Tommy Taylor and Kate Bullock go back to the Eastern Avenue Detention Centre at The Toronto Film Studios.

The Toronto SUN‘s Joe Warmington calls for a public inquiry into G20 and references You Should Have Stayed Home as clear evidence of abuse of police powers.

Praxis Co-Artistic Director Michael Wheeler writes an op-ed, Defunding Alternative Voices, for The Mark on defunding SummerWorks, cultural policy and directing a play about G20 Toronto.

Tommy Taylor performs a portion of You Should Have Stayed Home on CBC Radio. Complete with slideshow.

Toronto Life covers the SummerWorks controversy and You Should Have Stayed Home

The Toronto Star‘s Brendan Kennedy covers Tommy Taylor addressing the Toronto Police Services Board’s independent civilian review of the G20.

Torontoist‘s What’s Hot at SummerWorks preview calls You Should Have Stayed Home “one of the most hyped plays at SummerWorks, so don’t stay home for this one.”

iPhone photo of a recent Toronto Star editorial cartoon by Theo Moudakis

1 – Play Games With Us

“Do you need my bag of miniatures?”
Toronto Fringe Exec. Director Gideon Arthurs

Ever since we started talking about our site-specific Dungeons & Dragons project at this year’s Fringe Festival, theatre people from every part of the industry have been coming out of the closet as former players of the game, with some even revealing they still regularly get together with friends to play.

We’re looking for players for our 6 hour marathon sessions in the basement of Snakes & Lattes, so let us know if you play, or used to play, and if you’re free on July 10th or July 16th. We’ll also be playing a trial game in advance of the fringe to experiment with our live sound and lighting designers, so even if you can make it to a Fringe game, there is the possibility of using you as a guinea pig whilst we quest to save our enchanted donkey. (This is not a joke – we lost our Donkey in the first trial game and we still plan on getting it back.)

2 – Get Locked in a Cage With Us

“Don’t worry – I promise we won’t get arrested.”
You Should Have Stayed Home writer and performer Tommy Taylor

We have been rehearsing our 2011 Summerworks show You Should Have Stayed home off-and-on ever since we presented part of it at Buzz in April. Recently, we decided to include a scene that explores the conditions in the g20 detention centre on Eastern Ave. that requires 40 performers. No – that is not a typo: four zero. If you are A) Male and B) want to be in Summerworks – this is your chance.

You don’t need to be an actor, but you do need to be available for 4 rehearsals over evenings and weekends at the end of July, as well as all 6 performance dates (which are also mostly evenings and weekends). We will do some improvisational exercises to get a sense of each other, and Tommy and other detainees will give some presentations about their experiences. Then we will create a 10 minute scene that will be integrated with Tommy’s story. Mostly your job will be to act like someone surprised at and exhausted by being locked in a cage.

In either case all you have to do is send us an email to get the ball rolling to info@praxistheatre.com

If you want to play games make the Subject: D&D Player. Tell us in 150 words or less what your connection to the game is, what you do now, and why you want to play.

If you want to experiment with what it is like to be locked in a 10 x 20 ft cage in a safe theatrical setting make the Subject: G20 Detainee. Tell us in 150 words what you do with your time on this planet and why you’d like top be involved.

Well we have been busy bees here at Praxis, writing drafts, making proposals, cutting deals, and generally hustling the way that a company must in an era where not much is going to come for free to a small indie company with no operating funding, office space, or corporate sponsors (although we’re not against having the right ones).

The end result is that we have 3 different productions at 3 different stages of development that we invite you to attend and engage with between now and the end of the year.

So we are using “season” in a new way with this announcement.

Usually, it denotes a series of final products. This model doesn’t work for a small company that often integrates presentations and performances into our development process. So our season has one show we are doing the initial exploration on, one that will be mid-development, and one that is in fact our final product.

Each show has its own relationship to how it will interact with its audience through this site and we invite you to participate in whatever way interests you:

Maybe you just like to go to the shows and read the posts; maybe something about a show infuriated you and you need to interact with us about it; maybe you will send us your thoughts or ideas when we ask for them (or when we don’t). Or maybe something else we haven’t thought of that the internet is about to invent will present itself as a possibility.

Read below to see what we’re up to.

Thanks for involving yourself with our work and communications as you see fit!

Team Praxis

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Image by Jody Hewston

Dungeons & Dragons, (not) The Musical @ The Toronto Fringe Festival
Created by Aislinn Rose

Stage One – Just looking into it

Praxis Theatre will be playing host to three Dungeons & Dragons tournaments, where audience members can come and go throughout each adventure or stay for the full 6-hour marathon.

Part performance experiment, part research project, the events will feature some of Toronto’s favourite actors, directors and comedians at their nerdiest. While drama nerds and D&D geeks go head to head, live sound & lighting artists will create a unique atmosphere for each tournament.

Snakes & Lattes in the heart of the Annex has kindly offered their space for our shenanigans, so audience members will be able to enjoy coffee, yummy treats, and an authentic D&D in the basement experience.

Dates:
July 10th, 4pm to 10pm , July 14th, 7pm to 1am, July 16th, 5pm to 11pm
Venue:
Snakes & Lattes – 600 Bloor Street West.

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Image by Tommy Taylor

You Should Have Stayed Home @ The Summerworks Festival
Written and performed by Tommy Taylor. Directed by Michael Wheeler

Stage 2 – It’s a a play, but we could do more with more time and resources.

An original adaptation of the Facebook note How I Got Arrested and Abused at the G20 in Toronto, Canada produced in partnership with The Original Norwegian.

After being translated into seven languages, attracting a concerned following around the globe, and forming the basis for a The Fifth Estate documentary, this Facebook note is a major artifact documenting the deterioration of Canadian civil rights in the 21st Century. We look forward to working with Tommy to continue this important discussion through a live performance based on his experience that is integrated with online media.

Dates: Aug 4th @5pm, Aug 6th @ 2:30pm, Aug 7th @ 10pm, Aug 10th @ 7:30pm, Aug 12th @ midnight, Aug 13th @10pm

Location: The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen St. W.

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Photo of Margaret Evans by Will O'Hare

Jesus Chrysler produced in association with Theatre Passe Muraille

Written by Tara Beagan. Directed by Michael Wheeler. Starring Margaret Evans

Stage 3  – This is it. We spent a long time making it – now we’ll put it on for you.

Jesus Chrysler revolves around 1930s activist and director Eugenia “Jim” Watts and the work of progressive Toronto-based theatre artists of the 1930s.

An intimate, immersive production at the centre of which is legendary Toronto activist and director Eugenia “Jim” Watts.  An unsung icon of 1930s Toronto theatre, Jim had her work banned by a Prime Minister before enlisting in The Spanish Civil War, becoming its sole female ambulance driver. Jesus Chrysler invites a select audience to explore Jim’s life and loves along with her, in a show that engages with and questions the intersection of art and politics.

Dates: Nov 29 to Dec 11th
Location: Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Avenue, just north of Queen St. West, east of Bathurst Street.

The Guardian:
Noises off: Michael Billington gets the animation treatment

In this piece, Chris Wilkinson expands upon our December 3^rd post about whether the internet is facilitating a new form of theatre through websites like Xtranormal that allow text-to-movie story creation for free through your internet browser. Included in the article is a great video created using text created by Britain’s longest-serving theatre critic Michael Billington, whom no one likely imagined being mentioned in the same breath as Praxis Theatre this time last week.

Torontoist:
2010 Villain: Private Arts Funding Trumping Public

Steve Fisher goes into all the ways public funding for the arts in Toronto is important and necessary, and all the ways 2010 has been a bad year for government support for the arts nonetheless. Praxis get cited at the end, as a link to observations made in this space on November 30^th that our new ‘Arts Czar’ seems to be unwilling to advocate for the value of public funding for the arts, while running a world-class organization that receives 40% of its revenue from the government.

Reddit.com
Hockey fan (and theatre director) calls out Don Cherry hypocrisy in open letter…

Someone, I guess we’ll never know who, renamed and reposted Ruth Madoc Jones’ December 8^th Letter to Don Cherry to the social news website reddit.com – turning it into an overnight sensation. The post generated thousands of hits and additional 74 comments on reddit.com,  adding to the 45 comments the post inspired in this space, making it the first post on praxistheatre.com to became a trending topic on Twitter.

Praxis also came second in the country in the Culture and Literature Category. Congrats to both Brain Droppings who took first place in the division and fellow theatre bloggers at ATP Insider who took third.

Sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to vote for praxistheatre.com!

Margaret Evans plays Eugenia "Jim" Watts in Section 98

by Simon Rice and Michael Wheeler

Like any good tyrannical minority government gearing up for a fall election, Praxis is shaking it up! Nothing beats a cabinet shuffle to temporarily boost polling numbers for an independent theatre company.

Kidding… Sort of. We are making some changes at Praxis and they are lateral, but you know in the theatre world lateral means diagonal.

We wouldn’t have the wiggle room to be so obtuse if Margaret Evans, Maggie as we all know her, had not been General Manager of Praxis for the last 2 1/2 years.

Under Maggie’s tenure Praxis produced four shows, the scope of which were our largest thus far, both creatively and budget-wise. She also oversaw the creation of our board of directors, and was steward of the most successful fundraising campaigns in the history of the company.

Despite these skills and accomplishments, her greatest asset is actually as a performer.  Margaret will be retiring from her role as GM of Praxis and will be taking a more front and central role as an actor/creator in our production of Section 98, continuing her work playing Eugenia “Jim” Watts, the legendary 1930s political artist and Spanish Civil War ambulance driver and radio host.

Aislinn Rose - Praxis' new Artistic Producer

Continuing in the diagonal tradition, Aislinn Rose will be rewriting the books as Artistic Producer at Praxis. Over the past year she has acted as Script Supervisor on our 2009 Toronto Fringe production of Tim Buck 2, as well as Director of the Open Source Theatre Project for Section 98, presented as part of Harbourfront Centre’s 2010 HATCH season.  As Artistic Producer she will be handling Praxis’ day to day operations as well as developing a new creative project…  More on this soon.

We should also mention that she has a non-Praxis show running right now, Amy Zuch’s Key to Key, which she directs for this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival at the Royal St. George venue until Saturday July 1o.

Welcome everyone to their new diagonal positions!

Two events of note this week where people will get together to talk about the confluence of the arts and the internet:

Effective Blogging

• Thursday April 22, 12pm to 2pm.
• Alterna Savings Boardroom, at Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, 4th flr.
• With Matt Blackett (Spacing Magazine) and Michael Wheeler (Praxis Theatre).
• Deadline to register for this session is Tuesday April 20, 2010.

Yours truly and Matt Blackett, Editor of Spacing Magazine, will be speaking about blogs and blogging as part of the TAPA Trade Series presented in partnership with The Creative Trust. (First order of business: Lets start the gradual phase-out of the word “blog”.)

To register please contact Alexis Da Silva-Powell, TAPA’s Corporate Partnerships and Membership Associate at alexisdsp@tapa.ca OR Shana Hillman, Creative Trust’s Program Manager at shana@creativetrust.ca

Arts Journalism: Staying Critical in the Digital Age

Presented by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, this forum looks at the cultural giants of the past to the celebrity culture of today and how arts criticism and literary journalism have changed. Mainstream media cutbacks and the proliferation of blogging means everyone is a critic. Can the web save arts journalism?

Tickets are $5 – $15 and can be purchased here.

1 How do you decide what companies and websites are listed in the sidebar?

If you have a website that is about theatre, just send a quick email to the info account at the top right of the site. State the name, URL and category it belongs in and we’ll throw it up there.

2 How can I promote my show on your website?

There are two ways to do this: Variations on Theatre was started to avoid praxistheatre.com becoming a clearinghouse for listings and press releases. If you have a show coming up you would like to promote, this is the most straightforward route. Make sure you give at least 2 weeks notice that you would like to do it and send in your Variation at least a week before it should go up.

The other option is to pitch something creative, like when Christine Horne proposed her faux-bitter interview with Susan Coyne.  Like we would say no to something like that!

3 How can I write something for your website?

Send an email with a couple samples of your writing and a paragraph that addresses what you think is important about theatre, and what you hope it will evolve into in the next thirty years. We will proceed from there. We don’t pay (yet). When/if we do though, we’ll be paying the people that wrote for free first.

This week praxistheatre.com was voted the #1 Culture and Literature Blog in Canada in the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards.

We are super-happy about this and really appreciate everyone who participates with the company digitally and in reality.

Thank you in particular to these people:

• Graham F. Scott, for coordinating and designing the great integration, when our website and blog were integrated into a single place on the interweb at praxistheatre.com.
• All of the contributors to praxistheatre.com in 2009:
  Gideon Arthurs, Tara Beagan, Maev Beatty, Augusto Boal, Mark Brownell, Deanna Downes, Emily Farrell, David Ferry, Brendan Gall, Joel Grinke, Chris Hanratty, Christine Horne, Daniel Karasik, Ravi Jain, Richard Lee, Hayley Lewis, Bridget MacIntosh, Ian Mackenzie, Ross Manson, James Murray, Leora Morris, Tony Nappo, Simon Ogden, Simon Rice, Aislinn Rose, Michael Rubenfeld, Sarah Sanford, Adam Seelig, Samantha Serles, Rupal Shah, Caroline Sniatynski, Vinetta Strombergs, David Tompa and Aaron Willis.
• Celebrity Theatre creator Greta Papageorgiu and features writer Lindsay Schwietz, for producing regular engaging content in addition to their demanding schedules as arts professionals.
• Ian Mackenzie, for having the idea that we should use our website to engage with our community, and for creating an online culture around the company that put us in a position to succeed in the blogosphere in 2009.
• Everyone who took the time to vote for praxistheatre.com
• Praxis Theatre Board of Directors and Donors. Resources can make art, and arts-based websites, better.
• People and organizations that are kicking our ass in terms of achieving praxis through the confluence of ideas and internet. These inspirations include Mike Daisey, Naomi Klein, The Yes Men, Beautiful City, Avaaz, and Vote for Environment. There are a lot of folks setting the bar high out there by achieving concrete results though their internet-ing.

Happy Holidays to all!

Michael Wheeler
Editor
praxistheatre.com

It’s been almost a 1/2 year since we made big changes at praxistheatre.com with a new format that blended some of our best content from our blogspot blog with our company website. Inspired by a new commitment to integrate our creative process with our web presence, our goal has been to continue to be hub for discussion and analysis of independent theatre while increasing awareness of Praxis Theatre and the original theatrical works we are creating.

There has been mostly positive feedback about this switch, especially in terms of the high functionality of the new website and the potential inherent in an “open source” creative model. This tune-up addresses some consistent critiques from a number of readers regarding readability and organization and is reflected in three changes:

1. A single sidebar column that runs down the right margin of the site amalgamates the two smaller columns that preceded it. The text size of these links have been increased.
2. Hyperlinks are now underlined in red. If you pass the cursor over a hyperlink, the text will also change to be underlined in red.
3. The Upcoming Shows page will contain the “open source” elements of our Section 98 creative process. This page will contain the “source code” of our production: information, discussions, examples, scripts and research we are engaged in. This page will be maintained by Aislinn Rose, Section 98 Open Source Project Leader.

Thanks for participating. We hope you continue to use this is site as a resource and a place for dialogue about indie theatre in Toronto and around the world.

Michael Wheeler
Editor
praxistheatre.com