Premièring at Theatre Calgary on October 14, Skydive is an action-adventure comedy set in a world high above the traditional theatre stage. Literally. This is the story of two brothers and their dysfunctional relationship told mid-air during a doomed free-fall skydive.

In the creative life, there can be many frustrations — obstacles to overcome, predispositions to change and unique work to conjure out of thin air. Some people give up in the face of adversity, but others, like James Sanders, become pioneers. The quadriplegic actor is not only the founder of a professional theatre company, he is one of the starring actors and co-creators of Skydive.

After years of finding little or no work that allowed him to perform onstage in a capacity that satisfied him, Sanders partnered with longtime friend and acting peer Bob Frazer to change things. They enlisted playwright Kevin Kerr and the three created a captivating story with amazing visual components that enables Sanders to do what he enjoys most. Kerr, who won a Governor General’s Award for literature in 2002, enjoys recalling the collaborative evolution of Skydive, “The impulse really began on a crazy brainstorming night. Bob shared a vision and thought it would be really cool to see ‘a couple of guys just kind of falling from the grid.’ We sort of laughed it off at the time, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the image of two bodies falling from space and the theatrical potential of that.”

When they got together the following week, Kerr confided to Sanders and Frazer that he couldn’t shake the image, and wanted to explore it further. It was then that Sanders revealed his relationship with a man that just so happened to have a machine seemingly custom created for the project. Something that could make the actors fly.

After many years as an Arctic explorer, Sven Johansson — the aerial choreographer for Skydive — developed the ES Dance Instrument in 1986. Each instrument consists of two six-metre-long steel poles mounted onto gyroscopic pivots and counterweights. One pole has a bicycle seat on its end and the other, a harness. Strapped into and propped up on the poles, the actors appear to fly. The instrument requires four onstage operators who are kept hidden from the audience. While the instrument has often been used as a special effect in dance productions, Skydive will be the first to use Johansson’s multidimensional invention for the entire duration of a theatrical performance. The audience will witness both actors leaping, falling, rolling, rafting and flying throughout the show, as they reveal pivotal moments in their relationship.

The pivotal moment for Kerr came at the initial choreography workshop where the earliest images and inspirations for the play started to take shape. He began creating scenes, designing potential action and developing the relationship between the brothers. Kerr thinks the instruments provide a distinct advantage. “They lend to a kind of cinematic fluidity, you can shift scenes really seamlessly once you’ve accepted the theatrical convention that any space can become a whole new environment. The scenes shift on a dime (mid-air), cutting from moment to moment like a film.”

Kerr is honoured to be a part of this unique play, one that didn’t need to be issue-based to deeply resonate. “The backstory of James’s injury and Rob and James’s relationship as friends is part of the frame of the piece. It informs it, but it doesn’t dictate it or define it,” he says. “This piece isn’t meant to deny or hide James’s physicality in any way, but it also isn’t meant to dwell on it. Two great actors are performing in a piece that is about breaking through both the barriers of fear and personal limitation, and also through the barriers that get in our way of contacting each other as human beings.”

Sanders’s goal in creating Skydive was to finally employ his theatrical skills, but it has become a potential catalyst for developing professional opportunities for the physically challenged in theatre. Skydive is exciting for its soaring science, but also for its liberation of a tenacious actor.