A SHOUT-OUT TO CRITTERS
Play give animals a voice
Forget TED Talks and the Amazon expansion, in a real coup Vancouver is getting the third annual Slime conference.
And, though the conference itself isn’t real, the world premiere of a play by a major international playwright is.
Slime, which brings humans and animals together in a discussion about the future of the planet, is by Bryony Lav ery, the British playwright who wrote the 1998 Tonynominated drama Frozen, as well as several other plays and books.
“In all scenarios except this one, this play would premiere at a venue like the National Theatre in London,” director Kendra Fanconi said.
But Vancouver’s Fanconi was in the right place at the right time. She met Lavery at the Banff Centre, and “fell in lov e” with the play when only the first act had been written.
At that point, Lavery and her dramaturge Ruth Little felt that they needed to bringin a sound designer. As the artistic director of The Only Animal, Fanconi was no stranger to technically challenging plays. The local theatre company ’s previous productions include last year’s The City and the City, which features a story that takes place in two different cities that occupy the same space, and The One That Got Away, the company’s signature play-in-a-pool.
“Because of the way The Only Animal works, Iknew about those needs to integrate design early, in
this case to find the voice of the animals, to inform how the play wanted to mov e forward,” Fanconi said. “So we stepped in as dev elopment partners.”
The play is set at a conference in the near future, where animals have been invited. Seven actors (Lisa Baran, Pedro Chamale, Teo Saefkow, Anais West, Edwardine Van Wyk, Sophia Wolfe, and Mason Temple) portray translators, and also voice 100 animals.
“We felt that the play was really about the act of listeningand what happens when we listen to the natural world,” Fanconi said.
“It felt important that we not only create a play with those languages in it but that we learn to speak those languages.”
A part of the process was teachingthe actors how to v oice the animals, includingseals, otters, and cormorants.
“When Bryony’s writing a scene with a polar bear, she’ll dialogue for the bear,” Fanconi said.
“We had to investigate these animal languages and try to translate them into the kinds of things that we know polar bears might talk about. They talk about danger, mating, nurturing, where to find food. And they feel pain and suffer. We had to take the words that we knew, and translate the script into a series of sound cues that we call the animal library.”
When the actors came into v arious workshops, there was a library of animal sounds. “They can get their degree now in animal language,” Lavery said.
James Coomber is doing sound design, and April Viczko is doing costumes. To represent the animals, set designer Shizuka Kai has made puppets out of discarded plastic.
“We took the average amount of plastic the average Canadian generates in one year and used it in the show,” Fanconi said. Accordingto 2012 Conference Board of Canada stats, that amounts to nearly 360 kilograms of plasticwaste.
“Ithink it’s undeniable that this is what humans as a species have added to the geological layers of the earth, the ‘plasticsphere’ as it’s known,” she said. “It’s an actual geological layer, and we thought it was important to discuss humanity’s own slime, but in a way that’s transformative. And that takes the problems of this age, and the solutions, and pushes both slightly into the future.”