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The Monster by Aftershock
Dancers' Studio West Theatre
Thursday, October 30 - Saturday, November 1

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Dancers' Studio West Theatre

The Monster Ensemble and Dancers’ Studio West are celebrating Halloween with an aftershock performance of The Monster, a theatre and dance fusion show based on Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein. An aftershock performance is a short work that follows a full-length piece. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s Nick and Juanita: Livin’ in my Dreams will precede The Monster, which runs approximately 15 minutes. Just enough time to scare the pants off you and, hopefully, your date.

The Monster is an original work, developed under the direction of Calgary theatre artist David van Belle, familiar to the theatregoing public for his work with One Yellow Rabbit and Anita Miotti, choreographer and physical theatre specialist. The impetus for the piece came out of a discussion between van Belle and AJ Demer, a performing member of The Monster Ensemble. “[We] got on the topic of Frankenstein and how much we both love the book. AJ and I were pierced by the same things in the novel,” says van Belle. “Pop culture references always avoid the fact that the monster is articulate and asks the important question at the end: ‘How dare you sport thus with life?’”

The ensemble created the show over a period of two weeks using a method of generating new theatre that is popular among the plethora of little theatre companies popping up in Calgary. “Performance creation” is a method that supports the performers as they create the piece from the ground up with a facilitating director. It is highly effective considering Downstage’s success with the Dog from the Machine series, Dust Particle Productions’ little known but incredibly powerful The Opera Suicide and, of course, One Yellow Rabbit, which has built an international reputation as rock stars of the theatre world. However, without a solid story acting as a spine for the performance, the process is irrelevant. Fortunately, Frankenstein has been a captivating story since its initial publication in 1818.

“We met a number of times to brainstorm. It’s been an intuitive process. We knew the direction we wanted to go in and made a performance plan really quickly,” says van Belle. “We all brought in music first — lists of songs that we felt would be appropriate for the piece.” The ensemble used the playlist as a pool of inspiration they could draw from throughout the process.

During an initial meeting, it was brought to the ensemble’s attention that Anita Miotti would be eight months pregnant by the time the piece was performed. “Mary Shelley was pregnant, nursing or mourning the death of her child as she wrote the novel,” says van Belle. “Having a pregnant Anita Miotti was a great gift.” This connection prompted a meta-theatrical concept with Mary Shelley incorporated into the play as one of the characters. “She creates a character that creates a character. Layer upon layer,” says van Belle. Working with a pregnant choreographer could offer some interesting challenges. “She is fearless when it comes to her work and doesn’t want to treat herself as fragile when she’s pregnant,” van Belle recalls.

This led to the incorporation of an interesting juxtaposition of Gothic sensibility versus domesticity. “Victor and Mary become the parents of the Monster. We are in dark territory by the time we get to the end. It’s definitely a Halloween piece,” says van Belle.

Fusing theatre and dance is an interesting experiment itself; one the director seems to relish. “One of the things I love about the artistic community in Calgary is the way different disciplines interact with each other.”

The Monster is only a short work at the moment, but van Belle has bigger aspirations for his creation. It is scheduled for production at the Expanse Movement Arts Festival in Edmonton this coming February. “We’d like to expand it into a full-length performance,” he says. Godspeed, mad scientists.