The first thing you see when you walk into the Martha Cohen Theatre is a giant image of Eadweard Muybridge, the focus of Alberta Theatre Project’s final show of the season: Electric Company Theatre’s Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge. Once the show starts, a naked man walks across the stage. Then another. A third runs across stage, also naked. Several naked women walk across as well. One is slightly taken aback by this – we are in Calgary after all. You don’t exactly see a man’s penis in every theatre production, although some may wish life was like that.

However, you quickly get over the nudity (lots and lots of nudity) and suddenly find yourself drawn into the story. The show is a look at English photographer Eadweard Muybridge who is known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion. What is now taken for granted with webcams, digital recording and film was basically created by Muybridge.

In 1885 Muybridge embarked on a mission of cataloguing animal movement and human gestures, dissecting time, and in so doing revealed a world invisible to the naked eye. However, Muybridge is haunted by the ghosts of his past actions; the man he killed, the child he abandoned, and the woman he thought he knew. The play, a physically and visually explosive spectacle, explores themes of memory, identity, and the quest for meaning at the very beginning of our culture’s obsession with images.

It is almost impossible to truly describe this show. Visually it is stunning, with incredibly creative lighting, use of Muybridge’s own photos projected on screens, and stage sets created purely out of hologram and light. While the show clocks in at two 65-minute acts, the time flies by and is over before you know it.

I have never experienced anything quite like Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, and I’m willing to guess, neither have you. It certainly has Calgary’s theatre community buzzing and with good reason. Artistically brilliant, aesthetically innovative, and truly engrossing, it isn’t a show you go to watch as much as one to experience.

If that doesn’t have you sold, then by all means, go for the cute naked boys. This production deserves to have an audience, and if that is what it takes to sell tickets, then so be it! By the time the performance is done however, you’ll be raving about it to everyone you know.