Australian
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exploratory
performance and
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January 2008

Small Metal Objects

photo Jeff Busby

Small Metal Objects

It’s hard to describe the sense of freedom you get watching this show. To start with, there’s the freedom of being outside the usual theatre box. Small Metal Objects (performed by Australia’s Back to Back Theatre) takes place in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, a crescent shaped concourse with a glass ceiling many stories above. On one side of the concourse is the library itself, also fronted with glass, all the way up, it’s insides open to view. On the other side are the cafes, flower shops and pizza parlors. We’re sitting on a narrow bank of seats somewhere in the middle. Crowds flow in and out of the main library entrance. People sip lattes, read newspapers or eat snacks at the shop tables. Each person in the audience stall is wearing a set of headphones. To the passersby, we may look a little odd. To us, they just look like normal people doing normal things. ‘Normal’ is a concept that will be unpacked in a most ingenious and surreptitious manner over the next 50 minutes. When it’s done, we may never feel normal again. But we may feel a lot freer.

We’re sitting on a narrow bank of seats somewhere in the middle. Crowds flow in and out of the main library entrance. People sip lattes, read newspapers or eat snacks at the shop tables. Each person in the audience stall is wearing a set of headphones. To the passersby, we may look a little odd. To us, they just look like normal people doing normal things. ‘Normal’ is a concept that will be unpacked in a most ingenious and surreptitious manner over the next 50 minutes. When it’s done, we may never feel normal again. But we may feel a lot freer.

A conversation begins in the headphones. Voice One (male): “Cooked a roast last night. Think it was chicken.” Voice Two (male): “I love chicken.” Space. A couple of spare piano chords. Voice One: “Celebrated my 15th wedding anniversary.” Space. Piano. Voice 1 again: “If a guy with a gun came at my wife and my kids I’d take the bullet for them.” The conversation continues like this for some time. It’s affectionate, honest, witty. It may be pre-recorded, we don’t know yet. Voice Two talks about how much he wants “to give,” to help, that he’s worried he’s gay because he doesn’t have a girlfriend, that if he were famous he would give every needy person in the world 825 grams of food a day. Voice One has great ideas too: he wants to get into the self-storage business because these days people don’t throw things away. In the same breath he mentions childcare as another good bet, presumably because people don’t throw children away either. The general movement of the crowd continues. Suddenly I see the source of the voices: at the far end of the atrium two men are slowly moving in our direction. They both have headsets on. One of them is a skinny, medium height brunette; the other is short and heavy-set with a blonde buzz cut. It turns out Voice Two belongs to the brunette, who’s name is Steve (Simon Laherty), while Voice One belongs to the blond, Gary (Sonia Teuben).

As they get closer, we can see by Steve’s movement, and by the performers’ physical appearance that the actors are mentally/physically ‘challenged’—a concept that is already beginning to be stripped of the logic of prejudice. After all, they were having a conversation that might be attributed to any two ‘normal’ guys, one who’s been married for 15 years, the other who is lonely and confused about his sexual orientation. The gentle pace of the performance, supported by a hypnotic sound score, is at odds with the usual rhythm of the concourse. Gary and Steve seem to inhabit a parallel world; the people who sit at neighbouring tables haven’t taken notice of them. The actors are almost like spirits. They take their time with every exchange. The crowd speeds past. We are witnessing a genuine clash of cultures: one is slow and considered, one is madly goal-oriented. We know which one we usually live in.

By the time the next character appears we’ve been well massaged into the culture of Steve and Gary, and judging by the grinning faces around me the audience is grateful for the experience. Allan (Jim Russell) is a speedy big time realtor. He’s putting on a major function and needs to furnish his clients with drugs. And here’s another challenge to our expectations: Gary and Steve are dealers. Allan doesn’t have much time. Gary is happy to furnish him with the goods, but things have to proceed at a pace that doesn’t suit Allan’s pressing agenda. To complicate matters, Steve has become immobile. He’s “deep in thought” and refuses to go to the lockers to get the stash. As much as Gary would like to accommodate Allan, he won’t abandon Steve, so the deal’s off. Allan phones for support from his psychologist, Caroline (Caroline Lee). Lee, who is a motivational consultant for large corporate clients, arrives, and the two ‘normals’ get to work, soothing and cajoling Steve—Caroline offers everything from free consultations to (when she gets most desperate) a blowjob. Most significantly, she appeals to Steve’s desire to improve himself, to become a happier, productive, more efficient person. This is the dialectic that has been playing throughout: Steve and Gary’s culture is based on personal bonds, on trust and human compassion; Caroline’s and Allan’s is utilitarian. As Steve and Gary say, “Everything has a value.” Caroline and Allan would agree with this statement, but in their world value is equated with productivity.

Small Metal Objects doesn’t present a utopia. It simply defines the ethos of two contrasting cultures. In the current paradigm, we demand that Gary and Steve play by our rules. We reward them inasmuch as they are able to conform to our standards of successful behavior. Small Metal Objects reverses the paradigm. Allan can’t adjust to the values that supercede getting what you want when you want it. He and Caroline simply cannot speak the language of the minority culture they are confronting. The performance raises a whole host of concerns about ‘otherness’ and difference that can be applied to so many aspects of our fractured world, whether we’re looking at issues like racism, poverty and other forms of exclusion on a community level, or whether we’re facing macro issues like global military conflicts. That sounds heavy-handed, something this show is resolutely not. The superb ensemble playing of the cast, the deft direction of Bruce Gladwin, and the mesmerising sound design of Hugh Covill reconfigure the atrium, removing density from the space between passersby, unlocking new ways of seeing—no, of being—for those of us consciously taking it in.

It’s appropriate that this happens at a library, because we are getting a first class education here. This is what great art can do. It can re-organise your bones, re-wire your brain, and perform open-heart surgery all at the same time. Far from the confines of a theatre box and from the spatial concerns that accompany conventional scripts and conventional acting, we get to re-imagine how the conflicting cultures of our world might fit together a little easier, what little adjustments it might take for us to approach each other and make contact with difference. It’s a very moving exercise in the art of the possible, and it left me with a surprisingly untainted sense of hope.

Back to Back Theatre, Small Metal Objects, devisers Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sonia Teuben, Genevieve Morris, Jim Russell, director Bruce Gladwin, performers Simon Laherty, Sonia Teuben, Caroline Lee, Jim Russell, sound design & composition Hugh Covill; Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch Promenade, Jan 30-Feb 2

RealTime issue #83 Feb-March 2008 pg. 10

The General

You’ve got to enjoy this one. Before the movie starts, the outrageously accomplished Eye of Newt ensemble warms up the crowd with a jazz improvisation that foreshadows some of the tactics it will use to underscore Buster Keaton’s classic film The General. Stephen Smulovitz (violin and saw) and percussionist Pepe Danza start off with a weirdly haunting violin–mouth-harp duet that pulls at the heart while relaxing the body. Paul Plimley then layers in a piano ‘score’ that echoes the movie’s original soundtrack while maintaining a contemporary feel. Plimley, Danza and Paul Blaney (double bass) will drive us through the emotional peaks and valleys of Keaton’s epic slapstick journey, with Brad Muirhead’s trombone and Smulovitz’s saw adding comic inflection. The trombone, and the violin and saw (which sounds a lot like a theremin, actually) will also create dissonance, colouring the film’s original moods with a palette of exquisitely darker tones.

The pre-show improvisation has the effect of activating our imaginations and surreptitiously encouraging our vocal participation with the movie. This was a surprise to me — I hadn’t expected people to cheer and clap at Keaton’s antics. I’m used to movie patrons who are well behaved. But if the film has suffered any lack of impact since its 1927 debut, Eye of Newt and the enthusiasm of an all-ages crowd restored its immediacy. Keaton’s inventive choreography and physical daring prompted cascades of laughter, squeals of delight and more than a few gasps.

In the film’s American Civil War setting, Johnnie Gray (Keaton) is a Confederate train engineer who has but two loves: his engine “The General,” and Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). Annabelle is a patriot, so when Johnnie is rejected by the army he falls out of favour with her. She tells Johnnie not to show his face again until he’s in uniform. Johnnie redeems himself by diverting a Yankee attack almost single handedly, and by rescuing Annabelle (who was inadvertently kidnapped by a guerrilla unit).

There are plenty of heart-stopping train stunts and enough tumbling feats of daring to keep our eyes popping and our necks craning. Eye of Newt matches Keaton stunt for stunt. The musicians catch every pratfall and every double take. They have an arsenal of well-timed responses to the shifting moods of this surprisingly layered film. The General is given an infusion of new blood by Eye of Newt, just as Johnnie is redeemed when his commanding officer gives him a new uniform. Keaton was at the top of his game when he made The General, almost in a class by himself. It’s fitting that for this engagement he has been paired with five players whose powers inhabit the stratosphere of musical invention and ability.

Sherry J Yoon, James Fagan Tait, My Dad, My Dog, Boca del Lupo

The letterbox orientation of a typical movie screen is turned on end, vertically stretching from floor to ceiling. Like the rest of My Dad, My Dog this is just a gentle adjustment of accepted convention, not an aggressive challenge. A small picture frame appears on the screen, about the size of your bedroom window. Inside it, an animated dog skips through an animated fall landscape. The dog roams across the bottom of the large screen taking the frame with it. It’s as if we’re looking through a rectangular telescope. Then the dog arrives at the trunk of a tree and chases off a pigeon. Leaving the dog behind, the frame travels up the trunk into the boughs. As it reaches the crest we hear a crash, the tree shakes and sheds it’s leaves, the picture disappears.

This whimsical passage comes early in Boca del Lupo’s My Dad, My Dog, a delightful show that plays live action against a vast canvas of animations that are a wonder to behold. The dog scene offers us one possible way of exploring what’s to come. While taking in the whole, we might use a selective eye to pick out details that suit our sense of narrative. A similar technique is used a little further along. James Fagan Tait (there are no character names in the program) is an ornithologist searching for the rare white-necked red-crowned crane, which is found only in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea. He stands before the screen, now filled from top to bottom with animator Jay White’s depiction (a fluttering watercolour) of the DMZ. Looking not-too-hopeful about ever finding the rare bird, Tait exits. A live-camera feed from a mini-stage set up at the left side of the stage allows White to project his own hand holding a magnifying lens onto the large screen. It finds the crane in the foliated background. So this story is also about not seeing things — like seeing the tree shake but missing the crash. Framing certain things implies excluding others.

And there’s another story-telling technique at play here. Telling a story is always an act of translation. There’s a possible source event, someone puts that event through a subjective filter and transmits it to someone else. The storyteller may use the biological machinery of his or her body (lungs, larynx, mouth etc), or technological aids — a pen, a camera, a computer. I think we usually picture story telling proceeding in that order: original event, internal translation, re-telling. But in My Dad, My Dog the order is reversed. Sherry J. Yoon imagines her way back to a North Korea she has never visited and to a woman who doesn’t exist but is a plausible type for a relative she might have there. It’s like creating a photo album of a vacation you never had.

Well that’s just what fiction is, you say. And you’d be right. But Yoon takes pains to frame this fiction as a search for a missing part of her family story. She offers biographical details of her ‘real’ life (“I am Korean”) as the starting point for an investigation into her relationship with her father. She imagines her father reincarnated as a North Korean dog. When Yoon is not performing herself she plays the part of her North Korean alter ego, who works for the government monitoring and limiting the movement of visitors to her country. She visits the dog chained up in an alley and talks to it, believing it will understand her (in one hilarious scene the dog complains to a fellow canine that he can’t understand the woman because she’s speaking English). Yoon, as herself, returns to the stage periodically to tell us which parts of the story are true (and exactly what she means by ‘true’) and which are inventions. The difference is as important as we want to make it.

Often the characterizations are made deliberately flat, while animations like the dad-dog almost jump off the screen and display a psychological complexity the humans lack. The blurring of fact and fiction is kept in play. We realize that, to some extent, we all assemble our ‘selves’ from a patchwork of memories, dreams and desires. We put a frame around that which we accept as ‘I’, as ‘me’, and leave out the rest.

The autumn colours on screen and the delicate figures of Alicia Hansen’s piano compositions give the show a very west-side-of-Vancouver feel. There’s a lot of light-hearted dialogue about the character of the city: “Vancouver seems liberal but it’s conservative. But not as conservative as Toronto.” These comments aren’t serious digs. For the most part, My Dad, My Dog doesn’t try to be the last word on any issue. But after a while it starts circling itself. The content and episodic structure gets repetitive —I don’t think this is a deliberate narrative strategy. The animated sequences, mesmerizing as they are, become devices not always integral to the theme. The attempted resolution — “sometimes there are no answers” — felt pat to me. It felt too much like an answer, it created closure to that which might have remained open.

But then again, maybe I was looking in the wrong direction. It would be like me to put a frame around the thing everyone else thought was irrelevant. You know, looking at the tree and missing the crash. Oh, but maybe that was the point. Or lack of a point. Um, throw up another cool animation, the critic is leaving the stage.

Sherry J Yoon, My Dad, My Dog, Boca del Lupo

A tall, blank screen dominates Boca del Lupo’s My Dad, My Dog. The screen fills with a variety of images, some animated, some magnified sets and props manipulated live by Jay White, who stands on one side of the stage, wearing an apron like a modern day Geppetto. The images are sharp and effective, forming clever backdrops to the action, with White’s monstrously magnified hand appearing occasionally to open doors and move furniture. It looks great. And anyone who grew up in Canada with the Friendly Giant will no doubt smile. Although the projections were high-tech there was something old fashioned about the whole artifice. The machinery White operates reminded me of a doll-sized opera house. This sense of 19th century stage-craft was nicely complemented by the live piano playing of Alicia Hansen who resides on the opposite side of the stage from White.

Before seeing the My Dad, My Dog, a number of people told me they found it charming or delightful. While the imagery created by White gives the show a lyrical and at times child-like softness, this work is steely at its core. Even the central narrative conceit embodies this tension. Sherry J Yoon, one of the creators and performers, appears at the top of the show as herself to explain what inspired the piece: she became convinced that her dog was her father reincarnated. While this might appear an absurdist notion—at least to Western ears—it evokes a painful story of death and, as Yoon alludes, the fate of the soul of a violent man. Precisely what the steel core of My Dad, My Dog is remains a mystery to me, a blank, and maybe this is appropriate.

The play is set in one of the last blank spots on the map: North Korea, a world we only glimpse through government controlled images. This is neatly played out when one of the characters attempts to take photos. We see what the foreigner sees through his viewfinder projected onto the screen: animated drawings of the rough and tumble of North Korean life. The translator moves the Westerner’s arm so that a sanitised, acceptable image is framed. The camera flashes and the drawing is replaced by a photo. The photos, which already have an inhuman bleakness to them, are made even more ominous. This filling in blank screens with controlled images set against what our imagination creates is a central motif of the work and one that is played with very effectively.

Yoon, who was born in Korea, tells us about the numerous cousins she has spread over both sides of the border separating North from South Korea. She plays an unnamed translator, an alternative version of herself had she grown up in North Korea. She portrays this character with a remarkable level of formality and control: another blank slate. Her interactions with two unnamed Canadians, a bird-fancier from Vancouver (James Fagan Tait) and a filmmaker from Canada’s east coast (Billy Marchenski) are filled with frustrating literalness. Everything is taken at face value. The translator in fact does no translating. Her job is to speak English to foreigners so that they understand what they can’t do. Her blankness is only really broken through her relationship with an animated dog. The other two characters also have their familiars, the Tait character has a pigeon, the filmmaker monsters, specifically King Kong who looks through his hotel room at one point. The Tait character, whose bird obsession makes him a self-imposed outsider, is a nice counterpoint to the state-sanctioned translator. The filmmaker’s relation to the other characters is not so clear and his reason for being in North Korea—to make a monster movie—stretches incredulity, even in a piece that stars an animated dog. I suspect the filmmaker character was created to underscore the theme of blank screens and the creation of images, but it doesn’t quite hang together for me.

The relationship between the performers and the projected images has something to do with the blank screen itself. This is most obviously illustrated in two scenes set in a restaurant. White draws the restaurant for us while the scenes unfold. We watch random lines form recognisable shapes of tables and diners. Towards the end of the scene the filmmaker notes that people in the restaurant are looking at them. Direct interaction between the actors and the images on the screen is limited and therefore becomes pointed: the translator engaging with her dog and the bird-fancier releasing a pigeon. In these moments, it is almost as if the actors are puncturing the blankness of the screen, using their familiars to achieve this transition to an unknown other side. This somehow relates to the motif of reincarnation and the cycle of creation and recreation. The almost too sweet lyricism of the last scene—a released bird making its way across impossible odds back to Vancouver—is cut short by a moment of cruel humour. The transition between worlds, of crossing over into blankness is not without its danger.

Boca del Lupo, My Dad, My Dog, created by Sherry J Yoon, Jay White, director Jay Dodge, performers Billy Marchenski, James Fagan Tait, Sherry J Yoon, animation and scenography Jay White, music Alicia Hansen, costumes Reva Quem, lighting Jeff Harrison, Jay Dodge; Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, Vancouver, Jan 25-26, Jane 29-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

RealTime issue #83 Feb-March 2008 pg. 6

Nigel Charnok comes on stage with energy so fierce it’s hard to decide what’s going on. With his long legs and arms whipping out in all directions, he might be a great black stork gone crazy, or an enormous bird of prey in crisis. Soon he runs through agitated, fast-paced gestures of grabbing his crotch, slapping his neck (with cologne?) and raising his wrist to his eye as if to check the time. Perhaps an addict, desperate for sex and preparing for a date that’s bound to be disastrous? The theory is temporarily strengthened when he crams the waiting microphone into his mouth and it amplifies his gasps. By the time he swings the microphone stand crazily around his head, I’ve figured out what he reminds me of: the last, drunken guest at a brilliant party, who will simply not go home.

Charnok’s collaboration with jazz musician Michael Riessler and the Virus Quartet is a theatre work with three elements: Charnok’s words and movement, Riessler’s music and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Of the three, we get to know Shakespeare least – the sonnets are almost incidental to this one-person riot. Every so often Charnok recites one of them; usually he distracts us at the same time. Only once he admits to the power of the music on stage and removes himself: “this is really beautiful. I shouldn’t be talking. Listen to this.” He sits down in the audience half-way back. The sonnet he recites next is quiet and meaningful, in a way the others haven’t been, because we can’t see him, and he isn’t drawing our attention away.

The disciplined, rich sound of the quintet sometimes provides a middle path between Charnok’s mania and the sonnets’ formality, but it’s not always enough to stave off disorientation. Even Charnok has to remind himself to make the transition sometimes. “Oh, Shakespeare, right”, he says, after a rambling rant on Starbucks and Afghanistan. And then we’re wrenched into “O cunning love, with tears thou leaves me blind” as he hides behind the upstage blacks.

At one level, Fever is a classic introductory text to postmodernism. The work is endlessly self-aware and repeatedly deconstructed. It’s also very funny. Charnock never stops moving as he reminds us that we are an audience, although apparently we’re better than last night’s. Unlike that lot, we’re clearly “a collection of very fine, receptive, elegant human beings.” He lets us in on the music ensemble’s emotional state: “They’re all jet-lagged and I’m in a bad mood,” but assures us “it makes for great art.” Stripping down to near-nudity as the night proceeds, he runs bare-legged, sweaty and disheveled around the stage. More and more deconstructed himself, he exits and comes back on, looking at a polaroid of his own butt, to tell us it isn’t the end of the show but “we’re very near.” Then he refreshes himself from a water bottle, and spits it over the audience.

Much of the deconstructionism is applied refreshingly to modern dance. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” he says, striking a pose with knees braced together, one arm flung to the side. “Do you have any idea what this means?” After the show, he tells us some of modern dance is “a big con.” Certainly for much of the work he dances the way a child or a drunk might, exuberantly, with a “look what I’m doing now!” spirit to it. We might have been conned, because he makes us watch it, and he calls it art. But we’re happy for a chance not to take modern dance seriously.

The work is modular, with a mix of composed and improvised sections organized according to set cues. Charnok claimed afterward that he and the musicians “ignore each other most of the time,” but the superb clarinettist (Michael Riessler leading the quartet) watched Charnok’s every gesture closely during their duets. Charnok maintains a studied indifference to the work. “It doesn’t really matter. That’s what gives me the total freedom. It’s happening for no one and I’m not there…. I’m really not there.” His attitude can sound disrespectful – to the audience and to the work. But Shakespeare can take it. So can Riessler and so can we. Let’s hope modern dance can too. It if can’t, it’s in trouble.

Drunken party guests aren’t known for their concern for others, but they still work hard for attention. Charnok craves our gaze. He may say what he’s doing doesn’t matter, but maybe he cares more than anyone. Unlike the last, late guest who’s despoiling the furniture and taking polaroids of his body parts, I didn’t want him to leave.

It seems we’re about to take a stylistic journey into theatre history. Before us is a detailed replica of the front porch of an old Quebec country house. There’s a swing, a few lawn-chairs folded up at one side, a front door screen, windows that look into the rooms, little details like an overturned bucket under the porch. There’s an orange extension cord running out from the house and a power drill sitting on the swing. As the patrons take their seats, an actor walks out and uses the drill to put a new plank in the front steps. Soon we will meet the family that lives in the house, four generations of women and a few of their spouses. They will present nicely layered naturalistic character portraits rich in physical and psychological detail. Cars will honk off-stage, crows will caw.

Actors will wipe away imaginary sweat and present languid bodies oppressed by summer heat. They will speak dialogue that, through a century or more of theatrical convention, we have come to accept as ‘everyday’. The playwright will carefully note the psychological cause-and-effect that motivates each character. And like the 19th century progenitors of this type of play, he will insert a symbolic element (here, a seven foot garter snake) that adds mystery and is the key to unlocking the deeper meaning of the work. It will all be handled rather deftly by actors who have raised their craft to a fine pitch. And I will wonder if we still need naturalism in theatre, and whether I should be at the movies instead.

There’s a distinctly Chekhovian quality to Aout – un repas à la campagne (August: an afternoon in the country) produced by Montreal’s Le Théâtre de La Manufacture, and written by Jean Marc Dalpé. It’s the story of a family whose fortunes, for generations, have been tied to a maple tree plantation which is now failing due to devastation by acid rain. Jeanne (Sophie Clément) the matriarch, is dutifully running the household while trying to keep her daughter Louise (Annick Bergeron) and granddaughter Josée (Catherine De Léan) in line. She also has to keep tabs on her husband Simon (played by the playwright), who has ambitions to make the plantation turn a profit again, but who suffers a heart condition that lays him out when he gets over-excited. Josée, 19, wants to cut and run to start a screenwriting career in the big city. She’s also bulimic, and for that reason Jeanne tries to keep her under a watchful eye. Daughter Louise, married to Gabriel (Henri Chassé), is a realtor having an affair she hopes will be her ticket to California and out of here. Gabriel is a hard working, beer drinking, salt-of-the-earth type, who tries to pull Louise back into their twenty-one year marriage. Grandma Paulette, played by the 86 year old Janine Sutto, an acting legend in French Canada, masterfully provides comic counterpoint to the action with dry jabs and a stubborn refusal to surrender an inch of her hard won peculiarities for anyone else’s satisfaction.

Echoing Chekhov’s rural comedies, the two younger women are dying to get out of this backwater, while Jeanne is doing what she can to keep the family together and to uphold tradition. As we will discover, she will do this even if it means crushing Louise’s spirit and allowing her to be subjected to physical violation. Thankfully, like Chekhov, the playwright gives us plenty of opportunity to laugh at the contortions the characters put themselves through to maintain their sanity in this stifling situation. The predicament becomes positively farcical at times. Louise carries on a playfully seductive phone conversation with her lover right in front of the family and guests. After she leaves, André (Jacques L’Heureux), one of the guests, ineptly tries to comfort Gaby by touching on all the horrible legal and emotional complications he will face after divorce — but hey, at least there won’t be a custody battle, Josée is 19.

André again exemplifies the absurdity of human behaviour when he describes how he overcame the grief of his first wife’s death by playing a few rounds of golf just hours after burying her. While the humour opens things up, and while we’re temporarily seduced by the hopes and dreams of these people, as with Chekhov’s country characters, this family is stuck in an evolutionary dead end. This may be where the symbolism of the snake comes in. After an excited Gabriel shows it off, it escapes, perhaps representing his last chance to save the marriage and/or the family’s last chance to save itself.

I was eventually drawn into the story, mainly on the strength of the acting ensemble, which handled the material effortlessly, tightening and slackening the tension with acrobatic precision. A colleague described Quebec actors as having that rare ability to shift from heightened emotional pitch to casual patter seamlessly. Jean-Denis Leduc, Artistic Director of the company, thinks it’s the result of a Latin culture (French speaking) transplanted to North America. Seems like a fair assessment.

In the tradition of his naturalist forefathers (with nods to plays like The Seagull and Miss Julie), playwright Dalpé serves up a melodramatic ending (something the naturalists were rarely able to resist despite themselves) that returns the family to a disturbing status quo. Despite the strengths of the acting ensemble and the subtle rhythms of the script, Aout borders on museum piece, a homage to a period when naturalism was a subversive theatre movement.

Boca del Lupo’s new show My Dad, My Dog is an unusual convergence of animation and live theatre, and animator Jay White has talent to burn. The dog of the title is animated with spooky care. Its movement and timing speak of every dog I’ve ever known, although it looks like none I’ve ever seen. As it creeps into view from the bottom right of a huge screen placed upstage, it’s hard to believe it’s not real. A Korean woman (Sherry J Yoon) believes it may be the reincarnation of her father – this in a country where people eat dogmeat soup in the summer. Understandably, she’s feeling a little confused.

So am I. Although the dad-dog storyline continues to an inconsequential ending, other stories emerge and ramble about without apparent purpose. It doesn’t matter that the relationship between the woman and a slightly seedy pigeon smuggler (played with excellent timing and a submerged creepiness by John Fagan Tait) is never resolved. But there’s also a young Canadian filmmaker (Billy Marchenski) who may or may not be imprisoned in his North Korean hotel room by order of the autocratic Kim Jong Il. The filmmaker’s storyline peters out, as does the pigeon smuggler’s intention to study the rare cranes that have flourished in Korea’s demilitarized zone over the past 50 years. After narration and animation had spent several wonderful minutes building up to these magical cranes, I so wanted to hear more about them, and I missed them all the way to the end.

Animator Jay White stands stage left with the tools of his trade, and is a visible part of the action throughout. With his interventions, new scenes are often established by combining animation and live-action film. In front of a drawn backdrop projected onto the screen, White’s giant hand comes into view, setting out miniature pieces of furniture, where they appear full scale as set elements, but doll-house sized in relation to the hand of the artist.

At its best, the animation adds wonderful layers to the world of the play, literally. “I’m here for the birds,” the pigeon smuggler says as he sits outdoors with the woman. “So far I’ve only seen pigeons, but I’m optimistic.” And here comes a projection of the out-sized artist’s hand, holding a real magnifying glass. The glass reveals a miniature crane hidden in the painted foliage behind the couple.

In moments like these, the animation dominates the production, and it’s so good-natured and virtuosic that it temporarily blinds us to the fact that the overall aesthetic is fragmented. Scratchy black and white line drawings are mixed with full-colour, painterly scenes. Single animated elements trade places with panoramic views. The screen itself is often used to support the live action, but at other times it’s the actors who are helping to animate the screen. When the screen displays scenery, it maintains the focus on the foreground action. When the actors interact with animated images, their attention is directed upstage, emptying the playing area. At other times animation and actors are merged on one flat plane, as with silhouettes. And some moments are purely filmic, providing a sense of immensity in a small, black box theatre.

For some reason the narrator (Sherry J Yoon playing herself) feels compelled to interrupt this unusual world to tell us the dog’s a symbol, to teach us facts about North Korea, or to tell us what parts of the play were based on personal experience. The show’s creators are too aware of the information vacuum in our media on the subject of North Korea, and their concern for our education stilts the script. Without the narrator’s irritating presence, the play would have been almost twice as good.

Animation is laborious work, and the co-creators noted in a post-show talk that the “rhythms of animation and theatre are very different.” New plays in development are often being revised late in the production process; working with an animator would make that approach impossible. An 80-minute play represents a powerful amount of work for a single animator, and it may be that the needs of dramaturgy were overridden by the needs of animation. I still appreciate Boca del Lupo’s desire to try the partnership.

I absolutely loved this play for the first 20 minutes, and I’d see it again. But My Dad, My Dog has at least three unfinished stories, a constantly changing aesthetic, and an extraneous narrator. These post-modern embellishments weaken what would otherwise have been an absolutely captivating night at the theatre. The images are wonderful, but something’s gone awry when the strongest parts of a play are its scene changes. The variety of visual approaches could still triumph if the script were stronger, but with this script, the animation almost felt gimmicky at times. White’s obvious talent saves it from that. I left the theatre feeling oddly sad. This play had so much going for it, and a near miss can be devastating.

Directly framed by Sherry J Yoon’s straightforward announcements as herself to the audience, My Dad, My Dog presents a fragmented story about a Canadian woman of Korean descent (Yoon) imagining how one of her North Korean cousins might live. Yoon once had a dog who, she was convinced, was her reincarnated father. She wonders what her unknown North Korean cousin would do if she experienced the same thing.

Yoon appears as herself several times, emphasizing a (possibly false) truth-fiction distinction – “It’s not a real story, but every detail in it is true.” As the Korean cousin (all characters are unnamed), she presents a slide show about North Korean culture. A Canadian filmmaker (Billy Marchenski) worries that he’s been kidnapped; his monologues are rapid. Another Canadian, a professor (James Fagan Tait) who seems to have minimal knowledge of the birds he’s supposed to be studying, develops a flirtatious but awkward relationship with the Korean cousin by talking about his obssession with pigeons. Cuts from the original Godzilla backdrop the filmmaker’s thoughts about monster movies. Sound is mostly live: performers stand stage right by a microphone to provide voiceovers for hand-drawn animated scenes; Alicia Hansen plays gentle rills on an upright piano, stage right, silent movie style.

The play is a comedy, ranging from dreamy scenes of feeding (animated) pigeons to insightful comments on Kim Jong Il’s obssession with cinema to hilarious moments of non-communication sparked by differences in Canadian and Korean expectations. But it doesn’t find its focus in the story. The filmmaker overcomes the fear that he may be kidnapped and learns that he may be too presumptuous, but what does it mean to learn something so general about oneself? The pigeon-man remains a flat character whose role is to urge the Korean cousin to talk about herself. She becomes somewhat personal with him, but gives no specifics about who her father was, or why it would matter for her dad to appear as a dog. If that conversational distance is meant to reflect on opaque North Korean privacy habits, then the significance of the dad-dog needs to appear in another way. And the dad-dog, one of Jay White’s gentle, hand-drawn animations, doesn’t get enough stage time to become anything more than entertaining (there’s a great scene where the dad-dog confesses to another animated dog that he thinks the Korean woman has bad plans for him, but he can’t really tell because she keeps speaking English).

Because the storytelling style skips all over the place – the flow between scenes is almost, but not quite tight – the set and the layers of technical innovation take over and become the heart of the performance. In a high-tech culture increasingly devoted to all things digital, it is a pleasure to enter the well-crafted world of low-tech projections that White uses to create the whimsical set for My Dad, My Dog. White’s hand-drawn animations fill a movie-size screen, so images are large enough for the performers to walk around in or, suprisingly, for White to animate around the performers. In one scene, for example, White pans down an image of a tall elevator while a performer stands still. Elsewhere, the projection is set up so he can draw a backdrop live: as he sketches on a glass panel, the lines gradually form a restaurant and fellow patrons around the two performers sitting centre stage at a three-dimensional dining table.

The simple animation techniques are deft and playful, innovative in how they surround the performers. My Dad, My Dog is fun but ultimately remains sketchy, leaving the audience charmed by literal drawings instead of metaphorical ones.

What I write here doesn’t express my response to My Dad, My Dog. I’m just using it to explore my possible response, had I been watching a different show in another country, with other people. While it isn’t a true account of My Dad, My Dog, it is made up of details that are true…

It is with a similar postmodern bent that Sherry J Yoon introduces us to Boca del Lupo’s production of My Dad, My Dog, the story of her imagined North Korean doppelganger’s discovery of a dog she believes to be the reincarnation of her father. Through inventive interaction between animation, film and live performance, we witness her unfolding relationship with a man who likes pigeons (James Fagan Tait) and a filmmaker obsessed with monsters (Billy Marchenski). In an idiosyncratic exploration of how Yoon’s life might have been had she been born on the other side of her family tree in Korea rather than in Canada, we experience a sometimes witty, sometimes whimsical investigation into perspective and point of view.

Framed by the animator (Jay White) and his tools on one side of the bare stage, and the musician (Alicia Hansen) with her piano on the other, Yoon guides the naïve film-maker around the streets of her city, neatly stamping in a straight line as he trails in zigzags behind her. She is responsible for him during his stay in North Korea, and instructs what he may and may not photograph. He pans his camera towards the audience, looking for an image he wants to capture. On the large screen behind the actors, we see the rectangular frame of his viewfinder scan the landscape. The screen is white apart from the small frame, which reveals to us a continuous, beautifully painted watercolour image of the city. The filmmaker finds a view he is pleased with, and shoots; we are momentarily blinded by his flash. In this instant, the onscreen watercolour transforms to an actual photograph: several men, police or soldiers, are lined up carrying guns. Panicked, the guide snatches the camera and deletes this image, explaining that her charge must check that it is appropriate before he takes a shot. This is the least composed we’ve seen her: a momentary lack of restraint reveals the severity of the consequences if prohibited behaviour occurs under her watch. The filmmaker wavers over another couple of images and Yoon quickly points him towards more appropriate compositions. He finds a poster with a man’s face blown up to enormous proportions, presumably the President. Flash, and we see the photo. That’s right, says Yoon, you seem to be getting the hang of this.

Luckily for us, Boca del Lupo’s ability to portray differing perspectives on a narrative is not restricted. The cultural misunderstandings between Yoon and her newfound friend, the bird enthusiast, are touchingly comical. As they sit to eat, the animator draws efficiently simple lines onto glass, creating a restaurant around them. Yoon misreads the ornithologist’s emphatic concern about “the soup” and can’t understand why he struggles to bring himself to eat it. When it dawns on her that he believes that this is dog soup, an infamous Korean delicacy, to his embarrassment she laughs uncontrollably. When they first meet in the park, what she believes to be a polite smile in reaction to his invasive questions and attempts to test her personality, he reads as an Asian contempt for westerners.

By far the most entertaining perspectives on display are the conversations between animals, played out in animations which appear on the big screen while the actors provide voiceovers into a microphone downstage left. Two pigeons crossly discuss the fact that the crane, which gets so much attention, wouldn’t even be there if it wasn’t for the DMZ (Demilitarised Zone, a strip of heavily guarded, and therefore environmentally protected, land between North and South Korea). The dog that Yoon believes to be her father discusses his bewilderment at her behaviour with another stray: just one of the guys discussing his woman troubles with his buddy. Earlier we witnessed Yoon speaking to the dog, reaching out her hand towards his form on the screen as she thinks out loud about her father. The dog doesn’t know whether she wants to hurt him or love him. There’s one of a number of postmodern quips as his friend asks, “what did she say?” “Well that’s the thing, I have no idea – it was all in English!”.

Later on, the ornithologist’s huge face – actual not animated – looms over us, occupying the whole of the screen. He purses his lips, squeaks and clicks, and it becomes apparent that we are the pigeon that he has decided to smuggle back into Korea in his trousers, at the moment just before the sedative is administered. Later on, the filmmaker sets Yoon’s dog free and he scampers out of sight. We hear screeching brakes and a crash. The dog has been run over by a car. The camera is brought centre-stage and we see the three humans looking at it, while onscreen their sad faces look down on us.

With this clever layering we are shown that situations can be experienced differently depending on which perspective you approach them from, or which perspective you are permitted. Following the dog’s death, Yoon breaks out of character, relaxing her stiff body language and losing the almost robotic Korean inflections in her English. The dog’s death is the only detail of this story that isn’t true. It’s invented to create “a sense of convergence and closure.”

The three characters decide to write down their secrets and give them to the pigeon to carry away, in an act of remembrance. The ornithologist cups his hands, facing the screen, and as he opens them out the bird appears on the brown and green park landscape onscreen, flying away from us into the distance. The animation follows and eventually catches up with the bird, so we are given a literal bird’s eye view of the sea as it flies towards Canada. It passes a semi-submerged Godzilla, then approaches Vancouver, and finally a large white house. Just as we think we are safely home, another dog bounds into view, leaps past us and we hear a squeak and a crunch. A single feather drops to the floor. Through another viewfinder, the dog, mouth full, looks guiltily back at us, then jumps away towards a tree in the garden. The camera idly drifts up to the top of the tree. Then a screech of tires, a yelp, and a crash. The camera drops to the floor. Blackout.

Although the relentless postmodern frame of this show sometimes seems a little tired, it is often charmingly self-aware: this quirky twist is a beautifully crafted ending to the personal and cozy journey of My Dad, My Dog. And as for this article? The only detail of the review that doesn’t express my true response is the beginning…

The challenge any playwright faces is how to make their work robust enough to survive the potential vagaries of production. It requires making strong choices that will support a clear vision. Drawn from the writings of a young activist killed in Gaza, My Name is Rachel Corrie is far from a traditional play text. The process of turning Corrie’s journals and e-mails into a script is credited to the editors Alan Rickman and Kathleen Viner. Editing is an alien concept to theatre where the preferred term is dramaturgy, a process which includes an exploration of how the text will operate in performance. If Corrie’s voice survives this translation process, it is because of the performative quality of her journal writing and the chatty, informality of her e-mail style. Corrie was a gifted writer. Beautiful evoked images – salmon swimming underneath the streets of Olympia – alternate with affirmations that have Hemingway -ike economy: “I want this to stop”. Despite these strengths, this is fragile material that needs to be handled delicately.

The Havana is a small black box theatre located at the back of a restaurant on Vancouver’s eastside. It has never looked so gorgeous. The space has been completely cleared, with a single row of seating running around the four walls. Above the seating are wall-length rectangular projections. When the audience enters, cuttings from newspapers telling of Corrie’s death are projected. The texts overlap making them difficult to read. During the show, the projections are mostly colours and abstract designs until Corrie arrives in the Middle East, at which time we see photos of cityscapes and destruction. In the centre of the space a white square is boldly defined on the black floor. Within the square there is an office chair and an indefinable piece of ugly office furniture which acts as a table. The space looks futuristic and very tidy. Resting on the table is a white Mac Book computer, a model unavailable in 2003 when Corrie was killed; an early clue to the distancing artifice that informs the production.

The performer, Adrienne Wong, greets the audience as they come in, introducing herself to strangers. If she knows you, she greets you by name and spends a few moments catching up. When the show is ready to start, Wong goes to the entrance, where two more Mac Books glow stylishly in the darkness. She closes the door and does something with the laptops, giving the impression that she’s running the show with them. She makes her way to the performance space, takes off her shoes and then – accompanied by a suitable jet-like sound and lighting effect – steps onto the white square. She never leaves this claustrophobic space, except for one stylized moment where she follows a lighted path around the square. The rest of the time, Wong moves restlessly around the space engaging with the audience, making direct eye-contact.

It’s worth describing the production in this much detail. I will long remember the stylish presentation but not, alas, Corrie’s words. This is a production interested in the artifice of performance. The implication is that we should never believe Wong is Corrie and I never did. Rather, she is Wong performing Corrie’s words. Perhaps the producers, neworld and Teesri Duniya Theatre, were concerned about mimicry and felt this was a more sensitive approach to remembering Corrie. Unfortunately for me the artifice was simply too heavy. Wong’s entrapment within the white square is too distracting, even the projections take us too far from the words. This is not a traditional script with a coherent narrative structure that can support all the weight the production throws upon it. It is too fragile.

Wong is a charismatic performer who commands attention but even she struggles against the artifice. She gallops restlessly through the script at high speed. Perhaps this is meant to evoke Corrie’s youthful energy but it came across to me as a lack of faith in the material. It meant that her performance wasn’t as nuanced as it should have been and came off as too one-note. The one moment where things did slow down – an e-mail exchange between Corrie and her father – suddenly brought the production to life.

Corrie was a list maker and lists are featured repeatedly throughout the text. List-makers try to impose some form of order on a chaotic world. It is ironic that the over-determined nature of this production overwhelms Corrie. Her writings demonstrate the passion and emotion that drove her, yet this production generates a cool, intellectual distance. Perhaps this was a response to the controversy that has dogged this play (protests took place in New York and Toronto over the play’s sympathetic depiction of the Palestinians). While rationalism is laudable in the face of polarised debate, it seems untrue about what we know of Corrie. With the audience able to see each other, with Wong making direct eye-contact there is a form of calculated intimacy but it was with the performer and not the text or with Corrie herself.

Rachel Corrie was a vibrant individual seeking a role in the world and an identity that would suit her passions. Despite her strengths, her fragile body was too easily destroyed. I wish this production had relaxed its intellectual guard so that we could glimpse more of the fragile beauty of the script and the emotional power of Rachel’s story.

When the mob of twenty-odd men pounded the white girl and the floor around her with pillows, I was anxious. When the white girl held the chain of the person she had been forced to strip and purchase – the black girl in her prison irons – I was distressed. During the opening scene, I balanced between repulsion and fascination as a female form untangled herself slowly, jerkily, from a pile of oozing, pale pink slime that seemed abandoned on a laboratory table under a short-circuiting fluorescent light.

From the dripping slime to the silver, armour-like paint the white girl later slathers onto the black girl, Romeo Castellucci’s Hey Girl! is full of visual surprises and tensely sculpted stage space. Hey Girl! plunges us viscerally into women’s oppression, racial subjugation, betrayal and splintered willpower, using a few narrative fragments and a multitude of visuals, some illustrative, some opaque.

The best moments are both illustrative and opaque. For example, there are two oversized fake heads in the performance, both sculpted to look like the white girl. The heads appear close in time. After the white girl is beaten, she reappears from the line of now-still men wearing the artificial head and waving a huge black flag. She begs for the lights to go off. When the lights return, the head lies ‘decapitated,’ stage front: one of the many “queens who lost their head on account of the people” that the girl listed earlier on. For a moment, the head is simply illustrative.

Then there is female sobbing. The white girl walks gently through the crowd of men and brings forward the source of the cries: a black woman wearing an even larger version of the artificial head. So much for simplicity. When the white woman sees a version of her own face on another woman’s body, it’s a moment of total identification; it is also a moment where identification is cut. The white girl falsely comforts, apologizes, and beheads the white face from the black body. Then, although ashamed of herself, she joins in enslaving – or is she releasing – the black woman. There is similarity, there is difference; there is a shift of power from the white woman being a victim to the white woman victimizing; there is also a long list of words – all nouns – being projected above their heads. The interaction between the girls is so codified, and non-naturalistic, that any communication between them invites but resists interpretation.

Tension can be generated by presenting a highly codified scene and then asking the audience to decode with little assistance. This tactic flourishes in performance art, a genre that asks viewers to watch body-based action in a context made difficult either by long duration, physical discomfort or extreme content. Thinking about performance art helps me translate Hey Girl! because it specifically resonated with my experience of Marina Abramovic’s Lips of Thomas (1975, 2005). Naked, Abramovic alternates through a group of gestures aimed at exhausting her body so it can escape the heavy codes of Christianity and communism (Abramovic grew up in the former Yugoslavia and continues to use the name Yugoslavia for her homeland). She eats honey, whips herself on the back, lies on a cross of ice until numb, cuts a star into her belly, stands at attention in a pair of military boots and listens to a folk song, eats honey again. Because the actions and the timeframe are both extreme – the 2005 performance extended the original work from less than an hour to eight hours – the analytical mind can’t process what’s going on until later. If authority pushes the bodies it manipulates to total exhaustion, then authority collapses from the lack of having something to control.

Hey Girl! similarly works to shatter symbols by presenting bodies and structures on the edge of physical damage and exhaustion. Bodies on stage are in pain, at least if they’re female. The girls are buried, shackled, beaten, traded, but also capable of wielding a sword or joylessly dancing. Viewers’ bodies are affected: the viscous pink material is palpably revolting; we endure the acrid smells of lipstick, perfume and fabric burned against a flagrantly phallic hot metal sword. When at last the patriarchal, colonial gaze, represented quite literally by four suspended lenses that hang between the white girl and the shackled black girl, snaps, only then can a new code be written, though it initially involves dancing around the shattered glass left from the previous hierarchies.

Hey Girl! is theatre, though, not performance art. It’s theatre that asks us to move into an understanding with our gut more than with our mind. Canadian actor and writer Darren O’Donnell once said, “What theatre is really about – like any other form – is generating affect, and that’s it. Feelings. And, if things go well, quickly following feelings will be thoughts. Stories certainly can do this, but they’re not the only thing to do it, and they’re no longer always the best way to do it” (Social Acupuncture, 2006). Castellucci aims at our affect directly. As Hey Girl! evolves, visuals that seem iconic become messy and harsh moments are tempered by sudden kindnesses. This complexity means that, afterwards, images continue to shift and morph, playing with the mind and maybe never yielding a stable response. It’s an effective way to go into culturally familiar stories about women surviving violence because it provokes authentic feelings around gender and race.

Romeo Castellucci’s new work Hey Girl! contains many effects that aren’t really allowed in the theatre. Normally you don’t burn perfume because you’d get stuck with a huge bill for dry-cleaning the blacks afterwards. Normally you’re not really encouraged to shatter circles of glass onstage. It’s definitely considered inappropriate to drip gloopy substances all over the floor. Castellucci strips the stage back to a bare working space to protect the theatre (from himself), and gives us a painting instead.

Visual elements drive the work from moment to moment. Precisely focussed lights pick out the next object that will shape the action – a sword, a drum, a man watching. Careful staging draws our eye to each new tableau as if to a specific point on the canvas. Spoken text is rare, and always whispered, so as not to impinge on this dreamy, fog-laden visual world. Even the main character, the iconic Girl of the title (Sylvia Costa), is an image resolving out of an abandoned, amorphous glob of thick paint left heaped on a table. The skin-tone paint she emerges from never stops dripping onto the floor during the whole mesmerizing length of the work.

This is a polyptych – a many-panelled work of art, imprecisely seen through the smoke of ages, like the dust that collects on an old painting. On this panel, over here, is the bird that can no longer fly, and the violent crowd. On this panel is the other side of the Girl, the dark half who is enslaved to a man. On another panel is a newborn woman, weeping. Castellucci places the Girl stage front, listening to the brutal light of the Divine – in this case a laser beam. He shows us the Girl comforting herself in the person of another woman who bears an enlarged copy of the Girl’s head. In creating these moments, he’s suggesting what an allegorical painting would look like, if it came to life before us in three dimensions.

The challenge with allegorical painting – more typically a product of the Renaissance – is that the modern audience is out of practice reading the symbols. Castellucci has updated the images, but some mystery remains. How literal is the reading intended to be, and how much reading should we do?

The girl kneels before a large, metal sword. Slowly, exquisitely slowly, she reaches across and picks up a lipstick case I didn’t notice until just before her hand touched it. She puts the lipstick on. Then she places it on the sword and smoke rises. Reaching over to a bottle of perfume, she draws the scent onto her skin with a throat-slitting gesture. Poured over the sword, the perfume steams and sizzles and the theatre fills with a hot fragrance. The Girl soothes the angry sword with a folded pink sheet and recites the names of dead queens. Marie Antoinette. Ann Boleyn. The Russian Tsarina. She lifts the burning blanket and unfolds it, a dark brown X revealed, newly branded. “These are the queens who lost their head on account of the people,” she whispers.

A bald description of the Girl’s gestures does not convey the ritual power contained in each tableau. The impulse is to search for meaning, although following that impulse feels like an inadequate approach to the work. Certainly, there are multiple ways the scene above could be read. Most obviously, the lipstick and perfume signify the queens of history, the women with power who were destroyed by men. Alternatively, these are symbols of femininity that at various times have been rejected as disempowering. There are other possibilities, but the actual interpretation may be less important than the attempt to interpret. The pace of the piece is ritualistically slow, giving plenty of time for conjecture.

Hey Girl! is an extremely unusual work by a director with that rarest of qualities – a unique vision. It’s exactly the kind of work I hope to see at Vancouver’s PuSh Festival, which aims to present the best of contemporary work, including more risky and challenging pieces. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before outside the visual arts, and Hey Girl! makes me realize how much room there is to develop the images of live theatre. Castellucci expands our ability to read those images in places we never expected to see them. But he also creates a world in which humans move through a landscape full of symbols without ever trying to interpret them at all. Maybe that’s what we’re doing every day, but the layer of paint he applies allows us to see it for the first time.

If fever can bring on delirium, it can also loosen a person from the usual constraints of decorum and let unspoken truths tumble out. UK dancer/performer Nigel Charnock creates an atmosphere of excited passion from start to finish in Fever by interspersing mad, large-scale movements with pseudo gentle moments. He’ll rush about with sweeping arm movements and scissor-leg high-kicks, sprint up and down the theatre stairs, throw himself on the musicians’ speakers – and then sit in an empty audience seat to join us listening to “the beautiful music; isn’t it like Schubert?” Charnock speaks physical gesture so fluidly that he can improvise hilariously cutting monologues about fundamental human obssessions without dropping his focus on movement.

Fever is a structured improvisation for Charnock and for the musicians, the two-cello, two-violin Virus String Quartet led by Michael Riessler on bass and tenor saxophones and clarinet. Originally inspired by Shakespeare’s love sonnets which Charnock speaks in part or whole but, as the program points out, every night is a new possibility. “Nigel Charnock will present a personal selection of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, possibly: No. 18, 34, 16….” The musicians, for their part, satirize minimalist music, quote Purcell, send Charnock “shut it!” messages by increasing the volume when he teases by dancing erotically close to one cellist.

Nothing is safe from Charnock’s rant. This realization keeps the audience happily on edge, grinning in anticipation. It also creates a performance-long link of trust – we like this guy – so we’re willing to consider at least temporarily a comparison between a Catholic’s fear of passion (familiar satirical territory) and a burqua-clad woman’s view of the world “through a letterbox” (uncomfortable satirical territory). Charnock mocks everything, including his dance training and his (eventually) bare legs, so when he does get serious, we believe him. He ends the show with an orgasmic “death,” clenching the microphone stand in response to Riessler’s agitated clarinet solo played over his writhing body. The Vancouver crowd, for once, let silence sit for several seconds before applauding.

It’s remarkable that Charnock and Riessler have been performing Fever for a decade. The show stays fresh because the structure includes space for commentary on current events (the night I saw it, Charnock referenced current events like Canada’s presence in Afghanistan; another night he mourned Lady Di) and because Charnock and the musicians perform the piece wholeheartedly. The performers use their intimate knowledge of the material to bend phrases and treat everything with irreverent playfulness, knowing they will all meet up again at particular points and on cue. Charnock has a long, accomplished career behind him; successes include a commission to make Stupid Men for the Venice Biennale in 2007. Looking across from Fever to his later works, it’s clear that this rambunctious performer obssesses about death, religion and sex. But then, don’t we all, and he does it with irresistible hilarity and polish.

The slight young woman’s intelligent eyes lock onto mine as she perches on her upholstered white office chair, knees drawn up to her chest. I feel as though she and I are alone in the room as she tells me how, when she was younger, her mother told her that she thought she might be a better mom if she took her children to church. “This may have been a scare tactic.” The audience’s laughter snaps my connection with Wong and she swivels on her chair to address the person next to me.

Wong, who has introduced herself to each audience member personally as we entered the tiny blackbox space, is speaking the monologue edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner from the diaries, emails and letters of Rachel Corrie following her death in Rafah, Gaza in 2003. The audience are probably aware of the circumstances of Corrie’s death: while protesting about the demolition of Palestinian homes, she was crushed by an armoured bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces. But this performance allows us to get to know the woman behind the newsprint, extracts of which are projected in thin strips on each wall of the Havana Theatre as we enter.

The intimate, in-the-round setting of Wong’s performance painfully draws attention to her physicality in the space just a metre or two away from us. Four single lines of, at most, fifteen chairs form a square around the performance area; I can see the expression of every person present. Through Wong’s energetic portrayal of the powerfully evocative words of Corrie as a girl, we are invited right into her messy teenager’s bedroom and inner thoughts, witnessing her childish self-absorption, but ever-present sense of justice and engagement with the world. Through the strength of her writing, helped along with images projected above each line of seats, the space transforms from the world of her childhood and education in Olympia, Washington, to an aeroplane journey to Gaza, to check points outside of Rafah, and the base there for Corrie’s work with the International Solidarity Movement.
Wong jumps from chair to floor, she pushes her desk around the space, her boundless energy brims out of her small frame, threatening to spill onto the audience. She paces round the perimeter of her square of light, making lists, ordering her quick-firing thoughts. “What I have: thighs, a throat and a belly. Sharp teeth and beady eyes.” This witty attention to her corporeality and the horrible irony of her perceptive words as a 12 year old are incredibly moving: “It’s all relative anyway; nine years is as long as 40 years depending on how long you’ve lived.” We learn the motivations behind her activism, her desire to see what is at the other end of the spending of American taxpayer’s money, and her sense of guilt that she can leave the Middle East whenever she wants, but that the local people who have “sweetly doted on [her]” have no escape from their afflictions. The monologue is given a sense of conversation as we hear extracts from her worried parents’ emails: “There is a lot in my heart but I am having trouble with the words. Be safe, be well. Do you think about coming home? Because of the war and all? I know probably not, but I hope you feel it would be okay if you did.”

But at moments the dense text heads towards information overload and Wong’s unwavering energy feels monotonous. I alter my focus onto the audience directly opposite me. Some seem entirely engaged, others shuffle and accidentally make eye contact with me. It’s difficult to digest this vibrant stream of thought without any downtime. At one point my mind wanders onto why this show has previously provoked so much controversy in North America, with performances cancelled in New York for fear of offending Jewish audiences. The performance doesn’t claim to be anything other than an individual’s subjective thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian situation; Corrie’s naivety is not disguised. We see that this is someone learning, changing, and scared as she starts to question herself and her “fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature”.

In an article for the Guardian, Katherine Viner states that she and Rickman “chose Rachel’s words rather than those of the thousands of Palestinian or Israeli victims because of the quality and accessibility of the writing.” To me it seems that in using an outsider’s perspective on the situation in Gaza, Viner and Rickman not only create a route into these complex issues with which Western audiences might better be able to identify and therefore begin to think actively about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but they also avoid a reductionist “taking of sides”.
Wong’s animated outpour finally pauses. “Rachel Corrie died on the 16th of March, 2003.” She puts on a bright fluorescent orange jacket. Standing still, she switches on two TV monitors in opposite corners of the room. We crane our necks to see a fellow activist’s hurried and emotional account of Corrie’s death. The reality of his fear and adrenalin rush hits me hard in the stomach. Wong then turns over a panel on her desk which reveals a miniature landscape, a tiny version of the place Corrie died. Another video is projected onto the walls above: Rachel Corrie as a child is making an impassioned speech about how we can “solve hunger by the year 2000” if we work together, how a bright future where everyone’s human rights are respected is possible. As the onscreen audience applaud the small blonde child, Adrienne Wong joins in. Stunned, we follow.

During the show I was overwhelmed by the mass of information being propelled at me. But I’m still thinking, still running her words through my mind. I read my notes and Guardian reports on the incident of her death, trying to gather as much information as I can about the context for My Name is Rachel Corrie. If its aim has been to make us think, to spark interest and encourage discussion about the issues it introduced, it has succeeded. Whether the show will provoke action and involvement on the global scale that Corrie envisaged as a child, or even on the individual scale that she worked on in Rafah, is another—disheartening—question.

neworldtheatre & Teesri Duniya Theatre, My Name is Rachel Corrie, taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, director Sarah Garton Stanley, performer Adrienne Wong, collaborating director Marcus Youssef, designer Ana Cappelluto, lighting Itai Erdal, sound Peter Cerone, video Candelario Andrade, sound/video systems Jesse Ash; Havana Theatre, Jan 24-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

The actor shakes every person’s hand as they walk into the small, square Havana Theatre. “Hi, I’m Adrienne Wong.” The gesture invites you personally and a few minutes later, when Wong launches into My Name Is Rachel Corrie, you realize she’s set up an intimacy that she’ll develop as the play unfolds.

In fact Teesri Duniya Theatre (Montreal) and neworld theatre (Vancouver) have taken care to build intimacy into every part of the show. The performance is in the round but there’s only one row of about twelve seats along each wall, so every sight line is direct. The set is functional: a thickly upholstered white office chair and a skinny white one-legged table, both on wheels, a white laptop computer, and a white square of light projected onto a white vinyl square taped to the floor. Narrow horizontal screens hang above each row of chairs; the initial projection is a collage of headlines about the death of the young American peace activist killed in Gaza in 2003 along with excerpts from her emails. It’s all pared down and it’s all around you all the time.

Pacing the stage, or swirling in the chair, Wong swivels every minute or so to address all of the audience. At some point she will look at you, and you know she’ll do it again. It’s not invasive, it’s engaging, and it brought me into the story almost as if it was a conversation.

Directness shapes the evening profoundly. The play is constructed from Corrie’s metaphor-filled, descriptive emails and letters (compiled by UK actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner in 2004-05). Corrie was a skilled, nimble writer but the words were originally meant to be read, not spoken. Wong’s eye-contact and restless movements give them a convincing physicality. And the straightforward, person-to-person approach cuts through the thick layer of controversy that surrounds this work – polarized opinions, cancelled productions in New York and Toronto, and the difficult facts about Corrie’s death and Gaza Palestinians’ ongoing lack of reliable access to water, housing and food. When Wong/Corrie looks right at you, the question is: what do you feel, what do you think? It’s a powerful way to handle what has become such a locked-down story.

And this is what usually gets lost in debate about this play. A substantial chunk of it is about Corrie as a person. We meet her as a pre-teen, then in high school, then college, before she feels the pull to try and understand personally a complicated part of the world. Her young voice is endearing and funny. One day she goes for a walk in the forest and sings Russian drinking songs to the trees. She describes walking home late at night in “slutty boots” thinking about the salmon who, thanks to modern city life, have to swim back to their birthplace through culverts since that’s where the streams are now diverted. “It’s hard to be extraordinarily vacuous when you always have salmon in the back of your mind.” These are simple, almost innocent thoughts that show a mind growing.

The play reveals the context of Corrie’s activism. As she learns, organizes and joins events, like walking down the street with forty other people dressed as white doves, her voice alters. She wants to know what happens on the other end of US tax dollars in places where that massive military budget is being spent. She’s angry but humble. After she arrives in Gaza, to work with the International Solidarity Movement to watchdog against events like water wells and greenhouses being bulldozed, she retains that sense of probing. She never sets herself up as an expert: “I am new to speaking about the Israel-Palestine conflict so I don’t always understand the political implications of what I am saying.” She’s just a person trying to figure out what’s going on. She notices glow-in-the-dark stars in blown-out bedrooms; she’s disturbed when closed checkpoints prevent Palestinian workers from going to, or returning from, their jobs. The play doesn’t become didactic; it offers information and opinion, and asks us to form our own thoughts.

Wisely, Corrie’s death is not enacted. Completing her moments as Corrie, Wong puts on a bright orange safety jacket, reads aloud her last email to her mother (about two men offering her a meal), and steps off stage. A moment later, she takes off the jacket and activates two small-screen videos in which a young man describes how the bulldozer moved toward, then over, Corrie. It’s the right amount of detail: facts are involved here, and no one pretends to know them all.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie is a story about how a person grows to look outside her own life and tries to grapple with huge, traumatizing events that she knows she can walk away from at any given moment, even though the people living there can’t. Corrie’s convictions about justice, compassion and activism led her to Palestine, but those beliefs can be applied to other injustices in the world. Journalists, activists, immigrants and others in areas torn by military conflict talk about having to make difficult choices on a regular, sometimes daily basis. Can the rest of us learn from their experiences, or are they too distinct from ours? And, thinking of Corrie’s death specifically, aren’t there any insights from her story that reach beyond the specifics of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Like the square of light that widened and shrank around Wong as she moved through expansive or frightened, tightened moods, the play can open out or close down our ideas if we are willing to take that first handshake for what I think it was: an invitation to hear one real person tell another real person’s story, respecting us, too, as individuals with so much to learn.

The Vancouver East Cultural Centre, fondly known to locals as the “Cultch”, seems to be an ideal setting for a gothic horror about the possible dangers of playing God. Formerly an abandoned church, its wooden panelling and winding staircase could be creepy if explored alone on a dark stormy night. Tonight the chirpy crowd creates a homely community atmosphere. We cram in, haphazardly thrown together around the least pillar-restricted spots. The uneven floor almost trips me as I make my way round the back of the balcony to the last few empty velvet-covered seats. We huddle together as though round a campfire, eager for the ghost story to start.

Unfortunately the two hour performance doesn’t possess the quirky quality that makes this space so inviting. The eight performers creep hunchbacked and white-faced around the stage, head to toe in the white papier maché-like costuming which also covers the set, oversized beansprout trees and all. They step and grimace in time to the rhyming couplets with which they narrate the story of poor Victor Frankenstein. His childhood, tainted by the death of his parents, and his subsequent unnatural obsession with bringing the dead back to life, resulting in the creation of his monster, are illustrated with frequent songs, clockwork tableaux, and of course, the obligatory lightning flashes. The choppy narrative style keeps us at a distance from the characters portrayed, preventing any lasting emotional engagement. But this gap is not filled with ideas in an attempt at intellectual engagement. The didactic message is clearly spelt out with little space for ambiguity: “if life is a bowl of cherries, one day you’ll choke on a pip”; “the higher you climb, the harder you’ll fall”; don’t mess with nature or pretend to be God, 'cause you’ll get what’s coming to you. The text is strung through with cliché and the irony of the final song of the first act is unbearable: “We’re going to hell in a handbasket; does it get any better than this?”.

After the lengthy courtroom scene that ends the first act, in which Frankenstein’s beloved governess is sentenced to death (we’re not even rewarded with a dramatic execution) for a murder that his own creation, the monster, has committed, my hopes for the second half are not high. However, as the monster – also costumed in white paper from his platform-booted feet to his oversized Stetson – emerges from the shadows to tell his own story, things start to look up. In an unusually touching scene, for once uninterrupted by song and narration, the monster tries to cure his loneliness by befriending an old blind violinist. He breaks down and sobs as he describes his fear of rejection and his companion reaches out to comfort him. Realising that there is something “other” about the creature, the elderly man slowly traces his hands over the gruff monster’s long white claws, and up towards his bandaged face: “Ah, I understand.”

But sadly this friendship, and any potential depth to the piece, is not to be. The man’s family arrive home and chase the creature away in horror; the image of compassion dissolves, along with my tolerance. We are re-introduced to bitty tableaux and songs that fail to elaborate on the rhyming verse. The ideas inherent in Mary Shelley’s novel, her subtle ambiguities about identity, creative responsibility, and our relationship with the outsider, the “other”, seem to have been lost somewhere along the line in this production’s intention to be well-polished. Which it is: well-performed, well-sung, smoothly assembled.

Perhaps the problem here is the show’s packaging. This dummed-down version of Shelley’s novel feels like a show for children, but it isn’t announced as such. I’m bored by the relentless songs, but these might well sustain a 5 year old’s attention through the more complex parts of the plot. I’m disappointed by the lack of darkly gothic frights, but there’s no danger of nightmares for over-imaginative toddlers as a result of a nasty theatrical shock. However, even within the frame of “family theatre”, accompanying parents and older children might still be left wanting something a bit more jagged, a bit more inventive, with a few more original ideas. Nonetheless, the passionate local audience embraced the production…but have they embraced the unknown?

Any adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has to contend with the potency of the original story. The idea of a man so enthralled with his own brilliance that he pushes beyond the bounds of the natural order still resonates because of our unease over genetically “improved” fruit and veg. The horror is realised when man’s unnatural creation comes to life and starts to extract its demands. The central relationship in the Frankenstein myth (and it has achieved that status) is between creator and created. I also wonder if the story, as envisaged by Shelley, represents the fear of childbirth and what happens when the child we create becomes a monster. The horror of Frankenstein’s creation should be bloody and visceral. It should be muddy and dark.

Muddy and dark are the last thing we get with this Catalyst Theatre production. Instead we get a world of white, a world of strange organic shapes that reminded me very much of the drawings of Dr Seuss. The costumes, in particular, are striking with wild hats, eccentrically shaped dresses and bizarre dreadlocks. Paper was somehow involved in the creation of the costumes and set and so everything – and I mean everything – has the texture of crumpled paper. When lit with a rich colour scheme, the costumes look beautiful but somehow they irritated me. They looked too moulded, too constrained and uniform – even the monster is bizarrely made of the same stuff. Perhaps all this rumpled white is meant to put the audience in mind of a paddled cell.

If so, Jonathan Christenson, writer, director and composer wants to take us into the madhouse and the seemingly endless parade of characters we are introduced to (each with their own song) are meant to be inmates. But if everyone is crazy, if the world is a madhouse, then how are Victor Frankenstein (Andrew Kushnir) and his creation (George Szilagyi) any different and, crucially, how does this decision support the central themes of the work? Both are outsiders. They represent the unnatural capacities of man set against natural order. Having these two iconic figures lost amongst the paper lunacy is simply baffling. The only way to make this set up work would be to have the creature appear both sane and beautiful. What we really needed was Brad Pitt in a well-tailored tuxedo. Instead we get another nutter in a paper suit. The only difference is that he’s wearing a cowboy hat and his face is wrapped in bandages.

It’s not just white paper that Victor and his poor creation are lost in; they are also lost within the narrative. The most glaring example is the creation scene. There is none. Victor trots off to university wondering how life is created and why people have to die. He’s spurred into these thoughts by the loss of both parents. Yes, once again a madman is created by childhood trauma. Oprah Winfrey has a lot to answer for. The next thing we know, folk in the university town are singing of disturbing rumours about young Frankenstein. His housekeeper Nancy McAlear – channelling Madeline Khan from Young Frankenstein – keeps them at bay. Next thing you know, Victor creates a monster, with the help of some magical books! In his room! We know there’s a monster because we glimpse a pair of long clawed hands through a gauze screen. A narrator also pops up to tell us. I have to admire Christenson’s courage. Most theatre artists would have focussed on the bloody creation itself. We would have seen Victor consumed with madness as he neared his goal. We would have been drawn in, made complicit, as the creature begins to breathe, to move. Maybe Christenson didn’t want to get blood on the delicate costumes. Instead of all that gruesome nonsense, we get a courtroom scene.

The woman on trial is Victor’s nanny. She stands accused of killing Sweet William, Victor’s adopted brother. Three locals sing lengthy testimonies and, in the interest of fairness, the accused gets to respond to the charges in turn. The court case lasts so long that by the end I was beginning to believe she was guilty. Of course she isn’t. Sweet William was killed by Victor’s monster. We know this because Victor, in any earlier scene, had deduced who the real culprit was. In any event, Victor stands by and looks anguished while his surrogate mother is found guilty. We don’t actually see the hanging, of course, which considering what we had to sit through is a bit of a let down.

The Sweet William murder scene is told again in the second act, this time by the monster with the help of ever present narrators. We don’t see the murder, of course. The monster describes it while William appears upstage behind the gauze curtain. In fact the monster’s whole story, from departing the university town to reunion with Victor years later in the mountains of cling-film, is told in flashback. I stress “told”. The monster tells his story downstage while the characters he encounters appear upstage again behind the gauze of memory. This format is only broken once that I recall when he encounters a blind fiddler, a scene which unfolds in real time with two actors talking to one another. You have no idea how refreshing this moment was.

For some unfathomable reason, Christenson employs a team of narrators throughout. They describe every scene and practically every action, usually in rhyming couplets that feel like watered down Dr Seuss. If Victor looks on in anguish, we’re told about it. I can only assume that Christenson is trying to evoke the feel of storytelling. If he is, then it is deeply ironic because it interferes directly with the natural process of story-telling within a theatre context. The constant telling means there is no tension, no emotional engagement between the characters or audience. It creates a strange sense of stasis so endemic that it actively works against character logic. Not only doesn’t Victor speak up in defence of his nanny, he also stands idly in some other room while his bride is murdered by the monster. One has to wonder not only why Victor is not in the bedchamber on his honeymoon but why he is separated from his love for even a moment when the monster has explicitly threatened to kill her. The monster, for all his murderous ways, is just as bad. He stands by while Victor chokes the monster bride he has been forced to create.

It’s as if Christenson was afraid to deal with the visceral reality implied by the source material. Perhaps this sanitised version is aimed primarily at children. Mind you, most children I know revel in bloody excess. I must also add, as a caveat, that as a playwright I am inherently interested in text. The audience on the night I saw the production seemed enraptured and this was understandable. The design is gorgeous, the performances terrific. The music was forgettable but the singing was strong and committed. This was slick, well-crafted theatre. The setting of an insane asylum made of paper could probably house another story beautifully. It’s just not the house of Frankenstein.

When Rachel Corrie (Adrienne Wong) takes her special needs clients from a resource centre out for a treat at the Dairy Queen in Olympia, Washington, she wants them to practise their social skills. The trip degenerates quickly as the solo actor recounts it, standing on a white square in the middle of the room. Rachel’s clients cry and fight, and have to be given a long “time out”, during which their ice creams melt and make a mess of the table. Rachel practices her counseling skills on them – skills so new and deliberate they haven’t become part of her yet. “I’m grounded in my personal space,” she tells the audience, as she urges her invisible clients to do some deep breathing. Instead they get “very escalated.” Eventually she loses her cool completely and tells them they will never get to go to Dairy Queen again. She’s had zero positive effect on her clients that day, but Rachel Corrie is a woman who still believed she could have an effect on the world, and she turned out to be right.

My Name is Rachel Corrie has two goals. One is to let us better know Rachel Corrie, who was killed in Rafah in 2003 when she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer trying to demolish a Palestinian home. The other goal is to let us better know the situation in the Gaza Strip.

Rachel Corrie comes across as a profoundly serious woman who rarely indulges in the playful self-mocking of her Dairy Queen story. At first her words reflect the powerful influences of youthful self-absorption and activism. She speaks of “doing progressive work” on “anti-war slash global issues”, and informs us that she “tries to be local. That’s a big part of my ethic.” When later given the chance to leave Rafah and go to France, she writes that she would “feel a lot of class guilt.” The words are genuine Rachel Corrie – they come from Corrie’s own emails and journals – but they were meant to be read, not to spoken, and it’s hard to hang a play on their formal sincerity. There’s no doubt this is how an intelligent, passionate, political young woman would write, the kind of woman whose boyfriend reads anarchist works, the kind of woman who finds out that a salmon creek has been funneled into an underground pipe in downtown Olympia. “It’s hard to be extraordinarily vacuous when you always have salmon in the back of your mind.” But it’s not how this same young woman would speak to us directly, and there might have been more imaginative ways to adapt the original material.

An additional difficulty is that, in Wong’s delivery, Rachel’s emotional highlights are almost always based on political outrage. The director has also set the pace of the play very fast, and it feels relentless. The set compounds the sense of small range. Rachel only moves in the cramped white square on the floor, set with a chair and a table on wheels. She never steps outside the square, except when the lighting design adds a narrow grey pathway around it, and she treads that carefully. Rachel lives in a world she sees very clearly. Her sense of right and wrong is almost religious. Her certainty fuels her activism – it takes her to Gaza to see how she can help. People who tread the grey pathways more often would never buy the ticket.

At first she benefits from the trip. In Palestine, her language changes abruptly. It’s less inflected with stock liberal phrases, less about herself and more about the world around her. She becomes more real to us. And yet she still prefers to say, “I am scared for these people.” It takes a very long time before we hear her admit, “I am scared.” In fact one of the most poignant moments comes from her father instead. He writes her to say he is proud of her, but “I would rather be as proud of someone else’s daughter.” They are simple words and simple emotions, and they carry.

Rachel ploughs and re-ploughs the same white square, perhaps now the safe space of her own privilege as an American citizen, as she tells us what she experiences in Rafah. Long narrow screens on all four walls show us horizontal images of rubble, and walls pocked with bullets. It’s the first time we see representational images on the screens, as if coming to Palestine has been our first glimpse of the real world. But she never refers to any Palestinians by name, and even her fellow volunteers she calls “the Internationals.” Rachel is so focused on the power structure that everyone is identified by their position in it, rather than by their own identity. Although we see, and honour, her commitment, although we learn more about the daily struggles for normal life in Rafah, and although we share her sense of wrong, the window she opens for us in the Middle East always feels like a narrow one, just like the projections on the wall. The narrowness isn’t due to a single point of view. That’s all any of us would have to offer.

It’s important that we get to see plays like My Name is Rachel Corrie, even if limitations in the scripting and direction detract from the potential power of the story. But few among us will go abroad to witness first hand the results of our country’s foreign policy, as Rachel chose to do. The play asks us: what might happen if we did?

I don’t want to see this. About twenty-five men in street clothes stand together at the back of the stage. A small, blonde, white woman — she could pass as an adolescent — walks toward them. Not long ago they had beaten her. Someone is crying, I don’t know who. It’s coming from behind the men. The woman walks toward them. I don’t want her to go near them, but she does, passing through them untouched. She re-emerges leading another woman, a black woman. But the black woman has the white woman’s head. Her jaw, her eyes, her nose, her short-cropped hair. This head, though, is five times the size. It’s a huge, very life-like replica.

The white woman undresses the black woman, and my anxiety rises. The men leave the stage. All except one white man who, unlike the others, is in 19th century costume, including top hat. He holds out a hand toward the black woman, exhibiting her, offering her. My anxiety increases. The white woman whispers to the black woman, “I’m so sorry.” She then leaves her with the man, who fetches a pile of hay, and leads the black woman to it. He chains her. This, more than anything, is what I don’t want to see. I don’t want to see a female slave auctioned off like a mule on a pile of straw. The man holds out his inverted top hat. The white woman observes the slave woman through four discs—like windows—hanging one behind the other. The windows are streaked and dirty. What image of the slave is the white woman seeing through these glass veils?
Above, the lines from Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene are projected on a large screen: “How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?…the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here.” “With love’s wings did I o’erperch these walls; For stony limits cannot hold love out.” Where is love in this triangle? And to whom do I attribute the lines? Is the black woman Juliet, the white woman Romeo? Or is the man with top hat either? All of them, none of them? The white woman now digs into her low-rider jeans and produces some coins. She walks to the auctioneer and pays the fee. Is this simple complicity or is she paying for the slave’s freedom? I feel my heart may be breaking. It’s been coming for some time, this sense of grief welling up. Then something shatters. I think I feel a membrane burst in my chest. But it’s the four windows, which all at once have exploded in mid-air, showering the stage with glass.

I’m crying. It’s been coming since the beginning, when the white girl-woman first emerged, chrysalis-like, from the slime of a latex cocoon, when she first crawled like a new-born calf across the strange fluorescent landscape, which is also a soundscape where distant melodies arrive as if through a ventilation shaft. The images from the misty landscape are dense and shifting: a massive broad-sword out of the middle ages next to a bottle of perfume and a tube of lipstick; the girl-woman kneeling, like Joan of Arc, pledging allegiance—but to what? God, king, church, capitalism? Whatever it is, it isn’t hers; it’s an imposition that’s going to use and betray her—as Joan was betrayed. “Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’; And I will take thy word.” The girl-woman holds up a sheet, which has just had an ‘x’ burned into it by the giant sword. She stands at the center of that ‘x’, perhaps unconsciously making herself a target.

What’s this about, this heaving in my chest, this performance? I think it’s about one woman’s experience of being a woman. And me, a man sitting in the auditorium? It’s about one man’s imagining of that woman’s experience. It’s about the betrayal of this woman —of women, of innocence, of trust and of love. And it’s about making contact with those things momentarily, making and losing it at the same time. It’s also about sitting in awe at the work of art unfolding before me, at the restless shifting of symbols: first a big bass marching drum, then that drum being held by a naked woman, then the woman weeping over it, then the woman pounding it with the mallets while weeping. Meanings accumulate, line up side by side without cancelling each other out. The black woman is a slave. The black woman is painted silver by the white woman and given a sword. The silver-painted, armoured black woman puts on high heels. What is feminine, what is masculine, what is submission, what is rebellion? Hey Girl! doesn’t collapse these things to a single point. It enfolds meanings then distributes them liberally. There is plenty of room in this world for my personal ache and wonder.

Hey Girl! gets a hold of me and doesn’t let go for 75 minutes. It ended at 8:45 last night. It’s now almost noon and I’ve barely slept. I keep turning the images over in my head, the ones I drank in and the ones I couldn’t look away from. Director Romeo Castellucci, his designers, and the two women, Silvia Costa and Sonia Beltran Napoles, did that rare thing: they dislodged my thinking, allowing the images to bypass my mind and go directly to my body. They fed me, and they made me see what I didn’t want to see. “Therefore pardon me, And not impute this yielding to light love, Which the dark night hath so discovered.”

Socìetas Raffaelo Sanzio, Hey Girl!, director, design, lights, costumes Romeo Castellucci, performers Silvia Costa, Sonia Beltran Napoles, original music Scott Gibbons, statics and dynamics Stephan Duve, lighting technique Giacomo Gorini, Luciano Trebbi, sculptures Plastikart, Istvan Zimmerman; Frederic Wood Theatre, University of British Columbia, Jan 23-26; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16-Feb 3

It’s only a seven-foot garter snake in a bag, caught because it was busy eating a toad. But it causes a commotion: the glamorous Monique dashes into the house and won’t come out; her brother cruelly forces her fiancé to bond with the men by measuring the beast; and old, ornery Paulette falls half in love with the thing when she puts her finger in the bag and feels its tongue lick her “like a caress.”

It’s only a family gathering for a few days in August to prepare for the wedding of Monique (Marie Tifo) and André (Jacques L’Heureux), the second marriage for both. Août – un repas a la campagne takes place on a simple set: the front porch and window-view-only two front rooms of a wooden house in rural Quebec (as the dialogue gradually reveals). This particular afternoon is hot enough to melt reason. As Jean Marc Dalpé’s play progresses, it’s clear that reason – and humour – had been the short fences keeping chaos out of the yard. When these small protections fail, the family can no longer deny that Monique’s niece Louise (Annick Bergeron) has been cheating on Gabriel (Henri Chassé) without taking much care to dissemble. Facing that releases shame, desparation and pain for all of them.

Dalpé, who also acts the part of Simon, emulates Chekhov in several ways. The discussion about whether or not maple sugar trees are a dead-end investment or a chance to strike gold on the Japanese market is, of course, a nod to The Cherry Orchard. Dalpé’s use of casual, chatty conversations to build slowly to explosive moments reminds me of The Seagull, especially the way dialogues bewteen characters overlap. For example, Louise and her mother Jeanne (Sophie Clément) talk distractedly about whether to use a yellow or white tablecloth for the outdoor meal; between comments, Paulette (Jeanne’s mother, played with stiff, curmudgeonly humour by Janine Sutto) insists she would rather have an omelette than pork roast for dinner.

Also, as in Chekhov, these are ordinary people wearing regular clothes and having conversations about nothing particularly pressing. Until, that is, a conversation pushes a character to an emotional peak. Monique and Joseé (Catherine De Léan) – the funny, constantly distracted, lone representative of the youngest generation – have a rambling chat about looking endlessly for something that isn’t where it should be. The exchange is hilarious but also sets the tone for the kind of helplessness several of the characters experience as events unfold. André discusses golf as the healing pathway out of grief for his late wife. Gabriel only talks about home repairs, beer, swimming, the snake, until Louise provokes him by announcing she will go stay with her lover for three days to think about things. In response, he angrily, methodically describes what he’s done on the farm, which he only has rights to through the now-failing marriage, shouting (I paraphrase the translation) “I’m not leaving without getting paid back for those twenty-one years!” The dark undertones of the cagey, carefully lighthearted behaviour in the previous scenes become visible, and this ripple of of understanding backwards through the play yields a sense of empathy.

A three-time Governor General’s Award winner, Dalpé has a strong enough aesthetic to fold Chekhov into his play without being derivative. In the context of the PuSh Festival, which is dedicated to contemporary performance and is willing to take risks with experimental work, it’s interesting to note that August is neither a fusion of forms nor and attempt to invent new theatrical styles. Director Fernand Rainville is thoroughly experienced in shaping award-winning productions and has been a longtime associate with Théâtre de la Manufacture (Montréal), causing national excitement with Howie Le Rookie in 2007 (Théâtre la Seizième, Août’s co-presenters, brought Howie to PuSh that year as well). The actors are popular stage and television players in Quebec; the production at Waterfront Theatre was expert, down to the easily readable surtitles that provide access to anglophones like myself.

Août – un repas a la campagne expands the range of PuSh by including an experience of Canada’s other major language, which is not always easy to find in British Columbia. When traditional theatre is this well done, it can, and does, dig deeply into our psyches – just from a different direction than the bearing experimental performances use. Rather than grabbing us by the ears and throwing us into a world of devilish cabaret, for example, Août sidles up and shows us a snake in a bag that may kiss us or curse us. For me, Août’s eight characters were so well-rounded that, the night after the show, I dreamed about three of them as people in other contexts (Monique, André and Louise stranded by a pickup truck on a dusty road). Transformation can come to us subtly.

The space is pitch black. A fluorescent strip light upstage sporadically flashes on and off. Silhouetted against these violent interruptions, a young woman’s body is stretched out on the floor, uncomfortably twitching and writhing. She seems to be suffering some kind of fit, or is she forced to dance involuntarily by an unseen power? Unsettling, inhuman electronic noises cut through the dark, slicing into our consciousness: monster-like groans and unfamiliar clicks.

A longer flash, and the silhouettes of three male figures appear. Their backs to us, they group downstage and stare up at the woman. Their silent invasion is threatening and unnatural. Another flash. A male figure dashes into her space, close to her this time. The next flicker. He beats her with a square panel, maybe a cushion, maybe something harder than that. The other men look on. The repetitive thwacking of the attack continues even in the dark. In the next glare we see a couple more men hitting the girl. A second later there are five or six men grouped round her cowering body, beating her repeatedly. A split-second, and there are double this number of men. The onlookers have now joined the abusers. The noise crescendoes. A flash; more men. The new additions can’t reach her body so they beat the floor, the density of the thumping emphasising the sheer multitude of this gang. The flashes accelerate. Red flashes alternate with white. Each time the light blinks more men appear, swarming around the woman until it’s impossible to count. An overpowering slideshow. I am afraid what I will see in the next disorientating flicker.

This time the light stays on for a couple of seconds. The men are frozen, their backs to us, their weapons lowered. The woman is no longer visible. Light off. After the physical assault on our senses, this calm is more perturbing in its unpredictability. Light on. The men are lined in a clump upstage facing out to the audience. Their bodies are now lit, but despite their everyday clothing they still retain the faceless intimidating presence of the silhouetted gang. The girl, curled in a ball, slowly lifts her head. As in an alarming Alice in Wonderland nightmare, her head is now overgrown, disproportionately big on her tiny body, as though she should topple over under the weight of it. For a second I can’t make sense of this image. The uncannily life-like mask tricks me. I start to feel the dizzy lurch of travel sickness.

I have no idea how long I have been submerged in Castellucci’s vision. From the moment that the lights went down on the smoke-filled auditorium and we witnessed the birth of this wispy young blonde, emerging alien-like from a cocoon of dripping plastic gelatine, my faculties have been cut off from anything other than this terrifying world. Beautifully disturbing images have invaded me, touching obscure parts of my consciousness left dormant until now. I have no idea what to do with these pictures, and although the pace seems dream-like and slow, there’s not enough time to process one surreal image before the next appears. Picturebook words – “cat”, “horse”, “train” –are projected onto a screen as the light slowly rises and fades. The girl cries “please shut out the light”. We read the text of an intimate scene between Romeo and Juliet as the girl helps to remove another, larger version of her own head from that of a naked black woman. As we read new meanings into these words, the snatches of seemingly unrelated information link into one movement. It seems best to let this flood through you, rather than wash over.

Images that in themselves may be unsubtle or too literal seem to gain integrity and mystery in the context of this structure and through the clarity of the visual presentation. The black woman, still naked, is shackled by a bearded white man in Victorian top-hat and coat. The blonde woman buys her freedom, then points at the audience. This is not the first time that this gesture has implicated the audience in a crime committed in front of us. Whether she is apportioning blame or calling for action is left to our consciences.

We see this newborn creature boldly spurn contemporary femininity as she pours a bottle of perfume over a burning sword, angrily creating a shrine to the “queens who lost their heads on account of the people”. She is wise but she is also attempting to learn the rules of this place she is trapped in, just as we try to make meaning of what we see. Although she is strong she is not ultimately in control of her surroundings and her confusion and pain become a vivid metaphor for our experience of Hey Girl!, and for our own struggle to learn to live.

A painfully bright red and blue laser beam suddenly shoots down onto the girl’s face, burning our retinas, as a continuous high-pitched screech cuts into our ear-drums. The woman next to me puts her fingers in her ears. Many words are rapidly projected onto a screen, almost too fast to read this time. They halt occasionally: “porn”, “menstruation”, “mammiferous”. This seems to be a mechanical transfer of knowledge from machine to organic organism, a science fiction education on the adult aspects of this haunting world. The process is distressing, a physical violation of this small, thin being.

However, unlike this intervention, the process of Hey Girl! is bewitching because it refuses to guide our thoughts or spell out meaning. Each audience member re-enters their own solid world as they leave the auditorium, and perhaps we walk away with similar thoughts about femininity, sacrifice, servitude, empowerment. But the more intricate and unique imaginings that have been triggered in the last hour just might lead to further discovery within minds that believe they have already learned themselves and their world.

About three-quarters of the way into Hey Girl, the unnamed “everygirl” reappears on stage wearing an oversized head mask. It’s creepy. Not only is the mask extraordinarily lifelike, it focuses attention on the woman’s body in a way that turns her into a grotesque overgrown child. The head ends up on the stage next to a giant sword as if hacked off by an unseen executioner. A few moments later a second woman appears with an even bigger mask of the same head. This second head is neatly deposited next to the first. Initially, I thought the masks were meant to represent Princess Diana and my first reaction was “Hoo boy!” I found out later that I was mistaken. The heads were in fact enlarged versions of Everygirl’s own.

For better or worse, the connection to Princess Diana is made in and I can’t shake it. I find myself wondering how Romeo Castellucci felt on hearing the news of Diana’s death? Was he distressed? Did he rage against the paparazzi, those dreadful men who hunted down and killed this “beautiful woman”? At one point in the show, Everygirl kneels next to the sword and lists the women – Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, Katherine II of Russia – who “lost their heads on account of the people”. I don’t think Diana made the list but it is certainly company she would feel at home in. My sense is that – at core – Everygirl doesn’t represent all women but rather those beautiful women objectified by men only to be destroyed by them. It has to be noted that Everygirl is stunningly beautiful. She’s also fit. And blonde.

Rather revealingly, the central performer’s name is missing from the PuSh program guide [and there is no print program at the venue]. I don’t know whether this is an administrative error but would not be surprised if it was a conscious choice. Objectification is a central theme of the work. In an early scene, Everygirl moves slowly to the back of the stage and stands on a pedestal. She’s naked but her features are blurred through the haze of smoke that clouds the theatre. She reminded me very much of those small, wooden dolls that artists use to strike different poses – she is strangely inhuman. She then moves downstage and beats a drum with violent force and emotion as if – perhaps – to signify both her emotional energy and individuality. She dresses in jeans and a white t-shirt. I liked this touch as it made the performer both human and very contemporary in what is an extremely abstract environment. We could recognize her, although not so much as the girl next door as Kate Moss dossing around the house on a Sunday afternoon.

In the necessary short-hand our society is addicted to, Romeo Castellucci is described as Europe’s answer to Robert Lepage, the theatre auteur from Quebec. In the usual way of these things, it’s a misleading description. Lepage is an inherent performer and storyteller; both roles are woven into the very fibre of his work. Castellucci, on the other hand, is a designer who borrows heavily from the visual arts field. Lepage uses innovate design and stagecraft, these tend to be pure and simplified and used to support both narrative and theme. Lepage uses simplicity to convey complexity. Castellucci – at least with Hey Girl – uses visual and auditory complexity to reveal…not much, really.

That said, Hey Girl is one of the most visually stunning and technically brilliant shows I’ve ever seen. It is also one of the most didactic and condescending. I longed for depth but I fear there is none. When Everygirl points accusingly at the audience, I think it’s sincere. But I wonder if the brutal treatment of women in Western culture was news to many members of the audience? There is also a rather disturbing psychology underlying this work which links back to the notion of objectification. There is a scene where approximately 30 men invade the stage. The smoke in the theatre casts them in shadow and – while three of their brethren watch through a glass window – they beat the woman with what look like pillows or sacks. The image is heavily stylized but still distressing. After the beating the men line up and in flashes of light we are able to make out their features. They are us! Men drawn from the street! I couldn’t help but reminded of certain Hollywood films which show women being beaten and raped because we need to know just how brutal men can be. It wasn’t nearly that extreme but I do wonder at reproducing the pathology that objectifies a woman and then beats her. I realise this is the point but I don’t feel Castellucci earned this moment nor do I believe that the thin thematic content justified it. The simple code of the piece is: beautiful girl is alone, confused and abandoned, an object of desire she’s beaten by men only to rise again ready to kick ass, Buffy-like sword at the ready.

But wait there’s more! There’s a scene where L and R appear on opposing sides of the stage. These large letters light up – with a deafening racket – while Everygirl races between them as if pulled to and fro! Later, Slavegirl (a gorgeous, of course, black woman) appears and Everygirl buys her from a slave trader! Everygirl pleads “what must I say, what must I do”! This is a world where women are not capable of being agents of change. It is a world where women are isolated and victimized (until they discover sisterhood, as defined by Castellucci). This is the thin gruel we are left to digest.

But why would I encourage you to see it? Because it is visually (and to a lesser extent aurally) stunning: in particular, the opening sequence where Everygirl is lying on what looks like a coroner’s table, covered in dripping latex paint which has formed a skin over her body. It is beautiful, haunting and unforgettable. There’s a clip from this scene on the internet. See for yourself how beautiful the performer is. Maybe you can even discover her name.

A meal in the country; what a lovely idea. We could sit on this long narrow porch by the maple trees, and drink lemonade while Grandma gathers fresh eggs for an omelette. If only it weren’t so beastly hot. Heat always brings out the worst in people.

Monique (Marie Tifo) and André (Jacques L’Heureux) are fifty-something city dwellers who just got engaged, and have come out to the country for a pleasant celebration on Monique’s brother’s farm. The marriage is imminent and clearly doomed. “He likes women who wear bracelets,” Monique says of her fiancé. “And then he gave me some.” She thrashes her arms with their cheap bangles. André is an emotional lightweight, who says golf “helped me grow as a human being.” But somehow the presence of this outsider adds the extra pressure that will crack the entire family by curtain, just 70 minutes away.

We know it’s a tragedy from the start only because that’s how it’s billed, and the dramatic tension in what appears to be a comedy comes from trying to guess the family secrets, whom the tragedy will strike, and what the agent of disaster will be. The play is shot through with false dangers: an escaped snake, the rusty chains of the porch swing, a heart condition in a heatwave. Even the acid rain that’s destroying the maple syrup crop sounds like it has potential to turn the plot. “A mystery is a mystery until it isn’t a mystery any more,” Monique says. “And then? I love that feeling.” The playwright guides the audience towards the feeling Monique loves. As it turns out, the real danger comes from the people to whom we are closest. We can’t always see it because our eyes can’t focus in that proximity.

Jean Marc Dalpé’s Août: un repas à la campagne is a realistic play in a naturalistic setting that takes place almost entirely in real time. A classic drama, Août demands strong ensemble acting, and depends entirely on the text to work. This ensemble delivers, with no one actor dominating the stage, and no one character pitched too high or too low. The actors never seem to be acting; they’re just normal people doing and saying regular things. Fernand Rainville’s direction moves the eight characters naturally on the long narrow stage, and a family we’ve never met before starts to look very familiar. Design elements are deliberately spare. Crickets chirp. The lights change twice. The effect of this restraint is powerful.

In describing Dalpé’s writing, the program notes use the concept of ‘justesse” (roughly: the accuracy that allows authenticity). Everything is purposeful, and everything contributes to the final effect, which happens entirely without words. It’s no mistake that people keep blocking each other in the driveway, or that they keep asking for keys and are often denied. That doesn’t mean the audience always knows the purpose of each moment, although the playwright clearly does. About halfway through, Gabriel (Henri Chassé) is absolutely thrilled when he captures a long garter snake. It later escapes. Gabriel’s role in the play’s climax makes it appropriate for him to be associated with a phallic symbol, but the play is so well crafted that this long scene must have additional significance. The author plays with this gap in meaning, as the characters ask themselves what it means to catch a snake – does it represent good luck? No one is sure. Like us, the characters have lost touch with ancient symbols as the maple trees die, the golf course moves in, and they move out to the city with dreams of screenwriting glory.

The snake is seven feet long, and after the tragedy strikes, the Grandmother (Janine Sutto) returns to the stage triumphant, with seven eggs she has found. These symbols – the number seven, the snake, eggs, keys, barred passages, and the final image of a mother who should protect but instead takes on the role of avenging god – crawled over my brain like a vague ancestral memory. I knew the meanings once, maybe from hundreds of years back when every meal was a meal in the country. The play would have had an even greater effect if I could have accessed those memories in the moment of watching, but it’s also enjoyable to work away at the mystery long after the actors have gone home. Août is a rare achievement – a play that lingers and sticks, like a long, hot summer day.

Incidentally, the play, created by A Théatre de la Manufacture from Montreal in association with Vancouver’s Théatre la Seizième, is presented in its original French. English surtitles were projected above the playing area. The experience was rather like watching a three-dimensional movie with one eye shut. To really savour this text the way it deserves, nothing but full fluency would do.

In thinking of circus performers—particularly acrobats—the first emotion one feels is the thrill of sensing the danger that the performers may fall. The second, and perhaps surprising, emotion is a sense of comfort at seeing how the performers support one another. The overriding bond between two acrobats who rely on each other for their physical well-being must be one of trust. Comfort is derived from witnessing that trust affirmed. We see how powerful—and life-protecting—trust can be and this becomes the implied message of all circus performances. The language of physical theatre therefore comprises two inter-related elements or apparent polarities, risk and trust, repeated throughout a performance. This is manifest also in the individual performer: trust that their body will support them and save them from the harm of risk.

For most of us, trust in is one of the hardest things to achieve because of the inherent risk of putting our faith in others or, indeed, ourselves. Will we be let down, disappointed, left to fall? I suspect trust is a key theme in The Space Between but I’m not sure. Movement is not a language in which I’m particularly fluent but I trust the performers and creators to explore the themes fully.

There is no obvious narrative driving The Space Between. Instead we have three performers—two males, one female—working alone or in pairs with the occasional scene featuring all three. The links between scenes are more impressionistic than direct, building a layered exploration of the relationships between the performers. Like a poem, perhaps the key is in the title.

What is not in doubt is the sheer physical prowess of the performers. The show opens with a single performer falling backwards. He falls repeatedly before tumbling back onto his feet. It has a form of gracefulness but it is the sheer athletic skill, the physical energy and ability that strikes one. This visceral physicality is on display throughout the show. There are sequences where the performers tumble, roll and crawl across each other’s bodies. These are balanced with moments of stillness where the performers hold each other at dramatic angles. In a memorable sequence the female performer holds a small scarf while one of the men dives over and under it like a land-based dolphin. Amongst the solos, there is a wonderfully executed sight-gag involving a performer one of whose hands sticks to any surface it touches. The comic logic of the gag is followed through beautifully as his hand attaches to various parts of his body and the floor and he must contort his body accordingly. In the same scene the performer manages to get a collective wince out of the audience as he twists around on one wrist and seems to have dislocated his shoulder.

The playing space is simple—as it should be—a grey square with the audience on three sides. An occasional projection appears directly on the floor. These are always square and include letters or geometric shapes. The performers move through them but the effect only really lifts off when the square of light rotates and the male performers look like they’re flying on a magic carpet. The music is an eclectic grab bag ranging from electronica through to Serge Gainsborough and Neil Young. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it’s a little too obvious and other times it’s just there.

The Space Between builds to a trapeze scene involving a repetition of the physical gestures we’ve seen played out on the floor but with the extra sense of risk engendered from being suspended. There are a couple of breathtaking moments when the female performer is about to fall only to have the male performer deftly capture her—or at least seem to. Towards the end of the same scene there is a moment where he appears to hold her using only his hand in her mouth. It’s a brief but striking image that seems extreme when compared with what has gone before. There are allusions to male threat, for example when the men grab hold of the woman and swing her back and forth like a skipping rope but there was no sense of overt menace. While we see the potential for physical danger, we fully trust that the male performers would not allow any harm.

Although the moments on the trapeze involved risk, I’m not sure that they evoked vulnerability, and that’s what I thought was missing. I can’t escape the sense that the basic, physical language of circus—built on the polarity of risk and trust—makes it difficult to achieve more emotional nuance. While there were some tender moments—particularly between the two men—I can recall only one of overt aggression, again between the males. It is surprising in a piece about a love triangle that anger does not appear more frequently. Of course, as one male flew at the other in rage we could see the second male brace himself as he prepared his body to actually support his colleague. It was comforting to see.

A blind old fiddle player and the Creature (aka the Frankenstein monster) talk around a campfire. The Creature (George Szilagyi) is attired in what looks like shredded, white, hand-made paper. So is the old man (Dov Mickleson). Softer white fabrics are also layered into their costumes, and the paper covers almost every set piece, including the two stumps they are sitting on (designer Bretta Gerecke). White grease-paint completes the wintry, deathly tone of the setting.

When you take in a Catalyst production, you get a world that is aesthetically complete. You can expect rigorous consistency of appearance in the design, and persistence of tone in the performances. Which makes the scene described above a bit of an anomaly. In what is a rare exception to the rhyming couplets that have dominated the script, we are given prose dialogue. The scene is also unique in allowing two characters a stretch of uninterrupted conversation. Normally, ever-present narrators comment on the action. The Creature pleads for understanding (“Please don’t hate me”), and the old man offers his compassion. The scene is affecting in a way that the play’s alienating performance style hasn’t been, up to this point.

Virtually the entire play is delivered in metered verse, spoken or sung by a group of gothic spectres who seem to have emerged from an icy northern crypt. They lurk, they twitch, they glide. There’s a bit of the B-movie hunchback in some of them, others opt for the menace of Boris Karloff or Vincent Price. Judging from the corny, aphoristic content of much of the script, these references are probably deliberate. In fact, the text offers an almost exhaustive supply of proverbs and platitudes: “The higher you climb, the harder it is when you fall.” It’s relentless and uncompromising in its devotion to end rhymes — Which is easy enough to do / Whether you’re happy or you’re blue / Writing great dramatic text / Or just a snarky little review.

The narrative is handled in an equally simplistic manner. We are given a generic psychological sketch of Victor Frankenstein’s journey from happy child to tormented scientist: childhood trauma is the source of adult obsession. This biography is faithful to the broad outlines of Mary Shelley’s novel, but it’s short on the kind of details that offer genuine insight or build a character portrait that is unique or surprising. Despite the two-hour duration of the show, character relationships are likewise merely schematic and therefore unaffecting. Instead of narrative layers, we get a strong design concept, and highly competent physical and vocal work by the actors. Don’t get me wrong, I love image-based theatre, physical theatre and contemporary dance — I can easily do without psychological character development. But in the case of Frankenstein, form and style fail to make up for a lack of nuanced story telling and complex character relationships.

What seems to be missing from the outset is a genuine question, a speculative point of departure. Writer-director Jonathan Christenson has made up his mind about the issue, the meaning is prescribed: too much tinkering with the laws of nature is a bad thing. This lack of ambiguity is evident in Victor’s relationship to the Creature. He despises him and doesn’t waver from that position until the very end. Until that point he suffers no inner turmoil about whether he should terminate his scientific progeny, so there’s no issue to wrestle with. As a result, there’s really no play here.

Maybe it’s a control issue. As writer, director and composer, Christenson seems to have kept a tight leash on every aspect of his creation. Unlike the creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, Christenson’s monster — the production — lacks the capability to rebel. It’s ironic that a play about a scientist-inventor is lacking in invention. The show plods along methodically, like a rhyming pattern that won’t quit, like a thesis question that presupposes its answer.

A happy man stands still. He is alone. Suddenly, he falls straight back in a scissor-blade movement of rapidly diminishing angles. At the last moment, he averts disaster with a backwards roll. He will repeat the movement multiple times until it has lost the sense of risk. What follows is probably dangerous but, even though it is imbued with the acrobatics and trapeze work of a circus show, it doesn’t depend on our fear and amazement to move us.

Forget the ancient ideal of the golden rectangle; Australia’s Circa tells us the new model of physical beauty is the triangle. There is one hidden in the white handkerchief a performer holds taught between her toes, and a larger one in the shape made between her legs and the fabric, through which a man can leap. There are more triangles in the piked forms, the bodies cantilevered off each other, the space between elbow and ribs, between some unusual combination of back, legs, floor. There is an ever-changing triangle at the centre, even as one man dances a full circle around his own arm. The music moves through Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen and a selection of electronica, but it also begins with the mathematical beauty of Bach.

Projections light the floor part way through. Random letters, different grids, the mechanical approximation of a fingerprint whorl—most of the images reinforce the sense of math and geometry. One projection slowly spins a computer-generated pattern of three-dimensional triangles, while a male performer creates every possible triangular shape with his body in that light. Somehow, it’s not reductionist to see a human body in that archetypal shape, it’s beautiful.

There are three performers (David Carberry, Darcy Grant, Chelsea McGuffin), and it’s tempting to look at that obvious triangle for the continuity in the performance. There is no narrative, but there are varying relationships. One man dominates McGuffin, balancing on the soles of her feet, or holding a handstand on her face. She leaves the stage right afterwards, diminished. But another time she gives new meaning to the phrase “she walked all over him”, or she pulls the other man’s limbs to create the angles she needs that will propel her own movement off his. The dancers use each other, play with, need and love, and maybe hurt each other. But the strength of the work has less to do with the emotional space between people than with an investigation of physical space.

Of course the movement is not all geometric. But geometry is one way the work allows us to see space in a new way, particularly, as the title indicates—The Space Between. The space between two men can be used to swing a woman; the space between her midriff and the floor, between her head and the floor, is reflected in the desperate trust in her eyes. The space between her clenched fingers and her palm is big enough to disappear the handkerchief. The space between her teeth means a man can hang her body from the trapeze with his hand in her mouth. The space between can be contracted and released to propel movement. The work wants to know every possible way that one body can move around another, through that shared space.

An exploration of the physical space between body and floor, or one body and another, doesn’t sound like a particularly interesting idea for a performance. Most dance does that. This piece is interesting because the choreography is skilled, inventive and playful, but mostly because of the well-integrated acrobatics. Suddenly the space between one person and another is a matter of safety. The stage is small and we are close. We trust the performers, but we can still see them eye the distance before they run, check the waiting hand that will throw them higher if they have judged the distance right, and only if they have judged it right.

In improvised dance in particular, two dancers can become so absorbed in the space between them that it seems the only thing to exist, and can absorb the audience wholly. That space isn’t triangular; it’s the antithesis of geometry. Circa’s work is far from improvised. Every space has been carefully calculated for safety or success, in the precise scale that will allow a human body to slip through, to climb, to spin. Despite the obvious effort required, despite the constant calculation, every so often the performers do hint at that other, more transcendent, space between.

Circa, The Space Between, created by Yaron Lifschitz and the Cira Ensemble, performed by David Carberry, Darcy Grant, Chelsea McGuffin, concept, direction, lights, sound design, multimedia and operation Yaron Lifschitz; Performance Works, Granville Island, Jan 22-26; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16-Feb 3

There is an old vaudeville theatre in Vancouver’s notorious downtown eastside. It’s been closed for years. For some reason, The Black Rider put me in mind of the crumbling glory of the Pantages. With its expressionistic tone and sense of rotting decay, November Theatre’s production would be more at home there than in the utilitarian blandness of the Granville Island Stage.

However, it’s not vaudeville but the carnival that is evoked at the top of the show as Old Uncle (Mackenzie Gray) invites us – in the fashion of a sideshow barker – to join the Black Rider. While assuring us of a “gay old time”, he lists the freaks that will be on display for our pleasure. Any fear that we are about to experience a bewildering series of unrelated vignettes is soon dispelled as we are caught up in the story of young couple: Wilhelm (Kevin Corey) and Kathchen (Rachel Johnston). The girl’s father, Bertram (Jon Baggaley) forbids their union because Wilhelm, a soft city clerk, is not a hunter, an occupation integral to the history of Bertram’s family.

To win Kathchen and impress Bertram, Wilhelm makes a deal with the devil-like Peg Leg (Michael Scholar Jr), who offers him magic bullets that are guaranteed to never miss their mark, no matter what direction Wilhelm shoots. He quickly bags enough game to impress Bertram but, of course, any deal involving the devil is bound to sour and ultimately Wilhelm loses the object of his desires by his own hand. Taken from a German folk tale, this narrative provides the simple but durable structure to house the songs and music of Tom Waits and the heightened, poetical language of William S Burroughs.

No doubt reflecting its production history – The Black Rider was originally mounted as a fringe show – the piece is spare with a firm emphasis on performance and music. A small band of three musicians – playing a variety of instruments – are holed up on one side of an otherwise empty playing space. Thick vertical stripes of deep reds and blues form an effective backdrop upon which images of rifles and trees are projected. To create a carnival-like atmosphere with such a stripped down aesthetic requires ingenious stagecraft. There are some wonderful moments, for example when Wilhelm hides under Katchen’s wedding dress and uses his hands to create grotesque, rather dextrous feet for his bride-to-be. Other moments – a flapping kite for a bird – are less effective.

The six actors are fully committed to an expressionistic approach that includes white face, highly stylized movement, clowning and heightened vocalizations. With the aid of just a few props, they successfully create a hallucinatory, drug-like world. Such a performance style naturally has an alienating quality to it that shuts an audience out from emotional engagement with the characters. While this reinforces the flatness of the folk tale narrative, it can make the work difficult to take for stretches and I did find myself longing for pauses from the shrieking and clockwork movements.

Still, without losing any commitment to the expressionistic aesthetic there are some surprisingly touching moments, particularly between Wilhelm and Kathchen when they sing their duet, The Briar and the Rose. In the end, Corey’s Wilhelm provides the spine of the piece. With his deft use of physical humour, Corey reminded me of Chaplin with the same sense of a clown lost in a bewildering world. Johnston provides a strong, physical counterpoint to Corey. She is striking in both red dress and wedding gown, creating the weird doll-like creature of his desire.

Playing the devil, Scholar is allowed a little more freedom in his movements. There is a sultriness to his character, a physical prowess that the limp of his peg-leg surprisingly accentuates. The character, and Scholar’s performance, reminded me of the MC from Cabaret. Peg Leg isn’t the host of the evening – although he does close the night cabaret-style. Instead Old Uncle acts as our guide for most of the night. While Gray gives a powerful performance, I was less sure of the choice to mimic Tom Waits’ distinctive, husky singing voice. I found this affectation rather distracting, taking me out of the world of the piece.

The story of the magic bullets is meant to evoke the dark other-world of addiction. Ironically the stage is often flooded with light – perhaps to evoke the footlights of the 19th century. Instead of a rundown theatre, the flat, bright lighting put me in mind rather of a school auditorium. But then so does the Granville Island Theatre generally. I longed for more darkness, more shadows, more decay. I wanted to be closer to the performers somehow, pushed right up against the stage.

There is a dedicated group in Vancouver trying to save the Pantages Theatre. If they succeed, I hope they will consider this show for the re-opened venue. The Pantages languishes in a dark, decaying part of our city; a place where the Black Rider would feel at home.

Patti Allan (appearing with the permission of the CAEA) & Spencer Atkinson, Old Goriot

Don’t get excited. Stay calm. Watch. Listen. This seems to be director James Fagan Tait’s advice to the spectator in his production of Old Goriot — restrain yourself. His adaptation of Balzac’s 1835 novel is starkly placed in the dark expanse of the Telus Studio Theatre. Just a few essential set elements and a large cast decked out in period dress evoke Balzac’s Paris, while the dialogue, transposed to recent North American vernacular keeps us anchored in the present. A large scrim forms the back of the playing space, variously taking on a sombre palette of projections, which include baroque wall paper, an opera house, and a Parisian boulevard. To one side, a three-piece chamber orchestra of marimba, double-bass, and bass clarinet remains quietly present. A massive dining table drives forward from the scrim. The action of the play takes place on or around this stage-within-the-stage.

In the opening scene, about fifteen actors, inhabitants of Madame Vaquer’s lower middle-class boarding house, line three sides of this table, spooning and slurping their soup in unison, heads falling and rising mechanically. Individual heads then swivel one by one toward the audience as each character makes an introduction. But you’ve got to listen carefully, don’t rustle in your seat — these actors are deliberately keeping the volume down, forcing you to lean forward to catch every word.

What unfolds, in this hushed manner, is the story of Rastignac (Spencer Atkinson), a social climber seeking to marry any moneyed socialite who will have him. Despite the most calculating advice offered by his upper class cousin, the Comtesse de l’Ambermesnil (Anna Hagan), and criminal but advantageous arrangements made under the corrupting influence of the worldly Vautrin (David Mackay), Rastignac keeps getting tripped up by his romantic desire for true love. His affections end up falling on one of the daughters of Old Goriot (Richard Newman), a sombre and mysterious geriatric who also lives in the boarding house despite the fact that his daughters are fashionable ladies of Paris society. Rastignac will learn harsh lessons as he witnesses the daughters’ unfeeling betrayal of their father’s blind devotion. At one point Rastignac and Delphine (one of Goriot’s daughters, played by Cecile Roslin) argue across the body of the dying old man, she wanting to hurry off to the ball, he complaining, “I can hear your father’s death rattles.”

Despite this melodramatic sounding plot, almost every actor tenaciously underplays his or her part. No emotional ostentation — just simplicity of movement and an almost filmic vocal delivery. Director Tait establishes a tone of dispassionate observation and sticks to it. Even the musical numbers, composed by his longtime collaborator, Joelysa Pankanea, and hauntingly performed by her trio and the actors, are spare and contained. It’s Brechtian — that is if Brecht were to produce a period piece and perform it in slow motion. Old Goriot is full of Balzac’s shrewd analysis of the grim reality of France’s brutally stratified society, and Tait keeps us in an observer’s frame of mind by refusing to build dramatic momentum, and undercutting sentimental identification with characters that remain composed, slightly casual, offering only reference to anguish rather than fully embodying it.

Tait’s been working this aesthetic since Crime and Punishment, his 2005 adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which was a landmark production in modern Vancouver theatre history. One of the defining features of that production was the inclusion of five actors from the downtown eastside, a neighbourhood that has the dubious claim of being Canada’s poorest postal code. Of that production, Vancouver director/dramaturge D.D. Kugler remarked that watching the twenty-five member cast was like seeing a cross-section of the city on stage, something he’d never experienced before. Goriot is a mirror of that show, the main differences lie in the absence of the downtown eastside actors and the much more cynical bent of this play. Where Dostoyevsky’s novel builds to a spiritual crescendo, Balzac, through Tait’s filter, stays firmly planted on the unrelenting ground of modern class warfare.

In the case of Old Goriot, based on a novel some consider the father of the realist movement in literature, Tait’s approach serves the realist’s mission of looking at life ‘objectively’. He certainly strips Old Goriot’s death scene, masterfully played by Newman, of any sentimentality. Realizing his beloved daughters won’t be joining him for his final moments, the old man meanders between curses and expressions of undying love, as he tries to come to terms with the lonely predicament of his demise: “They’re not coming. I’m going to die like a dog.” His monologue is both interminable and engaging — I felt like I was watching the death of giant insect that had suddenly become aware of its own mortality: I was curious, mildly disturbed, and feeling just enough of an ache to raise a flicker of empathy. This scene was the highlight of the production for me. But a kind of low highlight. After all, Tait wouldn’t want us getting carried away by grief or laughter. Just stay calm. Listen. Assess.

The stage for Black Rider is dressed only with three columns of red light on a blue background, like a triple projection of Barnet Newman’s painting Voice of Fire. But the Black Rider quotes more than modern art. It’s based on a German fable of the Middle Ages; it also reeks of the popcorn smell of the American big top and the stale grease makeup of clowns. It quotes Byron and T. S. Eliot. It has Broadway melodies and Latin rhythms. In some moments, it’s positively Gilbert and Sullivan, as envisioned by people who don’t like Gilbert and Sullivan. And in this production it’s held together by the visual continuity of actors in exaggerated makeup who can move gracefully when required, but tend more to contorted bodies and faces, and to any gesture but real.

The style of movement varies almost at random from the pointed toes and sweeping limbs of ballet to the tumbling of the circus, and exaggeratedly bent arms and twisted torsos that come from some less familiar tradition. Speech varies as dramatically. Actors sing naturally while holding crooked poses, or distort their voices past intelligibility. The text morphs from moralizing to hucksterism, exposition to character. It’s oddly alien and familiar at the same time, without necessarily creating a strong, overall effect.

In this November Theatre version of the Waits-Burroughs-Wilson original, German expressionism goes to the circus, but it’s a cheap circus playing a small town, and the performers are giving it their all. They’re talented as hell, but their aping faces and distorted limbs distract them and their cheerful audience from the fact that this is, at one level, a story about drug addiction. As some will know, Black Rider’s writer, William S. Burroughs, was a heroin addict who accidentally killed his wife in a shooting game. In this production, when Wilhelm, the inept suitor, accidentally shoots his bride on their wedding day, with a bullet he got from the Devil to give him a marksman’s skill, few will guess at the resonance. The absurd, self-mocking gestures of the actors sometimes do work to hint at the self-loathing that must accompany addiction and homicide. In one of the final scenes, the morose Wilhelm ties himself up in a straitjacket made of his own dress coat, telling us that making deals with the Devil is the province of the insane. A moment of pity allows a brief connection.

Addiction can get ugly, and this production is most successful when it’s ugly and in the rare moments of sincere emotion which punctuate a lot of intentional silliness. Kathchen (Rachael Johnston), the bride-to-be, gets to scream twice: full-bodied, deliciously ugly screams that you rarely hear on stage or anywhere else, and in this case, electronically augmented to strong effect. Sincerity appears by surprise in a production that otherwise cultivates the absurd. The doomed lovers are truly touching only once, when Wilhelm plays with Kathchen’s toes as they sing the Briar and the Rose. It’s a straightforward duet in a production that would rather discomfit and jar the audience. Wonderful inconsistencies also appear, as in a love song that mixes predictably romantic words with phrases like “I’d be the pennies on your eyes.” Death and matrimony rarely converge so playfully. Too frequently though, it’s hard to find a connection and maintain it. I spent a good chunk of the lingering death scene wondering at the strength of Johnston’s legs as she inched herself to the floor.

Is there a point in reviving German expressionism after its era has passed? Without the rancorous signing of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, without the cabaret nightlife of Weimar Berlin, without bold experimental films like Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet, expressionism is just a romp. Artistic movements come naturally out of a particular time and place. Once, German expressionism was political. Now it’s just as moderately entertaining as anything else.

A long, bare wooden table, surrounded by fifteen assorted chairs, sits heavily centre stage splitting the performance space in half. Three musicians are fenced into a small area upstage by their instruments. The lighting is dingy and dull, and onto the wallpaper-patterned gauze backdrop, lacklustre brown panelling is projected, illustrating a lower-middle class Parisian boarding house. One of the musicians jingles a large triangle to summon the performers, and fifteen actors dressed in dreary 19th century French attire pile onstage. They each take a seat at the table, lean forwards and slurp from an invisible “trough” in front of them; “trough” being an image that is used throughout to describe Paris.

Madame Vauquer introduces herself directly to the audience as the owner of this boarding house, “for gentlemen, ladies, and others”, as another projection onto the backdrop informs us. Despite the 19th century setting, each guest introduces him/herself directly to the audience in vernacular English, stating on which floor of the house they stay and how much rent they pay. Rastignac, the ambitious young social climber, includes a lot more detail about himself and his motivations, before being interrupted by the irritable fellow boarders: “this story isn’t about you.” Following this character-labelling, the cast perform an eerie, plodding song, a call for self-reflection: you, the audience, might think that the author is making this story up, until you realise that similar events are happening at your own table at home.

Prologue over, the narrative begins. We are shown snatches of underplayed dialogue, interspersed with Brechtian elements: songs, projections and mime, accompanied by sound effects created in full view of the audience by the musicians. There are direct references to the form of the piece, such as Rastignac’s speedy addition of “intermission” at the end of his final speech of the first half, or the cook exclaiming “the time disappeared, just like a play in the theatre” (perhaps a bit too much of a risk at this point in the second act?). The densely packed narrative of De Balzac’s novel seems to unfold simply in front of us: the lodgers’ curiosity over Old Goriot, the broken, bankrupt vermicelli maker, and his relationship with the two beautiful women who come to visit him; the discovery that these grasping women are in fact his daughters and have treacherously bled him dry of his fortunes; the clumsy attempts at social promotion by Rastignac; the unfortunate and miserable story of each lodger. The smooth storytelling is dotted with bluntly comic moments: the best received being the deadpan delivery of impoverished gentlewoman Mademoiselle Michonneau’s “don’t try to butter me up, bitch”, after overhearing the cook insulting her.

The whole piece is very clearly staged, almost choreographed; each polished scene runs to another seamlessly, each transition creates an aesthetically pleasing, balanced picture. Although we are shown corruption and calculation, there is no overt evil or grime on display in this clean performance. The staging is as methodically planned as the characters’ schemes for social or financial progression. Carefully assigned downstage areas are preserved for whispered conversations such as that between Vautrin, the criminal, who tries to engage Rastignac in a murderous deal that will lead to his social advancement. Wealthier households are presented on the elevated level of the table-top (just in case we haven’t noticed the brightly coloured bejewelled costumes of the richer characters). The viewer is guided through this complex narrative and its themes, each aspect of the novel laid out clearly and signposted with juxtaposition of song, movement and dialogue. Despite the initial call for self-examination, we can comfortably settle into the role of listener and jury.

The Brechtian sparseness in the presentation of greed and exploitation allows the audience to make clinical judgments but there is a sense that we are being presented with the children’s picture book version of an intricate novel. By the end the audience has a clear sense of the pitfalls of being too keen to enter “fashionable Paris”, of the deception and betrayal that social ambition and self-interest can lead to, and of the dangers of being blindly generous in a society that revolves around social status and wealth. We see that Vautrin, the convict, is perhaps the most sympathetic of this assemblage of characters, as he seems to be the only one willing to break free from guileful social play-acting. Having been found out by the police, he redeems himself by forgiving his betrayers, and reminding the gawping onlookers that he has not betrayed anyone. He is perhaps the least hypocritical of this group of down and outs, and his outspoken stand against “organised authority” seems appealing in the context of the rigid structures of this society, and indeed of the performance. We are left with the feeling that this piece might have been more engaging itself, and have encouraged more self-scrutiny in its audience if it had attempted to borrow some of the vigour of Vautrin’s nonconformist philosophy.

A tall, bald man stands squarely in the light and megaphones his voice through a bone-coloured horn. He’s a circus-master in a tattered black coat. “See Sealo the seal boy, with flippers for arms!” The horn cuffs us with freakshow detail after freakshow detail and the crowd chuckles at the impossibles. The Devil’s Rubato Band—a trio playing trombone, bass, piano and percussion—punch out loud swaying carny sounds from the side of the stage. The crowd laughs particularly hard at the thought of “Crow-girl, half crow, half girl, one hundred per cent crow-girl!” All are invited, all will be taken advantage of; it’s very egalitarian.

As Old Uncle (Mackenzie Gray) barks, other circus members burst through the bright red door, centre stage. Each white-painted face yells, shrieks, their black-lined lips and eyes an invitation to the alluring nightmare The Black Rider promises to be. The performers limit themselves to stiff, doll-like movements in rectangular patterns. Their voices grate, their eyes bulge, the painted curtains glow red behind them. The pitch rises. The combination tips reality like a glass of beer on a table’s edge. Lured in, I’m uncomfortable—but ready to drink whatever’s offered next.

What’s next is the love story of Kathchen (Rachael Johnston) and Wilhelm (Kevin Corey), a passionate young woman and a doughy city clerk who wish to marry. But Kathchen comes from a long line of hunters, and her father Bertram will only accept a son-in-law who’ll continue the family tradition. Kathchen wailingly rejects his choice, the lewd hunter Robert, and the mother, Anne, attempts to intervene by reminding Bertram that they were young once too. When Wilhelm discovers how lousy he really is at hunting, he makes a deal with the devil—the limping, tuxedo’d Peg Leg, played dashingly by Michael Scholar Jr—to use magic bullets that always find their mark. The catch: Peg Leg gets to control one bullet, and Wilhelm only discovers which one when he accidentally shoots his bride on their wedding day.

Tom Waits wrote the original songs, adding a spooky texture to a production that foregrounds sound: you don’t put brass on stage and expect it to be subtle. But once I adjusted, I was able to concentrate on the significance of the movement. (The original large-scale Black Rider was created by Waits, Burroughs and Robert Wilson in 1990 and performed in German. Theatre November’s own 1998 English language version works with a handful of actors and has been touring internationally since 2000.)

As the generic circus characters melt into their individualized roles, their body language relaxes a little from joint-by-joint gestures, but movement remains formalized throughout. Almost every time the plot intensifies towards a crisis, the performers pace in pathways of right-angled straight lines. This is, I assume, influenced by Robert Wilson’s experimental minimalist style (Wilson with Waits and William S Burroughs created the original version of the work). Anne and Kathchen perform a rigid two-stepping grid of grief around Bertram as they try to convince him he is wrong about Bertram. In Wilhelm’s first successful hunt, the shot stags—four actors holding antlers at their temples—dance around the stage in the now familiar format, haunted and angular. However, the strict, slow movements alternate with acrobatics, tumbling and hysterical arm-flinging.

One slow but atypically fluid scene was particularly moving for me. From stage left, Kathchen takes one step onto stage, raises her arms elegantly in front of her head, and claps. Fine pale dust puffs up from her white-gloved hands. She claps again, takes another slow step, as if her floor-length white dress is weighing her down. She walks beneath the cloud her claps released. Peg Leg stands by the central red door, watching her proceed.

Kathchen, though, is dreamy, and doesn’t register his presence. He turns and leaves. She jerks her torso up and smiles, as if touched from below. It’s Wilhelm, beneath her dress, and laughing. As she sings, her fiancé stays hidden but dances his hands out from under her hem like a flirtatious chorus line of two. The duet—the music of her voice and the physical humour of his hands and later his legs extending her body as he lifts her high—is gorgeous and grotesque, as the production intends their love to be.

By now the circus framework seems far from the story’s action. When a circus-freak hunchback suddenly appears gibbering stage left, soon joined by Old Uncle declaiming loudly about the destructive powers of addiction, stage right, the abrupt transition is jarring and the speech oddly didactic. The feeling of disjunction is confirmed a few minutes later when the plot jumps back to the love story. Having made the effort to accept the characters and their peculiar mannerisms, I prickled at what felt like crass manipulation since the play had already clearly revealed Wilhelm’s risk.

Opening up to The Black Rider’s choreography was rewarding, and I found the main plot wonderfully suspenseful (though the important subplot about Kathchen’s ancestry was clear only when I read the program notes). Strangely, even though there are slow passages such as a completely silent death scene (that seems like five minutes but is in fact much less), the overall dynamic of the production is noisily staccato. That percussive pace keeps a cool gap between the performers and the audience. Maybe it’s the slight distance between humans and the devil(ish) that we prefer to maintain.

The Space Between is an exquisite physical theatre miniature focused on a series of mutating physical relationships in duos and trios with occasional solos. Bodies tangle, wrestle, caress and mutually manipulate each other well beyond the range of normal touch, but tell us much about ourselves. The show is built on close observation and fine detail and not on spectacle, comedy or sex or even conventional routines. The gravity that has to be overcome in this physical theatre is the weight of human dependency and the desire to intensify or to escape it. Every possible permutation of entanglement is entered into and every ounce of concentration is devoted to keeping that relationship balanced—always a tense, tentative affair but the drive is to do it again and again. Circa don’t rush, they enter these states slowly therefore often face more tortuous demands than usual on muscles and the sense of balance. This stress reaches a critical intensity in a late scene where all three bodies clamber up and over each other in a fluid knotting and unknotting of arms and legs.

While occasionally scenes appear perfunctory or oddly placed, and the musical selection is taxingly various (a through-composed score please!), The Space Between is a work which often demands and rewards careful attention, revealing how little real, unoccupied space there is between human bodies.

A new tension enters the space. A woman begins to favour one man, interacting more with one than the other. The ignored one, the one with the boyish face, leaves the stage. The one who stays, the taller one, she circles with a white handkerchief again and again, as if marking territory, or, more gently, inviting him into her space. He dives through the oval shaped by her arms and the cloth. She holds it between her feet and flips onto her hands, bringing the white line softly down behind his body. He tumbles into a somersault and rises to his feet again through the ellipsis her feet and the cloth make.

Acrobats who move like dancers are rare and beautiful, in part because most of us sitting in the audience know our bodies would crack if we tried to do this or that. Even more rare are the acrobat-dancers willing to use their unusual ability to create startling body shapes in support of moods and themes, not just for the sake of astonishment alone. David Carberry, Darcy Grant and Chelsea McGuffin, three members of the Brisbane-based physical theatre group Circa, have profound physical vocabularies. Each can move from stillness to a rapid flip with apparent effortlessness; each can hang from one arm, one foot or another’s neck, if the choreography calls for it.

These performers are amazing, I can’t avoid that word. Look at him fall backwards with a rigid body and arms. How does he flip backwards at the last minute to trace a full circle with his legs and not hit the floor? Both men repeat this phrase several times, which lets the audience figure out the mechanics, but it remains surprising. In other words, it’s not that the audience isn’t drawn in by the power of the performers’ extreme actions, but Circa uses their physical vocabularly to push and pull each other, and us, through different moods, questioning whether or how people desire closeness. It starts abstractly, then reveals a storyline where the woman is choosing between the two men.

Intimacy and distance can be equally painful. When the rejected man dances alone, he’s a contortionist, bending his legs over and around his neck, pulling a shoulder out of joint, then dancing serenely through a smooth phrase or two. When the woman dances with him, she punishes his limbs. She stands on his shoulders, steps down to his thighs, forces him to turn over onto his knees and remains standing on his flesh, not the floor, by walking on his calves. She repeats this coiling ruthlessness and he takes it. Distance, rejection, hurts.

Intimacy isn’t necessarily more cosy in this piece. Intensely close bodies scratch, pull and rub against each other. On the trapeze, the woman and the taller man climb up and down each other. She stands on the wooden bar, he wraps his legs around her ankles and lets his weight fall. Or he hangs upside down and she slips deliberately down his body, hand-grip by hand-grip, until she’s suspended only by her mouth, his hand holding her weight by her skull. (I think everyone in the theatre twitched here.) Almost instantly, she climbs smoothly back up his arms.

This harsh moment resonates exactly because she moves on. Similarly, the rejected man shifted quickly into and out of extreme positions such as using his apparently dislocated (presumably double-jointed) shoulder to balance between one contortion and the next. If either had hung in place longer, it would have become a trick, a “look what I can do.” The timing throughout the performance is consistently flawless in this way.

Pace is also affected when tumbling animations, always in black and white, project onto the floor. For those moments, the dancers commit to moving only in that light. The most effective of these is a vibrating grid pattern that appears several times to frame the two men dancing together, initially as supple equals, later as rivals who think one must dominate the other.

Playful, smart musical choices support the emotional arc of the performance by emphasizing mood shifts (Bach transitions to rock) or by adding lyrics. There are things a body simply can’t describe, like “there’s a piece that was torn from the morning, and it hangs in the gallery of frost” (Leonard Cohen, “Take This Waltz”). And the body, or at least these three remarkable bodies, gets to play with saying the things it says best: muscular phrases about passion, jealousy, tension, lightness, the mysterious hollow of the mouth, and the even more mysterious and wildly elastic spaces that resonate between people.

The ringmaster enters with a flourish of his long black coat as the houselights are still fading. Looking around at the eager faces in the auditorium, it’s clear that they’re all too keen to accept his invitation to “Harry Harper’s Bazaar” to see the three-headed baby and other assorted delights. Like the classic freak-show audience, with a taste for black humour and a desire to be frightened, we greedily gulp down the spectacle as the rest of the cast jerkily parade into line in time to the big-top trombone. They are followed up by the charismatically evil Peg Leg (Michael Scholar, Jr.) who, despite his disability, almost seems to moonwalk backwards in time to the music, slick and smooth in his black tailcoat, shiny shoes and bare chest.

We’re already sold as the performers ask us to “come along with the Black Rider”. But perhaps like our protagonist Wilhelm (Kevin Corey) who, desperate to please his girlfriend’s father and win her hand in marriage, makes a Faustian pact with devilish Peg Leg, we don’t know quite what we’re getting ourselves into.

A love story is played out in the mechanical movements of this feudal Addams Family, against the deep blue and red stripes of a minimalist backdrop. Their somehow medieval costumes are reminiscent of the German folktale from which this story is taken, whilst faces are contemporary gothic: deathly white skin, black eyes and lips. Bertram the Forester (Jon Baggaley) repeatedly expresses his dismay at his daughter Kathchen’s (Rachael Johnston) choice of boyfriend. With arms bent at the elbow moved stiffly up and down, he is like a doll being used to re-enact its owner’s latest tantrum. In a later scene (and with the clarification offered by the programme synopsis) it emerges that his reasons for objecting to Wilhelm, a clean cut city clerk, are deeply connected to his family’s history and his wish to keep up a hunting tradition. He presents his daughter with a vile, stooped hunting boy whose crude language and use of his horn’s phallic potential to illustrate the fact that he “knows women”, induces a shudder not only in Kathchen.

During these early scenes, Peg Leg occasionally appears on a small rectangular screen in one red strip of the backdrop, a perverse deity high above the action. His eerily distorted words, “do as you will”, add to a growing sense of inevitability. There’s no escaping doom in these forests. The large, tight, puppet-like movements of the characters suggest that they are merely the devil’s marionettes, acting out the story within the constraints he provides. This image is cemented later on, in a bizarre interlude in which a clown, complete with Charlie Chaplin bowler hat, enters spurting high-pitched gibberish. Frustrated with this noisy interruption, Old Uncle stands behind her, and takes control of her invisible strings: he makes her dance as they sing a duet. To me it’s unclear whether this interjection is meant to make sense or whether I’m just not listening hard enough. I have the feeling that I am immersed too deeply into a hallucinatory world that doesn’t operate on my terms. I did sign up for the ride but in doing so I handed my fate over to this motley crew. I can’t turn back now.

Silent film is referenced again at the pivotal moment when Peg Leg offers Wilhelm his magic bullets. With these the clerk is sure to hit his target and impress Kathchen’s father with his hunting skill. (Never mind that one of the bullets is bent to Peg Leg’s will.) The effortlessly cool devil teases geeky Wilhelm as he attempts to pick up an oversized white gun, pulling it away just as Wilhelm is about to grasp it. These movements are accompanied by exaggerated sound effects performed by the band stage left, who seem to laugh along with the joke. But the slapstick gains a more sinister edge once Peg Leg starts to play marionette-master with Wilhelm, singing “don’t listen to the devil, he got ways to move you”. Wilhelm is merely a toy.

Kathchen has a child-like innocence in her relationship with Wilhelm, which borders on ownership. She excitedly leaps about the stage when she discovers that there’s “dead game heaped all over the house!” thanks to Wilhelm’s shooting. At one point, previously hidden from the audience, Wilhelm’s head pops out from beneath Kathchen’s floor-length wedding skirt, then back under again. She seems to float, sitting on her lover’s shoulders. The couple are one: an image of pre-marital happiness. His masculine legs substitute hers beneath her disproportionately small torso, and they dance as she sings: “You’re so cute. I like your trousers. They’re black.” This youthful quality renders her unbearably drawn out death scene all the more poignant. The auditorium is thick with silence in the minutes after Wilhelm’s magic bullet hits her.

With the knowledge that William S. Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in a drunken reconstruction of the William Tell legend, the whole caper becomes disturbing on an entirely new level. Although the experience feels like being trapped in a Tim Burton bad acid trip, played out live in front of us instead of safely on a screen, there are very few direct references to the dangers of addiction. We are told the didactic story of Georg, who discovered that he couldn’t live without the magic bullets, reaching out for them “just like a junkie groping for his stash”. But maybe to be reminded of this gritty reality too often is to stop enjoying the fright of the ride.

“What a delightful sight I see! Dead game piled up all over the house!” This joyous exclamation issues from the mouth of Kathchen, the Royal Huntsman’s daughter (Rachael Johnston). Like everyone else in November Theatre’s production of The Black Rider, Kathchen is smeared over in a grotesque whiteface that accentuates her seemingly huge, blood red, and very plastic, mouth. For about forty-five minutes, a fusillade of the most astonishing vocal pyrotechnics has been erupting from this cannon of muscle and bone. Sounds, words, edgy ballads, grating arias — I haven’t always been sure what she’s been going on about, and to be honest that hasn’t bothered me much. But I now understand how the story is adding up. Kathchen is happy because her fiancé, Wilhelm (Kevin Corey), a lowly accountant from the city, has proven to her hunter father, Bertram (Jon Baggaley), that thanks to his newfound skill with a rifle he’ll be bringing home the bacon. And that means the two lovers can get married.

But there’s an ominous catch: Wilhelm’s success has depended on magic bullets he was given by Peg Leg (Michael Scholar Jr.), a cabaret MC of a devil who, of course, walks with a limp. But the bullets have run out, and now Wilhelm wouldn’t be able to hit his own pasty-white face with a rifle shot if he had his lips wrapped around the barrel. Too bad for Wilhelm, he won’t seal the marriage contract unless he passes the final test of shooting a wooden bird from a tree, and there’s fat chance of that happening without another magic bullet. Peg Leg gladly gives him one more, but this one’s going to be less cooperative. As Papa Bertram says, some bullets have their own special targets, “no matter where you aim, that’s where the bullets end up.”

But before I give away the ending and the anticipated heartbreak, let me assure you that you’ll leave the theatre with your heart in one piece, but your brain in at least two. The narrative, drawn from a German folk tale and a story by Thomas De Quincey, is the basic framework for an evening’s journey into the strange predilections of the show’s original creators, William S. Burroughs, Robert Wilson and Tom Waits. That might give you an indication of what you’re in for. But then again maybe not. While Black Rider draws on 1920s German Expressionism, cabaret, circus, vaudeville, burlesque, and a host of 19th and early 20th century theatrical traditions, it doesn’t try to boil them down into a cohesive whole. Both musically, and in the song lyrics and monologues, it ranges over these traditions and more, and that’s the source of much of the show’s inexplicable delight. It’s unclassifiable.

The most consistent elements are the visual and the physical. The stage is mostly bare black, backed by three columns of intensely red saturated fabric that hang from ceiling to floor. The centre column features a red door at floor level. At centre stage is a painted red circle pierced by a triangle of light from above. At the start, Old Uncle (Mackenzie Gray), a large, intimidating bald man in a trench coat, plants himself downstage centre and, through a bullhorn, barks out a freak-show catalogue that includes acts like “the man born without a body.” Through the door comes Peg Leg, in a shirtless tux and with raccoon eyes shaped like a sun visor — he walks a bit like a wind-up tin toy. Peg Leg entices us with promises to use our skulls as soup bowls before the night is done. I felt I was in good hands with Peg Leg, even if his hands were covered in snake oil. He is soon joined by four laughing, drooling, spitting clowns. What’s really disturbing is that they seem insanely delighted to meet us. All six performers have developed a grotesque physicality, and their vocal styles range from lounge to opera to a damn good evocation of Tom Waits himself by Gray. Choreographer Marie Nychka has the cast mostly moving in right angles across the stage for the duration, with the notable exception of the acrobatic Wilhelm who explodes in every direction — despite the irony of being the most manipulated character in the story.

The overall effect is of a gigantic puppet theatre in which the marionettes have not only taken off their clothes, they’ve then taken off their skin to reveal inner selves that are cheaply dressed, leering emanations from Burroughs’ mind. Step right up kiddies! Unfortunately the promise of danger is undercut during the first half of the show, which is mostly a meandering romp that struggles to be weird and accessible at the same time.

About half way through though, there’s a shift. It comes in the form of a vocal duet between Old Uncle and Young Kuno (also played by Johnston), a demented oversized kid, apparently scolding us in gibberish; Old Uncle looms over her as a kind of puppetmaster. Until this point most of the songs and monologues have been coming at us fast and hard. Here, Young Kuno begins to open up space for the spectator. The pace slackens a little. As Kuno, Johnston seems strangely vulnerable for the first time. And Old Uncle seems to genuinely want something from her, although that may be her very soul. It’s startling when the gibberish duet resolves forcefully into comprehensible English, although I can’t for the life of me remember what they sang — just how it felt. In a later scene, in which Kathchen tries on her wedding dress for the first time, Johnston pulls back on the physical and vocal extremes and speaks to us rather simply, which is a relief while it lasts.

But it’s Mackenzie Gray as Old Uncle who, time and again, makes me snap to attention. He has a remarkable ability to stand and deliver. Even through the Waits growl, his textual work is lucid and deft. He also moves less than everyone else, and in doing so, takes full command of the theatre. When he breaks out of that constraint, it’s a truly violent thing to watch.

In this second half of the show we’re are allowed to feel a genuine sense of uneasiness about what we have entered into. The earlier dispersion of energy seems to focus. It’s hard to say why it’s taken this long. Certainly the show seems to have lost a bit of definition since the first time I saw it at The Waterfront Theatre two years ago. This may be partly due to the open shape of the Arts Club stage. There’s too much unused negative space between the actors; they seem to be taking an extra step when they should already be at their destination. I wanted to shrink the playing area a bit, pull everything to the front of the stage, give it more of the cabaret setting I think is its natural home. In fact, this show should really be seen in a club. We should be drinking our faces off and getting high, so that Johnston’s malleable red mouth can grow to nightmare proportions and properly haunt our dreams, so that the evil fairy tale clowns can work themselves into our psyche and re-emerge in horror stories parents tell to frighten their children. The first half of the show feels a bit like William Burroughs ‘lite’ — the danger is faux, and the perversity feels feigned.

But to give this production its well-deserved due: as I’ve been saying, at mid point a little more space is allowed to creep into the work. The possibility of contacting something truly eerie and deliciously perverse is hinted at. And there are some show-stopping numbers. Gray, now as Georg Schmid, performs in a ritualistic circle of antlers. He holds a sword like an agent of suicide and convulsively sings the hard luck story of another poor soul who made a bad deal with the devil. He also performs a stunning multi-voiced monologue that blends drug craving with gun-culture addiction, while simultaneously deconstructing the classic Hollywood story arc. And Wilhelm, just prior to his exit to hell, sings a honky-tonk swan song to his old pals and alma mater, peppered with words of advice his dad once gave him: nothing can cheer you up like “a campfire and a can of beans.”

The superb Devil’s Rubato Band (Corrine Kessel, Dale Ladouceur and Jeff Unger), which has kept the madness afloat for almost two hours, accompanies Peg Leg for a farewell torch song, beautifully rendered by Scholar. But as he exits through his red door to the underworld, I can’t help feeling a little cheated: he said he was going to use my skull as a soup bowl, but every hair on my head is still in place. I thought dead game was going to be piled up all over the theatre. Where’s the stink of rotting meat and carrion birds? And please don’t take Kathchen’s evil mouth away yet; I haven’t been fully sullied by it. Other spectators, however, seem sufficiently titillated as they rise to their feet to give November Theatre an ovation.

The RealTime Editors and a team of six Canadian writers from the RealTime-PuSh
review-writing workshop are posting reviews of the festival as it unfolds from Jan 21.

RealTime’s participation in PuSh 2007 has been made possible by the Canada Council and the Australia Council for the Arts

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January 2008

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