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Working from the successful HIVE initiative, to which Boca del Lupo was a founding member, we started to ask ourselves, “what can be imagined or realized in an intimate setting that cannot be done in a large space?” And from that, the creation of The Anderson Street Space, a 400 square foot studio space on Granville Island, was born.

This space is equipped with sprung floors, full drapes, a lighting grid, and other hi-tech equipment and is dedicated to the creation and development of small scale, intimate performance experiences. The possibilities are endless for artists to experiment and innovate and offer a whole new realm of audience impact and experience within an intimate realm.

Imagine:

Thom is a soldier on his way to Afghanistan. He calls to say goodbye to his old friend, Evan. Evan’s a writer. He’s working on a story that re-imagines the Little Iliad; the lost Homeric poem that tells of how the wounded archer, Philoctetes, abandoned by Odysseus, was coaxed back to fight for the Greeks at Troy and finally win the war. Evan wants them to work on this project together, but first they need to agree on what the story is.

One performer is live. The other one isn’t. A small audience listens on headphones to their Skype conversation: an intimate performance about the differences between making art and making war. Thom and Evan’s story is a truth about fiction: the writer is trying to convince his friend, a soldier, to perform in a new version of an ancient war story. The text is built from the writers attempt at reconciling opposed politics, displaced geographies, and the uncomfortably fine difference between the performance of art and the performance of war. Their language is casual and intimate. They say hello. They talk about their work. They talk about the story and about the contemporary (and classical Greek) application of storytelling as “public therapy”. They talk about how their conversation can or cannot be used as part of a show, what would make it possible for one to make a performance out of it. The demands of the characters make their situation into a different version of the Philoctetes story, which casts each character as both Odysseus and Philoctetes. In the play they are in, each is the abandoner, each has been abandoned; is there some way out of the situation of this story? How do we stop performing?

Thom’s video-image is projected on a small plasticine body that must be kept in subtle motion to keep the image alive. The demands of this task on the live performer create a detailed, playful choreography, while live action in synch with the videotaped performance captures the tension in the unreal reality of digital communication. The performance feels familiar, even as its strangeness creates a critical distance between the work and the audience.

The audience too, is small. Twenty people gather in a room and watch a mediated performance, listening on headphones to highly detailed sound, and watching a precise mixture of the theatrically rough and the cinematically precise. The performance is just over half-an hour. One audience leaves as another enters. There is a moment of exchange. The performance begins again.

What you’ve just read is a description of One Reed Theatre’s Little Iliad, an intimate production created by Toronto based artist Evan Webber. We plan to present Little Iliad along with it’s companion piece Ajax in April as part of the 2012 Micro Performance Series.

Last year the “Micro Performance Series” took the form of two partnerships and four presentations. We aligned with The Vancouver Fringe Festival and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in offering two intimate performance pieces that ran for two weeks each during the same time frame as these two prominent and established performance festivals within the Vancouver festival landscape.

This year, we are increasing the number of presentations and performances and adding both national and international presentations. Keep your ear to the ground or better yet 'like' us on Facebook to stay in the loop regarding these unique experiences and events. 

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