Punctuate! mounts Silence Project
The Silence Project Theatre: Punctuate! Created by and starring: Elizabeth Hobbs, Sheiny Satanove, Andrea Jorawsky, Elliott James, Julie Ferguson Where: The TACOS Space, 10005 80th Ave. Running: Wednesday through Monday Tickets: Tix on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare. ca) Shhhh. Punctuate! Theatre is back. And in defiance of its exclamatory flourish, the original Punctuate! creation that runs through Monday at The TACOS Space is a hushhush affair. Literally.
The Silence Project is, says artistic director Elizabeth Hobbs, “an experiment in communicating without emotional and verbal language: No verbal text and no music ... Physical theatre, telling a story through breath and movement.”
This is a far cry from Punctuate!’s debut, a 2010 production of George F. Walker’s corrosively verbal and witty The End of Civilization, in which a middle- class couple is abruptly ejected from their normal way of life on, as the wife puts it, “an odyssey of doom.” And it’s perhaps even farther from Judith, a 2011 Punctuate! production of Howard Barker’s difficult and densely texted play about the biblical heroine who beheaded an enemy general while having sex with him. Even Punctuate!’s two clown shows, Vice Versa and Vice (Re) Versa, fielded characters who talked.
“We like pushing ourselves in crazy ways!” As Hobbs, Punctuate!’s resident director, describes The Silence Project, its isolated main character, one of 11 played by the five-member cast, “journeys into a dream world — absurd, heightened, expressionist — where she encounters other characters and learns to connect and communicate. She abandons her own world and rediscovers play and love, how to reach out and help others.”
“She accumulates connections with people,” says Hobbs. “And in the process, she learns how to own herself. All the characters she meets are facets of herself.”
Collaboration is invariably the Punctuate! mode, says Hobbs, who’s also the associate artistic director of Theatre Prospero. “The Silence Project, though, is their first “full-on collective creation.” And no matter what their individual specialty, every member of the company — including Hobbs herself, producer Sheiny Satanove and production manager Julie Ferguson who plays the main character — shows up onstage.
The inspiration for The Silence Project, Hobbs says, was a question posed by Punctuate!’s Elliott James a year ago: “Who doesn’t go to the theatre? And why? Language or cultural barriers? Hearing impairment?”
The thought came to the troupe members at a t rau m at ic ti me in their short history, the tragic death last summer of cohort Adam Cope. “We felt we needed to learn to be a company together again,” says Hobbs.
What they discovered, through the “ridiculously hard” means of fashioning a production collectively, with no specified writer or director, was “a new-found love of creation.”
Collective creation is wildly labour- and time-intensive, Hobbs concedes. The rest of the Punctuate! season embraces creativity of a more usual sort, in the form of producing existing scripts: Ron Chambers’s Dirt, last seen in Edmonton in the mid-’90s, and Hannah Moscovitch’s breakthrough East of Berlin, produced at Theatre Network in 2009.