Finding the right touch

Winnipeg Free Press

2 days ago

With their latest original stage production, opening tonight at Prairie Theatre Exchange, Sick + Twisted is inviting audiences not just to look and to listen, but to feel.
Before each performance of Neither Here Nor There, up to eight guests will have the opportunity to be led onto the Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage for a 'touch tour,' allowing low-vision, blind and sighted audience members alike to experience the set and gain an understanding of the production's non-traditional geography.
Playing on a traverse stage, also known as a corridor or alley, the company's adaptation of the legend of the blind seer Tiresias places audiences on either side of the action, says director Debbie Patterson.
BROOK JONES / FREE PRESS
Tyler Sneeby (left) and Vivi Dabee star in Neither Here Nor There.
With the stage bisected by a sheer curtain, the audience can only see half of the show clearly, the other blurred by the barricade.
The staging and the touch tour play into the trailblazing company's commitment to disability esthetics, using lived experience with disability as an opportunity for exploration and discovery rather than a barrier to experience, says Patterson.
'When you can't walk across the room, every other way becomes available to you,' she says.
One of the production's three blind actors describes their experience with vision loss as one of 'limitless possibility.'
'We embrace the barriers we face as potent catalysts for discovery and innovation, so the esthetic choices in this production have been arrived at through this process, giving us this utterly new approach to making theatre. No one else is making theatre like this,' says Patterson.
By decentring vision as a prerequisite for participation, the company was able to emphasize theatre as a complete sensory experience, with a script that expresses every action with a corresponding audio cue, designed by Dasha Plett, who was just nominated for a Toronto theatre award — a Dora — for her work in Buddies in Bad Times' production of Roberto Zucco.
'All the props are mimed, but the sound effects are hyperrealistic,' Patterson says.
Created and performed by a team of blind and transgender artists, Neither Here Nor There had its start during the pandemic when Patterson sought to create a work developed by members of both communities.
'One participant wrote a song about how being blind felt like being neither here nor there, and that idea of being in an in-between really resonated with some of the trans artists,' Patterson says.
The show's cast includes Lara Rae as the production's hostess, a cross between a Greek chorus and a standup comic who periodically comments on the action. Tyler Sneesby, a.k.a. DJ Hunnicutt, plays Zeus. Plett and Gislina Patterson (We Quit Theatre) also appear, as do Vivi Dabee as Tiresias and Vivian Cheung as the character's modern counterpart, Ti. Making their stage debut is m patchwork monoceros, who also designed the set.
BROOK JONES / FREE PRESS
The stage is split by a sheer curtain so the audience can only see half of the show clearly.
'My character is a person who has vision, who can see the future, who understands trends, but because she knows so much, she keeps herself small, experiencing a type of loneliness no one else can understand,' says Cheung, a blind actor, triathlete, author, graphic novelist, accessible yoga instructor and Dora-nominated theatre creator from Toronto performing in Winnipeg for the first time.
'Oftentimes, when a person lives with a physical disability, they have to explain themselves repeatedly until they're heard, and that gets very fatiguing. I can't stress enough that we need more listening in this world, more quiet participation and quiet leadership.'
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That's what Cheung says she found working with Sick + Twisted, which implemented her insights into the way the production took shape.
The script calls for Ti to make a stir-fry in her home kitchen, but when the actor pointed out that if she were holding a cellphone while doing it, it would end up in the wok, the team quickly decided with Cheung to mime all of the cooking actions instead.
'Now our sound designer Dasha is choreographing the sound to support my cooking. It's become a duet in cooking between miming and movement, with the stage manager timing the sizzling and the sounds of vegetables going into the wok,' says Cheung
'It's a collaboration in every sense of the word.'
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Ben WaldmanReporter
Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University's (now Toronto Metropolitan University's) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.
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