ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD created and performed by the company, directed by Mark Lawes (Theatre Junction/Free Fall). Fleck Dance Theatre (207 Queens Quay West). Opens Wednesday (March 24) and runs to March 27, 8:30 pm. $30. 416-973-4000.
On The Side Of The Road fits perfectly into Free Fall’s multidisciplinary mandate.
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Created collectively by Calgary-based Theatre Junction, it’s based on Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama’s painting of a woman carrying a dead deer on her shoulders and also on Lac La Biche in northern Alberta, where artistic director Mark Lawes spent time as a teen.
Dzama’s picture fascinated Lawes, whose company used to produce conventional plays before he spent a year in Europe and saw the range of performance there.
He appreciates Dzama’s “confrontation between culture and nature, something that was more apparent to me when I returned home. There’s a crazy wildness, a lack of cultivation, in Canadian nature.
“My work is influenced by pop culture, David Lynch, surrealism and Warhol. I see it as lying between art forms rather than sitting in any one of them.”
Lawes’s company includes actors, dancers, a composer and a sculptor, and he creates through a style called auto-fiction. The performers take off from points of reality to devise characters and narratives that blend truth and fiction, with viewers sometimes asked to sort out the two.
“The show is the second part of a trilogy about death, desire and the Canadian West,” explains Lawes, “Now Theatre Junction works in hybrid forms, which for me is related to a search for identity. Our name suggests a crossroads, and we’ve drawn in people from various disciplines and from all over the world.
“I’m especially interested in the idea of multiplicity, that identity is made up of many roots and memories.”
