REVIEW
The Cardiac Shadow
Northern Light Theatre and Good Women Dance Collective
ATB Financial Arts Barn
10330 - 84 Ave.
Tickets: Start at $20. Call 780-471-1586 or at www.northernlighttheatre.com
The first shock upon entering ATB Financial Arts Barns to see the world premiere of The Cardiac Shadow, is walking into three lines of wire strung across the edge of the stage.
The barely visible wires signify the walls of a Nazi concentration camp. They create a separation, a wall between the characters and audience that sends shivers down the spine.
No longer is the audience merely a happy-go-lucky viewer. We become peeping Toms, voyeurs in a disgusting human atrocity that is creepy to watch and uncomfortable to digest.
American playwright Clay McLeod Chapman based this true story on four women “volunteers” acquired from Ravensbruck concentration camp for a series of experiments to test the body’s tolerance to extreme temperatures.
The scientist in charge was SS Lieutenant Dr. Sigmund Rascher. He hand-picked Jewish men and threw them into barrels of freezing cold water.
When nearly dead, they were tossed into bed sandwiched between two naked female prisoners. The women, treated like carcasses of heated meat, were expected to warm and revive the men.
As the prisoners lay on bare beds, doctors watched from peepholes not wishing to interfere with the experiments. Dignity was non-existent. In the German scientists’ eyes, prisoners were test cases, something less than subhuman.
Despite the history of these horrifying acts, Trevor Schmidt, artistic director of Northern Light Theatre, and Good Women Dance Collective have turned the show into a surprising poetic meditation using dance, music and voice-overs. There is no violence or anything graphic in the one-hour production.
The play starts with a short black-and-white film showing an innocent, young blonde and blue-eyed girl unpacking a suitcase of dress-up costumes. At one point, she smiles sweetly, looks at the camera coyly and holds up a menorah and Hebrew prayer shawl.
Narrating the film is Dr. Rascher who introduces his daughter to the audience. In a voice-over as Rascher, actor Vance Avery, at first comes across as a loving father and reasonable scientist. He is soft-spoken, gentle and full of child-like wonder at the intricacies of the human body.
Avery’s voice is calm while explaining the human body’s complex functions. As Rascher explains, when faced with extremely low temperatures our blood crystallizes and the body slowly shuts down limb by limb. Yet Avery’s relaxed voice is a sharp contradiction to Rascher’s twisted experiments and his complete lack of moral ambiguity.
The four women endure never-ending suffering: the shivering cold, bottomless hunger and countless humiliations become unbearable. To survive they escape into the mind’s private world where they are cocooned in warmth.
The dance collective’s Ainsley Hillyard, Alison Kause, Alida Kendell and Kate Stashko represent four women through a series of flowing, sculptured moves that illuminate each woman’s story.
As the dancers move fluidly interpreting majestic classical music, voice-over actresses Megan Dart, Nadien Chu, former St. Albert actress Elisa Benzer and St. Albert Children’s Theatre former music director Rachel Bowron take us to their private world.
Chu, as Mary, replays memories of the mole on her lover’s neck. Bowron, as Anna, recalls her years as a musician, while Dart remembers a trip to the beach basking in the sun’s warmth. Sarah (Benzer), the fourth survivor, tells us she survived by stealing food from near dead prisoners.
Beautiful dance, music, theatre and film parallel the horrors of The Cardiac Shadow. Perhaps most chilling is the realization that similar savagery continues today 75 years after the Second World War. So where does that put us?
