The Tale of a Town brought Yellowknife stories to the NACC stage Saturday and asked big questions about the future of communities forever changed by big box stores and development.
The performance was the culmination of creators Lisa Marie DiLiberto and Charles Ketchabaw's three year tour of downtowns across Canada. The multimedia show took the audience on a journey
into the heart of Yellowknife, including main street life eaten away by big box stores, Indigenous memories of the time before the towns even existed, 11 cent ice cream cones and the harsh realities of homelessness and violence.
The Tale of a Town brought to life official and popular history told through interviews with residents. As the interviews played, managing director Charles Ketchabaw created tiny town scenes filmed and broadcast onto a giant screen. Local actors along with the Ursa Miners chamber choir took to the stage to sing and perform original numbers, accompanied by Casey Koyczan and Andrea Bettger. The audience was sprayed with silly string and asked about their fondest downtown memories, creatively breaking down the fourth wall between the stage and the viewers.
Residents who want to hear more histories of their downtown including hamburgers sold out of house windows, moose caught by the outcrop where the post office now sits and 50 Street's rowdy past, can find interviews from Yellowknife and other stops of the story-mobile on The Tale of a Town website.
A famous moment in Yellowknife’s history, Raven Mad Daze, was featured in The Tale of A Town with Terry Pamplin’s face in the midst of a raucous scene in front of the Gold Range on 50 Street. Charles Ketchabaw, front, sprayed silly string at the audience, a commodity that ran out in local stores during the Mad Daze.
Members of the Ursa Miners chamber choir and local actors sing along as Lisa Marie DiLiberto performs a song about coming home to her little community in a bar in downtown Toronto.
The Gold Range on 50 Street made several appearances in The Tale of a Town on Saturday at the NACC stage. Interviews from the creator’s previous visit to the city made audience members erupt into laughter, including one about the time a street light was installed on 50 Street. A man came out of the Gold Range and didn’t like the look of the streetlight so he grabbed a gun out of his vehicle, ‘back then everyone had a gun in the backseat of their truck’, and knocked the streetlight out just as the RCMP rolled around the corner.
Charles Ketchabaw, left, and Lisa Marie DiLiberto, far right, brought an audience member to the stage to help them relive the interview with 74-year-old Gerarde Langlande. The duo trecked around Canada in their storymobile for three years, gathering stories like Langlande’s about the spaces in towns people remember and how big box stores and modern development have changed the character of Canadian towns.
Terry Pamplin brings Harry Veiner to life, the tall, generous and gregarious former mayor of Medicine Hat. Legendary unofficial mayors like Yellowknife’s Margaret Thrasher are also given voice during the performance.
One number in The Tale of a Town laments on the drastic changes making way for new developments, the smashing of the old heritage buildings of main street to make room for the new big box stores and high rises without a thought to preserving the character or memories contained within them.
The Tale of a Town, a performance created from interviews with residents across the country, brought audience members on a journey through cities and Lisa Marie DiLiberto and Charles Ketchabaw traveled as far as Cape Dorset to hear from the artist collective that re-used the slate from pool tables in a shuttered pool hall to create prints for which the town and its artists are now world-renowned.
The performance also brought to life less official history, such as the streaking up and down the city’s main streets during Yellowknife’s rowdy years.
The performance brought to life the moment when Yellowknife became the official capital of the Northwest Territories in 1967, with this change came a plane full of public servants and paper. The audience laughed and clapped as one resident remarked that there is no more service now that we have 60,000 public servants compared to the 95 that were flown up that day.
The Tale of a Town ended with Lisa Marie DiLiberto accompanied by the Ursa Miners with a song about finding spaces in small towns where community can grown and flourish, the kind of community previously made on main streets across the country.
Managing director Charles Ketchabaw describes the shift from gleeful stories about the good old times on Canada’s main streets to darker themes of homelessness, violence and despair that met him and DiLiberto as they traveled across Canada interviewing residents in towns across the country. The pair also spoke to Indigenous people, dispossessed from their lands to make room for main streets and other city developments.
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