A fascinating experiment in Bioboxes
BC Scene brings an interesting theatrical experiment to the Cap
Rochon: "Sometimes a person will see the small room as a confessional and even talk back to you"
We usually think of theatre happening in a space. A section of the living world is sliced off by walls, floor and ceiling and becomes, for a brief time, a pulsing new world – even outdoor theatre is still bordered by the ritualized space which we imagine. Vancouver’s Theatre Replacement challenges that convention in their show Bioboxes, a series of linked, 10-minute performances that happen in a literal microcosm of theatre. Actors are placed with a single audience member in a closet-sized, curtained enclosure, and each wears on her head a box containing the very stage and scenery of the play. The whole short scene takes place in the extreme intimacy of this confinement, with the artificial world of the play very deliberately placed around the actor, and the reality of this intimate performance enveloping that.
Anita Rochon is one of the six performers involved with the production. “My performances always have the same base, but they change quite a bit depending on who’s in there with me. With someone who doesn’t react at all, the performance can be quite different from someone very engaged.”
Of course, the very proximity of the actor makes hazy some of the more stringent taboos of performance, as Rochon explains: “The intimacy of the performance is a huge part of it. I’m talking barely above a whisper and we’re breathing the same air… Sometimes a person will see the small room as a confessional and even talk back to you.” Donna Soares, another actor, recounts a moment in her performance “where I touch the viewer’s leg, and sometimes people just freak out.”
Each of the six pieces presents a story drawn from an interview held between the performer and a first-generation Canadian immigrant. The text of the play is the very words spoken by the subject – perhaps with sentences rearranged or not contiguous, but always verbatim. And along with each story, and each life, comes a new language: Each of the six performances offers the audience the opportunity to change from English to that different second language at any moment, changing the pace and sound of the play at will.
There are a lot of ideas to whet the intellectual appetite in Bioboxes, but the most intriguing is the simplest. As Soares put it: “Theatre doesn’t have to be a large stage or proscenium, but it can also be a small story just told to one person.”
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Apr. 16, 2009
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=17093
