FRINGE 2015: Is This Pretentious?

Team Greco’s play Is this Pretentious? borrows the conventions of a well-loved reoccurring comedy sketch in a late night variety show, à la Saturday Night Live.

The bare bones set, the larger than life foil characters, and the line deliveries that keep character interactions feeling semi-improvisational, are all defining features of this short, and conceptually strong show.

On the last Saturday evening of the Fringe, spectators at the Studio Multimédia du Conservatoire gladly assumed the role of a live studio audience. The collective laughs and groans accompanying the more cringe-worthy lines created an intimate, interactive environment.

Is this Pretentious? starts off in a coffee shop where a weary choreographer and jaded realist waits for her friend to arrive to discuss an ambiguous “artistic collaboration” in the near future. Her friend, an overzealous bombastic provocatrice and self-declared performance artist humorously embodies the cluelessness and self-delusion some have come to expect from the contemporary art world.

The dialogue in the piece may appear to be oddly reminiscent to anyone who may have taken a post-secondary liberal arts class, where artistic egos and lack of awareness often collide with cringe-worthy consequences. The provocatrice, just like the cliché of the pompous undergrad, operates in needlessly vague terms, whether describing her work as “so cohesive!”, or discussing her pseudo-philosophical creative process of “losing oneself in research” in pursuit of a work’s “defining aesthetic”.

Lines about getting funding from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, or references to under appreciated OFFTA - Festival montréalais d’arts vivants performances prompted swift laughter in the crowd, no doubt all too familiar with the caricature of the deluded artsy brat.

In keeping with sketch comedy conventions that clock within 30 minutes, Is this pretentious? is a show that remains short and sweet, not making the fatal flaw of overstaying its welcome.

Leaving the performance, I was convinced that all the comic dimensions of the story were fully exhausted, a testament to clever scriptwriting and great execution on the part of these recent dance faculty graduates from Concordia University.

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Learn more about Team Greco (not to be confused with CJLO's own and fellow Fringe festival performer Jacob Greco) via Twitter @TEAMGRECO514.

Danilo Bulatovic is part of CJLO’s Official Fringe Team covering the sights and sounds from the 2015 St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival.