Just a taste of the mad genius of Akhe Theatre.

DETAILS

24th Annual High Performance Rodeo
Big Secret Theatre
Thursday, January 7 - Sunday, January 31

More in: Theatre

Imagine ripping out the pages of a Dostoyevsky novel and rearranging them at random so that they no longer tell a story. Still powerful, these pages show only the actions of the character — completely liberated from the narrative that explains them.

That's exactly what Akhe theatre group's White Cabin is like, says Michael Green, the curator of the High Performance Rodeo, who helped bring the production to Calgary. Each scene, though seemingly illogical, is a powerful indictment of the character of man — exposing his actions as cruel and absurd. Maksim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko formed Akhe Theatre in 1989. White Cabin is one of its most widely toured performances and is heavily steeped in Russian literature and artistic traditions.

Blake Brooker, the co-artistic director for One Yellow Rabbit, describes Isaev and Semchenko as big burly Russians. “They look like bears,” he says. “But they are delicate. They are visual artists, but it sort of feels like they’re rockers or miners.” He says they dress like Russian gangsters — as if they walked off of a Hollywood-movie set.

He remembers sitting down with the pair in Prague, where both groups were performing at an international theatre festival. His Russian was dismal, but they could speak broken English. Unable to really communicate, the group sat in relative silence, downing Czech bitters.

Communication barriers aren’t a problem though — these “Russian gangsters” convey everything they need to through art.

White Cabin is a performance in the vein of abstract expressionism and theatre of cruelty. It explores the tumultuous world of the human psyche and man’s relationship with space, objects and people. It’s not that their actions are particularly “cruel,” or that they cause pain or anguish — though “pain” does play a role in the performance — but rather they are based on a violent determination to shatter the viewer’s perception of reality.

“It’s very rough,” explains Michael Green, curator and founder of One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo. “One gets the sense these mad Russians might tear the whole theatre apart.”

Green says he first saw it at the same time as Brooker and knew right away that it would be a perfect fit for the Rodeo. It took five years to bring the performance to Calgary, however, since he had to help set up a Canadian tour for the group.

In White Cabin, the performers call on a melancholy and eerie European tradition of miming. Their painted faces evoke the “white-face” character — the intelligent and all-knowing scene-setter in the clowning tradition.

They don’t utter a word throughout the performance, but the lunacy in their actions speaks louder than any words. They brawl, soak their bodies in wine and drunkenly march through the set with a flag in one hand and a beer in the other. And yet, despite these incoherent actions, one feels immediately what it is to be human. It seems being human is a deranged, chaotic, sometimes amusing, but all-too-tragic affair.

And that tragic existence might even be amplified because the performers are Russian, suggests Brooker.

“We don’t really see much Russian culture and so to see their culture is refreshing for us,” he says. “They have a different perspective because they have a tragic history. I mean, how many people were killed in the Second World War?”

It is obvious that culture plays a key role in the performance — from the antique setting and props, to scenes that seem to speak on its violent past.

Although these artists hail from a different culture, and perhaps one more tragic than our own, most of us will probably have no problem relating to the feelings of alienation, anger, confusion, pain and joy which permeate this performance.