>>PREVIEW
THE HEADLESS TERROR!
January 19 and 20
Ghostwriter Theatre, presented by Calgary Animated Objects Society
High Performance Rodeo
Centre Court (Epcor Centre)
Step right up, step right up! Prepare to be shocked and amazed by the terrifying result of science gone berserk! Grotesque! Beyond belief! A vision of the miraculous extravagance of science for the same price as a Tim Hortons’s double double! If you only see one hideous sideshow at this year’s High Performance Rodeo, this is the one, folks! More astounding than the diving mammalians, more horrifying than a dead Elvis, it’s Ghostwriter Theatre’s attempt at cloning gone awry! Only two dollars for two minutes! It’s The Headless Terror: completely normal in every way, only she has no head!
Ghostwriter Theatre’s Ron Pearson entreats you to step through his tent’s flaps to be stunned and confounded by one of his many illustrious illusions. In traditional carnival set-up, a freak of nature or an accident of science inhabited a sideshow tent, and each audience member entered at his own risk to gasp and gawk for a set time limit. Pearson invites you to do the same.
"That’s my favourite part, watching the kids gather the courage to walk through those doors. When I was a kid I was quite scared, actually," Pearson reminisces from his home in Edmonton. "The sideshow is a rite of passage. There’s something about being in that public space with other people. That’s what the carnival is all about."
Carnivals evoke nostalgia and mystique. Beneath the benign fairgrounds of current midways like the Calgary Stampede, buried below the 10-dollar-a-spin rides, beyond the metallic taste of machine-spun cotton candy, sits a foundation laid by a culture of gypsies, travelling bands of the horrid, the morbid and the fascinating. Freak shows were the reality TV before there was cable. "At one time sideshows brought odysseys of the strange and exotic to small towns and farming communities," Pearson says. "Now, there are less public gathering events – we can access everything in our homes, and it’s not quite the same." Pearson aims to draw people out of their comfort zones and away from their Fear Factor with his you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it set-ups. When Pearson describes the evolution of his sideshow, it’s as if he’s donned a straw hat and a striped jacket and leapt up onto a platform.
Pearson didn’t always see himself as a talker ballyhooing his amazing attractions to the public. He made his living as a magician and street performer before he thought to fuse his profession with the shows that enthralled him in his youth. "One day after performing at the Fringe, I’m packing up and I look up and I see the people, I see the mini doughnut stand, and it hit me: this is a carnival. This is a mid-way. The idea just struck me. I thought, ‘this is perfect.’
"A good friend of mine had given me a couple of old sideshow illusions the year before, and it all came together for me. We rebuilt one into Spidora, The Spider Lady. It became a very big hit." From Spidora, the spider with the head of a woman; to Cobra Girl, a snake with a smile; to Venus the Violent Vine, a flytrap with an attitude; to Pearson’s favourite, The Headless Terror, Ghostwriter Theatre strives to preserve classic sideshow atmosphere and attractions to stupefy and disturb today’s dubious audiences.
Look for Pearson himself to beckon you into his tent, set up in Centre Court outside the Big Secret Theatre, for a peek at his pet science experiment. Is it scary? "Oh, absolutely." His grin widens as he promises, "It’s terrifying." |
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