“Helen Lawrence” fuses visual art and film

The place is Vancouver and the year is 1948. The world is in recession, with banks plummeting and housing crises hitting every city throughout Canada. In the midst of it all, “tough guys and femme fatales” find themselves resorting to unethical measures to get by, scrambling and succumbing to daily gambling and vices.

Welcome to the world of Helen Lawrence, a film noir that centers on an up-and-coming woman, Helen (played by Canadian Stage’s Crystal Balint), as she navigates through crime hotspots like Hotel Vancouver and Hogan’s Alley. From Oct. 13 to 14 at UCLA’s Royce Hall, students and the general public alike will have the chance to step into this film noir landscape in an experience that interlaces live-action theater as well as visual and cinematic arts.

Coordinated by the Center for the Art of Performance, UCLA’s public arts unit, this Canadian Stage performance will showcase the work of world-renowned visual artist Stan Douglas and screenwriter Chris Haddock. Actors will appear in front of blue screens, which generate a 3-D facade of the run-down hotels and streets that make up the noir landscape.

With Douglas’ signature visual arts technique and the accompanying technology, the performance will have actors looking more realistic in the “movie” pictured on blue screens than on stage.

“[In this project], film noir meets theater in real time, live-action movie magic,” CAP UCLA Communications Manager Holly Wallace said.

Since late 2015, CAP UCLA has been planning the premiere of Helen Lawrence in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

While CAP UCLA boasts a season of ticketed performances that range from spoken word poetry to international dance, Art in Action is an additional public engagement program that hosts workshops, post-show discussions, symposiums and other art-focused activities tailored to the CAP performances.

“[These activities] provide deeper meaning and explanation to many of the events we have in our season,” said Meryl Friedman, CAP UCLA’s director of education and special initiatives.

For Helen Lawrence, Friedman and the rest of the Art in Action team started planning the artistic activities in late spring. Throughout the past four months, they have been communicating with the UCLA Library Special Collections, as it houses the papers of several noir writers, including Los Angeles-based writer Raymond Chandler.

“Los Angeles is known for its noir film and literary movement,” Friedman said. “And since Special Collections holds many [works from] noir writers and comic book artists, we’re also doing a co-curation with the library to feature a number of things in that collection that relate to the noir literary movement, especially if it relates to Los Angeles.”

CAP UCLA’s Executive and Artistic Director Kristy Edmunds, says she has enjoyed evolving her curatorial focus by working in both visual and live performance mediums. The integration of these two forums was made possible through patronage from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which helped CAP UCLA collaborate with various museums and visual art spaces to introduce performance work into its repertoire.

Having already done a number of past projects with LACMA, such as spotlights on American composer John Zorn and choreographer Trisha Brown, CAP UCLA is receiving support of the Mellon Foundation alongside LACMA again. Since Douglas has holdings that are on display in LACMA, a project that blended his visual arts practice and his live performance practice resulted in the premiere of Helen Lawrence.

For Friedman, the method and mechanism behind the show’s execution allows the performance to be “beautiful, innovative and interesting.” She is most excited for the audience to enjoy the show and especially to witness Douglas’ perfected techniques in the visual arts and theater. 

“The story is new but set in an old noir tradition,” Friedman said. “It is very tongue-in-cheek and it’s like watching actors from old-fashioned movie on stage in real time. The way the crew uses video and film and live actors is this beautiful merging of digital art and technology and performance that you normally don’t get to see.”

CORRECTION: a previous version of this article cited Tricia Brown as a saxophonist. It has been updated to reflect Trisha Brown’s correct name and title (choreographer). The Daily Trojan regrets this error.