The Array: First Contact's theatre innovators go high-tech and low-tech to reflect our times
Hunters, Tricksters & Mystics riff on doomscolling and dating apps, while Popcorn Galaxies looks to old-school snail mail
Hunters, Tricksters & Mystics’ Nyla Carpentier, Taran J. Kootenhayoo and Raven John. Photo by Marjo Wright
Upintheair Theatre presents The Array: First Contact online from December 3 to 5
AS SECOND WAVE COVID-19 lockdown sets in, you may find yourself diving ever further down the rabbit hole of technology, either searching for connection or doomscrolling through the latest COVID numbers and anti-mask protests. Or the opposite instinct may be kicking in right now: the desire to unplug and do something that doesn’t require wifi or a screen.
Those two contrasting impulses fuel a pair of offerings in The Array--Upintheair Theatre’s annual showcase of short new works.
In it, four genre-busting indie-theatre artists have taken two months to create pieces that reflect both what’s going on in the world and the set theme “First Contact”. Upintheair’s co-artistic producers Daniel Martin and David Mott will host each streamed show with a live artists’ talkback afterward, via Zoom.
While Hunters, Tricksters & Mystics’ new Snagged in the Loop delves into high-tech connections from an Indigenous perspective, Popcorn Galaxies’ The Dead Letter Office goes old school, exploring the disappearing art of letter writing.
“Everyone is aware that we've been trapped by our phones and media and social media, and it’s not news that we get dopamine hits from that,” says Snagged in the Loop’s David Geary, pointing to the evidence in the new documentary the social dilemma. “But now we can’t go out or attend events so we’re relying even more on our social-media feeds.
“And the American election magnified that even more, that we’re locked into certain echo chambers,” adds the New Zealand-born playwright, dramaturge, and Capilano University instructor, who traces his ancestry to Māori, English, Irish, and Scottish roots. “There’s just an awareness that a lot of the information people get through doomscrolling is news that hasn’t been great for Indigenous people, and that isn’t changing fast; the idea of reconciliation has become a bit of a joke...And also with COVID, Indigenous people are at risk.”
Raven John puts her own spin on a freen-screen forecast. Photo by David Geary
Researching and discussing these ideas, Geary and his team decided to give this grim subject matter a humorous take in their vignettes. For Nyla Carpentier’s piece, that means using powwow dancing as a way out of being stuck in a date-swiping loop. Using a TV-weather greenscreen, Raven John hosts a darkly comedic hate-crime forecast. And Taran J. Kootenhayoo plays an Indigenous politician struggling with selling out.
As for Geary’s section, it plays on the idea of swipe-based dating apps as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broadcasts his Christmas message. The playwright hints intriguingly that our leader’s holiday greeting is inspired by the saying that the true test of a Canadian is to have sex in a canoe—“something his charismatic father would have approved of.”
Popcorn Galaxies’ June Fukumura and Keely O’Brien. Photo by Marjo Wright
Over at the Popcorn Galaxies team, the idea of First Contact sent its co-creators in a low-tech direction.
“The project started out for us with the question about how we can adapt a theatrical model for a new era, with letter mail delivered to each audience member,” explains Keely O’Brien in a conference call with co-creator June Fukumura. “It was this concept of reimagining how we can reach out to people and create a shared collaborative space and physical connection.”
“We are in this digital space right now, in which the content being delivered to us is getting faster and faster and we’re getting drawn to the screen because of the way it’s being delivered,” Fukumura adds.
The idea for The Dead Letter Office came up as they were researching the piece. “I had no idea it existed,” recounts Fukumura. “In the ‘20s and ‘30s a lot of mail would get misdirected or put in a cycle where it didn’t get delivered, and it would end up at the Dead Letter Office.” There was even a detective there who was legally allowed to open someone’s mail to help find relatives or someone else so the letter could reach its destination.
The interdisciplinary work, which the team has dubbed “a theatrical letter-mail experience”, has two parts: a play in which the DLO has found a piece of mail that was meant for the audience members; and a system to sign up to receive the lost mail. Through a web signup, even for those who don’t catch the show, Popcorn Galaxies hopes people end up corresponding with each other through snail mail.
“In this era of isolation and physical distance, we were thinking in terms of physical, tangible connection that letter mail provides,” O’Brien says.
“How many times have we seen each other’s handwriting?” asks Fukumura. “That may be something we don’t see everyday. There’s just something really beautiful about that pen-to-paper contact. And it’s something you don’t get in a digital space.”
Of course, to watch the range of interdisciplinary innovations here, you will have to engage with that digital space too. But at the very least, it will give you a much-needed break from doomscrolling and swiping left or right.
For more information and tickets see here.
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