| Finally! After months of announcements about purchases, renovations and fundraising, Theatre Junction has revealed what it will actually be doing in its swanky new Grand Theatre this season.
Well, half of this season, anyway. The refurbishing of the historic Grand won’t be finished until December and, even after the tradesmen pack up their tools, it’ll be more than a month before the theatre company is ready to swing open the doors. But when it does, in late February, we’ll get a glimpse of where Theatre Junction’s programming is heading, with a lineup that includes a collective creation, a latter-day play by British absurdist Caryl Churchill and a new work by Quebec’s avant-garde dance magus, Marie Chouinard.
The accent will be on contemporary, multidisciplinary performance – something TJ co-founder and artistic director Mark Lawes has been intimating since he arrived home from his year-long European sabbatical in 2003.
"This is the direction we’re looking at going in. This space is about that," he says. "Although, it doesn’t mean we’re only going to do one thing. As an artistic company, there’s always an opportunity to do many different things – and the unexpected. And we’ve kind of built our reputation on that a little bit."
In fact, in the years when it was occupying the Jubilee Auditorium’s now-defunct Dr. Betty Mitchell Theatre, Theatre Junction often came off like Theatre Calgary’s younger, smaller, brainier cousin, doing the kind of intellectual classics and important international plays that the city’s box office-wary flagship theatre shied away from. But the new Theatre Junction, from the looks of it, may have more in common with the experimental One Yellow Rabbit.
The company’s opening production, dubbed simply Show No. 1, will be an eclectic entertainment collectively created and performed by artists of various disciplines, from actors and dancers to musicians and visual artists. Although the show is still in the planning stage, Lawes says it will be about life in Calgary today. "I couldn’t see us doing anything else to open the Grand but something that was appropriate to this time and place," he explains. It runs from February 21 to 25.
After its opening show, the Grand will host a splashy opening party on March 4. Then Theatre Junction gets down to business later in the month, with a foray into the darkly surreal world of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away.
"Her work is crazy, absurd, but always very political," says Lawes of the Canadian-bred playwright, one of Britain’s major modern dramatists, who is perhaps best known for her gender-bending classic Cloud Nine. Far Away, first produced in London in 2000, is a short but disturbing piece illuminating the passive complicity that allows violence, oppression and wars. It runs from March 21 to April 8.
After that, the thrilling Compagnie Marie Chouinard, a firm favourite with Calgary audiences after three visits to the High Performance Rodeo, returns to town with the eponymous choreographer’s new work, bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, which played at this year’s Venice Biennale. Its Grand engagement, April 25 to 29, will be a welcome opportunity to see this company in a more intimate venue than the Jack Singer, site of its last two Rodeo shows.
The season wraps up the following month with another edition of Random Acts, Theatre Junction’s pocket-sized festival of works-in-progress, from May 11 to 13. It will run in the Grand’s 50-seat studio, which Lawes says will also be made available for rent to the city’s smaller theatre groups.
The Grand’s main theatre is a flexible space with a maximum standing-room capacity of 400. Movable seating will allow it to be used in at least eight different configurations. In addition, the building will house a restaurant and lounge dubbed Velvet, to be overseen by Connie O’Connor, owner-operator of such classy eateries as Cilantro, Divino and The Ranche.
So far, Theatre Junction has acquired $10 million of the $11.5 million it needs for the Grand project – which includes a rainy-day fund – and is confident it will reach its goal. Lawes anticipates that the company’s previous $1-million operating budget will jump to $1.5 million next season, but increased costs will be offset by additional revenue from rentals of the theatre. |
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