| They wanted "creepy," so they called in a Devil.
A Plaid Tongued Devil, to be precise – Ty Semaka, the infernal-looking singer-songwriter with Calgary’s popular klezmer-rock band.
The people at Theatre Calgary were looking to add a little more spookiness to their annual production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol this year, so they turned to Semaka, who leads a double life as a graphic artist, and asked him to design a whole new series of projections.
"They wanted to darken the story a bit, play up the ghost story aspect a little more," says Semaka, whose soft-spoken manner belies his burly biker’s build and shaved head, from which a pair of jet-black locks sprout like horns. "When my name came up, they said, ‘Oh, yeah, he knows how to do creepy all right!’"
Semaka, whose illustrations have included the brightly grotesque cover artwork for the Devils’ In Klezskavania concept album, was happy to oblige. "We definitely turned up the creepy knob," he says. "It was very fun for me to paint graveyards and Scrooge’s old Victorian haunted mansion, and the horses and the hearse. I gave the horses these hollowed-out, skeletal eyes. It was great."
Of course, the enduring works of Dickens have been illustrated in hundreds of ways, going back to the writer’s lifetime, when the famous artists George Cruikshank and Hablôt K. Browne (alias Phiz) embellished his books with their memorable engravings. Semaka says he looked at their pictures and also used a book of Victorian woodcuts as a reference when illustrating buildings and objects, but stuck to his own distinctive style at the request of Theatre Calgary. "However," he adds, "we’ve kept it a little closer to realism than the over-the-top cartoon style like I used for In Klezskavania."
The occasion for the new images is Theatre Calgary’s purchase of a new, state-of-the-art LCD projection system that is more extensive than in any other Canadian theatre.
"They’ve tripled the number of projectors to nine this year," says Semaka. "They’re using eight in the back (of the stage) and one from the front, which does Marley’s face on the door and the gravestone. They’re all controlled by one computer using a program that’s similar to PowerPoint. It’s quite cool. The pictures can come in to the one-hundredth of a second; you can control the length of fade-out and overlap images. We even have stuff that’s almost animated, like clock hands that spin backwards in the flashback scene." The projections are programmed by LCD project manager Mike Hessler.
The show previously used a handful of projections, but Semaka says their style was inconsistent and included photos as well as artwork. He’s more than tripled the number of projections, from five to 18 images, and all of them are original paintings.
"They’re all watercolours that I scanned into my computer," he says. "There’s a fair amount of Photoshop work going on (to manipulate them). I would paint some images in layers, so one image might be three different paintings, one on top of the other."
Semaka isn’t the first Devil to dabble with Christmas Carol. Jonathan Lewis, the band’s violinist, has composed the show’s current score and served as a cast member in previous years. Still, a family Christmas play seems an unlikely place to find Semaka, whose past theatrical (and design) work has often been in association with the avant-garde One Yellow Rabbit. OYR transformed In Klezskavania into a raunchy musical in 1998 and Semaka has more recently performed as a freaky vocalist with Rabbit Michael Green’s Frank Zappa tribute band, the Whip It Out Ensemble.
Semaka came to music via the classic route – art school. A small-town kid from Taber, where he sang with the high school chorus, he came to Calgary in 1984 to attend the Alberta College of Art. A couple of years after graduating, he helped found the Devils. "We started off playing coffee shops," he recalls.
Today, the five-member band has four albums to its credit and a following both locally and abroad. This spring, the Devils will embark on yet another European tour. "We’re going to the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and possibly Switzerland and northern Italy, too," says Semaka. "It’ll be our third time back there and it’s always a blast."
As well, he adds, the band is planning to cut a new album next year. "We’re due for one and Jonathan’s building a studio in his basement. So we’re just waiting for him to finish and we’ll record the next one there." |
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