They say there are two sides to every story—but to get the full, stereoscopic vision of the saga behind Barbara Adler’s new musical, Klasika, you’ll have to wait until Czech director Jan Foukal’s Amerika hits the Whistler Film Festival in December. And even then it’s hard to say if you’ll know exactly what it was you’ve heard and seen.

“I am the most unreliable of narrators,” Adler tells the Straight with a laugh, reached at home in East Vancouver. Compounding that, apparently, is that Klasika finds Adler on-stage, hiding behind her accordion as part of the band. There is also a character called Bára, a Canadian researcher roped into starring in a Czech director’s documentary film.

Bára, Adler notes, is “kind of an idealized version of me, if I were five foot two and blond”. Adler is close to six feet tall and a brunette.

And then there’s someone named Barb the Bootfitter, whose function is never explained.

Are you beginning to get the picture?

What we do know is that Klasika is both a brand-new musical from the spoken-word artist, songwriter, and musician, and part of Adler’s thesis for Simon Fraser University’s MFA program. Weighty theoretical considerations around the politics of representation form the production’s subtext; a fantastic cast of singers and musicians, including vocalist Leah Abramson and drummer Skye Brooks, provide its extremely accomplished surface. And we also know that the show deals with the curious phenomenon of Czech tramping, a subcultural undertaking related to the well-known German obsession with all things Wild West, but less polished and more makeshift.

“This interest in going into the outdoors and reconnecting with nature, and also the romanticization of the North American wilderness, is pretty common throughout Europe,” Adler explains. “And sometimes the way I like to think of it is that there are German versions of a lot of these things, but the Czech version is the slightly less obnoxious version. When I describe tramping a lot of people compare it to the German fascination with [Wild West author] Karl May, and the Indian enthusiasm, and there are definitely tramps and woodcrafters in the Czech Republic who like to appropriate that kind of wear. But, as a culture, it’s much less about re-creating some kind of culturally appropriated historical thing, and more about this experience of finding some kind of escape or freedom in the forest with your friends.”

Adler admits that when she actually made it to the Czech Republic, in the summer of 2014, she was somewhat let down by what she discovered.

“The tramps I was meeting, they were not quite living up to my idealized version of what tramps were,” she explains. “Many of them are older now, and they don’t necessarily go out into the woods so much; sometimes it just looks like a bunch of nostalgic people getting together and drinking a bunch of beer and singing their favourite songs from the past. Which is a totally beautiful thing, but it didn’t really have the same kind of energy—that utopian energy that we were talking about before.”

She did, however, meet Foukal, who quickly retooled the HBO documentary he was working on into something other than cinéma vérité. “We kind of improvised this strange staged documentary where I play kind of like a fictionalized version of myself, and he plays an awkward, fictionalized version of himself, and we go through the woods of the Czech Republic meeting tramps,” Adler says.

Any residual utopianism, she adds, inhabits the joy she finds in working with her friends, who make up Klasika’s cast, band, and crew.

“That’s what drew me to tramping, definitely,” she says. “That idea that you could make your own kind of freedom or your own kind of fun for really cheap. You take what you have, you take what your available resources are, and you go out and do something with it.”

With Klasika, that “Hey, let’s put on a show” spirit even extends to inventing new instruments.

“The music itself, I think, is pretty unconventional, because I have this interest in the musicality of language,” Adler says. “But then there’s this other big element of sound design, which is mostly expressed in our use of field recordings. We even ended up building an instrument to play the field recordings; it’s really a MIDI controller in a beautiful guitar. Paul Paroczai, who plays Honza [Foukal’s alter ego] in the show, cut a big hole into the guitar and put a laptop and all sorts of little buttons into it, and then used MaxMSP to program really quick-triggering samples of the field recordings.

“Of course, part of it is totally just a theatrical device,” she adds. “Tramps play acoustic guitars. Our version of a tramp plays an acoustic guitar that happens to play crickets and sheep sounds and recorded voices.”

Barbara Adler & Ten Thousand Wolves present Klasika at SFU Woodward’s Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre on Thursday and Friday (October 29 and 30).