Reviews
SOLOCENTRIC FESTIVAL
Solocentric Theatre & Dance - One Yellow Rabbit
Runs until May 8
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Solocentric clearly takes the term "solo" loosely. The two shows I caught during the first weekend of this year’s festival of solo works weren’t solitary performances at all. One was a two-hander billed as "a solo duet" and the other featured one singer-actor accompanied by two musicians who also contributed occasional vocals.
Not that I’m being picky – in my experience, theatre mandates tend to be slippery things. And the solo duet in question, Hadji and Mar by the Solocentric resident company, is the sturdier for being a pair of entwined monologues.
This is a charming 45-minute miniature made from the letters of the English poet, author and gardener Vita Sackville-West and her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson. The bisexual couple maintained an open marriage that was quite extraordinary for the early 20th century – they had a long, loving relationship that lasted 49 years and produced two sons, yet they each freely and openly indulged their homosexual inclinations with various partners.
"I think we’ve managed things quite cleverly," says Vita (Katie Sanders) as she and Harold (David Friese) bicker cheerfully over the design of their celebrated gardens at Sissinghurst Castle.
But love can prove too wild and unruly to be treated like a flowerbed, and in the sixth year of their marriage Vita embarked on a mad affair with Violet Keppel, abandoning Harold and the children and running away with her to France. There, the two women courted scandal by living together, with tall, dark Vita (who was Virginia Woolf’s model for Orlando) disguising herself as a young man named Julian. Harold, distressed, begged for her to return and at one point flew to Amiens to "rescue" her. Vita continued to take off impulsively with Violet – even after the latter was married – for the next two years. In the end, however, she returned to Harold, the fever of infatuation having passed.
In this sensitive interpretation, one feels both for restless Vita, whose naughty fling sounds like it was exciting while it lasted, and for poor Harold, who showed the kind of caring and concern one would want from a life partner. The performances are also equally balanced. Friese’s Harold, with his neat little moustache and fussy ways, is played by the actor as a gentle, solicitous soul. As Vita, Sanders bears a resemblance to the real Sackville-West and, with short hair, also captures the writer’s attractive androgyny. In Jenny Ripond’s staging, the two move with barefooted grace, stepping lightly between the blossoms on a flower-bestrewed stage as if it were a garden, backed by a recorded score of sweet piano and violin music played by David Rhymer and Jonathan Lewis. Slight but lovely.
The ubiquitous Rhymer was also represented at the festival with On the Last Day Tina Did Nothing – an oratorio fashioned out of his musical Wreck Beach, originally produced in Vancouver and Edmonton four years ago. That show, like the Ghost River musical An Eye for an Eye (also composed by Rhymer), stirred up controversy for presuming to dramatize the death of a real person – in this case, Christina Thompson, a beer vendor on Vancouver’s famous nude beach who was murdered there in 1993.
Listening to this 70-minute song cycle for a vocalist and two musicians, it’s clear that Rhymer has made a sincere attempt to imagine the thoughts and feelings of the victim, a young woman fleeing sexual abuse who finds community among the mellow habitués of that Edenic stretch of West Coast sand before tragically falling prey to an obsessed killer. But the songs, long on mood and short on story, begin to feel repetitious, their tone overwhelmingly pensive and elegiac. And the novice singer for these performances, Lindsay Ell, while possessing a pretty voice, was an unexciting vocalist and a pallid actor during the linking monologues. Rhymer laid down the bare score on his trusty Roland keyboard and Ben Johnson of the Rembetika Hipsters dressed it up with a battery of instruments, from hand drums to tamboura, creating an appropriately dreamy Lotusland ambience.
Solocentric continues through a second and final weekend. The shows include: Touch, by One Yellow Rabbit’s Brad Payne and Decidedly Jazz Danceworks’ Sarisa Figueroa (May 6 and 7); Ma(i)ze by actor Natasha Nadir (May 7); Orcharestra by recent Enbridge Emerging Artist Award winner Eric Moschopedis (May 7); and two evening cabarets of 20-minute works, on Thursday, May 6 and Saturday, May 8. Saturday also features a matinee performance of work by young people, Teen Soul-Oh!, and a closing night party with Kris Demeanor and His Crack Band.
For a complete schedule of Solocentric performances, go to www.solocentric.com |
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