Theatre Network’s best-of-Fringe ‘February Festival Weekend’: the lineup

Theatre Network is throwing a bash, a five-show February Festival Weekend, at the Roxy. Thursday through Sunday they present a quintet of productions — four of them from last summer’s Fringe — on the Nancy Power and Lorne Cardinal stages.

In the lineup is Where Foxes Lie, Jezec Sanders’s adroit, disturbing solo thriller about the viral spread of a vicious rumour in a small town. A prairie gothic horror show of mounting dread by the dexterous young playwright who brought the Fringe The Cabin on Bald Dune. Sanders himself stars in this cleverly constructed ghost story — a ghost story told by a ghost? — in which the act of storytelling itself drives the story. Intrigued? And there’s this: his eerie co-star is a gooseneck lamp. Erik Richards’s soundscape for the Ready Go Theatre production he directs is a major asset too. If you missed it at last summer’s Fringe, don’t blow it again.

Chris Bullough in Undiscovered Country. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Undiscovered Country, by and starring the magnetic actor/ playwright/ singer-songwriter Chris Bullough, held over at the Fringe, chronicles the quest of of fictional “90s country rock legend” Tyler Wainwright Jr. to find the song that will snatch us all from the toxified apocalypse. I found it lyrical and hypnotic, and darkly comic, when I saw it in an earlier incarnation. Bullough is a true original. And his songs have a mesmerizing poetry all their own. “Hide me away in a clear-cut forest…. Float me away on a river polluted.”

Unkl Stiv’s Looping Machine by and starring Steve Pirot. Photo supplied.

And speaking as we are of true originals, the February Festival Weekend is your chance to meet theatre artist Steve Pirot, if you haven’t before. The actor/ playwright/ poet philosopher, who has a brilliance all his own, has a way of unhinging words from their usual mooring and putting them together in unexpected ways. And Unkl Stiv’s Looping Machine, billed as “a spoken-word rhapsody,” sounds like Pirot weirdness at its finest.

It’s Just You And Me by the contemporary dance troupe Viva Dance Company, a hit at the Fringe, is an exploration of “the fluidity of identity” and the “continual reinvention of self.” Stephanie Lilley, the company founder, directs a cast of 12.

Joining the four Fringe shows in the weekend lineup is Shivamanohari Company’s 11-dancer Dvaita / Duality, which explores, in amalgamating Kuchipudi and Balinese dance forms, colonial constructs of gender, and distinct but complementary male and female energies.

February Festival Weekend runs Thursday through Sunday at the  Roxy. The full show schedule and tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.