>>REVIEW
MUSIC FOR CONTORTIONIST
Runs until March 31
Sage Theatre
Joyce Doolittle Theatre (Pumphouse Theatres)
Weaving together song and dance numbers, disturbing trance-induced monologues and a live contortionist curving her body into inhuman configurations, Morwyn Brebner’s Music for Contortionist is perhaps the most surreal production to grace Calgary’s stages in a season that has included experimental ensemble creation, goat sex and child murders.
A one-woman show whose subject is a completely fictionalized representation of German avant garde theatre artist Valeska Gert (a deliciously bizarre figure in her own time), Brebner’s debut work is an exploration of beauty full of its own unique grotesqueries. Mired in its own ambivalence, Sage’s production is a beautiful portrait whose lack of clarity is most frustrating when trying to reach a conclusion. Is it a successful existential cabaret or an uneven whole?
The warm, beating heart of the production, Valerie Planche’s Gert is a woman torn between her overriding showmanship and the existential questions that plague her. Exploring 10 topics in no particular order, Gert alternates between candid storytelling and trance states where she outlines a series of horrific images, from fountains of blood springing from her chest to a nest of ravenous baby spiders consuming her body. At turns sultry, absurd and tragic, Planche fills the intentionally intimate space of the production’s cabaret-style stage, contorting her character with an elasticity matched only by the play’s literal contortionist, Angela Parkins.
With its tiny stage set into a corner of the Joyce Doolittle Theatre, a piano dominating the centre of the playing area, Sage’s production evokes a warmly inviting hole-in-the-wall bar replete with cabaret-style seating. But if the production suggests that this bar will allow its patrons to chat while the cabaret act on the corner stage prattles on, it erases the notion with Planche’s sudden stomp on a foot pedal, bathing the scene in deep red light.
Accompanied by Brendan McGuigan’s thrumming double bass and out-of-tune piano, a soundscape that fits the production like a showgirl’s red dress, Planche’s earthy delivery is complemented by a variety of live sound effects, produced off-side by the production’s stage manager, Rachel Parris. Decadent and dark, Cimmeron Meyer’s dimly lit bar set is a perfect complement to the flawlessly executed cabaret feel of the production’s sounds and Planche’s wild presence.
But, in a play so concerned with the difficulties of overcoming the inherent barrier between audience and performer, Sage’s production cannot break through the baffling ambiguity of Brebner’s script. Though Glenda Stirling’s direction provides Gert with an essential manic energy, its mania only seems to gain momentum in the play’s second half, leaving several stretches that feel lost in the playwright’s dense prose.
Either ironically or appropriately, Brebner’s text provides such a wild and whirling journey in its search to abandon artifice that the task of making sense of its stream-of-consciousness ramblings is terribly difficult, to say the least. With its only throughlines provided by Valeska’s meandering coarseness or the striking effects of its visual and aural production, the work is more a portrait than a play, almost static in its manic dynamism. What it produces is at times evocative, at others simply baffling, with a result that can only be described as "striking," in all the word’s negative and positive connotations.
In short, Music for Contortionist is theatre that is not for the faint of heart. Beautiful, hideous, rambling and poetic, Brebner’s words and Sage’s wonderful production combine in an intriguing piece that still feels less than full, like a cabaret whose numbers come in no particular order, ending with the uneasy sense that some key has been lost in the shuffle. |
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