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Making a mark with Blank Slate

Grassroots theatre festival returns for second year with The Big Oops and Canadian premiere of Almost An Evening
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What: Blank Slate theatre festival

When: Wednesday, Sept. 1 to Saturday, Sept. 4

Where: Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre

Cost: $20/show, $35/both

Whistler isn't known for having a thriving performing arts scene. Aside from grassroots initiatives like the annual Chairlift Revue at the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival and Snow, the musical that was commissioned as part of the Cultural Capitals program, the community hasn't seen a lot of live theatre lately.

One woman is hoping to change all that with a new, independent theatre festival.

Lilli Clark is multimedia events planner for Watermark Communications, but she's also a passionate member of the performing arts community in Vancouver, having studied theatre at Queens University and the Atlantic Acting School in New York. Over the last two years, in addition to her work with Watermark, she has been busy trying to get her Whistler-based theatre project, Blank Slate, off the ground.

"I really think that theatre is so important for a community and there's a reason why little theatre companies develop in small communities; it just happens naturally. It's like evolution!"

Clark has been a Whistler weekender her entire life but set down permanent roots in the community about six years ago. In that time, she's noticed a lack of theatre among the community's cultural offerings.

"I think maybe people have tried and I know people go, 'Oh, we've tried this before, it's never going to work,'" Clark reflected. "And that's fine and I think there have been efforts to do it, but maybe it was just not the right time."

It may seem ambitious, but Clark is hoping Blank Slate could act as a catalyst of sorts to build a thriving theatrical scene.

"I don't want to sound arrogant," Clark said. "I'm not saying that I think that's going to happen. But in an ideal world it would be fantastic."

Her long-term plan for the festival is to expand to include First Nations playwrights, offer workshops and perhaps even develop and stage an original work developed by Whistler locals.

"What would be great is if we could take little sub-communities like the writers and other local actors and stuff like that, and kind of incorporate everybody into the festival."

And she's quick to point out that Whistler has a wealth of multi-talented, creative minds.

"It's so welcoming. Everybody kind of really wants to pitch in," she said.

"Everybody is putting on like five different hats - they can do this, that and the other. And I think that's really cool."

They could even expand to unconventional venues in the same way that Fringe Festivals stage shows on buses, cabs or in other public places.

"We use the word 'festival' liberally right now, with two shows," Clark laughingly admitted, "but I'd really like to grow it in that respect."

Last year, the festival received a strong enough response that Clark is confident there is an appetite for theatre in this town of 12,000 year-round residents.

"The actors were just flabbergasted, they had such a great time. The audience reaction was unlike anything I could have imagined. The mayor was there, we had councilmen there, we had Whistler locals, and I think they were surprised."

The Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre's theatre proved to be a great venue for holding their small-scale festival, though they still had to bring in the tech gear, which makes it hard to break even on the event.

"Theatre has been known, in the history of the world, to not make money," Clark laughed. "When you start a theatre festival, you know you're never going to make any money on it."

Because they received such a welcoming response from the SLCC they didn't bother looking into changing the venue this year. But in the future, if the festival grows in the way Clark is hoping it will, they may need to move into bigger digs.

"I would really like to get to a point where we can feel like we can fill the 225 seats of Millennium Place and put up a big show. And I have shows that I want to put up there - don't get me wrong, there are definitely shows I can see there, my pulse races when I think about it. But at this point I think we wanted to concentrate this year on doing the same kind of thing we did last year and just growing the fan base."

In the festival's first year, Clark produced the shows and acted as the lead in one. This time around, she has decided to focus strictly on the production and promotion side of things, which includes selecting the right shows.

"When we first decided what we were going do with Blank Slate in general we wanted to put up shows that were really accessible to the crowd in Whistler, so something very intelligent, but something very funny and dark," she explained.

"We're really blessed to be able to find these little gems and to be able to put them up."

The shows they've selected aren't your run-of-the-mill plays: organizers have hand-picked scripts that are edgy, dark and a little off-the-wall. This year, they are featuring two shows over the four-day festival: Almost An Evening and The Big Oops.

The Big Oops features Cara Yeates, the same actor who starred in last year's one-woman show, Some Reckless Abandon.

"She's a dynamo performer and she's performing a script written by Brendan McLeod, who's a musician and a writer. It's about a children's entertainer - a really enthusiastic, fun children's entertainer - who gets pregnant and then she has to decide whether she wants to keep it or not."

Blank Slate is also producing Almost An Evening, which was written by Ethan Coen, one of the Coen brothers.

"We're pretty sure it's the Canadian premiere... It's a fairly new show, and for you to get the rights to do a fairly new show, it's quite difficult."

That performance will feature three short vignettes that total almost an hour of "existential comedy."

"There's a bit of religion in there, there's a bit of play on purgatory, hell and heaven, and then it's a really strange play, but very Coen-esque."

Check www.blankslatetheatre.ca for details on the festival, or to purchase tickets to the shows.