The Big Gravel Sifter is a highly poetic, multi-disciplinary interpretation of a Strindberg short story about an old piano submerged in the ocean. Dance, mime, animated and live-action film, repeated strands of spoken text and live music combine into a part-beautiful, part-mystifying production by One Trunk Collective.
The show has a lovely set -- including a smashed piano that's like a sculpture -- but suffers a bit from sightline problems caused by unraked seats and intrusive pillars.
Composer Garth Hardy plays "prepared piano," meaning the instrument has been purposely altered to sound hauntingly damaged and out of tune. His evocative music has a strong feeling of memory and loss.
The theme is the split between life's utilitarian side -- performers CindyMarie Small, Andraea Sartison and Coral Maloney initially dress like Rosie the Riveter and perform numbing manual jobs -- and the impractical realm of imagination, dreams, art and yearning represented by the undersea piano.
Has the instrument become just a "big gravel sifter?"
The piano, we hear, was loved by children, but to salvage it is "impossible." Its dreamy song, which seems to call to people on the shore, is expressed through lyrical ballet by Small (a former Royal Winnipeg Ballet dancer) that borders on the silly in the small space.
The show grows baffling when a romantic couple seems to split and Sartison grows distressed and scrubs her own body. But there are some striking moments, especially the dream-crushing one in which Small rips down a bedsheet that's being used for projecting home movies of children at a piano.
"Leave it alone!" she barks. One hears Strindberg's poignant personal song lamenting that in life, the harsh pursuit of work and money often drowns and silences the spirit.
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