"We create original and daring work inspired by plays, poems, history and literature with an eye to the relationship between text and movement. We are committed to creating plays that are spare yet image drenched and embrace the language of text and the body. …Our plays are challenging, dream-like, capricious and rich with meaning."
Although it is always encouraging to hear about Toronto-based theatre directors and companies making names for themselves locally and nationally, it is truly inspiring to personally know one such director and the work of her company. That director is Allyson McMackon and her company, Theatre Rusticle, consistently produces shows that you would never have thought of yourself, but wish you had.
McMackon's dual background of modern dance and theatre gives her productions a unique flavour. Dialogue is sparse but purposeful, movement is physically powerful but narratively significant, and staging is thoughtful but looks effortless. The repetition of key phrases and actions, a device McMackon uses frequently, never feels stale or forced. The balance between minimalism and richness is consistently struck and continuously maintained.
What makes Theatre Rusticle most interesting to me is what work they choose to adapt, and how they choose to adapt it. Not content with merely editing down or transposing the source material, McMackon and her team take cultural cornerstones such as Macbeth and Peter and the Wolf and elevate them to an entirely different dimension of thought and emotion.
Birnam Wood, Theatre Rusticle's 2010 take on Shakespeare's Macbeth, transported the audience to the titular wood, where tree spirits return to their long-ago destroyed forest and find themselves acting out the joy, aggression, love, and betrayal of the past. Audience members who expected a retelling, or even a chronologically accurate allusion, would have initially been disappointed. There is a King, but he should not be confused with Macbeth. And there was despair and death, but we are discouraged from putting any names to those who are faced with them. Instead, Birnam Wood took the kernels of those oft-tread themes we associate with Macbeth and allowed them to transcend time and location. There is no way Macbeth held any ballroom dances, but in dancing the spirits experienced love and anger and failure on a near-Shakespearean scale. It was unorthodox, it was mesmerizing, and it was accented with incredible costumes and set.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gMF2S-Knig (the uploader has, unfortunately, disabled embedding)
Stay tuned for "Peter and the Wolf".
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