LOVE, TRAUMA AND OTHER MATTERS
Chinook Series embraces three performing arts festivals
In 1996, a retired couple in their late 60s was driving from Calgary to their rustic family cabin at Gull Lake when it happened: a random act with terrible consequences. A car somehow ended up on the wrong side of the divide, lost control, became airborne, flipped, hit the driver’s side of the couple’s car. This violent accident turned out to be a test of true love if ever there was one.
Twenty years later, Megan Dart’s Ursa Major, premièring Wednesday, returns to this moment to follow the arc of a remarkable love story. The characters are the Dart sisters’ own grandparents.
The Catch the Keys Production, directed by the playwright’s sister Beth Dart, launches Workshop West’s Canoe Festival. It’s one of three performing arts festivals — including Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Movement Festival and Fringe Theatre Adventures — that are pooling their offerings Jan. 27 to Feb. 7 to warm this Edmonton winter under the Chinook Series banner.
“Our grandmother had comparatively minor injuries,” says Megan Dart. Pried from the car by the Jaws of Life, their grandfather was in a coma for months. And when he emerged, “able to walk, with some small control of language,” he was a man in decline.
His wife never wavered in the decade that followed until his death. “I was so struck by our grandmother’s decision to care for him at home,” says Megan. Her sister agrees. “It’s such an example of devotion. They were madly in love from the start.”
They remember their grandparents as “a lot of fun,” Megan says. “They were always having people over for cocktail parties. And (we) kids were always included.” Beth remembers her grandfather in the kitchen serving up “kid martoonies,” i.e. Sprite with olives on a stick. “They were incredible ballroom dancers.”
Beth remembers idyllic family summers out at the lake. Ursa Major, she explains, is named for the constellation you can see most clearly from Gull Lake. “We’d run in from the beach completely covered with sand. Our grandmother would sit us on her lap, and wash off our feet in a porcelain basin.” Memories like those have been in the air at rehearsals, she reports. “There have been some tears shed … We took the whole (production) team to the lake for the weekend so they could get a feel of it.”
The translation of personal trauma into performance happens elsewhere in Canoe, devoted to “boundary-breaking theatre” created by the artists who perform it. As Workshop West’s Vern Thiessen explains, “Edmonton already has the biggest of uncurated festivals, in August. We wanted to give Edmonton something it didn’t have, a big, curated performing arts festival in the winter,” an extravaganza like One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo in Calgary or PUSH in Vancouver.
Crash, for example, a touring solo show from Soulpepper Theatre, arguably Toronto’s most exciting company, is the Dora-Award-winning work of Pamela Mala Sinha. “It’s a fantastic, emotionally searing performance,” says Thiessen of a character who’s “telling a story of a traumatic event, a love story, a story of a sexual assault and survival. There’s music, there’s dance; it’s really harrowing.”
“Almost all the pieces deal with trauma,” he says of a Canoe lineup that includes Elena Belyea’s vivid performance in her solo show Fringe audiences saw last summer, Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable. Mouthpiece, a two-hander on tour for the first time, takes us, in a variety of theatrical, choreographic and musical routes, into the psyche of a woman dealing with her mom’s death.
“In all of them there’s darkness, certainly, but a certain kind of hopefulness at the end,” says Thiessen of the Canoe shows. “They take us on a traumatic journey, but make sure we come out the other side.”
There’s a striking array of theatrical styles and experiences on display, he points out — “dance, movement, audience participation.”
“I want people to come out of all our shows going ‘Wow; I just saw a fantastic performance’!”