Electric Company Theatre is lighting up the planetarium with its latest production, You Are Very Star, June 12 to 29.
The time-travelling piece includes two stories. Part One: Orbiting the Cusp of Greatness, set in 1968, the year the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre was built, will be performed in the centre's vintage-feeling basement auditorium, and Part Two: Transcendence, set in 2048, will play out, replete with projections, in the Star Theatre.
"[You Are Very Star] evolved over a question about our relationship to time, to memory and projection, or anticipation," said Kevin Kerr, co-creator of You Are Very Star and a founding member of the 17-year-old Electric Company. "And the flipside of those two things, which is regret or dread."
The venue inspired the award-winning theatre company's latest work. The Electric Company's former managing producer, Nathan Medd, proposed a show there after attending a panel discussion about arts venues in the city at the Space Centre half a dozen years ago.
"I've always loved this place," Kerr said from the Space Centre last Thursday. "This building has always been such a big part of my psychic terrain, memories of childhood visits here, and it was exciting to come back and when I did, it was this real wash of, a blend of nostalgia mixed with dreams of the future."
Orbiting the Cusp of Greatness, written by Craig Erickson with story development with Kerr, focuses on a disillusioned poetry professor who decides to reinvent himself as a guru at a time of revolution and ride the wave of change, battling his ego along the way.
Transcendence, written by Kerr with story development by Sarah Sharkey, explores a world where we live inside technology and are able to create conscious copies of ourselves.
"The ideas in it feel kind of ancient in the sense that there's a promise of immortality, you know upload your consciousness to the Cloud and live forever and a universal kind of consciousness that will expand," Kerr said. "If feels very akin to the promises of certain spiritual quests, as well."
You Are Very Star includes interactive elements. The Prologue, a social media component, allows audience members to interact with characters before the performance. The Interlude, a scavenger hunt connected the characters and themes of the show, happens instead of an intermission between the parts one and two.
You Are Very Star travels from the height of the space race to the dawn of a new, augmented humanity, according to its press bumph, and the characters in each story look forward or back to 2013. The audiences are the players in this present in The Interlude.
The Electric Company wants to examine the idea that the past is fixed and the present is unfolding by exploring the idea that the choices we make now are influenced by shifting perceptions of the past.
"Maybe there's a future that's present now waiting for us and choices are being made that are giving us opportunities to move forward in a way that's empowering and positive," Kerr said.
For more information, see electriccompanytheatre.com.
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