It starts off innocently enough: a Norwegian explorer named Fridtjof Nansen sets off on a quest for the North Pole. What he doesn’t know is that this will be a journey not just through a frozen tundra, but through existential questions about the rapidly changing climate and through time itself, stretching back over a century.
This is the premise of Chantal Bilodeau’s play Forward, which will be presented by the third-year honours acting class and production design students in the University of Winnipeg’s Department of Theatre and Film starting on February 11.
“One of the joys of working with the students is to find something that can relate to their current experience, but also provides an artistic challenge,” said director Hope McIntyre in an appearance on Morning Light.
In Forward, those challenges range from the vast amount of character work expected from the actors to the variety of arts experience contained within it. A personified version of Ice (which becomes a love interest for Nansen) is portrayed by electropop music, and Nansen’s wife Ava was an opera singer.
These are just a couple of the over forty characters that are portrayed by the nine actors in the show. Bronwyn Smith is charged with playing ten of those characters ranging from an eight-year-old boy to a sixty-year-old man.
“It was a big challenge that I undertook throughout rehearsals,” Smith admits, giving ample credit to her professors, coaches and coordinators to help her embody this wide range of characters.
Another challenge that Smith undertook alongside her castmates was that of addressing the existential threat of the climate crisis with a humourous production. It’s a tool that Smith says is far more effective than an approach of doom-and-gloom. “If we hammer down like, ‘The world is ending! It’s going to burn!’, everyone’s going to turn and look away. But, if we bring some more light airiness to it and some more relatable content to it, people start to actually pay attention more and relate to it more, and then they can take actionable steps to a positive outcome.”
The University of Winnipeg’s Department of Theatre and Film is also pursuing those outcomes through a pilot program alongside of Forward that will aim for more sustainable theatre practices for the production and for the audience. “We’ve done things like [trying] to keep our rehearsal room sustainable and not bringing in a lot of waste,” McIntyre explains, noting that the set is made of reused elements from previous shows and that the production welcomes everyone into its story and message by offering elements like audio description and ASL interpretation for certain performances.
“If you’re going to tackle a play that deals with certain content, I think it’s important to also reflect that in the process.”
Forward opens on February 11 at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film on Colony Street in downtown Winnipeg. It runs until February 15 with all shows starting at 7:30 p.m. Theatregoers can find more information at the website for the U of W’s Department of Theatre and Film.