>>REVIEW
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITIES
Mammalian Diving Reflex
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites Festival
Runs until February 19
Engineered Air Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
Toronto-based Mammalian Diving Reflex has called its work "social acupuncture," and the metaphor seems apt. The company’s latest project, Diplomatic Immunities, presented on the BD&P Stage 2 (a.k.a. the Engineered Air Theatre) of Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival, is a series of pinprick-quick portraits that, while briefly painful at points, produce an altogether welcome sensation.
Though I’m certain professional new media artists and theatrical professionals would balk at having their work compared to a talk show, I can think of no more appropriate summary for Diplomatic Immunities. Despite the consummate sheen of theatricality that binds its micro interviews together, it is the quintessential talk-show element of bite-sized human inquiry that provides the production’s momentum. Projected onto the Engineered Air’s back wall, brief interviews and images explore Calgary’s denizens, with the ensemble narrating, discussing and inviting audience feedback.
From a C-Train passenger currently in an open-ended marriage to interviews with elementary school students, the production’s unflinching inquiry is the source of its title and its power. Collaborators Faisal Anwar, Naomi Campbell, Jennie Esdale, Terrance Houle, Darren O’Donnell, Tarik Robinson and Vicki Stroich bluntly probe random encounters, and later the audience itself, for opinions and personal accounts relating to such broad topics as sexuality and class. The result is engaging and even instructive.
Complemented by Ian Martens’s invasive, surreal lighting, Diplomatic Immunities’ collaborators and video clips are spliced and staged with a dynamism that prevents the production from being a simple human slide show. At one point, filmed live, a superimposed Stroich sails through Calgary’s C-Train routes, as Robinson, an artist with local hip-hop crew Dragon Fli Empire, provides the soundscape – as consummately theatrical as it is an exercise in multimedia.
Live surveys, written on a dry-erase transparency, are transposed over a live video feed of the audience, revealing micro-demographics that serve to cull impromptu interviews. One audience member, comfortably seated in the stage’s green upholstered chair, gave a first-hand account of a vehicular three-way that was as absorbing a piece of theatre as I’ve ever seen in the Engineered Air.
Call it snack-sized documentary filmmaking or social acupuncture, the production is a heady blend of human snapshots whose most acute problem seems to be an occasional tendency to overestimate its own depth, inserting the needle inexpertly.
Although a fascinating exercise in brief interviews, and the unexpected and telling revelations that result, the production is a highly scattershot approach that cannot possibly afford its subjects the time to engender meaningful empathy. Fictitious accounts of the creators’ death and an accompanying filmed "death" scene, therefore, lend a false sense of completeness to the production’s understanding.
At its most painful, this assumption saw an awkward question-and-answer period that brought the audience’s most affluent and impoverished members onstage. Unfortunately, it seems that O’Donnell, Mammalian Diving Reflex’s artistic director, is under the misapprehension that the less-well-to-do would like nothing better than a solicitation for $20 in front of an audience. Of course, human beings aren’t snapshots, and the audience member’s obvious mortification was almost unbearable.
Thankfully, the production’s dynamic staging moves its action quickly away from its occasional missteps with an otherwise seamless agility, even affording audiences the opportunity to offer criticism in the concluding Q&A period. It’s a final exercise in interaction that drives the production’s emphasis home – social acupuncture delivered as painlessly as possible. |
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