Electric Company Theatre

Globe and Mail Review

J. KELLY NESTRUCK

November 26, 2010

Studies in Motion, directed by freshly minted Siminovitch Prize-winner Kim Collier, is a flashy and fascinating bio-play about the English-American photographer sometimes called “the father of cinema.”

In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge developed a technique that used multiple cameras to capture motion in order to solve the puzzle of whether a horse's hooves all leave the ground at once when it gallops (they do).

Written by Kevin Kerr, whose other works include Unity(1918) and Skydive, Studies in Motion pans back and forth between two significant slices of Muybridge's life: the years he worked at the University of Pennsylvania obsessively documenting animal and human locomotion, and the years he spent prior to that in a tumultuous marriage – a marriage that ended when he shot his wife's lover, who, incidentally, was the San Francisco Post's theatre critic (played by the excellent Jonathon Young).

The Edmonton Journal reviews Studies in Motion

By Liz Nicholls

EDMONTON - "The photographs ARE the story!" thunders Eadweard Muybridge, his dander up, defending his highly original experiment in equine motion capture from the claims of the California governor who footed the bill.

Not the whole story, though -- sorry Ead. As brought to the stage by Vancouver's Electric Company in a production of brilliant theatricality, Muybridge's story is much more complex, and even more fascinating, than those mesmerizing action sequences from the 1880s. Even if it were simply a Muybridge bio, Studies In Motion would still be a bizarre, melodramatic affair: betrayal, murder, child abandonment, a sensational court case, an acquittal for "justifiable homicide," not to mention a community of cavorting nude models.

But Studies In Motion uses nonlinear biographical freeze-frames to propose a fundamental shift in cultural perception -- from the vanishing-point optics of the 19th century to the flickering image streams of the modern world. It finds in a white-haired genius weirdo who shot frame after frame of nude people in ordinary activity -- walking, jumping, climbing, hammering, opening umbrellas, carrying things -- a visionary. A Victorian who crossed the conventional boundaries of his high-buttoned age, the frontiers between science and art, and the profound gap between the 19th century world and our own.

The Edmonton Sun reviews Studies in Motion

By Colin Maclean

Studies in Motion certainly captures your attention. It begins with a loud gunshot and some jagged modern music (composer: Patrick Pennefather) and the stage fills with the 12 person cast in a stylized dance based on the fragmentary imagery of the still photograph.

The company is completely nude.

Moment in time

So begins Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre’s take on the life of Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge was a mid-19th century photographer who became obsessed with using the newly invented process to “stop time.”

He considered himself a scientist and his process was to set up a series of still cameras that took serialized pictures of various animals (famously charging horses and nude women) in motion.

The Edmonton Journal's Graham Hicks Reviews Studies in Motion

What an intriguing piece of theatre.

Form follows function:

The plot, or function: A late 19th century pioneer in photographic motion doggedly pursues his dream of exploring motion in photography – being one of the first individuals ever to delve into research that led to film. Along the way, his domineering personality and dogged persistence comes at great cost to his personal life. Along the way, he comes under great attack, in a Victorian era, for the extensive use of human nudity to explore the essence of movement. But he’s in it purely for scientific experiment … or is he?