Electric Company Theatre

Moving right along : Kevin Kerr’s multimedia play examines a cinema pioneer with a hidden, emotion-packed life

Words aren’t enough for Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre. The troupe galvanizes audiences with a multimedia performance style. Last year, Nightwood Theatre brought us their co-created production of No Exit that relied on live video and focused on the usually minor role of the valet, who became our guide to Sartre’s hellish universe. The Electric Company’s back with Studies In Motion, Kevin Kerr’s look at the life and work of cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, who in the 1880s used motion-capture photography to film animals and people. His goal was to discover an invisible world of complex activity within simple movement.

Just as Muybridge tried to reveal one world, he kept another secret: a tragic love triangle.

“At the centre of the play is an investigation of how we see ourselves,” says artistic director and actor Jonathon Young, who played the valet in No Exit. “We’re living in an increasingly virtual world, one where we can separate the idea of our actual body from the idea of its representation. We frequently look at images of ourselves to define who we are, and that didn’t happen 130 years ago.”

The play focuses on Muybridge’s work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he photographed the movement of hundreds of subjects and analyzed the results. No surprise that in Victorian times he ran afoul of authority when he turned his camera on nude human figures, especially women.

Running through the show are flashbacks that link Muybridge’s hidden past to his present.

“That’s what initially drew Kevin to the story,” recalls Young, who’s become a writer as well as an actor during his time with the company. “The contrast between Muybridge’s passionate animal side and his orderly scientific work is fascinating. Then designer Robert Gardiner wanted to explore how a production could be lit not by stage light but only through video projection, and we added another piece to the show’s development. Lighting that also projected another image onstage offered an infinite variety of shapes and possibilities, and the form of the play became thematically linked to its content.”

In its final version, the production does use some traditional stage lighting as well as video light, but the latter creates a tone and mood that’s slightly distanced and clinical.

“The tension between sensuality and a cold scientific remove, between a moving body and a frozen image, between live and mediated, became key to Studies In Motion.”

For the movement aspect of the production, Siminovitch Prize-winning director Kim Collier called on exciting choreographer Crystal Pite, a Dora winner for last year’s Emergence.

“She’s brilliant at creating dance that can be acted, where the movement comes from character rather than years of dance technique,” marvels Young. “Her work is another aspect of the collaboration. Kevin wrote descriptions of physical sequences, or verbs that evoked different sequences in the story, and Crystal gave movement to those words.

“There’s a real interplay, too, between Kim, who directs with a great deal of physicality, and Crystal, whose dance has a theatrical sensibility. It’s an absolutely dynamic relationship in a truly ensemble piece.”

Young gets as excited about this third incarnation of the show as he did about its 2006 premiere.

“We keep tinkering with it, trying to get it right. That’s the beautiful thing about live theatre, especially in a co-created show like this where we blend the various aspects of performance.

“From the start, our theatrical imagination is one that has a spatial quality rather than just words interacting with each other. It’s about design and bodies and space, too.”

For a taste of the show’s visuals, see canadianstage.com/studiesinmotion.