Bathurst & Adelaide : How to Disappear Completely at the SummerWorks Performance Festival

How to Disappear Completely is not your average piece of theatre. Created and performed by award-winning lighting designer Itai Erdal, this production combines the heart-felt storytelling, documentary filmmaking, and the artistry and mechanics of light to create a piece that is altogether spellbinding.

Erdal is a story-teller, plain and simple. Being in the audience of How to Disappear Completely feels more like you're catching up with an old friend than witnessing a traditional narrative unfold onstage. Erdal tells us about his friends, family, goals, and dreams with such openness and generosity that his one-man show never borders on self-indulgence.

How to Disappear Completely has two distinct sides. The first is Erdal's abridged autobiography: the story of his life and family with a focus on his mother's terminal illness and eventual death. Erdal projects film footage of his family that he took himself during this time to bring the other characters to life and allow their own voices to speak onstage. The second is a mini-lesson on the mechanic and art of lighting design. Erdal operates the majority of the lighting cues himself from onstage and takes the audience through some of the artistic and technical process of lighting for the theatre.

Each of these stories alone could not sustain an entire full-length performance, but together they complement each other by their opposites. Together, they create a fully varied emotional and intellectual experience despite being very weakly linked thematically and structurally. Regardless, this is an autobiography, and perhaps family and light are both such large parts of Erdal's life that they cannot be separated.

Since life is not crafted as simply and carefully as a piece of fiction, we cannot ask that a biography be perfectly structured and still expect truthfulness and accuracy in the story-telling. Structural issues are why I usually steer clear of biopics and biographies, but Erdal has created a piece of theatre so unique in its use of lighting and documentary film that it never ceases to entertain. How to Disappear Completely manages to keep you on board wherever it may decide to ramble.


Remaining Performances at SummerWorks:
Friday August 16 at 3:00pm
Sunday August 18 at 12:30pm

Remaining Performances at the Stratford Festival (as part of The Forum series):
Thursday August 15 at 2:00pm
Saturday August 17 at 2:00pm

For more information check out the Facebook page or the SummerWorks website.
The annual Summerworks Performance Festival runs until August 18.