Livestream finds bold new Frequencies in Pi Theatre's Provocateurs series
Virtual reality meets synthesizers, family history, dreams, and synthesizers
Frequencies’Aaron Collier and his team found a unique perspective for livestream audiences. Photos by Richie Wilcox and Samson Photography
Pi Theatre presents Macbeth Muet on February 18 and 19 and Frequences on February 20 and 21
“A WAKING-DREAM techno confessional”: that’s one of the ways theatre artist and musician Aaron Collier describes his new play Frequencies, part of a boundary-pushing online double bill at this year’s Pi Theatre Provocateurs series.
What else would you call a work that melds a moving story from Collier’s past with a virtual-reality conjuring of a recurring dream—all with a soundtrack of his own electro-synthesizer music, forged from the frequencies of nature?
“Another way we describe it is it is ‘a musical storytelling show that is in mixed reality,’” says Collier, of Halifax’s experimental HEIST theatre company in Halifax. “You know when a singer-song-writer says who they are between songs and tells the stories behind the music? I enjoy those shows. You get a deeper understanding of the music.
“With a techno artist you don’t get that,” explains Collier, who toured for 12 years in that exact role before turning to theatre. “Often it’s seen in dark places with strobe lights or else it's a huge spectacle. So I thought I would create this genre that shouldn't exist.”
Collier and his creative team have come up with an ingenious perspective to engage audience members enjoying the livestream from the Bus Stop Theatre stage in Halifax—one timed to hit living rooms across the country.
The deeply personal work that tackles big themes about the cycle of life—through imagery, sound, and storytelling—was originally designed for a live, intimate audience. But it was through experimentation aimed at taking the piece to the pandemic-safe virtual realm that Collier and friends stumbled upon the Oculus virtual-reality headset technology.
By combining the headset with a camera on a second actor opposite him, Collier could allow audiences into a mixed-reality world that would replicate his dream imagery, but also tell the point of view of the subject—a family member he never met. The viewer essentially becomes his scene partner.
We don’t want to give away more than that. It’s enough to say the story takes place over 1981, the year Collier was born.
“I was trying to discover if I have a connection to this family member and also to explore this dream I’ve always had,” Collier explains, “and through making this show I actually found the answers to those questions—which was a little mindblowing.”
The story started to take shape through recorded interviews. As Collier describes it, his life and HEIST partner Richie Wilcox, a director and dramaturg, would pepper him with questions about life and death, and his memories of his family. They passed those confessionals on to two writers: Giller Prize nominee and Canada Reads 2021 finalist Francesca Ekwuyasi, and indie musician-playwright Stewart Legere.
“Both of them are just fantastically poetic writers,” says Collier. “It’s funny how someone else can listen to you and very successfully come up with things that are very true about yourself in a way you would never have talked about yourself.”
Collier explores and expands on the themes of his story through a mix of live and recorded music. Collier began experimenting with time and cycles using his synthesizer. He began speeding up the frequencies of the rotation of the sun and moon, and flow of the tides in a 24-hour period, and imagining how those beats could be accelerated to represent a year in the time he’s onstage. The result is a sort of sonic evocation of the life-and-death circle.
“It’s manifested as music—that sense that everything has a relationship to everything else, a kind of a spiritual thing,” says Collier. “It started to give me a profound sense of connection to everything.”
Genres that shouldn’t exist
Macbeth Muet. Photo by Sophie Gagnon Bergeron
The resulting show will expand viewers’ concept of what a livestream show can look and sound like—as Collier says, he’s invented “a genre that shouldn’t exist”. And that’s the kind of mind-altering creation that Provocateurs has been inviting to nontraditional stages since 2017.
Now, adapting to the pandemic world, it offers Frequencies alongside another work that expands our notion of livestream: Macbeth Muet, a Fringe-circuit hit streamed in real time from Montreal by La Fille du Latier. Created by Jon Lachlan Stewart and Marie Hélène Bélanger Dumas, it’s a fast-paced yet poetic distillation of the Shakespearean tragedy, using disposable everyday objects like paper plates and styrofoam cups, alongside litres of fake blood. This company, too, plays with camera perspective: audience members choose from a single-camera view or interactive multi-view, where it’s possible to choose the angle--and even peek backstage (the latter’s limited tickets are already sold out).
From what Pi Theatre artistic and producing director Richard Wolfe observes, it’s Canada’s indie troupes that are pushing the possibilities for the new realm of online performance.
Pi Theatre’s artistic and producing director Richard Wolfe. Photo by Matt Reznek
“The R&D seems to be coming from smaller groups,” he tells Stir. “Risk-taking is part of the DNA of smaller companies in Canada.”
The magical ingredient for Wolfe in today’s online realm is that the shows retain a live element, and aren’t pre-recorded.
“I wanted Pi Provocateurs to be live, in real time: it’s more dangerous,” he says. “There’s a connection to live performance—a bit more akin to live TV back in the ‘50s.”
Theatrical provocateurs are upending the Zoom platform, once the domain of suits, and finding a new potential. The added bonus is that the online platform also allows Vancouver audiences to connect to the more cutting-edge work of theatre companies across the country at a time when no one can tour here.
“I feel it’s imperative for people in Canada to experience the work of others who don’t live in their community or province,” Wolfe says. Maybe, as Collier so eloquently suggests, we really are all connected through this pandemic's strange waking dream.
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