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Fringe

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Welcome back my friends…

August 20, 2022 in Life as we know it, Life in BC | Permalink

“…to the show that never ends”

Emerson, Lake and Palmer

Though it did look for a while there as though the show might end after all…

Welcome back indeed to the Brentwood Bay summer season of Music in the Park. This year – for the first time since the COVID pandemic struck in 2020 – we have again been able to indulge ourselves with the weekly free concerts that have for such a long time been such a splendid feature of life on the Saanich peninsula. I have no doubt at all that similar stories can be told for other al fresco summer music seasons on the island – but the Brentwood Bay events are local to us and much beloved by all of the communities in these parts.

Now, you might – with good reason – cavil that there is little point in my writing about this splendid seasonal entertainment… when the concert series has just finished!

Good point – well made!

The thing is, of course, that we were out of the country for the first part of the season and sufficiently badly stricken with the hideous lurgy that we were unable to attend the first couple of events subsequent to our return. We did, however, get to enjoy the final two weeks of the program and I did not want to miss the opportunity to raise a cheer to mark the occasion.

We are particularly grateful for the return of this relatively safe form of entertainment. The Victoria Fringe – in a somewhat truncated and localised form – is also upon us, but frankly we are very unlikely to partake of any of the offerings. One weighs in the balance the risks of sitting in a small, crowded venue with others who may have contracted the virus against the desirability of the fare on offer. Frankly, nothing in this year’s festival moves us sufficiently that we are prepared to take that sort of risk.

The same is true of the local music scene (when not in the parks!). Local venues such as the Mary Winspear in Sidney have started booking acts again, but one really has to want to see something to overcome the reluctance to expose oneself to another dose…

I guess such things will improve slowly over time and, though we do somewhat resent the way that a huge chunk of experience has been denied us, we also acknowledge that these are our choices.

I guess that life was ever just such an ongoing battle of risk versus reward.

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Busy, busy, busy

August 25, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

There is no Victoria Fringe Festival this year, for reasons which will require no further elucidation. Indeed, fringe festivals are – in this exceedingly difficult time – exceedingly thin on the ground.

In common, no doubt, with other similar organising companies Intrepid Theatre juggled for a while notions of alternative festival forms (online only – local companies in carefully socially isolated venues…) but in the end had to admit defeat. One of the major problems is that many small fringe companies can only make their festival visits work financially if they can hop from one such to another, filling their summers with a brief international tour of fringes. Economies of scale – dontcha know…

Well – no-one is doing international fringe tours this year – so that all went out of the window. Intrepid – like many small companies heavily reliant on grant income – is having to work hard just to survive, without taking on further major challenges. Kudos to them – say I – for keeping the ship afloat.

So – the gentle reader will doubtless be musing – at a time of year when things are normally pretty frenetic, the Immigrant must be able to kick-back and enjoy the dog days sitting on the deck, chilled white in hand, enjoying the late August sunshine.

Not a bit of it! I am busier than ever and cannot frankly imagine how my fringe duties might have been fitted in at all.

The chief source of such busyness is my rapidly upcoming computer literacy teaching. Term starts in a couple of weeks and, because the course is being taught entirely online, all of the course structures and materials must be re-designed and re-written accordingly. It is one thing in normal times for students to slumber gently for ninety minutes in a lecture theatre whilst I drone on about the good-old days of computing (after all, when I am done they can all head off to the cafeteria for cheap sustenance and the chance to ‘diss’ my efforts) but quite another being taught online. In the comforts (or otherwise) of their own homes not a one of them would put up with an hour and a half of a disembodied voice emanating from the equivalent of a Zoom session. They would more likely just go back to bed and do what students do best.

No – the canny lecturer just has to get a whole bunch more canny than ever in order to keep them engaged. I will report back as to how it all goes.

My other busyness is much more fun. Since The Chanteuse and I discovered how to record with each other safely at arms-length we have been rampaging our way through our back-catalog of as-yet unrecorded tracks – trying to complete them before she too has to go back to work in September. Though I say it myself, we have been doing some great work. There is much to do on the mixing and mastering fronts – not to mention all the other bits and pieces that go to make up a release – but we have an album’s worth of material and we aim to get something out into the big wide world this autumn.

Now – that is exciting! 

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The magic circle

September 8, 2019 in Life in BC | Permalink

“The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe.”

P.S. Baber – ‘Cassie Draws the Universe’

Our relief at discovering – subsequent to our arrival four years ago from London (arguably the theatre capital of the world) – that Victoria is consistently able to offer a rich bill of fare in thespian terms… was palpable! As I have written before in these pages, we routinely hold season tickets for The Belfry and one of the reasons that I was keen to sit on the Board of Intrepid Theatre was my admiration for the work that they do in bringing adventurous theatre to the provincial capital.

I have waxed lyrical before within these musings on the subject of the Victoria Fringe Festival (for those seeking proof posts may be found here, here and here). Of the three festivals operated by Intrepid Theatre the Fringe is perhaps closest to my heart, my healthy love of fringe theatre having been nurtured over many years at the Edinburgh Fringe.

The posts referenced above extol the delights of the shows from the past three fringe festivals with which we were particularly impressed and this post will do likewise for 2019 – but I do wish first to make a brief observation concerning the changing nature of fringe theatre.

When I first visited the Edinburgh Fringe in 1976 I am very sure that there was on offer more drama than there is now and certainly less comedy. Now, I have nothing against comedy – whether as stand-up or as comedy plays – but it is good to have a balance. Likewise in the field of drama the trend over recent decades has been towards small cast shows – presumably as much as anything on grounds of cost – with the emphasis often on solo shows based on personal experience. Again – nothing wrong with that as a form, but I do find myself longing for a ‘proper’ script, preferably containing subtle and thoughtful dialogue and (please god!) subtext!

Is that too much to ask?

So – the production that I enjoyed most this year was “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Theatre Alive Productions. Mitch Alborn’s play dates from 2002 and is a sensitive and profound text that was beautifully and movingly performed by the company. I love to see new work but I also greatly enjoy a piece that has been properly honed over a number of years and through numerous rewrites.

Elsewhere Englishman Charles Adrian’s “Dear Samantha” was as funny and delightful as when we first encountered him/her two years ago and the frankly bizarre – but also very funny – “Ballad of Frank Allen” by the Australian company Weeping Spoon Productions rounded off our fringe viewing on a high. The premise of this latter – featuring a janitor who has been been accidentally shrunk to microscopic proportions and who is living in the beard of another man – pretty much embodies the sense of the unexpected that one hopes to find in fringe theatre.

 

 

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Fringe report

September 21, 2018 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidI promised but a few posts back to report on our discoveries and experiences at this year’s Victoria Fringe. What with the new term starting and suchlike I am all too aware that I have not thus far kept my word.

Time to rectify!

In the course of the eleven day festival we saw six shows. Wearing my Fringe Ambassador hat I ‘schmoozed’ the queues for those and another seven shows. I spent an afternoon manning the cardboard castle at the Fringe Kids event and also an evening selling fifty50 tickets at the Fringe Preview night.

I feel very sure, however, that the gentle reader is really only interested (if interested at all) in matters theatrical, so – of the six shows that we attended – these were our highlights:

The Wonderheads mask show – ‘The Wilds‘ was by turns amusing and thought provoking. Mask theatre is not for everyone but for those for whom it works it is revelatory, inviting us to consider anew just how we express – or hide – our thoughts and feelings. The Wonderheads remind me a little of Trestle Theatre in London, though perhaps a little less dark (than Trestle used to be!).

Our personal ‘Funniest Show’ award was this year split between two contenders:

Paco Erhard’s ‘Five Step Guide to Being German‘ was a complete hoot and has deservedly been selling out just about everywhere it has toured around the world. It was not spoiled for me in the least by my becoming – having been unkindly pointed out to Paco by my lovely wife as being ‘a Brit‘ – the butt of many of the jokes throughout the evening. I had a chat with Paco afterwards and he is a genuinely nice guy and actually something of an Anglophile.

Stiff competition in the humour stakes was provided by the hilarious retelling at Langham Court of ‘The War of 1812‘, by Mike Delamont, Morgan Cranny, Wes Borg and Rod Peter Jr. Given the strength of this cast of local comedic luminaries it will come as no surprise that they jointly hit it out of the park!

The most gripping performance that we saw this year was given by Anishinaabe writer and performer Josh Languedoc, with ‘Rocko and Nakota: Tales from the Land‘. Playing multiple characters with astonishing commitment and energy this telling of Anishinaabe tales had us entranced and captivated.

By all accounts this year’s Fringe was a great success. Congratulations to Intrepid Theatre and to all those intrepid performers who participated.

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The busy and the tired

August 30, 2018 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Image from PXHere“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I put the boat in the water at the start of July I toyed with the notion of keeping her there for two months instead of one. It would have been nice to have been able to take her out at a moment’s notice throughout the whole of summer.

Wisely (as it turned out) I deferred making the decision regarding a second month until near the end of July. My concern was that August might turn out to be a sufficiently frantic month that getting away to sit contemplatively upon the waters could turn out to be merely a pipe-dream – and the good ship ‘Dignity’ might simply bob about, sadly neglected, in her slip in Portside Marina for a month.

My fears proved to have been well grounded – with August slowly building up a powerful head of steam as it unfolded.

The latter part of the month is these days (as previously reported) given over to the Victoria Fringe. The Girl and I will have seen half a dozen shows by the end of the festival (upon which I will report in a subsequent post) but in my Intrepid Theatre BoD ‘Fringe Ambassador’ role I will have ‘schmoozed the queues’ for a dozen shows, spent an evening selling 50/50 raffle tickets at the ‘Fringe Preview‘ night and given a Saturday afternoon over to manning the Cardboard Castle at the ‘Fringe Kids‘ event.

I also have another term contract for post-secondary IT Literacy teaching for the fall term. This term starts in the first week in September, so preparation – including a fair round of meetings, INSET sessions and lengthy email exchanges – has been underway for a while now.

Finally – we are helping a dear friend move into a new house – in addition to hosting (this coming weekend) a birthday BBQ for her, since she is not really in a position to do so herself at the moment. To do this is, of course, both a privilege and a pleasure, but it does entail trying to knock the garden back into some sort of shape at just the time of year that it has decided that it can now relax, kick back and chill a bit.

This being retired lark is a total picnic!

 

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Fringe!

August 20, 2018 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Image from PixabayThis week sees the start of the 32nd Victoria Fringe Festival. Wearing my Intrepid BoD hat I (along with my fellow directors) will be in for a busy couple of weeks.

I naturally associate the month of August with fringe festivals, having been so many times to the Edinburgh Fringe over the years both as a performer and a spectator. Now, the Edinburgh Fringe is enormous and seems these days to be spilling over from four to five weeks. Here in Victoria everything is on a much smaller scale; a mere twelve days and forty seven shows in less than a dozen venues.

I was recently reading in the online edition of the Guardian an article by a journalist who had been sent to Edinburgh with the brief of visiting shows on the fringe that featured nudity – which trait has a long and chequered history. The Victoria Fringe is no stranger to such antics either – but that may be a post for a different day!

The article was only of moderate interest but – as might be expected – attracted a fair bit of Below The Line comment subsequent to publication – as was doubtless the intention. The online correspondence included this offering which rather caught my eye – from a poster going by the sobriquet ‘TheLonelyDivorcee‘:

“I went to the first Isle of Wight festival in 1968 when the headline acts were Jefferson Airplane and Fairport Convention, both of whom were fronted by naked women. Nobody thought it significant or indeed some sort of massive step forward in equality.

That was partly because people were a lot more open minded then, and partly because we were all out of our minds on LSD/Magic Mushrooms. I say ‘minds’ but really we were just a single mind collectively experiencing ourselves and the universe as unified, ecstatic matter.

In fact most people also spent the entire event entirely naked and due to our youth and the drugs, in state of high sexual arousal. As a result many happy unions were formed between men and women.

This occurred despite the complete absence of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘gender neutral zones’.

When I arrived back home to my parents I was completely changed, much to the disgust of my father who, when he was the same age as I was then had become paralysed after being shot down over Bremen during a 1000 bomber raid on the Nazis – note these were real Nazis, not just people who didn’t recycle their rubbish.

I can’t help think my generation has had the best of it. When I look at my Grandson who’s around that age he doesn’t seem to have much fun. OK, he’s got a £150 pair of jeans, an IPhone and a useless degree in drama – with the debt that comes with it – but there’s no culture other than consumer culture and an increasingly authoritarian attitude towards sex and relationships.

I’m in good health, but I reckon I’ve got about 10-15 years before I will return to matter, and frankly I’ll be glad to be gone as I believe we are entering new puritanical age, and that is not for me.”

If I say that this struck a chord the gentle reader may well understand why!

Happy fringing!

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