>>PREVIEW
MOVING ALONG
Simian Theatre and One Yellow Rabbit
Written and performed by Chris Craddock
Directed by Sophie Lees
Runs November 22 to 26
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
In the beginning, there was the chair.
An electric chair, to be specific.
And Chris Craddock said, "Let there be lighting!
"Make that theatrical lighting," he added, "which can be controlled by household dimmer switches attached to the chair."
And the Edmonton actor-playwright surveyed his quirky new performance gadget and saw that it was good.
"Now," he mused, "all I need is a play in which to use it."
Whether or not the creation of Moving Along was quite so biblical, Craddock’s offbeat play for actor and armchair is one of those works that’s grown out of, and been inspired by, technology and an unusual prop – not unlike the shows of Quebec wizard Robert Lepage.
Then again, maybe it’s just an excuse to sit down.
If you caught Craddock in the wildly energetic, manically inventive Faithless at the last High Performance Rodeo, you won’t blame the guy for wanting to rest a spell.
"I had been doing a real spate of one-person plays and they were always extremely animated – I was bouncing all over the stage," he says of Moving Along’s origins. "I began to really get into the stillness of a Spalding Gray situation, where the words and story were in motion and I was not. I wanted to see if it was possible to create that feeling of motion without actually moving."
So he came up with what he calls the Electro Chair, built for him by Doug Field – an armchair embedded with dimmers connected to outlets, which in turn lead to surrounding lights that illuminate the seated actor. "That allows me to run the lighting design as I perform the show," he says. And it’s a complex design, containing some 400 cues and using split-second changes in light to help create that illusion of motion.
"The quick lighting shifts allow me to edit the play, a little bit like a film," says Craddock. "The audience is well trained to consider a lighting shift to be a setting shift in imaginatively based theatre like this, and this way I can cut back and forth (between scenes) very fast."
Craddock’s electric chair looks not unlike the more infamous one beloved of the U.S. penal system and that resemblance helped suggest the Beckettian theme of Moving Along. "The play deals with mortality, the idea that we’re all sitting inside of a life, kind of waiting for it to end," he says.
Craddock’s seated character delivers a monologue about his life experiences, which Craddock says is "semi-, quasi-autobiographical."
"The theme is that, as we move through childhood, we encounter experiences that basically damage us – almost everything important that happens to us is a form of damage," he says. "There’s a line in the play, ‘Nobody appreciates damage at the time,’ and I think damage is actually something to be valued. The many-splendoured things that our personalities are, are attributable to the hard times we’ve had and the unfortunate situations we’ve encountered, and it’s a good thing."
Moving Along was originally commissioned a few years ago by Edmonton’s site-specific Theatre of the New Heart and performed by Craddock in the unfinished basement of director Sophie Lees’s house. After that, Craddock took it to the Edmonton and Winnipeg fringe festivals and then before the TV cameras in 2004 for the Bravo! Singular Series. It was while taping the show in Halifax that he met fellow series contributor Denise Clarke, who was re-creating her hit So Low. The One Yellow Rabbit connection ultimately led to Moving Along’s gig at the Big Secret this month.
The show is the inaugural production of Craddock’s new company, Simian Theatre – only the latest project for the prolific stage artist, who has been pumping out plays and performances (and racking up awards) since graduating from the University of Alberta less than a decade ago. While he’s currently artistic director of Edmonton’s Rapid Fire improv troupe, he’s formed Simian specifically to do his own work, modelling it on Daniel MacIvor’s Da Da Kamera company. In fact, that master soloist has been a big inspiration for Craddock.
"The whole reason I started one-man shows was because I saw Daniel MacIvor perform House when I was 19. Workshop West brought it into Edmonton and I was just blown away," he recalls. "It was one of the watershed events of my artistic development."
While Calgary has been exposed to a little of Craddock’s work – Faithless (which he wrote and performed with Steve Pirot) and Men Are Stoopid, Women Are Craa-azy!, seen at the 2001 Rodeo – his success in Edmonton suggests we should get to know him better. And he’s happy to return the sentiment.
"I love the scenes in both Edmonton and Calgary," he says, "and love being able to move a little bit between them." |
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