It’s a bird, it’s a plane. Oh wait, nah, that’s just old Bob Legare proving he’s priest enough
Sex sells, the adage goes, and if there has ever been a place that thrives on its performers’ ability to sell their wares with a dash of the risqué (and risky) it has to be the fringe festival, that most noble of ignoble summer institutions. At four years old, Calgary’s current Fringe Festival is a relative toddler on the national scene, but with a lineup that includes shows with titles like The Cockwhisperer and "Boobs," the unjuried fest is selling some particularly adult wares.
“It’s not censored, it’s unbiased,” says the festival’s artistic director, Michele Gallant, underlining the festival’s free-for-all mandate. “Whatever you want, go for it.”
That egalitarian spirit has been the driving force for Canadian fringes since Edmonton began North America’s longest-running Fringe Festival in 1982 and laid the groundwork for a network of Canadian fringes that run throughout the summer. Modelled after the uncensored entrepreneurship of the Edinburgh Fringe, every one of the 24 Canadian fringe festivals offers successful applicants a venue, techs and a stage and the performer’s to do with them as they will. It’s the kind of freedom that is allowing Calgary-based actor Bob Legare to talk about the hidden sexual impulses of a priest in training with Are You Priest Enough?
No stranger to fringe festivals — last year his first one-man show, In Tow, toured three western Canadian Fringes — Legare’s latest is an exaggerated piece of autobiography about his three years spent in a Catholic seminary. The play grew out of a nine-page pitch that Legare gave to the production’s director, Trepan Theatre’s Aaron Coates, before testing the production at the Calgary One-Act Play Festival.
But if sex runs through many of the festival’s shows, Are You Priest Enough? illustrates the counterpoint that often comes with it. Exploring the contradictions between the expectations of the priesthood and his inner thoughts and desires, the sex in his show is less about making easy jokes about the priesthood than it is about understanding commitment.
“If it was a show about marriage it would be the same thing: How do you make that commitment and what do I need to be sure I can do this,” says Legare. “Even when you’re married you can fall in love 100 times a day. How do you deal with that?”
Colette Kendall is taking a similarly serious tack with sex, even if the title of her show — The Cockwhisperer – A Love Story — might suggests otherwise. Having already established her fringe presence with two shows featuring her boozy, gadabout persona, Tippy Seagram, Kendall’s latest show is a fictionalized piece of autobiography looking at coming of age in the ’70s, while struggling with expectations and sexual mores. From her first sexual experience to escaping an abusive first marriage, Kendall sees the show as a chance to focus more on storytelling than standup. The result is a show that leaves fewer laughs for a performer who’s gotten very used to them.
“I’ve been doing standup and Tippy, which has been more or less: setup, punchline, and you’re getting your laughs every couple seconds,” she says. “It’s like a drug; you’re getting validated with every laugh. But when you’re doing a show where those laughs don’t readily come, you’re not sure how you’re doing, or at least I’m not.”
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean people aren’t coming along,” she adds. “The silences are where they’re listening.”
Serious or comic, the sex in the festival is hardly staying silent, shouting out from the titles and synopses of the festival program. Inviting Desire, from Portland’s Dance Naked Productions, is a collaboratively created piece spun out of responses to a survey that asked women about their sexual fantasies. A pair of productions from festival producer Blair Gallant’s Broadway West tackle sex with camp (The Rocky Horror Show) and monologues (The Vagina Monologues). Out of Our Head Productions, meanwhile, are doing their best to turn Charles Dickens in his grave with "Boobs" — A Tale of Two Titties.
But with 29 indoor performances drawn from a lottery selection that, according to Gallant, saw four applications being turned down for every one accepted, sex is hardly the only thing fringe artists are selling. One of the most marketable of all hooks is simple familiarity and this year’s festival includes returning faces like Jem Rolls (Leastest Flops) and remounts of local productions like Drunken Fucker (Ground Zero Theatre’s Groundbreaker series) and My Autopsy (Ghost River Theatre’s Double Solo). For a festival that grew out of the ashes of two previous fringe attempts, the staying power of a known commodity is no small order.
Now in its second year in Inglewood, following two years in the downtown core, the festival shows signs of getting comfortable in its new home. The only change in the festival’s main venues this year was a shift from The Inglewood Silver Threads Association senior’s club to the Alexandra Community Centre. This year will also incorporate the Inglewood Sun Fest, a one-day outdoor showcase that, for the first time, will focus specifically on the arts.
The micro-festival, running Saturday, August 1, will bring a taste of the kind of street presence that the Edmonton Fringe has long been known for — mini donughts included. Perhaps more importantly, the Sun Fest will provide festival artists with the all-important chance to exercise their entrepreneurial imperative to self-promote on the street.
Chris Gibbs knows how to sell a fringe show. Though he currently hails from Toronto, the native Briton owes his current Canadian home to fringes — he cut his teeth as an acrobatic street performer before he began touring indoor shows on the Canadian fringe circuit, where he met his wife. With years of national and international touring under his belt and a collection of shows — he’s currently touring eight fringes with four different shows including The Power of Ignorance, which will run in Calgary — he’s learned on his feet and doesn’t underestimate the value of a proven show.
“My favourite audiences are those who’ve seen me before,” he says.
Certainly, the fringe offers artistic freedom that doesn’t always traffic in pure entertainment. The Tom Waits-William S. Burroughs gothic opera The Black Rider could hardly be called a piece of light entertainment, yet it was on the fringe that it first found an audience — making its North American première in Edmonton. But for Gibbs, it’s all about entertainment, providing a show that makes his audience laugh. It’s an outlook that draws on an early piece of advice he received from a more seasoned street performer.
“He said never forget your audience works for a living,” recalls Gibbs. “You can’t look down on them for enjoying what they enjoy. I try my best to do shows that people like, but of course I wouldn’t do anything I don’t like in the vain hope that they’d like it. You bring yourself to it, and in the end I try to give people a fun hour or 70 minutes, and hopefully people feel like that was worth what [they] paid for it. Or better: more than [they] paid.”
Of course, where ticket sales are concerned there’s always the market to consider. Gibbs pauses before adding slyly: “Then I’d feel I’d have to pull back and make it worse.”
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)