HOME, a large-scale spectacle from the American theatre artist Geoff Sobelle and a collective of co-creators, is running at the Bluma Appel Theatre in the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts though June 16.Sea Sloat/Supplied
Wars rage, the world burns, democracy teeters, but housing is still the number one topic on the minds of Canadians. The next federal election continues to look like it will hinge on the issue.
The Luminato Festival Toronto, now entering its final weekend, has smartly programmed two performances that pitch in to solve the city’s housing crisis – temporarily, anyway.
In both HOME and I Am From Reykjavik, artists build housing in front of an audience, then demolish it – inviting onlookers to consider the emotions behind the issue and think beyond real-estate prices or the cost of rent for an hour or two (or seven).
HOME, a large-scale spectacle from the American theatre artist Geoff Sobelle and a collective of co-creators, is running at the Bluma Appel Theatre in the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts through June 16.
As lyricist Hal David noted, a house is not a home; Sobelle’s show illustrates how the former becomes the latter, through magic and clown and post-dramatic partying.
Sobelle, an illusionist before he became a theatre maker, begins the performance by casually walking from the audience onto what looks like an empty stage, pulling the frame of a wall out from the wings and stapling a plastic sheet to it.
Using this portable wall as a kind of screen, Sobelle moves it around the stage to magically reveal parts of a home – first a bed, then a desk, then a door.
HOME gradually evolves from melancholy magic into a clown show about cohabitating.Sea Sloat/Supplied
The first fragmentary scenes of HOME take place in this deconstructed room, where women seemingly signifying three generations appear out of thin air; the way Sobelle mixes illusion and physical theatre here to explore the life cycle is extraordinary.
Soon, however, the door opens and construction workers enter to complete the picture. A two-storey house is built in front of the audience with working kitchen, dining room and bathroom.
HOME – which features a cast of six that sometimes seems more like 60 because of quick changes – gradually evolves from melancholy magic into a clown show about cohabitating, with elements sure to please both fans of Mr. Bean and theatre wizard Robert Lepage.
Banal domestic moments of life are turned into vivid choreographic routines – people getting up, doing the laundry, making meals, watching television. Sometimes the dialogue-free action happens in multiple rooms at once as if one family lives in this house; sometimes multiple scenes overlap in one room as if time has been flattened and the house is haunted by all its past and present inhabitants at once.
In theatre, the word “house” is used to refer to the areas in a performance venue that the audience accesses, such as the lobby and the auditorium. By eventually bringing a slew of spectators up on stage, and having performers infiltrate the seats, Sobelle lends the St Lawrence Centre’s “house” a feeling of home as well.
HOME’s a neat show, for sure. Amid the housing crisis, however, I did wonder about its aesthetic emphasis on what appears to be a single-family detached home, probably in the suburbs somewhere, and the attempt to make a universalist statement within that environment. The tone veers into nostalgia for what many consider an unsustainable way of life. Many people living in densifying Toronto won’t recognize their home in HOME.
I Am From Reykjavik, by contrast, made more of a statement about housing as shelter in a crowded city, or so it seemed to me; it’s a piece of durational live art that Sonia Hughes performed in four parts of Toronto over the course of the past week before taking off to her home in England.
On Wednesday, I observed the British performance artist in Yonge-Dundas Square wrestling together pieces of wood to make a small structure there; she was on site for seven hours – and I popped by twice to observe her progress.
What do passersby think about when they see a Black woman building a little house in the middle of a public square? I thought about the City of Toronto issuing an injunction to stop “vigilante carpenter” Khaleel Seivwright from constructing small wooden homes for the homeless in 2021 – and now funding and promoting a festival where the same was done in the name of art.
Thankfully, however, Hughes’s work wasn’t framed by one of Luminato’s “It’s Art!” banners and so many Torontonians and tourists simply asked the approachable artist what she was doing – and part of the appeal of her project, for me, was listening to her chat with strangers.
A sightseeing bus driver, who was Black, talked with her for a while and then offered to bring her food and some water. My 76-year-old father, who is white, asked Hughes whether she was from Nigeria and what the message of her piece was; she told him she was from England and there was no message.
I asked Hughes why her performance was called I Am From Reykjavik; she said it was because people in Britain often ask her where she’s from – some out of curiosity, others with more of an edge to the question – and, when she tells them, they often follow up by asking where she’s really from. So now, sometimes, she says, “I am from Reykjavik.”
Luminato Festival Toronto continues to June 16.