When Prince George produces a national-level dancer, it almost always requires that they move away and do their best work somewhere else. Natalie LeFebvre is getting a rare opportunity to come back to her hometown and share the work she's doing.
The award-winning, classically trained dancer has performed with such luminous companies as Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Coleman Lemieux & Co. and MACHiNENOiSY. Ten years ago she and her dancer-choreographer husband James Gnam co-founded Plastic Orchid Factory in Vancouver, a modern dance and media-arts company that transformed the cultural expressions of the Lower Mainland, and it caught on across the country and has even gone international. LeFebvre and Gnam were nominated by the late, great Lola MacLaughlin for the 2010 City of Vancouver's Mayor's Arts Award for Dance for their groundbreaking efforts in the field of dance.
The work done by Plastic Orchid Factory is often so big it uses a full theatre or performance hall, and performances often last a full evening. With their latest production Digital Folk, however, they are out on tour. This show is portable and fits inside rooms of almost any size. It's flexible in almost every sense.
That is how LeFebvre is able to program Prince George into the Digital Folk hard-drive.
"It's been a really long time trying to arrange things so I could do something in P.G.," said LeFebvre, who has been back many times for family reasons, since she turned pro in the early 1990s. Many of her loved ones live in Prince George, and she has constantly felt a pull to perform here.
"When I grew up there, there was so much dance going on throughout the community all the time. Judy (Russell of Enchainement Dance Centre) and Bonnie (Leach of Excalibur Theatre Arts) do a great job of covering some of that off, but there was a lot more, I remember, and I wanted to be part of that and bring P.G. something different. This finally was the perfect piece to bring."
Digital Folk is an interactive performance that explores the connective abilities and the isolation realities of video games and other technology used by youth. It isn't new to this era, it goes back to the first Atari and ColecoVision home gaming systems back in the 1980s.
Through choreography, music, costumes, light, and the participation of the audience, Digital Folk tells a story of those tech forces that have now grown into the subculture of youth.
So effective is this physical storytelling showpiece that it earned the funding support of both the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council For The Arts, as well as other sponsors who helped get it off the ground and into Canada. It has already been seen in Labrador, Ontario, here in B.C., and it is scheduled for Edmonton and Calgary in the coming weeks, but Prince George is the next blip on the Digital Folk motherboard.
It will be performed at the Omineca Arts Centre on 3rd Avenue and Victoria Street. The local arts venue, led by volunteer and artist Jennifer Pighin, lobbied LeFebvre to bring the show as a way to get families and young people downtown in the evening.
"Jen is dynamic and it's great to know there's someone like that in P.G. right now, pretty rad, and she wanted us to bring all our people, she'd add some of her people, Bonnie (Leach) will add some of her people, so it's a real collaboration," LeFebvre said. "It felt so good to set it up the arrangements because it was a long time coming for me and my family."
It is an all-ages and family-focused show. It will run in a series, the show looping three times over the course of the evening.
"Digital Folk turns into a rock concert at one point. We want people to have fun and enjoy the thinking they might do about what the show is saying," LeFebvre said.
Excalibur Theatre Arts hosts Plastic Orchid Factory for some workshops on Oct. 29 that have some content connection to the show, then the Digital Folk performance happens Oct. 30 starting at 7 p.m. repeating at 8 p.m. and again at 9 p.m. Tickets to each show are $15-20 available online at the Universe Tickets website or in person at the Excalibur Theatre Arts front desk. Sellouts are expected so audiences are encouraged to buy well in advance.
