Vanishing act, with questions

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This article was published 31/01/2024 (954 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hazel Venzon wants to show you a magic trick. She can’t say much about it, but as with any well-crafted illusion, Venzon needs an audience willing to participate and disappear into the abyss of theatrical experience.

Any volunteers?

“No one is going to end up with pie on their face,” the Winnipeg actor-director says about her new show, an ethnocultural, spectral and speculative experiment in solo storytelling called Everything Has Disappeared.

“All I ask is that you sit in your chair and come with me on this big old trip.”

For Winnipeg’s Venzon, this specific journey has been happening for about six years, ever since she found herself in the downtown of one of the world’s largest metropolises, at the centre of a crowd she couldn’t quite fathom.

Thousands of people were in the street — sharing food, having dance classes, holding pageants, doing each other’s hair and nails, sleeping and relaxing, leaning back to back.

All of them, like Venzon, were Filipino, and all of them were spending their one weekly day off gathered together in public — a city all their own in a city that would never function without them.

“I was dumbfounded,” says Venzon, a co-founder of U N I Together (UNIT) Productions whose next project is directing The Mountaintop at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. “It was like being in the Philippines again.”

The gathering, which Venzon describes as a swarm in a city to be revealed during her stage show, was a tactile, visual representation of just how integral and interconnected Filipino people, and their labour, are to society’s well-being.

“It revealed to me that there are far more overseas Filipino workers in cities en masse than I had ever imagined,” says Venzon, whose mother moved from the Philippines in the 1970s to Winnipeg, where she worked in a garment factory.

What would happen, Venzon wondered, if that giant, powerful, yet often “invisible” group, were to actually vanish into thin air? Would the world grind to a halt? Would chaos ensue?

Those questions spurred Venzon, who is in her early 40s, to begin the research that would fuel Everything Has Disappeared, which opens Thursday and runs to Sunday at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

“What would happen if every Filipino person in our society suddenly … disappeared?” serves as the show’s tagline.

For five years, Venzon and Darren O’Donnell, the show’s co-creator and co-director, sought answers from whoever would talk with them.

“I would ask cousins or relatives or friends, or strangers at the coffee shop or pharmacy, what would happen if they didn’t show up for work. That was often followed by a big laugh, because of how impossible it would be for the rest of their staff,” Venzon explains.

When the pandemic began, the questions became even more pressing, as several industries with substantial representation by Filipino workers — including health care, senior care and hospitality — took centre stage.

Venzon also worked with UBC’s Geraldine Pratt, the Canada Research Chair in Care Economies and Global Labour, to add academic rigour to the experiential evidence she gathered while developing the production.

In terms of scale and scope, the performance is the largest in Venzon’s 20-year career as a theatre artist — an intriguing mash-up of science fiction that relies on an understanding of global truths and invisible realities.

“In some ways, I play myself onstage, but as a human and character, I have been infused with a timelessness, and that’s the same kind of effect we create in space. There’s an intentional ambiguity about where we are when we arrive at the show,” she says.

“The set is rather elaborate. It might seem like a spaceship to you, or an instrument in the dimension we’re in, but we are in an in-between landscape so that we can relieve ourselves from the reality of where we are in order to completely surrender to the magnitude of an idea of a disappearance.”

That’s about as much as Venzon is willing to divulge about what happens onstage because she knows with magic — and with theatre — the less we know is often for the better.

“Magic is all about secrets. It has to be deep and locked in,” says Venzon, who trained with Toronto illusionist Erik Mana to prepare for the production, in which she performs all her own stunts.

“Magic is about guiding the truth. If I want you to believe in something, I have to believe in it as well. First and foremost, I am the conduit of what you are going to believe. (This performance) is about being a conduit for the truth.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com