Teatro La Quindicina’s 2021 summer season

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It being summer (to put it mildly), and Teatro La Quindicina’s particular time of year par excellence, the company is back in rehearsal.

Yes, real actors in an actual theatre, the Varscona in Strathcona. “And it feels fantastic!” declare its joint artistic directors Belinda Cornish and Andrew MacDonald-Smith.   

A rarity among Edmonton professional theatres in running summer seasons June through September, Teatro “took a mulligan’ in 2020. The company rebooked its entire lineup — three Stewart Lemoine comedies and a musical created by Teatro stars — ahead a full year.

The world hasn’t entirely co-operated, you may have noticed. And Cornish and MacDonald-Smith have had to adjust. “It was impossible to do the 2020 shows in 2021,” say Cornish. “Either they were just too big (like Evelyn Strange), or they were a musical (Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s)!”

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What they’ve planned for Teatro’s return is a four-show 39th season in which the first three of the upcoming productions are streamed (released late summer, with in-person big-screen screenings at the Varscona in early fall). “Capturing something for eternity” has its appeal, as MacDonald-Smith puts it, an act of defiance against the ephemeral nature of live theatre. “And at a time of opening and closing and opening and closing, we thought ‘why don’t we just come to you?’” Says Cornish, “necessity is the mother … etc. It pushes us into something new.”

Jenny McKillop will star in Fever-Land, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo supplied.

The grand finale (originally planned for 2020) is live and in-person: a revival of Lemoine’s Fever-Land, which premiered in 1999, and hasn’t been seen since 2004. That, incidentally, is the year before both Cornish and MacDonald-Smith, Teatro stars both, made their company debuts, the former in A Grand Time In The Rapids, the latter in The Salon of the Talking Turk.

The first two streaming offerings, Lost Lemoine: Parts One and Two,  made possible by EPCOR’s invaluable Heart & Soul Fund and the Edmonton Community Foundation, gather short (and very short) plays by Teatro’s resident playwright. Their provenance is varied, some recent, some dating back decades in the extensive Lemoine catalogue. Some were written for one-night special occasions of yore, others had fleeting runs at the Fringe or for fund-raisers, galas, or the annual Fringe cabaret. Some were part of collections (The Argentine Picnic, The Portuguese Riding Lesson among them). “Stewart’s pandemic project has been digitizing his work,” says Cornish, “some of it written on a typewriter!”

Lost Lemoine, himself. Playwright Stewart Lemoine in 1987. Photo supplied.

“We had about 16 to choose from, and (for Lost Lemoine: Part One) we went for six…. They’re five to 10 minutes long, bite-sized and they vary enormously in tone,” says Cornish, who directs a cast of eight who appear, in various COVID-friendly perms and combs (two, three or in one case four actors), in both parts. “We go from “Stewart’s meditation on Ibsen (Ludicrous Pie) to a play set in the ‘70s.” Leona Brausen’s costuming for the latter, says MacDonald-Smith of The Crazy Women, will feature his personal favourite pair of stage shoes ever.

The seventh, Lost Lemoine: Part Two, is slightly longer. A Second Round of Seconds, a 2016 45-minute one-act originally written for The Novus Actors (Teatro’s adjunct company of lawyer thesps). The comedy is based on the concept of speed dating, Lemoine explains. “One on one scenes, a bell rings, they re-group….”

The pieces, say the Teatro co-artistic directors, rise to the extreme challenge of telling a story, dramatically and theatrically, with dimensional characters, in a matter of minutes. The playwright, says Cornish, “encapsulates their world in three lines, who they are, the journey they go on….”

Kristen Padayas stars with Mathew Hulshof in A Fit, Happy Life. Photo supplied

The protagonist of the third streaming production A Fit, Happy Life is a dedicated department store bed salesman, in encounters with a succession of customers. The original concept dates from a three-performance late-night run at the old Phoenix Downtown space in 1985. Mathew Hulshof plays the “earnest mattress expert” with Kristen Padayas as all the customers, in a series of quick-changes made possible by the medium of film. “When I was digitizing, I found three scenes I really like,” says Lemoine. “And I’ve added two new ones.”

The streamed productions will likely intersect with Fringe time in August. But though the Varscona will be a BYOV as usual, the Teatro offerings won’t be part of the festival per se this year (largely due to logistical challenges in scheduling and ticketing).

At the centre of the live in-person season finale (Sept. 23 to Oct 9), Lemoine’s highly unusual Fever-Land, is the intersection of characters in 1960s Winnipeg and other-worldly personages who advise a chorister involved in an illicit affair:  The Erl-King (star of a Goethe poem put to music by Schubert) and The Queen of the Willis borrowed from the classic ballet Giselle. Red velvet cake at the Eaton’s cafeteria in Winnipeg figures in the play (the original program, as I recall, contained the recipe). “It hadn’t quite made its comeback then,” says Lemoine.

Cornish directs the revival, starring Jenny McKillop, with MacDonald-Smith and Cathy Derkach.

The three streamed productions will not be movies, Cornish hastens to add. They’re “theatre-film hybrids.” Lemoine echoes the thought. “We’re trying to acknowledge we’re in a theatre.” And there are advantages, after all, to the digital world, to wit “outreach nationally and internationally…. Finally, my aunts in Winnipeg and Toronto can see the shows.”

Teatro La Quindicina 2021 season

Lost Lemoine: Part One (releasing late summer)

Lost Lemoine: Part Two (releasing late summer)

A Fit, Happy Life (releasing late summer)

Fever-Land (live in-person Sept 23 to Oct 9)

 

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‘A little love letter to the Edmonton theatre community’: the Sterling Awards go digital Monday

Posted on June 26, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s our little love letter to the Edmonton theatre community,” says Kristi Hansen of the digital 34th annual Sterling Awards, free online Monday night.

In “a wild year” for live theatre, the awards, named for theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes and designed to celebrate excellence on Edmonton stages, have adapted their venue, their tone, and their spirit for the occasion. For a second year, the Sterlings are taking to the digital stage, as so many theatre companies have undertaken to do this past year of pandemic chaos and devastation. And it’s in the spirit of celebration, Hansen says, “of toasting the year that was.”

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In a year like no other, shows were cancelled, postponed indefinitely, filmed, re-planned, pivoted into online versions of their originals. And theatre artists rose creatively to the challenges of a time that made live gatherings, the very  raison d’être of an art form where audiences and artists share a space, impossible.

“No awards will be given out,” says Hansen of the evening planned by the Sterling Committee. “We didn’t do any fund-raising or (go after) any sponsorships.” Instead, “we invited the community at large, theatre companies and indie artists, to put a little something together — pictures, videos, messages, greetings from artistic directors…. as simple as a 20-second iPhone video or a two-minute clip from online content. It’s whatever folks felt they had the capacity to contribute.”

The Citadel and Northern Light Theatre, for example, have offered clips from streamed versions of shows in their seasons. Rapid Fire Theatre artistic director Matt Schuurman, an expert videographer, put together “a hilarious video,” Hansen says.

The Sterling Committee didn’t prescribe. It wasn’t a year for that. It could be, she says, “a simple 30-second messages of ‘how’s it going?’” It’s a “low stakes” situation; we’re being gentle with ourselves as we figure out how to go forward, how to celebrate excellence in the future.”

The hosting duties of the evening belong to the 10-member committee, who have put together a Welcome! video. The year saw the addition of new and younger members,  among them Sue Goberdhan, Althea Cunningham, Luc Tellier, Andrés Moreno, Steven Sobolewski. “New faces, new perspectives, fresh ideas,” says Hansen, on the phone from P.E.I. where she and her husband Sheldon Elter are in the Charlottetown Festival production of Dear Rita, a tribute to the late Maritime singer-songwriter Rita MacNeil.

In a year of devastation for the live performing arts when theatre artists have applied their wits and skills so impressively, and so diversely, to the challenges “it’s nice to celebrate everyone without a sense of competition,” Hansen says. “The goal is ‘watch it and feel good’. And I think you’ll find it an emotional, touching, heartening event.”

You can’t keep creative people down (“we’re the cockroaches,” she says cheerfully). The annual Sterling after-party is not, I repeat not, ruled out. Says Hansen, “hold the date everybody, August 11! We should be allowed to gather outdoors!”

Watch the Sterlings online Monday 7 p.m. on Facebook. Or on the Sterlings’ YouTube channel. It will be available indefinitely on both after that.

 

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A real live in-person season at the Citadel, starting this summer. The Citadel welcomes audiences back to the big brick playhouse

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Shawn Ahmed and Rachel Bowron in The Garneau Block, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

And they’re back live —starting small in August and getting bigger —  in a real live in-person season.

At a well-named online Happy Hour Thursday, Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran announced a big line-up of 10 live shows that will welcome audiences back inside the big brick playhouse downtown — during the summer in reduced numbers and then, hopefully, expanding gradually into full capacity.

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“After 15 months of planning and re-planning and re-re-planning, we’re so thrilled to be announcing a season!” declares Cloran feelingly. “And we’re cautiously optimistic!”

For the Citadel’s 54th or 55th season (depending on how you count the travails of pandemic shutdown year), he’s gathered an assortment of shows that includes five world premieres and seven plays by Alberta writers. The line-up of four productions in a ‘Summer Season’ through October, and six mainstage shows starting November with the Holly Lewis farce The Fiancée, is the result of season-planning that’s been adjusted over and over,  says Cloran.

Some titles are familiar from the Citadel season announcements of January and then June of 2020; some deferred, rebooked, then delayed again. “So many shows we’d  already announced and sold tickets to…. We wanted to see as many of those through as possible while still not being 100 per cent sure when things would be open, and if they’d stay open.”

Helen Belay in Heaven, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Janice Saxon.

“We wanted to start back slowly, and welcome audiences back at a pace they were comfortable with,” says Cloran of a Summer Series that opens July 31 with Heaven.

Originally part of the small-cast reduced audience Horizon Series, the solo play by Calgary-based Cheryl Foggo (John Ware Reimagined) chronicles the story of a Black school teacher who arrives in Alberta’s Amber Valley in the 1920s. Patricia Darbasie’s production, which stars Helen Belay, runs through Aug. 15 in the 700-seat Shoctor Theatre, for a planned audience of 100. That number, says Cloran, is adjustable according to COVIDian restrictions of the moment.

The other Horizon play is Tai Amy Grauman’s Métis adaptation of the Stephen Massicotte Canadian classic Mary’s Wedding. It’s been online in a digitally streamed version since this past December but “it never got beyond its final dress rehearsal” before shutdown, as Cloran points out. So Jenna Rodgers’ production, starring Grauman and Todd Houseman, gets its first live audience in the Shoctor Theatre Aug. 28 to Sept. 12.

Todd Houseman and Tai Amy Grauman in Mary’s Wedding, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah.

In a Summer Series that includes September and October (which in Edmonton exudes “cautiously optimistic”), audiences finally get to see Belinda Cornish’s stage adaptation of The Garneau Block, Todd Babiak’s 2006 hit novel, originally slated to premiere in the 700-seat Maclab Theatre in March of 2020. Rachel Peake’s production was shut down the night before the first preview. Narda McCarroll’s set has been sitting intact on the Maclab stage ever since, ready for use after dusting.

At a dozen actors, The Garneau Block is not a small-cast show, true. “But “it’s such a symbol for us, that we’re back,” says Cloran. “It feels like an important way for us to start welcoming people back.” And not least, says Cloran, “because it’s a story about Edmonton, adapted by an Edmonton playwright, from a novel by an Edmonton writer.”

The theme could hardly be more topical: idiosyncratic neighbours in a signature Edmonton ‘hood coming together to devise a way to save it. And “It’s not dependent on us welcoming 700 people a night. If we can welcome only, say, a third (of capacity), we’re still going to do it!” It runs Sept. 23 to Oct. 10.

Bears by Matthew MacKenzie, starring Sheldon Elter.Photo by Alexis Keown

The finale of the Summer Season is the Punctuate! Theatre production of Matthew Mackenzie’s hit Bears, originally slated for Citadel’s Highwire Series (“designed to help amplify the work of great local companies”). The play, which has had hit runs in Toronto and on the West Coast, comes to the Maclab stage Oct. 21 to 31, trailing multiple awards. Sheldon Elter stars.

The mainstage season-opener (Nov. 6 to 28) is the premiere of a new “big fun zany farce” with all the classic door-slamming bona fides — and one clever reversal. Holly Lewis’s The Fiancée, short-listed last week for the 55th annual Alberta Playwriting Competition (and Introduced to audiences in reading form at the recent Collider Festival), chronicles the escalating chaos the protagonist introduces into her life by getting engaged to three men off to fight in World War II. The crucial farce glitch is that when the war ends, they all come home against the odds, and arrive at her place on the same day.

Playwright Holly Lewis. Photo supplied.

“A great way to welcome people back to the theatre,” says Cloran. “And Holly has done such a clever job of taking the trope we all know and turning it on its head: women juggling men, hiding people from each other, wearing disguises, tripping over things, getting cake in the face.…” Six actors (led by Helen Belay) and “at least as many doors,” says Cloran, who directs.

Ted Dykstra as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (2019). Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

David van Belle’s full-bodied 1940s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, starring Ted Dykstra as a department store with its World War II and post-war song list, is back to live in-person (Nov. 27 to Dec. 23)  for its third Yule season after a 2020 incarnation on film. “I was thrilled that when so many other companies were doing one-person Christmas Carols, we could still do our giant production,” says Cloran who directs. he says. “The team rallied to make something beautiful.” That film version (limited to Canada because of the infinite complications of song rights) will be accessible again this year, alongside the live production.

Philip Akin, former artistic director of Toronto’s Obsidian Theatre, directs a Citadel production of The Royale Feb. 5 to 27. The drama by American playwright Marco Ramirez chronicles the fortunes of a Black boxer in 1905 in his quest to be the heavyweight champion of the world. “The way it’s told theatrically is incredible,” says Cloran of “a play about race, about place in history.” There’s no actual boxing in it; “it’s all told through dance, clapping, stomping, super-physical language.”

On the grounds of caution vis-à-vis travel, partnerships, and logistics, the 2021-2022 lineup deliberately saves the biggest-cast shows — including three that had been announced for last season — for the second half of the season. One is the much-delayed Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Feb 26 to March 20), an international collaboration with surprisingly local connections.

The comedy, about an earnest community theatre doing their best to put on an ill-fated production of Peter Pan, is the work of the Brit company Mischief Theatre. Director Adam Meggido is known to Edmonton audiences for his improv virtuosity in Die-Nasty’s Soap-A-Thons. The 12-actor Citadel production, a partnership with Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre, is the North American premiere, “a testing ground” says Cloran, for expansion into U.S. markets including New York, where its companion piece The Play That Goes Wrong has been a long-time hit.

Jane Eyre, Citadel Theatre, Photo supplied.

The premiere of Jane Eyre, a 10-actor adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel by the star Canadian playwright Erin Shields, was originally slated to happen this past March. Now, one of literature’s most compelling heroines takes to the stage March 24 to April 10, 2022, in a Cloran production that stars Hayley Gillis and John Ullyatt. “Low-tech theatrical magic,” Cloran has said of the storytelling.

Like Jane Eyre, Kenneth T. Williams’ The Herd (April 2 to 24) is part of the in-person  2022 edition of the Collider Festival, a Citadel initiative that was all online in this pandemic year. It’s designed, says Cloran, to feature full productions of new plays, surrounded by readings of works in development, much like the late lamented PlayRites Festival at Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects.

Playwright Kenneth T. Williams. Photo supplied.

A Cree playwright from the Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, Williams (Cafe Daughter, Thunderstruck) was the first Indigenous playwriting graduate at the U of A, where he’s a drama prof these days. Cloran describes his latest, which spins from the possibly miraculous birth of twin white bisons on a First Nation ranch, as “a great script, very smart, with Ken’s (signature) sense of humour….” Kevin Loring, artistic director of the National Arts Centre’s Indigenous Theatre, directs the three-city partnership between the Citadel, Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, and the NAC.

The finale of the season Cloran announced Thursday is the 2008 musical 9 to 5, based on the 1980 Dolly Parton film. Music and lyrics, needless to say, are by the grande dame herself (just try extricating the absurdly catchy title song from your brain), book by Patricia Resnick. Rachel Peake, late of the Citadel and now of the Arts Club, directs the production (April 30 to May 29). Casting awaits.

“It’s a really big fun season,” says Cloran. In audience capacity and protocols, “we can adjust as needed as we go forward…. For all of us it’s really emotional experience to return to the theatre! Hopefully by the time of A Christmas Carol, we’ll be back together, shoulder to shoulder, having a great time!”

The Citadel’s 2021-2022 season

Summer Series

Heaven (July 31 to Aug. 15); Mary’s Wedding: A Métis Love Story (Aug. 28 to Sept. 12); The Garneau Block (Sept. 23 to Oct. 10); Bears (Oct. 21 to 31)

Mainstage Season

The Fiancée by Holly Lewis (Nov. 6 to 28)

A Christmas Carol, adapted from the Dickens novella by David van Belle (Nov. 27 to Dec. 23)

The Royale by Marco Ramirez (Feb. 5 to 27, 2022)

Peter Pan Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields (Feb. 26 to March 20, 2022)

Jane Eyre by Erin Shields, from the Charlotte Brontë novel (March 24 to April 10, 2022)

The Herd by Kenneth T. Williams (April 2 to 24, 2022)

9 to 5 by Patricia Resnick and Dolly Parton, from the film of that name (April 30 to May 29, 2022)

 

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Rocko and Nakota: star storyteller Josh Languedoc is back for National Indigenous Peoples Day

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It sits differently in my body, in my voice,” says Josh Languedoc, musing on his widely travelled solo show Rocko and Nakota: Tales From The Land. “Something has shifted this time around.”

It’s been that kind of year. A year that reinforces in every way the need for Indigenous voices to be heard, their stories to be told. And in honour of National Indigenous Peoples Day Monday, the Thousand Faces Festival (with help from EPCOR’s Heart and Soul Fund) is reviving Languedoc’s play (on Facebook Live), the one that really launched the career of the multi-talented Anishinaabe artist on the national stage.

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In Rocko and Nakota, an 11-year stuck in the hospital — a situation Languedoc lifted from his own life — gets a visit from his old grandfather. Rocko arrives with a cache of stories, and Nakota is transported into the past, and a whole world of myths, animal spirits, warriors, elders … all in a complex relationship with the present.

“A turning point? Absolutely!… It brought my voice to places I didn’t think I’d get to for a while; it became such a major platform for me,” says the affable Languedoc, whose roots are in the Saugeen First Nation in Ontario. He remembers the start of the accelerating adventure three years ago. “I remember being really nervous,” he says of his preparations for a cross-country Fringe tour, with a stop at the Blyth Festival in Ontario. “There’s this deadline and I have to make a show for it! This was me memorizing the show as I was doing it!”

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

“I was prepping for expressing myself on the Fringe circuit. And I wasn’t sure how it was going to be received.” Doing a solo show of any sort is a challenge to be risen to, “and it’s even more challenging when it’s your story…. There’s a lot of you in there, too. It’s not just revealing your skill as a performer, but as a person!”

Languedoc, who grew up in St. Albert in the musical theatre milieu of the St Albert Children’s Theatre, comes from an inspirationally artistic family. “My mom is a visual artist and singer; my dad (an Ojibway who was adopted off the reserve) is a thousand percent a storyteller and musician.” Some of the stories in the multi-character Rocko and Nakota are part of that blue-chip inheritance; others “are dreams, things that happened to me, turned into aural stories.”

The Josh Languedoc of 2018 was an actor, yes (and an improviser, witness appearances with Grindstone Theatre’s The 11 O’Clock Number.  More than that, though, “I was a budding playwright, with a few different projects on the go.”

At the U of A, studying sociology (the sociology of Canadian theatre was his specialty), “ I got obsessed, and so angry, with the ‘starlight tours’, the horrifying news stories (Neil Stonechild is but one victim) of Indigenous people picked up by police, driven to remote ex-urban locations, and abandoned to their fate. “I started playing around with character voices … and what started as research turned into a play,” says Languedoc. Starlight Journey, now called The Eyes of Spirits (commissioned by Workshop West, Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts, and Dreamspeakers),  was “my first venture into writing Indigenous stories, voices, ways of being and ways of knowing, and bringing them onstage.”

Josh Languedoc in Rock and Nakota: Tales From The Land. Photo suppoied.

He’s kept at that two-act six-actor, now on draft #11, “for damn near  a decade,” encouraged by Workshop West’s former artistic director Vern Thiessen, whom he counts a mentor. “I was young, naive, still finding myself. But Vern said ‘you need to keep writing this play; Indigenous communities need your voice’.”

“Using my gifts as a storyteller to represent my community” gave Languedoc, he says, the experience of tapping his family background, and his “cultural side. What does that mean to bring it into the open? It’s a very authentic and real part of my journey now.”

“So Rocko and Nakota wasn’t my first play. It was my first that came from me, from the inside out!”

The Fringe tour was a life-changer, Languedoc says. “People were quite surprised by it; they didn’t know how to relate to me, how to support me….” The reception was both warm, and revealing: “The dynamic was ‘we have never seen this at a Fringe. Ever.. Finally, an Indigenous voice on the circuit’”

Except for one September showing, Languedoc hasn’t performed Rocko and Nakota for a year.  The revival we’ll see Monday, live from the “very cool” new National Stiltwalkers Headquarters (Languedoc is amused by this) isn’t changed materially in the text, save a line here and then, from the Fringe version. ‘But it’s shaped differently,” he says. After the Fringe tour, Theatre Prospero included Rocko and Nakota in their school tour season, directed by Barry Bilinsky. “He helped slow it down.. It was a bit manic and out of breath. Now it’s smoother and more legato…. I had written a 55 or 60-minute play, and performed it in 45. I’m not trying to do the show in one big gulp.”

These days Languedoc is working on the play, IN-COR-RI-GI-BLE (a commission from the Blyth Festival, that will garner him a master’s degree in theatre practice from the U of A. It’s based on  (and named for) an autobiography written by his father. He’s spent the year venturing into arts administration and facilitation, as “youth education/outreach co-ordinator at Workshop West,” connecting with youthful playwrights digitally. And he’s got a gig, yet to be announced, with Fringe Theatre.

What’s changed for Languedoc since the Fringe tour of three years ago? “I’ve grown. I’ve matured …” he says. And as for the “news” about residential schools that isn’t really news since Canadians have known about it all along, “Why now? Now is when society is ready to hear it,” he thinks.

On the subject of progress in the relationship between the Indigenous and colonial cultures, he counts himself “fairly optimistic,” with major qualifications. “A lot of important conversations are happening now. There’s still a lot of work to be done. A lot of communities still have a lot to learn about making connections. But most places seem to get it, at least to some degree. Some are being pro-active, trying to move things forward; some aren’t.”

“I grew up in a white suburban city, never seeing my people, my stories anywhere…. It’s a bit different now, in schools, in art galleries, in gas stations (laughter). I see a lot of hope.”

PREVIEW

National Indigenous Peoples Day

Rocko and Nakota: Tales From the Land

Theatre: Thousand Faces Festival

Created by and starring: Josh Languedoc

Where: Facebook Live, 7 p.m., school performance 1 p.m. with talk-back to follow.

Tickets: free, donations very welcome, with 50 per cent going to Indspire.

  

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Breaking out of our cages: Night from Major Matt Mason in Rundle Park. A review..

Posted on June 18, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Rundle Park on a cloudy night is an eerie place.

A network of cement roads and parking lots, all abandoned. They seem to be holding at bay the woods, the dark tangle of trees, the taller grass, the shadowlands by the river. You get there by descending into it. You’re on the edge of the city, but there’s no sign of it.

The wild and the human pushback: that tension has everything to do with the experience of Night. The solo “drive-by” play from the Major Matt Mason Collective is live theatre you actually go out to (at 10 o’clock on a summer night when it isn’t quite light, not quite dark, but getting there).

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“Welcome to the theatre!” says an exuberant masked artist (Mac Brock, interim producer of the host company Common Ground Arts), waving expansively at the great outdoors as we arrive. We park in a (distanced) circle, facing inward: a circling of wagons against outside forces? It’s theatre in the round for people in cars (with 10 people max on lawn chairs), listening to the first-person soundtrack via car radio FM.

After so many months in the cage, connected to the world by screen, breaking out in itself counts as a bona fide thrill. Which will put us in sync — disturbingly, revealingly — with the character we meet in Geoffrey Simon Brown’s play, directed by Yousuf Liepert.

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

This person, played by Zoë Glassman, a particularly magnetic and intensely physical performer, is fretful, struggling to break free of … something. They’re seeking moonlight. “Nothing is wrong; it feels like something is wrong,” we hear them say in the voice-over track. “Just being OK. All the time. It feels endless.” Tomorrow, they tell us, “the bandages” come off.

Something has happened to the protagonist (information leaks out, in tiny details); they’ve washed up at home, back in their childhood room. On daytime outings with their well-meaning parents, they’re repelled by human contact and the human gaze. They’re distracted by every movement — of an ant, a bird with a worm, a rabbit, a dog — overtaken gradually by the overwhelming urge to run and disappear from human sight, to howl, to attack, to merge with Nature. They’ve covered the mirrors, and retreated to a lair; they have a sense of transforming. Hands are becoming paws. They’re in exile in the world of humans; they’re becoming a wolf.

Night is fascinating and powerful in ways that elude simple explanation but feel very much of the moment. Don’t you recognize that strange sense of not being quite oneself? Of being somehow between identities and not quite human as we being to emerge, newly created agoraphobes, from the pandemic bubble of time? And here’s a character who’s not only between identities, but between species. Which is, to put it mildly, an awkward place to be if you’re on public transportation.

Glassman is compelling as a character who’s not at home in their own body, ricocheting from moments of absolute stillness into startling 0-to-60 motion (choreography: Clarke Blair). That sense of hurling oneself against constraints is reinforced by Elise CM Jason’s scenography, a circle closed by the audience and lit from the circumference, with the sole props a circular rug and a coat rack.

Night (which would never work as a matinee), and its real live nocturnal circumstances outdoors, release a whole range of free-floating metaphors. That’s the beauty of it. What struck me is that you give up something, some sort of vital force, in order to be human and be with other humans. In order to “be OK” and wrap yourself in, well, love and support, you accommodate. You’ll be discussing, though. And that’s a great human feeling.

REVIEW

Night (a drive-in play)

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

Written by: Geoffrey Simon Brown

Directed by: Yousuf Liepert

Starring: Zoë Glassman

Where: Rundle Park

Running: Thursday through Sunday and June 24 to 26

Tickets: Common Ground Arts Society 

  

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‘A Fringe Event’: what to expect as the Fringe goes back to its roots

Posted on June 17, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Solstice … yeah whatever. It’s impossible to think of summer without visions of the Fringe, dancing in the outskirts of your brain and gradually moving in for full occupancy. In the four decades they’ve been entwined, the Edmonton summer calendar has naturally arranged itself around our beloved giant of a festival. Fringe is what August is for.

Which is why, in the spirit of anticipation, I made my way over to the Fringe Patio last week. To get a feel, on location, for the mystery landscape of the Fringe at the big four-oh. (An aside: they were testing new cocktails for the upcoming Found Festival in July; aperol was involved.)

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Fringe director Murray Utas and Fringe Theatre’s interim director Megan Dart were there, having a Friday afternoon think about the short list of five possible scenarios from the long list they’ve been working on since The Fringe That Never Was of 2020.     

In the unstable world of pandemic protocols and every-changing restrictions, for artists and audiences, the pandemic has made Fringe-size gatherings (the 2019 edition of the festival attracted a crowd of some 3/4 million), a mystery scenario. And the Fringe is its own unique combination of outdoor crowds in an entire ‘hood and indoor audiences in small, sometimes sometimes rib-to-elbow quarters. “Live” and “intimate” are among its favourite adjectives.

“This is not the year to break box office records,” says Dart. “Nobody’s expecting to make any money…. This is the year of looking after each other, the year of coming together, the year of ‘community cares’.” Declares Utas, “never put profit over people.”

“It’s gonna happen,” says Dart of the festivities slated to run Aug. 12 to 22. “But it will look so much more like it did in the earliest days…. We’re not even calling it a ‘festival’. It’s A Fringe Theatre Event.” In this it hearkens back to the first-ever Edmonton Fringe; that’s what it was called in 1982,  the continent’s prototype, when no one could say exactly what it was, beyond a small and strange grassroots eruption of theatre in Old Strathcona. Same thing in 1983, when the Fringe was still, in personality and identity, in its formative stages as a kooky experiment.

“I know people want to fringe,” says Utas, like Dart a Fringe artist himself before he ever ran the festivities, “But we want to make sure ‘weird’ is just on the stage.” So don’t expect to be using “fringe” as a verb (an Edmonton invention incidentally) in the same way this year, just hanging out for the day, jostling your precarious way to a packed beer tent through crowds with a program in one hand and a couple of green onion cakes and a tub of hot sauce in the other. “Coming to the site will feel very different this year,” says Dart.

So, here’s a peek at the mysterious scenario-juggling involved in throwing a giant theatre ‘event’ in the middle of a pandemic. “Yes, there will be shows. And some of them might be live,” Utas says. “There may be venues, but not very many. The park (i.e. the Gazebo Park next to Fringe headquarters) may be a venue….” BYOVs? Yes, but not very many.

Usually the Fringe team has a working blueprint/schedule of the festival by June. It’s not that kind of year. Utas and Dart say they’ll finalize all things Fringe by the end of the month, with the big reveal (hey, they’re both playwrights) set for early July.

Some of the Fringe shows we’ll see come August will be live, some streamed online; some may be both live and streamed. The proportion, like the COVID restrictions, is still in flux. In the year since the 39th Fringe got cancelled, the Fringe has invested in digital expertise and equipment “as a tool for everyone to use,” as Utas says. Fringe TV is now an invaluable digital platform used by many theatre companies in town, and it’s ready for action. Utas reports that last summer 61 countries tuned into the festival’s online experiments on Fringe TV. “We’re at the intersection of digital and live, and there’s no road map.”

Last year, Utas announced that all groups who’d landed a lotteried slot would get “first right of refusal” in this year’s edition. He Zoomed with them individually, and ran a series of town halls cum workshops for artists starting last November, to explain “digital options on the Fringe TV platform,” and “to make it an opportunity to learn some skills” for a world where digital performance has become prominent. What you shouldn’t expect, due to travel restrictions, is a contingent of international shows.

“The Fringe has always been an experience. And we’re back in experience mode for our 40th,” says Dart. Utas quotes a Fringe volunteer who “exploded my mind” (a pure Murray-ism) on what he values about the festival: “I can have an experience I never expected to have in my entire life.”

“When we cancelled last year, we had a (Fringe) funeral and two weeks mourning,” says Dart “And the team came back with such fervour. Kudos to them! 15 months of planning for the unknown with such care, so much heart…. It’s allowed us to be nimble.”

What you’ll see come August may not be the Fringe you recognize, Dart predicts. But it hearkens back to its origins lo these many years. And it will have something of the same experimental spirit. Says Utas, “we’re true to our scrappy DIY punk roots….”

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

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Shadow Theatre 2022 season.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shadow Theatre artistic director John Hudson

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

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

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

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

    

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

Posted on June 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

Concord Floral, Scona Theatre. Photo by Linette Smith.

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

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

Metamorphoses, Scona Theatre. Photo by Linette Smith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on June 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll never say No to karaoke again!”

PREVIEW

Night (a drive-in play)

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

Written by: Geoffrey Simon Brown

Directed by: Yousuf Liepert

Starring: Zoë Glassman

Where: Rundle Park

Running: Thursday through Sunday and June 24 to 26

Tickets: Common Ground Arts Society 

  

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

Posted on June 9, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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