By Andrew “Boots” Hardy (San Francisco International Arts Festival)

Annika Lewis has seen the face of evil — and lived to tell about it.

In fact, telling about it is the point of Kassandra Production’s upcoming show, “The Soul Catcher: Unmasking the Modern Predator,” which will kick off this year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival on May 1.

“Soul Catcher” is a complex and abstract theater performance piece that parallels Lewis’s own deeply personal lived experience as a survivor of an explosively abusive relationship. The show incorporates dance and a completely original electronic music score by veteran producer and atmospheric-industrial composer Sofus Forsberg.

Though performed on a traditional stage, “Soul Catcher” promises to be less a show than an immersive experience for theatergoers. 

“The audience is going to be experiencing this instead of just watching it happen,” Lewis says.

Born in San Francisco, Annika Lewis was raised in Sweden from the time she could speak, eventually moving to Denmark, where she has lived and made art for the last thirty years. Her formal education is in theater, and she was trained as both an actress and director. 

She knows what it is to be almost literally without a voice. Although Sweden and Denmark are separated by only a few miles of waterways, and connected by a string of islands and highways, their languages are very different. Her early career focused her creative energies on dance and choreography—rather than acting or directing—in an effort to circumvent the language barrier.

In spite of her efforts and sacrifice, however, the company she worked for at that time threw her out after she got pregnant—a set of circumstances Lewis says she refused to accept.

So in 1998, she formed her own company. She returned to directing, and was forced to learn to be a producer as well. 

Her first show was the highly stylized “Cassandra,”  written by East German novelist Christa Wolf. It told the story of the fall of Troy, from the perspective of Greek fortune-teller Cassandra, whose rebuff of the god Apollo damned her to a life of accurate predictions that would never be believed.

That very first performance took place in a tiny camper-trailer, with an audience of four. But it ignited something within Annika, and proved to her what was possible. She named her fledgling production company after her first play, and hasn’t looked back.

She now has more than 30 theater productions under her belt as a writer, singer, actress, director, producer, and choreographer—to name just a few of her talents.

THE FACE OF EVIL

“I had seen the devil. He had no restraint.”

So goes a line from “The Soul Catcher: Unmasking the Modern Predator.”

The performance started not as a script, but as a series of personal writings, a journal of sorts intended to help Lewis heal from a brutally abusive relationship. It was never intended for the stage.

“But I looked back and realized, I can create a piece of art from this. So I started to work with a dramaturge [the highly-accomplished Anne Hübertz Brekne] to go through the text.”

Thinking the healing part was over, she came to understand that she was only at the midway point. The real work had yet to be done.

As a performance, “Soul Catcher” isn’t your typical theater production. Three performers, swapping roles throughout, engage the audience; the performance itself becomes an abusive relationship personified, built as a living, breathing thing that goes through various phases of emotional and psychological violence.

“We are seducing the audience in the beginning,” Lewis explains. 

“Then we become abusive—not very much,” she adds quickly, “and then we discard them. We are moving through what they call the abuse cycle, using that as dramaturgy for the performance.”

As an audience, you don’t know what’s up or down, what’s right or wrong, who is good or who is evil. Because that’s what you experience in a relationship like this. All of the lines become blurred.

“And then, of course, because it is a piece of art, we are breaking [the cycle] also. So it ends more like a healing journey that we are taking together with the audience.”

Although the performance is steeped in such deeply emotional subject matter, it is also very restrained.

“It is self-censored,” Lewis admits, “because it was too much, too raw, too violent.”

Despite common stereotypes, it is not only women who are abused, and not only men who are abusive. And so the performance opens the door for communication on a topic that is often discussed only in whispers, to shatter those common misconceptions and build a platform for the truth.

“I really like to communicate. I love to experiment artistically, but of greatest importance is to communicate with the audience.”

For Lewis, the greatest healing comes from the creative process, and working alongside such creative forces as Brekne and two-time Reumert Award nominee, set designer Signe Krogh. “Soul Catcher” is really an amalgam of different media coming together in perfect harmony.

“The music really gets under your skin in a beautiful and subtle way,” Lewis reflects. “The lighting is powerful and delicate… A lot of people have contributed a lot to give birth to this piece.”

Like the best of all artists, Annika Lewis has found purpose in her pain.

“It was extremely empowering to share my story,” she said. “We are giving the survivor a voice, talking about something that is often suppressed. For me, it made a very violent situation meaningful.”

 

SFIAF presents the work of innovative artists from the Bay Area and around the world; many of the international artists make their US debut at the Festival. From 2003-23, SFIAF and more than 100 presenting partners have coordinated, presented and/or produced performances by over 600 arts ensembles from United States and 60 other countries, and presented hundreds of educational and community engagement  activities with diverse communities. The 2004 Festival will take place in San Francisco’ Mission District, from May 1st through May 12th. The Testival’s ongoing theme is “IN DIASPORA: I.D. for the New Majority.”

“The Soul Catcher” will be performed at the Mission Cultural Center on May 1st, #4d, and 4th.  For further information click here.

_________________________________

TheatreStorm is a proud contributing supporter of the 2024 San Francisco International Arts Festival.
For a full schedule of the upcoming Festival,  click here.

______________________________