Rodeo Song: One Yellow Rabbit Takes a New Approach to the Beloved Theatre Festival

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Prior to every new work they created over the past four decades - and there have been a lot of them - the company members of One Yellow Rabbit asked a very existential question.

“Who are we now?” says Rabbit Blake Brooker. “It’s a question we always ask of ourselves when we sit down as a group. And then that [question] starts to bake and gently move into other questions: Who do you want to be? Who were you? Who are you at this moment?”

They may have started asking those questions back in the mid-1980s when Reagan was president, a Mulroney was the prime minister, and phones hung on walls in kitchens - when they launched a performing arts festival called the High Performance Rodeo - but 35 years later, as 2020 turned into a year unlike any other for performing artists around the world, the question seemed more relevant and more poignant than ever.

In 2020, the whole world is asking who are we now?
Before they could answer that question of themselves or of anyone else, they had to ask, as the pandemic shut down Broadway, London’s West End and the performing arts across the world, what the 2021 High Performance Rodeo might look like - and how the Rabbits might present it to audiences in a world where audiences have to stay six feet apart and laughing is a super spreader, not an expression of joy.

There was no easy answer, Brooker concedes.

In fact, trying to dream up the 35th High Performance Rodeo, which kicks off January 11, 2021, on Instagram, was as much of an experiment as the plots of all those richly imaginative, idiosyncratic One Yellow Rabbit plays Brooker and Rabbits created for the first 34 High Performance Rodeos.

“You cannot have a food festival if there’s no food component” he says. “[With] the High Performance Rodeo, you cannot have the High Performance Rodeo with no performance idea.”

Brooker didn’t think much of moving it all to Zoom.

“Performance is people in a space with others,” he says. “Of course you can break it up and pretend… (but) you can’t put performance on screens. There is a [form of] performance that does that - and it’s called TV.”

Adding to the complications of conceiving and booking a huge international performing arts festival during a pandemic was the fact that the pandemic kept shifting.

By the summer, it appeared that the pandemic was on the wane, that audiences might be allowed to return, at least in some limited manner, in the winter.

“At a certain point, I thought OK, we can get 10 people or 12 people into our theatre,” Brooker says. “I can hire local people who can perform without expressing their mouth, without air. They can be behind plexi[glass] and speak into a mic maybe.

“You can picture all sorts of interesting things under any of these contexts,” he adds, “but by the time what we were imagining at that time was the second wave.”

That wasn’t going to work.

For a while, the Rabbits thought there wouldn’t be any 35th High Performance at all.

“Finally we got to the point where we [said], no, we’re not doing a Rodeo. We actually can’t. We’re not allowed to,” he said.

Welcome to the 2021 version of the High Performance Rodeo
“That’s what we’re doing,” he says. “35 by 35 Instagram things.”

Then, he reached for the Rabbit Rolodex.

“I reached to the [Rodeo] past, I reached to the [Rodeo] future, the [Rodeo] present and approached a bunch of people,” he said, “and said look, would you do a 45 second to 60 second digital artifact and then send it to us and it will be presented on Instagram in January?”

The result? An international performing arts festival delivered in easily digestible bytes, on a device that fits in your back pocket.

Among those delivering Instagram performances will be Dave Bidini, Alejandro Escovedo, Calgary choreographer and dancer Yukichi Hattori, Calgary playwright Geoffrey Simon Brown, Trailer Park Boys alumnus Cory Bowles, Hong Kong Exile, France’s Le Société de Petite Idee, Craig Northey from the Odds, Calgary singer-songwriter Kenna Burima, Calgary’s Michelle Thrush, Toronto’s Amanda Cordner, Calgary’s Kenji Ikeda, Jamie Dunsdon - and 22 others.

What can Rodeo lovers expect?
Well, if you’re a Rodeo lover, you’ve probably already figured out that trying to anticipate what a High Performance Rodeo artist might deliver is generally a longshot.

All the Rabbits asked of each artist was the same question they have always asked of themselves, all these years, for all those Rodeos that transformed Calgary, Alberta into a cultural hotspot in the coldest month of the year.

“[There will be] lots of different voices but not necessarily talking about the Rodeo,” Brooker says. “Just a lot of voices trying to answer the question of, who are you now?

“In your world,” he adds. “In your thing.”

As far as transforming the festival into an Instagram feed, the Rabbits have always been willing to try something new.

“This is an experiment - it’s like a collage,” he says. “You could look at them once a day, or you could go and go look it at that month and look at them all in a row if you wanted to.

“Different people will consume or absorb or experience this in different ways,” he adds. “It’s a tasting menu of all these artists.”