Closing Thoughts

This is the end (for now)!

We closed the show last night, and it was a great success. Great and full audiences, who all had wonderful feedback. My favourite comment that kept coming up was:

"I really liked the show, it was beautiful, I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure if I got the whole thing."

Because the whole show was such a collaborative dissection/creation process to put together it felt like when we were opening the show it still was growing and we were still discovering. And so I never felt quite right about telling people what it meant since along the way it had meant to us so many different things (I don't believe there is a right answer). It was so open to interpretation and I think very visceral and sensual, and that is how we wanted to keep it. That the people could come with us on the journey, but they could layer their own stories or ideas on top of what we were showing them. One comment from Chris Sigurdson which I think sums it up:

"...like most theatre people who see the show- they struggle to articulate why it moved them or affected them. Visual artists and people more familiar with performance who don't seek to find literal or rational connections between the images and moods that are created are more successful at letting the piece speak for itself."

We found that it was worth while. That hauling an old tale by a cromudgonly Swedish naturalist back up again could inspire a string of stories not only about a disheveled heirloom beneath the sea, but about three working women, each with a loss of their own searching for what is real.

One Trunk is a company, focusing on inter-disciplinary performance and multi-media collaboration. The short story of the Big Gravel Sifter hooked me from the first time I read it. It had such delicious imagery and romance (and even some young artists in Florida agree, if you’ve seen the piano they planted on a sand bar in the ocean recently) that it called for a team of creators fluent in the language of the body, who could tell a story through movement, and who knew how to create images that (hopefully) speak a thousand words. We’ve been in studios across Winnipeg in various assemblies of the company over the last few weeks. In particular Coral, CindyMarie and I discussing what this story meant, to who, and why they were telling it. It started with the adaptation by Jason. Then we all shared images that came to mind such as those of Rosie the Riveter, of mountains and seas, children and lovers, birth and burial. All of these were brought to life in simple choreography and piano by Garth, whose music clarified for us what each moment meant. From these we cut and pasted under the mentorship of Chris and Alex until we understood the story that pulled all of the layers of sounds and images together. Our individual processes and styles were challenged and at some moments left us feeling like fish out of the water. However, I can say in full confidence that this piece was created collectively. My hope is that in the meeting of our many backgrounds and media you too will be able to unearth the many dimensions of a simple story and come along with us in the showing and telling of the Big Gravel Sifter.

-Andraea Sartison