RAINBOW ON MARS IS A PLAY "TO SEE"

Review by Rebeccah Love

In my undergrad Art History lectures, our professor paid special attention to the Impressionist works of Edgard Degas. We learned about the role of the ballet in high society, carefully observing this arena through Degas' expressive lens. Describing a disturbing ecosystem with too great an emphasis on appearances and rigid social hierarchy, our professor joked that one went to the ballet "to see and be seen," a culture relected by Degas' canvases, capturing not just the ballerinas on stage but the elegantly dressed bourgeois audiences of the Opéra Garnier.

A person can't help but observe this truth in Toronto's modern theatre lobbies, in those anxious moments before the show starts or in the heat of intermission, where audience members chat up their friends, glancing around the room with curiosity. In a show like Devon Healey's much-anticipated 'Rainbow on Mars', which opened yesterday at the Ada Slaight Hall in East Toronto, the crowd was full of some of the city's most exciting figures in the world of theatre, dance, and journalism. We can't ignore the obnoxious thrill of being 'seen' at an Outside the March Production, whether the impulse is conscious or not: it is nice to feel a part of this immersive-theatre company's magic.

We pay less attention to the first half of that old cultural idiom: we go to the theatre to see. We want to see things happening on stage. We want to see bright colours and dramatic movement, we want to look at other people's bodies and faces, we want the lights to dazzle us and the costumes to expand our imaginations of the characters of each scene. 'Sight' is prioritized above all other senses on stage, followed closely by 'hearing', which is why directors manically plan their presentations in order to offer their hungry guests a visual feast, sometimes above the narrative itself.

But what if you can't see? Are theatre and dance off the table for the visually impaired?

Devon Healey, in collaboration with Co-Directors Nate Bitton, Mitchell Cushman and the National Ballet, created a revolutionary sensory experience in their Regent Park production 'Rainbow on Mars', a fantastical exploration of Healey's journey into blindness as a young woman. Lost in a complex fantasy world, we witness Healey's Iris struggle to find her bearings and to make sense of her new challenges. A narrator delivers poetic cues to visually impaired members of the audience but this second layer of storytelling also enriches the experiences of the sighted, who are treated with a multi-dimensional and multi-sensory storytelling experience. The costuming for Nate Bitton's 'Lynk' made for a whimsically modern jester, with the willowy flock of ballet dancers in their white slips gracing the stage under Robert Binet's extraordinary choreography. These dancers stole the show over and over again, in their uplifting prayers as much as in the more sinister movements. with Luiz Anselmo commanding the entire audience's gaze as the most standout performer in the production.

There were moments I felt fury that the Production had not properly warned their audiences about the content of the show, but as a person who regularly has to compose trigger warnings, I wasn't able to find the language I needed. The closest I landed was "Warning: Disability Despair", as someone who has endured many days (weeks? months?) curled up in a ball, weeping, terrified of how my disabilities might unravel my life, there were many moments in this production where I felt such enormous, visceral pain, to a point where I may have been too overwhelmed to sit through the entire show: Healy, Bitton and Cushman touched on a feeling that I know very intimately but have not often seen depicted in my own ecosystem of cinematic screen or in the world of theatre: it is that feeling of being so crushed by your own illness that you descend into a deep panic, existential terror or even suicidality, falling deep into a dark hole that no one else can really understand, feeling as though there is little hope for escape. The play captured this darkness with spine-chilling viscerality, it's the kind of depiction that only a person with lived experience can really conjure.

I studied ballet as a teenager but dropped the discipline partway through as I found the pedagogy was rooted in harmful philosophies around women's bodies: my teacher was pushing the connection between pain and beauty in a deeply troubling way, sharing opinions that I could later understand were subtly encouraging eating disorders, with some unsettling doctrines around perfection. So I worry about ballet dancers becoming prisoners of their own art form! But in this production, you really got the sense that the dancers were liberated, their movements fluid and joyful! I also appreciated the invitation of other disabled artists into the production, this was deeply moving to me as a person whose mood disorder, mobility issues and chronic pain forced me to quit acting at the age of 18. There is room for us all on stage.

When I weep I can sometimes make a little noise, the last thing you'd want for a sacred show like this! So I tried to hold my pain in and focus on breathing. In the end I'm so glad I made it through the whole show, as a reminder that transforming our pains and anxieties into narrative is one of the healthiest coping mechanisms. The darkness of the show was excruciating, but always levelled out with levity, hope, light: what a catharsis. In watching Devon Healey make sense of her experience, churning it into spectacle and story, generously offering her world and insights to an enormous audience of captivated listeners, teaching us and enchanting us, I am reminded that we each carry within ourselves a special kind of resilience: when Devon tells her story she invites each of us to consider the weights we carry on our backs, and proposes a powerful way forward.

A must-see!

Tickets at: https://outsidethemarch.ca/the-experiences/rainbow-on-mars/