There’s a unique vulnerability in singing – in using your own body as an instrument and sharing what’s in your heart and soul with other people.
Take that vulnerability and magnify it. Give an outside voice to your inner monologue – those thoughts and ideas and parts of ourselves that we don’t display in public because we’ve trained ourselves to keep them hidden. Then complicate it. Throw caution to the wind, throw away script and musical score, and just choose to perform wherever the moment takes you.
In front of an audience. Live. With no do-overs and no take-backs.
That place? That’s where Jennifer Pielak lives. And that’s where she’s travelling with her collaborator, pianist Peter Abando, as they launch their new experimental, improvised musical at the Vancouver Fringe Festival. Inside Voices: A Musical in the Key of P is onstage at the Firehall Arts Centre Sept. 6 to 16.
“It is terrifying. It’s like a rollercoaster,” Abando says with a laugh.
“When you’re really scared, but you do it anyway, and then you realize you didn’t die; you didn’t get killed by the lion,” adds Pielak, echoing his laugh. “Then it’s exciting.”
That, in a nutshell is what the whole world of improvised musical theatre is about.
“Musical improv isn’t such a huge art form around here – or anywhere, really,” Pielak admits.
Nonetheless, with her background in music, theatre and improv, it’s something she’s always had a hankering to do. Five years or so ago, she started to dream about the idea of creating her own one-woman improvised musical.
Then, last year, an opportunity came her way to make that dream a reality: the chance to take up an artist residency at the Anvil Centre and work full-time on her project. She and Abando, who’ve been collaborating on projects for eight years, decided to apply – and got accepted.
“It was an amazing experience to show up every single day, almost every day, and work all day on our creative stuff,” Pielak says, noting the residency gave her a chance to put all her other work aside for a month and concentrate on this one project. “I’m really grateful to the Anvil Centre for taking the initiative and helping artists.”
Thanks to the residency, which took place in June 2017, they were able to give shape to the musical and workshop it for live audiences.
“Initially it began as a one-woman improvised show, but it quickly became clear that it’s not – it’s a two person show,” Pielak says, noting Abando, at the piano, is as much a part of the performance as she is. “We wanted to have his voice heard, but his comes through the music.”
The two laugh about the fact that they have developed what amounts to their own language; when they communicate, it’s often through music – Pielak talks (or sings), and Abando answers in piano.
“He’s a musician; as an artist, that’s his medium. Mine is my body and my voice,” Pielak says.
And, yes, they find they understand each other best when they converse that way. It’s that same sense of conversation that they bring to the stage for each performance – a conversation that can venture pretty much anywhere.
Pielak laughs that the whole show “gets kind of existential.”
Imagine you gave voice to all the inner monologue that you go through in a day – starting from when you’re standing in front of your closet wondering what to wear, and journeying through all the mundane, emotional, silly and profound moments that you don’t usually share.
Only now, instead of silencing those inner voices, you sing them out loud.
“There’s some you don’t know are there because you’ve gotten really used to silencing them,” Pielak says. “Some are really loud. I find the inner critics are loud. Some are very positive, and those? Those can be quiet.”
“They sort of whisper in your ear,” Abando adds.
The inspiration for Inside Voices, Pielak says, comes from “persona” work she was doing in therapy – exploring how we all have a core self, around which we have created personas at different times in our life to help us deal with what we were going through in that moment.
Pielak and Abando credit two coaches, in particular, for helping them to take that inspiration in a theatrical direction. The first is experimental theatre artist Raina von Waldenburg, who recently moved to Vancouver from New York and teaches what she calls the I AM ONE WHO approach, which encourages performers to personify their inner judges and voices and allow those hidden and sometimes less-than-appealing parts of themselves to appear in their work.
Her brother, Avyen von Waldenburg, has worked with Pielak and Abando on the art of clowning, helping them find ways to merge its techniques with the I AM ONE WHO approach and create the rollercoaster ride that is a musical journey into your own psyche.
For Inside Voices, there’s no script, and no musical score. Pielak and Abando come to the stage armed only with a willingness to abandon themselves to the moment – and, of course, a solid foundation of extensive musical theatre training and experience.
“It’s like basketball players that are equipped with all kinds of plays they could potentially do,” Pielak says. Which plays get used, and which ones work, depends on the dynamics of the game and the players on the court – much as Inside Voices depends on the dynamics of the audience.
Abando notes that everyone in the audience has an effect on the performance. Whether it’s an expression on their face, an outfit they’re wearing, a reaction to the moment – any and all of those things can influence where Abando and Pielak end up.
Pielak notes that, as human beings, we have a built-in ability to read each other. Audiences tend to be able to sense when a performer is in the moment and when something is going awry; performers, likewise, can tell when they have the audience members are enjoying themselves and when they’ve mentally checked out.
When you realize they’re not enjoying it? That, Pielak says, is when the performers have to take that realization and work with it – either by giving them the metaphorical finger and carrying on with a “yeah, well, take THAT” attitude, or by turning sheepish and apologetic. Either way, the audience generally comes around.
“They just want us to open up and bare it,” Abando says.
It’s been freeing for Pielak to leave behind the usual performer worries about what the audience is going to think of her and instead regard the audience as something to be played – in essence, as part of the show.
“I think this is actually a trio,” Abando says, with the audience as the third player.
They admit that a performance of Inside Voices can take all the energy they have.
“Sometimes I feel like mentally drained,” Abando says. “There’s so much going on, it’s like your brain needs to take a giant breath.”
Pielak agrees. “The feeling is similar after the show to a therapy session, but different. It does have a lot of catharsis and emotion. I do feel drained, I feel kind of satisfyingly tired.”
If the show hasn’t gone as hoped, it can be frustrating and emotional. But when it works? “Often, I feel a sense of awe for what just happened,” Pielak says.
Right now, with days to go before the show’s opening, she admits she’s swinging back and forth between terror and excitement. But she’s decided to land on excitement.
She’s looking forward to Fringe time again – when Vancouver really becomes a theatre town and buzzes with the creative energy of live performance in venues all around the city – and to bringing this show to life for a new set of audiences.
“I have a little bit of this blinding faith right now,” she says. “This show’s hard, because how do you find the thing that people find interesting? That’s the risk, and it’s worth it.”
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Inside Voices is onstage Sept. 6, 9, 11, 14, 15 and 16 at the Firehall Arts Centre. For details and tickets, see www.vancouverfringe.com.
