Heartbreak and perseverance behind the scenes as multidisciplinary Over the Ridge returns in new form
The Fugitives’ Brendan McLeod returns to Vimy Ridge musical storytelling, this time with dance by Jacob Williams—an artist who knows what it is to suffer
Brendan McLeod. Photo by Mike Savage
Massey Theatre presents Over the Ridge on April 13 at 4 pm and 8 pm
SET IN THE TRENCHES of the First World War, Over the Ridge is a story that involves heartbreak and heroism, perseverance in the face of adversity, broken bodies, and a hard-won resurrection… And that’s just the behind-the-scenes saga.
This new multimedia production’s long and turbulent incubation began some decades ago, when its driving force, playwright and songwriter Brendan McLeod, discovered Pierre Berton’s Vimy. Telling the gory story of how some 10,000 young Canadians died in a brutally mismanaged battle for a few square kilometres of French soil, the book was a well-deserved bestseller.
“I started getting interested in Vimy Ridge when I was 13, because Vimy was my favourite book when I was a teenager,” McLeod told Stir in a 2020 interview. “So that’s where I originally got interested in the mythology and the history around it, and what’s true and what’s not.”
McLeod was particularly interested in how a foreign war could come to play such a significant role in shaping Canada’s national identity—and how the legend of Vimy Ridge crowded out other Canadian stories that needed telling. His first attempt at unpacking the myths came in early 2020, when a production called Ridge was set to premiere at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts that March. Just days before the curtain was to lift, Covid hit, and we know how that went.
Undaunted, McLeod enlisted director Mike Southworth and shot a filmed version of the musical that screened online in November of the plague year. The soundtrack also emerged in purely musical form as Trench Songs, the fifth album from McLeod’s folk band, the Fugitives; now the story, in somewhat altered form, is returning to the stage as Over the Ridge, at the Massey Theatre in two shows on Saturday (April 13).
This time, though, it includes dance.
“To be honest, I was pretty skeptical at the beginning,” McLeod allows now, noting that it was the theatre’s idea to bring emerging dancers from Arts Umbrella and Ballet BC’s youth program onboard. “Like, it’s not how this piece originally spoke to me. But I agreed to do a workshop, because I was artistically interested, and you don’t get handed many chances like this. So I was just ‘Let’s see what comes of it.’”
Dancers in Over the Ridge.
What came of it proved more than satisfactory, especially as it included the emergence of a new and promising choreographic talent in the form of the young dancer Jacob Williams. But here’s where the pain, suffering, and resurrection come in: early on in the production process, Williams was in a horrific car accident that left him in a coma for three months. He has still not fully recovered and remains on leave from Ballet BC; his planned career as a virtuosic dancer is still uncertain. But choreographing Over the Ridge is helping him recover, he says, and he’s finding hope in crafting an aesthetic response to wartime trauma.
“I’m super grateful to be able to choreograph so much,” Williams says in a separate telephone interview. “It is certainly a challenge, with all my physical therapy and occupational therapy, kinesiology, and massage—all these other things that I’m trying to fit it in with. I do plan to return to dance one day, but I’m grateful that this piece happened. And it’s also helping to bring me closer to what I hope to be doing.”
Not being able to move with his former fluidity has been a blessing in disguise, he adds. Instead of demonstrating what he wants the dancers do do by using his own body as the template, he’s been forced to adopt a more collaborative approach, watching the dancers to see what their bodies would find possible.
“You always have to look for the best things in the worst traumas, and a weird plus side of this accident and this opportunity to choreograph for Over the Ridge is that I used to be slow when I worked on this two years ago,” Williams notes. “I’d spend hours over minutes of choreography, trying to prepare more and more material to teach the dancers. But now, I don’t know…. I just come into the studio with nothing prepared and I just improvise on the spot, in the moment. That’s made me much faster, and more in touch with what the dancers themselves have to offer.
“It’s been a really valuable shift for me as a choreographer, and I think I’m likely to continue with this trend,” he continues. “I dictate with my words to them what the feel or what the type of motion is, and in needing to use my words more, I’ve also been able to connect more with what the dancers bring to the space.”
The Fugitives. Photo by Kevin Clark
At the time of our most recent interview with McLeod, there were still some loose ends to tie up before Over the Ridge’s premiere, but the playwright says that his initial trepidation about dance has evaporated.
“I think Jacob did a really wonderful job,” McLeod shares. “I was surprised by how much the piece changed in the hands of other collaborators like that. It was wild to see. It was wild, too, because I was kind of hands-off, and then the band just arrived and workshopped the stuff. I also really liked that a big focus of Ridge was the teenage soldiers who fought in World War I, 25,000 Canadian teenagers, but there was not really any of that youth corporeally embodied on-stage before. And now, with the emerging dancers that we have through Ballet BC and Arts Umbrella, you get a better sense of that—but it’s not very hits-you-over-the-head. They’re not playing soldiers straight-up, but they’re kind of abstractly embodying that spirit, and putting a physical reminder on-stage of the youth that fought in World War I.”
McLeod admits that he might not be quite done with the story of Vimy Ridge, even as his initial concept now enters its fourth iteration. What happened to the soldiers who survived and returned home to Canada continues to fascinate him, and he’s also going to take some time to consider how working with dance might inform his storytelling in future.
“That’s a question I need to sit with over the next few months, and I don’t know the answer yet,” he says. “I’m trying to be really open to everything that the project presents, and everything that might change about the project. It’s very weird; I’ve never put together an entire show and have it be done, and then had it remounted with a whole different angle. So I’m curious as to what the possibilities will offer—but I don’t think I’m going to know that until we get a few performances under the belt, and see what the show has become. So I don’t know. We’ll see!” 
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