Intermission Magazine: Ephemeral Artifacts with Travis Knights and Brandy Leary
(Originally published by Intermission Magazine on June 1, 2021)
Tap Dancer, Travis Knights, in Ephemeral Artifacts. Photo by Robert Kingsbury.
Excerpts:
Throughout the pandemic, the question haunting the theatre community has remained the same: When can we return to the theatre?
There are no reliable answers to this question. For more than fourteen months, the entire industry has blazed with an unsettled energy, jumping at every opportunity to return to the stage and re-experiencing the pain of loss with each subsequently cancelled show. But perhaps it’s time to take a step back from the return to traditional theatre, and ask ourselves a different question. What is theatre? How do we connect with each other, with our surroundings, and with theatre as an artform? Who are we to each other?
Two new works presented by Theatre Passe Muraille are exploring these very questions.
For both May I Take Your Arm? and Ephemeral Artifacts, the journey to their current form started long before the pandemic began.
Adapting to the circumstances and the time in which we live is not an easy process, but it can yield unexpected and exciting results. Artists are finding opportunities to experiment and create new forms of theatre they might not have considered in other circumstances. The creative team behind Ephemeral Artifacts also deliberately chose to avoid a live-streamed performance, instead opting to meld performance and video into a living installation piece. Every night, audiences are welcome to take in an interdisciplinary display, combining light, sound, movement, and the architecture of Theatre Passe Muraille’s historic building into a piece about connection, history, and gratitude.
Ephemeral Artifacts is an ever-evolving repertoire piece from ĀNANDAṀ Dancetheatre. Led by Artistic Director Brandy Leary, ĀNANDAṀ Dancetheatre thrives in creating compelling pieces that explore the ways in which we view architecture, public space, change, and the relationship between audience, performer, and space. Even though the company is known for pushing the boundaries of traditional staged performances, Leary acknowledges that this iteration of the project, presented in association with Theatre Passe Muraille, has brought them to places they would never have considered before.
“We thought, okay, what’s a way where people can still view the work, where we can look choreographically at still creating for screen, but also with light, also with sound, to make the building come alive? And I don’t think we would have ever proposed that, if there wasn’t a pandemic.”
Originally performed in 2017, the piece was created with a deliberately flexible structure. Taking an unusual direction for the company, Leary had initially envisioned this new edition of Ephemeral Artifacts, a solo performance featuring Tap Dancer Travis Knights, as a traditionally staged performance.
