>>PREVIEW
IGNITE!
Opens June 14
Sage Theatre
Pumphouse Theatres
Even if all the world’s a stage, there’s still something to be said for being given a performance space. After all, the roof over a production’s head isn’t free, and with the looming spectre of June showers menacing the skies, the outdoors still murder on lighting boards. So, for the third year, Sage Theatre’s Ignite! Festival will bring in the huddled masses of Calgary’s emerging artists, clustering them around the company’s annual Ignite! Festival under the welcoming roof of the Pumphouse Theatres.
Modelled after NextFest, an 11-day festival produced by Edmonton’s Theatre Network since 1996, Ignite! is a showcase for emerging artists looking for the professional assistance that self-produced work lacks. Selected productions, culled from a slate of applications by playwrights and performers, receive technical and casting support, as well as a professional mentor and a dramaturge. Unlike the unjuried expanse of the Fringe circuit that rejoined Calgary’s theatre scene last summer, both Nextfest and Ignite! are essentially supportive networks for artists, providing a more gentle push than the free-wheeling Fringe.
"It’s amazing the amount of support we get in this festival," says playwright and performer Jennifer Roberts, whose one-act play, The Dangers of Being, is one of the festival’s seven one-act productions, and Roberts’s second Ignite! contribution. "There’re stage managers that I don’t think I’ve worked with since university, directors and designers who are always keen to play in the dirt."
That cross-disciplinary spirit also extends to the festival’s management, with festival director Adrienne Smook still a relative newcomer to administration. As an artistic associate with Sage, she took the reins of the fledgling festival three years ago without any prior experience as an administrator. Known primarily as an actor, recently appearing in Alberta Theatre Projects’s Sitting on Paradise, she admits that even after two successful festivals, the learning curve for a festival devoted to nurturing young artists remains appropriately steep.
"I’m still an actor, and I still could be more organized," says Smook. "I still sometimes feel like a rookie festival director."
But if Smook’s personal administrative phobias linger three years in, the festival’s lineup certainly doesn’t reflect them. This year’s festival includes seven one-act productions, up from the first year’s five. In addition to its short program, featuring Running Out of Time, a dance piece based on the frantic morning’s rush to the door and A World Gone Mad, a collaborative creation shrouded in such mystery that even the press release dares not speak its synopsis, the program includes a diverse selection of emerging artists.
In Tentatively Untitled, Ignite! veteran Toby Cygman offers a satirical, meta-theatrical journey through the winding strains of a play without a narrative, while Cassandra Christie’s The Dirty Goddess: A Fairytale for Big Kids revisits far more familiar narratives with the grim esthetic of Eastern European fairy tales. Roberts’s The Dangers of Being finds three stories entwined by the singular risk of living, while Amos Altman joins the lives of a rocker and an audience member in Night Moves. Historical drama (Melanee Murray’s Nothing Like the Sun), a collapsible cardboard set (Lee Cookson’s Anne Frank is in My Dreams), and the 85 members of the festival’s assembled casts and crews – all topped with an exhibit at the Enmedia gallery and readings at the inimitable Auburn Saloon.
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to suggest that Smook’s ambitions for Ignite! are at least partly driven by her own experiences at the festival’s older Edmonton cousin. A Nextfest veteran, performing both as a University of Alberta student and later as a professional actor, she admits that memories of her time at that festival have been reignited periodically by her own festival’s success. But, she says, she’s in no mood to copy.
"It would be amazing to have multiple venues and shuttle buses to take people to these places, but Nextfest has been around for (11) years," says Smook. "All those things are great, the 40 venues they have, the 7,000 people they have, but it comes down to new work, exciting innovative theatre, emerging artists taking risks and being inspired by each other. I feel confident that if we keep doing what we do, Ignite! will end up being where it should be."
For now, Ignite! has already imprinted itself on Calgary’s otherwise bare summer season, presenting its emerging artists with the opportunity to find their way to the shelter of the festival’s venues. All the world may be a stage, but the seats are still more comfortable in the Pumphouse.
For show dates and times, check listings and visit www.sagetheatre.com. |
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