New wave of under-30 Edmonton artists show o their stu on the last weekend of Nextfest
Festival offers showcase for new wave of artists under 30
These days, the Roxy Theatre is lined — literally — with young and moody faces. They gaze out at you from the walls, some with active curiosity, some with a cool appraising look, some with secret amusement.
And some don’t look out at all; they’re turned our way, but they’re assessing their own reflection, thinking their own thoughts, dreaming their own dreams.
They’re the paintings, the signature poster images, of Next fests past, on the walls that slope down toward the stage. Together, they constitute a high-intensity group portrait of the Nextfest generation: the new wave of under-30 artists. And they’re the raison d’être of the festival that’s all about showcasing the way their brains tick.
In the corner of the lobby, under the ironic gaze of another Nextfest portrait with a particularly turbulent inner life (and hair), a rumpled bed is sometimes occupied by a squirmy, restless couple. The stars of Mindhive Collective’s Studies of Sleep try to doze off while a DJ spins, and buoyant insomniacs drink beer, discuss what they’ve just seen, air their views on the state of the art, pat themselves down to find their tickets for what’s next.
On a Thursday night, after Nextfest’s first experiment in hosting an alternative “gallery walk” through the cafés, wine bars, bistros, shops and tattoo galleries of 124th Street, there’s been a reception at the Duchess, home of extravagant French pastries that look like art installations themselves. After that, post-macaron so to speak, the Roxy is a happening place.
Inside I saw a trio of clowns make a “fourth wall” joke that was not just funny but touching. When does that happen? Vice Re-Versa, the inspired companion piece to Punctuate! Theatre’s Vice Versa, gives us a father-son duo of earnest and lugubrious aspect, whose relationship is destabilized by a third party. A slinky and sinister black widow (Andrea Jorawsky) has insinuated herself into the griefcoloured joint lives of Tonk (Adam Cope) and his son Fozby (Elliott James).
Fozby’s real mama is present too, as ashes in an urn with an uncanny resemblance to a cocktail shaker. But Tonk’s attention to sorrow has been seriously diverted by the sexy woman in the high-heeled boots, with an eagle eye for a man’s cash. The show is a kooky clown thriller, which bounces in jaunty fashion between lurid plot developments and the poignant adjustments of a son with his red nose out of joint. Cope, James and Jorawsky have claimed a clown territory that is their own, and stake it out with comic rigour that only occasionally loses focus.
Seven Steps To Success, by the comic improv team of Ben Gorodetsky and Mat Simpson, is a playful demonstration of free-associative creativity in which, like theatrical Iron Chef, the participants have given themselves a single ingredient from which to cook up something fantastical. It’s a simple object: a ladder. Of course, they also have a theatre, complete with stage and audience, to play with. And in the course of the show, they use both. The vignettes tease out, spatially and physically, ideas about upward mobility or the parent-child relationship from the object at hand. In one, the ladder becomes a mountain to be climbed by an over-achiever; in another, the mast of a pirate ship. Some scenes tick better than others, in truth, not so much because of the invention but the actual spoken text. What sounds funny when tossed off by an improviser in the heat of the moment doesn’t always work as dialogue spoken by characters. The performers, though, are energetic and charming.
Resonate is a collection of dance-inspired theatre pieces curated by the Good Women Dance Collective, whose multi-disciplinary creativity apparently knows no bounds or boundaries. There’s fun to be had in Julianna Shipanoff’s witty The Office Piano, set to a percussion score constructed entirely from the clack of a manual typewriter (Vik Chu). As a man types, a corps of five pliable dancers create the choreography of his typed inspirations, on the spot: every writer’s dream.
Samantha Ranson’s Cimex Lectularius gives us an ensemble of insects who hatch into perpetual motion, scrabbling blindly toward evolution into something more vertical, more erect. The dancers go intraspecies with alert physicality, and no regard whatsoever for their knee cartilage.
The standout piece is Richard Lee’s The Shallows, in which the charismatic Lee uses his dancer’s body to chart the serial circuitry of his life. As a guitarist plays and sings of loss, appearing onstage then vanishing mysteriously from time to time, a biography-as-map emerges. Lee has said Google mapping was his inspiration, in particular the route from his family home to the university. And you do get a sense of an identity coming of age, in the stage landscape here. He is his own metaphor, on legs.
Nextfest runs through Sunday at the Roxy, Azimuth’s Living Room Playhouse, and a whole bunch of other venues. Check the sked at nextfest.ca.