VIRTUAL ROGUES
Where: Rock Bay (enter at the north end of Store Street)
When: June 28-30 and July 2-3, 5-10 (nightly performances at 10 p.m.)
Tickets: Pay-what-you-can at the door
If co-founders Paul Kirby and Adriana Kelder are kept to their word, and upcoming performances by the Caravan Stage Company are among the last with the couple at the helm, they’ll exit in grand style with Virtual Rogues.
“This is our most ambitious show ever,” Kelder said. “Well, we did do a show once in Toronto that was an eight-hour show, but that was before we had the ship.”
Prior to building the tall ship in question, the 30-metre Amara Zee, on-board which performances of Virtual Rogues will be held tonight through July 10 in Rock Bay, Kirby and Kelder ran a one-wagon puppet show from their home in James Bay. After moving to Sooke, where they accrued a stable of horses, they relocated to the B.C. interior and formed Caravan Farm Theatre, with six horse-pulled wagons shuttling the company to each performance.
Kirby and Kelder eventually sold the farm theatre to make way for the Amara Zee. Not unlike the barges once common to the River Thames in London, England, the purpose-built tall ship was turned into a floating stage in 1997, but the couple’s theatre-in-the-wild mindset from the 1970s remains.
“We’re definitely a community, when we put a company together,” Kelder said. “This is not your traditional live theatre. When people come to work with us, we house them and feed them. We become a family.”
Kirby, who is from Vancouver, and Kelder, who grew up in Montreal, have taken the Amara Zee on several globe-trotting tours, including stops in Greece, Croatia, Turkey and Austria. They hope to sell both the boat and company this year, their 50th under myriad Caravan banners.
Shows staged aboard the tall ship are labour-intensive, Kelder said. “We are both in our 70s. It’s time for some younger people to take over.”
She said they are in talks with a group that wants to use the ship as a music venue. When that deal closes, it will be the end days of Caravan with the couple at the helm — but it won’t be their last as professional theatre producers. They recently purchased a smaller boat, aboard which they are planning to stage shadow puppetry performances while sailing through Europe, Kelder said.
Performances of Virtual Rogues will be held at 10 p.m. on show days and run for 90 minutes, with no intermission (patrons, who watch the performance from shore, are asked to bring their own chairs). The show is set in 2052 and is an ambitious sci-fi experiment, with characters as aerial acrobats woven throughout the story.
Like other Caravan performances, it’s a massive undertaking by the outdoor theatre company, which travels by water to each location and is always susceptible to the elements.
“It makes it difficult, which means this is something you do for the love of it, not for any other reason,” Kelder said.
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
