HUNCH Fest for those who go it alone
Artistic director pulls together three great solo performances into one three-night festival
Life gives you lemons. You make lemonade. Life gives you retinoblastoma at the age of two and you lose an eye. You make a one-woman comedy titled Blindside and tour it around the world fringe circuits, focused on normalizing the way people live with and look at disabilities.
Vancouver-based Stephanie Morin-Robert is the creator of Blindside and also the artistic director of the HUNCH Festival. This new addition to the local cultural landscape celebrates and showcases unique solo performances. Think of it as a place for those pieces that may have grown up in the Fringe circuit to get remounted in a new setting.
“Taking a show that was quite personal to me, that started off as a childhood trauma, and make it something I can stage and share has been a really meaningful growth experience for me,” Morin-Robert said.
“So I thought I should do something to provide those sorts of opportunities to other folks and peers. Because I tour so much, I don’t really get to connect with the Vancouver community, so this gives me a good chance to get grounded in it and build something.”
Morin-Robert is a graduate of Concordia University’s Performance and Contemporary Dance program and has a lengthy resume of work done in Montreal as well as other Canadian cities. She began her career while still in high school and completed her education on the road with the Tout feu tout flamme touring musical company. This insight on performing arts across different ages has made her an active lecturer and educator as well.
Besides her own work, her resume includes a continuing creative residency with the Dusty Flower Shop, the studio/performance space affiliated with the Dusty Flower Pot Cabaret crew.
“Alain Lafrance, who is also a solo performer and former GM of the Montreal Fringe Festival, and I are collaborating to present HUNCH,” she said. “We worked together before and both wound up here, so it made sense to come together for this. As it’s the first year, we are working on limited budgets, so that past experience helps.”
Understanding how solo performers experience limited opportunities to perform their work, HUNCH was conceived as a way to deliver access to audiences for shows that are proven from performers who have “blown away” Morin-Robert.
The lineup is Jayson McDonald’s imaginative hit Magic Unicorn Island (May 9, 8 p.m.); Deanna Fleysher’s wacky detective Butt Kapinski (May 10, 8 p.m.) and tap dancer Travis Knight’s Tap Tap (May 11, 7:30 p.m.). HUNCH finishes with a latenight Cabaret/Showcase (May 11, 10 p.m.).
As to what the cabaret may entail, it’s a come-and-see situation.
“All the things I’ve chosen are really professional productions that have moved beyond that Fringe circuit cycle and are now at that point where they are fully developed and can tour,” she said. “In some cases, these are things that people may have seen before, but that is helping to build buzz as well. It was really important that we addressed diversity with booking female performers, diverse backgrounds and so forth.”
In many ways, Morin-Robert sees all three performers as doing work that allows the theatre to bend in different ways and address multiple contemporary topics and techniques.
Another goal of HUNCH was to contain an educational component, so master clown and multiple award-winner Fleysher will conduct a master class over the weekend titled You and the Audience Art One (May 11, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.). For a first-year event, HUNCH shows off the organizers’ previous festival curating and presenting experience.
“We are trying to really reach out and give people an extremely accessible event price-wise that they can come out to,” she said. “The cabaret should really be something with around a dozen acts really representing what Vancouver has to offer at a latenight show with a bit of everyone.”
Touring about 115 dates a year with a 14-month-old baby has meant developing HUNCH wasn’t without its challenges. However, she says that Lafrance saved the day and made it all possible.
As ever, success in the first year will determine what is next for HUNCH.