Skip to main content

Edinburgh International Festival 2019 Theatre - Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools

The Studio
Four Stars

A seismic rumble permeates the air at the opening of this remarkable fourth world meditation on the relationship between Canada’s affluent urban south and the country’s indigenous community in the isolated and often frozen north. At first glance, the show’s creators appear poles apart. Evalyn Parry is a queer folk singer who runs the Toronto-based Buddies in Bad Times Theatre company, who are producing this show as part of Edinburgh International Festival’s You Are Here strand as well as the cross-festival Indigenous Contemporary Scene season. Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory is a Kalaalit, or Greenlandic Inuk, story-teller, writer and performer, who lives in Iqaluit in Nunavut, the newest, largest and least populated territory in Canada’s far north.  

Over almost two hours of words, music, story-telling and some of the most intense dance moves ever, Parry and Bathory lay bare the common ground they discovered after they met during an artists’ residence on a ship. Their parallel lives include both having English fathers, and both being sung to sleep with the Skye Boat Song. If these are the icebreakers, where they differ is Parry’s discovery of how Bathory’s community was colonised by her own.

Accompanied by Cris Derkson’s live cello playing and Elysha Poirier’s globe spinning live video feed, Erin Brubacher’s production opts for a low-key formalism that retains a speak-easy vibe to what is a cross-cultural cabaret of sorts. Electronically treated instruments conjure up wordless arias, with both performers criss-crossing personal experiences with elegance and warmth amidst their revelations of hidden history.

A brief interlude encourages the audience to chat about their own experience of northern extremes, after which Williamson launches herself with mercurial fashion into a display of uaajeerneq, a thrilling mask dance given full vent to its thrustingly libidinous intent. As Parry and Williams find accord, their international alliance feels as down-home local as a spoken-word night in an electrifying reclaiming of cultural roots delivered with power and grace.

The Herald, August 5th 2019

ends




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more