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theatre review

A show as simultaneously dense and transparent as this one really makes you question the whole nature of performance – and perhaps the whole complex of truths and mythologies that passes for normal life.Estelle Hanania

There is a museum for everything, including ventriloquism, which has its own small shrine and treasure house near Cincinnati. The Vent Haven Museum also holds an annual summer gathering of ventriloquists, which was used by French-Austrian director Gisèle Vienne and Puppentheater Halle as the basis for a theatre work called The Ventriloquists Convention.

The play, which opened a two-night run at Montreal's Festival TransAmériques on Monday, has the clammy intrusive feel of a Christopher Guest mockumentary, with most of the humour cut out and lots of personal horror put in. The material was worked up by transatlantic writer Dennis Cooper from improvisations by the performers, which seem to have veered strongly toward scenes of show-stopping catharsis.

The first half of the show is dominated by the one commercially successful ventriloquist at the conference. Nils (played by Nils Dreschke) hogs the microphone, bubbles with unfelt mirth and dismisses ideas or people by saying, "I love it!" He praises the others while subtly or coarsely belittling them, at one point foaming into a rage that he glosses as an impromptu acting demo. They applaud vigorously on cue and express their envy or disdain for the star only indirectly, or through their dummies.

After the celebrity encounter with Nils, the show pivots into something more diffuse, like a lull between conference sessions. Vienne has no fear of letting time go slack, or of allowing us to feel that the convention's real centre of energy has drifted offstage. The whole production is a masterclass in varying intensities of time and space, and in that sense, has something in common with FTA's opening offering, Une île flottante / Das Weisse vom Ei.

We see a few scenes from the conference periphery, including an encounter between the

earthy Sebastian (Sebastian

Fortak) and the more cerebral Uta (Uta Gebert), who can't find a way to animate her pillow puppet because her critical mind keeps getting in the way. Sebastian's Kurt Cobain dummy takes a break from his perpetual misery to cozy up to the pillow puppet. "I'd like to sleep with you," he murmurs, in one of the play's most charming moments. But there's no cute extension of this feeling to the human performers, who by the end of the scene have tacitly retreated to more alienated positions.

Nils condescendingly chats up Jessica (Jonathan Capdevielle), whose praying-mantis puppet complains of a bellyache that morphs into a shrieking accusation that Nils's dummy had date-raped her months before. The insect's water breaks and something falls onto the floor, to be instantly forgotten by the players, if not the audience.

The cast gradually reassembles for the second conference set piece: the open-microphone session. This is when Vienne and Cooper, fuelled by their actors' improvisations, really run with the old conceit of the ventriloquist's dummy as a double, surrogate or psychotic screen. Each turn in the spotlight ends in a cathartic explosion, so intensely played that it seems impossible to say where stage fiction ends and personal reality takes over. Capdevielle, for one, has done frankly autobiographic solo pieces as a very similar drag character.

The most ferocious scene of all features Kerstin (played by Kerstin Daley-Baradel), testing out a routine she has created with the dummy used by her late father, a renowned ventriloquist. As first, it seems that Kerstin's material isn't very good; her dummy falters, she giggles at nothing. But then the two start discussing their quite different relationships with the old man, and within minutes, we're hanging over a dark void of emotional neglect and sexual abuse.

All this material is performed with tremendous skill and sensitivity by the nine cast members. A show as simultaneously dense and transparent as this one really makes you question the whole nature of performance – and perhaps the whole complex of truths and mythologies that passes for normal life.

Near the end of the play, one ventriloquist prefaces her act by saying she had performed it for a child in a hospital who died before the end, and asks that everyone do likewise this time, by allowing their dummies to die. They all do, in a mass assisted death that wasn't at all easy to grasp. Was this a nihilistic gesture, or a positive step that might let these damaged people find some way out of their pain? And in the world of ventriloquists' dummies, is there life after death?

The Ventriloquists Convention continues at Montreal's Usine C through May 31.

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