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Caligula by Theatre Encounter
Dancers' Studio West Theatre
Tuesday, November 4 - Saturday, November 8

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Dancers' Studio West Theatre

First performed in 1945, Camus’s version of the play depicts Caligula after his sister-lover dies and he realizes how meaningless life is. It becomes his mission to wilfully destroy meaning for the people he rules over. “It’s really about freedom for the individual, but it’s a difficult thing for people to get. There is no right or wrong,” says director Michael Fenton. “Caligula is a tragic character, with a tragic flaw. This is a person extremely dedicated to principle. If his principle isn’t what others believe in, he has the power, as Caesar, to re-educate them, as painful as that may be physically or mentally.”

Fenton is co-artistic director of Theatre Encounter, a company he started a year ago with fellow University of Calgary drama department master’s student Mike Unrau. The company is bringing a distinctly Canadian perspective to traditional, western theatre. “We had a leaning toward the classic scripts in terms of an alternative approach that we felt would augment them. There’s a reason they stay alive,” says Fenton.

His interpretation of the play is a multifaceted, physical exploration centred on the idea of the absurdity of existence. Caligula believes it is absurd to be afraid of death, because if you live your life in fear, you are not really living. He believes he is freeing people from fear by making certain they are prepared to die tomorrow. It utilizes various artistic disciplines to investigate the relationship between the performer and the audience. Fenton and Unrau collaborated on their version of the script, a distillation of Camus’s original work, attempting to condense each scene of the play. “This is postmodern deconstructionism at its height. It is a process of tearing apart. We are looking for a full-body, intense experience, and this show is shaven down to its essence. It would probably be a two-and-half-hour show that we’re presenting in 65 to 70 minutes,” says Fenton.

Theatre Encounter is using this production to explore producing a brand new method of engaging with theatre. Fenton wants each audience member to have a visceral, full-bodied reaction to everything presented on the stage. “We are developing a style. When you have two artists who are as passionate about theatre as we are, it’s going to happen. We really found that what we like to do, in general, is look at the bare essence of what is being proposed,” says Fenton. By concentrating texts down to their fundamental meaning, the hope is that the play will become a potent distillate of the original.

Armed with his script, the director set about creating the piece with his company of performers: Val Duncan, Marcy Lannan, Kevin MacDonnell, Elan Pratt, Mike Rogers and Elaine Weryshko, most of whom have worked with the director before. “We would really like to build an ensemble for Theatre Encounter of eight members and really dissect text and always keep rehearsal and exploration at the forefront,” says Fenton. The first four weeks of rehearsal were spent building the style of the show and building up the performers’ abilities to concentrate on the extreme specifics of movement as well as their stamina. “At the end of the day, I want the best out of the performer as I can get,” he says.