There Are Strange Things Done in the Midnight Sun

Imagine it's 10:30 p.m. You are on a bus bound for "the bush"—actually Brian Fidler's property, which includes his home, studio, and "romantic" outhouse. At a time when most plays are letting out, this experience is just about to begin.

Each group took a different route through the bush. My group began by witnessing the liminal performers Eric Epstein and Cliff Cardinal summon musicians from (seemingly) deep in the woods to perform "Ripple" by the Grateful Dead. The ensemble was accompanied by Epstein on a mini Gibson. Our evening ended with performer Lucas Myers fretting, "I want to be unique, so I bring the guitalele, no one will have a guitalele and then fucking Eric Epstein shows up with a Gibson mini guitar from, like, 1932, that looks like the exact same thing and sounds like a million angels singing." Another example of internal referentiality occurred when Conor Wylie, as part of his theatrical experiment #86, asked audience members to vote on who they would rather kill, Fidler or Epstein. These references made Theatre in the Bush feel like a cohesive whole, as opposed to a series of unrelated scenes that just happened to occur at the same time.

One of my favourite pieces was Miche Genest's Boreal Feast. The author of two well-received cookbooks on northern cuisine, Genest divided her playing area into two sections: sweet and savoury. We paired off and were invited to create little bites for ourselves from a variety of Yukon-inspired ingredients, like spruce tips, berries, bison, and sourdough. After we ate, we sat around the campfire and discussed what we had created. This installation further supported my long-held hypothesis that creating food and creating theatre are undeniably interconnected.

Theatre in the Bush was an almost indescribable, whimsical, and ephemeral evening. It was simultaneously universal and Yukon-specific. It was as though we were ghosts, characters from a Robert Service poem, except that we were wandering around Fidler's enormous property instead of gold rush-era Dawson City. Theatre in the Bush, and all of the many bits and pieces that made it up, will stay with me for some time.