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Malcolm Page in Vancouver |
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Thursday, 20 August 2009 21:33 |
Play's International Reviews Studies in Motion
SUMMER 2009
With Studies in Motion, the Electric Company offered one of the most exciting and original pieces of theatre seen in this city for a very long time. The story is of Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer American photographer of the 1870’s and 1880’s who worked with sequence to understand movement. Kevin Kerr, the author, shows moments of Muybridge’s private life, some highly dramatic, as these include a man murdered and the abandoning of a child. The emphasis is on Muybridge at work, planning his next project, and supervising his employees.
Muybridge often required his subjects to be naked, which might add prurience to pure scientific enquiry. The programme note suggests deeper ideas, the ‘revolutionary time’ when photography changed our perception of the world, ‘themes of memory and identity,’ and ‘the birth of the mediated body.’ As visuals and sound are so overwhelming, I need a second seeing to absorb the more abstract levels.
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Monday, 06 July 2009 18:05 |
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BY ANDREW TEMPLETON REAL TIME issue #83 Feb./Mar. 2008 p.11 Palace Grand ends with an image that would make an effective gallery installation. We look into the interior of a wood cabin where a man, wrapped tightly in a sleeping bag, lies stretched out on the floor like a corpse. Through a window above the body, we sense the desolate , killing beauty of the North. This wooden cabin is the Palace Grand—or, more correctly—the Palace Grand exists inside the man, the central character of this piece.
I don’t think Jonathan Young, the creator of the work and its sole performer, or his colleagues at Electric Company would mind too much that I gave away the ending. If Palace Grand were a murder mystery—a genre it evokes—it would fall into the how-he-done-it rather than who-done-it category. It is clear early on that the two central characters, Walker and Tracker, are really one and the same person and that the driving force of the piece is seeing how the two halves will come together, what will happen when they finally meet at the Palace Grand.
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Monday, 01 June 2009 00:00 |
"When Studies in Motion is galloping...it leaves the ground entirely" EXCERPT from "Rambo, a photo riddle..." By J. Kelly Nestruck 
At the Festival TransAmeriques, Montreal has been enjoying a spring fling with Vancouver. You can see why the independent theatre scenes of these two cities are attracted to each other: They share an interest in vibrant visuals and a passion for toying with technology. Only one likes long walks on the beach, but I think they can get past that. The Vancouverite presence at the FTA included two small shows from Theatre Replacement - the clever WeeTube and the brilliant BioBoxes - and a big one from the Electric Company Theatre. The latter, Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, being seen for the first time on this side of the Prairies, is a flashy bioplay about the English-American photogrpher sometimes called "the father of cinema." |
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Performance flows after balky start |
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Sunday, 31 May 2009 00:00 |
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BY PAT DONNELLY THE GAZETTE, MAY 30, 2009  It was the opening night from hell. One could not help but sympathize with the Electric Company of Vancouver as the Festival TransAmériques debut of their Studies in Motion at the D.B. Clarke Theatre was short-circuited by three factors. First, there was a printing error on the tickets that gave the wrong address, discovered at the last minute. In spite of FTA organizers' efforts to contact everyone, some people headed for the Loyola Campus first, arriving late at 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. Then there was the bomb scare at Berri-UQÀM station that paralyzed the métro and snarled traffic, giving FTA director Marie-Hélène Falcon an excuse to announce a delay (25 minutes), without having to mention the ticket misprint. Studies in Motion began, at last, with a dazzling display of deftly choreographed naked bodies illustrating, under strobe lights, the stop-motion photographic techniques of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th century British pioneer of the motion picture industry. After a few minutes, however, a prolonged pause left the audience staring at a dappled screen. |
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California Thesis on Ensemble Model |
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Thursday, 12 March 2009 06:58 |
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From California's Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre: an MFA thesis paper, "Complex Conductivity: The Ensemble Model of Electric Company" by Kate Braidwood, 2008.
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