Festival works raise viewers’ consciousness
SummerWorks projects provide blend of vivid and versatile performances
Eleven days, 52 performance projects plus a host of ancillary programming: SummerWorks 2017 is up and running in venues conventional and unconventional along the Queen St. W. corridor.
When viewing work quickly in festivals such as this you look for themes and patterns, and it’s worth mentioning that of six projects seen, the ones that really popped for me were led by women.
Reassembled, Slightly Askew is a sound installation from Northern Ireland experienced by eight spectators at a time, lying on hospital beds and wearing headphones and sleeping masks. You’re attended to initially by an actor playing a nurse (Matt Faris) who gives thoughtful instructions about what to do and expect.
In short, you do nothing and everything: The installation takes you inside the experience of playwright Shannon Yee, who in 2008 became profoundly ill with a rare brain infection and now lives with a hidden disability. The cutting-edge audio makes the sound three-dimensional and simulates the breakdown of logical sense, the cacophony of sounds and silence, and the in-and-out-of-full-consciousness state that Yee lived in during nine weeks in the hospital.
Directed by Anna Newell with sound by Paul Stapleton, Reassembled, Slightly Askewsits on a fascinating edge between immersive performance, technological research and health-care advocacy. Those who like to let the effect of shows sink in slowly are advised to watch the excellent followup documentary later rather than on the spot (a link can be emailed to you).
These Violent Delights is a complex meditation on an obscure passage from the very end of Romeo and Juliet that proposes raising “a statue in pure gold” to the Capulets’ dead daughter. Sixteen artists devised the material, which was then scripted and directed by Cole Lewis for her Vancouver company Guilty by Association. The piece combines inquisitiveness and indignation as it explores the commemoration of tragic events, giving voice to the imagined thoughts and feelings of Juliet’s nurse.
The visual approach and choral movement, performed by 10 actors in pastel nightwear, are striking and accomplished; the piece moves from witty, thoughtful and poetic to frustratingly obscure to a final monologue so direct and profane it feels out of step with what’s come before and a bit indulgent (concern for the safety of a performer wrapped in plastic is also a distraction). While These Violent Delights is uneven, there is a refreshingly distinctive esthetic at play here.
Almeida (The Glorious) is written and performed by seven of its creators, participants in the AMY (Artists Mentoring Youth) project, which has been providing free arts training for young women and trans youth in the GTA for a dozen years.
The performers tell their own stories to the audience against a video of other young people. The experiences they’ve already had in their young lives are daunting: poverty, immigration, absent parents, sex work, a full roster of biases (fat-phobia is called out with particular ferocity by Morgan, a comic talent to watch), mental and psychological illness.
Co-directed by Julia Hune-Brown and Nikki Shaffeeullah, Almeida showcases its creators’ resilience, vivacity and wisdom as they search out inspiration from their ancestors: “My power comes from . . .” is the repeated trope. This show is bracingly educational and inspiring.
Nothing in Reality Theatre quite lives up to the promise of its initial moments, as the wonderful Akosua Amo-Adem and Andy Trithardt face off while chomping on movie popcorn. Between their amazing attentiveness to each other, the audience and the title, the show promises a demonstration of what live performance can offer in our hyper-mediatized age. It ends up being a series of unrelated, short absurdist plots awkwardly woven together in a production directed by Rebecca Applebaum.
At points it’s quite funny and Julia Lederer’s distinctive comic voice finds its ideal interpreter in Krista Morin, who captures the just-about-to-crack intensity of a musical theatre actress typecast as cutlery having played the Spoon in Beauty and the Beast for 20 years. Here, as in other projects, Lederer might have benefited from the input of a dramaturge or other strong creative force to help her better shape her potential-filled material.