Preview
I AM THE SERPENT
Theatre Utopia
Runs June 1 to 11
Preview
DIVA ME
Theatre Utopia
Runs June 3, 5, 10 and 11
Pumphouse Theatres
It’s time for a double dose of Utopia. Collective group Theatre Utopia is finishing off its third season with two shows: I Am the Serpent, which won this year’s best male actor award at the local and provincial one-act festivals, and the unusual romantic comedy Diva Me.
Theatre Utopia started out in 2002 with a focus on youth and community development, but over the past couple of seasons has evolved to focus almost exclusively on performance creation.
"When you do community development or performance creation, you get pigeonholed as non-professional," says artistic director Dawn L. Ford. She would like people to come to the shows and challenge their preconceptions about what they expect to see.
Although Theatre Utopia has moved away from community development, it is still involved in working with marginalized groups, as in the case of Diva Me. Ford says that they seem to be comfortable with the collective process and with the non-judgmental, egalitarian ethic of the collective.
Diva Me is based on the experiences and inner thoughts of developmentally disabled actress Jennifer Stewart, who came to Utopia through a mentorship program supported by the SCOPE Society, a local organization that works with people with disabilities, and others, to create solutions to personal and social justice issues. Not wanting to be limited to roles as a disabled person, Stewart wanted to work with Utopia to expand her horizons and hone her acting skills.
As director Ford was out of town for a year, the two began to conceptualize Diva Me via e-mail, with Stewart sharing her wealth of funny stories. They decided that a love interest was needed and that he would have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), so Ford and Stewart began working with Corby Proctor, an actor with OCD.
"This play is from their lives, from their experiences," says Ford of Stewart and Proctor.
When Ford returned to Calgary, they acted out the scenes they’d written and the play began to take shape. The production marks the end of Stewart’s mentorship – after this she’ll be a full-fledged member of the company – and, in a fitting conclusion, she’s playing the only non-disabled character in the show.
Ford has high hopes for Diva Me, saying there’s potential for it to tour, among other things. "One day we would like to do a full-length film version," she says.
Like Diva Me, Theatre Utopia’s other show, I Am the Serpent, began as an e-mail correspondence.
"The play is about an artist who’s struggling to write, and the inner demons that talk to him," says Ford, who directed it as well. "Ultimately, in real time it encompasses a two-minute decision in a man’s life, and we see 45 minutes of what’s going on in his head."
Writer and actor Ben Charland won awards for his performance when the play was entered in the Calgary and Alberta one-act play festivals earlier this year. Charland came up through Theatre Utopia’s youth program and is now the company’s creative director, which Ford regards as a real success story. "That was our intention (for the youth program) all along," she says.
Charland was also the first person to take up Ford on her call for project proposals – a bold move for a relative youngster.
"He is bold, there’s no doubt about it," says Ford, laughing. " That’s what makes him good."
However, after four or five months of exchanging e-mails, Charland still didn’t have a project, only a lot of ideas about what he didn’t want to do. When he and Ford printed off all the e-mails, they were confronted with 65 pages of rants. With Ford as facilitator, Charland set out to define the voices in the messages and eventually a structure began to emerge from the chaos.
This is an example of how facilitation is supposed to work, says Ford. A facilitator’s job is to "instinctively and personally guide the creative process of a group or individual and look after the well-being of the piece of art as a whole," she explains. "When you have someone there that you trust, you can get into the really personal stuff." |
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