Acting out

Australian troupe Force Majeure
make the ordinary extraordinary

ITS OWN THING: The Age I’m In

by NEIL BOYCE

There are those stage works that aren’t one thing—they’re their own thing.

It’s a kind of movement-based theatre, something with which the Montreal arts scene has a long association and that audiences here accept without question. We’re comfortable with shows that aren’t purely theatre or dance or music—stuff that falls under that vague, inadequate rubric: multimedia.

Helmed by artistic director Kate Champion, Australian company Force Majeure is a collective of dancers, writers, actors, visual artists, composers and filmmakers—on tour throughout October in a show that takes them from Dublin to Seoul. They stop in Montreal for a 10-day run with their new work, The Age I’m In.

Ten performers, ranging in age from 15 to 80, interpret via lip-synched dialogue, dance and gesture the beauty found in the ordinary. As characters talk about their lives and the world around them, they might bounce around to a Duke Ellington number, stand still for a video screen x-ray or emphasize with sign-language (or the small wireless digital monitors they all carry) what their words really mean.

There’s a strong documentary theatre aspect to Force Majeure that, if they took the work into a more text-based area, could be mentioned in the same breath as Montreal company Porte Parole. From another angle, their skills with digital technology, particularly the breezy way that makes it all look like no big deal, would be at home on any stage directed by Robert Lepage. Alternately, you could be huddled against the wall of Usine C at the Elektra festival, watching video art with an electronic music score pulsing in the background and voices cutting in on the beat.

The soundtrack is a rich texture of voices culled from some 80 interviews of ordinary people—kids, students, housewives, senior citizens—then re-edited and reinvigorated into a warm, intensely human narrative. A torrent of words spills out: the terror over a possible cancer diagnosis (“It’s like having a bomb strapped to your chest”); a five-year-old boy indifferent about his two girlfriends; a bored 40-ish woman recalling her divorce; the everyday things we tell friends and family.

In Champion’s native land, the show is billed as “a revealing portrait of Australia today,” but its poetry and universality take it far beyond a place only halfway around the world. Brilliant stuff.

No cliché left unturned

Re: Steve Galluccio’s latest effort, In Piazza San Domenico—well, the set looked real swell...

This pointless play—nominally about the jealous antics and zany mate-swappings among Napolitans in the ’50s—reached its nadir on the subject of ice cream cones: the bitter Marisa tells her hen-pecked schlub of a husband, Tonino, “Take that tone with me and I’ll shove that chocolate and strawberry down your throat and out your dick.”

Nice.

I’m sure everyone tried their best. God knows, Vittorio Rossi tried to make a go of it as the amorous fig vendor, Pasquale. But nothing worked: story, dialogue, comedy, it may be the worst show I have ever seen at Centaur theatre. I wish I could summon the strength to relate how dreadful it all was. Mostly it was just depressing—a halting, awkward, sad and sorry little spectacle. I’m off to take a shower.

THE AGE I’M IN, TO OCT. 25 AT
5IÈME SALLE, PLACE DES ARTS
(175 STECATHERINE W.), (514) 842-2112.
IN PIAZZA SAN DOMENICO, TO NOV. 1
AT CENTAUR THEATRE (453 STFRANÇOIS- XAVIER),
(514) 288-3161.