The Electric Company's one-act Brilliant!, about the life and times of inventor Nikola Tesla was one of the favourites of the 1996 Fringe.

We interviewed them on a soft summer night as the sun set over Britannia park, and Azra, the extraordinarily adaptable child of Kim and Jon, played on the nearby swings. The company is Jonathan Young, Kim Collier, David Hudgins, and Kevin Kerr. Adrienne Wong is the interviewer.

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AW:

Tell me about the inception of your company.

Kim:

Kevin and I had talked about starting a company for about a year. We had been thinking about it: where, when, what might be a good place and eventually we realised that the ideal situation would never arise and we better just bite the bull by the horns and get going.

Kevin:

[Then] we made the calls to go into the '96 Fringe.

David:

I think part of the reason we're a company is because we would always stay late at school. Everyone else would go home, and it'd be two in the morning and we're still working on stuff. So it was like this late night club. We're the workaholics.

AW:

What is it that you find most challenging about having this company?

Jon:

We have to grow up.

David:

And to do all this work to have a few creative moments.

Jon:

I think we keep coming to the decision that we really want to be doing theatre and the theatre that we're excited [about] is theatre that we create so...

AW:

So what kind of theatre would you say you're interested in making?

Jon:

Visually exciting theatre. When we write collectively, it almost always comes down to what we see, and often times, once a scene has been written by one of us the other three will say "OK, well I see this happening here" or "I see this". Scenes are written around their location and the visual style. Not always, but that's one aspect.

David:

That's one very strong aspect and the other, what we talked about in terms of a mandate, are stories that come from a place of reality, not necessarily non-fiction but sort of based in reality, real people and real situations ...Or historical, I guess the word is.

AW:

Which is what you did with Brilliant!?

Kevin:

Yeah, that's historically based.

David:

The content isn't historical!

Kevin:

We definitely took a lot of liberties with where the script went. There's not a lot of material available to say exactly what went on in these people's lives. We've created all these things that we think might have happened, but who knows what happened. We're interested, I think, in storytelling and finding different ways of telling stories than we're normally used to. I think this is something that drives us all: telling a good story, and a good story for us is a story that takes you places in a way you haven't gotten there before. Different routes. I think that's why the visual element's so strong, and I think why we go for the basis in reality, too.

AW:

We've noticed reading the reviews from Brilliant! that you used tap dancing and mask and song and all this stuff.

David:

We used it all up, actually.

Kevin:

All the tricks have been exposed in the first show.

David:

The next show will also have tap dancing.

AW:

Is that what you're interested in, that kind of interdisciplinary work?

Jon:

We just think of things that might be fun to do, then ...

Kim:

We think "hey that'd be a great image, that'd be fun on-stage" and then go from there.

Kevin:

Things that are fun for the audience to see, too. When we go to shows, what do we have a good time seeing? It goes back to story, too. It's not just arbitrary, it has to be within the context of the story. The tap-dancing in Brilliant! is definitely part of the storytelling.

David:

It's a war.

Kevin:

It's a tap war between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. It's a way to tell the real story. And the real story is these two guys battled over inventions and public attention. And they're both show men so we figured what better way to show these show men showing, [than] to put them in a song and dance routine and do it that way.

AW:

Are you planning to remount Brilliant!?

David:

Yes!

Kevin:

Yeah, we've rewritten it. It was a goal all along and we wanted to use the Fringe as a test drive. To put it out there. When we were writing it all through last year we had so much material and we knew it was a lot longer show. But we had already been slotted in to the Fringe which was 50 minutes. So we said we can get through this and have something that we feel good with, that we want to continue with and put into a longer format. So that's what we've got now - a two act, full length play.

David:

We don't know yet where we're doing the show, only that we're doing the show. We had big plans to do it, but now we're venue hunting like mad fiends. We're determined to have a really good show at a later date, a date that suits us.

AW:

What would you say are the artistic goals of your company?

David & Kim:

Fun!

Kevin:

OK, no fun. Forget the fun. We want to produce new original work: our own and perhaps new Canadian scripts.

Kim:

With an emphasis on strong physicality and visual imagery. Those are two things we're really interested in.

AW:

Do you feel that you're fulfilling a need in the Vancouver theatre scene?

David:

I feel that we are. I feel there's not enough original Canadian, or original theatre, in this town.

Kim:

And not enough that [is] taking a non-traditional approach to staging. Physical theatre has been hot for a long time, but not so hot in Vancouver. I've been passionate about it for ten years but only recently have I seen it manifest in Vancouver.

David:

Even the style of our show, I think you guys [indicating Kim, Jonathan and Kevin] come to it naturally, but I think that it also has Quebec borrowings. We talk a lot about shows Kevin has seen in Quebec and the flavour of anything goes.

Kim:

No limitations in what you put on-stage, just anything's possible and we don't have to fit in to any rules.

David:

I think that's something that people need to be told in Vancouver "you're allowed to do anything you want". You don't have to do things in a certain conventional way. It's kind of contradicted, in a way, because Touchstone and Tamanhous have been doing stuff like that for years.

Kevin:

Not that there hasn't been any, but just that it doesn't seem to be enough.

AW:

Is there something that you love about the theatre community here that you wouldn't change for the world?

Kim:

We're not sure what it is, because you go to these other places and it becomes clear what are the strengths of that area whether it's... I don't know, Edmonton seems to have a strong base, good support, friendly and good audiences and we love the unique styles that Quebec comes out with.

Kevin:

Toronto is always so busy.

Kim:

Toronto's thriving and has that edge. What's Vancouver got that's special?

David:

It's got us, man!

Kevin:

Vancouver's got a lot of talent here. A lot of people do wonderful original work, and writers, and performers, and stuff come here. I get inspired by a lot of the people in the theatre community. I guess we get discouraged sometimes because it doesn't seem to be supported a great deal.

David:

Maybe that's what it's got: potential. Lots and lots of potential. I think that it has a really healthy playwrighting community; John Lazarus being one of our mentors, even if he hasn't been with us through the process. His approach to playwrighting is something that we all really use.

AW:

Do you have something new bubbling in the works?

Kevin:

I think there's a lot of bubbling, but we've been so consumed with Brilliant!, getting the second production of it up, that everything else we've talked about is very much in a primal state.

Kim:

One of the reasons I'm not working on another project right now is that you only have so much creative space on top of everything else you do in life and it seems hard to focus on more than one thing at once. I feel like I have to finish Brilliant! and then start the next project.

Jon:

Brilliant! doesn't even have our 100% focus.

Kim:

I can't wait to start a new project.

Jon:

I can't wait to either, because of the excitement of doing it, but I think it would be insanity to launch into something else right after this is done.

David:

Which is also part of our mandate, complete insanity by the age of...

Jon: We're just incredibly excited about it: about the work that we're doing. And it kills us too.

Kevin:

It consumes our lives.

AW:

Any last words you want to add?

Kim:

The other thing that's important to me, and I think with you guys, is Magic. Theatrical magic. There's not enough theatre that's celebrating life, there's more like auuugh. We're all influenced by Caravan Theatre up in the interior and all of its magic outdoors - we want that to be a part of what we do, too.

Kevin:

Life affirming.

Kim:

Life affirming! No one's doing it. No one's creating heroes in our modern day. Where are you supposed to go to be leavened as a person in our society, now?

David:

The bakery perhaps? "You gotta bite the bull by the horns."...that's the best malapropism I've ever heard...