Fresh Meat Theatre Festival’s Weekend Inventive (WI) presented two one-act plays called The Gold Project by Bad Hats Theatre Company and Patrick and Karina Across Canada by Patrick Kelly and Karina Milech on Feb. 28 at Arts Court.
These productions were created and produced in the same space within the span of three days, with the night of the third day being the performance.
Fresh Meat Theatre director Tony Adams said the event intended to showcase the process and community actors have when creating work.
“The magic comes in being in the room together, making these things, and being with each other,” Adams said.
The show opened with Patrick and Karina Across Canada, a dynamic and funny romp about two best friends and actors who travel across Canada to seek out opportunities to work in theatre. It explored and showed the struggles facing young actors in Canada. The play was based on the experiences of a real-life road trip across Canada that Kelly and Milech took in 2014.
Kelly mentioned the unexpected outcome of their creation.
“Going into the process, I thought it was going to be more about the trip,” Kelly said. “It ended up being about our friendship.”
The next play, The Gold Project, was an extended, abstract solo piece contemplating values, self-worth, and gold using movement. The protagonist, played by Fiona Sauder, took the audience through fantasies of grandeur, as well as revealing the vulnerability of self-contemplation.
Bad Hats Theatre Company collaborators and friends, Nicola Atkinson, Fiona Sauder, Megan Carty, Sinead Sullivan-Paul, and Paul Griffin, worked together to expand and develop a solo piece developed by Sauder during her time in theatre school. Their performance at the Weekend Inventive was also their debut as a new theatre company.
“The best thing you can give a budding physical theatre company is time and space, and we got that,” Sauder said. “Whether it was what we intended or not, it propelled us. And that’s all we could’ve asked for, it was a gift.”
“Right from the get-go, the application said that it was all about celebrating process and being able to dive into some idea and just have fun with it and play,” Milech said. “This was a nice way for the process to be critiqued and celebrated as opposed to just the end result because arguably, these [productions] aren’t just end results. They’re little seedlings that will hopefully grow into something big later.”
