PREVIEW
Victoria Singe Festival
Where: Fort Caf脙漏 (742 Fort St.)
When: Friday to Sept. 2, doors at 6 p.m.
Tickets: $11 per ticket for each show, $20 for both of the evening's shows, available at the door (cash only).
For more information, including a schedule of performances, go to singe.ca
She's a sassy spoken-word artist who's performed at Victoria Fringe three years in a row. He's a comedian and storyteller whose solo improvisational show Photobooth earned him a Pick of the Fringe nod at last year's festival.
In spite of their credentials, neither Missie Peters nor Dave Morris won a spot in the 2012 Fringe lineup. Romantic partners as well as each other's creative foil, the couple were casualties of the festival's lotterybased selection process, whose outcome is as wildly unpredictable as some of the acts that grace the stage.
"As soon as we found out we weren't in it, we cried a little bit," recalled Peters.
But the duo refused to let their apparent bad luck scuttle their dreams of performing during Fringe.
They resolved to create their own independent festival to run in tandem with the well-established annual do.
After receiving the blessing of Fringe organizers, Peters and Morris teamed up with comedian Mike Delamont to organize a string of shows at the Fort Caf脙漏. Their residency, which they've irreverently titled the Singe Festival, runs Friday until Sept. 2, with each night featuring performances by two of the three acts.
Missie Peters will be performing Where's my Flying Car?!, which she previewed at Uno Fest in the spring. A collection of monologues from characters living in different eras of the future, the work stems from Peters' fascination with science fiction and particu-larly, how the genre puts forward lofty predictions about the world of tomorrow that often don't come true.
"It's 2012. Where are our flying cars?" Peters asks rhetorically in a faux-indignant voice.
"We were promised so much about the future. I feel like we're living in the future now, but it feels a lot like the 1990s."
In contrast, the concept behind her partner's show is hardly future-focused. The Life and Death of Dave Morris was inspired by Morris's recent ruminations on death and remembrance. Since last fall, five people in his life, including his grandmother and members of his peer group, have died.
"It was shocking," Morris said. "I spent a lot of time this year looking back on people's lives. All of them had wakes. I didn't go to many funerals where we sat sad and cried. It was more like we talked about the wonderful things about this person's life."
These reminiscences gave rise to the idea of improvising biographies of fictional people in front of a live audience.
"In The Life and Death of Dave Morris, we build a character with the audience at the beginning of the show and that character tells you their life story from beginning to end. There'll be some scene work, some flashbacks from moments in their lives, some monologues.
"It's all improvised, so it's going to be a different show every night."
To round out the bill, now-Toronto-based funnyman Mike Delamont will reprise his role as a cross-dressing deity for the sequel to his 2011 hit God is a Scottish Drag Queen. The original work, in which he takes on a salty brogue to wax outrageous on a host of topical issues, won the award for Best Solo Show at last year's Fringe.
The idea of starting a theatre festival to run alongside Fringe isn't unique to Victoria. In 2007, the Forest Fringe sprouted up as a lower-cost, independent satellite of the Edinburgh Fringe, the 65-year-old cultural institution that catalyzed the Fringe movement.
But Peters and Morris note the Singe Festival isn't meant as an affront to the Victoria Fringe. "It's not like we're like, 'F--k the Fringe,' " Peters says. "We just want to be part of the Fringe atmosphere."
"You know those little sucker fish that live on the bottom of a whale? We're like those. We're living off the bottom of the Fringe. And they're like, 'Hey, yeah, hang out there!'
"It's mutually beneficial."
