Banana Musik by Kris Alvarez, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There is nothing remotely classifiable about Banana Musik, launching Common Ground Arts’ new Prairie Mainstage Series Friday. There’s storytelling, yes, and a memory play with unusual trimmings. There’s original music. There’s a celebration of the immigrant experience, check, and an honouring of aging parents and the generation that put their own dreams on hold to give their kids a better crack at a fulfilling life, all there.
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Ah, and there’s this fascinating rarity: Regina-based theatre artist Kris Alvarez, a 50-year-old first-generation Filipina immigrant, shares the stage with her actual parents. Jim and Susan Alvarez, in their ’70s, are artistic, creative people, as their daughter describes, who emigrated from the Philippines to Regina in the 1970s, via Toronto and Windsor. “My dad thought the idea of going West not East sounded exciting; it was all the Westerns he’d watched.” But they’re not actors. And we get to meet them live and in person, and tour their stuff, as inventoried onstage by their daughter.
Alvarez, personable and friendly in conversation, explains that the music of Banana Musik, and the show title, come from “the name my dad gave his original music recorded in our basement in the 70s.” As a teenager growing up in Regina (“I’m very partial to Regina, and the Prairies”), she’d discovered a whole box of cassettes of her dad’s songs in his car. “I was really curious about him listening to his own music while he drove around…. We think we know our parents, but there are all these other parts to them.”
Kris, Jim and Susan Alvarez in Banana Musik, Found Fest 2024. Photo by Mat Simpson
Of the five songs in Banana Musik, Alvarez chose four inspired, she says, “by the memory of being young,” and one is more contemporary. The Alvarez household was a creative, music-filled place to grow up, as she describes. “Even back in the Philippines, my mom and dad were big Beatles fans, very into the British Invasion music of the ‘60s.” Her dad started as a drummer, and took up guitar; “he still plays in the living room all the time.” And father and daughter play music together, sometimes busking just for fun….” Her mom is creative in handicraft mode; she “paints, beads, sews purses and dresses….”
The seeds of the show were planted in 2017 when Alvarez, who’d always been “a self-proclaimed theatre artist” make a conscious decision to “dig in full-time to arts-making and community-building.” And she counts actor/ director/ playwright Joey Tremblay as one of her mentors in that decision. Instead of writing a solo play for herself, she wondered “who are the other people in town who consider themselves brown or ‘other’. And what are they up to?”
The result was Burnt Siena, a sort of talk show/ variety show mashup. The tagline: “a live variety show with a lot more colour. Special guests weren’t artists per se. “They were teachers, restaurateurs, business people….” And Alvarez would ask them “what does it mean to you to be brown? What is it like to grow up here, on the Prairies?” Burnt Siena ran for four years till Alvarez put it to bed in 2022.
And she devised a replacement, Burnt Siena Boulevard, still running in Regina, an homage to Sesame Street especially designed for young people. “We weren’t teaching didactically about race or culture. We just exist.”
As you will glean, Alvarez finds her inspirations in inter-generational ways. “I’ve always (included) my parents, all along the way…. I want to spend more time with them as they get older, appreciating them. And they’re fully artists in their own right, who gave up a lot as immigrants to do full-time jobs to raise a family.”
“If I’m doing an art show or a performance I want to scratch below the surface of the questions I’ve got. And this one, Banana Musik, is about elder care, about getting to know your older relatives….”
How do you construct a script for yourself as an actor, and your parents who aren’t actors? “Tricky ,” says Alvarez, laughing. Though not an actor, her dad had been a front man in bands in his time, so he’s used to performing. Her mom, primarily a visual artist, had never been onstage. “I used a few different theatre tricks, realism tricks; it feels a bit verbatim…. While I’m recounting family stories I just wanted them to be there, the family dynamic.”
“My mom’s track is (dealing with) the meal of the day; my dad’s track is playing music on the couch. And once in a while I engage with them singing…. When they have lines, it’s very much what they’d say (in real life).” After all, as Alvarez points out, “we all have scripts, when we go for Sunday dinner or at Christmas, certain jokes, certain arguments…. So that wasn’t hard when I started thinking that way. We all have our party tricks that are part of our identity.”
The Alvarez family, Susan, Kris, and Jim in Banana Musik, Winterruption, Saskatoon. Photo by Andrew Bromell.
And when it comes to some of the ‘issues’ that Alvarez explores in the play— “their stuff, their aging bodies, my worries about how to take care of things” — Alvarez and her parents had conversations about all of the above before they read the script — and during rehearsal. “I’d ask them ‘is this too exposing? Is this too much?’” Alvarez mostly “does the heavy lifting” in acting, she says. “They just have to be themselves.”
“The gift of them being Boomers is that they’re pretty confident about the way they’ve lived…. We check in. And mostly they find it super-special that we get to share this. They’re generous people and I’m very lucky to have them in my life.”
As a community-building bonus, the run of the show includes an Intergenerational Songwriters’ Circle Sept. 20, hosted by Jim Alvarez and his granddaughter Zoë James, as well as a Burnt Sienna Workshop Series, and Burnt Sienna Blueprint Sept. 24. On Sept. 21, Alvarez hosts Golden Potluck, “a special dinner party featuring Indigenous and immigrant women sharing perspectives on family, culture, and identity. Bring a dish to share.” Plus, Sept. 27, Burnt Sienna, “an evening of conversation, food, humour, and heart with prairie artists, thinkers, and entertainers from diverse backgrounds.”
PREVIEW
Banana Musik
Common Ground Arts Society Prairie Mainstage Series
Written by: Kris Alvarez
Performed by: Kris, Jim, and Susan Alvarez
Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: Thursday through Sept. 26, with Burnt Sienna Sept. 27
Tickets, full schedule, description of events: commongroundarts.ca
