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Motion and DJ L'Oqenz in Oraltorio: A Theatrical Mixtape.Cesar Ghisilieri

  • Title: Oraltorio: A Theatrical Mixtape
  • Written and performed by: Motion
  • Music and performed by: DJ L’Oqenz
  • Director: Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu
  • Company: Obsidian Theatre Company with Soulpepper
  • Venue: Young Centre for the Performing Arts
  • City: Toronto
  • Year: Runs to Oct. 20, 2018

Rating:

2.5 out of 4 stars

You’ll want to rewind Oraltorio: A Theatrical Mixtape and listen again as soon as it’s over.

There’s so much aural information in this musical journey through black history (or journey through black musical history) that you’ll wish the program provided footnotes for each sample of ragtime or reggae, dancehall or disco that zips by in this 75-minute wall of sound.

Oraltorio – an Obsidian Theatre Company production opening Soulpepper’s fall season – is an impressive package performed with style and confidence by two born-and-raised Toronto women.

Motion, a poet, playwright and chameleonic vocalist, plays B-Girl, who speaks, sings and raps in the show. L’Oqenz, a composer and sound designer, plays the DJ – backing B-Girl up on the decks throughout and occasionally playing the role of hype woman through history.

Oraltorio opens with the two fiddling with radio dials on a pair of boomboxes, searching for something on the Toronto airwaves that speaks to them. We hear, with increasing irony, U2’s Pride (In the Name of Love), Starship’s We Built This City (On Rock ’n’ Roll) and Alannah Myles’s Black Velvet. We could be in the 1980s (or today, alas).

Finally, with a coat-hanger antenna extension, the women start to pull in signals from further afield and hear their kind of sound. Lauryn Hill in the Fugees, Missy Elliott putting her thing down, flipping and reversing it – and then we’re really off on Oraltorio’s female-focused odyssey through sound and time.

There seem to be two main tracks to the show – one historical, one more personal.

The major throughline is an exploration of black music, as director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu puts it in a program note, as “coded language that has contained a power to speak to the unspeakable and revolt against injustice,” and of white opposition and appropriation of this music throughout time.

Early on, we hear a looped voice saying, “And they took the drums from us because that’s how we sent our messages.” Later, we’ll hear Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton’s original 1952 version of Hound Dog, followed by a snippet of a contemporaneous concerned-citizens group’s letter about the perils of letting young people listen to “Negro music” – and then a blast of Elvis Presley’s version of Hound Dog.

We hear and see through Laura Warren and Ramon Charles’s documentary projections the outwardly racist 19th-century (and onward) art form of minstrelsy and the more coded racism of Disco Demolition Night in Chicago in 1979.

Amid this remixed audio-visual, B-Girl speaks to us theatrically in monologues and verses in a variety of African, Caribbean and North American accents. Like Whitney, she’s every woman: A young Torontonian talking about her city as if each neighbourhood is a lover (she seems particularly passionate about Vaughan Road), a market vendor who hilariously haggles with the audience (and only takes American dollars), a concertgoer shocked by a shooting then equally terrified when the police show up. Female resistance to oppression is a recurring theme, though Motion is occasionally a man, too – memorably playing a male gospel preacher who only likes to hear women’s voices in the choir.

Motion could be mayor of Toronto tomorrow if she could transfer her flow to the Gardiner Expressway. L’Oqenz, with short turquoise hair and lightning-bolt earrings, fiddles with knobs in the casual and inscrutable way DJs do; she’s no doubt the coolest person to ever appear on a Soulpepper stage.

Under the direction of Tindyebwa Otu (who last took Soulpepper audiences into black musical history with her stellar production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in the spring), Oraltorio looks good, sounds good and has a few really slick theatrical moments. (I admired the way Motion morphed, in mime, from being behind a typewriter to rocking a guitar.)

The smoke and mirrors of André du Toit’s lighting and Jackie Chau’s set give the feel of a hip-hop concert. The complicated and compelling sound design from L’Oqenz and Thomas Ryder Payne makes the seats shake.

But while the show engages on a visceral level, there is the feeling that it has bitten off more than it can chew; there’s a lot of history and parts of the world we pass through here, but much of it is sampled too quickly and densely to really sink in emotionally. There’s no clear narrative to carry you through. The characters come and then are gone.

Hey, it says it in the title: Oraltorio is a mixtape.

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