We are haunted by our losses: Phantom Limbs at Expanse

I want to tell you about a haunting and mysterious play I saw last weekend at the Expanse Fest. Phantom Limbs is one of those experiences that move into your mind and lodge there. It’s a dance-theatre piece that gives a bravura role to body-sensing tech, since Moment Discovery’s impressively sparkly high-tech Dot Box, full of thousands of LED lights, plays along with playwright/performer Kristi Hansen onstage as she moves through the story she’s telling — a story of pain, resilience, obstacles overcome, joy.

On the one hand the tech is a kind of sympathetic stage companion. When Hansen moves, or jumps, or spins, the Dot Box responds in sync, with light and colour patterns. On the other hand, that technology eerily persists in mapping a right leg and foot that Hansen, an amputee artist of pretty much unlimited versatility (she’s a great dancer), no longer has on her body: a phantom limb that continues to ache and make its presence felt even though it doesn’t physically exist.

And in her play Hansen weaves a collage of phantom memories and selves, thoughts, images, dreams that stay with her, haunt her, refuse to vanish into the past. There’s her bright six-year-old self unfazed by people staring at her unusual leg and backward foot. There’s her 12-year-old self, counting backwards, the way anesthetists  command, en route to complex (and innovative) surgeries in hospitals. Counting backwards gives new meaning to the concept of phantom pain, a march into the past and an experience that time cannot remove (a powerful metaphor for our losses that resonate in the present).

And threading through the play is a free-association of thoughts about horrifying war-time amputations, land mines, limb-severing accidents in parts of the world where amputees don’t have access to prosthetics, or even anesthetic.

The spoken text — which includes voice-overs at a variety of aural distances, from six artists including Hansen herself — is both graphic and poetic. And you’re bound to reflect on the phantom “limbs” — the absent people, selves, moments, images that haunt you, still part of your body memory. They’re with you, and of you, even though they’ve been “amputated” by the passage of time.

Phantom Limbs by and starring Kristi Hansen, Expanse Festival. Photo by Ian Jackson.

It’s eerie, and it’s also strangely reassuring, I found. We are not just an architecture (albeit a fragile one) of flesh and bone, Hansen tells and shows us. Those can be lost, amputated, rearranged; flesh and bone can be cut away, or replaced by plastic and metal. But somehow, remarkably, we remain fully ourselves. “And life goes on.”

It’s a haunting, richly imagined piece of work — to which Moment Discovery’s team led by director of research Pamela Anthony and a long list of theatre artists at the top of their game (Aaron Macri, Ainsley Hillyard, Sheldon Elter among them) have contributed. And your chance to see it isn’t lost to the world of might-have-beens: Phantom Limbs continues at Expanse Friday through Sunday (at Moment Discovery headquarters in Edmonton Centre). Tickets: azimuththeatre.com.