The executive producers of ZGB Productions, Tori Beemer and Justin Ziegler, were still working on their first show together at the Heart of Riverdale, when they began pitching each other ideas for a new, larger-scale collaboration.
“All of a sudden, we realized that the common denominator of all these ideas was the garden. It was pretty easy, to be honest with you. We had to cut some of our ideas out of the show, because they were too much,” Ziegler explains.
What could “easily” have run for four hours boiled down to an hour-and-a-quarter spectacle of original music, dance, and aerial circus acts that Ziegler promises will give audiences a post-harvest lift as the October nights begin to darken.
But what is it, exactly?
“In French, we have a very good word for this, which doesn’t exist in English, but it is English, says French-born Ziegler, who graduated in dance from that country’s National Conservatory, with the equivalent of a red seal in dance and musical theatre.
“We call it music hall. It’s a very easy storyline, or common denominator … music and dance and circus, songs and comedy,” Ziegler says.
“It’s like Cirque du Soleil, cabaret, and vaudeville. But in terms of scale, it’s nothing like Cirque du Soleil. We will recover financially,” he laughs.
With a musical spine composed by Lorène Charmetant and Logan Bennett, the show involves seven dancers, four musicians and two aerial circus artists. Tying it together is leading lady Claire Ness, a multi-faceted artist and Yukon Circus Society founder, who also wrote two new songs: Welcome to My Garden and Vegetable Patch.
For aerial hoop artist Lexie Braden of Dawson City, the experience has been a bruising one—literally. But that’s just part of the job.
“It does take a bit of being in the hoop and building up those callouses, and getting used to being super bruised for a while,” Braden says.
“It’s about hanging from your knees and getting bruises and burns on your knees. It doesn’t really go away. It just keeps hurting. I’m always just covered in bruises when I’m doing it, but there’s kind of a point where you don’t feel it any more.”
https://dawsoncity.ca/see-do/Braden grew up in Whitehorse, where she developed a love of dance in high school. She moved to Dawson in 2019. In university, she weighed the idea of making a career in performance.
After her second summer as a dancer at Diamond Tooth Gerties, she decided to take a flyer on circus, an art form that had intrigued her. When she heard of the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) in Vermont, she decided to sign up.
“I tried it for a month, and I got really addicted to it. My hands turned into, like bricks. They just get so calloused. I would do everything I could to keep the callouses on my hands.”
Braden had heard of Claire Ness before, but hadn’t met her until a few years ago..
“I really wanted to get in on that really cool circus stuff when I was younger, but I was doing dance so much that it really didn’t line up.”
Ness, she says, has “connected a lot of circus crazies in one spot, and I really looked forward to the Sundays when I could see everyone. It’s a really nice kind of skill-trading event, where you can also work on your own stuff.”
Braden decided her “stuff” was hoop work, unlike her co-aerialist in The Garden, Malorie Gendreau, who performs with silks.
“I like watching people do silks, But for myself, I hate doing them,” she chuckles.” I just do the hoops. That’s the one I’m most skilled in, I guess.”
For the current show, Ziegler and Beemer assigned her the quintessential garden role of a spider. Her four-minute long piece was made specifically for this show, but with some bits she has done before, put together “in a different way”, with a dynamic to go with the music.
One challenge for Braden is that the other cast members have been able to work together in Whitehorse, while she has been rehearsing alone under a carport in Dawson. Another complication came from surgery she needed after a dirt-biking mishap this summer, which kept her from starting rehearsals in earnest until early September.
“It’s really nice that I can make mistakes on my own, or do things that are really ugly at first and I can fix them on my own, rather than thinking that it needs to be perfect from the beginning.”
Thanks to a YAC residency the ensemble has had the luxury of spending three weeks together, weeding and sprucing up their garden for this week’s opening.
In addition to Braden, Gendreau, and composer-musicians Charmetant and Bennett, The Garden’s cast includes musicians Daniel Witt and Michel Valières, as well as dancers Julian Beairsto, Michaela St-Pierre, Michelle Fisher Mayr, Marcy Mills, Nicole Murdoch, Valerie Herdes, and Sachi Kambara
Set design and construction were by Selene Vakharia, with Teagan Beemer providing visual design and posters.
As for Ziegler and Beemer, well … they’re already planning their next show.
“It’s going to be a very different project, on a different scale,” is all that Ziegler will divulge.
“We will take our time to build the next project differently, and we are going to take probably a few months to put out a call for this.”
The Garden runs October 17, 18 and 19 at the Yukon Arts Centre. Show time is 7 PM.
