Discovering the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is like discovering a room full of stories you’d never heard before, and being able to choose how you’d best like them to be told to you.
Does dance grip the corners of your imagination and flip it high in the air, so as to slowly drift down and settle as it pleases? Does magic make the most forgotten recesses of wonder in your mind come alive? What about circus, film, Bollywood, theatre, and music?
If every performance has a story at its heart, then every performer is a storyteller, honing their craft with each tour, town and audience.
Take two shows from the upcoming festival (running Jan. 20-Feb. 8): both star the ocean as a main character; both are performed by one person alone on a stage; both are heartbreaking, uplifting, and deceptively simple.
But that’s where the similarities end, and the infinite possibilities of storytelling begin.
Alvin Sputnik, deep sea explorer
“The oceans have risen, the land has been swamped, and the survivors look down at the water from the tops of skyscrapers and mountains.”
Reading like the jacket of a Cormac McCarthy novel, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik follows a man who will brave the deepest depths of the ocean to save the world and find the soul of his dead wife.
Created by Australian Tim Watts, this post-apocalyptic tale is packaged in the form of a puppet show, and a family-friendly one at that.
“Puppetry’s just a bunch of fun,” says performer St. John Cowcher, speaking with the Westender by phone from Perth. “It’s a nice way to play with scale, and create mini worlds and make them big again. There’s a lot of transformative aspects of the show, where it moves from puppetry to animation and creates this magical world that helps ground the story of the show.”
In Sputnik, the protagonist leaves the relative safety of his home to follow the soul of his wife to the bottom of the sea. There, he discovers entombed cities and ghostly reminders of what once was.
With Alvin, Watts has not only rendered an emotionally powerful visual character, but augmented his journey with hand-drawn animations and soulful music. It’s a dark look at loss, made uplifting by the persistence of hope.
Cowcher, who has performed the show nearly 100 times, took on Sputnik so that Watts could take a break from touring it to create new work. Already acquainted with each other through Perth’s performing arts scene, Watts invited Cowcher to audition for Alvin, and Cowcher’s enviable resumé of puppeteer, theatre performer, and ukelele player made him perfectly suited for the role.
And, having now passed through two sets of hands, Alvin has evolved from when he first premiered six years ago.
“I think I play more into the darkness of Alvin,” says Cowcher. “Tim’s Alvin is very wondrous and full of joy of the discovery of all the little creatures along the way, which I think I am as well, but I think sometimes I play a bit more for the overarching emotion and the pathos that he’s experiencing as he loses his wife and desperately tries to find her again.”
The story itself was a creation of necessity. As Cowcher tells it, Watts had designed the puppet – a plain white glove and a white LED ball with lights for eyes – before he knew exactly who the puppet was. Inspired on a dive on the Great Barrier Reef by the blue nothingness beyond, there was soon no mistaking it – Alvin was meant to be a deep sea explorer. A luminous hand telegraphing all the emotions and empathy of a human being.
“I think for me, the hand just makes the perfect body,” Cowcher explains. “There’s such a flexibility to it and a connectivity to humanity. Everyone speaks with their hands,” he continues, “so using hands to create another person isn’t so farfetched. It’s like an extension of our body… Every little movement you make could be another thought process for this puppet and you’re very acutely aware of exactly how you’re moving your fingers, but it’s also this living creature.”
One would be mistaken, however, in thinking that every ounce of Cowcher’s concentration is dedicated to this.
“Seeing the show at first, it looks like this beautiful world that seamlessly flows from one to another, but when you’re performing in a one-person show, you’re doing everything. You’re doing the animation and you’re doing the puppetry and you’re bringing up the lights and bringing down the lights and playing ukelele as well,” he laughs.
“Do you know the story of the swan? The swan on the surface is calm as anything and sort of gliding across the water, but underneath it’s just paddling like crazy. For me, that’s sort of what it’s like being the performer of Alvin.”
Our dying oceans
Before Sea Sick (Feb. 3-4), Alanna Mitchell might have thought she needed a keyboard to tell a good story. But ever since meeting theatre director Franco Boni and Brimful of Asha creator Ravi Jain, the former Globe & Mail reporter has discovered all she needs is a stage, a blackboard, and some chalk.
With only those spare implements, Mitchell has learned how to paint an alarming picture the failing vital signs of the sea, while taking her audience on her travels to Canada, England, Puerto Rico, the Galapagos, the Gulf of Mexico, and Australia – into a submersible 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean – and back.
“I always have this sense when I’m up on stage,” says Mitchell, “that I’m reaching out my hand and saying, ‘Come with me. Let’s go and explore together.’”
As a science journalist for the nation’s newspaper, Mitchell’s globetrotting gave the former prairie girl a firsthand glimpse of what has happening to the world. She was introduced to the vanishing forests of Madagascar and the effects of humanity on the Arctic. And then, about 10 years ago, she met Sylvia Earle.
“I was in the Galapagos Islands and I just happened to be staying with one of the great marine biologists of the world, and she explained to me about the oceans – the most important part of the planetary system. I just became riveted. I was fascinated with trying to understand how the oceans worked.”
At first Mitchell says she was unaware of the trouble that they were in.
“I had heard about overfishing and stuff like that,” she says calmly, “but I had never really imagined that we have affected them as greatly as we have.”
She soon began liaising with scientists around the world to research the matter for her book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, which won the prestigious Grantham Prize for environmental writing in 2009.
Subsequently, while giving one of her sought-after talks on the subject, Mitchell met Boni, who was looking for ways for the arts to explore environmental issues, and invited her to give a talk for his theatre in Toronto.
He then asked if she was interested in making it a play, and a shift from public talk to performance was made.
“All I could think about was, ‘Here’s a new audience for this information; I wonder if I can do it?’ So I just said yes.”
Hours of workshopping and rehearsal and frustration later, the piece had a new beginning and ending, and a dramatically different, highly personal and humorous play emerged.
“For me, it’s almost loving,” she says of Sea Sick. “We’re this really fascinating species and we’ve done these things; on some level we just have to stand back and honor the messiness of it, you know?”
Just don’t call her an actor.
“The piece is a theatre piece, but I’m not a theatre performer. It’s really critical thing for me to remember when I go into it, because if I try to be a performer the piece does not work,” she laughs quietly. “All I can do is tell my stories.”
The play stars Mitchell as herself, owlish glasses and professorial grey hair, using words and diagrams and a poignant moment involving the chalk and a jug of vinegar to keep all eyes on her. If Sea Sick the book was about our oceans, Sea Sick the play is about Mitchell. Rebecca Picherack’s lighting design and a soundtrack by Tim Lindsay are the only footnotes for this real life deep sea explorer, who overcame her fear of water to connect us with the “switch of life” that links the entire planet.
“I know that I’m just the metaphor, just a narrative technique. In fact, I tell people quite a bit about myself – things that I would really rather they not know. But because I’m on stage and I’m trying to communicate in a new medium, a new art form, in a way that will puncture them... I have to do it.”
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival runs Jan. 20-Feb. 8. The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik runs Jan. 21-24 at the Waterfront Theatre. Tickets $15-25. Sea Sick runs Feb. 3-4 at the Roundhouse. Tickets from $31. Go to TicketsTonight.ca or call 604-684-2787 ext. 2
PuSh Picks
Want to see more? Here are additional highlights from the 11th annual PuSh performing arts fest:
Bullet Catch (Scotland)
Do you think a man can stop a bullet with his teeth? Rob Drummond appears in the role of William Wonder, magician, to tell an inrecidble tale. Jan. 15-Feb. 7 at the Arts Club Revue Stage. Tickets from $25.
So Blue (Canada)
Dancer Louise Lecavalier pushes against the limits of human movement with the daring of an acrobat and the ferocity of a wild animal. Jan. 20-21 at the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. Tickets from $31.
Séquence 8 (Canada)
Torsos twist, bodies vault into the air, and dancers somersault in this awesome feat of contemporary circus. Jan. 22-24 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Tickets from $39.
Dark Matter (Belgium)
The weightiness of time, space and existence are turned into this wild play about the universe. Jan. 28-30 at the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. Tickets from $31.
Le Cargo (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
In the first solo show of his career, Faustin Linyekula uses dance and storytelling to bring us closer to his homeland, the Congo. Jan. 29-31 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. Tickets from $31.
Club PuSh
Set in Performance Works, the social hub of the festival, Club PuSh, is a place to grab a drink while being swept up in cutting-edge performance. From raunchy, Austin-style musical theatre, to Scandinavian song and film, to a New Orleans funeral, you can start your night in experimental spirit, and then stay up, inspired, until 1am. Runs Jan. 22-24, 29-31, and Feb. 5-7. Tickets from $22.
• For tickets and schedule, go to TicketsTonight.ca.
