Two queen-sized beds, bedside tables, lamps, an alarm clock, a desk and a pad of paper. They're the ubiquitous features of standard motel and hotel rooms where dramas around love, sex and death play out.
Battery Opera's artistic producer David McIntosh started writing stories situated in such rooms when he was on tour. He returned to these mundane spaces when his jaunt ended to write more tales about transient states in human relationships and the paths we trace.
Twelve narratives will be performed alongside improvised dance and evocative compositions in M/HOTEL in rooms at the Holiday Inn downtown, Nov. 22 to Dec. 10.
"Everyone's been to a hotel or motel room, whether on business, or if you're going to a funeral or maybe you're having sex with someone, and that room has been used thousands and thousands of times for all these narratives of your life," McIntosh said. "So they're both incredibly banal and dull and then they're full of the residue of people's lives." Audience members will meet McIntosh in the lobby bar, collect a key and then find the room where the performances will eventually unfold.
"It's really about the audiences' experience. That adventure of trying to find that room, of being in that room, what you would do in that room, what memories that might evoke for you, how you engage with your fellow audience members," McIntosh said. "When each performer encounters the audience they'll have no idea what has just happened prior, what kind of audience relationship has already been developed, so they have to improvise with what they find." Only five tickets are available for each dance-theatre show, which is obviously not intended to be a moneymaker.
"It's intimate and specific but also very minimal, so there's lots of room for people to interpret for themselves," McIntosh said. "Your body is the venue of performance. I like working outside the theatre because that just makes it more real, you're not sitting passively, you're actually engaged with the real world."
McIntosh, a writer and singer, created the narratives with composer Aleister Murphy. McIntosh would send a story to Murphy who would respond with the outline of a piece of music, and then McIntosh would rewrite the script based on the sound.
Battery Opera presented McIntosh's work Lives Were Around Me in 2009 and 2010. The roving theatre work took tiny audiences from the Alibi Room to a Downtown Eastside alley to the Vancouver Police Museum and morgue.
M/HOTEL runs on the hour starting at 6 p.m. with the last show at 10 p.m. Each performance features a different story, dancers and players. M/HOTEL runs Tuesdays through Saturdays at 1110 Howe St. For $25 tickets, go to ticketstonight.ca.
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