REVIEW: Poncili Creación whips up psychedelic whimsy at Montreal’s Ateliers Belleville
iPhoto caption: Poncili Creación performs at Montreal’s Ateliers Belleville. Photo by Benoît Paillé.
I let myself be coaxed out of my home on a cool autumn night on the promise of “a wordless conversation about the power of creativity.” The occasion? A sold-out show featuring Poncili Creación — an acclaimed experimental performance and puppetry collective founded in 2012 by Puerto Rican identical twins Efraín and Pablo Del Hierro — and Orkestar Kriminal, an eclectic underworld-inspired Montreal-based band.
Who orchestrated this unlikely pairing? The organizer was Elastic, a print magazine of psychedelic art and literature founded last spring by editor and writer Hillary Brenhouse with support from Harvard and UC Berkeley’s psychedelics in society and culture program. The venue was the black box at Ateliers Belleville, an arts hub in the Garment District in Ahuntsic-Cartierville. I followed the crowd through a parking lot to the building’s side entrance, traces of nicotine and cannabis in the air.
Inside, the audience was seated on a concrete floor around a performance space demarcated by fluorescent gaffer tape. The Poncili twins, dressed in identical bodysuits, shaped the crowd by beckoning us, in a mix of French and impeccably Puerto Rican Spanish, to sit closer together. The show opened with a safety demonstration as one half of Poncili Creación ran full speed toward the crowd, stopping short of contact. He mimed holding up his arms protectively and gestured for us to do the same. The world we were about to inhabit was fantastical, but the risk of bodily injury was real: suspend disbelief, not self-preservation.
The show traced increasingly outlandish cycles of dramatic tension and release featuring births, ingestions, metamorphoses, battles, and regurgitations, all enacted by handmade polyurethane foam and fabric puppets ranging from palm-sized to full-bodied. Musical accompaniment by vocalist-violinist Zeneli Codel and percussionist Ivan Bamford punctuated the performance. Dialogue consisted of nonverbal sounds and simple phrases.
Poncili Creación shines in its inventive use of common objects. At one point, an attendee’s loafer became a puppet in a performer’s hands: its opening a mouth, its insole a tongue. A sneaker’s shoelaces waved the former over, aglets beckoning flirtatiously. The shoes negotiated an erotic encounter, ultimately deciding to use protection, which took the form of a sport sock. In the meantime, the other performer solicited shoes from audience members. These joined in the fray and the scene crescendoed to an orgy of footwear as spectators threw their shoes on the stage to the performers’ moans. (“Somewhere,” my companion turned to me and joked, “George W. Bush, Jr. is trembling.”)
In another unexpected turn all lights went out, and what had been a large puppet became the screen on which the performer animated a small cardboard shadow puppet with a flashlight. The little shadow figure performed acrobatics across the dark ceiling’s exposed plumbing, jumping from one pipe to another, occasionally failing and screaming as it fell, to the audience’s laughter, before jumping into the other performer’s exposed anus. This grotesque turn detoured into playfulness as the same performer vomited up an identical puppet made of foam. The show closed on a participatory note with the audience holding hands and spinning in concentric circles to frenzied chants of “amor” (love) and “paz mundial” (world peace).
It does not, in my opinion, serve to seek profound meaning or moral lessons in this performance. While Poncili Creación’s previous work has engaged the political, here they offered play for play’s sake, from the erotic to the absurd.
The show’s stream-of-consciousness narrative style and intuitive gestural vocabulary remained largely outside of language. By contrast, Orkestar Kriminal’s performance, which followed after an intermission, embraced the spoken word with rhythmic, story-rich ballads of the underclass in Yiddish, Pashto, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Polish, and others. Lead singer Giselle Claudia Webber captivated with her astounding linguistic range and dramatic flair, while the band’s quirky instrumentation, including a sousaphone (Julie Richard), musical saw (Lisa Gamble), and bouzouki (Sam Minevich), made for a memorable sonic palette.
Did the show deliver on its promise of “a wordless conversation about the power of creativity”? It is a conversation in the Kuleshovian sense: two performances in sequence. While I would have loved to see material collaboration between these two original acts, their mere juxtaposition made a compelling case for psychedelia’s eclecticism. Untethered from the logic of dialogue or expectation of a logical resolution, the evening privileged collective amusement. It was an unexpected and daring program.
Orkestar Kriminal will be performing live at Quai des Brumes on October 29. More information is available here.
Liuba de Armas 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.
Liuba de Armas
Liuba de Armas is a working-class arts writer and curator based in Montreal, with roots in Ciudad Nuclear, Cienfuegos, Cuba. She holds a Master's degree in art history from McGill University and has curated exhibitions at Latitude 53, MSVU Art Gallery, Hermes Gallery, and the Khyber Centre for the Arts. She is one of two co-editors of Beyond the Gallery: An Anthology of Visual Encounters (Laberinto Press, 2021) and is a member of Neworld Theatre's Page Turn program (2025-27).
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