This solo show is a perfectly formed existential crisis meets French New Wave.
We’ve all been there, right? Moved to Paris in our youth to chase that joie de vivre, that Left Bank lifestyle. Non? Ok well at least I and Kaitlyn Kelly have; she’s a Canadian performer whose solo show charts her journey to trace her European identity, exploring the visa highs and passport lows.
It’s another of these endless hot summer nights, the sticky air stifling the small but packed crowd of the Hope Theatre. A solitary fan in the corner is honestly trying its best. Kaitlyn is wearing a long-sleeved brown velvet dress- the bravest of us all. It’s just her and her microphone, with some synth-waveomniscient voice interludes peppering proceedings.
I love this show. It’s about the bureaucracy of identity; her life funneled into paperwork and the attempts she has made to reckon with her roots. At the start, Kaitlyn describes in soft tones and lilting language her love affair with Paris as a young Canadian, and her desire to gain citizenship at a time when her Frenchness seemed almost too obvious. Alas, she is rejected and a source of personal pride is knocked back. If she’s not French then what can she be? It soon transpires she has Polish ancestry, linked to a time when Ukrainian territory belonged to Poland. Thus begins another arduous and complicated bureaucraticmission to discover how European she really is. It is a story I imagine resonates with a lot of European residents, grappling with the idea of borders and what it means to be from multiplesomewheres.
Cleverly, this piece lends itself well to the same elements of French New Wave Kaitlyn is at pains to present both contextually and in practice: personal expression, playing with narrative, authenticity and neo-realism. Punctuating the monologues, Kaitlyn uses dance breaks and silence to demonstrate a particularly admin heavy part of her journey. When she waits for a response, we wait with her. When she is delayed; so too is her audience. I feel like she could have made us all fill in some nonsensical form as well, like an unwantedsouvenir- “please provide four generations of family tree before you enter”.
What I enjoyed about Kaitlyn’s soliloquizing is that she makes it feel like a stream of consciousness on a personal scale, but dealing with weighty concepts. The very notion of cultural heritage is huge. Not least the description of her Ukrainian roots and the current politicization of its own national identify in the face on ongoing attempted Russification. She makes witty little references to painted eggs, food, religion and the acknowledgement that (lack of) language plays a huge role in her own psyche. She praises her amazing Polish citizenship lawyer, referencing the speed at which she was able to finally gain Polish citizenship and ultimately, her goal of European-ness.
This show is a 1 hour love letter to Europe without sycophancy. It explores the notion, so familiar to a lot of us, that we can often feel culturally within and without. What does it mean to be “from” somewhere anyway? It’s like if Agnѐs Varda poppedinto the passport office: bureaucracy, but make it art.
Kaitlyn asks the loaded question “how did I end up here?” as a finale and I can’t help feeling she’s headed for great things, starting with the Edinburgh Fringe festival next month. It’s easy to see how it will resonate with the eclectic, multicultural audiences.