Istvan Dugalin ➤

Devon Healey in Rainbow on Mars | Photo by Bruce Zinger

If you’ve seen The Matrix and hunched scholastically over Plato’s allegory of the cave, the opening scenes of Rainbow on Mars will seem very familiar. Written by and featuring Devon Healey in the central role of Iris, those works inform the piece as much as Healey’s own experience. Presented by Outside the March, in collaboration with The National Ballet of Canada and Peripheral Theatre, this presentation is loaded with intriguing and innovative stagecraft. Directors Nate Bitton and Mitchell Cushman have crafted a fun and intriguing theatrical atmosphere. 

The immersive aspect of this dance-theatre odyssey into Blindness feels restrained though, as if visual spectacle and passive comfort ultimately take precedence over the visceral provocations teased early on. The show as a whole never quite lives up to its urgent, disconcerting and theatrically disruptive opening beats. 

As the audience enters the auditorium—passing through a corridor of gentle visual, auditory and tactile stimuli—we discover a cavernous space dominated by a massive, scintillating object hung in the air. This device seems both decorative and sentient, a threat and an invitation. A sort of cross between a chandelier and a jellyfish, strands of glistening beads rise and descend, stretching out and looping in on themselves in this hypnotic centrepiece of Nick Blais’ set.

We first meet Iris as she emerges from the dark restriction of her cocoon to reveal a lithe and vulnerable human form. I found Healey the most compelling early on, as her expressive physicality and clipped, frantic and strained responses define the exhilarating and nightmarish experience of a creature finding itself suddenly adrift in a vast, unfamiliar landscape.

Our narrator, the disembodied voice of Vanessa Smythe, serves both an accessibility and world-building function—providing audio description and drawing us in as an empathetic overseer. Through her guidance, we begin to acclimatize to this strange environment. We learn that Iris was one of many slug-like creatures hunched over “devices”—their passive fixation with the stream of images an obvious reference to our smartphones and social media. 

Her Blindness casting her out from the inert and submissive horde, she is poked and prodded by doctors in a disturbing and hilarious nightmare version of an eye-exam—the drops, charts and testing, though absurdly skewed, are eerily on point. As these irksome ocular specialists, the chorus—Amy Keating, Sofia Rodriguez and Danté Price—sell the staccato torment well. They also portray the goofy and endearing “Techies” Iris encounters soon after. In their cobbled-together machine-boat, they speak in fragmented rhymes and overwhelm her with their invented devices to assist her in her new state, though Iris seeks something more truthful and transcendent. 

That quest leads her to others removed from the horde—Lynk (Bitton) and Arlo (Elliot Gibson). Sadly, this is where, for me, story’s mystique faltered and eventually dissipated. While the early scenes offered abstract and intuitive gestures to grip my imagination, these renegade outsiders bring with them more familiar parlance which seems so mundane and pedestrian by contrast. Everything felt suddenly smaller and, paradoxically, less intimate. 

There is still, however, Robert Binet’s sensual and earthy choreography to retain that sense of expressive wonder. The National Ballet of Canada RBC Apprentices (Luiz Anselmo, Tom Cape, Ryan Kao Cheng, Jackson Hazlett-Stevens, Yeju Jang, Karin Laldjising, Campbellle Malicse, João Massei, Heewon Moon, Celia Morrison, Felix Russell and Miyu Tobata) provide the dance ensemble and represent emotional phenomena. Costume designer Anahita Dehbonehie has given them two distinct looks for their evocative purpose. To represent their embodiment of freedom and celebration, she’s draped them in silky slips. As Arlo’s “Sads,” a manifestion of grief and isolation, red and veiny-textured suits suggest exposed sinew.

The whimsical dance, Melissa Joakim’s highly expressionistic lighting, Heidi Chan’s phantasmagorical soundscape—these elements remain fully compelling, though I did find my attention wandering during dialogue scenes, not especially interested in the plot. For the sake of broader appeal, I sense Devon and company have veered away from more experimental, interactive devices and the exciting possibilities hinted at early on.

When Iris first scrambles for purchase in a frightening environment she hasn’t yet mapped, she gets extremely close to one audience member in a distinctly intimate moment that never occurs again, let alone expanded upon or intensified. What if the audience was able to hold Iris’s beloved “squish?” (an impractical yet beautiful Christmas ornament-like object she acquires). What if some pivotal moments occurred in total darkness or, perhaps, against our bodies? Instead, the text gets increasingly didactic. Characters talk about the themes of the piece, ideas echoed in the creative team’s intentions, though they are never quite the fully sensory experience they could be.

Addressing issues of accessibility and challenging ableist assumptions, Rainbow on Mars has valuable motives. It is an undeniably impressive technical and artistic achievement. It just isn’t nearly as theatrically radical or transcendent as it wants to be.

Rainbow on Mars
August 9 to 20, 2025
Ada Slaight Hall, Daniels Spectrum
(585 Dundas St. E)
2 hours, 30 minutes (with intermission)

Devon Healey and members of The National Ballet of Canada RBC Apprentice Programme in Rainbow on Mars | Photo by Bruce Zinger