Electric Company Theatre

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?

Form: A pastiche of dance, surrealism, linear theatre, and the use of projected images such as you’ve never seen in theatre before. And nudity! Tons and tons of nudity! Yet nudity so separated from sexuality as to actually convince us the audience that it’s not gratuitous but quite essential to the essence of this piece of art … so tied to Eadweard Muybridge’s argument that it’s all about understanding movement, that we the audience do buy in and 10 minutes into the show accept the nudity as simply part of the entire complex interplay on stage between movement at a scientific and artistic level, a dance between human bodies, light-created images that replace props, and non-stop innovation that is quite dazzling in the higher aspects of this show.

Yet the script doesn’t reach the same heights as the presentation.

This Muybridge is presented as a rather one-dimensional personality, just a domineering individual caught up in his life’s work who makes some rather silly personal decisions on the side.

Given: His life story, in this show, is really an excuse to move into the dance/light/photography interplay. The most dramatic scripted scenes are wonderful excuses for strobe-light like sequences of this extraordinary cast that is so tightly intertwined with the magic of the visual enhancements as to create illusions on a Cirque du Soleil level. Come to think of it, much better!

It’s an absolutely brilliant and enlightening visual show, a pioneer in its own right of things to come in the theatrical world. Script-wise, however, there’s a disconnect between the lead character’s personal issues – of love, jealousy, ambition – and the light show.

There will be scripts that come along that somehow mesh more closely, on more levels, with this brand-new form. But if innovative theatre is of interest to you, you must catch this show before it closes on Nov. 14. Honestly, the nudity is not an issue.