| Finding yourself sitting next to an artistic director, dramaturge, playwright, actor, fight director, dancer, stage manager, designer, arts educator or arts administrator was part of the delight of being at the Fringe. Performing artists attended as many other shows as their schedules allowed and talked about how much they were enjoying the Fringe audiences. Being next to the mentors, teachers, partners, parents or friends of the artists was another treat. Everywhere, you heard reviews of shows.
Audience sizes ranged from a few of the faithful to sold-out houses with volunteers scurrying to place more chairs. The same show, depending on its time in the day, could experience this variation in numbers. And what happened on stage ranged from the finely polished and keenly designed by established performers to nascent talents veering towards perfection, but fumbling to achieve what they had envisioned.
Anita Miotti and David van Belle, the mesmerizing movers in Dragonfly, Episode IV: Identity were unrelenting in "a heroic love story." Miotti’s individual fingers have more expression than some performer’s whole bodies. She and van Belle simulate sex with a table sandwiched between them. It was hilariously inventive and consistent with their comic-book style.
The Aleatory Project relies on chance, from coin tossing or card turning to determine what role the actors will play and how the script will change. Intelligently written by Helen Juvonen, this talky play is enhanced by the ease with which she and Alan Lee adapt to chance.
At Late Night with the Moose, Dennis Cahill floated the idea that having all the audience naked would be a sign of support. Still outrageous after all these years. (TC)
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In some ways, it was hard to know what to expect going into the Calgary Fringe, back after a hiatus of several years. With a mix of amateur and professional performers, local and touring productions and a lottery system for choosing which shows get produced, there’s an element of chance in the festival lineup and I was eager to see many of the productions.
Going into the Fringe, the play I was probably most looking forward to was Death; A Comedy (In Five Stages), a look at the associations of death in our culture and around the world, a co-production between Calgary and Toronto theatre companies. While the two performers managed to create distinct characters and a shifting mood of humour and sadness, the play never really got past that: it wasn’t really clear what the focus was or what they meant to say about death, and the depictions of death rites in various cultures were themselves cursory. Maybe it was because I had high hopes for the production, but the play felt superficial and insubstantial. Nonetheless, the collective creation showed promise and, having constructed the outlines of a play, could be developed into a solid production.
The next play I tried to see was the much-lauded Electra at the Weiner Stand, a production from Orlando, Florida. Unfortunately, the show had been cancelled, so I saw its substitute, Spunk’d, a cowboy-themed cabaret. The performance I caught featured three performances, each a one-woman piece. The first two seemed cobbled together at the last minute without much of a story. The third, performed by Ella Simon, told the story of a former Young Canadians performer who grew up amid the ranching and cowboy culture of Alberta and Montana, and chronicled her relationship with a cowboy husband, their painful divorce and her expulsion from the Young Canadians. Towards the end of the show, she falls in love with her ex-husband’s prize breeding bull and has a tender bestial relationship with it. Simon was by far the strongest performer of the three, and although her acting and accents were often overwrought, the content of her piece provided a great mindfuck in the context of the cabaret.
The other highlights of the Fringe included Jihad Me at Hello, the latest offering from Calgary comedy troupe Obscene but not Heard. The hour-long series of interconnected skits is tight and well put together, and the four actors were all solidly funny as they moved from role to role. The skits are almost all loosely based on the concepts of religion and hell, and included a scene where the apostles debate how to "spin" the death of Christ, a segment of a 17-hour-long Leonard Cohen performance in the underworld, and a sketch of four people signing up for the Calgary chapter of Al-Qaeda as they discuss what to do with the 70 virgins promised them in the afterlife. The show was performed almost flawlessly, an example of how good sketch comedy can be.
On the dramatic side of things was Living Shadows, a one-woman play about Mary Pickford, the Canadian silent-film actress who earned the nickname "America’s sweetheart" and rose to become arguably the most famous actress in 1920s Hollywood. Constructed around a meeting with Billy Wilder, who offers an aging Pickford (Tracey Power) the chance to star in a new movie, Pickford relates the story of her life from growing up an impoverished Broadway performer, to her debut in movies, her relationship with Douglas Fairbanks and her retirement from film. Power’s portrayal of Pickford is convincing, as she explores the themes of celebrity and image from the point of view of a movie star who has lost her career due to age, the victim of her own personality cult.
In all, the first year of the new Calgary Fringe was solid, with a mix of local, regional and international shows, complemented by a film festival, a comedy festival and a contingent of street artists. Here’s hoping that the Calgary Fringe sticks around for years to come. (AM)
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Initially, I was leery of the plan to host the Fringe along 17th Avenue S.W. However, the 2006 edition of the Calgary Fringe made me a believer, and I’m looking forward to what next year’s festival has in store.
Scorpio Theatre’s The Very Long Night of Tyler and Selena thrilled audiences with a great story and performance. For theatre of the twisted, Obscene But Not Heard’s Jihad Me at Hello had the audience rolling with laughter at all the sacred cows being skewered. In that same vein of sacrilegious humor, Jesus Christ: the Lost Years played to a near-capacity crowd who laughed along as Monster Theatre unfolded a hidden gospel of Jesus’ life.
Ticket sales and other attendance numbers were the big success story. Fringe Festival producer Blair Gallant says, "sales have been 15 to 20 per cent higher than expected," and "10 to 12 per cent over the CAFF (Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals) average." The first Sunday of the Fringe saw as many as 15,000 people visit the main site at Tomkins Park. A big draw were some of the bands – Montreal violist Dr. Draw mesmerized crowds whenever he took the stage.
Two of the three 17th Avenue stage locations for the buskers and performers seemed a bit unusual and not as performance friendly as I would have liked. Gallant said they explored over 27 different areas in the neighbourhood that were discounted for various reasons.
Besides the hits and the misses, Gallant recounted some of the more interesting Fringe misadventures, from "religious and vocal people" verbally attacking a tarot card reader, to a small fire at one of the venues. However, audiences themselves were open to the adventure and went along with any changes. While the theatre was being repaired, they enjoyed a performance in a makeshift theatre/boardroom.
Overall, I felt it was a good start. I’ll expect that the festival will be even better next year. Gallant agrees. "Now that we’ve been through this, we know the logistics. There’s a lot we’ve learned in terms of everything from programming to how the venues go. It’ll be 10 times easier next year now that we know how things work." Here’s hoping that next year’s Fringe will also have 10 times the success. (EK)
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I had one measly day to Fringe this year and I was determined to make the most of it. Sadly, time, space and their evil acolyte, the Calgary transit system, seemed determined to thwart me.
I made it to Living Shadows: A Story of Mary Pickford, which in spite of its polish, left me rather cold. With a scheduled 30 minutes between shows, I thought I’d have plenty of time to shuttle over to Epcor for my next choice, Tippi Seagram’s Happy Hour. But Living Shadows, which played at the gorgeous Calgary Opera Centre (COC) just off 17th Avenue, had run nearly 10 minutes overtime. Fighting my way through an altercation between several cops and a do-badder who’d been taunting "The Greenpeace Girls," as the cops called them, I made it to the Tomkins Park Fringe Shuttle only to learn it wasn’t leaving for a half hour. "There’s no way you’ll make it," the info guy told me, rather gleefully, I thought. So I went for a beer.
Next up was Do You Bite Your Thumb at Me, Sir?! THEATREboom’s well-known anthology of Shakespearean fight scenes. It was effective tonic, just the right combination of silliness and actual athleticism (both physical and linguistic). But why do kids always get picked for the audience participation part? At that point, I could have done with a few minutes of pounding someone to a pulp with a Styrofoam noodle.
The show ended at 7:07. The Aleatory Project was doing a final performance back at COC at 7:30 p.m. I suppose I could have hurled myself into a cab (the Fringe Bus was there at Epcor, handsome enough but also dark and empty, clearly going nowhere soon). I felt insufficiently lucky and went to dinner instead.
I ended the day with P.S. 69, whose rather pat storyline about a substitute teacher getting her groove on was saved by the hilarious ventriloquial talent of the performer, Susan Jeremy. There was something else, too, about this production that made it a much better Fringe play than Mary Pickford. I managed to sneak out again on the Friday to attend the Flying Solo! panel, where Nicole Zylstra mentioned the connection with the audiences she’s experienced doing one-woman shows. That connection, I decided, was what Mary Pickford lacked. It felt like it would have been no different if performed to an empty room.
I’d learned my lesson – I had my bike this time. So I kamikazed across town to catch Nicole and the rest of the Obscene But Not Heard crew in Jihad Me at Hello. The spot-on spoof of Leonard Cohen was in itself worth the price of admission, but the whole show was good, sick fun, and seemed to embody the anarchic spirit of Fringe.
The Festival’s off to a good start, I think, and with so much talent in this city and so many companies itching to come here, it’s stupid that we’ve gone without it for so long. Maybe next year that infuriating police helicopter will volunteer its services to shuttle us between venues. (ML) |
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