The Horse Knows The Way (道)

As anyone knows who’s ever seen – or been – a player in the improvisatory, impromptu sandlot dramas of childhood, kids are the ultimate Magic Realists.

Realists in that they don’t flinch from even the grossest facts-on-the-ground, whether bodily effluvia or race-and-class discrimination. Magic, since they have no problems with non-linear time warps, cryptozoology or resurrection of the dead.

Magic, too, in their knack for turning any random flotsam into a crucial prop for their open-ended role-playing games. So eyes lit up in the packed, mostly juvenile audience, at the sight of Glenn Davidson’s set for “Spirit Horse” on Granville Island’s Waterfront stage.

What a heap of enticing junk, all pregnant with dramatic possibilities! Wood pallets, hubcaps, tyres, a busted Chevy grille, a beat-up old bus seat. And dominating it all in centre stage, a towering mishmash of interlocking tripods all lashed together from odd lengths of steel pipe.

In the course of the hour-long melodrama, this armature will serve as a mountain, a slummy high-rise, a railroad boxcar, a cop shop, a movie house, a TV screen and – above all – a preternaturally powerful “Spirit Horse.”

The horse has been conjured out of a lake on a remote First Nations reserve. The old Rez-bound grandpa who first invoked the magical mare tries to lasso her and catch her power, but all in vain. He tracks “Wildwind” (as she’s been named) all the way to Calgary.

That’s where his granddaughters have been eking out a hand-to-mouth subsistence as latchkey children ever since their mother died in childbirth while delivering the younger of the two. Their grieving father, an ex-rodeo =READ MORE