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Vancouverite Paul Kirby and Nans Kelder, initially from Holland, dreamed of a utopian neighborhood of travelling artists dwelling co-operatively and bringing pleasure and shock from city to city like an old-time circus.
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The Caravan Stage Firm celebrated its remaining efficiency final Saturday at Richmond’s Shelter Island Marina, bringing an audacious 52-year journey to an finish.
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The stage was its floating theatre, the tall ship Amara Zee. Because the ship and Caravan’s founders sail off into the sundown, it’s value recalling the outstanding saga of this distinctive B.C. theatre firm.
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Vancouverite Paul Kirby and Nans Kelder, initially from Holland, met in Montreal in 1970. They dreamed of a utopian neighborhood of travelling artists dwelling co-operatively and bringing pleasure and shock from city to city like an old-time circus.
“A theatre of hope and celebration,” Kirby would later name it.
Transferring to Vancouver Island, they began Caravan Stage Firm with a puppet present in a single horse-drawn wagon. They might finally take 15 wagons and 30 horses, plus a revolving corps of actors, goats and children, throughout B.C., Alberta and the American northwest, with forays into Ontario, Michigan and Florida. The horses’ brass polished to a shine, the corporate would march into city, led by musicians, unicyclists and jugglers, like Pied Pipers from one other age.
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Vancouver actor-playwright Peter Anderson fell in love with the seductions of Caravan life and artwork. From 1977-81 he carried out with the corporate, wrote their performs (Coyote, Horseplay) and, like all its members, did no matter wanted to be executed. Surprise-struck, he was “a child who grew up in Detroit, and there I used to be driving a group of Clydesdales.”
In 1978, Kirby and Kelder headquartered the corporate on a working farm close to Armstrong, B.C., the place their self-described World’s Solely Horse-Drawn Open-Air Theatre rehearsed its unique musical exhibits. An NFB brief, Horse Drawn Magic, presents a vivid portrait of these early years.
By the late-Nineteen Eighties, the couple felt that they had plateaued artistically with horses and wagons. Anxious to increase their nomadic theatre-making impulses, they left the Armstrong farm to a different firm — Caravan Farm Theatre, nonetheless going sturdy at present — and constructed the 90-foot-long Amara Zee in a Kingston, Ontario dry dock.
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Launched in 1997, the Amara Zee turned a self-contained travelling theatre on which the corporate staged its multidisciplinary extravaganzas preaching environmentalism, satirizing capitalism and analyzing social change. Actors, singers and musicians, video projections on the sails, and Cirque du Soleil-style acrobats dangling from the masts mesmerized audiences watching from shore.
Rebranded as The World’s Solely Tall Ship Theatre, Caravan sailed six oceans and dropped anchor in twenty-one international locations. They carried out in Canada’s inland waters and alongside the U.S. coast, sailed down the Mississippi and the Danube, traversed the Black Sea and the Aegean east to Istanbul.
The internationally numerous firm continued dwelling communally within the ship’s tight quarters. American Doria Bramante met her German husband Markus on board 12 years in the past. Each remained with Caravan to the top.
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“Nothing can change Nans and Paul,” Bramante says of her post-Caravan future. “It’s been a ship of goals.”
Nonetheless, she laughs concerning the Amara Zee’s one rest room for its two dozen crew and performers.
“We pee in buckets. I’m not kidding.”
What glue stored Caravan Stage Firm intact for therefore lengthy? The novelty of doing horse-drawn and shipboard theatre. Its cooperative nature: an equapolis, Kirby and Kelder name it, equal, equine and aqua. They’ve lived along with their fellow Caravaners for half a century and raised their three kids throughout the firm. Their theatrical, political and environmental imaginative and prescient, put into observe, has been magnetic.
“They’ve walked the stroll,” Peter Anderson says of the couple’s unwavering political and creative integrity over 5 a long time.
And it might not be fairly executed. Kelder and Kirby declare to be exhausted by the bureaucratic hoops they frequently need to sail by way of. But they plan to maneuver to a smaller boat and possibly kind a brand new firm performing high-tech shadow puppetry.
The dream lives on.
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