It’s a fairly safe assumption that Edward Lear would have very much enjoyed attending the Erring at King George multi-disciplinary arts festival taking place the first two weekends of May.
After all, the late English artist, illustrator, musician, author, and poet — best known for his popular ‘nonsense’ collections of poems and short stories — was as creative and whimsical as it gets. There’s no question he would have found himself very much at home in the midst of like-minded creators gathered to showcase their talents at the former East City school at Hunter Street East and Armour Road.
With The Lear Project, Brad Brackenridge and Dreda Blow are bringing together the elements of puppetry and dance to introduce audiences to one of the 19th century’s most productive and multi-faceted creators who, among other achievements, popularized the limerick form of poetry.
Presented by Public Energy Performing Arts and sponsored in part by kawarthaNOW, festival dates are May 6 to 8 and May 13 to 15. Tickets range in price from $5 to $30, can be purchased online at eventbrite.ca/e/erring-at-king-george-tickets-311827001957. Tickets will also be available at the door.
“We didn’t know exactly what this was going to turn out to be but then we did a little tour of the school,” recalls Brackenridge, a longtime theatre and film actor and designer and puppeteer, who previously “worked on a little thing” with Blow, leading to a goal “to work together on something else.”
“One of the (school) rooms had a lot of children’s books — storybooks and so on. Dreda talked about one book that she was familiar with as a tot, The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear. I had heard the name. Other than that, I wasn’t too familiar with him. But we kept coming back to that until we said ‘Okay, let’s attack the subject of Edward Lear and nonsense in his fantastical world.’ That was the seed of it.”
Blow, a dance-theatre artist, adds “finding a way to combine our disciplines — how dance and puppetry might meet in the middle” was a huge motivating factor in their working together again.
“This was percolating in our heads as we walked through the school for the first time and thought about what we could do in this big old building,” she says, adding she was most familiar with Lear’s famous poem ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’.
“I’ve always wanted to do something with that,” Blow says. “It’s so weird and bizarre and fun and romantic and sweet. That was sort of our point of entry. As we started to read up a little more on him, we were more and more fascinated with him, as a man and with his life.”
“He was very lonely … tales of rejection and unrequited love,” Blow explains. “He was epileptic, which caused him a lot of shame. He was one of 15 brothers and sisters. His mother sent him away to be raised by his oldest sister. He had these bouts of depression that he referred to as ‘the morbids’. We found this parallel between this beautiful, ridiculous, and lovely children’s world of fantasy characters and made-up stories and this really hard, sad, lonely and isolated life.”
The result of their research and script-writing collaboration, says Brackenridge, is “four separate pieces we’re calling chapters. We’ve taken poems, and added recorded music, puppets and movement.”
“Rather than having a clear, linear narrative that links them all, they’re like little windows into Lear’s world,” Blow adds.
The chapters are subtitled ‘How Pleasant To Know Him’, ‘How Unpleasant To Be Him’, ‘Uncle Arly And The Two Old Men’, and ‘The Owl, The Pussycat, The Nonsense’.
“One chapter is sort of a duo of two poems that we bring to life in a stairwell,” Blow says. “Another is this ridiculous sort of music hall Victorian-style song and dance. There’s a little bit of tap dancing but we bring in modern influences as well. We’re like travelling minstrels that are singing and talking and sharing, letting people know who this fellow Lear is.”
“Each chapter stands on its own. Each is entertaining and interesting in its own right. The nature of the festival is that people choose their own adventure. We had that in mind when building this thing. They don’t need to be seen in a particular order and they don’t all need to be seen to be understood.”
The four chapters of The Lear Project will be presented successively on each day of Erring at King George: at 7:30, 8:20, 8:50 and 9:35 p.m. on May 6; at 3:30, 4:20, 4:50 and 5:35 p.m. on May 7; at 2:30, 3:20, 3:50 and 4:35 p.m. on May 8; at 7:30, 8:15, 8:50 and 9:35 p.m. on May 13; at 3:30, 4:20, 4:50 and 5:35 p.m. on May 14; and at 2:30, 3:20, 3:50 and 4:35 p.m. on May 15.
The Lear Project also features an original score composed by Bruno Merz, with special The Owl and the Pussy-Cat masks and puppets created by Clelia Scala.
Both Brackenridge and Blow are excited to premiere The Lear Project at Erring at King George, with much of that excitement rooted in the venue itself.
“It’s so appropriate to have this beloved children’s literature brought to life in a school,” says Blow.
“I love unconventional theatre spaces where the audience isn’t quite so passive. They can peek through windows and go around corners. They might be looking at something on the second floor and hear us singing from above. It’s going to be fun to have that happening in one building that people can wander through.”
The plan post-Erring is to expand on The Lear Project with an eye toward presenting a fuller production, possibly staging it in a more conventional theatre space.
“Maybe this piece could expand a bit more. In the back of your mind, it’s a bigger thing but at the same time you don’t want to spend too much time thinking about what it could be because the clock is ticking. Let’s focus on this (for now). But it’s definitely a work in progress.”
“We’re not just taking a play and reinventing it — we’re devising something totally from scratch,” Blow adds. “Do we want to meet Lear at the end of his life? Do we want to follow him through his life? Is this a story of characters he wrote? We had so many versions and so many different ideas of how we could dip into his world.”
As they rehearse and refine their creation, Brackenridge and Blow share a common hope that audiences will come away with a better understanding of who Lear is, and why his work remains as treasured today as it was when it was first published.
“When they’ve seen what we’ve done, I hope people will say ‘I got a little piece of Lear’,” Brackenridge says. “They’re not going to say ‘I know exactly who he was.’ They’ll get an essence of him. Hopefully, we represent him well enough for that to happen.”
For her part, Blow is hopeful “people feel we’ve made a little bit of magic.”
“Nonsense is so fun — so playful and so ridiculous,” Blow says. “It’s delightful. It’s hilarious. We’re having fun with it. I want people to have fun with it. But there are also these quieter, poignant moments that I hope they feel. There’s life in it. There’s death. There’s marriage. There’s love. I can’t wait for when we get the lights on and we’re in our costumes and masks and all of these things come together. I have goose bumps thinking about it.”
For the complete Erring at King George schedule of performances and related special events, visit publicenergy.ca/erring-at-king-george-festival-schedule/
Involving more than 70 performance and visual artists, this is the third Erring festival held in Peterborough, the last being in 2014 at Mount St. Joseph.
This story was created in partnership with Public Energy Performing Arts.
