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Saskatoon Fringe Festival -- 2015

This blog article clearly has nothing to do with counselling and therapy, but rather a recommendation to see a show at the Fringe...

I'm not sure why this exquisitely beautiful and moving piece of work is on the Fringe circuit at all...but lucky for Saskatoon and other cities where this group travels to on the Fringe circuit. 

The name of the show is Bear Dreams.  It is a contemporary dance and spoken word piece of theatre.  This show should be in intimate settings in many places around the world....maybe it is and I don't know about that fact.....This is a group of four people:  two dancers -- a young male and a young female, who dance exquisitely with fluid movements and youthful beauty; and one female choreographer, who has accomplished artful and unique work with these two dancers, and a male writer who wrote and also narrates the entire piece of work--his writing is prolific (someone said that the torch has been passed from Jack Kerouac to Ian Ferrier).  And beautiful it is....this is one of the most sublime pieces of writing I have every heard, spoken with a soft and melodic voice by Ian Ferrier.  Ferrier also plays the guitar while narrating the text.   Stephanie Morin-Robert is the uber talented choreographer and Danika Cormier and Joachim Yensen-Martin are the gorgeous dancers.  Their bodies moving together through Ferrier's narration is breathtaking.  They are from Montreal and the name of their company is for body & light....(forbodyandlight.org)....

For me, some of the most emotional experiences of my life are the most difficult to articulate.  They are felt in the body. Such was the case the entire time I watched this production. 

When I came out of The Refinery, the venue to which it was held, I noticed I didn't want to enter the world.  Unfortunately, what I did hear was a weightlifting contest on Broadway (part of the outdoor Fringe festivities), where the announcer was screaming at the top of his lungs how much weight could be beared by a particular individual who was electing to life weights.  There could not have been two polar opposite ends of entertainment.  It felt like nails on a blackboard to me.

Bear Dreams is an aesthetically pleasing piece of work on so many levels -- the story and the dancing fit together to make magic.  The two things I suppose that are therapeutic about watching and feeling this piece of work is that it softens the heart and being in the presence of beauty is good for the soul. 

(I have now gone back a second time to see this show and it was just as inspiring as the first time I saw it).