Randy Gibson

Some of the Fools who will be entertaining folks at the Halloween Howl.

What springs to mind when you hear: random searches, unjustified incarceration, interrogations, beatings, protests and clampdowns? Barack Obama’s Guantanamo Bay? Vladimir Putin’s Russia? Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan? Stephen Harper’s Toronto? If you guessed any of those, well, you’re right. But the Green Fools take a different view. They think all of those things add up to one great Halloween bash at The Uptown.

“Throughout the whole night we’ll be arresting people, putting them in jail, interrogating them,” says Jennie Esdale, co-artistic director of Green Fools. “We also have a revolution starting, so we’ll have lots of dissidents staging protests and then getting fake-beaten by riot cops.”

Inspired by last July’s G20 protests in Toronto and the fact that the theatre company is celebrating 20 years, the Fools thought the numerical correlation warranted turning their annual Halloween Howl party into a sort of dystopic police state.

“One of the things, by the sheer nature of the Fools, is that notion of being able to be a critic, a social critic,” says founding artistic director Dean Bareham. “And we can do that through wit and we can do that through irony and we can do that through sarcasm. That is the nature of the Fools.”

The Green Fools, a loose theatre collective whose members perform and teach, has been an artistic hub and incubator for local talent in a variety of disciplines for the past 20 years.

It’s not just the billion-dollar shit-show in Toronto that got the Fools riled up for this year’s festivities; there’s also a bit of personal protest in their totalitarian imaginings. The troupe is currently without a venue, after losing yet another space to bylaws and landowners’ “greed.”

“It’s a little bit of why we want to do this this year; we want to make a bit of a statement. It’s like 20 years; we still don’t have a space. Hello Calgary, wake up. Does it take the Olympics to come to get the city to build some more venues for people?” says Bareham.

“Fortunately we have a mayor that’s art friendly, so we’re pretty excited about that.”

Esdale seconds the newfound civic enthusiasm of her co-artistic director.

“It’s the last days of the dinosaurs, and I mean that for those guys, and for oil. It’s the last days of the dinosaurs,” she says.

But this isn’t a political show. This isn’t protest in the tear-gas-and-Black-Bloc sense of the word. This is a party, and the Fools are all about making a celebratory environment worth remembering.

“Interactive is the key to our work, to the Fools’ work in general, and especially to our parties,” says Bareham. “We really want that interactive feeling so it’s not just another party. The minute you enter into the door, you’ve entered into our world.”

So, what does that mean? Aside from the random lockups, pat-downs and revolutions, there will be bands in the Marquee Room — Crescent Heights, Eve Hell and the Razors and ultimate Halloween rock band Forbidden Dimension — as well as DJs in a theatre and an original performance by the Green Fools at midnight. This year, a fake summit will divvy up the world’s resources, followed by a good ol’ uprising.

The real question, though, is whether the interactivity will go as far as strip searches.

“If people want to be strip-searched, we could make that happen,” says Esdale.

“We’ll have the gloves,” adds Bareham.

And while they may be searching patrons at will, the Fools continue to follow the same pattern of performance and education that is the company’s hallmark. Stilt workshops, teaching at schools, puppet-making, mask-making, one original show a year and annual Halloween and April Fool’s parties.

That work combined with the fact that so many artists from different disciplines enjoy collaborating with the Fools, has lead to some recognition and success. Some company members have gone on to create The Old Trout Puppet Workshop as well as the Calgary Animated Objects Society and its biannual Festival of Animated Objects. Mooky Cornish went on to perform with Cirque du Soleil, which led to ties between the two organizations.

This year’s production, which is currently without a name or a firm performance date, is about the early days of the nuclear age, a runaway girl who lost her mother, and outer space. The production will feature video work by local artist Keith Murray, direction by local theatre fiend Eric Rose and music by local composer extraordinaire David Reimer.

“We’re taking our kind of work, which is handmade, handcrafted, very analogue, and incorporating new media and creating a puppet world and a digital animation world to explore those themes,” says Esdale.

With a big space for the Howl and continued success in the formula, Bareham and Esdale are feeling confident.

“It’s funny, right from the get-go, we always had a 10-year plan. Right off the top we said ‘It’s going to take us 10 years to be successful.’ And, well, it’s taken us 20,” says Bareham.

“Our old motto used to be ‘We’ll sell out, but we won’t cash in.’”

Both artistic directors agree that it’s a motto worth holding on to.