Makings of a Voice: the SkirtsAfire premiere brings Dana Wylie back to the theatre

Posted on March 7, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Dana Wylie in Makings of a Voice, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by April MacDonald-Killins.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I don’t know who I am and where I fit into this world….”   

It’s one of those thoughts that touches down universally, and comes with its own personal question mark. And for a creative artist like singer-songwriter Dana Wylie, a questing traveller of an artist if there ever was one, it was a provocation.

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It happened when Wylie was seven months pregnant with her second child in 2019, prompted by the companion thought that “in order to bring this child into the world I need to know….” And it’s the seed of Makings of a Voice, a solo “theatrical song cycle” that premieres Monday on the SkirtsAfire digital “mainstage.”

It marks the return of Wylie to theatre and acting, the world she left a decade ago to forge a career in music. It’s not exactly a play, as she describes, though there are characters (and an alter-ego protagonist named Dana). And it’s not exactly a musical revue or a cabaret, though it’s a memoir of sorts, and full of her original music. Part of her unusual creation is a story about storytelling: “The story I’m telling — it’s quite non-linear — is me trying to find my story and trying to tell that story.”

The setbacks and careening turns in that process are part of the story. “Just before I started writing it, I was told a story I’d never been told before…” says Wylie, who’s impressively insightful about artistic creation. “My great grandmother had marched in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, had been arrested for hitting a cop over the head with something, and had spent the night in jail.” A mystery: why was this not something the Wylies tell and re-tell, she wondered, a highlight of every Christmas dinner?

So Wylie felt empowered. “For the first time the character senses a point of connection with (her) maternal line … with a lefty, a socialist, a bad-ass rabble-rouser,” as Wylie puts it. I can feel like I come from somebody awesome…. Great Baba Millie becomes a real protagonist!”

“And because I was trying to engage with her past,” Wylie consulted Google. And there it was, in a junior edition of the Winnipeg Tribune in 1920, a picture of Great Baba Millie as a 12-year-old, part of a group of kids who’d won a Christmas writing competition.” And Wylie did the math, and knew the Strike story couldn’t be true. “It pulled the rug out from the writing process.”

“It had to go into the show,” says Wylie, of this deflating news. The story gods giveth and they taketh away. She found that revelation to be “personally as well as dramatically rich.” As the show took shape, it dislodged a narrative with a hero, “a bad-ass super-hero,” into a zone that’s “much more culturally complex than … the narratives that belong to our contemporary Western patriarchal culture.”

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

“Then I’m just left with myself, and ultimately I have to be OK with that, with knowing, from my family history, that people have lived complicated lives and haven’t done heroic things. I can’t continue to insist to myself I be defined  by a story based on a hero’s journey.” Identity, lineage, and more specifically motherhood, make other kinds of demands than owning a heroic backstory. “It requires so much more than individual anything!”

There’s nothing predictable about the Wylie story, with its unplanned route from theatre into the world of music (and critically acclaimed albums). Not long after she graduated from MacEwan, and was out in the world working in musical theatre, “I just started writing songs; I’d never written songs before and I don’t exactly remember why.…” And not long after that came the realization that “this is what I want to do, I’m a musician in my heart more than I’m an actor. As I met more and more musicians I knew ‘this actually is my tribe’.”

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

At first her songs were of the musical theatre ilk, she laughs. “That was the world I was coming from; they all had a dramatic arc and went somewhere and someone learned something. I wasn’t well-versed in folk music, and certainly not pop, where you can be overcome by a feeling and just ruminate, where you can be in a place, and just be….”

Then Wylie up and moved to Taiwan, in search of a job teaching English and a cheaper way to live.

“Unbeknownst to me there was a rich scene of ex-pat artists of all kinds and music in particular that I fell into,” says Wylie. “And I ended up cutting my teeth (as a musician) there. I played in so many different kinds of bands, blues, bluegrass…. I really learned how to be a musician there, how to do gigs, how to do the equipment.”

Though big-cast musicals at the big regional theatres, the Citadel, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Theatre Calgary and others, occasionally came her way (Camelot, Evita…) a singer-songwriter had been born. “I didn’t know myself well but I had a sense that I wasn’t driven enough” to be in the high-stress world of auditioning actors, “living in a big city, being hungry and hustling for jobs…. I came into theatre working with (the late Edmonton musical theatre indie) Leave It To Jane. And I loved its smallness, the inventiveness of having four boxes instead of a set. There’s something that fires my imagination about that.”

Says Wylie, “I’m the same in the recording studio. I don’t mind having limits, budget or technical. That’s when my imagination comes alive…. Here’s what we can do!”

Maybe that’s why she hasn’t been entirely flummoxed by the serial pandemical limitations that have seen Makings of a Voice re-thought from a cancelled Fringe premiere last summer to a cancelled live premiere for a live SkirtsAfire audience, to the digital solo production shot at the old Army & Navy in Strathcona, minus the three musicians who were to have been onstage with her. “It’s a team of amazing creative people, really up for it!” she says feelingly of SkirtsAfire. “People who just take on the limitations, happily, and say ‘let’s come up with cool ideas….’.”

It was during three years in England, living in a little village north of London, that Wylie took a deep dive into the great “folk tradition,” and began to explore the sacred canon, Dylan and Mitchell and the rest. She and her English musician boyfriend constantly jammed in folk clubs and pubs. “It sounded very foreign to me at first; my ears didn’t quite get it. But once I got into it, the whole idea of a roots, of a deep cultural tradition, was very appealing to me, especially as a western Canadian.”

Just back from England in 2008, Wylie got a gig at the Mayfield, in the musical The Full Monty. And she actually lived at that hotel for a while. But musical theatre couldn’t woo her back. Wylie thinks of Makings of a Voice as “a way of integrating my background in music (which includes a U of A degree in musicology) with my background in theatre.”

After 10 years (her last theatre appearance was Kenneth Brown’s Cowboy Poetry), Wylie says “I don’t really consider myself an actor any more…. I feel more comfortable with storytelling; that’s what I love to do onstage, between songs. I’m a performer; that’s who I am. That’s what I do.”

But, under the direction of Vanessa Sabourin, a fine actor herself, Wylie has been nudged towards embodying the characters she’s written into the script. “And I’ve been looking forward to finding out what it feels like to be an actor as the person I am now, a 41-year-old instead of a 31-year-old.”

“It’s been a personal process,” says Wylie of creating Makings of a Voice. “And at points I’ve thought ‘who cares? does the world really need this story right now? is it just my story?’. And that’s all part of the narrative…. We don’t know how much we share; that’s the beautiful thing about sharing stories.”

In a world steeped in not-knowing, “I feel more seen, and I hope other people watching feel more seen too…. What I’d like to put out into the world, is whoever you are, wherever you are, however messy this all feels, you’re good!.”

PREVIEW

Makings of a Voice

SkirtsAfire Festival 2021

Created by and starring: Dana Wylie

Directed by: Vanessa Sabourin

Where: streaming on Fringe TV

Running: March 8 to 14

Tickets: skirtsafire.com

 

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A concert for our time: UnCovered 2021 crosses the country on (digital) tour and arrives at Catalyst

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Divine Brown, UnCovered: Notes From The Heart. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Your place. Saturday night. Drinks, snacks, songs. A cross-country meet-up between two of the country’s most distinctive theatre companies.

One is Toronto’s Musical Stage Company, a company with a musical theatre heart and a remarkable blue-chip record in developing, producing, and presenting them. The other (your genial presenter) is Edmonton’s Catalyst Theatre, whose original innovative musicals (Frankenstein, Nevermore, Vigilante among them) have been seen by audiences across the country and beyond.

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With UnCovered: Notes From The Heart, The Musical Stage Company has created a digital version for 2021 of their hugely popular signature yearly concerts. They’re a 15-year tradition in which musical theatre stars invade the pop music repertoire. And, times being what they are — which is to say isolating, disconnecting, devastating for live performance — The Musical Stage Company has ventured into sharing the concert digitally with like-minded companies and their audiences across the country. Companies like Catalyst, under whose banner Saturday’s performance happens (charcuterie boxes by Dalla Tavola Zenari).

“It’s kinda like touring! Digital touring!” declares the cheerful energetic voice on the phone from Toronto. It belongs to Musical Stage Company founder and artistic director Mitchell Marcus. “We’re trying to figure out how to work together outside the box in this industry, and use this weird digital time to collaborate.” This year’s edition of UnCovered, which premiered in Toronto in November, has alighted so far at the Segal Centre in Montreal, the Belfry in Victoria, the Regency in Picton (Ont.), and will arrive in Newfoundland soon — just for starters.

And now Catalyst. Marcus, not coincidentally, is an admirer — familiar with Catalyst’s unusual musical theatre aesthetic (he was a producer at Luminato when that festival brought Nevermore to Toronto’s Wintergarden a decade ago). “I’m so honoured we can share something musical with Catalyst …. their work is just so interesting!” he says.

A keen interest in “digital touring” is something Marcus shares with Catalyst’s Jonathan Christenson, not least because “Catalyst was built to tour, and share our work abroad,” as the latter says. Until the next breath, Catalyst’s contribution to the National Arts Centre’s Grand Acts of Theatre, a cross-country series of outdoor experiments, is up on the NAC website. A proposed national tour of The Invisible, Christenson’s latest Catalyst musical play, awaits an alternative impetus. Could it be digital?

“This is an opportunity to feel connected to other companies, to audiences, to be reminded that other Canadians are wanting to reach out,” says Christenson of UnCovered. “The need has never been more potent.”

The 65-minute show features songs by heavy hitters like Leonard Cohen, Jann Arden, Bob Marley, Carole King, Billie Holiday, Elton John…. They’re performed by top Canadian performers, including Jackie Richardson, Sara Farb, Divine Brown, Andrew Penner. We can renew Edmonton connections in the 12-singer cast, actor/singer-songwriter Eva Foote for one. Hailey Gillis appeared in the debut production of Catalyst’s The Invisible. Farb was in Citadel productions of The Humans and Next To Normal. Citadel audiences have seen the work of The Musical Stage Company (formerly called Acting Up Stage Company) when their musical revue Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata arrived on the Citadel’s downstairs cabaret stage in 2014.

The songs are delivered as music videos rather than from a concert stage, in a variety of locations in Toronto and elsewhere. It’s an extra layer, says Marcus, “being on a physical journey as well an an emotional one.” One camera person shot one performer, from a variety of camera placements, on location. Mostly, “it’s a love letter to Toronto.” But  Carole King’s So Far Away, assembles (digitally) a quartet of performers, one in Toronto, three who’d gone home, to Ottawa, Victoria, and in Foote’s case Edmonton, for COVID lockdown. Each of those four shot their own video. “Eva got some lovely footage driving from Toronto to Edmonton,” says Marcus.

As for the music, three musicians including pianist Reza, did all their rehearsing on Zoom, and passed files back and forth, adding layers. “They sound like 20,” Marcus says. The safety restrictions required intricate logistics. There were never more than two people in a room;  and recording studios with their glassed-in cubicles might have been designed with pandemics in mind.

UnCovered 2020, finale. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

What uncovered UnCovered 15 years ago, as Marcus explains, was a love of pop music he shared with his musical director/ collaborator Reza Jacobs. “In musical theatre our expertise is telling stories through words. Which is the opposite of pop music where the words are often unclear.… You’re in your car, singing along, and you think you know the words but really you’ve been singing the wrong words forever!”

“So we asked ourselves, what happens if you give pop music over to great storytellers? If you look at the song through a musical theatre lens?”

And that lens, he points out, is all about asking “who’s singing?’ who’s the character? what do they want? ‘what’s the journey through the song? It’s rare in musical theatre that you’re in the same place at the end of the song that you are at the beginning…. That, for 15 years, has been the experiment of UnCovered.” 

If you read the lyrics, a pop song like Jann Arden’s Good Mother, with its list of things to be grateful for, is full of feeling, but without “the specificity of a musical theatre song,” Marcus argues, as one example from the show. It’s open to the emotional heft and meaning that a great artist like Farb brings to her performance of it. The video has her in a tree house going through old family photo albums.

Pop songs, thinks Marcus, are a “container,” ready for meaning provided by the actors who perform them. They “give actors the space to really play.”

When COVID hit, The Musical Stage Company faced the prospect of trashing its entire season. “We thought we’d try to rebuild only things we thought were resonant. And UnCovered felt the most urgent for the moment,” says Marcus. Their usual practice has been to focus on catalogues of certain artists, often in pairs — Stevie Wonder and Prince one year, Joni Mitchell and Carole King, Dylan and Springsteen, Queen and Bowie. For this peculiar time in which we’re struggling, “we thought let’s look at songs written in moments of change or challenge, songs that contain hope or inspiration, (or speak to) loneliness. And let’s look at them again, with COVID being the storyline.”

“We asked the artists ‘what is your experience right now? what meaning do you see in the song’ — and then built their performance around that.”  

In the course of re-fitting UnCovered Marcus found himself “so enamoured” of the idea of digital touring, that his company has undertaken to reverse the idea, too. “We’re been taking our own audience on theatre-going trips,” presenting work from elsewhere, complete with pre- and post-show meet-ups. “We’ve gone to London (by licensing an Off-West End production of The Last Five Years for a night), to New York, to the Cultch in Vancouver….” More to come, and an Edmonton destination called Catalyst would be welcome.

“It’s such a cool opportunity to share,” says Marcus, “to introduce our audience to other things, but in our own time zone, on our own digital platform, and still under our own banner.… and bring our own context and experience to somebody else’s creation.”

As Christenson puts it,  “knowing you’re under a larger umbrella … makes you feel a little bit less alone.”

PREVIEW

UnCovered: Notes From The Heart

Theatre: The Musical Stage Company, presented by Catalyst Theatre

Musical direction by: Reza Jacobs

Video direction by: Victoria Barber

Where: online, from catalysttheatre.ca

Running: Saturday 8 p.m.

Tickets: catalysttheatre.ca

 

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A festival reimagined, over and over: SkirtsAfire 2021

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Reimagine. Repeat. Reimagine. Repeat….

What does it take to open a theatre and multidisciplinary, multi-location arts festival in the ever-shifting COVID-ian landscape of March 2021? The 9th annual edition of SkirtsAfire, Edmonton’s ever-expanding wide-embrace showcase of the talents, the stories, the voices of women and non-binary artists, is something of a test case.

A rare and exquisite combination of adaptability, creativity and unstoppable persistence, the kind possessed only by the species Artist, in short, seems to be de rigueur. As the indefatigable festival director Annette Loiselle attests en route to Thursday’s “opening night” ceremonies, the exact configuration of online and live in this year’s 10-day SkirtsAfire, has been recalibrated constantly since the new year began. Not least because (a) the festivities include performance and exhibition: theatre, musical, poetry, dance, visual arts, in innovative combos, and (b) the official Alberta government Covid restrictions are bafflingly inconsistent when it comes to theatre.

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Loiselle, an actor/ director/ playwright herself of buoyant personality who was a founding parent of another of E-town’s seminal cultural institutions (the Freewill Shakespeare Festival), knows what it’s like to back up the back-up plan of the back-up plan. The mainstage premiere of Makings of a Voice, Dana Wylie’s “theatrical song cycle,” an original musical exploration of intergenerational identity,  happens Monday, International Women’s Day, online in a film version — instead of a live-streamed version from the Westbury Theatre, instead of a live run for a reduced, socially distanced live audience in that venue. Tickets: skirtsafire.com.

Annette Loiselle, artistic director of SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by April MacDonald Killins.

As Loiselle tells it, the route to Monday’s opening has been an arc of hopes and hopes dashed,  adjustments and readjustments.The AHS restrictions of December, which forbade gatherings of a live audience in theatres, allowed for exemptions for theatrical livestreaming, for solo shows with a distanced and reduced crew (like Northern Light Theatre’s The Look). Those exemptions were pulled in January. “So we started rehearsals on Zoom,” says Loiselle of Vanessa Sabourin’s production. “We had to lose the three live musicians,” she sighs, “not knowing if we could even use the Westbury.…” By January 29, all theatre venues were off-limits, unlike say hair salons or churches or film sets — ah, or markets. Enter the old Army and Navy in Strathcona.

The Key of Me, SkirtsAfire 2021. Photo by April MacDonald Killins

In a collaboration with the Wild Heart Collective, that venue is where filming of Makings of a Voice happened. “And we’re having a live music stage there, in the display window pumping music out into Strathcona,” says Loiselle. The Key Of Me stage features pop-up performances (Thursday through Sunday, and March 11 to 14), by a whole gallery of singer-songwriters, including two of the three musicians originally slated to play alongside Wylie in Makings of A Voice (Bille Zizi and Kirsten Elliott). They’re safely behind glass; the sound is for you to savour as you stroll by (masked and distanced, natch).

There’s irony attached, of course. “It goes against all our natural instincts to tell the audience not to gather,” as Loiselle says of the 10-person maximum on the street. But if there’s a silver lining, she thinks, it’s this: “having the festival out in the street is a chance to build a new audience.”

Visible from the street, as well, mounted in the A&N display windows (with The Key of Me musical accompaniment), is SkirtAfire’s visual art exhibition, Systemic Contractions. Curated by Stephanie Florence, its focus is our urgent need for connection, heightened by the crisis in which we live., which disproportionately affects the economically and racially disenfranchised, the elderly, front-line workers. Florence’s audio tour for your device is available to accompany your visit to the exhibition at skirtsafire.com.

This year, in a collaboration with the Old Strathcona Business Association, the finalists in the festival’s signature skirt design competition are displayed in six Strathcona retail establishments: the Bamboo Ballroom, C’est Sera, Woodrack Cafe, Red Pony Consignment, the Plaid Giraffe, and the Paint Spot — all visible from the windows with lighting by star theatre designer T. Erin Gruber. And your vote (either by email or on Instagram, #myskirtvote @skirtsafire) determines the winner.

Since last June, SkirtsAfire has assigned four diverse “story collectors” — Mackenzie Brown, Lebogang Disele, Jodi Calahoo-Stonehouse, Sang Sang Lee — to gather personal stories from people whose voices are rarely heard in the theatres of the land. The idea, says Loiselle, is a first-hand documentation of real-life experiences in this strange time, unfiltered by the literary or theatrical. The result is Covid Collections, a 25-minute film that offers us glimpses into communities we might never encounter day to day. And, times being what they are, we find these 12 storytellers Zoomed in from their own homes.

Says Loiselle, who directed the film (original music by Binaifer Kapadia, sound by Aaron Macri, videography by Katie Hudson), we meet, among others, “a high school teacher who runs the schools GSA (gay-straight alliance), a respiratory therapist, an elder from the Maskwacis Reserve, a mother who’s a long-term care worker and her daughter, a front-line care worker, an Indigenous drummer and activist, a South Asian consultant with a Jamaican husband. Loiselle’s own sister Rachel O’Brien, who had Covid in the fall and is suffering still its lingering effects, is included, “a good story and an important one,” as Loiselle says. The ethnicities and perspectives are widely varied. Only one contributor is a theatre artist. Lebogang Disele’s story, says Loiselle, “was just too good not to be included.”

Actor/writer Disele returned to her native Botswana last winter for a wedding, and was to have returned to Canada a week after her husband and kids did. Meanwhile, on March 31, the borders closed; she’s still in Africa separated from them.

Says Loiselle, “the end of the film is quite uplifting … a spark of something good that’s come out of Covid.” Covid Collections is available Thursday through March 31 at skirtsafire.com.

Body of Words, Ballet Edmonton. Photo supplied.

The 2021 festival includes a debut SkirtsAfire collaboration with Ballet Edmonton. In Body of Words, originally designed for live performance on (or from) the Westbury stage and now available for streaming March 7 to 14, choreographer Karissa Barry fuses poetry (by Edmonton poet laureate Nisha Patel and Medgine Mathurin) with dance, and sets it to music. A seven-dancer ensemble performs as part of the Ballet Edmonton season. Loiselle sought out the collaboration; she says “it grabbed me and shook me to the core!” Pay-what-you-can tickets are available at skirtsafire.com.

Thursday, 5 p.m., is showtime for this year’s festival. The opening ceremonies, which happen around the Fringe’s fire pit, include an excerpt from SkirtsAfire’s 2022 mainstage premiere, Ayita by Teniel Whiskeyjack, and remarks from Loiselle and this year’s “Honorary Skirt” Wanda Costen, dean of McEwan University’s school of business. You can see it all live on SkirtsAfire’s Facebook account.

PREVIEW

SkirtsAFire Festival 2021

Running: March 4 to 14

Where: online (skirtsafire.com) and live on Whyte Avenue, in the Army and Navy display windows and 6 Strathcona retail outfits

Tickets and schedule: skirtsafire.com

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New faces in theatre: meet creator/performer/producer/activist Sue Goberdhan

Posted on February 27, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, bright, and unstoppably creative. And, pandemic be damned, their adaptable, flexible talents are already lighting up the Edmonton theatre scene. In this 12thnight series you’ll meet some of E-town’s sought-after up-and-comers, artists whose work, on- and backstage, is already having an impact in this challenging age — and will have more when the theatre doors are open again. 

Meet  The series so far has included  designer/scenographer Elise CM Jason, techno whiz Bradley King, and triple-threat Chariz Faulmino, sketch and improv star Sydney Campbell and playwright/ dramaturge/ theatre scholar Mūkonzi wã Mūsyoki.

Sue Goberdhan in her Elf on The Shelf mode – Sister Act II and a Girl Named Sue.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

SUE GOBERDHAN, creator/ performer/ performer/ activist

If you saw Jason Chinn’s big-cast 2019 political comedy E Day — set in a makeshift NDP constituency office on the eve of an historic provincial election (yeah, that one) — you’ll have caught sight of a charismatic newcomer.

Sue Goberdhan played Sue, Safeway union worker cum campaign volunteer assigned to the lawn sign brigade — a ‘sure-no-problem!’ can-do sort with a beacon smile, her own running gag, and a crucial role in one of the play’s sinister mysteries. And she nailed it.

It was a sighting of a young theatre artist, in her mid-20s, who’s burst onto the scene in startling fashion, with an expanding array of talents, passions, and thoughtful ideas for changing the way theatre works in these parts.

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Since then Edmonton audiences have caught the exuberant Goberdhan onstage, dancing along 83rd Ave whilst singing, in the Plain Janes’ Scenes From The Sidewalk. Azimuth Theatre has acquired a new co-artistic director (Goberdhan in tandem with Morgan Yamada). There’s a new Goberdhan podcast, A Bigger Table. Hey, maybe you already caught Fringe premieres of Almost Heroes or Marnie Day, two original musicals Goberdhan wrote with composer (and old friend) Matt Graham, Jasper Poole, and Kaleb Romano? Goberdhan and Graham, have their own musical theatre company, with a quizzical Goberhanian name, Could Be Cool Theatre.

Sue Groberdhan in Scenes From The Sidewalk, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Stephanie Wolfe.

She writes musicals and plays, she appears in them, she instigates and produces projects, both her own and others…. It’s no accident that Azimuth’s “Performance Lab #1” online Feb. 15 was “telling your own stories with Sue Goberdhan.” It’s a motif, a mission even, she cherishes. Her own story has a certain blithe unpredictability, true, but a certain inevitable momentum, too.

“I tried everything to not be an artist!” declares the effervescent voice on the phone. In this Goberdhan, who’s a funny, entertaining, unpretentious conversationalist, was following the advice Giancarlo Esposito (Gus in Breaking Bad) gave in response to a question about entering the field of acting. “‘Do everything else first; decide there’s nothing else in your life to do. If there is, do that!”

“So much less turmoil on the heart.” Goberdhan permits herself a sigh. “Ain’t that the truth?”

Goberdhan took theatre avoidance seriously. She lists her assortment of post-high school gigs: maternity store for five years, David’s Bridal, data entry clerk for a national oil outfit (“yeah I sold my soul; I needed the money”), a flower shop. “I don’t know what they were thinking hiring me. Annuals $3, perennials $5. I was like ‘how do you tell the difference?’. So I decided everything was three bucks. A lot of people got lucky that summer.”

Ever since junior high, theatre has been staking a claim, bigger and bigger, in Goberdhan World. There were, however, obstacles. Theatre was/is a white stronghold. “I knew I loved it. I was so sure. But I remember looking around me, at high school (theatre). And I was like ‘there is NOBODY onstage who looks like me doing this job’. So I didn’t think I could do it.”

Goberdhan is of Indo-Caribbean descent (her family is from Guyana in South America). “In Scarborough, where I grew up, half the kids at my school were Guyanese; some were my cousins.… I didn’t realize how multi-cultural my school was till I got here (for junior high), and didn’t meet another Guyanese person for five years!”

“What gave me permission to pursue theatre,” as Goberdhan puts it, was seeing “two brown girls” in a high school show, one in hijab. “OK, if they can do it I can do it,” she says. “It cracked the code for me. I knew I could have meaningful work.”

There’s another turning point in the Goberdhan story, too. And it has roots in a pop culture interview that stuck with her. “You’re a weird dude,” said Judd Apatow talking to Jason Segel at the Freaks and Geeks season wrap. “And you’re not going to get any meaningful work after this — if you don’t write it yourself.” Goberdhan took it to heart. “OK I’m a weird dude too. OK, write your own? Let’s do it! That’s all I needed.”

“We talk about this a lot at Azimuth,” she says of her campaign of empowering a diversity of theatre artists to create their own work.  “You have to start stacking hats on hats on hats … so you can actually get to a place where you’re happy with what you’re putting out. You’ve got to be a writer, a director, a producer….” The Fringe, where creators are of necessity producers, is, as Goberdhan points out, is the playground for that kind of exploration.

“I get asked ‘what’s a dream role for you?’. And I don’t really know how to answer that question. No one had me in mind when they were writing whatever they wrote. I was nobody’s first choice for anything…. So maybe my dream role is one I haven’t written yet. Right now it doesn’t exist.”

Sue Goberdhan

Goberdhan traces her love of writing back to a couple of high school projects. One was inspired by a 300-line Ferlinghetti (R.I.P) poem that unspools in metaphors. “We had to write our own.” The other was a stream of entries in a writing portfolio. “I didn’t really start writing (plays per se) until  Almost Heroes.” She describes her collaboration with Graham — “he was my first friend; we started writing together at 17 and never stopped” — as “a farcical musical comedy about what it really means to be extraordinary. It’s about superheroes who have really shitty powers and have to use them to protect their little town.”

“Matt has the music brain; I have the other one…. It’s a blessing to be his friend and watch his practice grow!” says Goberdhan, who’s a natural repository of exclamation points. Almost Heroes was seven years in the making before its 2017 Fringe debut. “We played the Garneau Theatre  — to never less than 100 people a night…. I was super-surprised! It just shows you a little bit of enthusiasm will take you so far!”

Their second musical, which explores grief, was “a complete 180,” she says. In Marnie Day five friends gather every year on the title day to honour a free-spirited friend who has passed away. “It’s about finding a way to move forward when you don’t think you can.”

As a musica theatre person Goberdhan gravitated to MacEwan University, didn’t quite grasp the intricacies of a musical theatre audition (finding sheet music, and a pianist, and all that), and ended up in the Arts and Cultural Management program instead. “I kicked myself down for it; for ages I couldn’t move past the fact I was already so many steps behind.… How did I not realize that if I wanted to be better at something I just have to practise the something?”

That’s why she’s so excited about the Azimuth job, Goberdhan says. “I have such an opportunity to fix things that were wrong when I was coming up…. People are at a point when they’re recognizing their own agency. And this is an opportunity to teach people the skills to explore that agency. People are just waiting for permission, for someone to tell them ‘you should do this because you’re going to succeed’.”

Goberdhan is “living proof,” she laughs, for the go-for-the-gusto model of self-discovery, of “opening your eyes” to your own talent. It applies to her big singing voice, to her ventures onstage in musicals she’s (co-) written, to forays into sketch comedy with Blackout (“I can’t write short form to save my life!”), to the kids’ theatre classes she teaches at Grindstone Theatre. “My whole practice in teaching is self-guided instruction!” she says.

“I’ve been lucky to bounce around from project to project, to do experimental things that aren’t necessarily ‘professional’,” she says.  Though “not an improv person,” she’s even tried that terrifying spontaneous form. What’s The Deal?, an improvised Seinfeld show in which she was the Kramer character, “is maybe my favourite thing I’ve ever done.” If they ever revive it, “I’m in!”

Warning: if Goberdhan gets an idea, she’s very apt to run with it. When she and Luc Tellier amused themselves in COVID-ian lockdown by creating kooky custom-made Elf on the Shelf memes for Edmonton theatre people, they ended up with a 2021 calendar that Goberdhan designed.

As an artist who’s also an appreciator and enthusiast, Goberdhan is all about empowering the reticent and the marginalized. “Accessibility” and “permission” are key words in the Goberdhan lexicon. “I get frustrated because our community is chock full of incredible talent, and a lot of it is stuck in the ‘community theatre’ lane, people that don’t have a way to get to the intersection with professional theatre, people doing it for zero compensation….”

I just think we’re really missing out…. We have so many performers who should have so many more opportunities than they do,” Goberdhan says. “And we need a way to make this whole process more equitable..”

“I think of all the times I’ve tried to open a door for myself and couldn’t. I needed someone to hold it open for me!” That door-opening someone could well be Goberdhan, paying encouragement forward.

“If we make space for people to tell their stories, our lives would be all the richer for that….”

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Préparez vous, mes amis: Lucy Darling is back — with a bilingual magic/comedy show livestreaming from L’UniThéâtre

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Lucy Darling (centre, aka Carisa Hendrix), with Richard Lee Hsi and Miranda Allen. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What I love about magic as an art form,” declares magician Carisa Hendrix at a non-magical hour of the morning earlier this week, “what magic is really about, is the feeling that anything is possible.…”

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The apparently impossible is Hendrix’s theatre and her métier — and the playground for her retro-glam magician persona Lucy Darling. “We are amazing and rationalizing creatures,” says Calgary-based/ Edmonton-quarantined Hendrix cheerfully, musing on her favourite subject. “Our brains are constantly looking for meaning in a world that’s pretty random and full of entropy.” Magic, she thinks, is validation for the liberating proposition that “I don’t need to know everything!”

“I’m a well respected, well established magician, and I get fooled all the time!”

You will, therefore, be in good company this weekend when you’re baffled by the magical mysteries in the online bilingual magic/ improv comedy live-streamed by L’UniThéâtre, Edmonton’s francophone theatre.

Mes amis, préparez vous: Lucy Darling revient, along with her two Edmonton collaborators, actor/escapologist Miranda Allen and actor/dancer Richard Lee Hsi.

Lucy Darling (aka Carisa Hendrix). Photo by Jon-Christian Ashby.

With Une Soirée Avec Lucy Darling/ An Evening With Lucy Darling, the quick-witted Lucy, a vintage diva with a golden age party frock and shellacked red bouffant coiffure, has acquired a third assistant for the occasion: actor/improviser Vincent Forcier, L’UniThéâtre’s artistic director. And what started with “a fun weird challenge” — “let’s do our show in French!” — has evolved into “a comedy about language, about misunderstanding and miscommunication,” says Hendrix.

Each of the four characters has “a different level of understanding…. Miranda’s character is under the impression that ‘bilingual’ means German. Richard’s character believes he speaks better French than he does. Lucy’s French (flamboyantly accented à la Piaf, and peppered with English) is OK, but she’s struggling.” So she’s hired a new  butler (Forcier) who constantly corrects her. “And you can imagine how that goes!” laughs Hendrix, whose français, which hasn’t been exercised for five or six years till now, has charted its own unique course. French Immersion in school, check. A French grandmother with whom she corresponded in French, check. Circus training in French in Montreal, check. Circus school (“mostly fire-related, and choreography”) in the Dominican Republic living in a condo “with all French speakers,” check.

“The feeling that anything is possible” seems to weave through  Hendrix’s own story — long before she set the Guinness world record for holding a lit torch in her mouth in 2014, and long before the 2016 SuperChannel documentary Girl On Fire.

As Hendrix explains, her Calgary childhood was spent juggling, doing magic tricks, walking on stilts — and volunteering with organizations that supported disabled or disadvantaged children. Her entry point into showbiz wasn’t theatre per se, or acting. “That felt fancy to me, and inaccessible. And somehow subjective. How do you know if you’re a good actor? I don’t know. How do you know if you’re a good juggler? Easy. You juggle.”

Childhood in a dysfunctional family ended abruptly. “I got kicked out of the house at 16 and needed to make money.” Hendrix worked two jobs, one at London Drugs before school, the other making smoothies at Jugo Juice after school, “eight dollars an hour, and it wasn’t enough.” When the manager of a haunted house offered her an entertainment job for 50 bucks a night, four shows a night for 30 nights,” Hendrix jumped at it. “The $1500 was more money than I’d ever seen. … I had no big ambition to be famous; it was how I survived.”

She landed a job at the Boys and Girls Club. “I loved teaching and I loved the kids, but I kept performing on the side because the money was good.” Bookings kept coming, and Hendrix found herself “juggling two lives,” a day life and a night-time life. When the ultimatum came to choose, and Hendrix picked “the noble option,” teaching, she knew it was wrong. “I burst into wet sobbing and disgusting tears, faced with the realization that somewhere along the way (showbiz) had become my calling….”

In the international world of magic, predominantly male, Hendrix is a star on the ascendancy, witness her string of awards, magic magazine cover stories, testimonial blurbs from the likes of Steve Martin and David Copperfield, and residencies in such magic strongholds as the Magic Castle in L.A. and the Chicago Magic Lounge. But Hendrix calls the tricks themselves, no matter how dazzling their execution, “ancillary…. Don’t get me wrong, I am a magician, and passionate about the art form. But as long as the audience is being entertained and is giving in to the experience, it doesn’t really matter what I’m doing. It’s the experience that matters.”

Generating wonder, overcoming human limitations (or maybe lighting them on fire) … that’s what it’s about. Take fire-eating, for example (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence). “Fire is the destroyer,” Hendrix says. So fire-eating is wish fulfillment for the audience: “if she can be on fire and not get burnt, maybe I can, too.”

In a world of improbabilities, making an online magic show might be the trickiest trick of them all. But Hendrix argues that “magic has always valued cutting-edge technologies; magicians have always been very technically savvy…. In the Golden Age, magicians were making automatons.”

“So when there was talk early on in the pandemic about doing virtual shows, the community of magic was one of the first art forms to get on board and really embrace it.” The early shows she saw were “pretty awful,” Hendrix says. “Which the magicians who put them on would happily and graciously admit. But it was a learning curve.”

She admits to having been “trepidatious” about doing an online show with her Lucy Darling character, “mainly because I’ve had a lot of success with her, and I was a bit afraid to ruin it….” But then against the odds the Canada Council came though with a show grant. “Arts funding typically doesn’t go to magic, so I was certain they’d say no!”

Since last March, says Hendrix, “I’ve been lucky enough to be quarantined with Miranda and Richard. They’re not only overwhelmingly talented performers but also writers and designers!” The Edmonton showbiz couple, who’d met Hendrix by chance five years ago during a Nextfest gig, invited her to stay in their spare room. Lately the three artists have just moved 10 floors up in the couple’s apartment building to gain a workable studio space.

They’ve undertaken the digital challenge together. “We weren’t just trying to figure out how to do the tricks, but how to translate the feeling of what we do in traditional performances onstage,” says Hendrix of the audience interaction that seems indispensable to magic. “In a regular show I’d hand you a cup, or a rope, so you could examine it,” and verify that it was for real. “In this environment you’re relying subconsciously on the shine of something or the sound of the glass coming down on the table so your brain can go ‘OK, that’s really a glass’.”

There’s a reason most magic specials onscreen include footage of the live studio audience. “Without that, the magic can seem like a special effect “even if it’s not…. The audience IS the trick,”says Hendrix. She’s “too much of a purist to ever use a laugh track.” Instead, her sound engineer pal Chris Coombs, in a role called “audience manager,” live-mixes the audience sounds,  “so we get the live audience feel.”

That sensation is enhanced by the “meet and greet” with audience members in the Zoom gallery at the outset. “Basically, we’re building a cast of characters, and getting to know them a little… we’re helping you forget there’s a screen between you and us!”

Carisa Hendrix and her alter-egos (Lucy Darling right). Photo by Jon-Christian Ashby.

Hendrix has a half-dozen other alter-egos for her comedy/magic entertainments. But it’s Lucy Darling, vamping it up in her old-Hollywood ultra-glam way, who’s the people’s choice. Hendrix “adores” Lucy’s era with its ‘30s high-style screwball sass and charm, “Dorothy Parker, Mae West, Zsa Zsa Gabor . I could watch them all day.”  And in our own hard-driven hard-edged time — “an era of perfectionism and side hustle and Silicon Valley and optimizing time,” as Hendrix puts it — Lucy is a sort of fizzy antidote. “She walks onstage and you realize all she wants is a bubble bath and a glass of gin and a cupcake and a hug. She gives you permission for that to be OK….”

(12thnight caught An Exceptional Night In With Lucy Darling online in October. Have a peek at my review here).

PREVIEW

Une soirée avec Lucy Darling/An Evening With Lucy Darling

Theatre: Ballyhoo Entertainment

Presented by: L’UniThéâtre, in French and English

Starring: Carisa Hendrix, Miranda Allen, Richard Lee Hsi, Vincent Forcier

Where: online, live-streamed from L’UniThéâtre

Running: Friday and Saturday

Tickets: L’UniThéâtre  (tickets include a personalized L’UniThéâtre mask)

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The Edmonton Fringe bids farewell to Executive Director Adam Mitchell

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Edmonton Fringe Theatre is bidding adieu to its Executive Director. After five years in the demanding administration job atop the company that presents Edmonton’s giant International Fringe Theatre Festival (the country’s oldest, largest, and most influential fringe)  every summer, Adam Mitchell is leaving that stage, effective March 26.

Mitchell, a multi-tasking fringe veteran of some 20 years standing much admired for his calm and thoughtful leadership, decided to leave once before, about a year ago. But he agreed to stay and shepherd the company through this challenging time of multiple uncertainties for the performing arts. This time, his exit is for real. He’ll be returning to his theatre production roots.

Edmonton Fringe Theatre will launch a search for Mitchell’s successor in the fall of 2021. In the meantime Megan Dart has been appointed Interim Executive Director, overseeing the team that will undertake the challenge of producing the 40th annual Edmonton Fringe, under circumstances and health and travel restrictions that are complicated, transforming, and, to understate the case, unpredictable.

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Dart, Edmonton Fringe Theatre’s “communications specialist” and a playwright and events producer of note, is half of Catch The Keys Productions, an indie company with a distinguished history of original experiments in site-specific and immersive theatre — including the annual Dead Centre of Town forays into the spookiest niches of Edmonton history.

The 2021 Fringe will look and feel very different in another pandemic year when live-ness and intimacy, the Fringe trademarks, come with so many strings attached. Dart wonders if it means a return to earliest Fringe times, when our mammoth festivities were a mysterious “fringe theatre event.”

Stay tuned.

   

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The letters you wrote and never sent: Letters To No One, a new show from Dammitammy

Posted on February 20, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of Letters To No One. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Everyone has a stash.

You know, the letters you wrote and you didn’t send.

Letters in which you confess your long-hidden love (possibly in free verse). Or your rage (likely in stinging prose). Or reveal your simmering grievances, regrets, grief, your subterranean resentments, your wounds. Letters where you admit your mistakes or declare ‘j’accuse’. Or set forth the views you squashed at the time in order to seem conciliatory. Or say the goodbyes or sorry’s you were too late to say in person.

That secret hoard of didn’t-send’s, wish-I’d-sent’s, glad-I-didn’t’s was Rebecca Merkley’s inspiration for Letters To No One, the Dammitammy production that opens online Feb. 26. The theatrical concept is simplicity itself, scarily so. A cast of eight actors read, for the first time, nine letters, written by each other, and anonymous. “You don’t know who wrote what, but you know you’re reading a letter by someone in the cast.” Envelope, please.    

It began a couple of months ago when Merkley was getting a new computer, and sifting through the stash of writing lodged in the old one — as one does during an endless pandemic. And there they were, “letters I’d saved to people I’d never sent, quite a few,” some of them dating back 20 years. “Letters it was good for me to write and get it out, but I just didn’t feel safe or comfortable sending them.… Painful moments, memories, but quite beautiful to read knowing what I went through at the time.”

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“How could this turn into art?” Merkley, a diarist of long standing, wondered. Encouraged by fellow theatre artist Brianne Jang (the managing director of the SkirtsAfire Festival), the pandemic-friendly idea became a video project, and Merkley approached actors. “And everyone jumped right in.… They were, like, ‘I’m scared to do it, and I’m gonna do it!’” Which pretty much counts as perfect theatrical motivation in Merkley World.

“Sometimes we doubt our simple ideas!. Sometimes we overthink, especially right now…. We can’t gather and do the big fun spectacles, the stuff I normally do,” says producer/ actor/ playwright/ director/ singer/ musician/ composer Merkley.

The Unsyncables

“Fun spectacles” dot the Dammitammy Productions archive, which begins at the 2016 Fringe with the funny, spirited sleeper hit The Unsyncables, an original Merkley underdog comedy in which an aspirational amateur synchronized swim team goes up against a snazzy and arrogant swim “club.” (It remains the only production in the last two decades to my knowledge in which the characters remain in bathing caps throughout). It was followed by River City The Musical, based on the characters from the old Archie comics, and Merk Du Soleil, an original circus cabaret/ variety entertainment.

You can’t keep a creative spirit down, even in times that have been devastating for live performance. “How can we do theatre now? We have to evolve fast. We have no choice!” Merkley has been looking for do-able alternatives. Hence a couple of Dammitammy radio plays, Camp!, a Halloween offering, and the Christmas comedy They Wanted To Do Chekhov. With more to come, including a Merkley mystery, Murder At The Park And Sleep Inn Hotel, set to be unleashed on St. Patrick’s Day (and having “nothing whatsoever” to do with St. Patrick).

Meanwhile, there’s Letters To No One, woven from real letters to real people, “people who wounded us or people we never had the chance to say sorry, or goodbye to, or who we hurt, or who we have mixed feelings about,” as Merkley puts it. Rage is “the palate cleanser,” she laughs. Hence, one letter is by someone who works in retail, a grocery store, and “has to deal with people.” The fury potential is doubtless stratospheric.

The theatre repertoire has its share of plays constructed entirely of letters. 84 Charing Cross Road and Love Letters spring to mind. Letters To No One isn’t like that. “It’s not a monologue project,” says Merkley, explaining that’s the reason the actors don’t see the letter they’ll read till the moment they open the envelope online, with the camera rolling. “I didn’t want it to be ‘acting’…. I didn’t want (them) to ask ‘who are you talking to, and why?’ I need this to be what it is….” And what that is, as she describes it, is unfiltered, unprepared, responses from people, not actors rehearsing a character. “We get the real raw reaction. It’s what makes the project unique!”

COVID has certainly highlighted the resilience and adaptability of our theatre artists. Even by those standards Merkley’s career continues to unfold and zigzag in a remarkable way, accumulating skills as it goes. For her radio plays, she “had to learn audio editing from scratch.” Each took hundreds of hours in post-production, “no exaggeration.”

Merkley, originally from Creston B.C. (near to the home of the polygamous Mormon fundamentalists who are the subject of her play Bountiful), grew up listening to music, and kids’ story records. Thanks to her mom, “I  listened more than I watched TV.”

In high school, she was an athlete, in love with soccer and hockey. Music was “singing and playing guitar in my room.… It took a long time for me to be able to share,” Merkley says. In her five-year Grande Prairie period that followed, she was a career  singer/musician, hired as part of church youth outreach programs and summer camps designed “to create safe spaces for troubled youth.” And she toured the U.S. doing just that. “It was where I thought my life was heading.”

Then came a falling-out with the leadership, and the life-changing decision to accompany a friend to an audition for Oklahoma!. In a classic theatre story, he got Chorus; Merkley landed a lead role, Ado Annie, the girl who “cain’t say no.” Says Merkley, “it was fun. So good for me to discover a community, a bunch of oddballs I fit into…. Sometimes you need people in your life to give you permission,” she says. “I didn’t know I had (musical theatre) in me.”

In 2011, she rented a car, drove to Edmonton, and aced the last audition spot for MacEwan U’s musical theatre program. Soon the Canadian theatre repertoire would be expanding with new Merkley musicals. And plays.

Letters To No One required a further expansion of Merkley’s already startling theatre skill set. And that was assisted materially by acts of generosity, as she says gratefully. A Merkley pal Aaron Hart, a professional videographer (hartfeltmoments.com), offered his equipment to the production for free. Ditto his encouragement. “This isn’t my wheelhouse,” she says. But she’s discovered she enjoys video editing.

When it came time to shoot, the Woodrack Cafe in Old Strathcona offered Merkley the space for free. “It was sitting there empty and beautiful.” So the actors arrived, one at a time, on a strict schedule.

“It’s all an experiment,” she says. “Hey, maybe I should have a separate webpage for my Pandemic Art!” Merkley laughs. “We had fun. I thought it’d be more sad…. It’s people being themselves. It’s real. And it’s pure.”

PREVIEW

Letters To No One

Theatre: Dammitammy Productions

Created by: Rebecca Merkley

Featuring: Bret Jacobs, Brianne Jang, Calla Wright, Carol Chu, Chariz Faulmino, Kristina Hunszinger, Rebecca Merkley, Samantha O’Connor

Where: online, dammitammy.com

Running: Feb. 26 through March 15

Tickets: dammitammy.com/tixevents

    

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New faces in theatre: meet playwright, dramaturge, theatre scholar Mūkonzi wā Mūsyoki

Posted on February 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, bright, and unstoppably creative. And, pandemic be damned, their adaptable, flexible talents are already lighting up the Edmonton theatre scene. In this 12thnight series you’ll meet some of E-town’s sought-after up-and-comers, artists whose work, on- and backstage, is already having an impact in this challenging age — and will have more when the theatre doors are open again. 

Meet playwright/ dramaturge/ theatre scholar Mūkonzi wã Mūsyoki. The series so far has included  designer/scenographer Elise CM Jason, techno whiz Bradley King, and triple-threat Chariz Faulmino, sketch and improv star Sydney Campbell. 

Playwright, dramaturge, theatre scholar Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

MŪKONZI WĀ MŪSYOKI, dramaturge, playwright, theatre scholar

If you ventured out in Strathcona on a freezing October night to experience a series of live (!) five-minute one-on-one outdoor encounters in unexpected locations, you’d have followed your phone app to a little exit staircase outside a church door.

The locale was meaningful. We met a troubled young man (David Madawo), mid-crisis, trying to unravel his complicated nexus of grief, loss, guilt, and spiritual alienation. In Dreams, Desires and Disguises, one of the octet of original five-minute solo plays in Workshop West’s season premiere Here There Be Night, we were seeing the work of Mūkonzi wā Mūsyoki.

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“A very personal piece,” says the thoughtful playwright/ dramaturge/ director, who’s from Kenya and brings with him, along with an accounting degree, two African languages (Kiswahili and Kikãmbã) and a formidable and elegant command of English. “My journey into disconnection with my Christian upbringing…. Very heavy for me,” he says of the piece. A world away from his home and his childhood in the Kenyan countryside outside Nairobi, Mūsyoki was remembering his mother and “the Christian way” from which he’s departed. “If you lose someone, how do you retain that memory?”

A play in five minutes? “At first it was 16 or 20 pages,” Mūsyoki says of the ruthless trim required. “It’ll be a full-length play in future.”

We have academia to thank for the arrival here four years ago of Mūsyoki, a specialist in post-colonial African theatre who came to get a master’s degree at the U of A. Mission accomplished. He’s now one of four international students — including one from Botswana and two from Ghana — working towards U of A doctorates  in “performance studies.”

Since 2016 Mūsyoki has been not only a playwright, but a rising star in a behind-the-scenes line of theatre work that, as a job description, eludes easy definition in English: dramaturgy. And, as a black African artist at this moment in our collective history on this continent, his outsider’s perspective on the colonial inheritance of theatre practice is well-timed, to say the least, to offer insight. Dramaturgy, from the Mūsyoki perspective, has a wider embrace than storyboarding Act II of draft 14 of a script. It’s all about “building a community of collaborators,” and “looking at different modes of creation….” And he feels particularly aligned with Indigenous creators.

The question of “protocols” resonates with Mūsyoki. “It’s one of the things I learned from (influential Kenyan writer/ researcher) Ngūgī wa Thiong’o. When you move out of institutions, universities, and go out to the community, you find where stories exist…. Moving theatre out of a building as an institution allows accessibility to different people.” Confining theatre to institutional buildings, he says, “limits the sense of indigenous performance and creation.”

As a country kid in Kenya, Mūsyoki’s first experience of theatre was the “skits” organized in the church for every festival. “I got my first spark of interest in dramaturgy from that…. looking at a Bible story, extracting something, and staging it within a local setting.” The entertainment value of enacting stories wasn’t lost on him: “we managed to teach  religious lessons without preaching them.”

As a linguistics and English literature undergrad at Kenyatta University in the big city, Mūsyoki’s entry point into drama was the page not the stage, starting with the classics: Shakespeare (Macbeth was first; “I had no idea what was going on. I was still learning my English,” he laughs). Greek tragedy. Ibsen, especially An Enemy of the People, with its radical thrust about the social price tag on a truth-teller’s zeal.

The African writers who particularly engaged him in his post-colonial theatre research, says Mūkyosi, include such leading figures as the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, the Kenyan writer/scholar Francis Imbuga, Uganda’s John Ruganda, and Ngūgī Thiong’o. All wrote in a variety of forms, including theatre.

Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki.

Since his arrival here, Mūsyoki has not only been a scholar (with a string of articles to his credit), but a theatre practitioner, out in the community, much in demand as a dramaturge — from Workshop West (where he was dramaturge-in-residence for a year) to the Citadel (he worked on The Color Purple and was much struck by the rarity of an all-black production) to Victoria School of the Arts. He’s brought his outreach and dramaturgy skills to bear on premieres, including Conni Massing’s Matara, Colleen Murphy’s Bright Burning, Cheryl Foggo’s John Ware Reimagined.

The latter, his first professional gig in Edmonton theatre outside the ivory tower, “put a lot of things in perspective for me about the place of black people in Alberta,” he says. “Race is an issue in Alberta; it was a bit concerning for someone moving to Alberta….”

“I was a bit shocked really” that the history of black settlers in Alberta was so little known to many, indeed most, people here. “A lot of conversation originated out of that; it’s very inspiring to keep that conversation going.…”

“I’ve learned so much!” he says happily. “Particularly from Indigenous scholarship in Canada.” His mentor has been the Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams (Thunderstick, Cafe Daughter), the first Indigenous playwright to earn an M.A. in playwriting from the U of A.  “And I’ve gotten a lot of mentorship as well from Vern Thiessen,” star Canadian playwright and the former Workshop West artistic director.

Mūsyoki has a new play ready for production at the U of A’s upcoming annual New Works festival (dates TBA). He describes Chanzo (“source” in Swahili”) as an experiment in multi-lingual storytelling (English, Swahili, and an Indigenous language called Sheng, a Swahili slang “spoken by youth to resist the colonial proficiency of English.” The three-actor production is an international affair, with a director from Korea and an assistant director from Venezuela. “It’s about going back home and grief and family; it’s been so much on my mind at the moment,” Mūkonzi says of the pandemic isolation.

Another Mūsyoki play-in-progress is Fumbo, a “reflection from my society where there’s been a lot of recurring domestic violence in some communities.” First workshopped at the 2018 Chinook Series, “it’s one of the most difficult things I’ve written, so it’s taken a while.”

We won’t be seeing a screwball comedy from him any time soon. All his plays have a dark, serious palette to them, Mūkyosi acknowledges. His very first, The Golden Handshake, “was about homosexuality from a Kenyan perspective. A very heavy play…. I’m always drawn to plays that ask questions that I find hard to reconcile with.”

Meanwhile Mūkyosi leads Workshop West’s BIPOC “creative incubator” every second Wednesday, “to explore all kinds of things … ideas that inform our creation, alternate forms of storytelling, looking beyond ordinary notions, drama informed by Indigenous dramaturgies….” Creating space, challenging received notions of what constitutes a point of departure for creating work…. it’s all part of the mandate.

Land acknowledgment (and “moving beyond saying into doing”) has a profound impact on Mūsyoki’s thinking. “He’s invited participants to consider their journeys to the place, the physical here and now they’re speaking from. For the first session, he had them each bring in an object with which they have a relationship in their life, to narrate the history of both object and relationship. He brought a scarf belonging to his mother.

Four years of Canada, winters included, have been “enriching,” he says. They have not, however, entirely prepared Mūsyoki for the meteorological trials of last week. “I’ve been building my tolerance. But I don’t think I’m quite there yet.”

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Happy Valentine’s weekend: have some theatre with your champagne

Posted on February 12, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Living Room Love Songs, Citadel Theatre. Photo, Citadel website.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Let’s try to ignore for the moment the origins of Valentine’s Day as a feast day in honour of a martyr, and, more recently, a massacre. Or the source of a bottomless supply of gummy limericks, and dreary memoirs about unsatisfactory ex’s. Arguably, we have enough to contend with in these parlous times without contemplating the baleful prospect of Romeo and Juliet getting poisoned and stabbed, respectively. By themselves. For love. Online.

But I digress. In 2021, this is a Valentine’s Day when you don’t have to feel like the world’s biggest loser because you’re at home alone, eating the chocolates you bought for yourself online. True, it’s a day to feel keenly how much you miss the sense of togetherness, of the shared communal spirit, laughter, breath, of live theatre. But thanks to the sheer ingenuity and wilful persistence of our theatre artists, the V-Day weekend is not without its theatrical prospects, my friends — brought to you on location at home, and consumable with your own champagne throughout.

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•The Citadel taps the romance repertoire with Living Room Love Songs, an online fund-raiser concert featuring the stellar musical talents of Nuela Charles, Farren Timoteo, Tara Jackson, Audrey Ochoa, Michael Bernard Fitzgerald, and John Wort Hannam. Each performs a set of three songs, originals and classics. It runs Sunday through Wednesday, and goes well with both chocolate and bubbles. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

playwright Natalie Meisner, Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story. Photo supplied

•KyleThe Alberta Queer Calendar Project, which spent 2020 premiering  some 13 podcasts of original dramas by AB’s queer writers, is hosting another this Valentine weekend. Co-hosting with Calgary’s Sage Theatre, it’s a “virtual listening party” Saturday at 4:30 p.m. In Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story, Calgary’s Natalie Meisner celebrates the life of the last Canadian man jailed simply for being gay. It’s a story little known to Canadians, an homage to a “quiet hero.” And the performance is followed by a Q and A with the cast and crew. Sage’s Jason Mehmel directs. sagetheatre.com.

•If you saw The Rocky Horror Show or Next to Normal at the Citadel, a few seasons ago, or more recently Jesus Christ Superstar at the Mayfield (his Judas was a knock-out), you already know how high Robert Markus rates in the watchability factor. A U of A theatre school grad in the day, he’s Toronto-based these days, with a notable list of Stratford and Mirvish credits like Dear Evan Hansen. His new cabaret Letting You Go — a title that resonates with every theatre artist in the country who’s lost gigs and a livelihood this past year (i.e. every theatre artist in the country) — is part of Stratford’s cabaret series. The song list includes Jason Robert Brown, Ben Folds and Stephen Sondheim. It’s streamed free through Sunday on Stratford’s YouTube channel, before joining the ticketed STRATFEST@HOME archive.

The Free Willies. Photo supplied.

•Revive your long-lost dreams of summer before they atrophy altogether by thinking about Freewill Shakespeare, that al fresco festival with the hot resident playwright. That festival, cancelled for 2020, launched a travelling trio of musical troubadours, the Free Willies (Jameela McNeill, Chariz Faulmino, Billy Brown), in parks and on river banks near you. The Free Willies will be back this summer, says Freewill artistic director Dave Horak. Meanwhile, catch a couple of their music videos at freewillshakespeare.com: The Free Will Song and their light-hearted What A Rogue Am I (which makes a question of I Will Survive) a speed-up musical version of Hamlet.

•The dazzling National Theatre production of Tony Kushner’s monumental two-part Reagan era epic Angels in America is available for rent, ntathome.com. I saw it in a memorable double-header day and night in New York. And Marianne Elliott’s production, starring Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn, James McCardle, Denise Gough, and Russell Tovey, is still astonishing, as I found out last night with Part One: Millennium Approaches. I’m saving Part Two: Perestroika for the weekend.

•Mile Zero, the dance theatre headed by the unstoppably inventive Gerry Morita, is back tonight and Saturday (7 p.m.) with For Cruising At 30 Kilometres A Second And Attempting Not To Crash. It’s an online “community participatory performance” which amalgamates pre-recorded video from participants who identify with Edmonton’s LGBTQ and/or BIPOC communities (and don’t have prior knowledge of each other’s contributions). Kevin Jesuino provided each with a score, and the footage is unedited and unseen till show time. Hey, video editing improv! Tickets: milezerodance.com.

•From the Grindstone Comedy Theatre & Bistro, an outfit with a festive regard for all high holidays, host Kyle Canniff presides over an online Valentines Revue Saturday and Sunday (7 p.m.), featuring Byron Martin, Danielle LaRose, Jocelyn Anselmo, Monica Gate and Terry Knicle. All pre-recorded in strictly distanced COVID-ian safety. Tickets: grindstone theatre.ca.

Ronnie Burkett and friend. photo from High Performance Rodeo website.

Catch this year’s 35th annual edition of Calgary’s great groundbreaking performance festival, the High Performance Rodeo, founded by One Yellow Rabbit. Who Are You Now? Thirty-Five For Thirty-Five had been transmuted for these pandemical times, by repairing to Instagram till Valentine’s Day (and then to the Rodeo website hprodeo.ca). An international array of 35 artists of astonishing variety and diversity who have appeared in the first 34 Rodeos were invited to answer the “who are you now” question, in any form they liked, in anywhere from 45 seconds to two minutes. Theatre companies, musicians, burlesque artists, unclassifiable multi-disciplinarians, avant-garde clowns … the list is long and fun to explore. And, hey, it includes marionettiste/playwright extraordinaire Ronnie Burkett.

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Fun with Greeks: Orestes, “a live online mythic adventure” from Tarragon Theatre. A review

Posted on February 7, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Home Sweet Homepage.”

In a new and witty Orestes, premiering in a livestream production by Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, the House of Atreus, world’s most famous dysfunctional family is online with you (hey, just like your own family). And they’re airing their dirty laundry.

For this “Iive online mythic adventure” the veteran actor/director Rick Roberts has re-imagined the Greek tragedy for the age of screen interfaces. And director Richard Rose and video/ streaming designer Frank Donato has created a colourful and (dare one say) highly entertaining world for characters to watch each other, plot, interact across platforms. They suddenly appear and disappear as disembodied heads in other vividly coloured backgrounds, and shimmer into pixels. Video calls and Zoom captures freeze and return to motion; configurations change.

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In an uncanny way (as Roberts points out in his playwright’s note in the program) the conventions of Greek theatre are made for the digital world, with its Greek chorus of “followers” and so-called “friends,” and Likes and Unsubscribes, its particular forms of voyeurism, and conspiratorial break-out rooms.

As a large-cast online production (as opposed to a filmed production), it’s one of the most ambitiously inventive theatrical infiltrations of multi-screen technology I’ve seen yet. And it’s fun, if that isn’t a blasphemy in Greek tragedy circles.

The title hero (the charismatic Cliff Cardinal), an internet star with millions of followers, is screwed up by guilt and grief in the aftermath of killing his mom Clytemnestra (who as you may recall arranged for the death of her war hero hubby Agamemnon). Orestes has just been exonerated of murder. BUT — here’s the rub — he’s been “de-platformed,” evicted from all his social media platforms. “Banned from Twitter, banned from TikTok, banned from Instagram…” the list goes on in the incantation of his sister Electra (Krystin Pellerin, in a powerful performance). In short, “a sentence worse than death.”

Electra, mostly seen in grainy close-ups and not a model of emotional equilibrium herself, mounts a risky campaign to restore him. “If I put him back online there is no turning back…. Already people are flooding the site.”  

The reinventions of the characters for this very post-Trojan War world are witty and sharp. In Richard Clarkin’s excellent performance Menelaus, who waves the Family First flag, is the ultimate political operative, a cunning and smooth self-server. With its echoes of Mark Antony’s virtuoso funeral oration in Julius Caesar, his speech about his nephew Orestes starts with protestations of familial affection and ends with a death sentence.

Richard Clarkin (centre) in Orestes, Tarragon Theatre. Screen shot.

Menelaus’s bombshell wife Helen (Lisa Ryder) — Helen of Troy, for whom the endless war was fought — is the ultimate glamour  celeb, a creature of the virtual world and, as Electra points out acidly, “always camera-ready.” Helen’s daughter Hermione (Eleanor Guy) won’t even answer her calls. Any breath of criticism and Helen says “I blame the media.”

David Fox as the fierce old family patriarch Tyndareus gives his offspring, including Menelaus, a withering review in a memorable diatribe against the younger generations.

To me the interactive part — you click on a character to hear a supplementary monologue — seems a little grafted on, in truth. For one thing I couldn’t get it to work without stopping to re-enter my password. But the show is lively and absorbing. And it reminds us of one of the few bright sides of this strange and isolating moment in history where we’re stuck. We get to see what bright ideas are happening on the other side of the country.

“The real was never an option for him,” says Electra of her troubled bro. I think we all know how that feels.

Orestes is live-streamed through Feb. 14. Tickets and schedule at tarragon.com.

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