Inspired by human-scale chess on the streets of New York and the Permaculture movement, Cedar Board Game is a free, live, interactive, collaborative event for twenty-five players at a time. Cedar Board Game is a playful engagement with the natural environment that features the five senses and your own ingenuity. We provide the giant game board. You and your kids, family and friends are the ones who play.
As part of Progress Lab's Obstructions series, in which peers issue challenges to each of eleven member companies, The Only Animal responded to the following obstructions:
1. Create a scene using an excerpt from the screenplay of "Forrest Gump" using no more and no fewer words than in the excerpt...
2. Using only what Kendra Fanconi, Eric Rhys Miller and Colin Cooper can carry in one trip...
3. On a set revealed 40 minutes before the performance when the doors open to the audience!
We created a strangely affecting, fairly bizarre portrait of American extremism using found text, the characters and staging from "Forrest Gump" and a whole lot of Crazy Ideas (realized with the help of some beautiful friends)
A man recovering from amnesia, the wife who doesn't want him to remember, and a woman who washes up out of the sea. Memory and desire are the twin rip tides at work in this lost and found story. A radio play/live action hybrid that plays up and down the beach, in and out of the water.
The Only Animal's contribution to the collective event HIVE 3, Sugar blends five stories of first love into a candy-coloured confection. Five women concot their miniature tales of bittersweet romance using baking ingredients and cookies. These intimate object theatre pieces staged on breadboards balanced on the knees of two spectators take place in a 1950s frosted kitchen by the multitalented Keith Murray.
NiX is Canada's first theatre of snow and ice. This theatrical adventure follows two survivors and an arsonist through the fireworks at the end of the world. NiX is a frozen fantasy, complete with a flaming tuba, a snowman death scene and an explosive love story that will melt the coldest of hearts.
HIVE 2 took over 2 warehouse spaces at the Digital Media Centre for a 9-day marathon of perspective-rocking, intimate, outrageous, and eclectic performances by 11 independent B.C. theatre companies. Our installation you and the moon used interactive video, animated illustration, wild shifts of scale, and one very surprising performer to tell a love story for an audience of one.
you and the moon was picked up by The Cultch and remounted in 2010 in the Micro Theatre Series
Who's gonna free the world if not you and me? In Bangs & Buddha a meek Tokyo schoolgirl and a tired Left-Coast drag queen break out of the humdrum in a quest for freedom. Brought to you by the creative stylings of The Only Animal's Kendra Fanconi and Eric Rhys Miller, with special guest artists, Maiko Bae Yamamoto, Wendy Bross Stuart, and Mima Preston.
The One that Got Away tells the story of a girl with a fish where her heart should be, chasing her rapscallion grandfather into an afterlife reckoning with love and loss. This play-in-a-pool combines narrative, music and innovative water staging in a tale of submerged Jewish identity. It premiered in Vancouver, Canada as a co-production with Electric Company and the Norman Rothstein Theatre, and received 11 nominations and 4 Jessie Awards including Best Production of 2002.
dog eat dog leaps from parallel worlds, to the real world with five true stories, inspired by recent news reports. The Only Animal is on the hunt for survival tactics: tracking a refugee from Hurricane Katrina, a Sasquatch stalker, an unlikely escape artist, a feral grocery clerk, and the woman who holds the world record in grilled cheese consumption. Truth is there, somewhere in the cultural-Cusinart of song-lyrics, CBC, natural disasters urban myths, prison art, roadside attractions, and competitive eating contests.
HIVE is a performance event created by 11 of Vancouver and Victoria's creation-based theatre companies. In 2006, these companies created 11 intimate performances for audiences ranging from one person to twenty. The event used every corner of The Chapel, a converted funeral home that is now a venue and art gallery in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The Only Animal's contribution sampled text from Shakespeare's The Tempest to reveal the nocturnal struggles of a couple on the rocks. Infesting hallways, parlours, a billiard room, the former embalming room, gallery space, garages, dumpsters, and more: HIVE proved to be a momentous demonstration of the fierce creativity and collaborative spirit that fuels this generation of theatre artists.
