Studies in Motion, directed by freshly minted Siminovitch Prize-winner Kim Collier, is a flashy and fascinating bio-play about the English-American photographer sometimes called “the father of cinema.”
In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge developed a technique that used multiple cameras to capture motion in order to solve the puzzle of whether a horse's hooves all leave the ground at once when it gallops (they do).
Written by Kevin Kerr, whose other works include Unity (1918) and Skydive, Studies in Motion pans back and forth between two significant slices of Muybridge's life: the years he worked at the University of Pennsylvania obsessively documenting animal and human locomotion, and the years he spent prior to that in a tumultuous marriage – a marriage that ended when he shot his wife's lover, who, incidentally, was the San Francisco Post's theatre critic (played by the excellent Jonathon Young).
Given that twist, it's a marvel playwrights resisted this dramatic real-life material for so long. (Although Philip Glass did compose an opera about Muybridge's murder trial – which ended in acquittal – in 1982.) Andrew Wheeler is intriguing, if somewhat impenetrable, as the antisocial and occasionally downright creepy photographer.
With his long white beard and unkempt hair, he looks like an aged Charles Manson. Muybridge certainly fosters a cult-like atmosphere among his scientific/artistic research team, demanding absolute loyalty, exploding in frequent rages and insisting that all his human subjects – men and women – be photographed in the nude.
Indeed, in presenting this production from Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre to Torontonians, the Canadian Stage Company is exhibiting the most naked bodies they have since their 2005 production of Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out.
As Muybridge explains to a shocked puritanical donor to the university, however, his motives aren't perverted (at least not in a sexual sense). “I strip away the clothes not to see the flesh, but to better see the motion,” he says. “If I were able, I'd strip away the flesh as well in order to see the muscle, then strip the muscle to see the bone, and I'd even throw away the very skeleton if it could afford me the opportunity to se the unencumbered essence of an action.”
Though Kerr's workmanlike script has a scatterbrained structure and his supporting characters aren't particularly fleshed out (despite appearing in the buff), Studies in Motion's central figure and subject are so transfixing that your attention is kept throughout – even on a second viewing. (I first caught the show at Montreal's Festival TransAmériques in 2009.) Collier and choreographer Crystal Pite – it's difficult to tell where one's work ends and the other's begins – have fed on the play's themes and Muybridge's work for their stunning staging.
They've broken down movements into their constituent parts and divvied them up between actors, as well as made innovative use of stroboscopic effects that sync up with Patrick Pennefather's pulsing score. We get to observe motion sped up, split apart and stopped completed – and share in the characters' awe at Muybridge's innovative dissection of time and space.
“It's like a memory – that everyone can see!” Blanche, Muybridge's assistant played by Juno Ruddell, gasps as she watches moving images for the first time, projected by “zoopraxiscope.”
When Studies in Motion is galloping ahead at full speed, it leaves the ground entirely.
Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge
- Written by Kevin Kerr
- Directed by Kim Collier
- Starring Andrew Wheeler
- An Electric Company Theatre production
- At the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto
Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge runs in Toronto until Dec. 18.
This review is a revised version of one originally published in The Globe and Mail on June 1, 2009.
