>>PREVIEW
HOFFOS/CLARKE CONSPIRACY
One Yellow Rabbit
High Performance Rodeo
Runs January 4 to 8
Engineered Air Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
The paranormal, an award-winning artist and Calgary’s dance diva will all come together onstage for a High Performance Rodeo production dubbed the Hoffos/Clarke Conspiracy.
The artist in question is David Hoffos, who, for the past decade, has been creating installations in galleries that use technology and scale to trick viewers’ perceptions about what they are seeing.
One of his projects, Scenes from the House Dream, is an ongoing work that Hoffos first unveiled in Calgary in 2003. Known for his imaginative installations that often incorporate film, video, mirrors and projectors, the Lethbridge-based artist was awarded $15,000 for his second-place finish in the inaugural Sobey Art Award in 2002. Hoffos is once again a semi-finalist for the 2006 Sobey Art Award, which was established for Canadian artists under the age of 40 who have exhibited their work in a public or commercial art gallery in the past 18 months.
For his first foray into professional theatre, Hoffos was approached by Denise Clarke of One Yellow Rabbit.
"They (OYR) were beginning to become aware of my work since the mid-1990s," says the artist. "They saw theatrical possibility for the work that I was doing."
Although eager to work with Calgary’s best-known avant-garde theatre group, Hoffos admits the project also creates anxiety for him.
"It’s exciting but also terrifying," he says. "If it sucks, it’s my fault. Sometimes I wonder, ‘Why am I doing this?’"
Describing Conspiracy as similar to one of his installations, but with the addition of a live performer, Hoffos admits handing off some of the responsibility for its creation to others is difficult. "I’m not a natural collaborator," he says. "I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy."
Hoffos and Clarke first met in 1996 at The Banff Centre, where Hoffos was participating in an artist-in-residence program and OYR was performing Alien Bait – a play written by Blake Brooker and Michael Green that revolves around a panel of experts at a symposium debating reports of visitations by extraterrestrials.
Inspired in part by those events in 1996, Conspiracy also has a sense of the otherworldly, thanks to Hoffos’s use of artistic illusions and Clarke’s ability to move stealthily around the stage of the Engineered Air Theatre.
The story – without giving away any secrets – centres on a woman who wakes up after a night of partying at a theatre opening. Disoriented and suffering from a hangover, the woman finds her memories of the previous evening, and those of her friends, are completely different.
"One side of the stage will be a forest and the other side will be a bedroom," says Hoffos.
Three video projectors, a couple of DVD players and a few other tricks of the trade will allow Hoffos to play with the scale of Clarke’s image onstage as well as her exact location. To enhance the impact of the visual effects, specific parts of the theatre, including the balcony, will be closed to the audience. Although Hoffos says there is a flavour of magic to his effects, he does not subscribe to the magician’s edict of not letting the audience in on the trick.
"The audience will see how it’s all done," he assures. "The audience will be included in the conspiracy."
In order to meld Hoffos’s visual effects with Clarke’s live performance, the lighting of the stage will be kept to a minimum. "We’ll be pushing it to the edge of vision," he says. "There will be almost no light."
Hoffos adds that another major factor in creating what he describes as "non-live performance" is to rely on the expertise of an experienced sound designer. OYR ensemble member Richard McDowell, who has produced scores for more than 24 of the company’s productions (including Alien Bait), will be responsible for creating the soundscape of Conspiracy. It’s something Hoffos says is integral to the success of the piece. "Sound is half of it," he says.
New to creating theatre but completely comfortable with temporarily suspending disbelief, Hoffos reminds everyone who takes in the 45-minute production that for him it is the visual sleight-of-hand that matters most.
"For my work, illusion is the primary subject, then the content," he says. "It’s an experimental piece. It’s a one-woman show punctuated by these moments of illusion."
For her part, Clarke says it is Hoffos and his imagination that will be taking centre stage in Conspiracy. "I’m behind the fourth wall in this one," she says.
Working only from an outline, Clarke says that Hoffos, McDowell and herself will be "completely hand-making the show together."
"It’s an exciting process for all three of us," she adds. "The Rodeo is about making work that creates its own edge." |
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