When you think of making an hour-long visit to a hotel room in your own city, it’s likely that the shortlist of scenarios of what’s going to happen in that room is pretty small.

Brian Solomon
[M/Hotel’s Brian Solomon]

David McIntosh’s new site-specific dance-theatre piece for battery opera, M/Hotel, suggests a much broader spectrum of things to enjoy with strangers in said rooms than hospital corners on bed sheets and those tiny, pre-wrapped toiletries.

In 2009 – 2010, battery opera presented David McIntosh’s work “Lives Were Around Me“, an intimate, site-specific, roving theatre work that explored the notions of history and evidence in the context of a downtown city block in Vancouver.

M/Hotel's Alana Gercke
[M/Hotel’s Alana Gercke]

Taking an audience of three at a time on a guided tour, the performance conjured past, present, and future histories of Vancouver. It also asked the audience to consider the residue and evidence that these stories left in their own bodies. Continuing and evolving out of this this stream of inquiry, battery opera presented the first draft of McIntosh’s next work, M/Hotel in January-February 2011. In M/Hotel, the audience spends time in a hotel room with a handful of other friends or strangers, the undercurrent of anonymous intimacy thick in the air, and considers the residue of lives lived in and amongst banal objects, and between destinations. 

M/Hotel’s McIntosh wrote a dozen narratives, all while staying in motel or hotel rooms. The work was performed within the confines of a standard mid-range hotel, meant for a small audience. The work offers improvised dances, music, and intimate narratives that create unique performance experiences evoking the transient states within human relationships.

M/Hotel
Venue: Lobby bar of the Holiday Inn, 1110 Howe Street, Vancouver
Dates: Tuesdays through Saturdays, November 22 – December 10, 2011
Times: 6 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm, 9 pm, 10 pm (only five tickets available per show) – no show is the same; consider staying for more than one! If you stay for subsequent shows, admission is via a modest donation.
Tickets: $25 (not including HST and service charge) online purchase only (via Tickets Tonight)
(If space is available, room rates are negotiable in person)

All photos courtesy of Amy Pelletier.

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