Theatre review: The Array serves up weird and inspired interpretations of our isolated times
Bumper-bubble soccer, drag sci-fi fantasies, and silent films: Upintheair Theatre’s mixed program pushes into new digital realms
Derek Chan and Pedro Chamale in what would it take for you to take my hand again
Upintheair Theatre presents The Array: First Contact until December 5 via digital stream
YEARS FROM NOW, WHEN WE LOOK back at Vancouver theatre in the time of COVID, we’ll be better able to define what exactly changed. It’s clear there’s something radical happening right now—it’s just a little hard to define when you’re in the thick of a shift like this.
Upintheair Theatre’s The Array: First Contact is another recent example, a show that expresses pandemic disconnect through everything from sci-fi dance explosions to soccer matches and old-timey silent films. The program illustrates how new plays being created from the ground up for online streaming push definitions of what theatre is, but also the new kind of connection happening before, during, and after the shows that is quite unlike sitting in an audience for a post-production talk.
It’s important to note that The Array, which had its first edition in 2019, pushes the bold, the experimental, and the interdisciplinary anyway. In it, Upintheair Theatre sets out a theme—in this case First Contact—and commissions short new works. It turns out to be a perfect platform to explore what’s happening in our world right now, in daring new digital ways.
Sitting in an empty theatre, hosts Daniel Martin and David Mott introduce each show, handily changing shirts for each act and proving amiable, casual emcees for the widely divergent array. You kind of feel like they’re hanging out in your living room with you.
The program gets off to a strong start with rice & beans theatre’s goofily inspired what would it take for you to take my hand again. Dead-serious performers Derek Chan and Pedro Chamale appear walking through corridors with giant backpacks, and proceed to pull out and pump up giant inflatable sumo suits—or the big wearable, clear-plastic balls I’ve since learned are called Human Bumper Bubbles.
Connection Error: Attempting to reconnect… with Shay Dior and Maiden China.
Setting up micro-footie-style soccer nets, they proceed to take each other on in a game of one-on-one—absurd-looking, bouncing off each other with their knee-socked legs sticking out from beneath the giant bubbles.
They offset this increasingly disturbing slapstick with electro music and heavy poetry about pandemic times, read in voice-over by Jessica Hood and Maria Zarrillo. While Hood and Zarrillo speak of “time is an arrow that thrusts...leaving an open wound” and the “rat race through dog days”, Chan and Chamale play themselves out to the point of exhaustion and collapse. It all becomes an inspired metaphor for what we’re going through right now as we try to social distance, maintain our work pace, and stick to our “bubbles”.
Elsewhere, Popcorn Galaxies gives a brief but artful look into a work-in-progress called Dead Letter Office. Inspired by an actual early-last-century home for lost mail, June Fukuwara and Keely O’Brien serve up a Chaplin-esque black-and-white film of two post-office workers sorting mail. (In one of my favourite touches they sport medical masks with big 1920s moustaches drawn on them.) The work kicks off a project for audiences to receive letters from the DLO—check out Upintheair Theatre’s website to sign up for that end of the project, and watch for something more fully realized from the team next year.
The show goes in a completely different, fantasy-dance-party direction with drag team House of Rice’s sci-fi-inspired take on First Contact. Connection Error: Attempting to reconnect… finds Shay Dior alone in outerspace, trying to conjure a hologram for company. Cue Maiden China, Skim, and Kara Juku in a whole lotta glitchy, glittery vignettes, and loads of lip-synching to the likes of FKA Twigs. In one glam-tastic scene, Shay receives a cosmically glowing birthday cake. Is it theatre? Who cares? Drag work is at the forefront of digital creation right now, and the production value here is far out.
Hunters, Tricksters & Mystics' devised work Snagged in the Loop plies some of the deepest and most provocative 2020-themed material here, leaping between doomscrolling, hate forecasts, date swiping, real estate versus land claims, and Indigenous politics. But as a reading, it doesn’t have the production finesse of the other works in The Array. Created jointly by Nyla Carpentier, David Geary, Raven John, and Taran J. Kootenhayoo, its actors perform largely via a Zoom-like platform and green screens.
Still, there's more than enough to provoke thought and entertain you on a cold December night here. And likely a bit more evidence to help fuel any future study of this weird artistic time.
Related Articles
