Three years ago the Belfry transformed its March programming when it introduced its annual SPARK Festival. Prior to SPARK the company presented three shows in its Studio space over six weeks and while the work was first-rate, the programming lacked focus and a community feel.

All that changed in 2009 when the Belfry compressed the festival into just two weeks, doubled the number of shows, added dozens of free events and reached out to local artists.

SPARK is broken up into five components: big shows, miniplays, new play readings, professional development workshops and one big party right in the middle of the event.

The festival will kick off on Monday, March 12 with a free new play reading of My Memory’s Not So Good by Matthew Payne from Victoria’s Theatre SKAM. Inspired by the late great arts maven Joan Mans (she was a character), Matthew and a group of Victoria artists recently spent a week in Banff developing the script for a future production.

The first week’s big shows, Goodness and Kitt & Jane, will start on Tuesday, March 13.

Goodness, from Toronto’s Volcano, has played Edinburgh, New York and Rwanda, stunning audiences at each theatre. While the play examines genocide through a series of concentric stories enveloping each other, we are never told where the genocide has occurred, leaving us all to question what we believe. Goodness is about what happens in the gaps between experiencing, telling and hearing.

If you are interested in social justice issues, Goodness is sure to challenge and engage you in ways you never thought theatre could.

Creators from Victoria’s SNAFU Dance Theatre, Ingrid Hansen, Kathleen Greenfield and Rod Peter Jr. will premiere their latest work, Kitt & Jane. Kitt & Jane is the Belfry’s 2012 Incubator project; every two years we commission local artists to develop and produce a new piece for SPARK.

SNAFU’s work has been described as fresh and daring, provocative and engaging -and, at times, wonderfully silly. Kitt & Jane is an unofficial sequel to Little Orange Man, their sold-out hit at the Vancouver and Victoria International Fringe Festivals this year.

While SNAFU’s work is inspired by a radical collection of ideas (Viewpoints – a creation practice that provides a vocabulary for thinking about and acting upon movement and gesture, Butoh – a Japanese avant garde performance art, found-object puppetry, clown, ritual, fables, politics, children, history, and lore), it is always surprising and delightful.

Each Wednesday through Saturday, prior to these big shows, we’ll present a series of free miniplays. These quirky pieces, performed throughout the Belfry will feature new work from local artists Missie Peters, Dave Morris, Krystal Cook, Theatre Inconnu and, in an unique collaboration with Judd Palmer from Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Puente Theatre.

Miniplays run each night at 7:20 and 7:40 pm. While they are free, attendance is first come, first served. Trust us, you’ll need to be there early as capacity is limited; last year we had a show in a closet with one actor and one audience member. You could see a musical in a washroom, a dance piece on the roof or a comic monologue in an office.

For the past eighteen months the Belfry has been working on a new play, now titled Home is a Beautiful Word, about homelessness in Victoria. On Monday and Tuesday (March 19 & 20), we’ll give this play its first public reading.

Home is a Beautiful Word is a piece of verbatim theatre; the script is created entirely from transcribed interviews that playwright / journalist Joel Bernbaum has had with a wide spectrum of people from Victoria – it’s the community’s voice on stage and the story is fascinating.

We’d love to have you there to hear what others have said and to hear your thoughts about the play.

The big shows in the second week of SPARK are Shane Koyczan’s When I Was A Kid and Fish Eyes by Anita Majumdar.

You probably know Shane. He’s best known for the piece “We Are More,” which he performed at the 2010 Olympic Opening Ceremonies, but he was an established and well-respected artist long before that.

Accompanied by his band, The Short Story Long, Shane explores what it means to grow up – what we learn, what we forget, what we gain and what we give up. When I Was A Kid is a quest to rediscover our silliness and to embrace our wonder, to let go of our fear and spark our imaginations.

You only have to hear Shane Koyczan once to be hooked. He is humane, furious, sexy, political, tragic and so funny you’ll be laughing through your tears.

Anita Majumdar will just have you laughing. Her piece, Fish Eyes, complete with Bollywood dance moves, tackles imperialism and cultural misapproriation, with a sly nod as she struggles to find herself and her cultural identity. This comedic “east meets west” story celebrates the joy of youth and heritage.

The second week of SPARK will also feature a new round of free miniplays and Belfry 101 Live.

Belfry 101 is our program for local high school students (public, private and home schooled)  from around Greater Victoria. Each Spring Break we throw these intrepid students into a rehearsal hall with a huge mission – to write, create, rehearse and mount a new show in just one week. The results are always astounding.

We’ve been running Belfry 101 for over 10 years now and it’s been very satisfying – we’ve had graduates tour the country with their own shows and this year former student Rod Peters Jr. has a show, Kitt & Jane, in SPARK.

There will be much more happening at the Belfry during these two wonderful weeks – much of it free. Tickets, on sale now, are $20 for the big shows. If you’re a University or College student you get $5 off; if you’re in high school you’ll get $10 off.

Whole-body voice training for performers, teachers & creative professionals in Victoria, BC

Fitzmaurice Voicework® is a whole-body approach that helps you communicate with freedom, flexibility, power and authenticity – the full range of humanity that can be expressed in the voice. The work will help you to:

-increase vocal ease, resonance and health
-awaken true spontaneity enhance presence through relaxed energization
-deepen emotional availability
-release freedom of breath
-transform nervousness into vibrancy

The work combines classical voice-training with adaptations of yoga, shiatsu, Reichian bodywork and other practices.

Dates and times:
January 27 – 29, 2012
Friday 5pm – 8pm
Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 10am – 5pm

Location:
The Belfry Theatre, Studio A
1291 Gladstone Ave, Victoria BC V8T 1G5

Cost:
$180 – $260
(sliding scale — no questions asked)

Info/Registration:
www.noahdrew.com/voice-workshops.html

Noah Drew has worked across North America as an actor, composer, sound designer and teacher. One of Canada’s only two Certified Fitzmaurice Voicework® teachers, Noah is a graduate of the MFA Acting program at Temple University in Philadelphia. He has studied a broad range of vocal training techniques including: Linklater, Lessac, Roy Hart, Bel Canto, Grotowski/Barba and the Suzuki Method. Noah has been honoured with six Jesse Richardson awards and a Siminovitch Prize nomination.

The workshop meets Tuesdays, 7-10, in Studio B at The Belfry Arts Centre, beginning February 7, 2012, and culminates with the popular Playwrights Cabaret, on Monday, April 9. The cost is $225.

Contact Charles Tidler, 250-386-3786, or e-mail for more details. Enrollment limited to seven writers; reserve your space now!

By John Threlfall

She’s written about middle-age sex lives, teenagers with lethal attitudes and ad execs on the verge of nervous breakdowns; she’s been a lousy waitress, a Milan-based fashion model and a creative director for Starbucks; she’s mother to a young son, wife to a successful film and television actor, and the award-winning author of a dozen plays staged both nationally and internationally. Now, she’s back at the Belfry with a slice-of-life trio of X-chromosome monologues that seem more captured than created . . . but with a bio like that, it’s hard to know where truth ends and storytelling begins. Will the real Michele Riml please speak up?

Regardless of how little you know about her personally, dedicated Belfry audiences are already familiar with Riml’s work: Sexy Laundry was a smash hit back in 2003, and the far more dramatic high-school stand-off, Rage, was one of the more memorable offerings in 2009′s debut SPARK Festival. And while her latest—the world premiere of the Belfry-commissioned on the edge —returns to familiar themes of identity, relationships and consumerism (all with her characteristic wry-gal slant), any similarity to the actual playwright is mostly accidental. True, she does share certain affinities and insights with her characters and plotlines, and she does have a healthy sense of humour leavened by the life experiences of most early-40s women, but anyone expecting to hear Riml’s own voice emanating from the stage is in for a bit of a surprise. “I don’t think things up,” she says. “I write them down.”

The Siminovitch Prize-nominated playwright is explaining how she writes such effective characters and dialogue, regardless of age, gender or socio-economic situation — a process many might think simply involves having her dramatic creations share her own thoughts. “It’s not just me sitting around thinking up clever things to say,” she admits. “When the characters start talking to me, that’s when I know there’s something to be written. It’s more a way of seeing the world, walking around with a filter and processing things without even thinking about it. It’s so much more than just sitting down and typing—that, for me, is almost the end of it. I love the mystery of what makes people do what they do; I find human beings wonderful and infinitely interesting.”

Granted, while she enjoys the creative process (what she laughingly describes as “the artsy-fartsy airy-fairy part”), Riml doesn’t shy away from the real work of being a playwright — the research. “You don’t sit down to write something unless you know what you’re talking about,” she says. Case in point? The female cop in on the edge; she may have had the idea for that monologue, but the character’s voice only came after Riml spent time grilling an actual RCMP officer. “Your characters have to be authentic; if you don’t have the language, you won’t have the authenticity. I’m interested in that moment where things break or people fall apart — that’s when the truth, the authenticity, gets revealed.”

No surprise then that her own copywriting background helped inform the advertising world of her acclaimed 2008 play Poster Boys — but did her time on Italian runways provide background for the fashion addict at the heart of on the edge? “I had no clue,” she laughs. “I won a contest when I was 19 and got to go to Milan and work in a showroom as a model for a while; I was out of the sticks of North Vancouver and was suddenly in the centre of the high-end fashion world.” Alas, it didn’t last long and she was soon back home in Vancouver, being “a really terrible waitress at about 15 different restaurants” before segueing into part-time playwriting and ad copywriting.

“I just wanted a job that had something to do with writing,” she says of the gig that would eventually make her associate creative director for Starbucks. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to make rent money by writing plays. And advertising taught me so much about discipline, about letting go of my ego — if the client doesn’t like your idea, you don’t get to do it.” It also offered a flexible schedule for writing, and invaluable access to the manufacture of desire. “Whether you’re talking Holt Renfrew or Value Village, there’s a certain kind of woman who just loves to shop; it can become an addiction, and take the same place as alcohol for an alcoholic—which is particularly relevant in our society, because we all have a bit of that in us. In a funny way, it’s a search for something . . . but in the wrong direction.”

There’s that keen sense of insight again, which forms the real backbone of on the edge (as one character says, “truth is my identity”). But while she’s written three women with a lot on their minds, Riml equally credits her reunion with the Sexy Laundry team of director Andrew McIlroy and actor Susinn McFarlen. “We make a good unit. Some directors don’t even want the writer in the room on a new play, but I work really closely with Andrew; he actually lets me speak in the rehearsal hall — he says if he doesn’t let me talk, he can hear me sighing anyway,” she chuckles. “And Susinn is probably my truest muse as an actor . . . we just breathe the same way or something.”

on the edge is loosely based on the earlier trio of female-focussed monologues Under The Influence that played the Vancouver Fringe back in the late ’90s and the Arts Club in 2000. Yet only the “timeless, addicted consumerist woman” survived the transition to on the edge. “I just outgrew the other two monologues,” Riml admits. “When I wrote Under the Influence, I was in my mid-20s and I’m now in my mid-40s — I’ve always liked women in their 40s, and now that I am one, I like them even more — but one of the original pieces was about Princess Diana . . . another was about a new mom, and it wasn’t up to what I wanted it to be anymore.”

Riml spent last year completing on the edge — which she partially wrote in the Belfry’s belfry. “I think the folks working there thought I was completely anti-social, because I’d climb up the stairs in the morning and not come down again till four o’clock in the afternoon,” she recalls with a laugh. “But I was over without my son, without all the different things you have to do as a mother, so I just got to write and workshop the play — and I loved it. That building has such great energy, it’s an amazing place to work.”

But just because contemporary theatre audiences are exactly the place you’ll find these kinds of three-in-one women, don’t think this is just another canny marketing move by Riml. (Would you like coffee with that play?) “I wish I could write a piece of commercial theatre,” she laughs. “I’d like to be able to know that the audience was this or that, but I don’t really come from that place. I’m just sharing my experiences as a woman, and I’m lucky that I’m speaking to a theatre-going crowd.”

Always good with a closing line, Riml reveals her final insight just as the curtain falls on our interview. “Thanks for asking such interesting questions,” she says. “I was thinking about them at the same time I was planning a potluck lunch for some friends — and I kept going between, ‘Do I have enough forks?’ to ‘Who is the real Michele Riml?’,”she laughs. “And I gotta tell you, the forks kept coming back to my mind . . . so that’s who the real Michele Riml is.”

—-
If John Threlfall was a trio of monologues, one would run the communications desk for UVic’s Fine Arts faculty, one would be a sexy husband, jaunty father and west-coast witch, and one would be working on those books he’s supposed to be writing. Ah well, it’s like that old Meatloaf song: two out of three ain’t bad.

Michael Shamata, Artistic Director of The Belfry Theatre, will be holding General Equity and Non-Equity Auditions:

When: Tuesday, January 17 & Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Times: 10 am – 6 pm
Where: Vancouver – False Creek Community Centre’s Youth Lounge, 1318 Cartwright Street (Granville Island)

For the audition, please prepare two audition pieces of approximately three minutes in length. Our preference would be: one Canadian piece and one other of your choice – Canadian, classical, or contemporary American or British. Please no self-written pieces, or pieces from plays that have not been professionally produced.

Actors: Please forward your headshot and resume to the Belfry Theatre, “General Auditions” before the deadline of January 9, 2012, after which you will be contacted to book an audition time. NO PHONE CALLS OR FAXES, PLEASE.

Audition time priority will be given to Equity Members and Equity registered apprentices.

Please Note: We have a limited number of audition spots. If you have not been notified of an audition time by January 10, this means we don’t have room to see you this time around. Erin Macklem will call you. We would prefer that you don’t call her.

To those who were seen at last season’s General Auditions, priority will be given to those we have not yet seen. We will not be holding General Auditions in Victoria at this time.

The Belfry’s 2012-13 Main Stage Season has yet to be announced.

Mailing Address:

General Auditions
Belfry Theatre
1291 Gladstone Avenue
Victoria, BC
V8T 1G5

Email:

associate@belfry.bc.ca
Subject: General Audition
Please keep files under 1 MB.

We’ll be closing the Administration and Box Offices from noon until 4:00pm on Friday December 16, for a little festive fun with Mr. Claus.

While the offices are closed, you can still purchase tickets and gift certificates online anytime at tickets.belfry.bc.ca

You can get a Belfry gift certificate, in any value, online. Plus, for a limited time, we are offering gift certificates for one of Fernwood’s fine restaurants for before or after the show.

If you are coming to see Jitters (or you’re just in the neighbourhood) please bring in something to put under our lovely Christmas tree in the lobby.

Non-perishable items are preferred, but hey – if you want to bring a Turkey we’ll make sure it gets there quickly. Thanks for helping out.

This past week was an exciting one for the Homeless Project. Our creative team spent six days in working with four actors, reading hundreds of pages of interview transcripts.

These interviews have all been done over the past year with people around Greater Victoria: Homeless people, housed people, kids, teenagers, senior citizens, spiritual leaders, social workers, police officers, judges, lawyers, business owners and people walking down the street.All interviews were then transcribed, and names/identifying information was changed.

The next stage of the play building process is to do more interviews, this time, door to door. Playwright Joel Bernbaum will be knocking on doors in neighborhoods around the city over the next two months. Maybe he’ll knock on yours?

Got something to say about Homelessness in Victoria? Send Joel an email: joel(at)belfry.bc.ca.

Related Stories
http://www.belfry.bc.ca/news/the-homeless-project/
http://www.belfry.bc.ca/news/the-homeless-project-question-period/

Yaz Bol, Elaine Gallagher, Robert Garfat, Tim Gosley, Richard Olafson present stage readings from their new plays.

Explore the edge between page & stage where new theatre begins!

Admission by donation.

[WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE; ADULT THEMES]