Work ‘untangles’ child sex abuse
Avant-garde dance/theatre piece mulls explosive contradictions
It’s always a challenge to bring new works to the stage. Harder still, if your creations are outside the ordinary or you are an emerging artist. That is why events such as the six year-old rEvolver Theatre Festival are so important to the continuing evolution of new Canadian performance.
Supported by funds from the Canadian Council for the Arts, Government of Canada, B.C. Arts Council and the City of Vancouver, the 11-day-long festival showcases 11 mainstage shows and four free micro-performances or other related special events.
Four of these — Fuchsia Future, Geologic Formations, Good Things to Do, Probability and Asking Alice — are world premieres. Macbeth Muet is a West Coast premiere from Montreal’s La Fille Du Laitier. Participants are selected from across the country and then presented at rEvolver by Vancouver’s Upintheair Theatre, which developed the event.
Among the works at this year’s festival is 12 Minute Madness. An avant-garde dance/theatre piece exploring the impacts of childhood sexual abuse on the victim’s psyche. The deeply personal, somewhat autobiographical piece is written and directed by Raïna von Waldenburg. Modelled after a full-length play in German, titled Das Kaspar Theatre (the Puppet Theatre), the 40 minute-long piece was first presented at the Vancouver Fringe. It is described as being about “arched backs, open hearts, and raunchy groins — the dark and hilarious inner world of a sexual abuse survivor.”
As noted above, rEvolver provides a venue for those works that fall outside the mainstream.
Von Waldenburg spent two decades as a full-time faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she taught physical theatre. She has been celebrated for her original, edgy solo performances. She is currently on faculty at the University of the Fraser Valley, and the 12
member all-female cast is comprised of her former or present students.
“I am specifically based in post-modern, physical theatre as developed by Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, which is kind of out there on the periphery,” said von Waldenburg. “It’s a super awesome, body-based epic approach to channelling the larger picture of what the play is about. It’s a mix of dance/theatre which has scenes that are blocked and others where the ensemble is choreographing itself right in front of you, which is pretty amazing.”
12 Minute Madness takes von Waldenburg’s own childhood
experience of violence and sexual abuse and “untangles it” through the actors. The cast expresses the explosive contradictory feelings which arise in the character of Marlena in the fist dozen minutes of discovering a repressed memory of being abused by her grandfather. In individual and group configurations, the inner workings and conflicted experiences of the victim are brought out and von Waldenburg is up front admitting a lot if it isn’t easy and also not without controversial content and a least one cast member felt impelled to quit because she felt the language of her character too offensive.
“The first disclaimer is that every
character in this play is a part of a woman’s psyche, and not a real person,” she said. “The second disclaimer is that (characters) Skinny and Cigar call Smoker out on her slurs. The problem with truth is that, to quote Jordan B. Peterson, “in order to be able to think you have to be offensive.”
Fair warning then. While this version of the show is with an all-female cast, it was never designed to be.
“I really just felt that it was right for this particular production to close in on the female experience telling this story,” she said. “And I love the fact that there are so many of us in the room. There is something so powerful about seeing a group of women
tackling such subject matter with their bodies and movement.”
She also admits that there is something about acting out how “the mind shatters itself into all these pieces to deal with this thing called “discovered memory,” which is bound to be intense on the cast. To get to where the show resolves, it has to leap from places like decimation, denial, hiding and — a particularly difficult portion of the text — hate.
“Life is so many shades of grey and this gets into that deeply and up front, so be prepared,” she said.
When it comes to 12 Minute Madness, the adage of what doesn’t drive you crazy makes you stronger may really come into focus. For those who like their art served up sans saccharine filler, rEvolver Theatre Festival is a budget entry into the world of new art works.