The Grand
608 1st Street SW
Calgary.

Saturday, March 08, 2008
Time: 8.00 pm
Tickets: $15 - $25

For Tickets information Call at 403-205-2922

Get ready for Little Red River Created by Theatre Junction at The Grand.

LITTLE RED RIVER

Created By THEATRE JUNCTION At The GRAND

This is a prairie road.
This road is the shortest distance between nowhere and nowhere.
This road is a poem.

Memory contains the secret of each creation, each architecture of life. But at the same time, memory is coloured by today's events. Each time we remember, we create a new memory of the memory. Little Red River seeks out the relationship between reality and one's personal experience of it, the way images in the mind and truth overlap, the "lie acted reality".

Little Red River is the open stage of the memory of Smith.

Harry Smith is born with an uncertain past. The actors of his memory are talking to him, in fiction and reality, in the world of his waking dreams. He is a metal Smith and in his life he is constantly forging and melting his own past and future in multiple shapes. His dreams are populated with ghosts, Blanche, Charlie, Andermann, Ten Foot Henry, playing and replaying on the stage of his memory.

His mother, Elena Sokorowska (a.k.a. Blanche Dubois) comes from Europe to escape the fatality of the war. She makes her way across Canada from the Saint Lawrence to the West performing magic tricks with a Vaudeville troupe.

Her journey leads her to the Ponoka institution where she is committed for mental disorders. There she becomes pregnant and is transferred to a small farm in Alberta where she marries a metal Smith and taxidermist. Here, with her son Harry Smith, she attempts to imagine a new life, reconfiguring a fragmented past.

The scars of the body of Blanche are engraved in the consciousness of Smith like enigmatic tracks of the collective memory of the West, colonization, amnesia caused by emigration, brutality of nature, and murder. The wildness of the West finds a strange echo on the voice of Smith. His waking dreams are populated with the ghosts of his memory, living with him in the here and now, in his studio, in his room, in the landscape of his mind. But something clicks when Smith meets Rose, The girl who collects butterflies, The Painted Lady, staring at him like a double of his own soul.

Just two miles up the road you'll find a porcupine dead in the ditch.

It was trying trying the cross the road. - Robert Kroetsch