A light creature springs deftly through a landscape of silver and white, chanting the rhythm of her approach. She is a deer, watching in the “death angle” on the side of the road, a new and familiar danger in the Alberta landscape that we entered last year with Little Red River. The danger comes from the possibility of collision. Hands thrust forward like antlers, she runs at the audience, lunging to the front edge of the stage. The force of the accidental impacts that propelled Little Red River and now drive this new show are captured here and made imminent.
This is how Theatre Junction celebrates a death. What began as an invitation to the audience, and to tell a story, never settles. The story is, at first, a love story following a young writer who returns home from Europe upon the death of his father, together with his French girlfriend, to meet his uncle and take possession of his father’s cabin on Lac la Biche. All love stories necessarily fracture along unavoidable fault-lines: as narratives of an encounter, they resist a single point of view, and in recounting a moment of pure experience, they threaten to ossify into memory. In this theatre, though, these ruptures become principles of the performance. “Go on then, tell him the story,” Lola says to the Bill when they first meet his nephew Sam, and the narrative immediately refracts into slightly incongruent points of view spoken in idioms that jostle each other. Words are doubled and translated, metaphors echoed back as jargon, and the same sounds come out shaped differently by widely separated origins. This friction is productive. But this performance is most keen when it forces open the gap where telling becomes acting, where remembering finds no anchor, and where the narrative loses its keel as things begin to happen. The exuberance of these events coalesces compellingly into a shared story when the cast sings the refrains of Ian Kilburn’s original songs (or when the audience erupts into laughter). But like all song and dance numbers, these celebratory gestures also suspend the narrative in a way that underscores the fragility of its illusion. The illusion of this performance is sustained by emotion and atmosphere, and both of these can be shattered in an instant by another rupture inherent to love stories: the impulsive, violent power of accidents. The impossibility that opens up in the hope and desire of one “harpooned by love” cannot help but explode the structure of any narrative that would carry this moment alive into the future. To maintain such intensity and avoid triviality, love stories inevitably draw upon undercurrents of betrayal, loss and separation. But this production avoids redeeming the sacrifice of its ‘love’, either for the characters or for the audience as a kind of tragedy. Instead, it risks refashioning one of the theatre’s most fundamental resources: the power to make things otherwise that comes from the power to forget.
At times, the show purports to have a word for this loss. Identity is a game, we are told, a series of masks, and characters appear true when they adapt to the situation they inhabit. Although not all of the characters are equally adept at this metamorphosis, all seek in their own way to make sense of the world. Sam’s earnest and pained naiveté encounters its rebellious counterpart in Alice; Bill is a sculptor whose work on a medium that is constantly melting helps him keeps a grip on reality; John is a chemist who methodically measures the algae in glimpse of a theory that would unlock the secrets of nature, the “memory of water.” The landscape too seems to relinquish secrets of time and culture, preserved in rock and ice, but its open secret – and perhaps the strongest element of the performance – is the sound and stage design. Introduced as the game warden responsible for “protecting the environment,” Nicolas Bernier performs minimal, precise sounds that create space in the same way that music creates mood, or that a changed voice can suddenly and utterly alienate an identity. To contain this space, Julie Fox sketches a collection of planes with spare ornaments that anchor, in the course of the performance, a world that fills out and comes together with stark complexity, each new iteration and each new addition surprising in its potential to transform, extend, turn topsy-turvy or to one side. Nevertheless, this space strikes hard as one vast, claustrophobic imagination of the Northern Lakes, standing sideways to its own history and landscape, like this theatre in Western Canada. On the Side of the Road produces the most friction when the performance collides with obstacles that dislocate its elaborate lyricism, when its characters and images jut through the inexorable shaping force of its artistic vision to come straight at the audience, tranquil and fierce, “I am a deer, deer, I am a deer.”
Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de
No comments:
Post a Comment