| Maybe it’s post-Fringe cynicism that leaves me feeling blasé about the first week of One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo. The summer festivals are a full four months past, but I can still remember the feeling of ducking into a venue and waiting for the extremes of either exasperation or pleasant surprise to wash over me. For the Rodeo, I wanted to see the bull tearing out of the gate and stomping the rodeo clowns into paste. What I’ve seen is more like barrel racing – more right turns than wrong turns, but still nothing off the beaten path.
The week began with Ground Zero Theatre’s 10 Minute Play Festival, now in its eighth year and practically a baby compared to the 21 years of the Rodeo itself. Featuring the Downstage Theatre Society, Obscene But Not Heard, Urban Curvz, Theatreboom, Ground Zero and Sage Theatre, the event is an annual "who’s who" showcase of small and emerging theatre companies. Though the 24-hour creation period produced at least two shows that gave in to self-referencing last minute panic, Lindsay Burns’ collaboration with Urban Curvz was a spot-on satire of Theatre Junction’s much-maligned first ensemble-created production. Featuring Calgary Fringe artistic director Jason Rothery as the egotistical, tyrannical "Stark Paws," Show Two: Abyss proved that one female playwright and a women-centred theatre company have ovaries made of solid brass. Cojones, ladies and gentlemen – they’ve got ’em, too.
Thursday brought the premiere of the Rodeo’s much touted centrepiece, a collaboration between the Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini and the Rabbits themselves: Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica. Though the production certainly had its moments, with Bidini’s soothing baritone lending hardboiled sensuality to his account of a 1940’s love affair, the piece as a whole left me a little cold – not freezing in the stands but hoping for the heater to kick in just the same. With Rheostatics, Rabbits, sexuality and hockey bundled together, perhaps I’d expected too much. But if Five Hole only failed to realize lofty expectations, the night’s second production reminded me that disappointment doesn’t have to be anything short of total.
Blurring the line between mediocre installation and impenetrably vague theatre, The Shelter: Uqquag promised more than its performers or their multimedia display could offer. Ostensibly a love story between Montreal dancer Genevieve Pepin and Laurentio Q. Arnatsiaq, what followed was a series of unadorned home video and banal physicality no more comprehensible or entertaining than Arnatsiaq’s long stretches of Inuit-only dialogue.
Proving that mediocrity doesn’t have to be brief, the following morning’s Indigenous Perspectives saw Native performance artists Lori Blondeau, Margo Kane and Terrance Houle hemming and hawing for a full hour-and-a-half. If the panel set out to determine whether performance artists speaking about how they first came to performance art can be entertaining unto itself, Performance Creation Canada can consider the question dismally answered. Unmoderated and utterly lost, any one of the session’s participants would have been better served by terminating the whole exhausting exercise after the first, "What else can I talk about?"
Thankfully, Friday night brought a rousing musical explosion in Elephant, a fundraiser for local artist Janet Turner. A reunited Same Difference brought the house down before Kris Demeanor and his Crack Band came out to prove that there was still life left in the audience. With a night like that one, it was no small blessing that the next day’s earliest show didn’t begin until 3:45 p.m.
Returning after last year’s Diplomatic Immunities, "social acupuncturists" Darren O’Donnell and Naomi Campbell’s Q&A provided the festival’s most audience-driven production, with the audience acting as both interviewer and interviewee. Essentially a stripped-down version of improvisational guru Keith Johnstone’s "Life Game," with "real people" providing creative fodder, Q&A admirably made much out of seemingly nothing, filling an hour-and-a-half with seven candid and surprising interviews.
Along with Tedd Robinson and Istvan Kantor, O’Donnell also performed as part of Interrarium, the culmination of a two-week creative residency at the Banff Centre. True to the relatively unmediated form of theatre seen in Diplomatic Immunities and Q&A, O’Donnell presented A Free Show for the People of India and Pakistan, a sort of performance slideshow recounting his time in Pakistan. Robinson’s piece, on the other hand, proved more physical and surreal as he literally layered pages of his narrative over his body. Because of a conflicting interview, I was forced to leave before Kantor took the stage. Until next Tuesday’s Transmission Machine then.
The week’s final event was the annual Bravo!Fact Screening, featuring works from around the country and Calgary. Though one banal film actually featured product placement for Swiss Chalet and another played like a ham-fisted medieval "Part of Our Heritage" video with a revisionist bent, the program provided a few lively twists. In addition to a parodist French art film and nude conga line shot on a cell phone, the screening included the Rabbits’ own Andy Curtis as an artistic taxidermist and a spoken word piece by Kris Demeanor.
Satisfactory, certainly, but after eight shows I still find myself craving just one wonderful festival surprise. In a festival cheekily named after Calgary’s annual flirtation with cowboy life, I’m still waiting for one eight-second ride to buck me wide awake. Two weeks to go. |
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