Anita La Selva’s interdisciplinary 12 Litres 8800 Steps frames caregiving as an emotional odyssey

Going by its scale, creator-performer Anita La Selva’s new play 12 Litres 8800 Steps doesn’t immediately scream “epic”: the story’s geography isn’t expansive, and the production features just one other actor. But La Selva considers the emotional voyage of her largely autobiographical protagonist, Woman, to be a kind of odyssey.

“It’s this massive journey that this woman goes on in her life,” said La Selva in a phone call. “The degree to which she goes through these different experiences and then is affected by them is huge — just as huge as if she were in Greek times, on a boat, traveling around the world… It’s an odyssey because an odyssey often doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t follow a specific trajectory… Life is often never how we plan it.”

The journey that inspired the show involved both caregiving and grief. In 2014, La Selva’s partner passed away after a long struggle with alcoholism. A little while later, a friend remembered La Selva’s childhood love of horses and suggested she try equine therapy. It immediately clicked with the artist. “I worked with this one horse [named Spiritwalker] that gave me all these different messages and prompts about how to process what I was going through, and how I could pick myself back up… after all the chaos and destruction and exhaustion,” she said. 

Spiritwalker was constantly in motion during their session. “The message was: ‘I understand. I understand your pain, I understand your grief. I understand — I feel that too,’” said La Selva. “‘We feel these big emotions, and we’ve both been broken in the past, but we still got to keep walking. We got to keep moving.’ And so I started… walking, one to two hours a day.”

During those daily walks, La Selva often found herself looking back at her time caring for her partner. These memories took the form of images and sounds, which the artist soon combined into the draft of a script. The pandemic meant that the first public iteration of 12 Litres 8800 Steps was a short film with the same title, which — to La Selva’s surprise — made it into 18 international film festivals, including the Sherman Oaks Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Now, the stage version is premiering at the Factory Theatre Mainspace in a co-production between the Unbridled Theatre Collective and Aluna Theatre (which has supported the play’s development over several years). The show is co-directed by La Selva and Beatriz Pizano, artistic director of Aluna.

La Selva believes that a lot of contemporary media fails to sensitively depict addiction, particularly when it comes to caregivers’ points of view. “I really wanted to tell the story of the people who are affected by their loved ones’ addictions. Because I don’t think that that is a story that we see very often,” she said. “We see really bad versions of it on television, like Intervention and shows like that, where you just see a bunch of people screaming at the person who’s struggling with the addiction. And I found that very unrealistic.

“I wanted to tell the story of how difficult it is to cope,” she continued. “‘How do we take care of people? How do we take care of ourselves?’ Or, ‘How do we not take care of ourselves?’ Which is usually what happens when we’re dealing with someone else’s addiction or illness or struggles, when we’re so focused on that other person.”

Though it’s been carefully refined over many workshops — “the whole process is a bit of an odyssey,” La Selva reflected — the show’s associative structure reflects its creator’s initial deluge of memories. To render this nonlinear succession of images, La Selva, Pizano, and production designer Trevor Schwellnus take an interdisciplinary approach. “There’s projection, there’s video, there’s a lot of immersive sound [by Thomas Ryder Payne and Daniel Tessy],” said La Selva. “I’ve created a hospital world. I’ve created the woman’s internal world. I’ve created an outside world … and then we’ve got [a] fantasy world as well … We’ve used a lot of the design elements to really enhance those worlds, to create those atmospheres.”

12 Litres 8800 Steps also riffs on La Selva’s experience of equine therapy, with the performer Brad Cook embodying a horse via wordless choreography by Victoria Mata. “From very early on, I wanted a horse presence on stage, and at the beginning, I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be a puppet or a real person, but I trashed the idea of the puppet,” said La Selva. “It just felt too artificial. And we had seen a lot of shows with those big puppet horses, like War Horse, and that was not what I wanted. I wanted the horse to be very, very intimate with the woman.”

This movement-based relationship contrasts text-heavy scenes in which Woman describes, in exact detail, the schedule of her packed days of caregiving, which involve a constant flurry of activity and only five hours of sleep. The monologues help underline that an odyssey like Woman’s ultimately unfolds on a day-to-day level. “‘What is the moment-to-moment-to-moment-to-moment experience that we all go through?’” asked La Selva. “Sometimes we think about it as a big, sweeping thing, but in fact, it’s all these tiny moments that we have to cope with and that we have to deal with, that just start to accumulate.”

It’s highly personal material that La Selva has already seen resonate with audiences. “Even when I made the film,” La Selva recalled, “people came out of the woodwork and said: ‘I saw your film, I need to tell you something.’ And then they’d be telling me something very private, very deep, very important, and oftentimes very painful for them. 

“Just getting people to talk about these subjects is such a privilege.”

12 Litres 8800 Steps runs from May 1 to 17 at Factory Theatre. More information is available here. 

The Unbridled Theatre Collective and Aluna Theatre are Intermission partners. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Liam Donovan

Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto. His Substack newsletter is available at loamdonovan.substack.com.

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