The Quest (2008)

Gabrielle Martin chats with David Hudgins and Kevin Kerr, co-founders of Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre.

Show Notes

Gabrielle, David and Kevin discuss: 

• The beginnings of Electric Company Theatre and its early collective model

• Why the fledgling theatre company had to “bite the bull by the horns”

• The function of interchangeable roles in the creative process

• The impetus behind early ECT shows at the PuSh Festival, such as Studies in Motion and Palace Grand

• The rich physical-visual landscape that plays a role from inception of piece, and in dialogue with the text

• How development of a company and its work corresponds to the process of aging

• What’s it like when opening night is the same as your baby’s due date?

About David Hudgins

David Hudgins is a founder of the internationally acclaimed Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver.  After more than two decades with this innovative company he has won numerous Jessie Awards. David received his BA Honours in English Literature at McGill University, a diploma in Acting from Studio 58 and a PDP Diploma in Education from Simon Fraser University. He teaches acting at Studio 58 and has directed nine shows there, including two Ovation-Award winning productions: Guys & Dolls (2007) and Spring Awakening (2012). The homegrown musical The Park (2010) which he directed and helped to dramaturge, garnered it five nominations. His 5-year orchestral/physical-theatre hybrid experiment odyssey called Flee, with composer Peggy Lee, found its legs at the Fox Cabaret with Electric Company and Studio 58 in 2016. He has written song lyrics for a variety of Hollywood movies. David is also a father, musician and sailor. 

About Kevin Kerr

Kevin Kerr is a playwright and founding member of Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre with whom he’s collaborated on the creation of more than a dozen full-length productions, including Brilliant!, Studies in Motion and Tear the Curtain!

He received the 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award for his play Unity (1918), which has been produced more than 100 times across Canada and around the world. Other plays include Skydive, Spine (both for Realwheels Theatre), The Remittance Man (Sunshine Theatre), Secret World of Og (Carousel Theatre for Young People), and The Night’s Mare (Caravan Farm Theatre). He also co-wrote the feature film adaptation of The Score for CBC Television (Screen Siren Productions) and collaborated with Stan Douglas on his interactive immersive National Film Board installation Circa 1948. His latest project is a suite of virtual reality Installations that accompany Electric Company Theatre’s newest production, The Full Light of Day.

Kevin joined the University of Victoria’s Department of Writing in 2012. He currently teaches playwriting and screenwriting, with a creative focus on cinematic/theatre hybrids, collaborative creation, site-specific theatre and interactive narratives.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

Gabrielle Martin 00:02 Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabriel Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who've helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming. 

Gabrielle Martin 00:21 Today's episode on the 2008 Push Festival highlights Electric Company Theater in conversation with David Hudgens and Kevin Kerr. Electric Company Theater was originally formed as a collective in 1996 by Kim Collier, David Hudgens, Jonathan Young, and Kevin Kerr, who met while training at Vancouver Studio 58, and now includes Carmen Aguirre as core artist with the founding members. 

Gabrielle Martin 00:44 After more than two decades with this innovative company, David Hudgens has won numerous Jesse Awards. He now teaches acting at Studio 58 and has directed nine shows there, including two Ovation Award -winning productions. 

Gabrielle Martin 00:58 Kevin Kerr, a Governor General's literary award winner, has collaborated on the creation of more than a dozen full -length productions with Electric Company Theater. He currently teaches playwriting at the University of Victoria's Department of Writing while continuing to develop new work for the company. 

Gabrielle Martin 01:13 Here's my conversation with David and Kevin. 

Gabrielle Martin 01:19 First, I just want to acknowledge that we're on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Wautu. And on that land, we're on what is now known as Commercial Drive, here to have this conversation today. 

Gabrielle Martin 01:35 So, let's go back to the beginning. So, before Palestine in 2006, which was the second official push festival, push presented electric company theater Studies in Motion, Studies in Motion, the hauntings of Edward Muybridge. 

Gabrielle Martin 01:53 But I'd imagine that your relationship with the festival started even before that. So, yeah, bring us back to the beginning of that relationship. 

Kevin Kerr 02:02 Well, I guess it would have started with just being in the community with Norman. And, you know, when we started the company in 1996, I think, you know, Norman was running Rumble Productions and we got to know him fairly early on. 

Kevin Kerr 02:20 I think our first ever profile, first ever interview, was a piece for Transmissions magazine that Rumble produced. And it was Adrian Wong interviewing us for their, yeah, their first issue. And we were just a brand new company then in like 1998 or something. 

David Hudgins 02:44 I believe of that and the producer it was called transmissions. Yeah. Yeah 

Gabrielle Martin 02:49 But, do you remember what... 

Kevin Kerr 02:52 We talked about the company, about creative process, there were some really beautiful quotes from Kim in there that we got a lot of mileage out over the years. She talked about starting a company and making a go of it and Kim used the expression, sometimes you just got to bite the bull by the horns. 

Gabrielle Martin 03:13 Whatever it takes. 

Kevin Kerr 03:14 every day. It was just a classic Kim sort of malapropism of fight the bullet and grab the bull by the horns and merge together. So we would laugh about that for years. So we knew Norman in the scene and as he became more and more engaged with, you know, the international performance community and I think the I guess we had probably early conversations with him around that and we we were in development for this project that was a partnership with UBC and that was Studies in Motion and it was our yeah the timings were all kind of aligned that our kind of track for production for that play was looking like it would fit nicely with that festival that year in January and and so yeah I don't know 

Gabrielle Martin 04:20 You wrote that word, so do you want to check it out? Yeah, yeah. And so even early on with your company, Peter, your roles were interchangeable. 

Kevin Kerr 04:31 Yeah, I think in the earliest days we kind of were just a classic collective, we did everything at the same time, we wrote, we directed, we performed together, and then we started to, and projects kind of take specific roles, but those would trade around, so in that case I wrote the script, Kim directed it, Jonathan was a performer in it. 

David Hudgins 04:56 that was starting to be one of our well I guess we've done it a little bit but we were starting to separate from each other in the sense artists not we're still collective but we were taking on different roles and wearing different hats specifically so that was that was like a venture yeah right yeah 

Gabrielle Martin 05:15 And what was studies in motion, what was kind of the core of the piece in terms of what it was talking about or in terms of the kind of forms it was using, why was it a fit for push in the early, in that second festival? 

Kevin Kerr 05:30 Yeah, I think the exploration of that play was around kind of perception and the notion of sort of I guess the influence of technology on the way we see the world, the way we understand truth, and also kind of a celebration of the human body in motion. 

Kevin Kerr 05:50 And it stemmed from kind of stumbling upon the works of this photographer who was an obsessed character that documented human and animal motion and kind of accidentally invented the motion picture by doing that. 

Kevin Kerr 06:07 And so I was, yeah, I became, I pitched the idea I guess to the company of doing a show that was inspired by his life and work. He also had a really crazy, his biography was kind of read like a melodrama, involved betrayals and murder and abandonment and all these things along with this obsession with trying to capture truth in an image. 

Kevin Kerr 06:33 And so we worked with Robert Gardner at UBC who was also kind of obsessed at that time and was trying to, he was running a research project where he was attempting to replace traditional theater lighting with digital, just all digital