catkidd.com

(Photo credit: Tristan Brand)

(…) The space is an integral part of the evening, as central to the event as Cat Kidd herself, or her text. Squint and you have the raw, harsh world of the play (South Africa’s savannahs). Squint again and the street lights coming through the trees through the industrial space’s windows is the orange moon.  And Kidd dominates this space with a huge presence and yet without busy-ness…and she IS like no other solo performer I have ever seen.

The text, with its almost invisible patterns and rhyme schemes, is brilliant – 80 minutes of stories told which, in an odd way (an organic way, if you’ll permit me to enlist jargon) create their own chronology. The tale is of a mad artist, exiled by critics to the planes, who must relive the diagnosed madness of her childhood to find the violent peace which wild Africa might offer. Toward this end, she uses/inhabits the figure of the hyena who, in nature and in lore, is a chimera—shape-shifter, scavenger, savage, witch, whore, but, above all, a survivor.

Kidd pours words, turns of phrase and images over us, separated into cantos which each have a set of rhythms and themes. Sometimes the passage is one of life in a modern world, but in one glorious one it is about a connection made with a dying lioness (whose eyes we see in film projected on the rear wall) who, like the central character, is a victim of modernity. (…)

Continue reading at charpo-canada.blogspot.com/2011/10/review-hyena-subpoena.html

The UN-definable Catherine Kidd 

Kidd’s performances elevate words to new heights, their endless pliability and depth stirring up lightning-quick associations, setting synapses afire. You can’t latch onto any one idea or memory as they come at you, rapid-fire, from every nook and cranny of your conscience and sub-conscience; you have to let go and just let the images wash over you. One super-charged phrase of words-on-steroids can bring you to the brink of despair and have you laughing to split a gut. The Montreal Gazette wrote that, “[Kidd] takes little shreds of language and lifts them up and turns them in the light, holding them, playing with them – searching them for meaning as if they were toys that had just come out of a black box, without instructions.”

Continue reading at charpo.blogspot.com/2011/10/fords-focus-cat-kidd.html