Studies in Motion's 2006 premiere was a success,

but that didn't stop its creators from

spending 16 months retooling the multimedia work

BY NATHAN MEDD, VANCOUVER SUN APRIL 2, 2009

Electric Company Theatre's artistic producer Kim Collier directs Studies in Motion - The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, on now at the Playhouse Theatre. Nathan Medd is the company's managing producer.

Nathan Medd: Studies in Motion premiered at the 2006 PuSh Festival, but you still spent the next 16 months rewriting the script with Kevin Kerr and pulling Crystal Pite back in for choreography workshops. Why not just rehearse that 2006 version again for the Playhouse Theatre Company's audience?

Did his singular focus blind him to the big picture?

BY LYNN MITGES

THE PROVINCE, APRIL 1, 2009

Eadweard Muybridge led a life in pure technicolour -- a far cry from the high-speed black-and-white photographic images he painstakingly devised to depict motion.

Although Muybridge was a gifted and revolutionary photographer who is credited with creating the precursor to cinema, his life didn't mirror the neat and orderly film frames of his work.

"What a complex man," says Kim Collier, who directs the Kevin Kerr play, . "When you read everything, it's not like you can get a final answer on Muybridge." Collier directed a previous version of the play, which has since been reworked with Kerr so that it has 40-per-cent new material for the 12-member cast.

"Muybridge seems to have a powerful, singular focus that he applies to his personal life, to his work life -- and that passion and that obsession that drives him can lead him to beautiful places but also to very tragic places," says Collier.

The play targets Muybridge's photography of both animal and human locomotion. From there, Collier says the play dips into Muybridge's past. "We see Muybridge struggling with haunting memories while he's doing his work."

Specifically, Muybridge discovered his wife was having an affair and sought out her lover. He shot and killed the man and was tried for murder, but acquitted on grounds of justifiable homicide.

This co-production, with the Vancouver Playhouse and Electric Company Theatre, uses several visual and artistic disciplines to portray the enigmatic character, including digital lighting technology by Robert Gardiner, choreography by Crystal Pite and electronic compositions by Patrick Pennefather. The effect has been described as seductive.

of revolutionary photographer Eadweard Muybridge

BY ELAINE SCHIRMAN

YUKON ARTS AND CULTURAL MAGAZINE, 2008/2009

In March 2009, Whitehorse will be the first stop when the Vancouver-based Electric Company takes its innovative and dynamic style of physical theatre on the road.  The company will stage a four-day run of Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge at the Yukon Arts Centre.

The play examines the life and work of Muybridge, a turn-of-the-century photographer who was fascinated with capturing animal and human motion on film.  Studies in Motion playwright and Electric Company artistic associate Kevin Kerr came across Muybridge’s work while researching silent film.  “His photographs look like frames from a motion picture, but there was no such technology at the time,” says Kerr.  “Instead, he set up dozens of cameras and had his subjects walk or climb a ladder, dance or crawl, or do pratfalls onto a mattress.  An electronic timing mechanism triggered the shutters as they moved.  It was all very revolutionary for that time.  Before him, no one had even used shutters.”  The subjects were often naked and carried out their actions against the background of a grid.

Electric Company’s Brilliant! gets recharged at the Belfry

BY AMANDA FARRELL

MONDAY MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 12, 2008.

It all started with a story about electrocuting animals. Kevin Kerr, one of the founders of Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre, came across the anecdote about Thomas Edison’s cruel attempts to discredit Nikola Tesla’s alternating current electricity and the sparks that ignited Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla flew.

“Edison realised the tide was beginning to turn towards this new system and he had this monopoly on direct current and was hoping to be the one and only dude, so he started electrocuting animals to show how dangerous alternating current was. It was a low point for Edison, I think,” explains Jonathon Young, another of Electric Company’s founders and its current artistic director. “That tweaked Kevin because, first of all, he was so surprised to hear this, and then he’d never heard of Nikola Tesla.”

The more they learned about Tesla, the more the folks at the then-unformed Electric Company Theatre (rounded out by Kim Collier and David Hudgins) became fascinated with the character: a man whose contributions to the fields of electricity and wireless communication still shape the world today, but whose eccentricities and wild claims later on in life had him pigeonholed as a mad scientist and led him to die poor and virtually forgotten.

“I think part of the initial thing that really grabbed us was this man, who was at the height of popularity in his day, could become so forgotten, and that his work is so ubiquitous and pervasive and yet his legacy went into these strange conspiracies and science-fiction stuff,” says Young. “So many of the people that still knew him clung to his legacy because of his more bizarre proclamations, like that he was in contact with a civilization on Mars. By the ’90s, he was attracting a completely different kind of people—not what you would call the intelligentsia.”