Hanging out with a cult cabaret caricature in 360 degrees, in Pochsy at the Airport Hotel
Theatre artist Karen Hines talks about the challenges and pleasures of working with VR video technology
A screen shot from Pochsy at the Aiport Hotel.
Boca del Lupo’s Fishbowl, where audience members can strap on a headset.
Boca del Lupo presents Pochsy at the Airport Hotel from March 30 to April 3 at the Fishbowl on Granville Island
LATE LAST SPRING, when theatre artist Karen Hines was shooting the new 360-degree-video one-woman show Pochsy at the Airport Hotel, the titular location captured the idea of pandemic limbo in both metaphorical and literal ways.
“It appealed to me that you could imagine that you’re in a kind of limbo, you’re between places or countries,” Hines relates from home in Calgary. “And when we shot it, there were a lot of people actually quarantining at airport hotels.”
As comically absurd or surreal as her new one-woman show may feel, it has nothing on the experience Hines had one day on a jaunt out in search of dinner during the real airport-hotel-room shoot.
Heading through a walkway into another hotel, she suddenly realized she had stumbled upon a travellers’-quarantine site. “Everybody was in hazmat suits; the meals that were being prepared were immediately covered,” she says with a laugh. “I thought, ‘I’m in DEFCON 40 Land here!’”
What was going on in her own retro-mod hotel room was sometimes equally surreal. Hines’s beloved Pochsy, a satirical character who’s been dubbed everything from a vapid vixen to “Beckett meets Betty Boop”, has been around for decades; Hines has even been a finalist for the Governor’s-General’s Literary Award for the collected Pochsy Plays. But this was the first time in her career that the veteran theatre artist was shooting in 360-degree video. It’s not just new terrain for Hines: theatre artists are just beginning to explore the rich potential of a format more well known in video gaming. Pochsy at the Airport Hotel was commissioned by Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo and its Sherry J. Yoon, as part of the new LivePerformance360—a series aimed at boosting the form, and getting the technology into the hands of Canadian theatre artists.
Shooting with director Sandi Somers, Hines likens the process a bit to “working blind”, because you can’t see the footage in full 360 degrees until later on, with headsets.
After hours of Somers setting up the high-tech camera, Hines had to do the entire 16-minute piece in one fluid take, moving from midcentury chair to window to a king-size bed whose frame is lit with funky blue LED flights (those came courtesy of the hotel).
“Sherry’s challenge was to make it like a live performance—like a 16-minute cabaret piece, hopefully seamlessly,” Hines reveals. But it proved harder than performing a live show. “Onstage, by the time you get to the performance you’ve repeated and repeated and repeated it. But because this was on location, we only had a finite period of time we could shoot, so we had to set up and go!”
The result is a monologue that puts you right in the same room as Pochsy—decked out in her trademark white headband, powder-white makeup, and lace gown—as she rattles on about being “weirdly busy”, the flammability of bubble wrap, and the benefits of being a “partial vegetarian”.
Interestingly, Hines—a Second City alumna who started on TV comedy The Newsroom and who directs the dark clown act Mump & Smoot—prefers not to use the term “clown” or “bouffon” to describe the vampy yet clueless character; instead, her Pochsy is a self-deluded and narcissistic—a sly satire of consumerism and indifference to the climate crisis, and basically anything else of importance in the world. (Here, she’s just lost her job at the Mercury Packing, thanks to “global fuck-ivization”, but still suffers the effects of using her bare fingers to pick up stray stray blobs of the quicksilver.)
“She will never really grow,” sighs Hines, who has drawn on tried-and-true material for Pochsy, as well as creating some new content for this show. “As I’m working on the piece, I find she’s just more tired and not more wise. She’s as self-obsessed as ever.”
Audience members can head down to Boca del Lupo’s Fishbowl studio on Granville Island over the next few days to strap on the headset and spend time with the character who’s built a cult following in Canadian indie theatre. (The show alternates with a much-different-feeling 360-degree version of The Magic Hour, the critically lauded, multimedia, Kim Collier-helmed production that took over every corner of Presentation House Theatre last year.)
It’s fascinating to join Pochsy in her delightfully Kafkaesque limbo, turning to look around the suite as she speaks, watching her stretch out on the bed, and even ordering room service with her. It can be unsettling, jarring, and, in signature Pochsy form, eye-rolling. As for the actor herself, when she finally saw it on headset, watching Pochsy at the Airport Hotel was slightly overwhelming.
“The 360 experience is really intense in itself, and then to see what we had done in 360 was intense, because it really had been transformed,” Hines, who wants to pursue the art form more, raves. “And then for me to be in the same room as myself… Well, actors have a hard time watching themselves at the best of times, and this was really intense.”
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