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  • Drawn North
  • Christine Quintana (bio)

It's almost midnight at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre in Whitehorse. There's a flurry of quickly downed drinks and a search for bags and jackets when a volunteer announces that our ride will leave in five minutes. We're crammed onto a large bus like kids on the way to summer camp, and we all watch, laughing, as one straggler comes sprinting out of the centre—and we're off. The midnight sun lights up miles of beautiful boreal forest as we hurry down the road toward Ramshackle Theatre's Theatre in the Bush. This is the furthest north that I, a lifelong west-coaster, have ever been.

The bus drops us off under a canopy of string lights, the smell of weed and stealthy beers perfuming the air. Everyone is grinning, loose, cheeky. Even a trip to the artfully decorated outhouse feels novel. There's something about that midnight sun. Someone has bug spray and is generously spraying down anyone with bare limbs—the mosquitoes are out in full force.

After an exuberant welcome from Ramshackle's artistic director, Brian Fidler, on whose land the performances take place, we're each handed an item—a rock or a stick, or maybe a flower—and told that these items divide us into groups. We find our fellow adventurers and trudge out into the forest. [End Page 108]


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Image from Trouble, presented as part of Theatre in the Bush.

Photo by John Gelinas; illustrations by Charlie Fidler

The shows are a sensory mélange of installation, experiment, experience, and narrative. The first performance for my group is by Conor Wylie, and it's an ode to possibility, aching with an undercurrent of finality as he refers to his late father. We continue deeper into the forest, shining flashlights on protruding roots, extending arms to steady one another. We watch as each of us tries our hand at a two-operator noise machine, four guitars suspended from a tree with an alluring-looking mixing board. We play chef as we're ushered to a tasting station and invited to construct our own gourmet snacks. Our chilly hands and feet get a brief reprieve as we gather around a campfire, eyes stinging from the smoke. As we experience our last piece of the night, created by Eric Epstein and Cliff Cardinal, exhaustion has set in. We shiver our way back to the buses, which whisk us back toward town. Bodies drawn north, drawn to the forest, and drawn together under the midnight sun.

Christine Quintana

Christine Quintana is a playwright, actor, and co-Artistic Producer of Delinquent Theatre based in Vancouver, British Columbia (Coast Salish territory). In addition to her practice as a theatre creator, Christine is Marketing and Operations Coordinator for Neworld Theatre and Program Assistant for the LEAP Playwrights program at the Arts Club. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from the University of British Columbia.

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