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written by Kevin Kerr, choreographed by Crystal Pite, directed by Kim Collier

Electric Theatre Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

November 25-December 18, 2010

Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge is a depressing case where an enormous amount of imagination in design and direction has been expended on behalf of a mediocre play.  Eadweard Muybridge (pronounced “Edward Moybridge”), the father of cinematography, has been the subject of stage works before, like Philip Glass’s opera The Photographer (1982), and deserves further exploration.  Studies in Motion excels when its is about movement especially as choreographed by Crystal Pite but clunks to the ground when it becomes Kevin Kerr’s spoken play.     

Kerr’s play is superficial and confusing.  It begins in 1882 when a book is published based on Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion without given him due credit.  We then move to his work from 1883-86 at the University of Pennsylvania when he made over 100,000 photographs in an effort to catalogue all aspects of animal and human locomotion.  Kerr uses this as is base time period from which he periodically flashes back to life of Muybridge (Andrew Wheeler) in San Francisco in 1871-75 when he marries Flora Downs (Celine Stubel), who has an affair with theatre critic Harry Larkyns (Jonathon Young) and later has a child whom Muybridge places in an orphanage.  Muybridge then hunts down, murders Larkyns and is tried.  Only if you already know Muybridge’s story or can decipher the complex chart in the dim light of the Bluma Appel Theatre will you realize that the scenes in California are flashbacks and, indeed, the “hauntings” of the title.  Kerr doesn’t even try to relate the events in Muybridge’s past with his work.  Besides this, Kerr’s script is overly preoccupied with Muybridge’s use of nude male and female models.  Kerr has Muybridge explain that he is interested not in the body but in the motion it makes.  Yet Kerr himself, like some prurient Victorian, annoyingly harps on this theme until the play’s end leaving more pertinent topics about identity, representation and personality unexplored.   

It would have been best if director Kim Collier had simply abandoned Kerr’s play and created a movement theatre piece instead.  Movement, not speech, better suits the essential subject.  Pite’s choreography to Patrick Pennefather’s throbbing music is dazzling and is further enhanced by Robert Gardiner’s extraordinarily inventive lighting and projections.  In speech, Wheeler blusters and the other characters are so much cardboard.  In movement, however, the cast performs with amazing precision and grace and fully justifies Muybridge’s obsession with capturing the beauty of all bodies in motion. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-11-26.

Photo:  Cast members of Studies in Motion. ©Bruce Zinger.