>>PREVIEW
SHOW NO. 1: ARCHEOLOGY
Runs until November 11
Theatre Junction Resident Company of Artists
The GRAND (Theatre Junction)
On the bare brick back wall of Theatre Junction’s studio rehearsal space, beside the ruins of The GRAND’s former projection room, TJ’s Resident Company of Artists has posted a set list with titles like "I Have 23 Girlfriends," "Suzette’s Poem" and "Archaeology of Fear II." Added later in lighter ink is "Always Got," a gushy ensemble number replete with a chorus of "la la la’s" that the company is rehearsing as I position myself at the studio’s fringe.
Together, these vignettes will form Show No. 1: Archaeology, the first show created and performed by TJ’s unique collection of 12 theatre and non-theatre artists. It is significant that "Always Got" is still in light ink – two weeks before the production opens, the company of artists is still rehearsing in bare feet, crafting the final product. While creating a production so close to the work’s premiere isn’t uncommon, it isn’t often that an ensemble so young (the Company of Artists first met in September) takes that plunge.
Whispering under the strumming of company member Peter Moller’s guitar, artistic director Mark Lawes says of the company’s creative process: "Before September, a lot of us had never met, so we didn’t have a ‘way.’ We’ve had to find that."
The process of compiling the work into its 70 to 75-minute final form, he notes, plays heavily into the "discovery" theme of archeology that unifies the piece. In addition to new pieces brought out in the process of rehearsing – while I observe, Cole Lewis shows the company a shadow puppetry-style piece using a projector – Show No. 1 is largely composed of the 10 to 15-minute pieces that each company member brought as part of their initial recruitment. In fact, while the play’s title hearkens to the company’s never-created original Show One – cancelled because of The GRAND’s delayed opening – nothing survives of that show other than company members Lawes, Moller, Kris Demeanor and a series of video clips.
Actor and company member Mike Tan’s own monologues, reflections on the generational distance between his father and grandfather, have also been excised from the current production. But despite losing his original contributions to the show, the recent University of Calgary graduate has already begun to create another piece, explaining aside with a sardonic wistfulness: "It’s about love, Jeff."
It’s all part of a creation process that is still unearthing itself.
"We go on the guideline where, if you want to try something, then do it," says Tan. "If it doesn’t work it doesn’t work. It’s not comfortable necessarily, but everyone is ready to take risks with each other, and that’s how we move forward."
As an actor, Tan is no stranger to rehearsal spaces like the GRAND’s, but he admits that the company’s creation process is an entirely new game.
"I’m really used to getting a text and then just memorizing the text and playing around with it, then severing yourself from it so you can look at it objectively, then delving back into it to interpret it," he says. "So that’s something I’ve been getting used to, and I’ve found that very stimulating and difficult too."
If, to extend the show’s archeological metaphor, Tan’s experience in TJ’s studio is simply a new excavation technique, novelist and poet Suzette Mayr’s experience is more akin to being flown across the world to an unfamiliar dig site. In fact, her own involvement with Show No. 1 and the resident company of artists began quite unintentionally when TJ’s artistic director, with whom Mayr had worked as part of a Shakespeare Company created by Nikki Lundmark and Lawes, approached her on the street.
"I immediately said, ‘I’m not a playwright. I don’t actually want to be a playwright, I want to have a different perspective,’" she recalls. "And it just went from there. It just sounded so appealing I couldn’t resist."
While Mayr has appeared onstage before – in amateur companies, with the now-defunct Maenad Theatre and in a Ground Zero production of The Vagina Monologues – her full-time occupation as a novelist and creative writing professor at the University of Calgary remains miles away from the added challenges of another full-time position as a member of the Resident Company of Artists.
"I’m coming from the perspective of a novelist, writer and professor at a university, and that’s a very specific kind of life, both in terms of the art and physicality," says Mayr. "And then coming in here and it being taken for granted that of course I’ll sing in this song, and play the drums and get thrown on (company member Wojciech Mochniej’s) modern dance shoulders and pretend I’m a mermaid – it’s unbelievable."
Even eight months ago, visitors to The GRAND would have seen bare walls and scaffolding, heard the roar of the main level’s heater or the rush of air filters. Today, its rehearsal space is filled with an ensemble creating a work whose final shape is just as difficult to see as The GRAND’s own, even when squinting at the faint ink of the show’s set list. What is certain is that the company seems to be having fun in the process, tossing improvisation into "Always Got" and joking with each other as the rehearsal wraps up. Whether or not Theatre Junction’s Company of Artists has already found their "way," at least one sign is already apparent – though the company’s second show won’t be released until March, Archeology’s creation process has already produced material for Show No. 2: Atlantis. |
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