>>REVIEW
Mutton Busting Performance and Visual Art Festival
High Performance Rodeo
Epcor Centre
The five-year-old Mutton Busting Performance and Visual Art Festival really raised its profile this year, offering some big-name attractions onstage and unintentionally stirring up controversy with its Plus-15 exhibits in the Epcor Centre.
Yet despite such headline acts as indie rocker Calvin Johnson, sexologist Annie Sprinkle’s films and a screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc, I couldn’t help but feel drawn to some of the lesser known performers and artists featured during the two-week festival – the ones that have always made Mutton Busting special. Here are some highlights:
· Faire (1 + 1) Tu – RED2BLUE Physical Theatre’s show was the first to be performed at Motel, Mutton Busting’s new venue across from the Big Secret Theatre. Faire (1 + 1) Tu spins the tale of Philistine the librarian (Zoë Cobb), who walks among the shelves of lonely books. She runs her fingers over their spines with her eyes closed, feeling their textures. When she senses a book’s loneliness, she gently pulls it from the shelf. Things change when she meets George (Mark Jenkins), and a rich mélange of imagery dances onto the stage. Light is created from opening of books and umbrellas, and, combined with a massive list of props and effects, provides a magical show that’s a constant feast for the senses. Romantic clichés abound, including a miniature Venetian-style boat (ingeniously rolled onstage by skateboards) and trumpets playing that sort of sidewalk jazz you’d expect to hear while two lovers kiss in Paris, from an illuminated phonograph.
· The Three Sisters: A Prairie Opera of the Macabre – Kristine Nutting’s absurd Prairie opera took the stage the moment the audience entered the theatre. Here, we first meet and chat with Mommy-Daddy, a.k.a. Angel Cuddy, a.k.a. Butch, a cross-dressing, pathetic yet charming farmer turned lady turned psychotic, played magnificently by Jason Carnew. Then there’s Pax (Caitlin Fulton), the ingénue who loves Jesus, and her sisters, Maggie (Tamara Hamilton), renowned for her jazz hands and mouth, and "ugly" Olga (Nutting), who loves nothing except Pax and her accordion. Brad Payne as Mitch Mitchell McKracken, a.k.a. "The Pork Whisperer," must also get an honourable mention for his truly sinister performance and famous backflip. But the Upstaging Award goes to Scott Shepeley as Billy Hamm, for breathing life into a character who has an amazing sense of innocence next to the hard-core, grotesque figures that drive this farmland narrative. The Three Sisters is both a vegetarian’s nightmare and a masterpiece of Prairie storytelling and musical spoof.
· Plink Plink Plink Two and Queer Projections – Bubonic Tourist’s second mini-festival of two-minute dances, Plink Plink Plink Two, featured a range of choreographers and performers. By far the most interesting piece was one by MoMo Dance Theatre, facilitated by choreographer Laurie Montemurro and performed by Jennifer Roberts and Thomas Poulsen. This beautiful version of a love story/musical chairs was captivating. In Mutton Busting’s Department of Soft Architecture series showcasing queer art, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s Queer Projections Program B included a performance from his major project LYRIC, a sung narrative comprised of sound bites collected from the lyrics of 1,000 love songs. The highlight, however, was his 2003 work AUDITION TAPE, an eight-minute video in English and Russian, combining a personal monologue with an audition for a Russian lesbian pop group.
· Pardon Moi Si Je Fume, Ease and The Headless Cowboy – In the festival’s second week, Bubonic Tourist’s Pardon Moi Si Je Fume combined sound, movement, visuals and languages, yet often fell short of its storyline. Certain images stole the show – Krysten Blair walking barefoot on a poorly tuned piano; Ethan Cole as a clown, smiling, then flipping the bird at the audience. It was these moments that rescued an otherwise empty show. Meanwhile, Samuel Garrigó Meza’s Ease turned the literary tradition of the poetry reading on its head and pointed to the absurdities inherent within it. Broken Spoke Theatre’s The Headless Cowboy, featuring Bubonic Tourist’s Blair and The Three Sisters’ Nutting and Payne, while at times brilliant parody and great physical theatre, again felt as though something was lacking. We never got much explanation of, or transition between, the show’s stock characters, which made this otherwise entertaining show feel incomplete.
VISUAL ART WALLED IN
There must have been a prophetic irony in Megan Hepburn’s artist statement that her work Terminal Modern "deals with the transitional nature of destruction and reconstruction, what is lost in the process, and what continues to haunt the visual by its absence." The Plus-15 link in the Epcor Centre, where Hepburn’s trilogy of paintings is on display as part of Mutton Busting, is now being haunted by a wall. Terminal Modern shows the beauty inherent in ugliness (known as jolie-laide) and perhaps the wall built in front of it adds yet another layer to her work, although that doesn’t seem to be the Epcor Centre’s intention. Rather, it erected the wall in response to public complaints about the Vancouver artist’s disturbing images of animals.
I saw Terminal Modern and the festival’s other artworks before the wall went up. They consist of Edie Fake’s comically rendered Gaylord Phoenix in the Flower Temple, Kit Malo’s beautiful characters in suspension in we are constantly deceiving our eyes and Geneviève Castrée’s Are You Scared? Well, yes, apparently some of us are scared to become a cultural centre with freedom of expression. Hopefully, the efforts of the people behind Mutton Busting will continue to change this. |
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