I ordered radio silence, then posted lookouts in the navigator's blister. We looked around at each other and realized there was no going back over the Pacific. Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese warplanes and had suffered heavy losses the United States was at war. ESM, we copy any radio traffic from zero-eight-zero?' 'You think he would have turned back if he missed? And if it was anything but a Bear, he'd have broken radio silence. And maritime radio operators, for example, might follow a directive of radio silence in order to hear faint distress signals. After that, the hope is that it can travel more extensively in Canada.In military operations, radio silence is usually a command issued from above, as out of fear that a signal might be intercepted by an enemy. When Radio Silence finishes its run in Whitehorse, it will travel to Dawson and then to Intrepid Theatre in Victoria, BC. So I think that that will resonate with a lot of people.” “It kind of tears it apart and people grow apart. The whole kind of backdrop of this play is about family and a family that is united,” she says. The moving parts, the soundscapes and visual landscape of the play, are as varied as the northern landscape and culture that influenced its plot. The end result is a sensory feast, with visuals that transport and immerse audiences in the world of the twin protagonists. And then not only learning it, but also mastering it enough to be able to teach others who are in the show.” It really is kind of like learning a new language.

And it's very, very technical and it's very, very precise. “We had to learn a lot about the form itself. “It was a steep learning curve,” she says. Hickman had worked with masks before, says Doyon, but it was new for her. The masks are oversized, with exaggerated features and expressive faces. On top of that, Open Pit worked with Wonderheads, a company in Victoria, B.C., that specializes in mask performance and visual storytelling.

The play features original music from Whitehorse musician Calla Kinglit, puppetry, visuals by Whitehorse artist Rosemary Scanlon and beader Vashti Etzel, and production design from Edmonton theatre designer Erin Gruber.

It’s because of them, she says, that wordlessness doesn’t actually equate silence. “I think that the reason that we're able to pull all of this off is because we've really surrounded ourselves with really excellent people and we're kind of orchestrating them all to tell the story.” “We definitely didn't make it easy for ourselves in the sense that we kind of wanted all of the things,” she says. It follows the Yukon’s first female bush pilot and her twin sister, who has to find the pilot when she goes missing.ĭoyon says it was an ambitious project, to tell a story without words, but credits its success to the team she and Hickman were able to assemble. The play is a 50-minute fictional story set in Dawson City in the 1920s and 1940s, on the traditional territory of the Tr'ondek Hwech'in. The result of that effort is Radio Silence, running at the Old Firehall from May 12 to May 15. “We decided to go completely opposite from and try to make a play without words to challenge ourselves as artists and to experiment with storytelling in a different way.” “We’re both kind of physical performers,” says Geneviève Doyon of herself and Jessica Hickman, both co-artistic directors of Open Pit. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but how many words is a performance worth? The Yukon Arts Centre has the answer to that question in the form of a new play from Open Pit Theatre.

Radio silence director