Paint may not be dry, but show will go on and a whole lot more besides
Glen Schaefer
Province
Artistic director Michael Boucher sees the theatre as an umbrella for the artistic community. Photograph by: Mark Van Manen, PNG, The Province
It’s apt on several levels that the leadoff production at SFU Woodward’s new theatre is called The Show Must Go On.
The Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, named for the philanthropist and former Simon Fraser University chancellor, was still surrounded by construction fencing and peopled with hard hats when we met the theatre’s cultural director Michael Boucher at a nearby coffee shop.
He’s the guy tasked with filling the 430 theatre seats which, when we talked last week, hadn’t yet been installed. The paint will likely still be drying when the theatre opens today for a two-night architectural salon but it will open because, you know, the show must go on.
Cheap wordplay on the title aside, this dance work by French choreographer Jerome Bel wittily captures what Boucher and the theatre aim to do in the long term — provide a link between artists (SFU is moving its 1,800-student contemporary arts school from Burnaby Mountain to 125,000 square feet of classrooms at Woodward’s) and the community they live in.
Bel’s work, previously staged throughout Europe and North America, plays with audience notions of where performance ends and begins by blending a cast of 22 dancers, actors and high-profile laypeople. Those latter cast members include critic Max Wyman and Heart of the City’s Savannah Walling in this production. The performance opens Jan. 20
“It’s in a way inspired by the average person, their sensibility of what dance is about,” says Boucher. “It’s very personalized, they move to their own rhythm. It’s set to contemporary music and they move in ways where there’s a narrative that unfolds. There’s a street sensibility to it.”
The Show Must Go On is part of the Push Festival, founded by SFU alumnus Norman Armour. The new theatre’s six-month inaugural program is a homecoming of sorts — past SFU students on the program also include actor-director James Sanders, starring this March in the play SPINE, about reinventing the body through technology. That mixed-media play is a joint production with the Cultural Olympiad, and Boucher sees such external partnerships as a way of getting the most out of the theatre.
For most of February, the theatre will be home to writer-director-actor Robert Lepage’s international hit play The Blue Dragon, also part of the Cultural Olympiad.
The Wong will feature about 100 student-driven productions a year after the contemporary arts school moves in this September. In addition to the below-ground 430-seat theatre, the facility includes two 125-seat studio theatres, an orchestra studio, a 350-seat theatre equipped to screen films and host lectures and the ground-level Audain Gallery.
“We’ve been waiting for a building for 30 years,” says Martin Gotfrit, the school’s director, adding the school aims to be more visible after years on the mountain. “The building itself is very porous. To walk into the plaza from Hastings Street you have to walk through our lobby. We hope there’ll be a sense of people feeling welcome.”
Aside from the student productions, groups outside the university will be able to use the space.
“The inaugural program is a model of how we want to work with the community,” says Boucher. “A lot of it will be driven by cultural partnerships. The city needs more venues and this building addresses that need.
“When you have a venue with multiple studios in it, a state of the art theatre, it allows for smaller companies to step up. We’re looking at ways to make it workable and affordable to well-recognized smaller and mid-sized companies to come in and use this space, animate it.”
The benefit to the university is that students will be amid the outside professionals as well. “It will motivate this cycle of students wanting to go out and become professionals, and coming back in.”
The theatre opens its doors Thursday and Friday with a two-night onstage dialogue among members of Vancouver’s architecture and design communities. Tonight, architects Bing Thom and James K.M. Cheng will talk about the late Arthur Erickson’s architectural legacy. Friday night will feature a discussion of the art and architecture of the new Woodward’s housing, theatre and commercial complex itself, including the inauguration of a huge photographic installation by artist Stan Douglas and the re-lighting of the restored Woodward’s “W.”
The free multimedia exhibition Vancouverism: Architecture Builds the City will be staged in the Woodward’s atrium, showing until Feb. 27, and it will serve as the starting point for the two City Salon dialogues. [email protected]
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