It’s amazing that you can create an experience in a room where, in theory, you are distancing the audience from yourself, the performer, by giving everyone headphones, by having your co-performer wearing a VR headset, and encouraging the audience to watch you on a screen, even though you are also right there in front of them, and yet somehow everything comes together to make the performance seem even more intimate, even more immersive, even more connective, heart to heart and palm to palm. This is Heist’s mixed-reality theatre show Frequencies, playing tonight, June 10th, 2023, at 8:30pm at Alderney Landing Theatre as part of Eastern Front’s Stages Festival.
Performer/Composer/Writer/Designer/Programmer Aaron Collier begins at the very beginning, the moment the universe, our shared universe, is created, which makes the story he is about to tell us: a very personal story about his family, his upbringing, and his journey of connection to his older brother that he never got to meet, part of all our story, the one we have been creating together since the beginning of time. Collier plays with time being sped up, and slowed down, using techno beats that he DJs for us onstage, to mark the passage of time from different perspectives. Richie Wilcox is with Collier onstage and he wears a VR headset, and the psychedelic digital scenography that Wilcox sees is projected onto screens for the audience to see too, using a special camera. The landscape moves as Wilcox does through the space, shifting our perspectives, allowing us to see Collier’s thoughts and his dreams. The result is simply magic.
It was the story, though, that grabbed me firmly by the heart. Written by Collier with Francesca Ekwuyasi, and Stewart Legere, Frequencies is a mediation on grief, and an exploration of a kind of inherited grief, an experience that is less frequently examined. Collier tells us that before he was born his older brother David was killed in a tragic accident, and that the sadness of that loss has been inside him for as long as he can remember. He “misses someone he never met.” Throughout a loving childhood with a great big brother and best friend to play with, the idyllic rural stomping grounds of the forests of Prince Edward Island, and a love affair with the piano, a dark hole of heartache lives inside Aaron, and he doesn’t know how to shake it. Things become even more complicated as he grows up and has to contend with the ways in which he is different, the coping mechanisms he developed into adulthood, and their consequences.
Frequencies is also a love letter to sound, to finding the music in everything around us, such as the colour green, and the solar system itself. The way Collier has used math and imagination to squeeze music out of nature is another one of Frequencies’ magic tricks. Music is an integral part of Aaron’s life. He begins composing music as a child, and it is music that brings Aaron to Halifax from PEI as a young man when he joins the indie rock band The Jimmy Swift Band, with whom he would go on to tour extensively for over a decade. The score here is as deeply personal as the story, and the two are beautifully interwoven. Watching Aaron’s body move organically along with the music he is creating radiates his own joy and openheartedness directly into the audience.
Ann-Marie Kerr directs the piece, which I am sure has a myriad of moving pieces, but it feels very much like Collier and Wilcox are moving of their own volition, whichever way the spirit moves them in the moment, which grounds us all in the shared space of this moment. I was struck by the moments were Collier has his back to us, where he faces Wilcox, still wearing the VR headset, but then we see Aaron’s face looking at us on the screen. This layering of alienation on top of intimacy is fascinating, and I found myself wondering as I watched the play when I was choosing to watch Aaron on the screen, and when I was choosing to watch his person, and why? How much was my choice, and how much was the choice being guided for me? Did it change the way I interacted with the narrative? What is the effect of a dramatic shift in perspective?
The pandemic, of course, was a dramatic, communal shift in perspective. As we are slowly coming back together after years of only seeing one another on screens, or through Facebook photos, and various layers of technology that disrupted our ability to connect directly, Frequencies is a beautiful and gentle exploration of how mixing avant-garde technology with the timeless art of storytelling can actually bring people closer together. All I wanted to do after the show was give Aaron a hug, and thankfully, in this moment, in this space, at this time, I was able to do so.
Heist’s Frequencies plays one more time on Saturday, June 10th, 2023 at 8:30pm at Alderney Landing Theatre (2 Ochterloney Street, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia) as part of Eastern Front Theatre’s Stages Festival. Tickets are available at this website and are between $17.00 and $27.00 on a sliding PWYC scale. If cost is a barrier to you reach out to Kat. Alderney Landing is accessible for wheelchair users; the theatre is on the second level, and there is an elevator. For more information or questions about accessibility, please email Accessibility Coordinator Sara Graham.
