By Liz Nicholls,
Coming together to tell stories (and hear them). It’s what people do; it’s what people have always done; it’s what people will keep doing.
Call that urge a tradition. Or a compulsion. At heart, Cardiac Theatre’s KaldrSaga: a new queer, old Norse cabaret, opening Friday in a new old place, is a playful homage to that evergreen impulse. And it marks the return to action of nine-year-old Cardiac since their massive Alberta Queer Calendar Project, which in undertook 13 podcast releases of new plays by queer Alberta artists in 2020-2021.
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The beautifully reno’ed venue, airy, wood-trimmed, lined with original brick, is the ArtsHub Ortona in the river valley with a story of its own — once an armoury and in its time a home for naval reservists, Hudson’s Bay offices, a butter company headquarters … more recently artist studios of every stripe, and more recently still, performance spaces. The location is liminal. “It’s not downtown and it’s not Strathcona,” as playwright Harley Howard-Morison points out. “We’ve opened a magic portal,” laughs director Sarah J Culkin. “A gathering place. With lots of parking.”
That’s where a pair of queer storytellers ply their trade, which as Culkin says, “depends on the audience being there for the story to function, in the same way people did in 600 BCE.” Kaldr and Saga (Graham Mothersill and Michelle Diaz) tap the vein of Norse mythology, a bizarre and wonderful repository of vigorous heavy-hitter characters and oddball minor players, who change genders not to mention species, and trample norms, pretty much at will.
The last time we saw them, in 2019, the two friends Kaldr and Saga were having one of their yearly catch-up sessions in a bistro pub. The Almanac is no more. And neither, as Howard-Morison explains, is the friendship. In some ways, the new cabaret is “a revision, in some ways a sequel, though you don’t need to have seen the first (Culkin didn’t)…. It’s a deeper exploration of what I wanted to do.”
“It’s about a friendship between the storytellers, where they’re at. They’ve had a massive falling-out; they’re ex-best friends. And this is Kaldr coming back and saying ‘let’s give it another go’.” Culkin, a specialist in new work (Brick Shithouse, Re:Connect, In My Own Little Corner, the Nextfest Smut niteclubs), describes the estrangement as Kaldr “going off, doing greatest hits. A bit commercial, TikTok, social media…. Meanwhile Saga’s been doing a PhD in nihilism.”
“This is watching two people who are a bit older trying to re-negotiate a former friendship that is not a romantic relationship. So interesting and beautiful.” It’s not familiar relationship scenarios, “the ones we’ve seen before, the break-up, the divorce, the trying to get back together after a break-up…. This is ‘what does it mean to lose a best friend?’”
Says Howard-Morison, “we don’t have as many touch points for that, for getting back a friend.” And, adds Culkin, “exploring the more specifics of queer friendship…. Those relationships can become a lot more important when you’re not in a position to feel comfortable with your family, or with yourself in every situation. This is ‘chosen family’. The loss is felt more acutely and the stakes of repair are a lot higher.”
“It’s not a partner, and it’s not a parent … and not relationships lost through the process of coming out.” Howard-Morison laughs, “is a rom-com for a friend a platonic-com?”
Kaldr is hot to “get the band back together, set up a night of storytelling, get those juices flowing, and maybe help repair the relationship,” he says. The first part of KaldrSaga is “a camp-y cowboy origin story, a folk ballad, silly, with a dozen characters in the West.” And, says Culkin, “a flurry of superficially addressed western tropes.”
Howard-Morison, the former managing director of Theatre Network, is not without legit cowboy cred himself. He grew up outside Calgary “with earnest ranch-y folk who don’t really appreciate camp ranch that much,” as he says cheerfully. Speaking as we are of unusual origin stories, how many “two-buckle” 4-H Club cattle champions” are there in theatre, after all? The protagonist of his play Redd Meats, set in the Alberta hamlet of Redd (workshopped at Script Salon in 2023) is a student vet and part-time butcher.
“As a queer person you grow up in a world, and you inhabit a world. And I kept them quite separate. Now that I’m in my 30s, all the worlds are colliding, and I’m in a place to write the camp-y ranch story and for that to be OK.”
Cowboy and Norse mythology mash up nicely, say Howard-Morison and Culkin. How about Hervör, a female warrior with an impressive skill set, who dressed like a man to reclaim her father’s cursed sword from his grave? How about the blood content of “the Mead of Poetry,” the magical elixir the knowledge-seeker Odin is after. Making Bud Light look particularly lame, it gives poets their special power. In KaldrSaga you get archetypes with roots in both Norse and Wild West Alberta mythology — “the wanderer, the father figure, the bandit, gunslinger, the mysterious stranger with magical power …” Culkin says.
The second part of KaldrSaga, is a “drag musical theatre revue” inspired by that time Thor, a Norse star, wore a dress to a wedding in order to get his famous hammer back. Thor’s son Mosey, a name meaning brave, is looking to go into musical theatre studies instead of, you know, war.
And part three, as Howard-Morison and Culkin describe, is a kind of found-object puppetry extravaganza. It’s inspired by a particularly gruesome Norse incident in which Fenmer, one of the kids of shape-shifter Loki, selflessly loses a hand, on purpose, to a ferocious wolf.
Howard-Morison calls the show “a triathlon” for actors Mothersill and Diaz. They play Kaldr and Saga, who play characters, who play characters in drag. They’re wearing “hats on hats,” says Culkin, “sometimes nine hats deep. And we’re having a lot of fun.” Demanding, strenuous fun, to be sure: acting, singing, dancing, comedy, puppetry. Which is one reason Cardiac is trying an unorthodox performance schedule, three Friday through Sunday weekends, so the actors can have a breather.
“It’s a silly, irreverent look at how we tell stories — a cowboy ballad, a drag musical revue, and object puppetry story,” says Howard-Morison of his re-imagined cabaret. “A challenge,” Culkin beams. But such a juicy one!”
And what makes it particularly delightful, to a team that is almost entirely queer, is that “it’s fun. It’s a queer story that isn’t trying to prove anything. We’re not defining anything. We’re not making an argument for or against anything. We’re just a bunch of gay people making a little play,” says Culkin.
These days “queer people in Alberta much less queer artists (pause), well, it’s a bit of a minefield right now,” they say. “So it’s such a relief to me that we’re creating in the positive; we’re not reacting. We’re moving toward what we find exciting, not against what we find scary and upsetting…. You need both; you need a counterpoint. But what if you made a piece about how being a queer person was just kind of awesome?”
PREVIEW
KaldrSaga: a new queer, old Norse cabaret
Theatre: Cardiac
Written by: Harley Howard-Morison
Directed by: Sarah J Culkin
Where: ArtsHub Ortona, 9722 102 St.
Running: Friday through June 8, Fridays through Sundays
Tickets: cardiactheatre.ca
