KO Review- Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere from Theatre Junction on Vimeo.
Everybody Knows this is Nowhere presented by Theatre Junction with Mark Lawes and Theatre Junction’s company of artists in Calgary.
I have had the privilege in 2015 of seeing several performances at Theatre Junction. Everything I have experienced has been thought-provoking and challenged the viewer to see the world outside the theatre differently. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere takes this notion to a existential deeper level by penetrating the temporal waves of experience into the future.
The performance opens on actor Luc Bouchard-Boissonault strutting across the stage, announcing over and over that he has “Everything he needs” because as he states; he owns a huge home, lake house, exotic cars, boats and closets full designer clothes. Fade to the future when the next scene is Luc in the desert wearing cut-off shorts in a tank top in front of a blank billboard where a vintage large marquee letter “M” is half buried in the sand. It becomes clear when he starts talks, this is the future. A desolate, dry future with little hope. Luc is free physically, but the memories he built on past experience seems to hold him back from who he wants to be. There is no specific continuity to the story line. It jumps backward with the use of 16mm video projected on the desolate billboard. We see forests, past places, experiences and people. We see togetherness in the video. The stage performance with music and spoken word conveys a disconnection from humanity. Luc is joined on stage by female performerMelina Stinson, a Montreal based dancer and choreographer, who responds physically to the spoken word. She vigorously tries to connect with Luc through movement and it results in fight scenes where the two performers seem like polarized magnets.
Raphaele Thiriet who is the second female performer in Everyone Knows This is Nowhere has been part of Theatre Junction’s company of artists for the past six years, collaborating as a co-writer, performer and dramaturge. When Raphaele and Luc speak to each other, they struggling to interact, but they are not connecting or really hearing one another. The mixed use of various media: such as video projection and live musical performances add to the nostalgia and overall experience to create bridges connecting one experience to another. It is reminiscent for me of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. It produces this kind of vintage aesthetic that moves through time exploring the different characters but never really getting their full story. In turn, the audience is forced to engage their mind to bridge the gaps, reflect internally how these scenarios play out in relationships.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is the 2nd chapter in the Supernova saga, research on the notion of identity and territory. In this multidisciplinary creation that skirts the boundaries of live performance, mixing pop-music, theatre, video-art and new technologies, Lawes asks us to question “what is this place”, or more precisely, “what is this non-place” that we are searching for? Set sometime after the cultural, economic, and political impasse of the 21st century. Inspired by the “last man” of Nietzsche and the “last woman” of Lana Del Rey, passing through the American dream to the other side of emptiness, it is an artistic exploration of the mechanics of the disenchantment of the Western world: How did we get here? What happened to us? Are we in a desert or on the set of a 1950s Hollywood western? In an expressionist cabaret or a decrepit motel room? On stage lies an empty billboard, a transmission radio, and four solitudes whose stories of broken love bring back memories that haunt us and, in part, define who we are. In Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere the future becomes a retrospective: it is an active inquiry into the possibility for re-enchantment, to be found in the cracks of lost and broken dreams.
Since 2006, Lawes has been creating work with Theatre Junction’s multidisciplinary company of artists. His writing for the stage is created organically out of a friction between fragments of history, philosophy, visual art, contemporary dance, music and an alphabet of material coming from dramaturgical research. Utilizing a vibrant and surreal combination of text, live music, dance and film, the ensemble has developed a post-modern aesthetic that’s been described as “hallucinatory Franco-western Canadian gothic”. In their work, time is fragmented, alternating between the hyper-accelerated globalized state and the disorienting absurdity of the sterile suburban environment, creating a juxtaposition between technology and solitude, culture and nature. After a Calgary reprise and a Montréal tour of Sometime between now and when the sun goes Supernova, Mark Lawes and Theatre Junction’s Company of Artists have been invited to begin their next work in residence at Montréal’s prestigious Théâtre Aux Écuries in September 2015.
