Col Cseke takes personal protection to a whole new level in Bubble Boy.
Downstage premieres its new festival with an Alberta centric lineup
Calgary’s first encounters with Downstage came in the intimacy of a Unitarian church basement with a quartet of performance creations in 2004 ( The Culture of Fear Rights & Freedumbs Rogue Wheat and Smoking Broccoli ). Since then Downstage has found a permanent home in the Epcor Centre has premièred its own work as well as Sharon Pollock’s 2007 Man Out of Joint all while cultivating a place in the Calgary scene as the go-to company for political work. Five years later the company is once again introducing Calgarians to a handful of shows in an intimate venue this time in the Motel theatre with Uprising the company’s festival of new political work.
This year’s three mainstage shows include Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show by the Emergency Architect Theatre collective Bubble Boy: Slide Show by Col Cseke and Redbird by Joel Crichton. Selected from about one dozen submissions a strong Alberta connection runs through them all with a Calgarian (Cseke) an Edmontonian (Crichton) and a collective which despite counting members from Ontario Newfoundland British Columbia and Alberta still has its sights set firmly on the province’s infamous tarsands city.
“As our reach expands in terms of who we’re contacting about submitting proposals then hopefully the scope will expand across the country” says artistic director Simon Mallett of the festival’s geographic bias. “But it’s also really exciting to be starting with voices that are very much engaged in our local community provincial community.”
But if the shows share a geographic and political sensibility their styles approaches and subjects set them apart. Where The Fort Mac Show blends documentary theatre conventions with three fictionalized characters — a truck driver a tailings-pond reclamation scientist and a dancer — Bubbleboy is an absurd slideshow-driven monologue that takes aim at the American-Canadian border and the myriad paranoid fantasies that live there. Redbird meanwhile is a semi-allegorical story about post-election clashes in Iran seen from the perspective of a hijacked news broadcast.
“I’m not suggesting that with three shows you can run the gamut covering all the political and social issues that are relevant to the world by any means” says Mallett. “But I think The Fort Mac Show exposes an under-represented element of our province that we in the major cities know little about. Bubbleboy is first of all comedic so there’s a nice balance there and the Canadian-American interactions are always sort of something we’re interested in exploring. And then Redbird is more about the global culture of fear that we find ourselves living in and [what] the constant threat of terror [has] done to our society and interpersonal relationships.”
The festival also features Uproar a fundraising event featuring three new 10-minute plays by Governor General’s Award-winning playwrights Judith Thompson Colleen Murphy and Catherine Banks with musical interludes provided by Kris Demeanor and Allison Lynch. Juxtaposing a trio of writers with national profiles the event was designed to link the company’s existing connections to its still-developing profile.
As one the festival’s artists Georgina Beaty has already seen her fair share of Motel’s stage over the last year. In addition to being a member of the Emergency Architect Theatre collective her one-woman show Squeeze Machine premièred as a workshop production earlier in the season and was a runner-up in the festival’s Uprising National Playwriting Competition where Andy Garland’s Stillborn placed first.
Since premiering on the Motel stage in March 2009 Emergency Architect’s collectively created examination of the community that surrounds the massive development of the Athabasca tarsands has toured Toronto Ottawa and recently Edmonton. And while the show is revisiting the stage where it began The Fort Mac Show has evolved in response to the essential challenge of describing “place” in other places.
“In Fort Mac they laughed at everything and recognized jokes before they came” explains Beaty. “Then in Ottawa there was a very different attitude because they were being introduced to a community they had never heard of.”
Adapting to multiple perspectives was always inherent in the work she says. Working in a collective provided a set of disparate viewpoints and questions that led the way the collective explored their temporary home during their three-week residency. And for Beaty engaging in a unique discussion lies at the heart of political theatre.
“I’m interested in telling stories that need to be told so in trying to address things that aren’t already visible if that defines political then yes [I am a political artist]” she says. “But I’m more interested in investigating things that aren’t already apparent in society bringing a discussion where I felt there was a lack of one.”
Engaging in those discussions has been at the core of every Downstage production since the company first appeared in November 2004. From four short performance creations to five seasons of work the company has gone from guests in the Birds and Stone’s basement theatre to the operators of Motel. And now they’re hoping to grow the festival.
