It has been over two year's since Apsara Theatre Company's inaugurating production Someone Between took its first breath in Montreal. Since then, the company has been invited to perform at Centaur Theatre's 2010 Annual Wildside Festival and, most recently, at the 2010 Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University, Montreal.

Having found shelter at a week-long creative residency at Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, we were fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to go further in exploration. The focus of this residency has been on the lighting design, specifically looking at its adaptibility for touring. Now with months to prepare and back from a month-long trip to South Vietnam with her father, performer Chantria Tram will be working to go deeper in the images and actions of this story. 

We would like to sincerely thank the director of cultural programming, Luk Côté, for this precious opportunity and his technicians and staff for their dedication and hard work. We look forward to the creative residency presentation of "Someone Between" and hope to see you there.

Doors are open to anyone interested, but space is limited.

Synopsis

Someone Between is a play about a young Cambodian-Canadian woman, named Chantria, struggling with the pressures of her traditional Khmer upbringing in her new Canadian home. She tries to find her place between two very different cultures; her Canadian community and her Khmer household. 

It traces the journey of Chantria Tram, a first-generation Canadian. Having escaped their home country of Cambodia, and finding amnesty in a Thai refugee camp for three years, Chantria and her family are plunged into the Canadian mosaic. As a new immigrant, she is faced with not only the same challenges as any child growing up, but also with having to deal with her traditional parents who expect her to be their “perfect Cambodian daughter”. This becomes even more difficult as she falls in love with a Black man: her parents’ biggest fear. Her father, a quiet and stern man, and the ultimate authority figure in her eyes, attempts to instill traditional Khmer values through her loving but overly protective mother. This constant pressure makes her question what it really means to be Khmer while she struggles to discover her own truths. As she moves away and immerses herself in the

Canadian culture, she finds herself rooting back home for some unanswered questions.

Chantria slowly moves away from her parents and Khmer community, immersing herself in the Canadian culture that she has found to be more appealing. The more she distances herself from that world, the more curious she becomes. She believed that becoming Canadian meant letting go of her past and her roots. But as she struggles to find herself, she keeps being confronted by the questions of “Who are you?”, “Where are you from?”, “What language do you speak?”, and “Where were you born?” As some of these questions are answered, she begins to appreciate and understand her parents and in turn, the Khmer values that she never fully embraced.

Someone Between is the journey of a woman who finds herself between two worlds; old and new, family and the individual, Cambodia and Canada.