Drop expectations and cherish moment
Created by Njo Kong Kie. Music Picnic & Point of View in association with Canadian Stage. Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs. Runs to May 6. Canstage.com Just like that kid in kindergarten who coloured like there were no lines in the book, Torontonian Njo Kong Kie has refused to obey usual theatrical rules in Picnic in the Cemetery, now playing at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre.
Picnic in the Cemetery is not a play. It’s not a musical. It’s not a movement work. It’s also not a concert. But somehow it manages to be a little bit of all four.
It is not a high-concept creation, nor is it something meant to evoke randomness. Instead, this strange but cute and fuzzy beast is something like whimsy, conjured into four-dimensional shape for 70 minutes, only to disappear again into the ether.
Picnic in the Cemetery is probably not a good idea for anyone wedded to the traditional conventions of performance or theatre. But for anyone with a sense of adventure and a willingness to live in the moment without narrative expectation, there is a lot to savour in this child of Njo’s invention.
Picnic in the Cemetery was first created for a festival in Macau in 2013, and features a largely Macau-based cast and creative team. Njo, who grew up in Macau before moving to Canada, is artist-in-residence with Music Picnic at Canadian Stage this season and next.
This is his second show for Canadian Stage this year, and there is more to come in 2019.
Picnic in the Cemetery features Njo on piano alongside violinist Hong Iat U, cellist Nicholas Yee and mime Iris Chan Chi Ian. All are in costume, on a stage littered with assorted objects separated by diaphanous scrims that serve a variety of projec- tions, including titles and other bits of information that separate the show into segments.
The piece begins and ends quietly. The music in between — all written by Njo — covers a wide range of moods. All of the more than a dozen songs are instrumental. Much of Njo’s music relies on minimaliststyle patterns that play with each other and then break out into little solo or duo turns with clearly identifiable melodies.
Instead of lyrics for each of these instrumental songs, we get video and movement and lights, all integrated with skill by Fung Kwok Kee Gabriel and Ao Ieong Weng Fong.
Once you hand any conventional expectations over to simply being in the moment, the show becomes a gently entertaining and wry reminder of what it was like to drift from one daydream to another when we were little children still in awe of the world around us.
Or, if you’d rather try this at home, you can go lie down in your backyard and stare for an hour at the spring sky. Classical music writer John
Terauds is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.