In Stories That Transform Us, Corey Payette retraces 20 years of Urban Ink theatre accomplishments
Taking the director’s chair for the first time, the artistic director blends interviews with dazzling theatrical sequences at VIFF
A sweeping scene from the new musical Sedna, as shot in Stories That Transform Us. (Directed by Corey Payette, produced by Urban Ink; director of photography Ryan McDonald, design by Marshall McMahen and Jay Havens; featuring actor Chelsea Rose.
Stories That Transform Us screens October 6 at 8:30 pm at Vancity Theatre with a VIFF Creator Talk after the film. On Oct. 22 the film will become available for viewing online; watch for details here.
FOR ITS 20TH ANNIVERSARY season, Urban Ink, like the rest of the performing-arts world, was thrown into a forced pause last year. Among the many projects and tours it had to put on hold was a major new production of the musical Sedna, created by artistic director Corey Payette, Reneltta Arluk, and Marshall McMahen, in Stanley Park in April 2020.
But as it has done for most of its history, the company persevered to create something new. Payette set about filming a small-scale documentary that reflected on the company’s accomplishments—a project that grew into an impressive feature that is now set to debut at the Vancouver International Film Festival as Urban Ink enters its 21st season.
Corey Payette
“All of our tours for the next three years were postponed and are still postponed. All of a sudden there was nothing on the horizon,” Payette recalls. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to just sit here and wait.’ We at Urban Ink are not in the privileged position to stop. The stories we share are very much about stories of struggle, about communities that need these stories right now—or yesterday!”
Payette started by filming an interview with founding artistic director Marie Clements, the Canadian Métis playwright who has gone on to work across theatre, film, and TV, and making her mark as a director-screenwriter of such films as 2019’s Red Snow. Payette wanted to highlight the fact that she was a pioneer in the field of local Indigenous theatre with Urban Ink.
From there, he says the project “snowballed”. Soon he was filming interviews with his onetime mentor, Talking Stick Festival and Full Circle Productions founder and artistic director Margo Kane, and former Urban Ink artistic director Diane Roberts. Their conversations shed fuller light on the role Urban Ink has played in bringing forward Indigenous and BIPOC voices in the city’s theatre scene. While those voices might be hitting the mainstream stage today, that was not the case when Clements began the company two decades ago.
“I really wanted to understand why Urban Ink needed to exist and what were those initial impulses to bring it to fruition,” Payette, who’s an artist of Oji-Cree heritage, tells Stir. “So many people don't realize that she started to do those things right here on the Downtown Eastside. What Marie was doing back in the early 2000s: people were still struggling to have those conversations about those things back then.”
Urban Ink founder Marie Clements in Stories That Transform Us. (Directed by Corey Payette, produced by Urban Ink; director of photography Ryan McDonald).
From there, Payette—as he so often has in his large-scale musicals like Children of God and Les Filles du Roi—started to think bigger, trying to illustrate what his subjects were talking about by bringing elements of theatrical spectacle to the film.
The result is beautifully shot excerpts from each of his interview subjects’ works over the years at Urban Ink. These include not just a scene from Clements’s Urban Ink play Burning Vision, but a sequence from Kane’s Moonlodge, which Payette staged when he became artistic director at the company. There are also intimate renditions of songs from Payette’s own award-winning songbook.
Most stunningly, Stories That Transform Us opens with a sweeping cinematic rendition of a musical moment from Sedna—complete with drone shots over an Inuk character in a canoe interwoven with shots of her dancing amid glowing seal, whale, and wolf lantern puppets on-stage. (See the trailer at bottom.)
“I feel we’re working in the narrative-driven musical in film in a new way—and I’m just so excited,” Payette enthuses. “We’re not just doing a camera in a theatre.
“Urban Ink is a small performing arts company, and we’re punching above our weight and trying to compete with these massive theatre companies and film companies,” Payette adds. “If they're not gonna do it, we’re gonna do it.”
In other words, watch for more film from Urban Ink over its next 20 years; next up in this season, a full cinematic rendition of Les Filles du Roi in spring 2022.
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