Tasty theatre
Fresh Meat festival offers bite-sized productions
Its name suggests a slaughter, but the Fresh Meat theatre festival is actually a pretty convivial place.
Running weekends Oct. 15 to 24 in the Arts Court Studio, the fourth-annual event offers local artists a place to try out new, short shows, most works in progress, before habitually generous audiences. That audience mindset is not a bad thing when, like Leslie Cserepy, you’re not sure how your show is actually going to unfold.
Cserepy, whose stage roles have included the despised office manager John Williamson in the excellent Glengarry Glen Ross at The Gladstone in 2014, is performing Slow Burn with Chris Hannay at Fresh Meat. It’s an improvisational show that is written and directed as it’s performed, but it’s improvisation with a difference, according to Cserepy, a more theatrical and cohesive show than your standardissue, bar-glasses-clanking-in-the-background improv.
He says Slow Burn is also less concerned with eliciting laughs than a lot of improv. “The goal of our show is to see if we can make people care through improvisation. We want to leave people (thinking), ‘I really cared about those two guys on stage having a genuine conversation.’ ”
Pushing to that level and wondering if people will like it “really kind of scares us,” he adds.
But if there’s one place to be scared, it’s probably Fresh Meat. Audiences know they’re going to see new works at varying stages of completion, explains Cserepy, who has previously performed at the festival. “They’re looking to have a good time and see different and original work they haven’t seen before. That’s what I like about it.”
Cserepy and Hannay’s show is one of 10 at this year’s festival and one of 40 that have booked into the event since its inception. All shows are 20 minutes long and push the envelope of live performance, encouraging artists to buck convention and ask the question, “What is a play?”
Other shows include Stephen and Me in which a young woman falls deeply in love with Stephen Harper, although she’s never met him. Also on hand: the indispensable Jesse Buck (Odyssey Theatre, A Company of Fools, Cirque du Soleil’s Alegria) in Mr. Eff, an homage to traditional 2D animation in a present-day world sorely in need of heroes.
Élise Gauthier also has a new, bilingual show, Pandora. Performed by her and Alex Zabloski, it blends poetry, music and more in a revisiting of the myth of Pandora.
Mixing art forms is simply how she expresses herself, says Gauthier, who you may have seen striding about high in the sky as a member of the Ottawa Stilt Union. She began writing Pandora in 2009 as a straight theatre piece, but wasn’t satisfied.
“I realized I’m not very good at writing normal dialogue. I’m more
It’s when I gave myself permission to write in a more poetic style that words flowed.
interested in poetry, in approaching it from a different angle. It’s when I gave myself permission to write in a more poetic style that words flowed and I was able to understand what I was writing better.”
Unsurprising, then, to recall that she played Roxane in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, a show written in rhyming couplets, in a 2012 production at The Gladstone.
Gauthier has not previously performed at Fresh Meat, but has been an audience member.
Those audiences, she noticed, were ready for anything.
“In some theatres in Ottawa, the audiences maybe don’t want to be surprised, which is too bad. So having things like Fresh Meat where you can go a little outside the box is good.”