Theatre Seen

Talking Stick Festival:  Opening Gala and Festival Week
Presented by Full Circle, Talking Stick Festival and
The Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre
At the Roundhouse and other venues
February 21 to 28, 2010

Vancouver , BC: To the accompaniment of  occasional roars from the hordes watching the Canada-USA hockey game on the giant screen at Yaletown Live, we strolled down a relatively quiet Pacific Boulevard to The Roundhouse to attend the opening gala of the Talking Stick festival.

We had arrived at 6  for the reception and chattered to several people visiting for the Olympics, as we waited in line.The house opened shortly before 7 and we found  seats at a table for four and were joined by a couple up for a visit from the Napa Valley. Things started off with a great beat with the Talking Stick house band 'Friends of the Indians' rocking the Roundhouse. They were joined for another rocking number by singer Gillian Thomson of "Sister Says". 

We were welcomed to the opening by co-hosts  Greg Coyes of APTN's The Mix and Theresa Point, Festival Artistic Director Margo Kane and several other gracious hosts before a plethora of traditional songs and dances were performed by Spakwus Slulem, the Eagle Song dancers of the Squamish nation; Tsatsu Stalqayu, of the Coastal Wolf pack of the Musqueam nation and the traditional Gitksan Dancers of Damelahamid.

Chris Bose, poet and storyteller among his other talents, read poems from his newly published book "Stone the Crow."

Delusion by Laurie Anderson
with  Eyvund Kang (viola) and Colin Stetson (horns)
Commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and BARBICANBITE10
Vancouver Playhouse
Feb 17 to  21st,  2010.

Vancouver, BC:  Yesterday I found myself on the opposite side of an interview - interviewee rather than interviewer. I was checking in for my last shift in the Main Press Centre and unbeknownst  to me, lurking around the check-in desk was one of the volunteers who write the daily Volunteer Newsletter. On hearing that this was the last of my 15 shifts he begged, pleaded and cajoled (alright I exaggerate) until I agreed to have a picture taken for the newsletter. 

While I was chatting away a mile a minute about the Cultural Olympiad among other things - the caffeine from my early  morning coffee was obviously still racing around my system - he asked what I had most enjoyed about the Cultural Olympiad. I began to rattle off memorable aspects from several of the shows I had seen and then when my brain finally caught up to my mouth I stopped and thought about it.

The Vic by Leanna Brodie
Directed by Sarah Szloboda
A Terminal Theatre production
Jericho Arts Centre
Feb 16 th to 21 st, 2010

Vancouver, BC: This production of The Vic is an ambitious undertaking by the young Terminal Theatre company which staged its first production in the summer of 2009. For this, their third production, they might have been better served had they chosen a less convoluted play.

The Vic features 8 female characters - described as part victim, part victimisers - in four disparate story lines which finally come together - sort of. I found the continuity of this play hard to follow so without having read the script, here is what I gathered from the show. 

The set is dominated by a giant screen on which brief film clips show at different points between the other scenes. This as we discover is the thread that draws the four stories together.

The play opens with women entering the darkened space, each carrying a light, the Spanish singing evoking the "desaparecidos" or "the disappeared" of Latin America. Then we see four local women searching for a missing woman, Cara (April Cameron) whose inner thoughts are revealed through her "diary" shown in the film clips. Cameron's naively wistful, young girl provides the only really sympathetic character in the story.

Dance Marathon at The Roundhouse Community Centre
bluemouth Inc. and Boca del Lupo
February 12 th, 2010

Vancouver, BC: I was having a blast at the Dance Marathon until I got eliminated in The Derby - how lame, so to speak! That was when I  realized that my competitive streak is as strong as it ever was - because I was not ready to  go and I was MAD.

The Dance Marathon is a greatly truncated version of the 1920s and 1930s endurance contests as depicted in the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Originally commissioned for Toronto's Harbourfront Centre,  Vancouver's Dance Marathon is part of the exciting Cultural Olympiad that has been entertaining us with an incredible variety of art, theatre, music and dance. 

As an Olympic volunteer I was able to to see the Opening Ceremonies dress rehearsal on Wednesday night and was really impressed but last night, watching the show on television, I realized what an amazing show Vanoc had put together. As the final speeches were taking place I made my way along Pacific Boulevard to the Roundhouse in time to see on the television there, the two cauldrons being lit.

The  ceremony being over, it was time to get the Dance Marathon under way. I signed my waiver form , picked up my number plus a bottle of water  and was ready to go. Several of the dancers from the opening ceremony wandered in and joined up. I recognised some of the folks who did the Celtic dancing with that amazingly fast footwork. Some competition!

The MicroTheatre Series :
At The Cultch (1895 Venables)
1 to 6 Feb, 2010

1) Etiquette - A Rotozaza production (UK)
2) You & The Moon - The Only Animal (Vancouver, BC)
I3) Intimate History - An Untied Artists production (UK)

Vancouver, BC:  Three cheers for the new Wine Bar  at The Cultch. The Olympic road-closures are at the stage where part of Pacific Boulevard and both the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts are closed to traffic so to get from my place anywhere involves ferreting out new routes.  To make sure we were in time for our Micro-Theatre adventure, we set off early along the E. Hastings route to Commercial. Although until just beyond Main Street traffic moved at a snail's pace, after that the pace picked up and we were actually at The Cultch with a good half an hour to spare after collecting our tickets. So we settled down comfortably in the Wine Bar to enjoy a glass of wine while we waited to be called for our show.

The Passion Project
Director/Creator   Reid Farrington
Pacific Theatre and the PuSh Festival
Pacific Theatre
an 27 to Feb 6, 2010

Vancouver, BC:  When I initially read the description of The Passion Project as "video art installation- meets theatre" I wasn't sure what to think about it other than that it would be novel and different. After seeing it, I concluded that think is the wrong word. It is more a sensory experience than a cognitive experience.  And what on earth do I mean by that?  Let me try and articulate my experience.

Arriving somewhat early, as usual, I await the start of the show in the lobby of the theatre. A suggestion of what is to come is shown by three sets of grainy black and white images projected onto a sackcloth screen. As more people arrive we are taken round to the back entrance of the theatre and told that we should wander around during the performance for an interactive experience.

The theatre space has been reconfigured and some rows of seats removed. There is a 10 x 10 square delineated by rows of panel with loops of ropes hanging overhead. Around the square there is room for the audience to walk. The lit set is quite striking. The ropes and sack-cloth screens evoke a sense of medieval times; the demarcated space, a sense of confinement.

Ivanov by Anton Chekhov
A new version by Tom Stoppard
Directed by Victor Vasuta
United Players of Vancouver
Jericho Arts Centre
Jan 22 to Feb 14, 2010

Vancouver, BC: I really enjoyed United Player's production of Anton Chekhov's Ivanov, although I did find myself wanting to hand Nickolay Ivanov a strong dose of some psychotropic  medication and a referral to a psychotherapist. But that's the infuriatingly hapless self-absorbed character that Chekhov created.

In the title role, Noel Johansen showed us a  man who has lost his way in every aspect of his world - his marriage, his work and his finances. Married to the ailing Anna (Tamara McCarthy), whose wealthy parents disowned her when she converted from Judaism to marry him, Ivanov has "fallen out of  love"  with Anna. He leaves her at home each evening while he goes to  visit the  Lebedevs,  the affable Pavel (Dave Campbell) and his  wife Zinaida (Christine Ianetta). Zinaida is a wealthy moneylender to whom Ivanov is severely in debt. And then there is Sasha.

Best Before
by Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Haug  & Stefan Kaegil)
The Cultch, PuSh Festival and Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad
The Cultch
Jan 29 to Feb 6, 2010

Vancouver, BC:  As a computer-nerd/technophile of long-standing I was intrigued by the concept of taking the multi-player video game concept into the theatre and eagerly anticipated the experience of my personal avatar interacting with some 200 other avatars to conjure up  a new society in BestLand.

Best Before, an innovative  audience interactive production was developed for the PuSh Festival by Helgard Haug  & Stefan Kaegil of Rimini Protokoll, an  experimental theatre company based in Germany, working with local playwright/dramaturg, Tim Carlson.  Rimini Protokoll create  novel forms of "reality" theatre, casting non-professional actors for their "theatre of experts" projects  and often employing technology as a form of equal partner in the work.  For example for  Best before, as well as the usual team of set, video, sound and light designers, the "backstage" or "offline" development team included a computer game designer, character animator, and programmer

Nevermore - The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe
Writer, Composer, Director  Jonathan Christenson
Production Designer Bretta Gerecke
Choreographer Laura Krewski
Sound Designer Wade  Staples
A Catalyst Theatre production presented with the:-
Arts Club Theatre Company, Cultch, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival,  Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad
Arts Club Granville Island Stage
Jan 21 to Feb 6, 2010

Vancouver, BC:  Wow, they just keep coming. One stunning show after another. I just love the cornucopia of art that is spilling out all over my beloved  city of Vancouver during the Cultural Olympiad. Nevermore is  another superb production not to be missed. The visual aspects  are  spectacular, the music haunting and the effect is strangely disturbing and other-worldly.

As you take your seat, you see a  bank of panels on an otherwise bare stage and think minimalism and simplicity. But these panels will confound your imagination and be transformed by brilliant lighting into transparent moving screens behind and through which strange characters move.  Clad in strikingly geometric and oddly shaped black and white costumes, coloured by red, blue and purple lights, these characters inhabit two bizarre worlds, the imagined "real" world of Edgar Allan  Poe's bitter life and those equally dark and bitter worlds created in his stories and poems.

Sõ  Percussion plays Steve Reich and David Lang
Push Festival and Music on Main
Heritage Hall
Jan 24 and 25, 2010

Vancouver BC: My insanely busy life living and writing on theatre, food, travel, and of course dance - the doing of it , not the writing about it, leaves me little time to go to music events but when I read about Sõ Percussion in the PuSh brochure, I could not resist going to this performance.  Rhythm is what my life's about at the moment - I feel the beat - all the time. Maybe a different kind of beat. I'm talking samba, chachacha, waltz, tango but rhythm trumps melody when dance and dance music plays all the time when I am at thome.  Since I had no idea what the range of percussion music would encompass, this would be an opportunity for me to learn something new. So, for any of you who, like me, know painfully little about this subject, I did some pre-event research and spent some fascinating time reading and listening at the websites of So Percussion , Steve Reich and David Lang.