The bicycle serves not only as inspiration but also as instrument in a new show called Spin thats rolled into the Cultch until April 20.
While songwriter, poet and social commentator Evalyn Parry muses about advertising, womens liberation and bikes, she performs duets with a vintage bicycle played by percussionist Brad Hart.
Its fun to watch people come up at the end of the show and look at the bike. They kind of creep around it like, How did that happen? Parry said. It is an ordinary bike and it is kind of unique, the magical kind of sound that comes out of it. Theres nothing prerecorded about the sounds that get made.
But before Hart started playing the bike, plucking and bowing its spokes, brushing its fenders, using the sprung vinyl seat as what Parry calls an amazing bass drum, Parry, an avid cyclist and wordsmith, recognized cycling terms could provide rich fodder for word play. She was keen to research the links between cycling and the budding suffragettes shed heard vague mentions of. She also wanted to investigate advertising and spin. Everything came together when she learned of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to ride a bicycle around the world in 1895. She did that by selling advertising space on her bike and on her person, Parry said. I was just kind of like, Wow, all my themes have just come together in all in one.
Londonderrys story, which includes the fact that the Latvian-American changed her last name, Cohen Kopchovsky, to the name of a spring water company, serves as hub for the show. I like to use the image of a wheel with many spokes and the stories add up to something bigger than the sum of their individual parts, Parry said Monday afternoon from the saddle of her bicycle in False Creek.
Spin travels from 19th century womens emancipation to 21st century consumer culture. The sense of freedom women experienced when they traded skirts for bloomers and hopped on bikes resonated with Parry. It connected for me to read about what early feminists discovered in this sensation, she said. I became an avid cyclist in my late teens when I was discovering feminism as well, and my analysis of the world was shifting and growing. There was something about being fierce and having this freedom of autonomy of movement on that bike that it came to represent, without me thinking about it at the time.
Music also flows in her Parrys veins. Her father is a member of the iconic Toronto folk ensemble The Friends of Fiddlers Green, her mother is a childrens music performer and her brother is a member of indie-rock band Arcade Fire.
Parry, who premiered Spin in Toronto in 2011 and has been touring it ever since, loves when audience members tell her the show has made them want to ride a bike. It seems like it really resonates with other cyclists, she added. We were just in North Carolina for two shows this past week and a young man came up to me after the show and he said, That was amazing. Im not a woman and I dont ride a bicycle but I felt like you were speaking right to me, so, hopefully, the themes transcend.
twitter.com/Cheryl_Rossi
