At HOLD ON LET GO, artists express intense emotions through everyday objects
Keely O’Brien bakes cakes with personal messages in Secret Ingredients, while Kyle Loven uses puppets to address grief in Loss Machine
Kyle Loven’s Loss Machine. Photo by Tim Summers
Keely O’Brien’s Secret Ingredients.
HOLD ON LET GO presents Secret Ingredients on February 4 and 8 and Loss Machine on February 5 and 8 at Russian Hall
SINCE INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST Keely O’Brien first launched her anonymous cake-delivery service, she has received a total of 65 requests from strangers hoping to send personal messages to people by way of desserts.
One such web-form submission from a person to his upstairs neighbour read: “Remember me when you set things down, it’s scary loud sometimes. Thanks, downstairs.” So O’Brien whipped up a delicious plant-based cake, decorated it with frosting swirls and fresh-floral garnishes, and piped the message on top in a cutesy cursive font.
“It was a lot of words to fit onto a cake,” she tells Stir by phone with a laugh. “And this was someone who saw the cake-delivery service just posted on Craigslist—so it’s not someone I know at all, it’s not someone who’s part of the theatre community—it was a total stranger to me who requested this cake. And I baked it and delivered it to the shop above his apartment, which was very stressful for me, because I didn’t know how it was going to be received. It felt like a slightly confrontational cake.”
This cake, along with several others that O’Brien has baked for her anonymous delivery service, forms the basis of her theatre show Secret Ingredients, which debuted as a work-in-progress at Theatre Replacement and Company 605’s HOLD ON LET GO last winter. It’s now premiering as part of this year’s festival at the Russian Hall on February 4 and 8, alongside a few other productions that use everyday objects to convey intense emotions.
When audience members walk into the Russian Hall to see Secret Ingredients, they’ll each be handed a wheel that correlates different emotions with the flavours in O’Brien’s cakes. Spicy, burnt, and roasted notes represent anger, whereas salty, bitter, and medicinal flavours imply sadness. There’s dark-chocolate embarrassment; citrus-zest annoyance; tart-cherry grief; and more.
A selection of the cake samples served in Keely O’Brien’s Secret Ingredients.
Of the 65 message submissions O’Brien received, she has baked 14 so far, and five of those are included in Secret Ingredients. Though she doesn’t always find out what happens once a cake is delivered, several people have chosen to update her on the outcomes of their messages (and HOLD ON LET GO audiences will get to hear about how the aforementioned upstairs neighbour reacted to their cake).
“In one way, it started because I realized how much I love making weird-looking, over-the-top, maximalist cakes,” O’Brien shares of her delivery service. “Cake decorating is something that brings me a lot of joy, so I wanted to find a way of incorporating that into a quote-unquote ‘real’ art project. And then from somewhere in the depths of my brain, I had this idea that if there was something you were struggling to say to someone in your life—if there was a message that was too hard to deliver to someone, but that you wanted to say—a cake messaging service could do that for you.”
Cakes are incorporated into Secret Ingredients in a few different ways. Audience members get to try a little slice of each cake, so that they can experience for themselves the flavours O’Brien describes. Projection design by Andie Lloyd shows close-up imagery of the intricate decorations and cursive-frosting messages on each dessert. And on top of all that, O’Brien is decorating a cake throughout the duration of the production, giving the whole thing a cooking-show delivery.
Klepto, one of the puppets in Kyle Loven’s Loss Machine. Photo by Tim Summers
Just as O’Brien transforms cakes into vessels that help people express difficult messages, another theatre artist at HOLD ON LET GO, Kyle Loven, is using discarded items to address loss and grief.
Loss Machine is a one-person show that combines a miniature installation with experimental puppet theatre. (It’ll be at the Russian Hall on February 5 and 8.) The entire performance takes place within an absurdist seven-foot-tall structure onstage—it’s effectively a city full of lost items, with odds and ends that reference the human body. There’s a bird-cage rib cage, for instance, with a heart made of ice locked inside that melts slowly over the course of the production. Near the bottom of the structure, a table leg props up the floors above it like a human leg supporting a torso. And on top of it all sits the glass-dome top of a gum-ball machine—except it’s filled with marbles, and there’s an old typewriter tapping constantly against it, dislodging the orbs onto a track that weaves throughout the set (a visualization of losing your marbles).
“As we move with these characters through the grieving process, we are experiencing those emotions and actions in how they also affect the body,” Loven tells Stir over a separate phone call. “So the scenes and the characters—their placement within the show, and the things that happen—are references to the impacts of grief on our human body.”
Loss Machine premiered back in 2012 at a venue called On the Boards in Seattle (where Loven, who’s currently based in Vancouver, was located at the time). Since 2014, the piece’s massive focal point has been in storage. Now, Loven is revisiting the work from a more vulnerable angle; he lost his father in 2018, and is drawing on many of those emotions to bring this work back to the stage. Loss Machine also acknowledges the weight of all the global loss that has occurred around the world over the past decade, namely due to wars, climate disasters, and the pandemic.
Extincty, one of the puppets in Kyle Loven’s Loss Machine. Photo by Tim Summers
Loven is responsible for maneuvering dozens of puppets in Loss Machine. One character named Klepto—a floating head of sorts that’s made from an old coin purse, cat-eye glasses, a string of pearls, and a lace glove—appears a couple of times throughout the story. (Much as her name suggests, she has a knack for stealing things.) Elsewhere, a bird named Extincty is modelled after the now-extinct dodo; and a sock-puppet character in search of their long-lost-sock soulmate is a reference to all the lost socks of the world.
The appeal of using everyday items in theatre, Loven shares, is their power to connect people through memories. The patina and wear of many found objects lends them a certain nostalgic charm.
“I’m really interested in the relationship that we all bring as viewers, as audience members, to these objects—that we have our own relationships to them, that we come in with a certain sense of shared knowledge around these items,” Loven says. “It allows the starting point of the storytelling to be a little deeper in. We’re not starting from scratch or from ground zero.”
Both Loven and O’Brien have mastered the art of using familiar items to address heavy themes, whether it be a tasty cake or an old sock. That balance of lighthearted and serious tones is what makes these shows appealing, says O’Brien.
“Inherently, we’re asking people to express a difficult message—something that’s hard just to say to someone,” she says. “Having a cake is traditionally very celebratory, joyful, cheerful—it’s often an act of love, like a wedding cake, or celebrating someone, like a birthday cake. Having that as a medium to say something hard makes it easier. It sort of sweetens it or softens it, and it also makes it funny. Putting a really intense message onto a super vibrant, colourful cake adds this element of subversion and humour that I think can make it easier for someone to say something that they might be struggling to say otherwise.” 
Related Articles
