Relationships provide fodder for performers
Documentary focuses on intriguing life on the Canadian fringe festival circuit
Back in 2013, Calgarian Natalie Watson figured enough was enough.
Every year during the Calgary Fringe Festival and other festivals across Canada there would be murmurings about the need for a documentary about exactly what it’s like to be a fringe performer in Canada.
She teamed up with Ottawa fringe artist Nancy Kenny, who that year was touring her hit show Roller Derby Saved My Life, and budding filmmaker and fringe performer Cory Thibert. They agreed to follow four sets of fringe artists through the entire 2014 Canadian fringe circuit.
That meant 10 cities in the space of a few months, beginning with the London Fringe Festival and ending with the Vancouver Fringe Festival.
Director Thibert has finished the documentary, entitled On the Fringe, which he premiered earlier this year at the Orlando Fringe Festival and then at Winnipeg and Saskatoon and Calgary. It will show at Metro Cinema in Edmonton on Saturday, Aug. 20 at 7:45 p.m.
The Edmonton Fringe, the oldest on the continent, features prominently in the documentary.
“Edmonton does take up a huge chunk of the documentary, just by virtue of being the biggest,” says Kenny. “And this was one of the cities in which all of our primary, featured performers were here, and all of them had been doing the Fringe since London — since early June. So we had a lot of exhausted Fringe performers working very hard to find their place at this festival.”
“It’s so big, people have to try harder to find their niche here.”
The Edmonton Fringe Festival is the largest in North America, which makes it unique. But there are other factors that set Edmonton apart from other fringe locations. For one thing, says Kenny, it is one of the few places where people will happily take a handbill from performers hawking their shows on the street. She puts that down to the festive air of the fringe site, in part created by the atmosphere of the kickoff parade. Edmonton is the only city in Canada that still has a parade.
“It’s an amazing congregation of performers dressed in funny costumes to get some attention. People are there, and they want to give you their attention.”
As Edmonton is one of only a handful of Fringe festivals that use a star system for reviews in the local daily papers, the documentary examines the pros and cons of this system. Included is an insightful interview with the Edmonton Journal’s veteran theatre critic, Liz Nicholls.
“For Edmonton, because there are so many shows — the system is what people base their choices on. (Otherwise) how do you pick a show when there are over 200 shows? For the audience, that’s an important factor. But it comes with a set of challenges for the performer.”
Edmonton can make or break a Fringe performer. “I think that Edmonton is one of the festivals where you can be the most successful on the circuit, financially successful. That said, the opposite is also true. But it’s the sense of hope that brings performers here, the fact that you can make your summer at the Edmonton Fringe.”
The first of the artists Thibert follows in On the Fringe is Jem Rolls, the spoken-word artist from the United Kingdom who, in 2014, was marking his 100th appearance at a Canadian fringe.
“Jem is an amazing example of how an artist can make the world fringe circuit his oyster,” says Thibert. “He is able to live for the rest of the year off what he makes during the summer fringe circuits he works. He’s an inspiration for so many young artists just starting out.”
So many artists talk about life on the fringe as their extended family. They get to know other artists, form lasting friendships and, in the case of Martin Dockery and Vanessa Quesnelle, they meet, fall in love, get married and tour as a couple.
“One of the things you hear so often from artists is how lonely touring the fringe circuit can be, especially if you have a solo show which so many do. Their marriage has given Martin and Vanessa a built-in support system that so many other artists envy, and for good reason.”
The documentary also features interviews with some of the superstars of the circuit, including Tara Travis, whose solo show The Six Wives of Henry VIII remains one of the most popular shows to come out of the fringe circuit.
There’s also T.J. Dawes, the creator of Burn Job and Chase Padgett, whose musical journey show Six Guitars began on the fringe and is now being booked into theatres across North America.
You can’t be at the Fringe very long without noticing that the “relationship play” — most often referred to as the “relationship comedy” no matter how dark or light — comes in every conceivable stripe, shade, permutation. It’s an elastic and surprising category, as malleable as modern marriage. It takes two to tangle. Everywhere at the festival there are shows that discover surprising new angles to observe the couple.
70 Scenes of Halloween, for example, a strangely mesmerizing loop of repetitions, looks at a marriage and its routines so close up that it dissolves into pixels of cliches, with fleeting glimpses of monsters under its surfaces. The Noel Coward double bill We Were Dancing takes the opposite optic, skimming elegantly and amusingly on a surface designed specially to conceal the turbulence — love at first sight, marriage fracture, financial ruin — underneath.
The Dirty Talk brings two guys, the one kicking and screaming and the other oddly pliant, into a Relationship, for mysterious reasons.
And it doesn’t let them out till they’ve come to a close understanding and a sense of possibility that qualifies for the R word.
In The Panto Girls, an affectionate backstage look at theatre, it’s the Relationship of two working actors, the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella.
After all, they can’t even get into their stage underwear without help from each other: how intimate is that bond?
Nighthawk Rules wonders how on earth you break up with your rowdy best friend, a veritable philosopher of dissipation, to start being a grown-up with a deadening job? It’s a bond, sealed in booze, that you might want to call love.
There’s even a Canadian classic, Salt Water Moon, in lovely form in Cheryl Jameson’s production. In the vintage romantic comedy in which a young man with a gift of the gab returns home to woo his erstwhile sweetheart away from her current fiance.
Airswimming (★★★ Stage 42, Campus St.-Jean Auditorium) fosters its against-the-odds Relationship in the most unexpected of settings, an English hospital for the “criminally insane” in the ’20s. St. Dymphna’s isn’t so much a hospital as a prison, where girls who are wayward, mouthy, resistant to the sexual proprieties, get hidden by their families.
“Shuffle and look crazed,” advises Dora (Kendra Connor), who thinks of herself as a soldier and St. Dymphna as the trenches. “They prefer it that way.” She’s already been “stationed” there for two years when “not so bright” rich girl Persephone (Kenny McKillop) arrives, thinking she’ll just call daddy and be out in a flash. That’s where they will stay, forgotten, for the next 50 years, a sort of horror story wrapped in sadness wrapped in a very unconventional relationship comedy — apparently based on a true story.
What they do for half a century is the chronicle of Charlotte Jones’s 1997 “comedy,” another fascinating choice from director Amy DeFelice. They wash and sweep, they jettison their previous lives and survive on stories. To stave off despair at their losses, they tolerate, then embrace, each other’s stridently contrasting alter-egos: Dorph, the articulate one, as the girl soldier, an admirer of Joan of Arc and other feisty female go-getters of history; Porph, in a blond wig, as Doris Day, the icon of sunny female positivity. Persephone may be addled, but she has an encyclopedia knowledge of Doris’s movies.
In a dark underworld where spring never comes and fantasy is all, sometimes they go airswimming, a ballet that would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
The scenes are designed to convey the sense of vast time that never passes and is always now. But the production hasn’t quite clarified itself so far into conveying a sense of a developing interdependence. It feels a bit all over the place. But the performances from Connor as the brisk Dora, who develops a nurturing streak, and McKillop as the more bewildered Doris worshipper, strike notes that will make you smile, and tear up. The moment Dora can’t remember the year, and Persephone’s blithe consolation that it doesn’t really matter anyway, will break your heart.
It’s a marriage of sorts, the sustaining kind that becomes a habit. And the ending is both chilling and somehow beautifully satisfying.
Everywhere at the festival there are shows that discover surprising new angles to observe the couple.