Laser’s blue light gives green light to enter world of pure imagination

Before the humans take the stage at the beginning of Glitch, the audience’s senses are already activated.

Throughout the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, it’s cloudy. Over the sound system, pipes drip. Through squinted eyes, one can almost make out a staircase and the downward swoop of a curtain. “I have a question,” a young girl asks her grandmother before the matinee production begins. “Why is it so foggy?”

The fog is a stand-in for the plumes of dust that one might find in the basement of an abandoned theatre, where four friends — Carlos Mendoza, Léa Noblet Di Ziranaldi, Chloé Ouelle-Payeur & Marie-Ève Dion — stumble onto a world of balletic make-believe.

As they head down the staircase, the friends cross flashlight beams. When the quartet takes its first collective steps, each member is reluctant: what transpires is a testament to the transformative power of a performative green light — a signal to go where you’ve never gone before.

In the case of Glitch, the green light is often blue, but it descends from the ceiling of the MTYP mainstage as a dazzling channel of laser light. This beam seems to have a mind and a spirit of its own. At times, it directs the friends to open stage boxes and remove the worlds contained inside, at others, it forms walls and conical structures that seem intent on keeping its friends downstairs for a little while longer.

Directed by Hélène Langevin, who choreographed with Audrey Bergeron, Glitch — a production from Montreal’s Bouge de là — is an ode to unadulterated, infectious creativity, with its performers imbuing found material with narrative, energy and life.

This is perhaps best exemplified by a sequence in which one performer dons cardboard sleeves that seem to have a mind of their own, magnetized, as it were, by the beam of light. At first, the other three are reluctant to play this game. But as each successive performer straps their arms into pieces of discarded boxes, they each buy in.

In no time, the four performers unite at centre stage to perform a robotic dance, a well-oiled machine working together to tell a story.

The group numbers are strong, but each performer gets the opportunity to shine in the light.

As Au Clair de la Lune plays, Mendoza, wearing a silky dress, manipulates the lasers with his hands as if he were controlling the pitch of each instrument in music director Bernard Falaise’s interpretation of the classic French folk song.

A trained gymnast, Ouelle-Payeur stuns with a backwards, back-bridged walk and other feats of flexibility. Noblet Di Ziranaldi excels at playing both rigid — a technically stunning, futuristic light tunnel dance is a standout — and loose, playing as a flaccid green monster with remarkable control.

Dion, whose variety of facial expressions hint at a rich education in mime, struts her stuff in a green morphsuit to close out the show with a jazzy ensemble piece that bursts forth from a long-sealed wardrobe.

Falaise’s music and Guy Fortin’s sound design enliven the production in tandem with Lucie Bazzo’s and Martin Lepage’s dynamic lighting and Jimmy Lakatos’s laser show. Costume designer Marilène Bastien’s work here is modernist and refuses to play by any rules, once again highlighting the value, in theatre and in life, of chosen appearance.

Langevin shows this most clearly when the characters are presented with four options for masks to wear. The characters make initial choices but then shift. When Mendoza emerges a minute or so later wearing a dress, the audience takes it as a natural decision, as do his friends, who watch the performer from the wings.

A surreal treat, Glitch ends after just under an hour-long run, when the lights and the lasers cut to black. Until next time.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman