FFWD Weekly
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| Theatre by Lori Montgomery I Cut, You Bleed Jacob Wren has a hard time condensing Candid Stammer’s contribution to the High Performance Rodeo into a sound byte. "It’s difficult for me to state it in words," he says. "There’s a certain kind of dynamic that goes on between people that maybe is a little bit beyond language." In simplest terms, I Cut, You Bleed is a show about relationships, he says. About the ways in which meaning gets away from us, and things we do and say have a life of their own. "It’s about the unintentional, small, neutral gestures that have a much larger effect than was intended," he says. There is nothing so prosaic as a simple plot on which to hang the ideas, but each performer plays a version of themselves, and "a clarity of narrative develops over the course of the show as you see how we relate to each other," Wren explains. The element of a relationship that is "beyond language" lends itself naturally to dance, and so movement plays a large part in the way the story unfolds. "One of the things I think is most interesting is the idea that there is no difference between theatre and dance," Wren says. "They both begin from the same place, which is an observation of the world around you. You can interpret that world around you using dramatic language or you can interpret it using a choreographic language, but fundamentally, they’re the same. They speak to the same world." Wren admits without any prodding that the concept of communication in relationships provides a vehicle for the company to explore their mandate – finding subversive ways to "bring theatre back to life." "This kind of theme is maybe just a pretext for finding some new ways of working with the stage and new ways of blending the language of performance and the language of dance and the language of theatre," he says. "I think it’s very important for theatre as an art form to bring in new ideas and not basically be a historical art form." While Candid Stammer’s mandate also proclaims their aspiration to blend "the cerebral and the visceral" in a way that seeks a new way of speaking to an audience, Wren says that they are not conscious of leading the way for other companies. "In terms of Canadian theatre and dance, I feel somehow disconnected from it. I think maybe what we’re doing is quite far away from that language," he says. "Certainly individually, we’re all part of that community. We hang out with those people and see their work and are interested in it. But I feel that somehow when we create the work, we’re creating a world apart from all that. I think that somehow when you make a work of art, you have to make the work of art for the first time. You have to create a place to work where nothing has been done before." |
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