Blindside creator’s new show tackles insecurities By: Ben Waldman Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024

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This article was published 17/10/2024 (673 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“I don’t believe that anything is ever done,” says Stéphanie Morin-Robert.

She’s referring to her own work in a category of solo theatre broadly referred to as autobiographical, in which the Timmins, Ont.-born, Winnipeg-based artist explores her life story and the memories that fill it.

Certain mental pictures return in richer hues, demanding to be understood once and re-understood over again onstage, in front of an ever-changing audience where the only constant voice is that of an inconsistent narrator.

“Inconsistent” isn’t intended as disparaging, but rather an acknowledgement of Morin-Robert’s approach to the theatre of the self.

“Theatre is very much about motion for me,” says Morin-Robert, who also performs with Canadian puppeteer Ingrid Hansen as the Merkin Sisters.

“When I open a show, it’s the show I’m doing right now, but it’s constantly changing and evolving because I am.”

Take Blindside, the solo work Morin-Robert has performed more than 1,000 times — including at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival — but has probably altered a million times more inside her own notebook.

A show whose core is ultimately about shared perspective, Blindside is rooted in the francophone artist’s experience with retinoblastoma, which led to the removal of an eye as a two-year-old.

“At first when I was doing Blindside, I was just onstage telling a story and barely looking at anybody. My main insecurity was eye contact,” she says.

After adding a camera to the show to emphasize external perception, Morin-Robert took eye contact more literally. She’d pop out her glass eye and hand it to audience members to safeguard. Afterward, her empty eye socket became the mouth of a puppet, surrounded by false brows and a ring of orbital dentures. By opening and closing her eyelid, Morin-Robert made the puppet talk, creating a character inside her own head that everybody could see.

“I was constantly seeing how far I could take (my story) while still taking care of the audience,” she says, using her stage time to normalize disability and move past mystification to a point of understanding.

The eye was a lens for Morin-Robert’s conception of the audience-performer relationship. While one party shares its vulnerabilities in an open forum, the other sits in the dark, watching, listening and, hopefully, recognizing both uniqueness and universality through the medium of “individual” expression: a monologue isn’t necessarily one person talking.

That’s a central theme of Morin-Robert’s latest work, Soft Spot, a dramedy about generation and regeneration. The opening production of Théâtre Cercle Molière’s 99th season, the piece follows Morin-Robert as she drives down dimly lit alleyways of familial memory.

In Soft Spot, Morin-Robert continues to share with audiences her own insights beyond the margins of nostalgia. After honing Blindside for the better part of a decade, Morin-Robert says she wanted to “work through the next thing.”

“I look at insecurities that scare me sh—less,” she says.

In Soft Spot, two parallel stories are told, Morin-Robert channelling both with a comedic touch. She plays a pregnant woman going through the labour of a performance tour and an old man alone in his basement, with the performer oscillating between both settings like a fan on the fritz.

“Both stories collide and reality and time start warping a little bit,” she says.

The set features a shag carpet, three projectors, seven cameras, a six-foot aquarium and 24 feet of vertical blinds used as a projection surface.

Everything is beige.

Wednesday night was the first time Morin-Robert invited others into that particular world, one locked behind doors she felt too nervous to even consider opening until she felt brave enough to see what stood behind.

“Every part of me feels like I’m doing something wrong,” she says.

“I don’t see this as the show. This is what it is right now, and I can’t tell you what it’s going to be a year from now.”

Nothing is ever done.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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