Feb. 01, 2012 - Issue #850: Godot

Sky Life

They've been up for several weeks now, but the group of oddly-shaped structures occupying Sir Winston Churchill Square still make for a commanding sight. Made from scaffolding covered with an exoskeleton of shrink-wrapped plastic, the Metropolis Winter Festival pavilions provide a unique theatrical space, and the minds at Firefly Theatre & Circus were keen to take advantage of it.
"Sky Life is a show that we created knowing that it was going to be a site-specific piece," explains Annie Dugan, artistic director of Firefly. "We knew we were going to do it in the Community Centre at Metropolis and we wanted to take advantage of the height. The way it's built, there's kind of like channels—it's not a big, huge, wide-open space. There are just little pockets where you can go up and down."


Beginning with the space—the Community Centre pavilion—and working backwards from there, Dugan explains that the narrative structure of Sky Life resulted from a series of ideas which were incorporated and contrasted with various physical mediums: the show features stilt walkers, aerialists, jugglers, poi, club-spinning and hula-hooping.


"One of the ideas is the story sky: the night sky and constellations," says Dugan. "There are a group of people known as The Elevated Ones, who are the stilt walkers. They are for the party that is taking place in celebration of the constellations. And the constellations, who are the aerialists, are going to come to life."


"But then we're also basically telling the story of the Ugly Duckling," she continues. "We've got poor Number Six, who is walking around on a couple of Home Depot buckets, trying to fit in with The Elevated Ones, and it's just not working out very well. But when the Sky People come to the earth—which has never, ever happened before, it's kind of a mystical moment; the Sky People have never touched the ground before—it's a pretty big deal, and most of The Elevated Ones don't know what to make of it. But Number Six—she's pretty intrigued by the Sky People and what they can do."

Described in this manner, Sky Life appears to have a fairly elaborate story—and yet Dugan also asserts that there are actually no spoken words throughout the duration of the performance; the entire story is told through physical movement.


"The name of our company is Firefly Theatre & Circus—we merged the two disciplines," states Dugan. "In the fusion of the disciplines we get to showcase the circus arts, but we put them within the context of a narrative."


Admission to Sky Life is free of charge, but Dugan cautions patrons to arrive early in order to ensure a spot, as the Metropolis Community Centre can only house a fixed number of people.


"We're all gonna be in the venue together—there's no one performance space," she explains. "We're going to use different pockets of the venue for different things, so we're going to move the audience around the space.


"Sky Life is choreographed, but I think each show will be different based on how many people will be in the space with us, and who they are, and what time of day it is," she continues. "It will be radically different at eight o'clock than it will be at four o'clock, because it's really bright in there at four o'clock, and at eight o'clock we'll be able to use more theatrical lightning."

Fri, Feb 3 – Sun, Feb 5 (8 pm nightly; 4 pm shows on Feb 4 & 5)
Created by Firefly Theatre & Circus
Directed by Annie Dugan
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