Two sisters break new boundaries
Latest play offers twist on Egyptian myth
If you called Catch The Keys “party planners,” you wouldn’t exactly be wrong. But you wouldn’t even come close to describing the cutting-edge indie production company that undertakes “multi-disciplinary performance parties” or “creative events solutions,” experimental new music mash-ups or “Edmonton’s only travelling haunted house.”
Or, in the case of Snout, the Catch The Keys production opening Thursday as part of Azimuth Theatre’s Emerging Company Showcase, an original poetic deconstruction of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris myth, rooted in modern dance.
Did I mention the “living soundscape,” the inclusive set design, and the projections in the round? Or the fact you’ll be experiencing Snout while sitting inside “a giant blanket fort,” on cushions, benches or the floor?
Catch The Keys is, by origin, a sister duo who share the experimental gene and a certain effervescence of personality. Between them, the Dart sisters, Megan and Beth, are an unclassifiable repository of artistic skills, talents and enthusiasms, who regard the old boundaries between the arts as so much dead air.
The former is a professional writer and playwright; the latter is an experienced director and stage manager. “We’re always looking at ways to combine the disciplines, and stretch our understanding of performance art,” says Megan Dart. “I’m interested in immersion theatre, where the audience is part of the world of the characters.”
Catch The Keys’s Dead Centre of Town, for example, ventures annually into the graveyard of Edmonton history to exhume our ghosts in an immersive horror story/theatre experience that takes its audiences through locales with a past. Their Nextfest “performance parties,” invariably packed to the rafters, are bashes that infiltrate their audiences with 30 to 50 artists of every kind of specialty, sound poetry to sound installation, in a freewheeling event that operates on the spontaneity principle.
Snout started out as a Megan Dart short story that “gave traditional Egyptian mythology a modern spin,” says the writer. Theatre beckoned because, she says, “the language is very poetic, so it lends itself to contemporary dance.”
As Dart describes it, our narrator Ori (Ben Stevens), “a childlike savant and keeper of the fates,” invites us into the world of Jim (Mat Simpson) and Lynn (Ainsley Hillyard of Good Women Dance Collective), “an every-couple whose relationship is starting to fall apart.” This disintegration is propelled by Ori’s manipulative and destructive counterpart Wolf (Steve Pirot), one of the world’s natural underminers, who “embodies everything dark and chaotic.”
For Dart, the route between being a prose writer/poet and a playwright had an impromptu quality that seems to speak Catch The Keys language. “My sister had me write a play for her university project, The Revolution, and the deadline went from two months to two weeks,” says Dart. That’s how Anatomy of the Heart came to be penned on a flight home from Toronto. “Lots of technology, music, visual artists ... it was huge. We always say that Catch The Keys was born out of The Revolution,” Dart laughs.
Their second project, The Art of Pretend, was similarly experimental. It started with a photography series, and added music, text and movement to tell a story.
With Snout, the Darts are inviting an audience of 40 tops to “be free to explore how things will be shaped. ... The Wolf may sit down next to you. And the design itself will move around the space. You’ll become part of the design and the set,” Dart laughs. “I’m expecting a very different experience every night. All I can say is you’ll never go to a Catch The Keys production and have a conventional experience.”