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One Yellow Rabbit
Performance History: 2000 and On

Overview

25 yearsOver the past 24 years One Yellow Rabbit have produced a large and strikingly varied body of original work.

The productions below are listed by date with the most recent productions at the top. Each link will load a list of credits, an image, sometimes a short synopsis and performance or tour dates.

Also available:

Productions from 1987 to 2000

Mainstage Productions from 1987-2005

Touring History from 1982-2005

Sylvia Plath Must Not Die

Sylvia PlathHigh-society party poets, with passions as fiery as their verse.

  • Directed by: Blake Brooker
  • Assistant Director: David Van Belle
  • Staging: Denise Clarke
  • Sound Design: Richard McDowell
  • Production Manager/Lighting Design: Scott Baier
  • Fiona Kennedy - Production Coordinator
  • Stage Manager: Gina Puntil
  • Denise Clarke – Anne Sexton
  • Andy Curtis – Kayo Sexton
  • Onalea Gilbertson – Sylvia Plath
  • Michael Green – Ted Hughes

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two of the 20th century’s most prolific and complex literary figures, are inexorably linked, as much by their mutual zeal for life as by their infamous deaths.

They met in a poetry class, but their friendship flared over martinis at the Ritz, where they spilled stories of psychiatry and suicide, delighting in a mutual disdain for taboo. Their insatiable appetites, sexual and intellectual, defied straitjacketed social norms and their prescribed roles as mothers and wives. Together, their writing sparked a revolution in American poetry, bringing personal confession to the forefront of verse by pounding frustration and turmoil onto typewritten pages.

In their newest original work, the award-winning One Yellow Rabbit Performing Ensemble invites audiences on a voyeuristic journey to another era, where cocktails are swilled and conflicted souls are expressed in a cathartic torrent of ink and emotion. Using the text of Plath and Sexton as a springboard, they tackle themes of power, madness, extinction and survival, presenting poetry as it should be: fierce, fervent and devastating.

Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my door on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther’s tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.

- Sylvia Plath, from “Pursuit”

Performances

22nd Annual High performance Rodeo.
Vertigo Playhouse Theatre - Calgary, Alberta: January 8-12, 2008

Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica

Five Hole

One Yellow Rabbit and Rheostatics

Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica

  • Written by Dave Bidini
  • Adapted for the stage by Dave Bidini and Blake Brooker
  • Directed by Blake Brooker
  • Original music by Rheostatics
  • Performed by the One Yellow Rabbit Ensemble and Rheostatics
  • Staged by Denise Clarke
  • Sound Design by Richard McDowell
  • January 4-6, 2007: 7:30 pm nightly
  • In the Martha Cohen Theatre at the EPCOR CENTRE for the Performing Arts

Five hole (n.):
1. The space between a goalie's legs.
2. A new show that brings Canada's two favourite pastimes-hockey and sex-together at last on one rollicking theatre stage.

As exhilarating as winning game seven, more off-the-wall than Don Cherry's fashion sense, and naughty enough to draw a five-minute major: Five Hole presents a suite of engrossing, tender and hilarious erotic stories about the steamy underbelly of our national sport.

About Rheostatics

For more than two decades Rheostatics have mapped new frontiers across Canada, embracing the nation that bore them and reinterpreting its sea-to-shining-sea grandeur in music of startling variety and indisputable beauty. Lead by stalwarts Dave Bidini and Martin Tielli, their music has been described variously as "prog-rock," "art-rock," "orchestral psychedelia" and "a loosely organized cacophony of sound," all of which reveal the frustrating limits of language.

Rheostatics on the web

About Dave Bidini

A master storyteller, Rheostatic Dave Bidini lifts the hockey story to the level of modern Canadian folklore. He has become popular in recent years as one of Canada's best known authors, having published several books including two critically acclaimed volumes on hockey culture, including Tropic of Hockey and The Best Game You Can Name (McClelland & Stewart).

Dave Bidini on the web

Performances

Martha Cohen Theatre - Calgary, Alberta: January 4-6, 2007

Down With Up With People: The Untold Story of Anthony Curtola

Anthony Curtola
Synopsis

He only owns one suit, but it's a tuxedo!

One Yellow Rabbit's new comedy, Down With Up With People, takes you deep inside the untold story of Anthony Curtola, known to thousands of tipsy Calgarians as the smarmy host of the Big Rock Eddies.

But who is the real Anthony Curtola? Mr. Nude Medicine Hat 1978? Love child of Keith Richards and David Niven? Or reject from Up With People, that troupe of clean-cut, dancing teens whose saccharine theme song told us to like everyone? ("Up, up with people! You meet them wherever you go...")

Featuring
The Olés!
Performances

The Big Secret Theatre - Calgary, Alberta: September 20 - October 7, 2006

Hayride

Hayride
Synopsis

Hayride is a thought provoking comedy by, for and about grown-ups coming of (middle) age and for those who yearn to understand them.

Bearded God, bus maintenance through prayer, Logan's Run, what to do on your night sea journey, Walt Whitman, heavy petting, the mysteries of plasticine, Changes.

Featuring
Performances

The Big Secret Theatre - Calgary, Alberta: April 18 - May 6, 2006

A Fabulous Disaster

Fabulous Disaster

A Fabulous Disaster will make it's Calgary Premiere on Sepember 13, 2005 at The Big Secret Theatre and will run until October 1.

Synopsis

A Fabulous Disaster is Denise Clarke’s newest signature dance/drama about one seemingly hopeless person’s bravery in the face of the obvious disaster around her and the quiet one in her heart. Strange, beautiful and funny, the show toils with love, jealously, loneliness, acceptance and brilliant stupidity. Clarke brings sharp observation and glorious physical response together in an original piece drawing on all things opposite.

Featuring
  • Denise Clarke
Performances
  • Ruby Slippers Theatre and The Firehall Arts Centre: November, 2004
  • World Stage: Flying Solo Festival in Toronto: May, 2005

Liberators, Occupiers and Population

An international collaboration by One Yellow Rabbit, Het Huis van Bourgondië and Hebbel am Ufer.

Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Holland.

Friction

Sixty years on, three modern theatre companies explore a defining moment in World War II in a unique collaboration.

Any Canadian traveller who has spent time in Holland knows that the Dutch hold a persistently high regard for our nation. The reason is that in the final year of WWII, some 7,000 Canadian soldiers lost their lives there in a series of large set-piece battles and vicious house-to-house fighting that was largely instrumental in liberating the country from Nazi occupation.

Now, three theatre companies - one Canadian, one Dutch and one German - mark the 60th anniversary of this turning point in their collective histories with a unique trans-Atlantic collaboration. Their rules of engagement: to create a triptych of short pieces, fused together into one tri-national work of theatre. Calgary's One Yellow Rabbit, Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer, and Het Huis van Bourgondië of Maastricht, Netherlands, will each present a section of the triptych, exploring the liberation from their own particular national viewpoint. One Yellow Rabbit's Blake Brooker will direct the Canadian portion; celebrated director Hans Werner Kroesinger will take the reins of the German section; and Feico Sobel, one of Holland's brightest young directors, leads the Dutch piece.

Friction's (contribution to the triptych)
  • Featuring: David van Belle, Andy Curtis, Michael Green and Brad Payne
  • Created by: The Cast
  • Direction and Lighting by: Blake Brooker
  • Sound Design: Richard McDowell
  • Managing Producer: Stephen Schroeder
Performances
  • In Calgary at the Big Secret Theatre - January 4 - 8, 2005
  • In Amsterdam at Theatre FRASCATI - May 4 - 7, 2005
  • In Berlin at HEBBEL AM UFER's HAU 3 - May 10 & 11, 2005
  • In Maastricht at HUIS VAN BOURGONDIE - May 13 - 18, 2005

Andrew Allan's Chair

Andrew Allan's Chair

CBC Radio Arts & Entertainment

  • Executive Producer Damiano Pietropaolo CBC
  • Radio Arts & Entertainment Department Head James Roy
  • Sound Engineers (CBC) Bob Doble and Tory Meyer
Featuring
Performances

The Big Secret Theatre - Calgary, Alberta: January 7 - 10, 2004

Heavens to Murgatroid

Murgatroid
Synopsis

Heavens to Murgatroid! You're on your way to a posh shindig at the Calgary Marriot Hotel when your guardian angel turns his head for a second, and - wham! - You're pavement pizza. Now you're standing before judgment at the Pearly Gates, wearing nothing but a few fluffy clouds. That's a sweet deal if you're Mother Theresa or Ned Flanders. Not so hot if you're one of the all-too-recognizable sinners in Denise Clarke's new comedy. This is the last test and heavens to murgatroid it's gonna be comic...no cheat sheets allowed.

Featuring
Performances

The Big Secret Theatre - Calgary, Alberta: March 9 - 27, 2004

Dream Machine

Dream Machine
Synopsis

One Yellow Rabbit paints a hallucinogenic chronicle of the American Beat movement, including William S. Burroughs and his Canadian mentor Brion Gysin. At the centre of the 1950s Beat circle, Burroughs and Gysin worked tirelessly to build the enigmatic Dream Machine, a device that used flickering light to alter brain waves and plunge the user into a waking dream state, free from the influences of advertising and mass culture. An exploration of their iconoclastic aesthetic and context forms the basis of One Yellow Rabbit's unconventional musical inspired by this group of notoriously wild outsiders, whose spiritual and artistic quest changed popular culture forever.

Blending live and electronic music, haunting visuals and One Yellow Rabbit's trademark physicality, Dream Machine is a radical departure from both the traditional theatre musical and the conventional bio pic.

Featuring

The Maverick Think Tank

The Band
  • Jonathan Lewis - Violin and bass
  • Richard McDowell - Audio treatments
  • Peter Moller - Percussion
  • David Rhymer - Piano, synthesizer
Performances

Sign Language

sign language
Synopsis

Clarke's witty choreography has enlivened productions for years. But it's when she's on her own - with no left-footed actors or inflexible script demands to get in the way - that she really gets to cut loose. Clarke does just that in Sign Language, using a "dance salon" motif to open up a two-way communication with the audience.

Featuring
  • Denise Clarke as herself.
Performances
  • The Big Secret Theatre - Calgary, Alberta - November 13 - 24, 2001
  • Firehouse Theatre - Vancouver, B.C. - 2003

Featherland

Featherland
Synopsis

What happened to Cecil and Adele Hyndman the day they received a new tenant in their bird sanctuary/research farm/roadside attraction called Featherland, was to fascinate and obsess them for the next twenty four years. Susan was the most beautiful golden eagle they had ever seen and they fell in love... no... they really fell in love. Forty years later, a nature writer named Bill Burns, delirious with avian virus, investigates as their breathtaking love story unfolds before his eyes. A tender poem/play of jealousy and passion between a man, a woman and a golden eagle.

Quotes from the author Bill Burns

"A book can create a world, but it's always an interior, limited space of one's own imaginings. On the other hand, a play brings a story to life in front of you. I'd have no hesitation in telling people, if they had only one choice to see the play."

"The imaginative decision to use two female actors to play the two female eagles was daring, the proverbial stroke of genius- potentially dangerous-but it worked perfectly, giving the eagles a voice, a sexuality and a dangerous 'edge' with their talons."

Featuring
  • Denise Clarke as: Susan
  • Andy Curtis as: Bill Burns
  • Michael Green as: Cecil Hyndman
  • Rita Bozi as: Adele Hyndman (Calgary)
  • Jennifer Roberts as: Adele Hyndman (Victoria)
  • Christine Bandelow as: Kluane (Calgary)
  • Onalea Gilbertson as: Kluane (Victoria)
Performances

History of Wild Theatre

History of Wild Theatre
Featuring
  • Denise Clarke as: Ridley
  • Andy Curtis as: Ginger
  • Michael Green as: Mike
  • Elizabeth Stepkowski as: DeMorne
  • John MaCaulay (Edinburgh, Scotland) as:
  • Peter Moller as: Bike Cop
  • Judd Palmer as: Lyle
  • Anne-Marie Timoney (Glasgow, Scotland) as: The Captain
  • Beverly Wooding as: Cherry
Performances

Productions before the year 2000

Productions before the year 2000 are here

Including:

  • These Girls
  • Thunderstruck
  • Death in New Orleans
  • In Klezskavania
  • Somalia Yellow
  • Doing Leonard Cohen
  • Hunger's Brides
  • So Low
  • Mata Hari - Tigress at the City Gates
  • Permission
  • Alien Bait
  • The Ugly Man
  • Conniption Cabaret
  • Serpent Kills
  • Naked West
  • Dance Freak
  • CD Dance
  • Breeder
  • Ilsa - Queen of the Nazi Love Camp
  • Dream of a Drunken Quaker
  • The Land - The Animals
  • Touch
  • Exit the King
  • Erotic Irony
  • Tears of a Dinosaur
  • Rembrandt Brown
  • Changing Bodies