“It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? It’s so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly toys and send myself a greeting card saying, ‘Congratulations on your Engagement’. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me.”

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(don’t watch…just listen!)
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Laurel Green is an Associate Producer with the 2010 SummerWorks Festival. She is spending her summer vacation helping to organize their first-ever Performance Bar: a collision of theatre, music, and performance hosted by improv heroes The National Theatre of the World.

Fiasco Playhouse runs August 5 – 14th at 9PM on the Ground Floor of the Lower Ossington Theatre (100A Ossington Avenue). PWYC. Full Bar. Air Conditioning

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Theatre creation workshop led by Jeremy James

One of Ellen Bayley’s many jobs as the The Metcalf Foundation Arts Management Intern at Volcano Theatre, is organizing and promoting The 2010 Volcano Conservatory, which offers intensives and master classes taught by industry leaders for actors, dancers and theatre-makers.

Classes offered between August 16th – 29th in Mnouchkine Technique, Fearless Dancing, Lecoq Red Nose Clown, Viewpoints, Chekhov Technique and more. Don’t miss out!

“Beautiful girls make the best wives….

We need to educate our boys to know real beauty, to go beneath the paint and powder and look at features, the shape of the face, the poise of the head.  We ought to teach them to know real beauty like a horse man knows a thoroughbred.

When a woman has a beautiful face and figure, she is sure to be healthy and intelligent.  Beautiful figures are becoming obsolete to-day and a real beauty is as rare as genius.  There is only one beautiful woman in every four thousand.

The very slim, boyish figure, so much desired by the girls of to-day who are willing to suffer endless dieting, is not beautiful.  The trouble is that fathers and mothers have tried to make their offspring look for other qualities first and to leave beauty alone, till, simply from ignorance, the saying ‘Beautiful but Dumb’ has sprung up and persisted.”

Another failing is that the beautiful young women of this generation do not desire to become mothers and it is largely the biologically unfit who are having children.”

Professor Albert Edward Wiggam

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Eve Wylden stars in Miss Toronto gets a Life_in Parkdale, an exciting site-specific multi-media performance on hijacking the history of beauty pageants in Toronto.

Presented by The DitchWitch Brigade, Miss Toronto gets a Life in Parkdale previews July 20 and runs July 21-25 @ 8 p.m. at The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen Street West.

“Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.”
- Mother Teresa

“I know that if I wasn’t scared, something’s wrong, because the thrill is what’s scary.”
- Richard Pryor

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Jonno Katz in Cactus: The Seduction, Toronto Fringe 2010

An Australian artist, this is Jonno Katz’s 5th time at the Toronto Fringe Festival, where he is presenting Cactus: The Seduction.

Click here for more information about the show, and here for more about dates and times at the Toronto Fringe.

The Thief and the Cobbler was conceived by Canadian animator Richard Williams, who worked 26 years on the project.

“[Williams is] an incredible animator, though. Incredible. One of the biggest problems we had was trying our desperate best, where we had brand new footage, to come up to the level of quality that he had set.”

—Fred Calvert

The first time that the Miramax version of the film appeared on DVD, was in Canada in 2001 as a giveaway promotion in packages of Kellogg’s Froot Loops cereal.

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Amy Zuch is the solo performer and writer behind “Key to Key.” A regular improviser at the Bad Dog Theatre, Amy has also appeared on stand up comedy stages across the city, in musical theatre productions, and in the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival.

Amy Zuch’s Key to Key, the true story of an animator pulled from fantasy and dropped into the real world, opens at the Toronto Fringe Festival on July 2nd at the air conditioned Royal St. George Auditorium, 120 Howland Avenue (North of Bloor).  More information available here on Facebook, and buy advance tickets here.

Less Talk, More Action.

“Even if I knew tomorrow that the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”  -Martin Luther King

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“Talkers” by Entire Cities

Click here

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inFORMING CONTENT Workshop Leader Deborah Pearson leads a workshop exploring immersive theatre and its relationship to ethics.

FREE EVENT June 19: 10am – 1pm

A series of brief “ethics talks” on a range of topics from post-graduate ethicists from the University of Toronto. current . urgent . compelling.

FREE EVENT June 20: 7pm – 9pm
Workshop participants will respond to the “ethics talks” by creating site-specific theatre. immediate . experimental . intimate .

Performances will be directed by Team Leaders Claire Calnan, Susanna Hood, Ravi Jain, Michael Rubenfeld, Mumbi Tindyebwa.

More information available here and here on the Africa Trilogy Blog, and here on Facebook.

Deborah Pearson is co-director of the artist-led experimental Edinburgh Fringe venue Forest Fringe.  In January she and her co-director Andy Field were named in the Stage List of the 100 most influential figures in UK Theatre.

“Suppose I were not to talk to you about Democracy, but about the sea, which is in some respects rather like Democracy! We all have our views of the sea. Some of us hate it and are never well when we are at it or on it. Others love it, and are never so happy as when they are in it or on it or looking at it. But certain facts about the sea are quite independent of our feelings towards it. If I take it for granted that the sea exists, none of you will contradict me. If I say the sea is sometimes furiously violent and always uncertain, and that those who are most familiar with it trust it least, you will not immediately shreik out that I do not believe in the sea; that I am an enemy of the sea; that I want to abolish the sea; that I am going to make bathing illegal. If I tell you that you cannot breathe in the sea, you will not take that as a personal insult and ask me indignantly if I consider you inferior to a fish.

Well, you must please be equally sensible when I tell you some hard facts about democracy. When I tell you that it is sometimes furiously violent and always dangerous and trechearous, and those familiar with it as practical statesman trust it least, you must not at once denounce me as a paid agent of Benitto Mussolini, or declare that I have become a Tory Die Hard in my old age, and accuse of me wanting to take away your votes and make an end of parliament, and the franchise, and free speech, and public meeting, and trial by jury.

Our business is not to deny the perils of Democracy, but to provide against them as far as we can, and then consider whether the risks we cannot provide against are worth taking.”

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Marie Jones performs in Citizen Theatre’s inaugural performance: A PWYC staged reading of GB Shaw’s: The Apple Cart: A political extravaganza at The Piston on May 25th at 7pm.

“And let our hope succeed.  I have great hope.”

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Photo by Photography Division

Laura Nordin (pictured with co-star Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) stars in the Theatre Cipher production of Agamemnon at the Church Hall of Christ the Saviour Cathedral (823 Manning — three blocks north of Bloor between Bathurst and Christie) Wednesday through Sunday at 8 PM, between MAY 22 and JUNE 5. Tickets are $10 – $20 and can be purchased here.

“If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction.  Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighbourhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings.  Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do.  Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings.  but the unformalized feeders of the arts – studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and arts supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions – these go into old buildings.  Perhaps more significant, hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the safety and public life of streets and neighbourhoods and appreciated for their convenience and personal quality, can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction.

As for really new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction.  Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

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Lisa Marie DiLibereto stars in The Tale of a Town, produced by FIXT POINT in association with Theatre Passe Muraille. The show has its own blog with more info here.

The Tale of a Town runs May 1st -16th and BEGINS AT: Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Avenue and ENDS AT: the SCAR MFC Theatre, 609 Queen Street West, Toronto.

Magpie

I remember I was playing in my grandma’s backyard after some wedding or something. And um… I had this beautiful white dress and I was playing with some boys on the back lawn when I felt it. All hot all over my legs and I didn’t know what to do so I just lay down. I didn’t want none of them to see it you know so I just lay down like someone lays down when they’re reading a book or something with their head in the hands and all. Like I was just enjoying the day or something when really my guts are screaming and I think I’m dying I really did think this was it I was leaking all my insides out and I was just lying there in the grass smiling, feeling my blood pouring out from under me and mixing with the dirt. I felt my blood mixing with the dirt and I was just lying there getting my white dress all dirty underneath but none of the boys could see that. They just saw me lying in the grass and smiling like I was sunning myself or something and they said “Come on, let’s go to the park” and I didn’t move. And they called at me again and said “Come on Magpie, let’s go to the park” but I wasn’t getting up and showing them I was dying. I just kept lying there and they started getting mad at me and saying “Stop laying around like a cow” and they started calling me a cow because I told them I just wanted to lie there, maybe all day. (Pause) And then they got bored with me and left. And then… when I knew no one was watching… I went inside and made myself clean again. That’s what I did Cody. I made myself clean again.

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Jordan is the founder of Suburban Beast, a company dedicated to the creation of ‘documentary-performance’.

He is writing and directing the company’s new show Post Eden, which will receive a workshop production at Ryerson Theatre School from April 14-18, 2010. For more info click here.