Review: (Montreal / Dance) Iredea (Fringe, Montreal)

Dancin' The Sci-Fi

by Sarah Deshaies

@sarahdeshaies

Iredea is a bold, inventive and wild foray into the future - and a must-see for dance and sci-fi enthusiasts.

Following a disastrous series of explosions, bleak post-apocalyptic Earth is inhabited by human survivors who are mutated distorted shadows of themselves. 

A shapeless narrator takes us back to the beginning, when the world’s supplies and goods were managed by an omnipotent organization called the Superstructure amid unrest and climate change. An engineer who controls the water supply begins to doubt the Superstructure, and he sets about quietly destroying the status quo from the inside.

After he’s wreaked enormous havoc and effectively broken the system, the mystery man we know as the Endgamer vanishes. 

The dregs of humanity divide into the scavenging Wanderers and the robotic Renders, who resuscitate dead humans. One of these re-engineered creatures (Jenn Doan) is gifted with an android arm that can create sculptures from the landscape. She is tasked with tracking down the Endgamer, and creating a statue in tribute to him. 

Collaborators Doan and Ted Strauss founded Woo Me Myth as a dance rock opera company a few years back, after scoring a Fringe success with The Duck Wife, a piece based on Inuit myth. Iredea is another accomplished, creative chapter in their playbook. 

The level of attention to the sound and music design is impressive. Iredea features talented performers, but also folds multimedia and gadgets like a small (kinda adorable) robot into the mix, creating a futuristic world that is wholly believable, magical and repulsive. 

June 13 - 20