The Three Week Convergence of Contemporary Performances
If you’ve been craving avant-garde drag, transgendered fabulousness, riveting solo performance and techno-based theatrical enterprise, then February in Toronto is shaping up to be very exciting.
Thanks to the Rhubarb Festival, the month is filled with spectacles handpicked from the
plethora of performance talent found in our fair city, province, country, performance art warehouses, what have you.
Take Canadian performer Jeremy Bailey’s cyber/futurist demonstration of innovative software, The Future of Theatre. It’s designed specifically for the performing arts industry and promises to enlighten as he brings “art and technology, techies and technophobes into tension.”
Heralded as a kind of Jeff Koons with Microsoft aspirations, Bailey asks his audience to “examine their acquiescence to the GUIs (Graphic User Interfaces) that provide the face of contemporary living” as he invites “one and all to watch his unique brand of interface-off.” It’s typical of Rhubarb — quirky, self-aware and reflexive.
While Rhubarb isn’t all gay, all the time, it has always showcased the latest in theatre and performance with a decidedly non-mainstream edge.
Festival director Erika Hennebury sees this year’s incarnation as one marked by performance re-enactments, ranging from Beyoncé concerts to a cuddly version of the Texas chainsaw massacre. Hennebury is especially excited by the number of lesbian directors and transgendered performers who will be presenting over the three-week period of Feb 10–28.
Hennebury feels that the overall Rhubarb experience is “completely unique in terms of other festivals,” many of which feature both theatre and performance. But, she says, “Rhubarb is different because it showcases primarily new work” and allows the artists to have a strong connection to their practice with the emphasis on experimentation and originality.
With no critics allowed — part of the festival’s original strategy — the emphasis is taken off reviews and competition and lies wholly on performance. Hennebury sees this non-competitive structure as a way of facilitating “artistic risk as a fundamental building block for the festival,” and adds that Rhubarb achieves this in a way that no other festival does.
She describes this year’s installment as a “wild eclectic mix,” complete with a headbanger show, an interpretation of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and an episode of the ever-popular Keith Cole Experience. Ultimately, the festival, as Hennebury joyfully concludes, is “really kind of celebratory, kind of ironic, kind of sincere, really anarchic and kind of wild.”
Here are some highlights.
The Rhubarb Festival runs Feb 10–28 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St.
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