PERFORMANCE SPRING FESTIVAL a fest of Canadian theatre and dance (Factory, 125 Bathurst). Runs to April 24, various times (see website for details). Pwyc-$40. 416-504-9971, factorytheatre.ca. See Factory Theatre listings.
Theatre and dance from across the country get play at Factory Theatre during the annual Performance Spring Festival.
Headlining the festival is Human Cargo’s Night, whose central figures are Daniella, a white anthropologist from Toronto, and Piuyuq, an Inuk teen who learns the history of a grandfather she’s never known (April 13-24).
“The script began more than seven years ago as a cross-cultural exploration, involving Icelandic, Inuit and southern Canadian actors, of how darkness affects people,” recalls playwright/director Christopher Morris. “But on my second visit to Pond Inlet in Nunavut, I had the actors from northern Canada talk about the first time they’d met people from southern Canada, and vice versa. The two Inuk actors remembered a priest and an RCMP officer the southern Canadian actors mentioned an orphan and a homeless person.
“Those memories stuck with me, especially when there was a teen suicide in the community on one of my visits. I recalled the figure of Minik, the Greenland boy brought with his father and others to New York by Admiral Peary in 1897, and his later attempts to get his father’s remains returned to their community.”
Morris transformed Night into a story of ancestry and the feelings of obligation, anger and need. In the play, Daniella brings Piuyuq’s grandfather’s bones back to his home, and Morris started exploring what motivated her doing so.
“I don’t want to offer any solutions, just show the various sides of the question,” says Morris. “Daniella has the best of intentions, but her desire to help is one of the play’s key questions. I think we always have to ask whether we act because we feel that an individual or a culture needs help and should, in some fashion, be saved.
“Daniella acts from a desire to cure, aid, make amends. And maybe she doesn’t do so in the best of ways. Is her action based on performing something good for herself? We may want to help in lots of situations, but when the action of helping compromises us, endangers us or even makes us feel uncomfortable in some fashion, we often draw the line.”
You’ll hear both English and Inuktitut in Night in fact, the combining of the two languages was a central part of the creative process.
“When I’m working with different cultures on devising a play, I always encourage actors to create in their own language. What then emerges is unique and artistically powerful,” adds Morris, who’s currently workshopping a script called Petawawa, which involves Pakistani, Afghan and Canadian actors.
Morris had lots of opportunity to develop Night during the course of its creation, he visited Pond Inlet 14 times and helped set up a theatre company there.
“One can never get all the information one needs, but there’s no doubt that all those visits helped shape the play.”
Setting is just as specific for choreographer/dancer Heidi Strauss, who follows last year’s acclaimed production as it is with another show sporting a lower-cased title, still here (through April 17).
She speaks of the show, presented by adelheid, as “a window into the layers of life that accumulate over time, what is lived, what is discovered or rediscovered, what is exposed, how we see differently in certain moments a series of little deaths.”
And what about the setting?
“The residency at Factory has really enabled the development of the solo, because the set (by Julie Fox, with video and sound by Jeremy Mimnagh) is very specific. In fact, it could be described as my partner. Working with the set has informed and in some ways created the work.
“In independent dance, it’s a rare opportunity to have a space exclusively yours for a period of time that’s what’s allowed for this kind of exploration. I’m accustomed to making work in large, empty spaces, so this has presented me with a new work of working.”
In the final days of rehearsals, Strauss made some other discoveries, including “the dichotomy between being an agent of our existence – making choices actively – and meeting what our lives bring. The character is caught between these ideas, struggling through them to make a passage.”
The choreographer sees still here, just like her two previous creations for Factory, as an intimate piece, one in which some viewers may find a loose narrative.
“But more important for me is that its imagery allows for thought around loss and rebirth. I want to bring dance closer to the public, to allow more minute movements to read, for the experience to feel more human.”
In addition to Night and still here, Performance Spring highlights two other productions. Members of Factory’s Monday Youth Theatre Ensemble (MYTE), who have been working together for the past several months, show the fruit of their collaboration in P.O.V., a collectively created piece by the 14- to 19-year-old troupe under the direction of Bronwyn Davies Glover (April 18).
Vancouver artist Julia Mackey brings her solo show Jake’s Gift as Performance Spring’s final production. The all-ages performance looks at a Second World War veteran who returns to France and meets a young girl who enables him to confront personal ghosts (April 19-24).
