Synaesthesia last night was a long and mind-stretching event. I think the most discipline-blurring part of the show was the spoken word preformance, "Last Tracks" - the chapbook was available and I'm glad I grabbed a copy because I wanted to go back and reread a lot of the pieces, in particular Marcus McCann's "Nirvana - In Bloom," a really entertaining and complex riff on the physics and geometry of big death and little death. The readers were a varied bunch, from short fiction writers to poets, with performance poetry, props and drama, and straightforward monologue thrown together over a soundtrack made up of all their choices for the last track they wanted to hear. Except Festrell, of course, who brought a mix of fragments of a dozen songs and integrated the mix tape into her own performances, so that its silences and changes of mood were echoed in her performance.
The readers all stood on the stage for the entire performance in a semicircle, giving each speaker a silent and still audience of other people who were also, by the nature of the subject, standing in the moments of their deaths, waiting to speak from whatever their take on it was. I thought the choice of David Emery's beautiful "Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism" for the final piece was particularly good. "The only thing I know for certain about dying, and I can say this with a degree of expertise now that I've died, is that the music never stops. It's so rampantly present in the air that you feel yourself constantly becoming a part of it . . . Know that there is great peace and understanding. And that it all sounds very familiar."
The weird thing about shows at Arts Court Theatre, however, is the fact that they seem to usually get everyone to get up and file back out to the reception area between acts. Not that in this case that was such a bad thing, because it gave people a chance to check out the merch table and the visual art which was also a part of the event. Seemed a little odd fishing out my ticket every time we went back into the theatre.
"Love me.... Now!" was a really funny short play, very well produced and acted. I didn't get much information on the actors, unfortunately. The premise - three women, three men, and a speed-dating service - allows for the playwrights to have a lot of fun creating characters and then mixing and matching. The short scenes, five minutes each, put each couple together and just sat back. When all three couples had been covered, the men changed tables and they did it again. But just when I thought it might get repetitive, the pattern got shaken up when one of the men sat down at another man's table because the woman had left the room. For a minute it seemed that after all this ultra-hetero speed-dating, it'd be the guys that finally hit it off. . .
Check out more work these guys do.
And then the night was wrapped up with My Dad VS Yours, an instrumental group doing some cool sort-of-ambient post-rock, with a really quite mesmerizing video running behind them. I thought they were just a touch too loud for the space, but it did add to the wall-of-sound effect that they were creating at times.
Tomorrow I'm going to be catching "Fired...on Yo' Day Off" at the Bronson Centre and the OutSpoken reading at Mother Tongue books. Stay tuned for reviews.