Le Cyc at Workers Arts and Heritage Centre

Between last night’s James North Art Crawl and today’s The Big Picture Revisited forum, there’s a lot of weekend content to be digested, enough that I hesitate to comment on any of it here with any degree of authority. It’s a good weekend to be critical, and I suspect that I have a few bones to pick, so until then, allow me to wax poetic on something positive, namely Le Cyc.

I count myself lucky to have gotten out to see the show at Workers Arts and Heritage at all, since I only received word of the performance an hour before the fact (cheers to Dave at Mixed Media for the glowing recommendation as well as the much-needed chocolate biscuit). Falling somewhere between an operetta and a graphic novel come to life, Le Cyc is a multimedia spectacle of surprisingly simple means that brings its story to life with shiver-inducing verve.

Le Cyc is played out in some 380 drawings by David Willekes, the originals of which looked particularly stunning arranged against the WAHC’s photomural of striking steel workers. In the course of the performance itself, these ink, coffee and red wine drawings are digitally projected in time to an eclectic indie rock score composed by Eihab Boraie and performed by a six-piece orchestra of Guelph-based vocalists and musicians. The fusion of musical styles sprawling through the performance defy this art writer’s capacity for description, but Le Cyc’s site features enough rehearsal video to give a taste of the wide-ranging energies of the 70-minute show.

The rapid genre-bending of Le Cyc serves an equally unstable dystopian vision of an industrial society ruled by the vaudevillian Mis de Berm, an impossibly moustachioed despot who systematically banishes anyone capable of besting him in the Democratic Bike Race that determines the city’s leadership. Such is the fate of Jean Paul, whose brother Pierre has already disappeared; in a remarkably disturbing passage, Jean Paul is taken down by Mis de Berm, who amputates his leg with a saw and throws him into the outer world of Le Noir. While Jean Paul is reunited with Pierre and plans his return and revolution, his sister-in-law Sophie, jaded by the disappearances of both Pierre and Jean Paul, plots her own subtle subversion from within Le Cyc’s propaganda factory.

Both the style and the content of Le Cyc is unmistakably political, from the Soviet-influenced style of Willekes’ drawings to the story of a repressive society’s downfall at the hands of a working class that stops pedalling the machines that run their televisions - these people literally have nothing to lose but their bicycle chains. Within that timeless struggle, there is also a more contemporaneous comment to be had in the ambiguous society of Le Noir, where children are tasked with the labour of transporting the injured adults on their bicycles, and find their only leisure in rolling downhill to their stunt ramps where “we fly through the sky like birds/nobody cares if we get hurt.” Facing down the prospect of a health care system increasingly tested by an aging boomer population, the fate of the children of Le Noir seems somehow prescient, and releases the narrative from a simplistic socialist formula.

Thematically, Le Cyc is also strongly evocative of another great bicyclean dystopia fuelled by brilliant drawing, Les Triplettes de Belleville. It’s hard to believe that the one didn’t somehow influence the other (and pending the perfection of time travel, I think we can assume which way around that goes), but the two together are just as likely descendants of a Futurist tradition that saw the bicycle as an insidious means of fusing man with machine. The attending images of shadowy political corruption played out in both Les Triplettes de Belleville and Le Cyc are strangely emblematic of that early industrial fear.

Le Cyc has performances coming up on November 20 in Guelph at Dublin St. United Church, and November 22 at London’s Arts Project. While a DVD version is apparently pending next year, the live performance is not to be missed if you have the opportunity, no matter how short the notice.

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