Review: Kabarett '33 at the Gladstone

Last Thursday, I saw Kabarett '33 at the Gladstone, which was written and performed by Bremner Duthie. Duthie has training as an opera singer in Montreal and his vocal talent shone, despite his voice sounding strained and tired. Overall, I was disappointed with the performance, and more disappointed that the reviews I read were deceptively inaccurate. I had taken 3 guests with me that night expecting a rip-roaring cabaret show. This is not it.

I thought the performance felt rushed and a lot of creative opportunities to develop character and flesh out the more poignant themes and dramatic moments were ultimately missed. The character appeared neurotic in a way that was unrealistic and distracting and prevented me from being taken into his world. In fact, at one point, there's a reference to contemporary events that completely destroys the illusion of the world created. It happens about 2/3 of the way through the show.

The staging should have taken place on a smaller scale for a one-man show: the strewn-about bits of clothing were cliche,  scatterbrained and ultimately unintuitive for the audience to follow. The set did not resemble the ransacked green room of a theatre. Green rooms are cramped characterized by "organized chaos" of costumes, props, dust, makeup stands, lights, wigs, old sets, sponges, liquor bottles etc. Better use of props, like an old piano (which I know from experience is backstage at the Gladstone green room) or a makeup boudoir would have provided levels, dynamism and inspired choreography. Better use of elements of cabaret (hello, drag!) would have given the show the flare it lacked as well as provided the audience with the depth and variety it craved.

There were a few exceptional moments: the opening scene was creatively done with a flashlight. The purple lighting was gorgeous and dramatic. The lighting overall was outstanding, actually.

The music was good; it was all originally recorded by Bremner Duthie and his ensemble.  I was concerned about copyright violations, as the program did not indicate whether the copyrighted works had been used with permission; many of them have been re-released and re-recorded, so I'm not sure if they're in the public domain.

The one and only bit of choreography had some compelling wrist movements. Lastly, Bremner did a good job of highlighting the complex ethical role that audiences played in attending Weimar German cabarets at the time, and he teased out that role with his audience.

Kabarett '33 closes this weekend at the Gladstone.

Anatomica at the NAC

Last week I had the great privilege of attending the performance of Andre Gingras' Anatomica by Dance Works Rotterdam at the National Arts Centre Theatre. The piece reminded me of two things: the contemporaneous reflection of human relationships that emanate from the Dutch dans theater scene, and secondly, the lack (or my ignorance) of a dance theatre scene here in Ottawa. There is contemporary dance and classical dance, but no dance theatre. I was thirsty and drank in the incredible social commentary about love, sex and relationships of Anatomica's first half.

The piece opened with with the dancers dancing as though they were in a club or in a strip club. It was sexual and reminded me of the mating dances I have seen in documentaries. Then they would stop, point at an audience member on which the spotlight was shining as though to say, "Dance, now you're the performer. Perform for us." The day after Valentine's Day, it was a reminder of the performing we do for each other, the vulnerability we have at the risk of performing and feeling rejected and the expectations that are dashed if we do not perform well - however you take that to mean :)

I also found poignant the performing we do for each other on the Internet, specifically on internet dating sites (of which I actually have no experience) and sexting. In this collection of short scenes, the dancer opened her laptop and proceeded to pose and type and flirt with her partner, who was situated offstage and only represented by a voice. The voice asked personal questions about what she likes to do and asked her to touch herself, take of her shirt, etc. The dancer obliged. But then the voice asked her, "Is your daddy proud of you?" The dancer was immediately offended, hid in shame from the computer and then gingerly shut the top of her lap top. The impact was like a mack truck on the audience. There was a collective tension in the air at her sense of hurt and shame and betrayal. She had trusted her partner, she had received his/her approval, and in one foul swoop, the partner had inflicted shame without really knowing the ramifications of what he/she was doing. This is the human condition of our contemporary society. We please and hurt each other instantly without the personal realtime connection to how our comments are absorbed and processed. For this to be represented in dance reached all of us. Prior to this, there had been grumblings in the audience, "what are they doing? Is this dance? This is what the NAC makes us pay for?" I heard of one family leaving close to the beginning with their children, which is too bad, because this is a way for their kids, in my opinion, for them to make sense of the world they live in. Sexting is part of their kids' lives now and there's no turning back and I truly think protecting children is futile - except if it's from adult predation. Child pornography is a scourge and we need to deal with it, but I think that's a separate conversation.

The second half of Anatomica was somewhat less compelling. The show opened with a photographer walking in the audience: he was performer and watcher as he took polaroids of audience members. Then, he gradually made his way onstage only to find a clone of himself with the same wig and camera. I understood that we perform for each other with this belief that we are all individuals, but we are not. Our identities are shaped by our desires to conform or not conform to society. We are an aggregate. We can be understood empirically and predictably.

After this portion, I found the dance less engaging although it was beautiful to watch, full of levels, kicks, jumps, and tumbles down a mattress or teetering at the top of a precipice and choosing to jump or not to jump.

In my own mind, I chose to jump. Andre Gingras and Dance Works Rotterdam and others (Natasha Royka, Natasha Bakht, Le Groupe Dance Lab and Lainie Towell) have inspired me to build and appreciate my dance vocabulary. The culmination of this is that I decided to found my own Dance Theatre company, unleash the dance vocabulary and ideas I have had building and have repressed and denied for the last 5 years. Art that inspires appreciation and reflection is wonderful; but art that inspires further creation is an art in itself.

I am so grateful to the NAC and Cathy Levy for bringing contemporaneous, moving (no pun intended!), cutting edge dance theatre to Ottawa. If you have the opportunity, check out Andre Gingras and Dance Works Rotterdam. You won't be disappointed.

I think I won't: A review of NAC's "I think I can"

I couldn't stay. No matter how much I thought I could. I wouldn't. I COULDN'T. So I didn't.

Here is my review of what I saw before I walked out of the theatre 20 minutes in.

I think I can, the NAC's presentation of the Dora Mavor Moore award-winning musical that claimed to use hip hop and tap to reach and portray adolescent angst and bullying, was the most stereotypical unoriginal caricaturized portrayal of kids today. It was insulting to the nuanced, sophisticated, intelligent SmartPhone-toting mini-adults I know and see regularly.

I wanna see that musical!

The scene opened with a tap sequence and a promising multi-layered set. The dancing was impressive, even to one unfamiliar with the tap lexicon. Particularly convincing was the character who danced with a limp.

However, the show quickly disintegrated into a series of overused tropes about 10 minutes into the performance. Again, the portrayal of science was reduced to the over-quoted E= mc (squared). And all kinds of disparate concepts were conflated - the writers had clearly either badly parodied science teachers or misunderstood the facts when they wrote the script.

The bullying sequence where "the bully stole my homework but I can't say anything" was once again overused. Stealing homework is the least of kids' worries. When I was mentoring elementary students in high school in the early 2000s, we were dealing with e-bullying, swarmings, gangs, drugs and sexual favours. I think some of those kids wished they could have had their homework stolen instead of enduring some of the experiences they did. Ten years on with the addition of Facebook and Twitter, I can only imagine the challenges of social networking for the socially stunted student or young shunned scholar.

The second problem the company encountered was the lacklustre use of their space. Despite a multi-level set, they spent most of the time tap dancing in formation on the stage.

Then there was the problem of consistency within the world Byfield and Gibson created. It detracted from whatever insight they were trying to communicate about kids today. The kids never spoke. The teacher spoke in her weird, mangled Scottish accent, but the kids moaned and gestured ridiculously. What's the message? Kids have no voice? The inconsistency between human interaction on stage made no sense and it destroyed the willing suspension of disbelief for the reviewer and ultimately undermined the message of empowerment.

The scene with the supposed cheerleader and the boy with the limp droned on too long.

Were I one of the kids in the audience on Saturday night, I would have felt insulted and exasperated that these are still the tropes we think of when we pander to "Youth" theatre. No wonder the NAC Theatre was only half full on a Saturday night. If Peter Hinton wants to keep his theatre full, he had better stop pandering and start envisioning.

Photo Credit: Daniel Alexander, NAC.ca