Electric Company Theatre

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 camera catches everything you can’t see,” enthuses one character.

Along the way he invented the motion picture long before the Lumiere Brothers and Thomas Edison.

Muybridge’s story is worthy of a romantic novel of the time and includes obsession, exhilarating scientific breakthroughs, stolen research, marital breakup, seduction, adultery, a sensational trial and the abandonment of a child.

But the Electric Company is not writing a novel. They are presenting Muybridge’s story using the photographer’s original techniques spliced with the technology of today.

The result is a visually dazzling evening using grids, projections, moving screens, gobos, pinpoint lighting, sound, special effects, strobe, music, dance and just about everything the theatre is capable of today.

Many of Muybridge’s original studies are used and many more are recreated. The brilliant young director of all this, Kim Collier, has just won the Siminovitch Prize in direction for her contributions to theatre and you can certainly see it in her precise yet wildly creative concept for this play.

Lacking development

The evening is not quite so successful dramatically. Although the play is never less than interesting, Muybridge’s epic story is softened and distanced by the weakness of the character development and the overpowering production techniques.

Scenes that should be wrenching (such as when Muybridge meets the son he callously sent off to an orphanage as a baby) never really touch the heart. Kevin Kerr’s play traces Muybridge’s progress from demanding scientist to mystical visionary as he moves from studies of simple animal movements to ever more extreme experiments but, despite Andrew Wheeler’s commanding performance, the character remains emotionally opaque.

His marriage falls apart and his pain and desire for revenge seem to come from another play.

There is a good deal of humour in the first act, mostly in the juxtaposition of Victorian prudery and the copious amounts of nudity.

If you regard the story as a serviceable device to hold a remarkable evening of eye-filling theatrical fireworks, then Studies in Motion provides an arresting experience.

Four Suns out of five