Body-image trend big in Vancouver Fringe Festival 2019
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2019 18:08:00 +0000
When: Sept. 5-15, various times
Where: Various venues, Granville Island and East Vancouver
Tickets and info: vancouverfringe.com
The Vancouver Fringe Festival received 302 applications to mount a show at the 2019 event. Using the proven selection technique of drawing names from a hat, 101 shows were selected for this year’s run. Any supporter of this theatre free-for-all will appreciate that, among the wide variety of works presented, there was room for a show called Bedwetter about a person still dealing with this condition at age 14.
Coming to Vancouver with great reception at the Windsor, Hamilton and London, Ont., fringes, the show from the writing team of Tamilynn Bryson and Kyle Kennedy, produced by Drawing Board Productions, won the Best New Script at the Windsor-Walkerville Fringe Festival.
“My job as the publicist is to really read through every artist’s submissions and we also have a form we have them fill out about plot outlines, who is involved and all that stuff,” said Vancouver Fringe Festival’s Debby Reis. “And doing that, I noticed a recurrent theme of talking about body image, which has definitely been in our culture of late with body positivity and which people are open to talk about. At the Fringe, that has manifested itself in a few different ways that I find very interesting.”
In other years, topics that have been recurring have ranged from invaders from outer space to reimagining classic cult films as solo shows. This year’s team of body-image-related shows ranges from the aforementioned testimonial about bedwetting into your teens to the realities of body-image dysphoria from the male perspective in How to Become More Less Crazy, where performer Bill Bernat exposes what it’s like to be someone who would prefer to never let his fiancee “see me with my shirt off.” Both of these productions sound like classic Fringe offerings.
Delving into Pulitzer Prize-nominated works is a leap. But that is exactly what is happening with The Most Massive Woman Wins, a work about four women in a liposuction clinic from Pulitzer nominee Madeleine George. Looking into the motivators that bring this quartet of characters to a body-altering decision addresses social expectations, personal pressure and more.
“It’s part of our Dramatic Works series program where artists use previously published works and the Most Massive Woman Wins fits into that category,” she said. “One of the actors in the show, Hilary Fillier, is also a body-positive performance artist who speaks eloquently on the subject. I think one of the reasons that this is a popular topic now has a lot to do with social media, which lets you curate what your seeing over mass-media images, and you can realize that there are other people out there who look like you, feel like you and explore that.”
If a youthful view informs Bedwetter and the Most Massive Woman Wins and How to Become More Less Crazy relate impressions of a young-to-middle-age life, it only makes sense that there would be productions that reflect the huge Boomer-era generation having to come to terms with the facts that the youth-obsessed culture it created and reinforced isn’t interested in it at all anymore. Archetype Productions’ A Woman of a Certain Age, by playwright Wendy Froberg, is billed as a story about six women stressed out by the demands put on them as they age: “Widowhood, grey divorce, dementia, online dating, Botox — it’s all here!”
Among other shows about aging are the clearly named Old Fat and Old-ish. Reis says that this subject matter is also an emerging trend.
“Susan Freedman, who wrote Old-ish, is a total Fringe veteran who has written five hit comedy’s (including Spilling Family Secrets) and, I believe, even worked for the festival,” she said. “So stories artists want to tell change and develop over time and the whole point is to explore them all. You don’t have to have that perfect 20-something look and the audience really is coming seeking out that variety.”
The audience is coming to see authenticity too, complete with all its jagged edges.
The fact is that the Fringe Festival circuit has become a global one that provides artists whose vision might just be too particular to appeal to a large enough crowd for an established professional company to take on a place to perform. There are also a lot of performers who begin their careers at the Fringe and then go on to shake up the local theatre scene. Addressing the continuing need for equity, diversity and inclusion in the theatre scene, the Fringe has hired Siobhan Barker as an electronic data interchange director, and established artists such as Rohit Chokhani (Diwali in B.C.) and Marcus Youssef (Neworld Theatre) are involved in initiatives and judging awards to widen the scope of whose stories are told at the event.
Fringe workshops at the Nest (11 a.m.-1 p.m.) include topics ranging from Radical Collaborative Inclusive Theatre, Powwow 101, Art We There Yet? and How to Tell a Story: With Jon Bennet. And the expanded musical performances on offer at the Phillips Fringe Bar, courtesy of Soft Cedar, have come a long way from college indie-pop acts. This year’s lineup includes everything from the 2nd Annual Fringe Festival Ceilidh with Alison Moen and Kilbirnie Station (Sept. 9, 8 p.m.) to sitarist Mohamed Assani (Sept. 11, 8 p.m.) and non-binary musician and author Rae Spoon (Sept. 12, 8 p.m.). Entertainment continues later most nights with DJs and assorted other acts.