Fresh Voices, Brave Stories: Inside Downstage’s Stage It Festival

Downstage Theatre is bringing “an explosion of new multi-media creations featuring Calgary’s freshest talent” to Werklund Centre’s Motel Theatre from May 21 – 24.

Called Stage It, the Festival features several world premieres and new works that push boundaries and create conversation.

Here’s a sampling of what you can experience at this year’s Stage It Festival.

HUNT / PECK - Donna-Michelle St. Bernard

European sex tourism in Africa. That’s at the root of Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s project HUNT / PECK, a seven-minute film presentation paired with live dance and an audience-interactive conversation.

St. Bernard says her film operates on several levels, from metaphors around animal behaviours regarding consumption and privation to “inverting the optics of what predators look like.”

The Gambia is the setting for the piece. “In this instance, we’re looking at European women of a certain age with young African men,” St. Bernard says.

In HUNT / PECK, two parties encounter each other at a nightclub. While they are in the same space, they are having very different nights.

“What is the cost of things we consume? That’s also part of what we’re exploring,” explains St. Bernard.

And, she says, she tries not to position anyone as a “villain” in the story. “I want to be in conversation about global phenomena…Who is being exploited?” St. Bernard adds.

Following the film, two choreographers –– who appear in HUNT / PECK –– will share the movement piece they have created to reflect their experience of making the film and the themes it explores.

“The movement aspect reflects how the experience sits in their bodies. We’ll see the work in another language,” explains St. Bernard.

SQUEAKY - Tara Beagan

Ntlaka’pamux playwright and director Tara Beagan says she awoke one morning with the voice of a newly-birthed character, Squeaky, running through her head. And Squeaky became the title of her latest one-woman show, featuring Tara Sky, that will have an in-process reading at Stage It.

Squeaky explores “how the system fails Indigenous foster kids.”

The character of Squeaky is a 20-something woman who has been through the foster system. The name Squeaky is actually a nod to one of the women who belonged to the infamous cult of Charles Manson…the group responsible for the gruesome 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and her party guests.

Beagan’s play takes place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Manson murders are all over the news, as is the election of Pierre Elliott Trudeau as Canada’s prime minister.

“Squeaky is consuming the Manson trials through the media, and she becomes obsessed with the women who belong to that cult,” describes Beagan.

Beagan says the themes of her work are personal, as residential schools are part of her family history. “For the Indigenous community, the foster-care system has replaced residential schools,” she explains.

Beagan says another of her aims is “to provoke thoughts about how the media shapes our own internal narratives,” something she says is more prevalent today than 50 years ago.

“I think Squeaky will reach through time. Look at our dependency on our phones,” observes Beagan.

FOUR STRONG SEASONS - Natalia Cortes

The changing seasons. Chinook winds. Tall grass. The Bow River.

These are among the natural phenomena Calgarians highlighted when Natalia Cortes and her team reached out to Calgary’s citizenry, asking them how they relate to the natural world around Calgary and what home means to them.

Some eighty submissions answering those questions –– ranging from poetic pieces by artists to the heartfelt truths of children –– informed the creation of Four Strong Seasons.

Aela, a young Calgary transplant, is the fictional protagonist of Four Strong Seasons, a multi-disciplinary work that encompasses dance, music and puppeteering. “We follow her as she finds her own connection to the land,” Cortes says.

“The natural world transcends words. What does a chinook wind look like? Birds in flight? There will be a lot of non-verbal storytelling,” Cortes says, adding how characters relate to different weather events, including droughts, floods, short winters and wildfires, also form part of the story.

Of the dozen ensemble members behind Four Strong Seasons, Cortes says the majority have moved to Calgary, and approximately two-thirds of them –– including herself –– have immigrated to Canada.

Cortes came to Calgary from Colombia when she was seven years old.

“My relationship to place has been ongoing since I moved here. After spending a lot of time outdoors, I feel so strongly connected to this city, because of the landscapes we have,” she says.

“We wanted to create a piece that is an ode to this place that is our home,” Cortes concludes.

Kaya Coleman and Kamika Bianca Guerra-Walker

Coleman and Guerra-Walker are bringing an intimate piece to Stage It about what it’s like as mixed-race individuals to grow up in “very White spaces in Calgary.”

“I was the only mixed girl in my class, and the only Black girl in my class, at Senator PatrickBurns,” recalls Guerra-Walker, who is half Chilean and half Jamaican, of her junior-high years.

“Experiencing that extreme White environment impacted how I looked at myself and my family. It gave me an idea of what identity is and how that interconnects with society,” she adds.

Coleman says something a bit different. “I grew up with a White family in a non-White neighbourhood. For me, it wasn’t about race. It was economic status that united us. In Grade Seven, I went to a private school. It was very well known that I had a single mom with the lowest income," Coleman recalls of her identity-forming early years.

For their piece of “devised theatre,” Coleman and Guerra-Walker are inviting audiences to watch something akin to a sleepover. Coleman and Guerra-Walker will engage in an improvised conversation before the audience each night. Audience members will also be invited to ask questions of the two women.

“We want to reduce the stigma around talking about race…We want to be raw, honest and ask questions of each other that might be provocative,” Guerra-Walker explains.

“It’s important to share different perspectives from what we normally see. Calgary is so multicultural, but there’s this weird feeling of division,” Coleman adds, noting that sometimes it’s a misconception that people focus on identity only via their skin colour.

Audiences can expect a different show each evening, and Guerra-Walker hopes people will feel sufficiently comfortable to interact with the two artists by calling out questions or comments throughout the show.

In addition to performances there are a multitude of free music events during the Festival, including live music by local artists Belladonna the Blest, SallieMae Salcedo and ZENON, and DJ fun with DJ Goodword and Harvey Nichol, plus beer tastings from 88 Brewing during Happy Hour on Friday, May 23, and an arts market running all weekend long. Lastly, join for a free Creative Stretch (yoga and creative movement) session led by Linda Kee on Sunday, May 24.

For more information and to buy tickets to Downstage’s Stage It Festival, visit downstage.ca.