Electric Company Theatre

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 past is past," he says to his flighty wife by way of giving her infidelity a reluctant pass. "See, I blow it away!" And he's right -- although he'll also literally blow away his wife's lover, a slimy theatre critic ( quelle horreur!).

Studies In Motion is, in every way, a beautiful piece of work. Not least because it is, onstage, what it proposes. For one thing, it's genuinely multimedia, in an age that has devalued that term into murky nothingness. The collaborators are all essential, and all exceptional: a playwright (Kevin Kerr), a director (Kim Collier, winner of Canada's richest theatre prize, the Siminovitch, this week), a scenographer (Robert Gardiner), a choreographer (Crystal Pite), a composer (Patrick Pennefather), a costume designer (Mara Gottler).

"I stopped time," argues Muybridge, dissector of life into universal bytes of motion, beat by beat. "And now I've eliminated space," he says, surveying the multiple cameras by which he "makes the invisible perceptible." Using bravura digital light projection and choreography, Studies In Motion captures in its very stagecraft Muybridge's idea of capturing time and space. From the first moment, we see bodies both clothed and unclothed move serially in synchronized patterns on a luminous grid, forward and back. When it rains, it's in torrents of light shards. A highlight death sequence in Act II is deconstructed as an ingenious marriage of choreography and Kerr's text, exclusively in verbs. The verb, in effect, is Muybridge's gift to the modern sensibility.

The visuals are stunning, not least because it's exhilarating to see light play off a dozen bodies on a stage. And the visuals have something to say about theatre -- both in the way theatre can tell a complex story on a stage unencumbered by set pieces, and the way that actors "become" other people. There's even a scene in which Muybridge's wife and her lover playfully, but meaningfully, pretend to be actors in a fatal Victorian love triangle.

Ah, playful but meaningful: That would be theatre. And the actors here aren't squelched by the visual ingenuity. Andrew Wheeler, the only actor with a single assignment, is riveting as Muybridge, gruff, impatient, imperious, an eccentric caught between centuries, between his progressive and Victorian selves. He makes Muybridge's personal struggle dramatic, and moving: A man trying to find the continuity between the mind, the body and the heart. The others, including the luminous Jonathon Young, are equally good.

"Where does one person end and the other begin?" wonders Muybridge's assistant Blanche (Juno Ruddell), gazing at a film strip of herself in motion. It's a question that every actor asks.