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Friday, 26 November 2010 20:36 |
Moving right along : Kevin Kerr’s multimedia play examines a cinema pioneer with a hidden, emotion-packed life
By Jon Kaplan
NOW Toronto
Words aren’t enough for Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre. The troupe galvanizes audiences with a multimedia performance style. Last year, Nightwood Theatre brought us their co-created production of No Exit that relied on live video and focused on the usually minor role of the valet, who became our guide to Sartre’s hellish universe. The Electric Company’s back with Studies In Motion, Kevin Kerr’s look at the life and work of cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, who in the 1880s used motion-capture photography to film animals and people. His goal was to discover an invisible world of complex activity within simple movement.
Just as Muybridge tried to reveal one world, he kept another secret: a tragic love triangle.
“At the centre of the play is an investigation of how we see ourselves,” says artistic director and actor Jonathon Young, who played the valet in No Exit. “We’re living in an increasingly virtual world, one where we can separate the idea of our actual body from the idea of its representation. We frequently look at images of ourselves to define who we are, and that didn’t happen 130 years ago.”
The play focuses on Muybridge’s work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he photographed the movement of hundreds of subjects and analyzed the results. No surprise that in Victorian times he ran afoul of authority when he turned his camera on nude human figures, especially women.
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Tuesday, 23 November 2010 20:44 |
PREVIEW: VUE WEEKLY, EDMONTON
Officially, Kim Collier is the director of Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, but to hear her talk about this particular project, her role sounds more akin to that of a mediator, bringing different artistic disciplines together and balancing their influences to create a cohesive, unified whole.
That's not to say Collier lacks directoral panache; quite the opposite, as proven on Monday night when she received the Siminovitch prize—which comes with a $100 000 purse, $25 000 of which must be given to a "protégé" of her choosing—for her innovation as artistic producer of Vancouver's Electric Company.
That's quite the steady hand to have guiding Studies in Motion, the story of the man responsible for instantaneous photography, and his more-than-slight obsessions with documenting the movements of the body. A fairly linear, literal staging wasn't in the cards for Kevin Kerr's script; it just didn't seem ideal for capturing Muybridge's obsessions, or the photographs themselves, which had been Kerr's original inspiration.
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Tuesday, 23 November 2010 20:38 |
Kim Collier, Recipient of the Siminovitch Prize for Direction, 2010
The following acceptance speech was made by Kim Collier at the 2010 Siminovitch Prize in theatre honouring directors on November 1, 2010.
What an incredible honour this is to accept the Siminovitch (sim-in-ove-itch) prize for directing. I would like to send a heartfelt thank you to the founding donors of this prize for creating this remarkable opportunity in my life and the lives of other recipients and for what it means to our Canadian Theatre Community. Thank you to BMO (BeeMo) Financial Group for supporting this prize and organizing this evening. I extend my gratitude to the jury chair Maureen Labonte and jury members Marcus Youssef, Marti Maraden, Marie Clements, Alain Jean, and Jillian Keiley. As well, thank you to Matthew Jocelyn who took such care with my nomination.
It is really beautiful that this award celebrates the remarkable story of Lou and the late Elinore Siminovitch, and the conversation between the arts and science that existed between them. In the spirit of what this Prize celebrates I want to mention some years ago my collaborators and I at Electric Company were commissioned by Dr. Michael Hayden from the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics to create a play called The Score that would later become a feature film for CBC's Opening Night. The commission was for a project that would create dialogue around the ethics in the advancing field of genetics. We dove into our research with full access to Michael's lab and his team of researchers. And what was so surprising to us at the time was that we found a reflection of ourselves as artists in this scientific community: the same passion to move towards the unknown, to explore ideas and articulate questions, to pioneer projects towards the greater good of humanity and driven by a bottomless curiosity for the work. We made some wonderful friends and I believe helped create meaningful dialogue within the larger community. So a special thanks to Lou and Elinore who saw into one another's hearts, who understood the shared ideals of these two fields that are more alike than different, and in whose honor this award continues.
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Tuesday, 23 November 2010 20:34 |
Victoria Ahearn, The Canadian Press
TORONTO - After working without a real break for 16 years, Vancouver-based theatre director Kim Collier wanted to take a sabbatical to recalibrate her career. Still, she fretted about the financial toll of such a move. On Monday, her worries were alleviated when she won the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre for a body of work that includes co-founding the innovative Electric Company Theatre ensemble.
"It's just the perfect time in my life for this to happen," Collier, 45, said in an interview before Monday night's awards ceremony. "I'm just finishing a whole bunch of shows, I'm exhausted, I had already planned a break with no revenue coming in for after Christmas, just some real quiet time. I can't believe that this has happened because the stress of how to sort of manage that time, which I knew was really important for me, that stress is now lightened."
Collier, who is also artistic director of Electric Company, beat out five other finalists, including Toronto's Alisa Palmer, who'd made the short list for the third time. That list was rounded out by Edmonton's Ron Jenkins and Torontonians Ross Manson, Soheil Parsa and Jennifer Tarver. Jury chair Maureen Labonte says they chose Collier for her "leadership and spirit of innovation in the theatre world."
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Saturday, 23 May 2009 00:00 |
The spelling of his name is strange.But the story of British photographer Eadweard Muybridge's life is even stranger. BY PAT DONNELLYTHE GAZETTE, MAY 3, 2009. The so-called "father of cinema," whose photographic studies of motion proved hugely influential, murdered his wife's lover and got away with it under a defence of "justifiable homicide." No wonder Vancouver's Electric Company decided to explore the theatrical possibilities of Muybridge (born Edward James Muggeridge, in 1830) in its Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, following in the footsteps of Philip Glass who launched an opera on him, The Photographer, in 1982. 
Intent on doing the subject justice, ElectricCompany artistic director Jonathan Young asked Governor General Award-winning playwright Kevin Kerr (Unity 1918), a co-founder of the company, to write the company's first non-collectively-created script. (Kerr also wrote Skydive, seen last fall at Centaur Theatre.) Young, who visited Montreal earlier this year in a one-man show called The Invisible Life of Joseph Finch during the Wildside Festival at Centaur, will also be performing in Studies in Motion, as Major Harry Larkyns, the murdered lover of Muybridge's wife. "He was a bit of a scoundrel," Young said of Larkyns, during a recent interview from Calgary, where the show played at Alberta Theatre Projects. It has already been seen in Whitehorse, Yukon, as well as at the PuSh Festival in Vancouver. In addition to Larkyns, Young plays multiple characters in Studies in Motion, as do the 11 other members of the cast, with the exception of Andrew Wheeler, who remains a constant, as Muybridge. |
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