Two self-portraits onstage: Beth Graham & Brian Webb at Theatre Network

One of the season’s most unusual collaborations happens Thursday (through Saturday) at Theatre Network when two of the country’s most accomplished and adventurous artists take to the stage. Together. But apart.

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Beth Graham and Brian Webb isn’t a play. It isn’t a dance. Dance-theatre? Nope. Veteran dancer/ choreographer (and the founding artistic director of the Brian Webb Dance Company) meets award-winning actor/playwright Graham onstage as they each perform — as themselves — a personally revealing monologue.

“Just who am I today?”: that’s the intimate self-portraiture Webb and Graham asked of themselves at the outset. And the result, presented  in movement and words, is Graham’s Turn Left Gather Speed and Webb’s An Old White Fag Sits At His Desk … Naked. The titles alone, the one intriguingly mysterious and other pure Webb-ian sass (disclaimer: he doesn’t take off his clothes), speak volumes.

As Webb explains, in a joint phone conversation with Graham this week, “we met 10 years ago, on an arts jury. We hit it off, and we’ve been pals ever since.” The agent provocateur for the production was Webb who has a history of match-making dance with theatre, the visual arts, spoken word. “Did you know,” says Webb (who refers to dance as “body dramaturgy”), “that I got the Canada Council’s very first interdisciplinary grant?”

The Graham playwright archive, which reveals an artist who tries something different every time out in subject matter and form, includes a notable experiment in fusing theatre and dance. Her 2024 award-winning Mermaid Legs is a story of sisters told by a cast of actors accompanied by a chorus of dancers. And, she says, that 2024 play, with its “movement text,” has led to a new kind of artistic exploration for her: “how does dance inform storytelling?”

playwright Beth Graham

“I wouldn’t call myself a dancer,” Graham laughs. “I resist that. Dancers train for years. But (as an actor) I can move…. I’m playing with thinking more abstractly.” And that has theatrical implications. “The way actors and dancers use space is not the same,” says Webb, like Graham as a bachelor of fine arts in acting (his mentor was Tom Peacocke).

The double-monologue production is a risky new venture, in different ways, for both artists. In An Old White Fag … “I’m reading a poem I’ve written that’s just been published,” Webb says. “There’s spoken word in all my (dance) pieces, and there’s much more of that today…. But with Beth I’m leaning how to improvise, add a bit, take a bit away ….” For his part, as a dancer/choreographer he helped Graham with the ‘movement text’ in her monologue. “And she’s beautiful doing it!” he says.

In the course of his piece Webb at 77 steps up, unflinchingly, to include the death by suicide of his long-time partner. In fact he arrives onstage at the outset carrying a cardboard box, which he tells the audience contains Bill’s ashes. “The most beautiful , intimate piece of writing ever” he thinks, is Hamlet’s “to be or not to be …” soliloquy.

Brian Webb, founding artistic director of Brian Webb Dance Company

“I may not take my clothes off (as per his title), but I reveal myself — as an old white man I’m a person of privilege and as a homosexual …” He breaks off to remember vividly that when he moved to New York as a young dancer, “I was against the law. In my lifetime! What does that mean?”

For Graham, the starting point for Left Turn Gather Speed was that in her 50s she’s arrived at a mid-life turning-point moment. “I’m going to make a change in my life. A very big change. 180 degrees. And how do I manage that?”

“I’m wrestling with how life takes left turns. My life has changed. And I’m trying to find meaning in that.” In reflecting on her theatre career as both a playwright and an actor Graham thinks “most artistic growth has happened for me, in experiments…. And one experiment leads to the next.” Maybe the biggest challenge with Left Turn Gather Speed, she thinks, is that she hasn’t created a character to be played by an actor, the way playwrights do. For the first time ever “I’m onstage as … myself.”

The Fringe is full of confessional solo shows. This isn’t one of them. “We’re working through the questions we have for ourselves,” as Graham puts it. “We’re looking to find meaning.” And sometimes, as she points out, “the meaning is asking the question.”

PREVIEW

Beth Graham and Brian Webb

Theatre: Brian Webb Dance Company

Created by and starring: Beth Graham and Brian Webb

Where: Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10709 124 St.

Running: Thursday through Saturday

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca