A symphony of language

By STEVE TILLEY, EDMONTON SUN

2 MILLION YEARS OF TECHNOLOGY - STAGE 10

Toronto's John Sobol opens his one-man show with a saxophone solo, wandering through the crowd at the Yardbird Suite - aptly enough - before taking the stage. Cool.

He then launches into a fable of sorts about ancient man and ancient dreams. At which point your internal klaxon may start blaring, warning you that you've stumbled into the most dreaded of all Fringe phenomena: the self-obsessed artiste. Not cool. Not cool at all.

But don't be fooled, not for a moment. It's merely the opening strains of Sobol's symphony of language, and he's just setting the stage for what's to come in 2 Million Years of Technology.

Sometimes he's a storyteller, sometimes he's a philosopher, sometimes he's a beat poet or an a cappella singer, and sometimes he's simply this really interesting and intelligent guy having a chinwag with us, his audience friends.

Sobol talks about the evolutionary phases of human communication, and the journey we've taken from speaking to writing to the electronic digitopia, where file-sharing and the blogosphere have replaced oral histories.

A social science lesson as a Fringe show is not going to be everybody's cup of tea, and the teens sitting next to me looked at times like they might faint from boredom. At least until the final part of Sobol's journey, where he probes the evolutionary significance of the teenage mind, trained through video games to understand three-dimensional space as though it were a language unto itself.

Sobol wields the English tongue like his saxophone, coaxing exotic, melodious and profoundly poetic combinations of words into the air. He takes the simple word "dy-no-mite" repeated over and over and recasts it as everything from a paralyzing fear of death ("Might die? No!") to the feeding of a pet thunder lizard ("My dino might dine").

Surf to www.johnsobol.com and see if what you find there interests you. If it does, you definitely need to see this show.

If not, nobody's going to hold it against you - his thoughts and theories are fascinating, but might be a little meatier than what some people are craving from their Fringe experience.
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