We live in a society where saying no is the norm. No smoking, no killing hookers: it’s an epidemic. So it’s interesting, and refreshing, to see what saying yes will do for you.
“We said yes to everything,” says Brieanna Moench, one half of the Wind-up Dames. “It allowed us to follow our instincts, our combined instincts, and do things we never would have had the courage to say out loud on our own.”
Since 2000, Moench and Renee Amber have been saying yes as the Wind-up Dames, however their theatrical impulses are currently forming Le Gros Spectacle, the team’s first foray into the Alberta Theatre Project’s Enbridge playRites Festival. Moench and Amber started developing Le Gros Spectacle when they were approached by ATP artistic director Bob White and production dramaturg Vicki Stroich.
“We really wanted to work with Bob [White],” Amber says and Moench agrees. “He’s a dream director, he just threw himself into it. He doesn’t usually work the way we do, he was always asking for pages, something we didn’t always work with as we use a lot of physical elements. But it was great because that push helped us to make the narrative an essential part of the play.”
The narrative the Dames came up with complements their strengths as a duo, while adding the challenge of writing for a third character–the part bravely taken on by Frank Zotter. Two girls from small town Alberta make their way to Montreal in the ’50s with high hopes of stardom.
“They want to be vaudeville stars,” Amber explains. “They’ve modeled themselves after the starlets and femmes fatales but they’re a little behind the times, but they’ve gotten there a little late and now they just don’t quite fit.”
To best illustrate the story–and to let the girls do what they do best–the play runs like a cabaret with the story being told within each act, allowing for all the ups and downs, moments of quiet and blasts of sound of a rollercoaster ride.
“It’s structured like a cabaret, but there’s other structures and levels and layers on top of it,” Moench explains. “We dance, we play instruments, we tell a story. There’s so much there it’s like an adult, cartoon, fairy-tale cabaret.”
“We like to call it a ‘melan-comedy,’” smiles Amber.
And so the Wind-up Dames, through the power of saying yes and letting the creative juices flow, have conceived a play of fun, props, mixed metaphors, sound and sex. Which begs only one question: who could say no to that?
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