Fascinating, and nerve-wracking: Cycle pedals a provocation. A review

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

There is something valiant, energizing, and scary as hell, about the show that’s currently spinning its wheels faster and faster at Mile Zero Dance.

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The man we meet in Cycle does something we all know how to do. He rides a bicycle. But here’s the thing:  Andrew Ritchie, the intrepid creator and star of this Thou Art Here Theatre production, rides his bicycle everywhere, in every season, to work, on holiday, in cities, on mountain tops in Bolivia, in theatres.…

And in this fascinating and nerve-wracking solo show — part-memoir, part-documentary, part activist drama on wheels — in a city where ‘bike lane’ is a conversational gambit that could singe your eyebrows, the cyclist stakes a claim. A claim for safe urban space.

Cycle spins under the flag (now tainted by whack-jobs) of “freedom” — of space and movement. And in his appealingly low-key, self-deprecating way, Ritchie challenges the notion, so engrained it’s become an assumption over time, that car and truck drivers are the natural proprietors of the city and its streets. By now we recognize the value of diversity of all sorts in our communities. So why not in modes of transportation?

Who owns a city anyhow? What should the urban ecology be, in this polluted, traffic-clogged world? Cycle asks the questions. And the stakes are high.

Andrew Ritchie in Cycle, Thou Art Here Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

Kristi Hansen’s production is an original fusion of inventive physical movement (choreographer: Ainsley Hillyard); projections, live video, vintage footage (designer: T. Erin Gruber); amplified and altered sound effects to alter Ritchie’s voice as other characters (designer: Liv McRobbie). And in the course of the show Cycle makes its case. In the mortal combat between bikes and cars there’s greater safety for both in a more inclusive urban environment.

With its history of “site-sympathetic” Shakespeare shows, The Thou Art Here archive attests to an attraction to non-conventional theatre spaces. As this show opens, Ritchie, atop a bicycle himself, has assembled a bicycle “gang” of half a dozen audience volunteers, also up on bikes onstage. “You could actually fall off,” he warns his cohorts amiably, as they pedal together.

And he consults with the audience directly on how they learned to ride a bike, the most scared they’ve been, and the happiest, on a bicycle. Ah, and whether they wear a helmet. In Amsterdam, probably the world’s most bike-friendly city, most people don’t wear helmets, and there are way fewer fatalities. It’s largely, Ritchie argues, because of the critical mass of cyclists and more cautious behaviour by car drivers.

He’s genuinely curious, and un-judgmental, about what he hears from audience members. And he has a casual free-wheeling performance style that’s in sync with the script and its free-associative vibe. There’s really no reason to resist joining in if you get a chance.

The land acknowledgment isn’t an add-on. The bicycle, after all, is all about a direct connection between rider and the land, the particularities of place — the Edmonton street, the exact intersection, the six-lane chaos of 109th St., the accident-magnet traffic circle at 142 St. and 107 Ave. The sense of the here and now is pretty much built into cycling. Witness the graphic live image of Ritchie, cycling furiously in the centre of a lane of traffic, with the headlights of an F-150 behind him. It lingers. The car and the truck are bound to win in close encounters, and the faster they’re going the more lethal the impact.

I’m getting nervous just thinking about it. And his recounting of a winter nightmare in his time as a bike food courier in Toronto will stick in your mind too, next time you’re figuring out your Uber Eats tip.

Cycle, in short, doesn’t skimp on the dangers of cycling. Truthfully they seem a bit more explicit to this car driver than the subtler joys of “the wind in your hair” on a winter’s evening in snow-bound Edmonton.

“I think about crashing all the time,” Ritchie tells us. But there’s joy to be had, he insists, in a more immediate relationship with the world outside. And there’s a larger principle of fairness, of the livability of cities, to consider.“Bike Lanes are political.” Something to think about that the next time you’re stuck in gridlock on the Whitemud.

REVIEW

Cycle

Theatre: Thou Art Here

Created by and starring: Andrew Ritchie

Directed by: Kristi Hansen

Where: Mile Zero Dance Warehouse (9931 78 Ave.)

Running: through Dec. 22

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca