Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by the Ensemble, directed by Trevor Schwellnus
Aluna Theatre, The Theatre Centre, Toronto
March 15-27, 2011
Nohayquiensepa is by far the most successful example I’ve ever seen of multimedia theatre by a Toronto company. It seamlessly combines dance, spoken word, video projections and live line drawing to create a visually stunning performance piece about violence in Latin America. The work is subtitled “Requiem of the Forcibly Displaced” and just as a requiem can be beautiful even if the death is memorializes was horrific, so Nohayquiensepa transmutes suffering into beauty while underlining our connection to these deaths.
The piece was inspired by events in the Columbian town of Puerto Berrio, where locals found body parts floating in the river. These were victims of not just of Columbia’s internal armed conflict but of those who objected to being forcibly displaced by the government for the benefit of foreign, including Canadian, mining interests. To speak of what happened was to be classed as an insurgent which in turn justified murder at the hands of government forces. “No one knows,” the English translation of the title, is the only safe answer to any questions. Though the hour-long show in non-narrative, a through-line does develop in which a woman (Beatriz Pizano) discovers the hand of a man Kimy (Carlos González-Vio), whom she imagines was a chef. We observe his flight, capture and record of his death.
Trevor Schwellnus’s direction and design achieve brilliant effects through simple means. A screen close to the audience allows projections both on the front and back while the dancers/actors can appear on either side in person or or as projected images or behind the screen as shadows. In one of many highly imaginative instances, González-Vio in front of the screen interacts with his shadow self (Stanton) behind the screen. In another a projection of González-Vio running is entrapped by the multi-limbed shadows other cast members. At the end the projection of Lorena Torres Loaiza’s live line drawing, creates bars of fives imprisoning the entire cast. Olga Barrios’s choreography repeatedly pictures people writhing and contracting in pain or grief while Thomas Ryder Payne outdoes himself in creating unnerving music filled with energy and menace. The meaning of every episode is not always clear, but if you’re looking for an example of how a multimedia collective creation can both dazzle as well as enlighten, look no further.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-03-16.
Photo: Scene from Nohayquiensepa. ©Katherine Fleitas.
2011-03-16
Nohayquiensepa