From Taking Flight
University showcases new work from clowns to Beckett
The University of Calgary wraps up its 2007-08 season with the fourth annual Taking Flight festival featuring one-act plays staged readings of new works and performance creation. The festival is an opportunity for drama students to showcase their work for the public.
At the festival’s core are graduate directing students who use it as a venue for their pre-thesis productions. Playwriting students also have the opportunity for their works to undergo a public reading. “In the current context of the Taking Flight festival more is made of the fact that these are student-directed works and less that they’re student exercises” says Jim Dugan who heads the University of Calgary’s drama department.
One of the highlights of this year’s festival is An Evening of Clown . It’s the culmination of an intensive month-long workshop headed by John Turner of Mump and Smoot fame who are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. (Turner is Smoot in the Canadian clown duo.)
“Mump and Smoot is the most fantastic clown show I’ve ever seen” says Dugan. “It’s the only clown show I’ve seen that can fill a mainstream theatre.”
The evening will bring together the original work of the 11 students who studied with Turner. “We have these preconceptions that a clown has to make you laugh and that it has to be for children but these are total fallacies” Turner says. Hence the audience advisory that some scenes “may not be suitable for children.”
Turner says he practises and teaches a style of clowning pioneered by Manitoba’s late Richard Pochinko. “Pochinko borrowed from many traditions including European and Native American and he evolved it into a specifically Canadian style of clown training” says Turner noting that Pochinko became famous for his “baby clown workshop” at the end of which one’s clown is born.
“In this style of clowning you go into yourself to discover the personal trickster or saboteur as opposed to learning about it through external mechanisms” Turner says. “It’s really an explosion of creative exploration.”
One of the other one-acts in this year’s festival is Samuel Beckett’s Play . Described as “three souls trapped by urns infidelity and memory” it tells the inter-connected stories of a married couple and “the other woman.” The characters appear in urns onstage. “The setting the audience is given is quite incongruous with the ordinary tales the characters are telling” says Dave Own who directs the piece.
“We can all relate to things like relationships and relationships gone sour but the visuals we are given in this show are so unfamiliar that we ask questions as to what we are really seeing” Owen says. “The visual background of the characters in urns is what takes the piece to that existential and metaphysical level.”
Owen says the festival experience as a whole is important for new directors. “Directors who haven’t made it to an A-house theatre yet build their resumes going to festivals” he says. “The reality is when I leave university I can expect to do quite a few festivals at first.”
Some of the other works showcased this year include Potentilla an original work by Meg Braem. Named after a hardy flower that can grow in hot and dry conditions it tells the story of an aspiring actress who visits a prison to stage a play and develops a relationship with one of the inmates. A solo performance creation piece Dance of the Damned by Paula McNulty will be performed in conjunction with a staging of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit .
A total of 12 performances make up this year’s Taking Flight including two staged play readings. “The great thing about this festival is that if you don’t like the shows one evening you can always come back the next night and it will be different” says Owen.
