Theatre Junction GRAND announces 2010/11 Anniversary Season!

The 2010/11 Season marks beginning of the Grand Theatre’s 100th Anniversary and Theatre Junction’s 20th Anniversary.


Theatre Junction GRAND – Calgary’s culturehouse of contemporary live art, will present new works from around the world including a new creation by artistic director Mark Lawes and the Resident Company of Artists, who recently embarked on their first tour as part of World Stage at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. The 2010/11 Season marks a major juncture in the organization’s and Calgary’s collective history where two great landmarks in art and culture will be celebrated and reflected upon.

The 2010/11 Season represents a multiplicity of viewpoints from leading artists in the fields of contemporary theatre, dance and music. Each one pushes the boundaries of their discipline, to move beyond the surface appearance and to ask: what is the potential of the artist to re-invent their medium? and, ultimately, what is the potential of the spectator to re-invent the world in which they are living?

Artistic Director Mark Lawes notes, “This Season represents an important crossroad and a ‘junction’ in our history with that of the city of Calgary and the historic Grand Theatre, our home since 2006, as we create conversations around art and culture in our city…… today, tomorrow and in the future.”

Critical Perspective of West by "Awesome" by Michael Taylor

For me, last nights show West by Awesome just failed to come together in any coherent way. Things I heard in the lobby: It had its moments These guys are certainly talented a lot of thought went into the set. One could add a number of elements to the list, all of which, taken in isolation, were extremely polished, sometimes witty, and occasionally conceptually innovative. But like all those glow-in-the dark bouncy balls that fell from the ceiling (spoiler alert), each aha-moment exploded up into the atmosphere without leaving much of a trace, only to end up scattered on the floor. Or rather, the parts seemed to slowly meander and drift away from each other like so much flotsam and jetsam on a very still lake. There were projections of mythic images and voices, slapstick play with costumes and seemingly bottomless containers, rituals of violence and cleansing, a few jokes, monologues dripping a bit sweetly with longing and gazes into the distance, and the music, which unfortunately was often upstaged by the recorded sound-track and the sound of waves. One friend summed up the possibilities and failures of the piece particularly trenchantly. The background is the foreground, she said, generously trying to articulate what was going on. But she also said the same thing earlier in a very different way: Its like a screen saver. Indeed, we did see several screen-savers projected onto the stage in the third act. I suppose some people found a meditative space in these empty evocations of mood. I wasn't one of them.

Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de

Critical Perspective of Meg Stuart's Do Animals Cry by Michael Taylor

One thing I overheard last night after Meg Stuart’s Do Animals Cry was: Why is this work in a theater? Or as a friend wrote to me today, if it’s supposed to be a kind of lived experience, why not stage it somewhere else where the audience can become part of the experience? But I think the theatrical frame was integral to the performance. Whether you agree with me or not, the point remains that the piece challenges the expectations we bring to the theater. These are not all the same, there is no reason why they should be, and it seems to me that’s the wager of the piece. It’s Tanztheater – emphasis on both of those words – in the most essential way we’ve seen this season.

I should say right away: I loved the work. So much so that I went twice. Obviously, many other people didn’t. We saw them get up and leave in waves, like migrating flocks of birds. That’s unfortunate. Hahn Rowe’s music was superb enough that the evening was worth two hours of anyone’s Friday night. But that’s just the point: there was something about the theatrical situation that made people feel like they had to leave, or maybe even escape. Of course I can’t know why. Was it frustration? Boredom? Or as one friend said, a sense of having been insulted at being asked to watch this? More discriminating reactions generally settled on this point: the work had its moments, but did it have to be so long? As a short warning, my reaction will be longer than usual, too.

The length seemed particularly unbearable, so I heard, because the work lacked range and development. We got it, so to speak, after sixty minutes. One friend who certainly knows something about dance sketched things out in a flash: there were three kinds of movement, sloppy, frantic, and slow motion. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. I’m sure she’d agree that with those three things you can do a lot. You can paint a picture with just one color, too. In this sense, the performance asks – expects – to be taken on its own terms, as a kind of repetition and variation that refuses to define its own development as a narrative or necessary structure. It is the kind of experience that refuses to necessarily last 90 minutes or 120 minutes or – why not? – even longer. So the question remains, why watch this in a theater?

One obvious answer, and one that I think matters, is that this makes the work a kind of moving image in a very traditional way, the tradition that treats the theatrical stage as a canvas for a tableau vivant. The choice to invoke this tradition also corresponds to another tradition that has used this canvas to project the harmonies and disharmonies within our domestic spaces and worlds – within spaces that are both places of retreat and places, like families, from which we can’t escape. For Meg Stuart’s piece, these spaces have been reduced down to the world of everyday movements as forms of shared communication. Our bodies speak and are being read everywhere we go; this is a communication we can’t escape or control. The piece trades on the analogy between this understanding of performance, which is so important to contemporary dance, and the forms of communication that build up, like shared substance, to make people familiar to each other.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has a word for this kind of communication, habitus. At the risk of sounding academic, and of outing myself as someone excited by these kinds of things (too late), I got a thrill and a shock to experience this kind of communication performed and deconstructed on stage. Or to make the point in a different way, in the performance’s own terms: the work translated everything captured in a family photo into movement. Imagine being at a family reunion and being forced to hold still for a snapshot that freezes interminably, while everything that makes up the family around you – all the secrets and loves and animosities and games and taunts and betrayals – are suddenly made vibrant and present, and excruciatingly so. (If you want a sense of what I’m seeing in my mind, google Thomas Struth and look at some of his family portraits, for example here: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cruelandtender/struth.htm) This unspoken ground of communication, of history and shared meaning, of familiarity, is what drew me in.

It thrilled me because it was so accessible and communicated to me in such a direct and powerful way. I felt myself become isolated into dissociated structures of communication, like seeing my mouth speak rather than just speaking. And I felt like I was sharing this experience with the performers: suddenly a form of communication had been made visible in which we always were and had been connected and communicating. This wasn’t entirely pleasurable: I also had the sensation of not being able to avoid this familiarity. I felt turned inside out and exposed, which can also mean misunderstood. That was a dilemma that the people who left faced, too. The moment we all sat down we faced the option of staying or going, and either way of making a statement that everyone present would understand, whatever our motives or whatever we meant or did not mean to say. This is one reason it mattered that this piece was in a theater. The performance made this dilemma obvious and palpable by making visible the structures of communication that immediately permeate a shared room.

The surreal quality of many of Meg Stuart’s choices reflected, for me, the simple idiosyncrasy that our experiences nevertheless preserve. The beauty of the performance arose out of the tension between these fundamental structures of bodily communication and the elegance and whimsy of the scenes. (Here I thought of the painter Neo Rauch, as if someone had managed to put his imagination on stage.) The piece was not about statements, but about structures that could be expanded and stretched this way and that, but which had a tension that pulls everything back inward as this operation makes the fabric of the connection more apparent. By this I mean the way that the movements dissociate from the performers, the way that the performers dissociated from each other and return, or not, like the way the surface of the body becomes a shirt and is stretched and pulled apart, or that underwear is torn apart but then ends back up on your head. The performance strained against limits and conventions (everyone ends up in the doghouse) and, ultimately, the situation of theater itself, but without any ambitions or need to break free or escape, or more importantly, any resentment that this might be impossible.

Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de

Critical Perspective of Meg Stuart's Do Animals Cry by Natalie Meisner

“Do Animals Cry” focuses on the various animalistic aspects that often lurk under the surface of the dynamic of the nuclear family. The terrain it excavates seems to be rooted in Freud’s famous theories on infantile sexuality that continue to be influential and yet can often feel dated if not supplemented with more contemporary notions about the formation of the subject. Father and son roughhouse in a duet that turns murderous. A mother fawns on her son with adoration that turns erotic. Violence and tenderness mix in nearly every interaction between the performers. One family member arrives back home and injects energy and enthusiasm into the otherwise moribund group using the breathing and bodily gesture of an excited dog. This energy infects everyone else. This same family member (perhaps a son/brother?) arrives from the top of the set and is placed into a familiar sacrificial pose upon the backdrop of the woven branches while the other family members prowl and fawn over him. This, of course, leaves us wondering how we use one another for emotional crutches. Why do we need unconditional love? Why do we need devotion of any type? Do we objectify one another when we extract or demand adoration? Outcast members of the family are, in one sequence, stuffed into the doghouse (which echoes the metaphoric notion of being “in the dog house”) and in another sequence a cozy family gathering takes place inside the doghouse while one member is left out in the cold. The dialogue deploys generalized clichés that serve to highlight the mundane nature of the “tragedies” endured by the average nuclear family. Dad left, Mom is on prescription drugs and we’ve lost the house. These events are paired with horrific stories from page one of the newspaper as if to offset the very different nature of these events and yet each are termed, in an ironic deadpan voice by one of the actors as “good news.”

The notion of the nuclear family as an abiding and necessary (even a useful) unit is put into question here through movement and dance. The movement is a deliberate departure from the convention of beautiful movement that, at one time, we might have expected from dance/theatre/performance. It seems to want to externalize emotional pain through the medium of the body. This, of course is not unbroken ground as the controversial work of artists such as Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist will attest to.

There are gestures toward absurd humour (a dead stuffed dog being made to fetch a stick) that echo the cyclical and futile struggles of Hamm and Clov in Beckett’s Endgame and there is much here that can be said to be derivative of the theatre of the absurd but it never reaches the provocative and murky depths that Beckett plunged theatre audiences into. The set is beautiful; an arresting piece of visual art, in itself. A tunnel composed of lashed together branches that is lit from the inside creates an eerie and evocative metaphor for the often disturbing emotional landscape of the family. The length of this piece, unfortunately, undermined its potential power. It was as if the audience were asked to sit through the improvisation that the team went through, as well as the finished product. Of course repetition can be deployed and the staging of work in progress can serve to challenge audiences’ inherently Arnoldian notions of high culture but this alone is not enough. The making of this piece seems to have been a complex journey, more engaging for the creative team than for audiences. There simply wasn’t enough complexity, in my opinion, to warrant the length.

Dr. Natalie Meisner
Department of English, Mount Royal University

Masterclass with Meg Stuart

Theatre Junction GRAND welcomes Meg Stuart and her company Damaged Goods to Calgary with their new show 'Do Animals Cry' (running Mar.3-5). As part of our ongoing 09.10 Masterclass series, Meg Stuart will be teaching a workshop on contemporary dance in The Studio at Theatre Junction GRAND on Thursday, March 11th from 1pm-3pm.

This class is open to the professional community and senior dance students.

Cost: $40

To apply: Please send a brief letter of interest to Erin Jenkins, Education Coordinator for Theatre Junction GRAND, stating in less that 400 words, your dance background and your interest in attending this Masterclass. Enrollment is limited. Individuals selected for participation will be contacted by Monday, March 8.

Submissions may be sent to erin.jenkins@theatrejunction.com or dropped off in person at our Box Office between the hours of 11am-6pm Monday-Friday.

Critical Perspective of Splintergroup's roadkill by Michael Thomas Taylor

“It owes a lot to David Lynch … It’s very physical … you’ll really like it …” These were the things we heard from friends in the foyer before Wednesday night’s performance of Roadkill, choreographed by Splintergroup from Australia. Right on all counts. The dramaturgy of the work’s scenes and the characters certainly do owe a stylistic debt to Lynch. But if this performance is like a film, then it is a film that unfolds in ten dimensions. I mean “unfold” here in a literal sense, or as literal as one could be about dimensions: the performers carve out spaces as if from inside out. In the slow opening sequences, these are moods of boredom and frustration, emanating from Gavin Webber, that are wound so tightly you may not even notice that he and Gabrielle Nankivell are not speaking a word. As things get moving, these two start to carve space itself into insides and outsides, ups and downs, that reflect each other across the frame of the car like the two sides of a looking glass. When the third man, Grayson Millwood, appears ominously out of the darkness, this control of the stage gains a sudden, and suddenly powerful new function. It is the power to change the point of view from within a single space – to make our camera look this way or that, see inside or outside, to show multiple shots and frames at once, or to make time run forwards or backwards or nowhere at all. And this also means the power to destabilize the narrative and pull it off center. The shift and play and conflict between these dimensions becomes the narrative. As the performers rapidly expand their repertoire of tools and the number of dimensions increases, the performance becomes increasingly precise. Split personalities, explosions of athletic agility and controlled movement, flashbacks and jumpcuts, sidewise eruptions and downpours, and of course the sound and light – always the fourth and fifth performers, and sometimes more – on the stage. These too can unfold from within, or from a structured opposition of within and without, but they can also channel the vast void of the Outback, as does the blaring car radio when it jerks from country western to heavy metal to snippets of commentary on the murder case that was one inspiration for Roadkill. All together, these dislocations make a performance so supple and plastic it’s like nothing we’ve seen this year at Theatre Junction.

Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de

Critical Perspective of Splintergroup's roadkill by Natalie Meisner

This innovative piece of dance/theatre mines filmic conventions of suspense and horror. The whip pan, the tracking shot, aerials, and the low to high level lighting are all deconstructed and drawn out through the medium of dance to extract their maximum emotional impact upon the spectator. Throughout Roadkill, one can feel and yet also analyze the way that these tricks are routinely used to provoke our animal instincts of fight or flight in film. Exploring these filmic techniques in a live performance in slow motion serves to alienate them and demand that we probe beneath our first response of breathless fear. The beauty of the dance sequences lulls us into something of a hypnagogic state that is shattered suddenly when figures spring up without warning or melt away into darkness attended by visual and auditory markers of menace.

The dancers, as is evident in their exquisite lines and focused movement are highly trained and intensely focused physical performers. There are many sequences of dance that are strong enough and thematically complex enough to function as stand-alone solo or duo dance pieces and yet they are well woven into the thematic fabric of the larger piece. The paucity of dialogue --although Roadkill is admittedly a piece whose power is derived primarily from movement-- seems to be a moment of missed opportunity in a piece that is otherwise a very powerful piece of theatre. Not to say that dialogue should step to the front in this piece, rather that when it is used, it be used as creatively as some of the other elements have been. The sound scape is outstanding; ranging from evocative grinding engine that refuses to turn over, to the zany power metal “killer” music to the chirruping birds of spring to, finally, what sounds like vultures circling overhead. The sound design along with the inventive yet minimalist set of the beaten up Toyota and spastically dysfunctional telephone booth serve to further unify the piece. Roadkill does things with Johnny Cash that I wager you won’t easily forget.

This piece zooms in on a subgenre of horror, the slasher. In this genre a couple or a group of young people go into the forest or other isolated place and begin to explore their awakening sexuality when they are discovered by a psychopathic killer who terrorizes them. On one level, this can be read as retribution for extramarital or taboo sexual explorations. The victimization of the young woman at the hands of the stranger could be read as punishment for her beauty and/or for the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. Critics such as Carol Clover (Men, Women and Chain Saws…) point out that the manipulation of audience point of view makes the matter more complex, however. We may start out seeing the movie through the eyes of victimizer, but as the piece progresses we begin to laminate ourselves onto other characters and thus begin the terrifying and murky oscillation between the hunter and the prey. There are also usually moments of communion or at least shared past trauma between the so called “final girl” in a slasher film and the killer. These overlaps are illustrated in the doubling and redoubling in movement and intention between the young woman’s boyfriend and the stranger. They are also evoked during a number where the young woman walks all over her boyfriend, from head to foot during an entire sequence. Who is the real aggressor is it the stranger in the dark night, is it the outback itself, or do we each harbour this darkness within? These are questions, it seems, that we are meant to be pondering throughout Roadkill.

Roadkill promiscuously exploits the B-movie conviction that the plot is merely an excuse for everything else: the “good stuff”: special effects, close encounters with human psychopathology, high or low speed chases, scantily clad women in postures of abject terror, zippy one liners, and some good old fashioned gore. Nearly all the plot we have is forecast by the setting: a dark and stormy night, the middle of nowhere. Add a couple whose car breaks down, a stranger with a flashlight and a mysterious phone call and you’re right in the thick of it.

Dr. Natalie Meisner, Department of English
Mount Royal University, Calgary AB