Photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s life was filled with the events of Victorian melodrama: adultery, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and an abandoned child. Tried for the murder of his wife’s lover, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide. However, these events, which predate his subsequent obsession with stopping time and freezing motion, become the ghosts that haunt Muybridge in the fictional world of Governor General’s Award winning dramatist Kevin Kerr’s new play, Studies in Motion. Attempting to absolve himself of the tragic consequences of his past actions by inventing a new world where action is neutralized by scientific analysis, Muybridge uses instantaneous photography to dissect time into its smallest possible fragments—to reconstruct his life, his identity and his legacy.

On the surface, these sequences of still photos signify a person committed to the emerging culture of modern science: understanding through controlled observation and rational analysis, using the potential of technology to transcend the limits of our own senses, to enhance our powers of perception. Women and men, usually nude, are presented performing “everyday” actions alongside movements that are ritualistic, comic, sensual, absurd and even diseased and pathological. The variations seem endless. There is a tension in the collected images: scientific, classical, elegant, erotic, startling, disturbing and grotesque.

But taken together, particularly as the technology pioneered by Muybridge lead to the world of cinematography, they seem to say something else—to inescapably construct a narrative that has shaped our culture into one that objectifies human beings, where information is fragmented, mediated, where observations through the filter of technology are trusted more than those acquired directly through our physical senses, and set images into motion in the service of a public manipulation of perception as effectively as Muybridge himself used them in the revision of his own private mythology.

Kevin Kerr is playwright and founding member of Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre, with whom he’s co-written numerous plays including The Wake, The Score, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Flop, The Fall, and Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla.In 2002 he received the Governor General’s Literary Award for his play Unity (1918), which has been produced across Canada as well as in the United States and Australia.In 2005 he co-wrote the feature-length screen adaptation of Electric Company’s The Score for Screen Siren Pictures and CBC Television.Other works include Studies in Motion (Electric Company Theatre) and Skydive (Realwheels). At present he is writing a stage adaptation of Pierre Berton’s children’s classic “The Secret World of Og” for Vancouver’s Carousel Theatre.For Electric Company he’s co-directed Brilliant!, The Wake, and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, and in 2008 he directed Jonathon Young’s Palace Grand, presented at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.Kevin was Lee Playwright in Residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton from 2007 to 2010. He returned to Electric Company Theatre in 2011 as Artistic Director.

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“Studies in Motion is always seductive to look at … the resulting complexity is sublime.”
—Georgia Straight

“For Studies in Motion, Kerr has written a complex, thoughfully layered script that makes us laugh and care about this deeply troubled man.”
—Globe and Mail

“A piece of theatre polished to brilliance, so complete and so completely satisfying that this awe-inspiring oddity should be seen on major stages around the world.”
—Vancouver Sun

“A lucid, visually compelling and forceful piece of theatre.”
—Calgary Herald