A play imagines a future with gender-neutral people in love with “millennial behaviors”

“I was born in Moscow, during the times of the Soviet Union. My mother worked in a theater, so I spent my childhood backstage. “I never dedicated myself to anything else,” he says. Arkady Spivakartistic producer and executive director of Talk is Free Theater, TIFT. The Canadian company presents, starting tomorrow and in different performances until Friday, at 8 p.m., the work For both rest and reproductionwith dramaturgy Adam Meisner.

Humans become gender neutral and use the pronoun ish to identify themselves. It’s 2150 and five ish historians want to transform an old house into a ’90s museum to represent cis people (those who identify with the gender and sex assigned at birth) from the past. The project progresses, the group members fall too much in love with the gender of their characters and begin to recreate the dangerous behaviors of their ancestors.

That is the plot of the piece, which comes with the contribution of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Arts Council, and has the collaboration of Tsunami Project. It will not be staged in a theater, but in a theater, with Aryan technology for subtitling. The public will have a meeting point in the Almagro neighborhood and from there they will be taken to a secret location. Admission is free with prior reservation.

Talk is free Theater It has its operational base in the city of Barrie, Ontario. For more than twenty years he developed and produced more than one hundred projects, from independent to mainstream, focusing on new dramaturgies, unusual classics, and drastic revisions of repertoires.

TIFT It focuses on the development and production on the periphery of musicals in new formats such as site specific and immersive creations. They do seasons in Barrie and go on international tours, generally projects with new or unusual content. In addition to Argentina, Suriname, Fiji and New Zealand were some of his destinations.

Spivak, the company’s founder twenty years ago, lives in Canada, where he is during the virtual interview. He tackles a variety of repertoire, in traditional and immersive media, produced 101 works and toured nationally and internationally. He was hailed a Canadian Hero of the Arts in 2020, by the newspaper Globe and Mail.

Winner of the Dora Award from the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts for his co-production of Assassins, in the fall of 2018 he was responsible for the world’s largest theatrical experience, The curious journey, in which each attendee starred in their own story and was literally transported from Barrie to London. The answer that TIFT gave to covid was an imaginary wedding, Something Bubbled Something Blue, a party in which each participant wore human-sized balls over their formal clothes. The work was viewed on Facebook 1,800,000 times and is now being reworked to make it long-lasting.

A multiple-time juror for the Ontario Arts Councils and Theater Ontario’s professional training program, Spivak is a volunteer business and arts mentor and works with several small-scale and emerging organizations. He was also honored with the Barrie Arts Award and Contributions to Tourism awards.

—You do not propose assistance but an experience. What is the peculiarity of For both rest and reproduction?

—We reflect a lot about the past and the future. But we almost never consider ideas like “legacy” or history. We focus on a look at the future from the present, the work is exhibited in a found space, and we are trying to break a language barrier through the testing of a new technology.

—Have you already been to Buenos Aires?

—I was in Buenos Aires three times, including a business trip with the Canadian government during February of this year, with our successful Sweeney Todd/The Curious Voyage. At the time we carried (the work) A Red Poyo as part of our season in Canada. Then, the exceptional work of Elena Roger in Piaf. I love many things about your city, especially the balance between the royal and the opulent.

—The assembly comes with a surprise, does it require any special preparation for the public?

-I don’t believe it. Our main joy is seeing the audience discover little by little what world they are in.

—In this work there is important work with the concept of time: it occurs in the future to review the past and seems to be anticipating this present from that past.

—ish people believe that gender issues taken to the extreme were the cause of conflicts around the world. A peaceful solution was to adjust the playback frequencies within certain values. Male-dominated family life is one of the causes of violence. Jealousy, greed, sexuality, and childbirth encouraged the temptation to control each other, causing friction and war. Humanity was replaced by people without gender, without name, with number, who do not pursue physical contact, value personal space and dream.

—What is the conflict they face?

—The future world, that of the Ish, is exposed with some problems. While trying to understand people from 200 years ago, some practice millennial behaviors, feeling attracted to the glamor of those years, to the frenzy, hyperactivity and open sexuality, which causes new conflicts.

—As things are in the world today, do you think there is a future?

-It’s completely possible. In fact, it is necessary. Our vision of today is terrible and tomorrow potentially terrible, but we live thinking about the future anyway. Theater is a vision of a person or a group gathered with a specific objective: to take elements of the present with a look at tomorrow.

—What expectations do you have with the Buenos Aires performance? For both rest and reproduction?

—It is wonderful to be temporarily immersed in the theater and artistic traditions of Buenos Aires. It will be quite an adventure to meet your audiences.

* The cast of “Both for Rest and Play” includes Maja Ardal (ISH62), Amy Keating (ISH34), Richard Lam (ISH40), Jamie McRoberts (ISH20) and Alexander Thomas (ISH84). Maja Ardal is directed by Bruce Gibbons Fell, translates, Jeff Braunstein is stage manager, Matthew MacQuarrie-Cottle is the subtitle operator, Joe Pagnan is lighting designer, Arkady Spivak is artistic producer, Sebastián Romero is producer and tour manager, Sebastián Cáneva, producer in Buenos Aires and Dustyn Wales, associate producer.

*Reservations to attend performances are made by Theatrical Alternative.