This year's rEvolver Festival gives artists space to imagine post-pandemic performance
Using everything from virtual reality to sign language, creative teams find new ways to connect with audiences in works-in-progress
Simran Gill and Jess Amy Shead come up with new approaches to integrated theatre in Catfish.
Collider invites audience members to build their own avatar and enter a VR world.
Upintheair Theatre presents the rEvolver Festival online from May 19 to June 6
FACED WITH THE prospect of an uncertain future, the folks at the 2021 rEvolver Festival have leaped even farther ahead. They’re encouraging this year’s artists to imagine what new theatre and performance might look like after pandemic limbo ends.
“Back in fall when we were planning, we said, ‘What is the most useful and interesting thing we can do in response to the moment next spring?’” says Dan Martin, on a conference call with Dave Mott.
The Upintheair Theatre co-artistic producers present the event each year. And late last spring, their company had become one of the first to pivot entirely online with the temporarily renamed and slightly postponed Evolver Festival. But Upintheair wanted to do something different for 2021. “We didn’t feel there’d be as much of an appetite for online performance as there was last spring,” explains Martin. ”We thought that artists would want to do something hopeful.”
“We would have loved to have had an in-person live festival,” adds Mott. “We said, ‘We’re gonna project even further in the future.’”
The result is three weeks of programming, with 12 presentations of boundary-breaking work in development, presented across an array of virtual formats.
The showings take the form of digital and audio experiences, as well as workshops and conversations. Offerings range from VR role-playing games to play readings and an interactive website.
Instead of theatre that tackles the pandemic and the time we’re in now, expect wildly creative assertions about how performance—and the world—may change as we emerge from it.
“Artists were responding to the future, not to the present,” emphasizes Mott.
Daniel Martin and Dave Mott, co-artistic producers at Upintheair Theatre, knew they wanted to do something different for 2021.
If there’s a throughline to the risk-taking work-in-progress, it’s that the artists have boldly rethought and upended the way that performance is created. In some cases, that’s meant hearing and nonhearing artists finding a new language of performance, or a group of innovators building an entire show through virtual-reality headsets. (More on those two shows below).
Other form-busting offerings include Jackson Tegu’s Necessary Dream, an interactive Zoom role-playing game where seven audience members play strange beings from a green, hopeful future travel back in time to craft a literal dream to pull a person out of despair. Elsewhere, the climate-action-themed Shadow Sign for Bedroom Protest: What I Dare To Do In The Dark is a Zoom workshop where you’ll craft protest signs, as well as hang out in an interactive website to connect people around climate action. Also living online will be Vancouver dance artist Stephanie Cyr’s messier objects EP, described as a visual album featuring three video performances.
“Website theatrical interactions are trendy and new and important,” observes Mott.
Online spaces offer a “stage” or gathering place in a time of social distancing restrictions. That’s led to technology playing a key role in several of the shows at rEvolver this year.
The fest’s approach is for audiences to connect with artists right at the level of the creative process. They’ll get an inside look at the works curated from this year’s open submissions by Mott and Martin with Resident Curators Davey Calderon and Kayleigh Sandomirsky.
“The audience can see directly into the making of work and how artists are working through the pandemic and into the future,” says Mott.
Stir checked in with two production teams for a closer look at the ways that this year’s rEvolver Festival artists are reimagining the creative process. Here’s what we found:
Collider
May 28 at 6 pm, May 30 at 2 pm, June 3 at 5 pm, and June 5 at 2 pm
When Vancouver theatre artist Chloe Payne joins her co-creators of Collider for rehearsal, everyone attends wearing headsets. That’s because they’re meeting in a virtual world—some of them from Single Thread theatre company’s homebase in Kingston, Ontario. And that virtual space is where they’ve built the show that will invite audience members to create avatars and join them on an immersive journey through a digitally created, abandoned 3-D collider—the kind of powerful particle accelerator that most of us will only ever see on TV science shows like NOVA. There, your virtual “cartoony, bobblehead” self (as Payne describes the avatars) will come into contact with “things, people, and beings”.
Chloe Payne, who has a background in physical theatre, was blown away immediately by the potential of VR.
With a background in physical theatre and clowning, Payne was blown away immediately by the potential for creating theatre using VR technology.
“The things we found exceptionally exciting were we were able to build same level of camaraderie that we would have in real life,” she says of her team, who operate as avatars even in the creative process. “There was that same sense of play and working well together, even in VR.
“The other strength was we could be anywhere. You could be like, ‘I want to be in a cabin in the woods’ and you could just go there. Or we got to spend a bunch of time saying, ‘Okay, how do we fly guys?’ We got to look at ways of inhabiting these avatars that are human and beyond human.”
The potential is limitless, Payne reports, in a field that is only just beginning to be explored by the theatre world. The pandemic, of course, has accelerated this interest. And rEvolver will be the first chance any audience has gotten to enter the world of Collider—a project Payne describes as a new hybrid of VR, immersive theatre, and physical theatre.
“What we are pushing the limits on right now is what we call ‘virtual embodiment’ that’s emotive and captivating to watch,” Payne explains. “I realized back in the fall: ‘Oh my gosh, it’s like animating a puppet or wearing a mask!’ We could make these so engaging to watch. It became, How far could we go in terms of puppeting or embodying the avatars?”
All of this exploration, of course, has taken a lot of trial and error; Payne laughs that a few avatars had to fall to their doom for her team to find out what physical changes need to be made to the collider “set”.
In the end, Payne stresses that you don’t need a VR headset to take part in the piece; you can also participate via a personal computer, in much the same way you would play a video game.
“When people come out of the experience I hope they are inspired by what is possible in VR and that it can be interactive, moving, funny—that all of that is possible,” she enthuses.
As for Payne, she sees a world of possibility in VR well beyond pandemic times. “And I didn’t feel the same excitement for creating a physical theatre piece on Zoom,” she adds. “This had the same liveness as a live show.”
Catfish
May 30 at 7 pm via Zoom
“The ping-pong effect”: that’s the term Jess Amy Shead and Simran Gill are trying to avoid with a radically inclusive new play called Catfish.
Gill, who was born hard of hearing, says it’s a common experience for members of the deaf community when watching theatre: their eyes have to bounce between an ASL interpreter and the action onstage.
Adds Gill: “It’s great to have an interpreter in the theatre but sometimes you don’t get the full experience. It can help you to understand what’s going on but some plays might struggle to find a good interpreter.”
And so, with the show Catfish, about a person who impersonates someone else online, the team set out to create a show that would be inclusive from its inception.
“One of the things we’re intending to do that we think is interesting and exciting and important is making a show that doesn't require any outside interpretation,” explains Shead, joining Gill in the ASL assisted call. “Most of the characters are using spoken english and signing at the same time, or enough from both languages so people from both communities get a full experience.
“It’s integration not as an afterthought, but as the seed of the project,” adds Shead, a hearing actor who met Gill on the set of Alley Theatre’s The Ridiculous Darkness project and is now learning sign language. (Alley is copresenting this presentation.)
The story itself was inspired by the true, traumatic experience of one of Gill’s friends. “My friend was in a romantic [online] relationship with someone who said they were her age—20—when they were really in their 60s,” she explains. “I had to help my friend, so that meant really having to learn what catfishing was as well.”
To flip the script, Shead and Gill, who perform the two leads in the piece, make the protagonist a deaf person who takes on a false identity online—goes “catfishing”—using her hearing friend’s voice. When it’s time to meet in real life, Gill’s character has to come to terms with the fact she must accept herself before she can look for acceptance elsewhere.
“Part of what we wanted to show is every human is complex and we all do things that come from vulnerability and that come from need and connection,” Shead explains. “We all have that in common. And you can see how a person who is hard of hearing, growing up in a hearing world that puts up barriers for them, might have struggles and might do something like a catfish to find some connection in the world.”
At the rEvolver presentation, they’ll show an excerpt of the play and then launch into a discussion of deaf theatre and their process creating an integrated ASL/English production.
Like so many other emerging artists at rEvolver this year, Shead and Gill have dreams of mounting a full live production post-pandemic--and much more into the future. “There are quite a few deaf theatre companies in the east, but as far as I know, there are none in BC,” Shead says. “What this show is doing is to help support deaf theatre in the West.”
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