Three days, two continents and a big dose of uncertainty
Arkady Spivak is the artistic producer of Talk is Free Theatre.
A theatre production that spans three days and two continents: you can’t deny it grabs the attention.
That’s exactly the gambit behind The Curious Voyage, a project that sees audience members spend up to $2,000 (before flights and meals) to journey between Barrie, Ont., and London, England, for a series of one-on-one and group experiences leading up to a fully staged, site-specific musical theatre production.
The project’s outsized ambition is in the interest of generating hype that will raise the profile of Canadian theatre artists and provide opportunities for them to undertake “gravity-less risk,” says its mastermind, Arkady Spivak, artistic director of Barrie’s Talk Is Free Theatre. While the project has enjoyed undeniable success, it also hit snags along the way, evidence that abundant risk-taking with human subjects requires equally abundant earthbound care.
The $650,000 production budget is drawn almost entirely from government grants, and private and corporate fundraising; only 4 per cent comes from ticket sales. Among the expenses were some 52 flights for Spivak, executive producer Sara Schwartz Geller, and the creative teams and performers. “I think Air Canada and Air Transat owe me a lot,” says Spivak.
Talk Is Free has used site-specific
formats before — its production of The Music Man was set in multiple Barrie locations, while Tales of an Urban Indian took place on a moving bus — but Spivak didn’t find these fully satisfying.
“You’re welcoming an audience in a non-traditional setting, but you are treating them traditionally” — performers in The Music Man pretended not to see audience members even though they were inches away. The next step was “take an audience and make them the centre, or at least (engage with them) without a boundary,” says Spivak.
Two Toronto artistic directors created the show with Spivak — Daniele Bartolini of DLT built the immersive content, while Outside the March’s Mitchell Cushman directed the musical — and it was at their urging that the musical’s title has been kept secret: “It’s this whole idea that you access the work through a different mental state” if you don’t know what you’re seeing in advance, says Spivak.
This notion of spectators being refreshed by novelty is central to Spivak’s conceptualization of the project. A key question behind The Curious Voyage was how to “transform people who have everything.”
When it’s pointed out that this sounds like rather an exclusive agenda for a publicly funded project, Spivak counters that the full three-day Voyage is “the VIP version, sort of like business class on a flight.” Hundreds of other spectators are taking in the “express” versions: a masquerade ball in Barrie (with tickets at $39.55) and a multiple-hour walking journey through London ending with the musical (tickets $66 to $78).
There was a glitch in the first run of the VIP version, which began on Oct. 23: an audience member engaged in disruptive behaviour in Barrie; he did not travel on to London. Spivak declined to comment on the situation, saying there were “matters still pending” around it but did allow that more could be done to advise audience members about appropriate conduct.
A considerable body of academic work has developed around immersive and participatory theatre, with a significant focus on the ethics of audience risk. When I ask Spivak if he and his collaborators made use of this re- search he says he has “no way to approach that question,” but adds that early on he had the idea to audition each audience member just as he would a cast member, but was talked out of it by colleagues who were worried this might put off potential spectators.
Another idea that didn’t make the final version, he says, was to replace participants’ passports with fake ones during the flight and only give them their real ones back when they were just about to cross the U.K. border. But wouldn’t that be dangerous and utterly terrifying? “That’s why we let it go,” says Spivak. “Sometimes in the arts, practical heads prevail.”
When the production ends on Saturday, some 71 participants will have undertaken eight cycles of the three-day Voyage. One is Samantha Plavins, who works in financial services in Thunder Bay, and who says she’s “still blown away by and still processing” her Voyage experience in late October.
Having been told little more than to “have comfortable shoes and an open mind,” she was “floored by the initial interaction”: a one-on-one exchange with a performer in a Barrie hotel room that ended with her “quote unquote killing someone.”
A self-described “control freak,” Plavins says it was sometimes unsettling to not know what was going to happen next. “At one point I was playing ping-pong in a basement with a guy in a shark’s head … someone was working on the roof of that house and I was wondering if that was real; was I going have an interaction with him?”
When asked what the point was of being unsettled, Plavins take a moment to consider her response. “I think a lot of us go about our daily lives in a routine structure. We don’t often stop to just release control and surrender to what might be happening … What I took away was just roll with anything that happens, jump in with both feet, embrace the uncertainty.”
The quality of the musical (which features such top talent as AJ Bridel, Derek Kwan, Mike Nadajewski, Glynis Ranney and Michael Torontow) was “unbelievable … top drawer,” Plavins says, adding that she would “100 per cent” recommend the show to people, particularly those in their 40s and 50s, who have a spirit of adventure and some grounding in the arts (not to mention the requisite funds). Spivak says the project has more than surpassed his expectations and hints strongly that there may be future opportunities to attend The Curious Voyage, perhaps even closer to home. “I’d like to make it cleaner,” he says. “It’s one thing to shave someone, but when you do that you have to wipe off the cream and I don’t think I wiped off the cream yet.”
The Curious Voyage continues in Barrie on Nov. 8 through Nov. 10 in London. See curiousvoyage.com for information. Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga. Follow her on Twitter: @KarenFricker2