Electric Company Theatre

Play's International Reviews Studies in Motion

SUMMER 2009

With Studies in Motion, the Electric Company offered one of the most exciting and original pieces of theatre seen in this city for a very long time.  The story is of Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer American photographer of the 1870’s and 1880’s who worked with sequence to understand movement.  Kevin Kerr, the author, shows moments of Muybridge’s private life, some highly dramatic, as these include a man murdered and the abandoning of a child.  The emphasis is on Muybridge at work, planning his next project, and supervising his employees.

Muybridge often required his subjects to be naked, which might add prurience to pure scientific enquiry.  The programme note suggests deeper ideas, the ‘revolutionary time’ when photography changed our perception of the world, ‘themes of memory and identity,’ and ‘the birth of the mediated body.’  As visuals and sound are so overwhelming, I need a second seeing to absorb the more abstract levels.

The show begins with several nude men cavorting, music throbbing, the stage floor a grid.  The rest alternates visual moments like this and dialogue.  The shifts are abrupt; the movement-based work so varied and polished that all ended too soon.  The technology, described by the term ‘scenography,’ is credited to Robert Gardiner.  Sound and light are crucial: one computer glitch could surely do serious damage, yet this is a technologically-heavy show which doesn’t flaunt it.

Muybridge is played by Andrew Wheeler, a long-bearded Shavian sage, perhaps genius.  Eleven others share 25 parts.  Kim Collier directs; her role here has surely been an exceptionally complex one, to bring so much together, to create coherence, to use all the supporting crafts to serve the humans.

The Electric Company has been together for more than ten years, a collective intrigued by the possibilities of both movement and machines, while centered on quality acting.  Studies in Motion goes on to Calgary and Montreal, greater national recognition at last.  The show deserves to join the international festival circuit (are you listening, Avignon and Adelaide?), the west ready to rival Robert Lepage.