because we had no choice!” And they were quickly followed, says Mitchell, by this question: “if we invest in tools, in streaming equipment, in FringeTV the platform, would they be useful (to us and to other companies) beyond the days of The Fringe That Never Was?”

I guess we know the answer. And when some reduced distanced in-person audiences were allowed for a time last fall, “we had an immediate purpose for the building, too,” says Mitchell. “It gave us time to take what we were learning into our planning for 2021,” and Fringe #40.   

Edmonton Fringe Theatre’s Executive Director Adam Mitchel. Photo supplied.

A collaborator by nature, Mitchell is much more drawn to the pronoun “we” than “I” — not least because he appreciates his lively complementary rapport with Fringe artistic director (and actor/ playwright/ director) Murray Utas. “We don’t disagree very often; we volley ideas back and forth till we find the elegant solution! Mitchell is “so excited” that playwright/ events producer Megan Dart, Fringe Theatre’s communications specialist” will be interim Executive Director. “Perfect!”

“I’m very fortunate because, in whatever role I’ve had, I’ve always managed to be a collaborator with the artist in the room, whether a designer, a director … I really believe in the value of that type of collaboration; it’s part of the magic of what we’ve created at the Fringe.”

Mitchell, a graduate of the U of A’s technical theatre program, is steeped in Fringe, the concept and the execution. His first Fringe experience was in the late ‘90s, as a techie at both the Winnipeg and Edmonton festivals. Then he became the technical director of both Fringes, the two largest in the country. In Edmonton, his first year in the job was the Fringe’s last in the old Bus Barns, before the rebuild that opened as the Arts Barn in 2003.

Fringe touring? Mitchell has done that, with the sketch comedy troupe The Spleen Jockeys, and with Rick Miller, the star and creator of the widely travelled Fringe hits MacHomer and Bigger Than Jesus. “I got to see venues across North America — and hang out with a very cool artist. It was fun,” he says.

Theatre production resumés don’t come much more blue-chip and varied than Mitchell’s. He’s been the U of A drama department’s production manager, and the technical director at the Timms Centre for the Arts. He’s been the production manager at the Arden Theatre, the St. Albert Children’s Theatre, and the Kids’ Fest.

And he has big theatre experience too. He landed a “dream job” as the mainstage technical director for Canada’s oldest regional company, the venerable Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. “After the very modern program at the U of A, and years of working in the scrappy indie theatre world, it was (like) going back to school.” Mitchell’s wife Keri Mitchell, the executive director of Theatre Alberta, headed the RMTC’s education and outreach programs.

“When I came back to the Fringe in 2015 (as executive director), I was coming home,” he says. And leaving that home wasn’t an easy decision. “I’m going back over to the production side,” he says of a theatre career that began with carpentry. Meet the new manager of Rock Solid Custom Cases, a locally-owned family-run 35-year-old outfit specializing in creating road cases for entertainment touring. It was recently bought by FM Systems (the audio production company that has long supplied Fringe venues, as well as the Grey Cup and the Junos).

Meanwhile Mitchell, the maestro of contingencies, has spent the last 12 months juggling multiple possibilities for Fringe 2021. Certainties are in short supply — beyond this one, perhaps: “it is not realistic to say we’re going to on the other side of COVID by August this year.” Health and travel restrictions, safety rules governing gathering, social distancing, house capacities, the zeitgeist for that matter, are all in a state of continual flux. How can there be a fixed Plan A with a back-up B? No, try F or G, or Q, and avoid “plan” in favour of “possible scenario.”

“We’re trying to extrapolate from what we’ve learned on the digital side, and create the opportunity for artists to build and simul-cast a version of their show for consumption over the internet,” says Mitchell of this year’s edition of our summer theatre extravaganza.

He’s hopeful that alongside the digital, “artists and audiences will be connecting again live in the theatre“ to some extent, however restricted that live indoor audience might have to be. Ideally, artists can sell whatever limited number of tickets for live consumption are available, and also market their show online.

The scale of the 40th annual Fringe will be strikingly different from its decades of predecessors. Mitchell can imagine, depending on restrictions, five or so lotteried venues and a handful of BYOVs, with a preference for cabaret-style seating and a dual focus: “maximizing safety and the ability to film.” The aim, says Mitchell, is “an aesthetic and a standard that honours the live theatre experience, and doesn’t try to be film or TV, but is still better than a single-camera locked in at the back of the house.”

Worst-case scenario: “if we’re not able to have a live audience indoor audience at all but can still facilitate live streams and film for local companies, we will do that.” And he and the Fringe team have considered every possible gradation in between.

“At the end if the day we believe the live theatre experience is what theatre is about…. We don’t want to compete with Netflix but we believe people still want to support creations by local artists in their community!”

“We’ve accomplished an incredible amount with a small team,” a fraction of the usual Fringe size, says Mitchell. “We remind ourselves every day that we’re the fortunate ones; the people we’re doing it for aren’t working right now.”

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Finding your own story: Dana Wylie’s Makings of a Voice at SkirtsAfire

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Makings of a Voice, by and starring Dana Wylie. Photo by April MacDonald Killins.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m right here with you right now,” says Dana Wylie, looking intently right into our eyes at the outset of Makings of a Voice. Against the probabilities and across the screen (the defining demarcation of the times), damned if that isn’t how it feels.

Curious and rather wonderful, since Wylie’s solo “theatrical song cycle” comes at us (online) in the middle of a pandemic from the middle of a mysteriously vast, expansible, dark space that isn’t a stage, or maybe even a place. There Wylie is, gazing at us and holding our gaze, from a sort of arena circumscribed by lights, like a landing pad in the mind (designer: Elise CM Jason).

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There are domestic touches, a lamp and painting; there are cosmic touches — a suspended slatted wooden orb that might be the moon or a rustic rendering of the moon (lighting by T. Erin Gruber). And there is a guitar.

If the world had been a different place, this unusual piece, which gets its premiere on this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival digital mainstage, would have been in a theatre (the Westbury at the Fringe). And Wylie would have been there onstage accompanied by three live musicians. But Vanessa Sabourin’s production, filmed in the empty, echoey old Army & Navy in Strathcona, has a kind of between-worlds dislocation that isn’t misplaced in a memoir from an artist making a return to a realm, the theatre, she left a decade ago to be in another, as a singer-songwriter.

And one of Wylie’s fortes as a performer, as you’ll experience in this odd and lovely show, is her conversational, direct-in-your-ear intimacy, backed up visually by Andrea Beça’s film-making, with its artful array of angled close-ups.

“We need to know we have a story,” Wylie tells us, from personal experience. “We need to know we are a story.” The term “narratable” doesn’t exactly shimmer (it’s new to me, and I probably won’t be using it any time soon), but, hey, it’s the only show in town where it comes into its own. The enigmatic title Makings of a Voice (lifted from a Wylie lyric) actually fashions a shape and a structure — which calls out for music, and gets it, original songs woven with spoken text. “I have the makings of a voice; I need a song, a source, a well.”

Dana Wylie, creator and star of Makings of a Voice. Photo by April MacDonald Killins.

The dramatic proposition of Makings of a Voice is that Wylie the artist and mother feels in need of a story, one that will weave the intergenerational strands of the maternal line (every daughter has a mother who has a mother who has a mother) together into a compelling inheritance:  “access to a cosmic source of creativity.”

As Wylie puts it, memorably, “I careened into my 30s as if I’d been flung from a faulty carnival ride….” And the impending birth of Wylie’s second child seems to make her quest  for a family story urgent. She’s sure she has one when she discovers, by chance a heroic anecdote about her great-grandmother Millie. And she, as the inheritor, will be empowered to have it all — baby, PhD, globe-trotting career.

Then there’s a crash: it’s a story about abandoning one affirming story and scrambling to find yourself another. I leave you to the pleasures of discovering the narrative route, where poetry meets drama. It doesn’t place Wylie’s songs the way musical theatre would. They do come at critical moments, yes, but they’re for second thoughts and reflections. And there’s this: music fans know know this already, I’m sure, but Wylie’s voice is luminous, clear with warm depths. Somehow she has the actor’s ability to make poetic lyrics seem possible as conversations with you.

There are lessons to be learned, including an appreciation for a heroism that’s quieter, more quotidian, more mundane than the borrowed narrative arcs of “the patriarchy culture” might invite. This will sound off-putting, and more abstract than it is, not least because the word “patriarchy” isn’t exactly lyrical. But the show is carefully, gracefully constructed; it’s built on birth — as both the most visceral and metaphorically powerful of experiences — and self-discovery. They are, after all, the exit from one world and the entrance into another.

“I will rhyme, I will chime, I will vibrate like a bell,” Wylie sings at one point. In Makings of a Voice, she does all three.

12thnight.ca interviews Dana Wylie here.

REVIEW

Makings of a Voice

SkirtsAfire Festival 2021

Written and performed by: Dana Wylie

Directed by: Vanessa Sabourin

Where: streaming on Fringe TV

Running: through March 14

Tickets: skirtsafire.com

 

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