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BREATH[e] Designed and Directed by Steve Lucas The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen Street West Thursday, April 25 - Saturday, May 18, 2002 ONLY! Review by Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail - May 4, 2002 When Steve Lucas unveiled BREATH[e] with a few workshop performances in 1999, Toronto theatre types were so astounded by this brief piece without narrative, text or actors, they demanded Lucas bring it back for a longer run, which is now under way at the Theatre Centre. Apparently, Lucas's fans don't spend much time in art galleries: If BREATH[e]'s 27 minutes of sound, light and fog effects create a highly unusual piece of theatre, they fit much more easily into the world of avant-garde art, where such experimentation is commonplace. Indeed, I think BREATH[e] is more usefully reviewed as art (and thus haven't given it a star rating), although Lucas positions himself as a theatre-maker and cites as his inspiration Samuel Beckett's wordless Breath, in which a stage full of garbage is shown under intensifying light. Lucas is primarily a lighting and set designer, and a theatre critic might complain that BREATH[e] is nothing but a set and some effects. The audience is ushered into a black box with three long pews and settles itself in front of a blank screen, while a sound like a heartbeat begins to resonate. The screen lifts to reveal a massive but mysterious shape, very close at hand, low-lying, horizontal and red. It turns out to be a blanket of fog shown under a red light. There's a blackout, and then the lights come up to reveal that this first effect has given way to a second, slightly further back in the space and of a different colour. This transition is repeated again and again, to a continual soundtrack of breathing sounds, as one watches new and different shapes recede into what turns out to be a huge space. After that, the story gets a bit muddy as various other lighting effects bring the piece to a slow and elusive conclusion. Lucas has said he is interested in inducing a trance in the audience, and I certainly found that the latter half of BREATH[e] was becoming a impenetrable haze in which I could not longer discern an aesthetic trajectory. Before that haze descended, what I admired most about Lucas's piece were its engrossing painterly effects, with chiaroscuro worthy of Frederic Church's apocalyptic 19th-century American landscapes and a reflected glow reminiscent of Edvard Munch's phallic sunsets. Indeed, an art critic might complain that Lucas is basically an aesthete whose work produces pretty results but lacks a theoretical purpose. The test of any artistic experimentation is what it tells us about the form as it pushes its boundaries: BREATH[e] is pleasing to experience, but ultimately dissatisfying because it lacks implication for either art or theatre. |