The Chop Theatre weathers 2020 with an even-more-relevant Pathetic Fallacy
Candelario Andrade and Milton Lim’s digital projections translate the show easily to our online world
Pathetic Fallacy plays with green-screen technology—and the weather gods are angry. Photo by Mark Chavez
Rumble Theatre livestreams The Chop Theatre’s Pathetic Fallacy from November 25 to 29
TWO YEARS AGO--which, let’s face it, feels like two lifetimes ago--the central conundrum that The Chop Theatre artist Anita Rochon and her creative team tackled with the show Pathetic Fallacy was this: how to make a play that wouldn’t require her to travel to perform it.
Rochon was worried about climate change, and she wanted to devise a play about global warming that would not mean making a jet-fuelled carbon footprint. That meant creating an entire digital world of projections that a solo performer at each destination could step into.
The resulting setup required a new, unrehearsed actor to get in front of the show’s green screen each night. There, the chosen performer would take instructions from one monitor, and would watch the wild weather-report-gone-haywire unfolding behind him or her on the other.
Actors and comedians from Edinburgh to Australia have since taken on the task in front of a live audience--all while Rochon has sat comfortably at home.
Now, in 2020, Pathetic Fallacy turns out to be just as well-suited--if not more so--to a world that’s not allowed to travel at all. And thanks to a livestream presentation by Rumble Theatre, from its digs at the Progress Lab 1455, the production will now broadcast a different Vancouver actor juggling the role each night.
“We’re showing it to the world and anyone can connect and watch it, whereas before, the show travelled to everyone,” says Candelario Andrade, who’s sharing a line with fellow Pathetic Fallacy projection designer Milton Lim. “With the pandemic, the whole streaming world is meeting the show.”
Historic landscape paintings meet meteorological graphics in Pathetic Fallacy’s projections (here with creator Anita Rochon).
“Those questions around isolation and whether we want to travel--they’d been in discussion in the larger arts community for a lot of years, and it seems like the right time to be asking those questions,” adds Lim. “The world was in such disarray--all we needed was a pandemic!”
The show takes its name from a literary term that means the attribution of human feelings to nonhuman things--like the weather. And though the standin performer may at first feel like the setting is the meteorological green screen familiar from the nightly news, Andrade and Lim’s digitally generated projections soon conjure everything from landscape paintings to old TV weather footage to even weather gods and Rochon herself.
“From the inception of the show there was a lot of references to art and how we’ve been trying to understand weather and weather systems for so long,” Andrade explains. “So a lot of inspiration is coming from art history.”
Lim used Isadora computer software to program all the vivid, ever-shifting imagery to set cues in the work--building a structured world for each actor to adapt to. For this rendition, the team has added extra cameras to capture the performer from different angles for the livestream. (Rumble had to cancel small live events around Pathetic Fallacy at Progress Lab when BC’s health office ordered stricter lockdowns, but livestreams were always the main part of the picture.)
“Everything that Milton and I have worked on is pretty much set, but it’s a very spacious container for each performer to fill it up in different ways,” says Andrade. “It has a very robust system built behind it.”
Guests who dare to step into that world--one as unpredictable as our weather during global warming--include Jonathon Young, Omari Newton, and Rumble Theatre’s own artistic director and actor Jivesh Parasram.
The result is a work that blends cutting-edge new online performance technology with good-old-fashioned flying by the seat of your pants. It’s a lot of fun, say Lim and Andrade, but at the same time, it gets audiences asking pressing questions about our role in the planet’s doom. This new, stay-at-home rendition of Pathetic Fallacy also has a thing or two to say about our 2020 world of online connection and performance. And about juggling the unknown while we’re alone. And about whether we’ll be in a hurry to jump on a plane again, when and if this insanity ever ends.
“It’s an opportunity to reflect upon our current conditions and the technology that allows us to connect with each other,” offers Lim.
“In a weird way, this is a theatre show for this specific time,” Andrade adds.
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