Alvina Ruprecht

Encount3rs/ Rencontr3s : World Premiere of three commissioned works at the National ArtsCentre.

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 21, 2017

Photo. Barb Gray
Alberta Ballet Caelestis

In view of an exceptional arts event to celebrate the 150^th Anniversary of Canada, three choreographers and three composers were chosen from across Canada, to create specially commissioned works by the NAC. This was an exceptional opportunity for audiences across the country but also for the artists to meet other companies and other dancers from other parts of Canada. They were invited to develop their own work freely and to have the rare chance to work with a complete orchestra .Each event lasted 30 minutes in Southam Hall and the whole evening which opened last night and lasted just over two hours, left much to ponder about the future of dance in Canada. …

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Little Shop of Horrors – a first-rate performance of this grotesque campy musical!! Theatre Kraken is back on track!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 14, 2017

Theatre Kraken has never been my favourite Community Theatre but this new production of Little Shop of Horrors just changed all that. The show began with a surge of vocal and musical energy blasting from the five piece stage band under the direction of Chris Lucas. There was also the impeccable precision of director Don Fex and choreographer Brenda Solman whose efforts were right on the mark.

This story of Mr. Mushnik,(with the ever powerful and oh so versatile Lawrence Evenchick ) owner of a flower shop in the skid row district of New York, becomes the site of a strange event that suggests the War of the Worlds except that it is a hillarious drama and love story, peppered with Jewish jokes and Yiddish expressions and an underlying tragic history of the second world war. Something that Mel Brooks himself could have created but this musical was adapted from the film by Alan Menken- music, and Howard Ashman-, book and lyrics. With strong musicians (the keybords were particularly noteworthy), director Don Fex’s captured the underlying seriousness of these campy characters with great style to produce a very strong show.

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Vigilante: High Energy, Raging Fury, An Opera of Epic proportions.

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 1, 2017

Written composed and directed by Jonathan Christenson, produced by Catalyst Theatre (Edmonton) in collaboration with the NAC English Theatre

Massacre of the Donnelly family in Lucan, Ontario (1860) was one of the bloodiest crimes ever to take place in Canada. The fact that it was never solved has kept historians, writers and researchers interested for many years. As rumours grew, imaginations were fueled and the family of seven boys and their parents, who had emigrated from Ireland, were transformed into a local legend of monstrous killers who terrorized the community. Probably the best known work of fiction based on the murder, was the Donnelly Trilogy, a verse drama by James Reaney, first performed in 1973 -1974 and finally published in 2000. It came to the National Arts Centre many years ago but, as I remember, the impact of that event was minimal. The horror and the tragedy did not click with a production that mainly foregrounded the literary qualities of the text that explained the story. …

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The Associates/Les Associés : Fine evening of dance performance!

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 24, 2017

Echo by Christopher House
(The Associates)

It is easy to understand how dance is at the forefront of all performance because it is constantly pushing the boundaries of the human body, investigating the relationship between the human body and the possibilities offered by all technologies involved in spacial creation, transforming the relationship between the text and the body. We are so lucky that the Director of Dance at the NAC has the courage to bring us programmes that may not always be easily understood but that help and have always contributed to forming a demanding dance public in Ottawa.

Marie Chouinard has always been synonymous with extreme originality on the Quebec dance scene and her work seems to be a constant investigation into the anthropological sources of the human being. Emerging from the green greasy Uhrschleim of creation, ritualized movements that take us back to pre-western civilization,(not unlike Romeo Castellucci!) her dancers now propel us into new relations between the human animal and our current technological revolution.

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The Ghomeshi Effect: Sexual assault results in something being broken! A cathartic encounter at the Gladstone Theatre.

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 22, 2017

Photo: Andrew Alexander . from left to right: Marc-André Charette, Emmanuel Simon, Gabriel Lalonde, Front: Annie Lefebvre, Leah Archambault, Mekdes Teshome.

How could one name this performance that is now running at the Gladstone?? It could be docudrama; it could be multi-disciplinary theatre; it could be corporeal theatre although the text is central to the event; it could be verbatim theatre, or even socially engaged theatre that goes for the jugular as it tries to transform our culture in the same way R. Schechner and J. Beck in the 1970’s hoped to do with their political and ritual performances. Perhaps, it also wants to make people aware that many individuals are living in a “war zone” when it comes to sexual violence in our society. In fact it’s a bit of all that. A huge agenda that might seem almost overwhelming for director Jessica Ruano who also wrote the script, for the choreographer who conceived the movement portions, and for the actors who had to shift moods, narratives and characters nonstop during 75 minutes!

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Onegin: Magnificent ensemble work by the National Ballet of Canada brings to life this highly dramatic piece based on Pushkin’s verse novel

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 19, 2017

Photo. Aleksandar Antonijevic, with Xiao Nan Yu and McGee Maddox.

Spectacular narrative ballets are the forte of the National Ballet of Canada and Tchaikovsky’s work based on stories and fairy tales have become the mainstay of their production, not to discount that exquisite Romeo and Juliet set to the music of Prokofiev which brought Karen Kain to my attention many years ago. This was just after seeing her dance Nana (based on the novel by Emile Zola) with the Company of Roland Petit in Paris, Now, thanks to the choreography of John Cranko the Company has added to its repertoire, another exquisite production of storytelling on point, this one inspired by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Evgeni Onegin written in 1823. …

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Le Dire de Di : la naissance d’une petite créature mythique!

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 14, 2017

Photo: Céline Bonnier dans Le Dire de Di.

Le Dire de Di : Mise en scène de Michel Ouellette, interprété par Céline Bonnier à la Nouvelle Scène, Ottawa

Dans un premier temps, les phares alignés au fond de la scène nous aveuglent alors qu’une voix douce annonce l’arrivée d’une petite tête blonde tout ébouriffée, la merveilleuse Céline Bonnier en « Di(ane) » un ado de 16 ans. Elle sort lentement de sa boîte noire comme un animal qu’on a enfin libéré. Les phares s’éteignent doucement, la jeune personne avance vers la salle, sort de l’ombre, s’approche du lutrin (il s’agit d’une lecture-spectacle) , regarde le public furtivement et commence son « dire » en hésitant.

Bonnier capte la délicate fragilité de cette petite. Timide, elle choisit ses mots, consulte peu son texte et peu à peu, sa voix s’affirme et le texte s’évapore. On est hypnotisé par les trois couloirs de lumière qui tranchent l’espace au-dessus de sa tête comme un crucifix luisant, signe du grand malheur, le supplice qui va bientôt s’abattre sur la jeune fille. Et Di, naïve et fraiche, gaie et amoureuse de la nature, celle qui appartient à « la race des incivilisés humains, », un être profondément ancré dans le miracle de la création, nous livre son secret : une belle histoire d’amour avec la terre!

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Batsheva Dance Company’s “Last Work”: Ohad Naharin researches the performing body.

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 12, 2017

Photo: Gadi Dagon

At first, we are intrigued by the evolution of these young bodies in space: disarticulated, disjointed, straining muscles in unusual directions, in opposition to what happens to bodies executing existing dance steps. Dance has repossessed the human body in a way that makes unhuman demands on the living human creature and opens a new world.

Choreographed at first as individuals, each dancer crawls, lopes, twists, leaps, floats in from the wings, opposing the rhythms and movements of the preceding dancer, just to give us the feeling of the enormous possibilities of the human body in this investigation of what can take place in a performance space. Then groups form and reform, as all around them the fluttering and twisting of slim, elongated and finely muscular creatures jerking in and out, up and down, below and above, create a parallel dialogue with the electronic sound effects and highly dramatic music. There is so much excitement, so much activity that our gaze keeps shifting around the stage, picking up individual movements, noticing other bodies regrouping, almost as though we were watching the trembling of some nervous cellular activity under an intense microscope.

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The Blizzard of Oz: British Panto geared for winter in Ottawa, is back!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 7, 2017

Photo, Tomson Simon. After the show with the audience!

This time the choreography is slicker (with such numbers as Gotta Get Home, Steppin’ Time and Popular) the singers feel more confident, the acting is top notch, the writing takes the young and less young into account and the audience is perfectly integrated to the point where it knows its lines ahead of the performers!! Oh yes, Panto has come of age at the Gladstone and it was the greatest of pleasures to see this vibrant and bouncy cast, under the direction of Ken MacDougall, hit the spot, with the small tots, the parents and the grannies alike. …

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No Man’s Land: Complex portrayal of memory loss captures much more in the world of Pinter.

By Alvina Ruprecht | December 22, 2016

Photo courtesy of National Theatre Live. Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart

Those of us who cannot dash off to London, now have the chance to see some of the greatest English language theatrical productions in the world as filmed theatre comes to our local cinemas by satellite.

This version of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, filmed from the Wyndham Theatre in London’s West End is just one of those wonders. It was originally produced at the Old Vic in 1975 starring the “two sirs” John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson and has since toured and been given numerous productions.

In this case, the show was followed by an excellent question and answer period which let us see these actors , also two sirs, who are old friends, going back to their first contact with this play and with the theatre in general. In fact this experience was all the more special for us because it reveals the complicity of the actors, as if it were all taking place in the real home of Patrick Stewart (Hirst), who had just invited Ian McKellen (Spooner) in for a drink and then by accident spilt coffee on his jacket and had to wipe it off with a napkin! “That did happen” said Stewart “but I didn’t think anything of it, I just wiped! “ Of course we are “pissed” adds McKellen so delicately but even when we learn that the characters have just met in a pub in upper crust Hampstead Heath, it doesn’t quite seem possible because of the closeness they exude along with a slightly playful familiarity that feeds the naturalism of their performance style.

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