After a year’s hiatus, Rhubarb — Canada’s oldest new-works festival — is back, with a bit of a different spin, courtesy of its director Erika Hennebury. The same commitment to experimentation and (relative) youth is there, but Hennebury has, in keeping with Buddies in Bad Times’ 07/08 mandate, privileged performance over scripts. The Chamber and Tallulah’s Cabaret host a variety of fourth-wall-breaking works for bigger audiences, while the “Ante Chamber” — the connecting room between the two playing spaces — is also open, divided in two for both “Mini” (maximum audience of 12) and “Solo” (one-person) engagements.

Norman Lup-Man Yeung and Kathy Moretton’s Lichtenstein’s an 8: A New Formula to Quantify Artistic Quality, premiering the second week of the festival, might be the paragon of Hennebury’s vision. A raucous and culturally savvy investigation of the ways in which science and art intersect — which employs everything from Super-8 projections to glockenspiel — Lichtenstein opens with one Dr. Genet delivering her findings on the quantifiability of all artworks. (Hence the title, an out-of-10 rating the doctor gives the artist’s Drowning Girl.) The presentation soon unravels as a slew of surprises, both scripted and unscripted, tamper with the neat and tidy hierarchy Genet tries to establish.

“I’m not convinced that Lichtenstein’s an 8 is a play; it’s more a happening,” says Yeung, noting its origins in an idea he and partner Moretton, a geologist, had to host a science and art salon in which she lectured and he goofed off and did projected drawings behind her. “It’s trying to tear apart notions of science and art — as well as those of performance and reality.”

Still, Yeung, who also does work in film and visual art (he’s a painter and illustrator), hopes Lichtenstein acts as a commentary on, or exploration of, the ways in which theatre is changing — and the ways in which Rhubarb reflects that — in addition to being a mere example of it.
“I see a lot of productions incorporating technology superfluously,” he says. “People use projection because it’s now the mode: it’s exciting; it’s cutting-edge, sort of. Sometimes it’s executed extremely well. But sometimes people just do it because they feel that’s what people want nowadays.
“There’s another perspective, of course: celebrating theatre for what theatre is, what it has been since the creation of the art form — simply the performer and the spectator in a space. Those are the essential elements, and there’s no need for technology there. It’s something Dr. Genet in Lichtenstein ultimately has to address: what is the bare minimum required to create art?”
Yeung adds, deftly, that the true test of Rhubarb’s success is in who agrees to be witness to its declared newfangledness. “There are definitely establishment theatregoers in the city, the CanStage crowd for instance, who might not think of going. But I hope they do. The whole point is to bring in a diverse audience for this stuff.”