The Last (cardboard) Stand in Courtenay

Saturday November 3

This is it. Today is the last show to wrap up Homewerk Tour 2012! We’re staying in a Best Western on Cliffe Avenue, which coincidentally is the same street where we find our Courtenay performance venue, the Sid Williams Theatre.

Courtenay...how to describe it? A bustling little big fishing-town island.  I suppose when you’re stationed in Vancouver, every town seems like a “small town”. What I have learned on this tour is that the size of a town is correlated with its number of big banks. CIBC? BMO? Yes, we’ll find dinner. I even happened upon a live jazz trio at a café at 9pm on the first evening.

While falling asleep last night to Darcy serenading me on her ukulele, I decided I’d wake up early and go for a run. However, in the deep darkness that was our hotel room this morning, that didn’t quite happen. Call time was just around noon so I got some stretching in before we headed off.

It was a pretty full day in the theatre, so photos are severely limited, I’m afraid.  The theatre is beautiful even though the stage is certainly the smallest we’ve performed on yet.  Tech was as per usual, except for one big thing—our cardboard tables were missing. Loading into the theatre yesterday we were stunned to find that a part of our set didn’t make it. And so Bruce, Jennifer and Darcy had the fun task of hunting someone down in Vancouver who would be willing to haul three large cardboard set pieces onto the ferry and over into Courtenay. The winner? Jennifer’s husband, John, who heroically threw open the backstage doors at around 4pm with our boxes in tow.

As we did tech,  I realized this was the first (and I suppose will be the last) time I got to hear the Nail to House lecture in full. I think it really is an incredible journey into Jennifer’s mind and creative process. I love what she says about contact improvisation bringing dance from a visual art back into a physical art, about what stories we choose to tell on stage, about collaboration and about how the audience provides form with content. Prior to the show, Jennifer delivered each of us gifts, a package of homemade cards with an image on the front of our cast performing at the Russian Hall!

The show itself was a tricky one with my sprained hip flexor and as we battled our cardboard partners on the small stage. At one point Lexi and my cardboard got jammed between the stage’s floor panels at the exact same time. It was so perfect I nearly burst out laughing. We had a wonderful Q&A session with a curious older crowd who asked some nifty questions about choreography, improvisation and the history of the work. Questions like, what is your favourite moment with the cardboard? really made me think about the relationship I had developed with these cumbersome things. Someone else asked, do you miss home? And funny enough, I do.

The afterparty we took to a posh little restaurant where, over margaritas, we reminisced jovially about all the things that went wrong with the cardboard that evening. With daylight savings time on our side, no one was particularly rushed to depart from celebrations.

Back at the hotel, I went hunting for ice in the middle of night, when I bumped into a woman stretching in the hallway. Turned out it was our videographer from this evening!  We spoke for what must’ve been almost an hour. She works in film but a part of her wishes she had chosen dance as her career path. She urged me to get in touch with her daughter in Vancouver, an avid recreational dancer. She asked me about what this tour had been like, why I dance, how I started and what now?  It was a fitting conversation to end this epic cardboard adventure. I hobbled back to the room to be serenaded by Darcy’s ukulele and pack for home, for the last time. 

Kitimat quake!

Many have requested that I blog a bit about what it was like to be performing during the earthquake that hit the Queen Charlottes so I thought I’d speak about that a bit.

October 27, 2012

It was our last day in Kitimat, and an incredibly lax day at that. It began with a brunch that I could not be more excited about, Ruth’s homemade salmon quiche with pumpkin lentil soup and baked foccacia. AND  baby cheesecakes for dessert (that  had found her working on last last night). Afterwards, Alex, Karissa and I trekked off on a nature walk through some of the Minette Bay Lodge property, bear spray in tow.

 

We were off for the Theatre at 4 30pm for notes, class and an 8pm show. I don’t know how we could’ve been that lucky, but we were running a couple of minutes late come show time. At 8:02pm, we were about to begin when…

Jennifer was in her own dressing room preparing for Nail to House when she felt her knees sway under her and a wave of vertigo. She thought maybe she was really getting nervous about this talk... Or maybe these were sure signs of a stroke? Jennifer then noticed water sloshing about in the bottles on her dressing room table and thought “…well that’s not normal…”.

Out on the stage, Karrisa and Alex had been all ready to go. The ground beneath them began to move and the lights hung were eerily shivering about. Karissa, certain we were all going to die, grabbed Alex in a desperate embrace.

Lexi was out in the cafeteria at a table surrounded by a chatty group of young girls, set up to start the  Homewerk comic book colouring workshop. The table seemed to be moving all about and Lexi figured it was one of the girls kicking. She looked underneath and when she saw no one was doing any kicking, it occurred to her what was going on. When she uttered the word, “earthquake”, the girls shot up in a panic.

It really took me ages. I was sitting in the audience at the far back, waiting to usher kids into the Homewerk comic book workshop. I started feeling my entire row of chairs start swinging and figured someone was kicking the seats, but it was only an elderly man in a wheelchair behind me! I turned around and just sat there, feeling this very bizarre lurching of the space around me when all three hundred people in the crowd stood up and started exiting. People shouted, “ORDERLY!” and I thought it quite impressive how calmly everyone filtered out. I waited for everyone to leave before running up into backstage to check on the crew, who were leaving through the backdoor.  It was snowing, as the crowd waited outside for the fire department to alert us to the kind of damage that had occurred around the town and whether it was safe to head back inside.

It was at that point we were hearing, 7.1, 7.7… Apparently, about one-fourth of the audience headed home at that point to check on their houses and their family. I was already texting  family and friends to tell them of the latest adventures of the Mascall Dance tour, and that we were all safe. And that, the show must go on!

Forty minutes later, with no obvious aftershocks and with the safety of the building cleared, we all headed back inside to begin. But first! A Front of House speech about emergency exits in case of emergencies...which definitely got laughs from the crowd. I admit the piece felt differently that night, especially a section where we build up the cardboard sets two stories high and have them all come crashing down in a big “explosion”. The piece is about where and what is home, and what happens when our home or house is destroyed. It felt all too relevant given the circumstances and I wondered about how it was affecting the audience.

Flash forward to 11pm. Of course the earthquake had delayed the reception, but we finally found ourselves wining and dining at Anne Marie’s (our Kitimat host) beautiful house with dozens of members of the Kitimat Concert Association. They recalled the Mascall Dance White Spider cast doing some musical acts for them...so I hope they didn't expect us to do the same! The organization has been promoting and presenting performing arts to Kitimat for fifty years! The snow was really coming down then and it kind of made the whole night all the more surreal.  The evening ended off with loving food and loving people brought together by art and an earthquake.