Theatre
-Lori Montgomery

Across town, the Mount Royal College theatre department will also be mounting a student production - this one with a slightly different tone. Also composed of one-act plays, the MRC show will include Reverse Transcription by Tony Kushner, The Case of the Crushed Petunias by Tennessee Williams, and an unusual piece of collective creation by MRC students, called May Contain.

Heather Taylor, a first-year student in the cast of May Contain, says that the skills involved in collective creation are important ones for young theatre practitioners.

"This kind of work is becoming more prominent in theatre and actor-generated work," she explains. "It teaches you discipline, it teaches you what works and what doesn't work, and you gain more ownership of your work because it comes from you."

Under the guidance of a pair of faculty facilitators, the cast members used movement, music and free association to create the piece.

"Basically, we started off with 10 actors, an empty room, and that's it," Taylor says. Then the facilitators brought in a wide variety of music, from African rhythms to Vivaldi, to get the creative juices flowing.

"It was a tool to free up what was inside, because music is kind of a tie between the right and left brain," Taylor explains. "It lets you explore other sides of your thinking that aren't as literal."

After the music came the contact improvisation, a movement technique that the students used to physicalize their ideas. Little of the movement was retained in the final piece.

"That was more of a tool to extract the information from us and open up possibilities," Taylor says.

When it came to the actual text, the students started by musing on childhood memories.

"We had a big box, and we brought in pictures that were important to us, and books or quotes or something that really struck us," Taylor recalls. "We put them in this box and did work out of that, too. Some things that we did from there never went anywhere and some things did. It fell into place."

The final result, Taylor says, is almost indefinable, but poses a series of existential questions.

"The audience leaves with more questions than they came in with," she says. "It leaves you with something to think about."