The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Zuppa mixes talent with technology
App-based piece Vista being unveiled Friday
Zuppa Theatre Co. is very much about creating memorable moments that linger with you long after you’ve left whatever particular space they’ve commandeered in the name of ground-breaking performance.
But the company’s latest creation Vista is very much in and of the moment — and still in the process of being created — prior to its Friday unveiling as part of the multi-disciplinary Mayworks Halifax festival taking place through the end of the month.
Mayworks Halifax switched to an online model for this year as soon as it became evident that the health safety requirements of the COVID19 pandemic meant pubic events could not be possible. A schedule of online performances, screenings and podcasts can be found at mayworkshalifax.ca, including the expanding exhibition Voices From the Pandemic: COVID19 and Work.
Zuppa Theatre was way ahead of the flattening of the curve with its app-based piece Vista, addressing the importance of public health with a guided tour through urban spaces, meant to be experienced alone, making it perfectly suited for social distancing. Much different from its original incarnation which debuted in the U.K. in 2019, this month’s edition will be a unique presentation based on first-hand observations by those who are currently combating the novel coronavirus in one capacity or another.
“It’s not quite possible to have an accurate philosophical reflection on what’s happening right now,” says Zuppa troupe member Stewart Legere. “But to speak to people who are workers, currently working in the field ... they’re not professional poets, they’re just responding with their experience.
“It just so happens that it’s all quite meaningful. A conversation with a person whose job you never even knew existed becomes a meaningful conversation because you realize how many cogs in the machine are usually overlooked.”
TALENT AND TECHNOLOGY
Vista marks the third major combination of the Zuppa troupe’s talents and technology, an exploration which began with The Archive of Missing Things, staged at Dalhousie University’s Killam Library and elsewhere starting in 2017. A year later came the impressive and expansive This Is Nowhere, which turned downtown Halifax into an interactive stage as participants let an app guide them from one site to another to witness scenes connected to a secret plan to shape the future of Halifax.
Unlike those two shows, Vista is completely digital, with no outside interaction with cast members or attendees, and much like the current health crisis in which we find ourselves, it will be subject to change.
“In a way, it’s a kind of companion piece to This Is Nowhere, or a way to think about doing something like that that doesn’t involve 100 live performers,” says Zuppa’s co-artistic director Alex Mclean.
“This is much more about asking these kinds of questions in a way that’s completely digital, and therefore much more available.”
U.K. PREMIERE
Zuppa Theatre premiered a version of Vista last September at the International Agatha Christie Festival in the seaside U.K. town of Torquay. It was commissioned by the festival’s director James Tyson to create a piece involving the theme of public health and how it relates to large and small communities.
Working with This Is
Nowhere’s principal writer Kate Cayley, Zuppa members started talking to health professionals, city planners and social workers in Halifax and the U.K. for their thoughts on this theme, and set about to find a way to combine their information with the same digital engine that powered This Is Nowhere, which combined story details with GPS coordinates and directions.
The result is like a combination walking tour and podcast, with no live element, which means that anyone who wants to engage with it can do it on their own time. After Torquay, it seemed like a pretty short jump from there to tailoring Vista for Halifax, also a waterfront town, without changing much beyond the predetermined locations.
But then COVID-19 happened.
“So we had a piece about public health, which originally had poetry and recorded theatrical dialogue. And now we realized that it obviously had to talk about COVID because it’s the biggest national scale public health crisis in our lifetime,” says Mclean, noting that the original basis for the project, talking to health professionals in the field, began to supersede the need for dramatic dialogue.
“Now what it’s become, as we enter the final stretch, is we’re reimagining what the thing is. We even considered changing the name because it’s become quite different from what it was in the U.K.”
BRAND NEW EXPERIENCE
The end result will be something wholly unique in Zuppa Theatre’s history of work that consistently plays with and expands upon our traditional notions of what dramatic performance is capable of.
Because it’s on your phone, in whatever space you choose to experience it in, it may not have the same level of intimacy as a live event with actors right in front of you. But it does carry a level of immediacy that is unlike any they’ve ever attempted, compared to other works that they’ve considered current and in response to the present.
“But that present context is usually what’s happening in the form of theatre, what’s happening in the discourse around this idea or that idea, and those scopes tend to be bigger, over a couple of years or an even longer period of time,” says Legere.
“The context of Vista is so immediate because we’re currently still in it, and everyone is responding immediately to what’s happening right now.”
For full information on how to download and experience Vista starting on Friday, visit zuppatheatre.com/ show/ vista. The app also includes a version designed for the deaf and hard of hearing.