The opening weekend of the Ottawa Fringe Festival was a grey and rainy one, but the festival’s energy wasn’t dampened.
The annual event’s 29th edition features 62 shows, selected by a lottery system, including pieces in both English and French. I had the chance to catch several of this year’s English-language shows in the Arts Court complex, containing seven of the festival’s 10 venues. This slate of offerings from both local and visiting artists provided a diversity of theatrical experiences, guided by my own pursuit of shows with a metatheatrical bent.
Schedule of Loss (ODD Box)
In February 2023, creator-performer Claire Biddiscombe escaped her burning Ottawa apartment building with her cat, her purse, a wet bath towel, and the clothes on her back. She lost the rest of her belongings in the fire. Schedule of Loss is named for the insurance spreadsheet which Biddiscombe had to complete afterward, naming each possession, its cost, and its provenance. The solo show thoughtfully interrogates the meaning of value, exploring the space between emotional and monetary valuations of the pieces of a life.
The actor begins the show by reenacting her experience of the fire, but the bulk of the performance occurs in the aftermath. Schedule of Loss, like grief, is not linear. Biddiscombe invites audience members to hold onto pieces of her grief (represented as stones), and to select the order of scenes, which examine both what she’s lost and how she’s moved forward.
Biddiscombe recalls quipping after the fire that “I better get a really good piece of art out of this,” but, more than a joke, Schedule of Loss is a serious reflection on how creators use art to navigate trauma. The show provides Biddiscombe with self-definition and control after a life-altering event. Schedule of Loss is a process rather than a stable object, and Biddiscombe invites her audience along on this smart, sensitive, and often funny journey.
Umugisha (ODD Box)
Creator-performer Canda-Leigh Habonimana opens this Foison Theatre dance solo by defining “umugisha” as “blessing, repetition, and becoming.” It’s left ambiguous whether they are defining the Kirundi word — which indeed means “blessing” — or the performance of the same name.
Either way, Umugisha is a story of becoming; specifically, a coming-of-age story of a queer Burundian in rural Saskatchewan. Habonimana shifts between dance/drumming sequences and one-sided conversations in which they speak and listen to absent interlocutors. Certain transitions between scenes are clearer than others, resulting in a somewhat disjointed narrative arc.
Rather than story, the show’s structuring principle is the interplay between sound and movement. After offering the audience lotion, Habonimana opens the piece by leading the crowd in making their own soundscape, snapping fingers and rubbing hands together to produce the sound of rain and wind. This is the first of many soundscapes, including recorded storms, music, and voices.
At times, Habonimana’s actions seem to transform these sounds, such as when they consume a beverage at a party, and the soundtrack of overlapping conversations pivots suddenly to dance music. At others, however, the piece’s recorded soundscapes appear to determine Habonimana’s capacity for action, like when a powerful drumbeat spurs them to follow its rhythm.
The bodies of Umugisha’s audience are also implicated in this transformation of atmosphere; near the production’s end, Habonimana calls on us to snap and rub our hands together once more in order to transform a particularly thunderous recorded storm into less violent weather. Despite occasional narrative opacity, Habonimana succeeds in bringing the audience into Umugisha’s sensory world.
Robin Hood But Everyone is a Glove (Studio 2201)
I’ve seen sock puppets before, but a glove puppet show was, for me, a first. Directed by Douglas Newham, Robin Hood But Everyone is a Glove is a comedic romp told almost entirely through glove puppets, manipulated by Anne Hamels and Newham.
Newham and Douglas Futter’s script is rife with puns and elevated by visual gags. An impressive suite of puppets (by Zoe Oka) and props (by Kel MacDonald) fills the miniature playing space (also designed by MacDonald). And the theatrical world of Robin Hood But Everyone is a Glove extends beyond its small stage: it’s narrated by a disgruntled actor, Rupert (Thomas Futter), being forced to participate as community service. At one point, Robin’s puppet friend Alan-a-Dale tussles with Rupert for his narrator’s chair; at another, Hamels and Newham, as the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin, jump out to sword fight in front of the stage. But the production still leans into the specificities of puppetry; Newham’s struggle to make Robin successfully shoot his bow and arrow is a source of great comedy — and of celebration, when Hamels later helps him succeed.
Robin Hood invites its audience into the fun: signs instruct us to cheer and boo, Rupert directly addresses us (sometimes marketing his solo show), and the performers hand out noisemakers for the show’s sound effects. Robin Hood is advertised for audiences of all ages, and its creators’ clear love for puppetry translates into a funny show that anyone can enjoy.
Cracks: a one trans-woman dark comedy memoir (ODD Box)
Military school is a lot like theatre: there are props, costumes, and stage directions — or, rather, marching orders. For young Claire Lochmueller, it also offered a possible script on how to be a man, which, as a not-yet-cracked trans girl, didn’t come naturally. Lochmueller, who is now 30, transitioned in 2022; her one-woman show goes back in time, exploring the various scripts of masculinity she tried to follow, such as the Ten Commandments of her Catholic upbringing, or the “plebe packet” of rules at her military high school.
The stage is empty save for Lochmueller and a camping chair. The performer fills the space with both narration and reenactment; at one point she demonstrates the military march which, as an underachieving young officer, she and her squadron had to perform in a school competition. The narrative is nonlinear, frequently returning to the key moment when Lochmueller’s faltering façade of masculinity finally cracked.
Lochmueller’s experience in a Cincinnati improv group was central to her gender journey. Improv gave her an opportunity to be present (and sober) in her body, and demanded that she make her own choices rather than following the directions of priests, sergeants, and Benedictine monks (who, bafflingly, co-ran the military high school).
Lochmueller’s narration practices profound compassion for the scared, unhappy young person she used to be. The tenderness of this central relationship between Lochmueller now and Lochmueller past generates a show that’s heartfelt, witty, and immensely kind.
Gander Euphoria: A Pretty Gay Goose Play (LabO)
Ottawa-based Lighter Touch Art Collective follows last year’s A Sexy Pigeon Show with more fowl fun. Written by Erik Karklins and Harley Wegner and directed by Karklins, Gander Euphoria concerns Alberta goose Em (Jeannie MacRae), who’s in Ottawa because their father is part of a goose convoy on Parliament Hill. While visiting their first-ever gay bar, the fictional Gander Euphoria (referencing the goose, not the town), Em becomes embroiled in a queer resistance movement after dog-mayor Bark Sutcliffe (Zayira Bunzigiyie) makes it “illegal to touch grass” and the police begin to raid gay bars.
Bark’s speeches allude to real-life Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s refusal to attend Capital Pride in 2024 due to the event’s pro-Palestine stance, and the controversial cancellation of the 2025 Pride parade. The fictionalized Sutcliffe’s actions, however, echo Stonewall-era bar raids rather than contemporary Ottawa municipal politics. The resulting satire is somewhat muddled, with the show failing to meaningfully articulate the intended connection between Stonewall and its local points of reference.
Gander Euphoria’s performers (who also include Sarah Ivanco and Seona Henry as Em’s new gay goose friends) talk to the audience, and at times halt the play’s narrative to explain queer history/terminology or to give practical tips on protesting. Most joyfully, spectators are invited to enter Gander Euphoria and party onstage at the show’s beginning and end.
Because of these digressions, the show at times struggles to keep its plot and characters in focus, but Gander Euphoria is nevertheless a delightfully entertaining trip to the gay bar.
Working Title (LabO)
Working Title is probably the most fun one can have learning how to fill a pothole. In this devised performance piece from Turret Theatre, performers Laura Donohue and HD Chevalier don high-visibility vests and explain the seven steps of asphalt repair. Perhaps fittingly for a Montreal-based company, they don’t quite manage to fill the pothole, but Working Title absolutely succeeds at everything else.
Donohue and Chevalier perform movement sequences under oppressive urban noise, make denied appeals for leniency in various labour environments, and react to recorded critiques from a fictional director. Sudden changes in sound and lighting often rapidly transform an atmosphere that otherwise remains relatively constant. The piece tells audiences exactly what it is about — Donohue and Chevalier describe, in overlapping explanations, their aim to explore relationships with the self, labour, art, the urban environment, condominiums, nature, history, and each other.
Working Title is metatheatre at its best: cerebral, playful, and unabashedly weird. It takes itself seriously enough to not take itself seriously. It is too much, and therefore exactly whatever an audience needs it to be — whether that’s a campy comedy, a psychological thriller, or an earnest interrogation of artistic practice.
The Ottawa Fringe Festival runs until June 28. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Madeleine Vigneron
Madeleine Vigneron (she/her) is a graduate student in English Literature at Carleton University. She is an editor at Augur Magazine. Her writing has been published in khōréō, Quilt, The Undergraduate Review, Collective Reflections, writing in the gallery, and performed by the Dan Studio Series. Madeleine is based in Ottawa, Ontario.
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