Skin by Leslie Baker, Joseph Shragge and Emma Tibaldo

A LlIVE THEATRE DIGITAL PERFORMANCE CREATED BY LESLIE BAKER, EMMA TIBALDO, AND JOSEPH SHRAGGE - DIRECTED BY LESLIE BAKER - PRODUCTION DESIGN BY PETER BOTTAZZI - LIGHTING DESIGN BY HOWARD MENDELSOHN AND LUC PRAIRIE - SOUND DESIGN BY PETER CERONE - MUSIC COMPOSITION BY MICHAEL LEON
PERFORMED BY LESLIE BAKER, EMMA TIBALDO, BURCU EMEC, CARINA ROSE, DEAN MAKARENKO, PAUL GIRARDIN, KEVIN KOMODA, AND MICHAEL LEON

PRODUCED BY THE BAKERY AS PART OF THE CENTAUR THEATRE’S WILDSIDE FESTIVAL
MONTREAL, QUEBEC - JANUARY 2021
FRENCH SURTITLED AND ASL INTERPRETATION VERSIONS CREATED FOR LA CHAPELLE THEATRE (MONTREAL, QUEBEC) - APRIL 2021

CO-CREATOR, PERFORMER

SKIN, Wildside Festival
Posted on January 29, 2021 by Jim Burke, Special to Montreal Gazette

Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival continues on-line with the SKIN, a collaboration between The Bakery and La Chapelle that unfolds in four short episodes.

Inspired by a photograph of a partially illuminated door, and by a 2000-year-old text by Roman playwright Seneca called On the Shortness of Life, it asks those questions that all of us are gnawing on right now as we endure a seemingly never-ending lockdown: what’s the best, most productive, or just most tolerable way to fill our hours? And what is it with time, where it sometimes feels as though it’s dawdling along, sometimes like it’s hurtling us towards our end?

The creative team, led by Emma Tibaldo, Lesley Baker and Joseph Shragge — the latter two behind the coruscating and brilliant Fringe show Fuck You! You Fucking Perv! (a far more thoughtful and sensitive show than that title might suggest) — seamlessly melds together a combination of spoken word, dance routines that are sometimes sinister, sometimes joyous, allusions to classical myth, even a punk rock performance led by Tibaldo (who, as well as being director of Playwrights Workshop Montreal, moonlights as lead singer for her band, The Tibaldos.)

The cycle of presentations begins and ends with us being taken on an astral journey that initially seems like a soothing wellness session, but soon let’s us know that there’s something less luxurious going on underneath. Are you still crawling like a dog back on earth?, Baker intones. And this image of human suffering and indignity is something that the piece keeps coming back to, often in imagery that’s both unsettling and weirdly beautiful — Baker herself painfully crawling across a black-and-white limbo, Tibaldo undergoing a martial arts exercise which grinds her down to abject exhaustion, three figures reenacting Sisyphus’s eternal torture of attempting to push a boulder up a hill only for it to keep rolling back down.

Alternatingly meditative, disturbing and at times grotesquely funny, it’s also superb on a technical level, combining green-screen effects and an evocative soundscape, with committed performances that range from deadpan humour to punishing physicality.

POTATO CAKES DIGITAL 2021