From Motion to Emotion

Press

Saturday, 04 April 2009 04:24

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?

Kim Collier: You learn so much about a show in performance. Some of our plays get left behind while others are revisited, depending on interest and opportunity, but every project at Electric Company is an ongoing creative process. Works age with time, technology improves, artists mature. When we revisit a work, we can't really help continuing to work on it. Our premiere production of Studies in Motion was a real success, there's no doubt about it, but that doesn't necessarily mean artistic satisfaction.

NM: This show is about a scientist who happened to leave a profound artistic legacy. Eadweard Muybridge was a 19th-century inventor who earned the nickname "The Father of Motion Pictures" with his pioneering work in photography. He once got away with a jealous murder of his wife's lover in a curious piece of frontier justice. What's the balance between historical fact and fiction in Studies?

KC: It's curious that way, Muybridge's life up until the motion studies is the stuff of melodrama: revenge, murder, betrayal, abandonment; he suffered a head injury in a stage coach accident that legend has it turned his hair completely white. He changed his name twice, reinventing himself -- this kind of stuff. But looking at his magnum opus, the motion studies are really his life's work - you don't see any of this. There's not really any record of events during the taking of the photographs -- so this part of the play is imagined. And Kevin has had his fun here for sure, imagining what it must have been like in the 1880s with scores of nude men and women, all kinds of animals, cumbersome equipment, attempting to achieve something exacting and precise outdoors, and with technology that was really cutting edge. And, likely dealing with considerable skepticism if not outright hostility when it came to the true value of these nude studies.

NM: What kinds of technical challenges did this production bring with it?

KC: Studies in Motion is a complicated meeting of the arts; the show comes to life through integration of so many elements: sound and movement, projection scenography and animations, text, actors, costume designs, moving set pieces. The stage manager acts like a conductor of an ever-moving stage and together with the backstage crew helps manifest the feast of staging and design.

NM: How do the story and movement interact?

KC: They evolved together in tandem with sound design and projection design, so they are essential components in telling this story. Obviously movement works on us differently than text and that's important for this subject matter. Sometimes the physical sequences are adding layers of meaning to the piece without actually furthering the plot.

AT A GLANCE

Studies in Motion

Until April 18 8 p.m

Matinees April 8, 11, 15, 16, 18 at 2 p.m.

Vancouver Playhouse

Tickets start at $20 from