The
Red Horse is Leaving
Written and Performed by Erika Batdorf
Directed by Todd Hammond
Dramaturg Iris Turcott
Lighting Designer Kimberly Purtell
Sound Designer J. Rigzin Tute
Erika Batdorf presents her newest one-woman show, The Red Horse is Leaving . Based on the journals of Thaya Whitten, a Nova Scotian painter, performance artist and musician, The Red Horse is Leaving travels through the dangerous territory of creative inspiration, sacrifice and clinical madness in the pursuit of artistic excellence and beauty.
Directed by Todd Hammond with dramaturgy by Iris Turcott, and charged by Erika Batdorf's poignant physicality, quirky dialogue and disarming humour, this production gives the audience an intimate view of someone who is plagued (or blessed) by visions and struggles to distinguish inspiration from delusion. Along this journey we watch an intensely painful and joyful battle with prescription drugs, addiction, isolation, and manic-depression in the pursuit of something truly beautiful.
Thaya Whitten herself was an abstract painter who incorporated her own musical notation directly into her paintings. Referred to as a "controversialist", she toured university campuses doing performance art before the form was widely understood. Thaya Whitten was also Erika Batdorf's mother.
Reviews...
Keith Garebian — Stage
and Page Website
Erika Batdorf’s one-woman show may be the first stream-of-consciousness
monologue to depict how an artist struggles to express an elusive artistic
vision. … packs a great deal into its duration of slightly over
sixty minutes. What stamps it with genius is not simply Thaya Whitten’s
singular artistic and spiritual identity, but Ms. Batdorf’s artistry
that expresses the relationship between genius and madness with haunting
vividness and sympathetic understanding..…quirky humour …Ms.
Batdorf’s extraordinary physical movement speaks volumes to this
theme. … for the most creative of us (as Ms. Batdorf articulates)
are destined to be “lovers of longing.” One of the extraordinary
achievements of this solo piece is its vivid ability to make this longing
a thing of spiritual radiance.
Eye Weekly, Paul Issacs
... supremely talented physical performer. The Red Horse Is Leaving opens
with a single scene of magnificent control, … (completely free
of dialogue) is an absolute marvel: a pitch-perfectly timed symphony
of coffee slurps, pill-pops and cigarette drags, as the artist contemplates
a terminally blank canvas before her. It’s a wonderfully sustained
piece of tragic-comic acting.
National Post, Robert Cushman,
In The Red Horse Is Leaving, Erika Batdorf plays her own mother — a
Nova Scotian woman of multiple talents; primarily she was a painter,
but she was also a jazz musician and some kind of performance artist.
She was also mentally ill, with a double-edged attitude to the drugs
prescribed for her condition. …Batdorf, herself an accomplished
performer … very funny silent sequence showing the artist in her
studio…
There is nothing embarrassing about this audience participation; Batdorf
is an underplayer, and the attitude she presents — firm in her
ideas, diffident in their presentation — makes everyone feel at
ease.
(Batdorf is)…stabbing and unadorned.
One section of this show, sympathetically directed by Todd Hammond, bleeds imperceptibly into the next, and it seems that suddenly we are back in the studio, watching and hearing a verbalized elaboration of the opening silent sequence. This is a loving portrait, and both she and the audience are nourished by that fact, but it's an objective and unsentimental one.
Images
Photo by David Leyes
Photo by David Leyes
Photo by David Leyes
