“What do you remember about your main street?”
Charles Ketchabaw and Lisa Marie DiLiberto travel from city to city across the country asking Canadians that question. The Tale of a Town, a nationwide theatrical tour, gathers real-life main street memories and turns them into multi-platform performances. From Dec. 4-6, they will perform in Ottawa for the first time.
“It’s about what people remember in their own lifetime, their own living memory of their community of their main street,” DiLiberto said.
She said the inspiration behind the idea came from her hometown of Ancaster, Ont.
“As I came of age, the Main Street: the bakery and the ice cream shop, and the fish and chips store, and the bowling alley slowly closed down as the big box stores opened on the outside of town. Then I noticed how it was happening all over Canada, in many small towns. The main street culture was disappearing,” she said. “The play and the movement of Tale of a Town is an effort to keep the spirit of main street alive and reflect how important main streets are in building community.”
DiLiberto said the best part of this project is working with the local artists.
“It’s so exciting to create a new piece specific to a place with artists that I don’t know. It’s so thrilling to do that and to discover what happens,” she said.
Emily Pearlman, artistic director at Mi Casa Theatre, is one of the local artists involved.
She said the project involves a very diverse group of artists with all them sharing different roles.
“It’s a chaotic process, but it’s wonderful having solutions proposed that you would never come up with on your own,” she said.
Growing up in Wellington West, Pearlman was intrigued by the stories in her neighbourhood.
“I was really excited to delve into what people think about the neighbourhood to partially understand my own relationship to it,” she said.
DiLiberto said the Ottawa performance is going to be different from previous shows.
Ottawa’s version will be bilingual and will take place in three different locations, something she said they’ve never done before.
“Those are the two big challenges and also exciting points of the Ottawa piece,” she said.
The audiences for each show will meet at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Wellington West, Arts Court downtown, and the Shenkman Arts Centre in Orleans. From there, they will be led to the location of the play, which is currently confidential, “just to add an element of surprise,” DiLiberto said.
The Tale of a Town will continue after the tour.
“This will culminate in some sort of artistic, multi-platform celebration of Canada’s main street culture across Canada for Canada’s 150th anniversary,” DiLiberto said.
Details of that celebration are still unknown.
“Just as we never know what the play is going to be until we start to make it, we don’t know exactly what it’s going to be, but we know all the stories that we’re gathering. All the pieces that we’re making are going to somehow inspire the creation of something that celebrates Canada’s main streets in 2017,” she said.
