Now in its sixth year, Ottawa’s Fresh Meat festival brings 12 short shows over two weekends to invariably enthusiastic Arts Court audiences. The following were reviewed during the first weekend.

Le Crip Bleu

Featuring brave, generous and very funny performances by Alan Shain and Frank Hull – both wheelchair-using actors who celebrate the “able” in disabled – Le Crip Bleu is a wordless burlesque show that reminds us that humour and the glory of the human body in all its guises matter far more than shallow, contemporary conventions of beauty. The two perform a mating dance using their chairs, taunt and tease the audience with stripteases (the show does count on hooting, cooperative viewers), and generally carry on in cheeky, envelope-pushing fashion. One suspects the show could touch the heart of even a die-hard Republican.

La disparition

Marc-André Charette and Anie Richer blend words, movement and song with deep love and compassion in this textured tale of a mother sliding into fragility. Performed with English surtitles on a bare stage with hundreds of sheets of paper as props, La disparition (She’s Gone) is authentic, satisfyingly choreographed and – whether you’ve ever watched your mother slip away into the unknowable world of dementia or not – both powerfully resonant and oddly hopeful. …

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 Now in its fifth year, Fresh Meat Festival is all about letting artists do what ever the thing is that they want to do. As evidenced by this set of five shows on Thursday, October 12, what artists in Ottawa want to do adds up to a heady mix of theatrical innovation and talent.

La disparition :  Opening the evening with La disparation (She’s gone) created & performed by Marc-André Charette and Anie Richer, en Français with English surtitles, the packed Arts Court studio was treated to a poetic meditation on a mother gone, or swiftly fading. Unsentimental, as they wield their spare, poetic text with keen precision, Anie and Marc-André tell us, “It’s with my mother I spent the most hours of truth.” Here we have a loving family suddenly conscious of a mother’s “budding fragility”. The stage is bare but the picture that emerges of the woman they are losing is beautifully vivid. She’s Gone is a well paced and tightly choreographed presentation that is both homage to love, and to the theatre as a medium in which the audience is pulled into the all consuming embrace of a shared experience. In both the writing and performances, She’s Gone is magical.

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