En­dan­gered Species

The ti­tle for Mile Zero’s new work, En­dan­gered Species, con­jures up im­ages of the wild threat­ened by hu­man progress, but the piece is in fact in­spired by the evo­lu­tion of one of Ed­mon­ton’s old­est his­tor­i­cal build­ings, the Or­tona Ar­moury.

Built in 1914 by the Hud­son’s Bay Com­pany as a sta­ble for their de­liv­ery horses on the Ross­dale Flats, now 102nd Street and 97th Av­enue, the dis­tinc­tive brick build­ing was later home to Ed­mon­ton’s Pure But­ter Com­pany, the naval cadets, a 1930s boys’ re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion cen­tre and trade school, and the Or­tona Gym­nas­tics Club.

As the city marched for­ward in the name of progress, the pur­pose of the old build­ing changed dra­mat­i­cally and all the while, its ar­chi­tec­tural brick fa­cade has be­come all the more rare. To speak to that loss of cul­tural mem­ory, Mile Zero has tem­po­rar­ily oc­cu­pied the Or­tona, to bring the hall­ways back to life with real and imag­ined char­ac­ters de­rived from a his­tor­i­cal re­port com­mis­sioned by the Or­tona Ar­moury Ten­ants As­so­ci­a­tion, writ­ten by Ken Tin­g­ley, Ed­mon­ton’s His­to­rian Lau­re­ate.

“We are us­ing it as a jumping off point to tell sto­ries and make things up be­cause the ac­tual his­tor­i­cal ver­sion isn’t that dance-y,” says Gerry Morita, Mile Zero’s artis­tic di­rec­tor. “There are a lot of miss­ing ques­tions that we are tak­ing the lib­erty to fill in.”

Morita and fel­low per­form­ers Am­ber Borot­sik, Jean­nie Van­derk­erkhove, Kris­tine Nut­ting and Ka­t­rina Smy, have taken up res­i­dency in the Or­tona the past two weeks, work­ing quickly with scenographer Pa­trick Arès-Pilon and sound artist Shawn Pinch­beck to build the piece to­gether on­site.

“We only re­ally worked a cou­ple of days in the stu­dio be­fore we re­al­ized we had to get into the space to re­ally be pro­duc­tive be­cause the dif­fer­ent spa­ces that we are trav­el­ling through are so site-spe­cific in their view­points and ob­sta­cles and light­ing and size. We re­ally de­cided to source di­rectly from the space as much as pos­si­ble.”

Each of the cre­ators has a lot of in­put into their in­ter­pre­ta­tion of their room, with each per­son head­ing up a cer­tain area of the build­ing and draw­ing on a spe­cific his­tor­i­cal fact, im­age or fic­tion. The per­for­mance will lead au­di­ences on a tour through­out the build­ing, where they will meet char­ac­ters and ghosts along the way.

“Am­ber is in the Or­tona Room Kitchen, a De­pres­sion­era room. The build­ing was used for the National Trade School, and dur­ing the De­pres­sion it was used for re-train­ing boys, al­most like ju­ve­nile de­ten­tion, but it of­fered var­i­ous trades train­ing pro­grams which we are draw­ing par­al­lels to Al­berta’s fo­cus on the trades to­day. Jean­nie is be­ing a ghost of a pre­vi­ous party. We have mil­i­tary for­ma­tions that we are work­ing on. And Sean is work­ing on a col­lage of sounds — he’s got a ra­dio go­ing on in the kitchen. Kris­tine is down­stairs and she’s go­ing to be do­ing a rit­ual about ap­proach­ing tough eco­nomic chal­lenges and how we can look to this build­ing as a model of adapt­ing and sur­viv­ing any­thing.”

Morita says En­dan­gered Species is about so­cial and cul­tural change as wit­nessed by this one build­ing.

“It’s about the ‘evolve or die’ en­trepreneur­ship of Al­berta and all of the failed jobs peo­ple have had. We are draw­ing on the changes in trans­porta­tion, so horses, be­cause it used to be a sta­ble at one point. And the fact that it was a but­ter fac­tory at one point gets us into the whole off­shore econ­omy and im­port­ing all our stuff now rather than hav­ing fac­to­ries lo­cally.”

The whole piece is com­ing to­gether over a short span of two weeks or so, and while Morita would love the lux­ury of more time to cre­ate, as is some­times pos­si­ble in other parts of the coun­try, such as Mon­treal, where there are more es­tab­lished sources of fund­ing for dance artists, she says in Ed­mon­ton, “We tend to work with what we have to make what we can.”