Review
HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
One Yellow Rabbit
Runs until February 1
Epcor Centre and Tower Centre
In classical Greek terms, it was like seeing a raucous satyr play followed by a lofty tragedy.
The second week of the High Performance Rodeo began with Ground Zero’s annual, laugh-a-minute 10-Minute Play Festival, which this year offered us blind rodeo clowns, singing mad cows and a psychotic little girls’ tea party, among other delightful mini-absurdities. It was followed two nights later by the opening of Sumida River, a sublime piece of dance theatre about a mother mourning her child’s death, choreographed by distinguished Japanese butoh artist Natsu Nakajima and executed by Canadian dancer Denise Fujiwara.
The 10-Minute Play Festival is always a hoot. Sure, not all these micro-plays click, and even fewer hold the seeds of a promising full-length work, but strung together they form a kind of wacky, R-rated vaudeville with something for everyone. That was especially true this year, with Obscene But Not Heard and Firebelly Theatre staging nutty musical numbers, The Wind-Up Dames doing their giddy comedy-team shtick and Solocentric delivering a pair of astringently funny stand-up monologues. And, just for a mood change, Maple Salsa opted to be the "straight" contributor this year, creating a morbid, Sarah Kane-style triptych of sexual perversity called "Baudelaire’s Corpse."
The whole evening was like one big curtain raiser for the real art to come.
Sumida River is a riff on Juro Motomasa’s classic Japanese Noh play Sumidagawa, the tale of a woman searching for her kidnapped son, who discovers he has died on the banks of the Sumida. Nakajima uses the premise to seamlessly unite traditional and contemporary dance into a series of ritualized yet inventive scenes.
From the opening passage, when she glides slowly across the stage with her golden robe spread out, in the words of Rimbaud, "announcing a sail," to the closing, when she appears leading a real boat made of fabric, Fujiwara gives a graceful, evocative and often moving performance. The powerful emotions conveyed by her facial expressions are a reminder of the difference between dancing as mere kinetic activity and as true theatre. With Roelof Peter Snippe’s sculpted lighting and a forceful score that also shifts between classical Asian and the avant-garde, the overall effect is stunning. Fujiwara first performed this work almost 10 years ago and I’m happy we finally got to see it in Calgary.
It set a sombre tone for the rest of the week, which also saw the première of a locally created show about the ugly side of humanity called The Beast. The multimedia production, spearheaded by Patricia Duquette and Shauna Kennedy under the name Impetus Interdisciplinary Works, incorporated a semi-poetic (and semi-coherent) text with physical theatre, dance, video and visual-art images, and a spare score by that musician-for-all-seasons, David Rhymer, teamed with Natascha Stoesser. Only the physical stuff worked for me, thanks more to the talent of dancers Wade Laing and Anita Miotti than to any overall conception. They were something to watch while listening to a painful but familiar litany of evil, the past century’s genocidal outrages placed side by side with the smaller daily cruelties of child and animal abuse.
Not that I’m getting jaded, but I decided to seek a second opinion from a teenage couple that also saw the show. They felt the writing was "disjointed," the use of video sometimes "pulled focus" from the performers and that, while the atrocities detailed here might be news to some sheltered audience members, "they aren’t the people that go to One Yellow Rabbit."
Way back in 1991, when the Rodeo was in its amateurish infancy, one of the first guest artists to raise the performance bar was New York actor-musician Jim Howley. His searing solo, Almost in Exile, was a cocktail of urban anger and rural blues that went down like Eric Bogosian mixed with Mississippi John Hurt.
Howley came back once more the following year, but since then we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of him. The Rabbits didn’t lose contact, however, and this week he finally returns to unveil a new one-man piece, The Rocket Box, directed by OYR’s Blake Brooker. Like Almost in Exile, it promises to provide a street-level perspective on American life during wartime, focusing on the Iraq invasion as well as telling the story of Howley’s late Marine neighbour, a battle-scarred Vietnam vet. It runs for three performances from January 23 to 25. I can’t wait to see it. |
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