For those of you who have been reading TWISI for years, you know that there is a special place in my heart for Fringe. I love the community spirit that comes from so many shows happening simultaneously. I love the spirit of experimentation, where audiences are sometimes treated to the very first incarnation of something that might end up on Broadway someday. I love how Fringe makes theatre accessible to audiences, how it is the perfect way for young theatre companies to find new audiences and for audiences to realize that often there is much more diversity in theatre programming in their city than they were aware of. I love Fringe, and I have a very special affection for Halifax Fringe, a Festival that has grown to really reflect the best of what Halifax theatre is and can be. There are over fifty shows in an array of different genres, with companies both local and “from away,” in various stages of development. Here is a closer look at three shows coming to Halifax Fringe this week.
Laura Thornton is certainly no stranger to Fringe. For the last twelve years, the Artistic Director of Whale Song Theatre has worn almost every hat one can wear at Halifax Fringe, including several stints as a Fringe juror. This year Thornton is returning to the stage for the first time in years, as she produces and acts in Ali House’s new play The Birthday. Thornton characterizes House’s play as “the perfect Fringe show” saying, “It’s 15-20 minutes long. It’s very short, which I kind of love for Fringe. This is [Whale Song Theatre’s] first foray into developing a new piece. Sarah Richardson is directing it. I am in it, along with a new actor named Briony Merritt, who I saw in Dartmouth Player’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [Are Dead], and she was phenomenal, and I was like, ‘Ooh! You are new talent and I like you a lot!’ She ended up coming out and auditioning for us and Sarah liked her as well, and we have a nice chemistry going, which is a lot of fun.”
According to Thornton, the premise of the show is, “a little slice of life in an alternate reality.” It asks: How would you live your life if you knew the day you were going to die? In the play everybody in the world knows the day they are going to die, but they don’t know the year. Thornton notes, “From the conversations I’ve had with people, they kind of divides into two camps. There are the people who are set free by this information, and the people for whom this information is a curse. There are the people who are like, ‘If I can only die one day a year, Whoo! I can do what I want!’ and the other people only live their lives 11.5 months at a time because they can’t think forward, they can’t think past it. They can’t make plans.” Thornton laughs, adding, “It’s a really weird way to think about your own morality. I don’t know how Ali comes up with these ideas. They are weird, and they are dark, and they are just a little bit off… and I love it.”
Whalesong Theatre is committed to nurturing new talent. Thornton sees the company operating like an incubator, as a safe space for theatre artists to try new things. The company also bridges the gap between theatre and community outreach, usually pairing with a charity during the run of each show, and making a donation from the proceeds at the end of the run. Thornton is also proud to have an all female cast and creative team for The Birthday and we chatted wistfully about this show being one of the last to perform in The Waiting Room, which has become one of our favourite theatre venues in the city. “We need another venue to pop up tout de suite,” says Thornton, and I could not agree more.
Find Whale Song Theatre on Facebook. Twitter. Instagram (@WhaleSongTheatre).
One of my favourite things about Fringe is the connections that are made between the local theatre community and artists from other cities (many of whom who have roots in Nova Scotia), which leads to artists returning to Halifax Fringe multiple times. Hanlon McGregor, a trans man originally from Nova Scotia, with an Acting Degree from Dalhousie University, who currently lives in Toronto, returns to Halifax Fringe with Bubble Trans Pride, the sequel to his show Unexpectedly Trans, which received a glowing review in The Coast at Halifax Fringe last year.
McGregor “began writing as a way to process [his] feelings of not being settled in a female gender role with two small children and a husband. [He] began performing monologues at cabarets and curated evenings at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.” This led to a collaboration with Mihaly Szabados, out of which came Unexpectedly Trans. This year McGregor has collaborated with Syrus Marcus Ware, “an amazing and accomplished visual artist, a performance artist, a committed activist and member of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and also generally a really wonderful and loving human.” Ware describes Bubble Trans Pride thus, “[it] tells a different kind of story, an intersectional story… that brings together understandings of race and gender and sexuality all together… it’s really an essential story to be told right at this moment. It tackles things like what happens when you’re a political activist and you’re dating and you’re trying to be engaged in your community. What happens when you are transitioning and you maybe are too much of one thing and too little of another in the eyes of cisgender (non-trans) people, and how that interacts with power and access to spaces and those kind of things. It is… a complex story, a detailed story, a story of what it means to be trans in 2018.”
I asked McGregor to speak about the choice to centre this story in two spaces that many would consider “Progressive,” the world of activism and the world of Pride, and framing them instead as spaces where folks can still feel marginalized, unwelcome and unsafe. “I think it was a big shock for a lot of folks when the Toronto Pride Parade was stopped by BLM a couple of years ago,” McGregor says, “In the time that followed I heard things like, ‘Why are you (queer people) fighting each other?’ Which gave me pause, because I had grown to perceive that the ableism and racism and transphobia that exist in other parts of society also exist in our queer community and also require activism and work, but because others perceived us to be one big happy family it seemed we were not supposed to make a fuss if things were not working. I felt like I was being scolded personally at times a bit, but it gave me a chance to think about the issues and the notion that pride should be a party, when we are all aware by now, I think, that it began as a protest.”
McGregor’s mandate is “to use theatre to make the world better and more empathetic” and he stresses that his art is created for trans folks and also for everyone else. “My mentor Diane Flacks said that as we watch the characters struggle for clarity, we as an audience should feel culpable. What I took from this is that we should recognize our own approaches and also begin to question how they may be flawed or immature and how we might evolve them in order to grow the culture in the direction it needs to evolve. … I am always learning and growing and making mistakes. … If we could all just commit to the process of making mistakes and owning them, maybe we could solve some of the internal issues in ourselves [and] in our communities.”
Community is important to McGregor, who got into theatre because of the late Dr. Elizabeth Murray, the choir director of the Tatamagouche Area Singers, who also wrote their annual community historical plays. “That connection to our community, our roots and our past was a lesson she instilled in me. I feel like coming home is a bit a of a tribute to her, and a “thank you” for turning my teen years into a time of making art in community.”
Bubble Trans Pride is presented in a double bill with McGregor’s short film Holding Hands With the Awkward.
Fringe is also a place for experimentation and taking risks. Casey Lynne Delaney brings her show Le Petit Clown to Halifax Fringe via Florida and France. The concept for the show began in Paris, where Delaney, a graduate of the Dalhousie University Theatre Department, is currently based. As a dancer and a mime Delaney faced a new challenge creating theatre in Paris in that it is difficult to translate one’s humour from English to French. She was inspired by seeing an actor do three of Samuel Beckett’s solo pieces at an experimental theatre in Paris, and then saw a French production of Waiting for Godot where Delaney says, “The guy playing Lucky killed it.” She was also seeing a lot of parodies of La Comédie-Française, which is “all about a character in Existential crisis where the actors pronounce the French words to the fullest extent, so that it is closer to Spanish, which is easier for non-Francophone audience members to understand.” Delaney found the large gestures in these parodies akin to both clown and mime. She was also inspired by the children’s film Le Roi et l’Oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird) during a train ride from Paris to Versailles during Christmas when she was feeling especially homesick. All of these images were still percolating in her mind when she returned to her hometown of Gainesville, Florida a few months later and read an early draft of her piece at a Poetry Reading. From there she met two actors who were interested in further workshopping the draft into a show they could perform at the Gainesville Underground Theatre Festival in May, 2017. Delaney returned to Paris and ended up directing the first incarnation of Le Petit Clown via Skype. She continued to workshop the show, working toward its Paris debut a year later. She stresses that each production hinges on the skills and abilities of the actors she is working with. Some actors have more dance training, some have more circus skills, some are better at mime. “It’s very interesting to see how different actors react to the same suggestions. I know I need the actor to get from point A to point B, but the way the each one goes about getting there is different.” In Halifax, the cast of Le Petit Clown is Kaylon Fraser, who was in the Dalhousie Theatre Department at the same time as Delaney, and Amanda Cormier, who Delaney is working with for the first time. Delaney says that there is a safety in working with people she knows, and credits Cormier’s “let’s try it!” attitude as being essential to the rehearsal and workshop process. “My shows can very easily become dark,” says Delaney, “But I want it to be fun. That’s why I like having the Circus themes.” She explains that a clown show is ultimately very simple: the clown wants something, but something keeps getting in her way. You could play a character having her goals always being thwarted and it would be tragic, but in clown you have to keep finding the funny. “I don’t want the clown to be dumb, I want the clown to be in the moment and not to anticipate anything, I want her to be natural and fun to watch. I want to make sure it’s inherently funny, so that everyone can understand it. I think that if I think it’s funny, and I’m seeing it over and over again in rehearsal every day, if I still think it’s funny, then I think the audience will think it’s funny too.”
Halifax Fringe runs from August 30 to September 9th, 2018. For more information and to purchase tickets please visit http://halifaxfringe.ca or stop by The Bus Stop Theatre in person at 2203 Gottingen Street. The Bus Stop is the Festival Hub and the Main Box Office. You can also pick up a Fringe Guide there.
You can follow Halifax Fringe on Social Media: Facebook. Twitter. Instagram (@HalifaxFringe)
Hope to see you at Halifax Fringe!
