Appearance, disappearance through Filipino lens

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This article was published 03/02/2024 (955 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Hello, I’m Hazel Venzon, and this is a thrust theatre,” the co-creator and star of Everything Has Disappeared says at the beginning of the show.

The configuration slices the audience into three wedges, their viewpoints converging on the front or either of the sides of a cyberpunk set, creating distinct divisions within shared experience and representing in a physical space the tenuous mentality of a performance built around a core question of invisibility.

It’s impossible for any one audience member to see, hear or feel everything that’s happening on Venzon’s shimmering spaceship and that’s exactly the kind of atmosphere she and co-creator Darren O’Donnell aimed to cultivate in this wide-eyed, curious and often surprising production, on at Prairie Theatre Exchange until Sunday, Feb. 4.

“It produces the feeling that we’re all in this together,” says Venzon, fashioned in this performance as a tour guide, lecturer, Vegas headliner, game-show host, labour researcher and anthropologist exploring the Filipino diaspora.

It’s a mixture that, mostly to its benefit, feels loose and improvisational, relying on a willing audience to support its audacious format — a blend of animation, mentalism, magic, video collage, graphic novel and even choral performance.

Calling to mind the oral historian Studs Terkel and reminiscent in ways of the work of visual artist Miranda July, who has built a career out of assessing the fragility of human connection,

It’s in these unplanned moments when the production is most tense and exciting.

It’s clear every person asked is internally weighing the reasons they sense certain professions such as education and health care, but not others. One woman answered “fast food restaurant” when asked what one projected person’s career had been before quickly abashedly adding, “as a teen!”

She was absolutely right. Venzon, without judgment, illustrates the implicit ways different labour is valued or undervalued, and with each example given, she showcases the integral nature of Filipino workers to industries such as shipping, senior care and electronics. Often that work is migratory, bringing individuals out into a global diaspora frequently united by its intrinsic relationship to labour and capital.

Almost two-thirds of the Taiwanese workforce making about 90 per cent of the world’s microchips is Filipino, she says. Beneath every industry, behind every brand and within every corporation is a skeleton of invisible labour, without which the world would grind to a halt.

With disappearance as a core theme, Venzon trained with mentalist Erik Mana and there are a few excellent examples of visual misdirection at play, with Venzon popping up in unexpected places after fading out of view.

Everything Has Disappeared is the latest in a burgeoning trend of alternative apocalyptic theatre on the Winnipeg stage, dovetailing with PTE’s season-opening show, Feast, Theatre by the River’s Glad to Be Here and Ellen Peterson’s None of This Is Happening, produced last year by Theatre Projects Manitoba.

It presents human connection as a possible method of staving off the end, with Venzon asking audience members to make sustained eye contact with nearby strangers.

“No self exists outside its relation to others,” she says — a particularly relevant message in the wake of the global pandemic.

Running 90 minutes, Everything Has Disappeared is a marathon squeezed into a sprint, teeming with concepts of heaven, colonizer-colonized relationships, the dehumanization of capitalism, Catholicism and spiritual reciprocity.

It’s busy, it’s loud and it’s got a whole lot to say, but ultimately, Everything Has Disappeared puts faces to concerns that are often neglected, telling human stories that usually go unseen and unheard.

When Venzon asks you to close your eyes, you listen.

And when you open them, you learn.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com