REVIEWS: High Performance Rodeo 2026

Reviews

/By Eve Beauchamp / Jan 18, 2026

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For Calgary theatre-goers, January holds the antidote to frigid post-holiday slumps: One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo, the city’s biggest performing arts festival. This year marks the 40th iteration of the interdisciplinary event and offers Calgarians a feast of over 30 shows across 12 venues from January 13 to 31.

As a Rodeo newbie, I’m determined to dive headfirst, cover festival highlights, and complete the final step in my initiation to Alberta’s charged arts scene. My five reviews will be published below over the course of the festival.

Yee-freaking-haw!

Body Concert (The Studio at Vertigo Theatre)

You ever love someone so much that you’ve wanted to crawl inside of their skin? Feel the flex of their muscles and the pump of their heart because surface connection just wasn’t enough?

Maybe I’m the freak, but I couldn’t help but read Body Concert as a meditation on this peculiar yet very human desire. The solo show, created and performed by American artist Kevin Augustine, leads audiences on a search for that bone-deep contact in an inhospitable world through dance, puppetry, and original music by Mark Bruckner.

I won’t spoil drool-worthy puppet design details, but will say that Augustine’s handling of his handmade creations is remarkable; the precision and care with which he endows every creature with breath is testament to both his skill as a puppeteer and the passion that underpins each heartbeat of Body Concert. (And when I say skill, I mean it — Augustine even uses his feet to animate certain puppets.)

Given its nonverbal and surreal nature, there may be a slight learning curve to knowing how to watch the show. Once I surrendered to the leisurely pace and emotion-driven textures of its terrain, though, Body Concert was a deeply touching experience that stirred everything from wonder to grief without ever uttering a word.

Amid the chaos looming outside the theatre, Augustine extends a vital invitation to slow down, give in to our senses, and revel in the biomechanical miracles that are our living bodies.

Hucksterland (Alexandra Centre Concert Hall)

Sprawled on a bench with his face plastered on it, Jordan Jameson announces that, like his soldier father, he’s always dreamt of taking a human life; so, naturally, he became a real estate mogul. He then takes a bountiful leak on the sidewalk while a live punk-rock band shreds behind him.

Welcome to Hucksterland — a new satirical musical co-produced by Chromatic Theatre and Thumbs Up Good Work, written and directed by local Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Caleigh Crow, and composed by her partner, Sacha Crow, and Gus Rendell.

The show follows the attempts of Jordan (Mike Tan) to extricate friend and fictional Calgary mayor Jan Van Jan (Josh Bertwhistle) from legal troubles — in which Jordan himself is enmeshed. Abetted by executive assistant Aspyn Colorado (Safia Comtois-Mohamad), Jordan’s mission is a theatrical inferno of bouffon-esque scheming, where no politician-, businessman-, policeman-, neoliberal-, or even Swiftie-shaped stone is left unprobed.

Caleigh Crow’s book is gut-bustingly clever, despite the occasional heavy hand. Her conception of the Jordan-Jan duo is especially watertight. The buddies-in-crime spew every expletive and parrot every tenet of conservative dogma imaginable — invoking the infamous Musk-Trump ex-bromance — which had me and the rest of the preview night audience laughing, wincing, and laughing again.

Even more striking is the outstanding star power of Huckersterland’s cast. Dripping with gusto and abandon, Tan gives a world-class performance that’s only further bolstered by Bertwhistle’s comedic savvy. Add in Comtois-Mohamad’s grit as well as Michelle Thrush and Colin Wolf’s poise in the good-guy roles, and you’ve got an infallible unit that makes a 100-minute runtime whizz by.

Baring sharp teeth and a bleeding heart, Hucksterland is exactly the kind of theatre I’d like to see more of on Calgary stages.

I Would Prefer Not To (Heather Edwards Theatre)

David Gagnon Walker and Tori Morrison, performers and real-world couple, have two stories to tell. One story lays bare intimate details of Walker’s clinical depression. The other is by Herman Melville. (Yes, the Moby-Dick one.)

Co-created by the pair, Strange Victory Performance’s I Would Prefer Not To fuses Walker’s autobiography, Morrison’s retelling of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” live performances of emo-rock numbers, and a wooden puppet — for good measure.

The show has a stripped-back feel, particularly in tone and staging (the performers remained seated, in direct address to the audience, for the majority of the performance). But what makes I Would Prefer Not To remarkable is its unflinching and unpretentious honesty. In a post-13 Reasons Why cultural landscape, Morrison and Walker have devised a script that is devastatingly sincere and tactful in its discussion of mental illness. Whether illustrating a person who lives with it or one who lives beside it, this production presents an account of depression that isn’t very sexy. Or melodramatic. But it’s critically real and unmasks depression’s mundane truth.

I did wonder if being on-book was an intentional effort to up the raw factor, or if it was a consequence of this being the production’s world premiere. Regardless, the couple were spot-on, delivering measured and matter-of-fact performances that allowed the quiet elegance of the text to ripple out into the house.

If it wasn’t already apparent, this is a heavy show dealing pretty much exclusively with themes of depression and ennui. And yet, I left feeling something adjacent to hope and a gratitude for the experiences, feelings, and people that make human existence, well, human.

Dream Machine (Big Secret Theatre)

In a program note, writer-director Blake Brooker reveals the query within Dream Machine: “Could we create a musical without characters or plot?”

I think it’s safe to say the artistic team succeeded. There are whiffs of character here and there, but it’s true that One Yellow Rabbit’s revival of its 2003 production, composed by the late David Rhymer, is a fever dream of rock-operatic proportions, hurling audiences through 90 minutes of nonstop acid-fuelled verse with little indication of which way is up or down.

When you brush away the film of outward perplexity, Dream Machine is a musical exploration of the Beat Generation in both content and form; it’s a fluid, atemporal peephole into the movement’s hedonistic idols including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, activated by a replica of Brion Gysin’s real-life Dreamachine (a spinning, light-up cylinder designed to induce visual illusions).

The show is nihilism incarnate — on purpose.

But for me, it often buckled under the laissez-faire philosophy it aims to exemplify, sacrificing legibility for style and blurring the borders between representation and reverence. Even after dramatizing a substance-addled Burroughs murdering his own wife and beatnik peer Joan Vollmer, the world of the play sprints on — seemingly unchanged, apart from an arresting, but brief, lighting cue.

In complement to Dylan Bauer’s transcendent lighting design, Dream Machine boasts a truly magnanimous three-piece band responsible for breathtaking sonic landscapes and driving the pace for the air- and skin-tight ensemble of five. Recurrent solo moments help to temper the group freneticism and Allison Lynch’s especially stunning voice introduces a welcome agility to a talk-singing heavy score. Andy Curtis and Geoffrey Simon Brown deliver punchy performances as well.

In its devoted search for poetic entropy, Dream Machine shirks a discernible argument and a nuanced treatment of its failable muses. As a result, I struggled to be fully stirred by its visual and musical offerings and, in the end, the production just didn’t work for me. But if you’re looking to get down and esoterically dirty, Dream Machine is a show — or rather, an experience — that’s impossible to forget.

SWAN? (The Studio at Vertigo Theatre)

Swan-ballerina Odette is cursed to a life of anthropomorphism on the shores of Swan Lake. That is, of course, until she finds a hero: her one true love.

It sounds syrupy at the outset, but SWAN? is a far cry from the delicateness of Tchaikovsky’s ballet; the solo show is a frenetic, lewd, and sporadically dark reimagining of Swan Lake that plunges audiences deep into absurdist clownery.

Alberta-based creator-performer Lauren Brady is undoubtedly magnetic. Her pointe work is an inspired and graceful motif, and her handling of the disillusioned human side of Odette (who nurses a vape lifeline named Timothée Chalamet) is especially steady-handed. But SWAN?’s interactive moments are where Brady’s performance thrives. Her grounded and incisively spontaneous crowd work livened up an otherwise timid opening night audience in Vertigo Theatre’s modest end-stage black box. Brady owned the room — I would’ve watched her question audience members for hours, given the chance.

Aside from standout participatory beats, I left with a sense that SWAN? doesn’t quite know where to tether itself. The themes of feminine digestibility and corporeal agency that Brady grazes are stinging and relevant when they emerge, but are often eclipsed by a steadfast commitment to raunch. Given more elbow room, the play’s weighty thesis could become more accessible to audiences, which would make it easier for us to connect with Odette along the varied colours of her story.

Despite minor dramaturgical frailties, however, SWAN? is a riveting investigation of internalized misogyny that simmers with brilliance and edge.

High Performance Rodeo runs from January 13 to 31. More information is available here.

Eve Beauchamp wrote this review as part of Page Turn, a professional development network for emerging arts writers, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and administered by Neworld Theatre.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Eve Beauchamp

Eve Beauchamp (they/them) is an award-winning Calgary-based theatre artist, playwright, and graduate of the BFA in Acting at the University of Ottawa. They are the co-artistic director of Levity Theatre Company and primarily create work that explores queerness, capitalism, and neurodivergence through humour, poetry, and storytelling. Currently, you can find them pursuing their Master of Fine Arts in Drama at the University of Calgary.

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