Surviving the pandemic VII: live on FringeLiveStream 

05 Jul 2020

Theatre artists, particularly Fringers, will not be stopped by a pandemic. The Toronto Fringe moved online but a collective of international Fringers were already there. Victoria Urquhart (The Girl in the Photograph) of the Spur of the Moment Shakespeare Collective and Shakesbeer Showdown fame brought FringeLiveStream to my attention. Despite my continued antipathy for Facebook in general, I have a great respect for Urquhart and a fondness for the Fringe, so I checked it out.

FringeLiveStream runs on a lottery system similar to a Fringe festival but is not associated with the CAFF (Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals) which appears to be a governing body of the ungovernable 33 festivals across North America. FringeLiveStream provides an Eventbrite page with tickets for the live showing every Thursday at 9pm throughout the summer and then for a week following. After that the production can choose to remain online, but they have to organize their own Eventbrite page. "I saw the FringeLiveStream pop up a few times on Facebook through some online threads that I follow as well as Derrick Chua," says Urquhart, "The rules were that if you didn't get pulled the first time you would be put in the draw for next time, which I thought was pretty great, so I entered."

The production Urquhart is producing is Chloe Whitehorn's Dressing Amelia, directed by Kendra Jones and starring Blythe Haynes. Whitehorn describes it as:

My mother was an artist and undiagnosed manic-depressive raising me alone. She was my whole world. And I was hers. I found myself calling hospitals and hotels looking for my mother who had just up and vanished. She always came back and usually whisked me off on some adventure, surrounding me with wonders so I would forget the abandonment. When I was thirteen years old she told me I was old enough that I didn’t need her anymore, so she might as well kill herself. My childhood was magical and unique and made me the person I am, albeit one with some dark undertones.

It is a one person show with Haynes unpacking her mother's outfits, momentos and "costumes" while her mother's wake is held downstairs. She also unpacks her feelings about their relationship. While a performance featuring only one performer seems ideal for online, Urquhart says, "The process is a mix between being your own director with a self-tape, knowing what costuming, lighting, etc, you can offer up, then working site-specific, knowing how you are collaborating with the group, with zoom, with your internet." She also notes that, "Tech rehearsal online is intense and tricky."

Of the other FringeLiveStream offerings Urquhart says, "Being Brown is my Superpower was great, Fireside Chats with Adam Schwarz is the one I am checking out next."I am hoping to catch up with Velvet Wells' Personal Demon Hunter ("Motivational speaker, Velvet Duke, was skilled at exorcising your personal demons, until the day that his got their exercise") that I missed at last year's Fringe, Les Kurkendaal-Barrett's Climbing My Family Tree, and Creeping Murmur, Poring Dark where John D Huston "whips four classic horror stories into a breathtaking 60 minute verbal smorgasbord of the uncanny, the funny and the unexpected."

"It's best to check it out live," says Urquhart, even though the experience is onscreen rather than in a theatrical space. "It's less about hearing the audience and more about hearing your phone go off with Facebook comments. The more engagements, the more popular it is. On the one hand, it's less organic, but on the other hand, you get to read the story of the audience's journey with you. Dressing Amelia has been a passion project of mine for years now. One day we will all gather in the same room again and I will see the audience's story unfold, but in the meantime I consider myself really grateful to get the inside scoop on their journeys in ways I wouldn't have gotten to know outside of this format. Just a different medium."