Congratulations Egypt

Cairo’s Tahir Square – 5 hours before Mubarak’s resignation was announced at 6pm local time. Image by kairoinfo4u

In solidarity with Egyptians seeking civil rights and democracy

Your process is showing: an introduction

(l-r) Mass [Cross-Section], Holy Vedas [Brain Scan], Savannah [Cellular Scan]. Click to enlarge

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by Shira Leuchter

I am going to try a little something here. It’s not often that I have the opportunity to unite my practices of performance-making and fine-art-making, but the Praxis blog seems like the perfect place to give it a go on a regular basis.

So, how am I going to do this? Well, the questions I’ve chosen to explore are: what does process look like? What kind of image would I make or select if I had to find a way to visually represent a process of creating performance?

Here’s what I’m going to do. It’ll be en experiment that I’ll share with you every month, right here. It’ll be a personal exploration that I’d love you to witness, respond to and try to figure out alongside me.

I’m going to sit in on some rehearsals. I’m going to watch all sorts of processes. I’m going to profusely thank those who let me in to their rehearsal rooms to observe what they do and how they make their work. Then I’m going to make something as a response to that particular act of creation. It could be any form of visual representation – a painting, a collage, a dress, a meal – I’ll let what I see determine what I make.

One Block - Click to enlarge

I’ll try my best to choose work that will be in performance close to the posting dates, so that you’ll have the opportunity to actually see the piece.

I know that this work will be personal to me, that you’ll have to see these processes through my eyes. My big hope is that, by taking a close look at How We Make Things, we can start a conversation about how different ways of art-making converge and deviate.

One last thing: I’m not going to write much about what I saw and how I came to make what I’ve made. Sometimes I may not write anything at all. But I will always tell you what materials I’ve used and what piece I’m responding to.
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Images:

• The Room asked me to make pieces for The Red Machine as a response to the brain’s temporal lobes, commonly thought of as the religious centre of the brain. The top images are personal photographs with found images (2009).
• A work-in-progress piece responding to One Block. I’ll probably keep adding to this as the process continues. Encaustic and oil with found archival photographs and images donated by anonymous Toronto residents.

Shira Leuchter makes performance stuff and other art stuff. She is currently working with UnSpun Theatre on a new piece that will be performed as part of Harbourfront’s HATCH program this April. She collects all of her shallowest thoughts here.

This is happening today, and Praxis will be there tweeting

Click to Enlarge

by Aislinn Rose

Last week in this space, we told you about the Toronto culture consultations. The first of those public consultations is today from 2pm to 4pm at the Assembly Hall in Etobicoke, and I’ll be there “live tweeting” for Praxis. You can follow our Twitter feed here, and if there is a hashtag for the event, I’ll come back and add it to this post so you can follow along with everyone else.

In the meantime, you might be interested in looking back at that earlier post about the consultations to see what happened after the events document was circulated, and then read the even more interesting comments to our post.

See you at 2pm!

Hashtag #creativeTO

Rhubarb takes over the Buddies blog

Click to check out the Rhubarb blog

Nine days away from week one of the Rhubarb Festival-  a lot of content has been going down on the Rhubarb blog.

The experimental performance festival has taken over the Buddies in Bad Times blog – running features and interviews with many of the artists involved leading up to the festival. In a core feature of this content, artists from various projects interview each other about their work and what they’re up to at Rhubarb.

This approach has led to some interesting discussions with 2Fik, Johnnie Walker, Morgan Norwich, Nicholas Billon, Erin Brandenburg, Out of Line Theatre and Alicia Grant. Using various combinations of text, image and video in their posts these discussions go beyond the basic overview you might read in a preview through traditional media. (Can you tell we’re fans?)

Stay tuned for an upcoming conversation between Praxis Theatre and bluemouth inc.

Tara Beagan takes over the (theatre) world

Tara Beagan is captured by iPhone being announced as Native Earth Performing Arts new Artistic Director on January 26 at The Theatre Centre during the Weesageechak Festival. Photo courtesy PJ Prudat

January 2011 was a pretty good month for Jesus Chrysler playwright Tara Beagan:

The multi-talented theatre artist became Playwright in Residence at the National Arts Centre and was named the new Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts in the same GD month!

Congrats to our friend and collaborator on both of her well-deserved successes. Tara replaces out going Artistic Director Yvette Nolan – who was also a great friend to Praxis Theatre.

Yvette sent us some well considered notes on her experience and thoughts surrounding Praxis productions, and she has been an ally as an artist and community member. Congrats to Yvette as well; she passes on a company in great shape to exciting leadership and we generally like it when things work out this way.

Toronto culture consultations- you have 4 hours to talk to the big guns

UPDATE: EYE WEEKLY is reporting that “The City is actually holding 11 consultation sessions on the culture plan, seven of them in downtown neighbourhoods.” Additionally, that “incomplete information had been circulated to some organizations “. Safe guess that’s the document below. Assuming the math stays the same – you now have 22 hours to talk to the big guns.

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Similar to the recent city budget consultation process under Mayor Rob Ford, Toronto’s just-announced culture consultations will have no downtown meetings -holding consultations from 2pm-4pm on February 9th in Etobicoke and February 10th in Scarborough.

Titled, “Creative Communities Public Consultations”, these will presumably form some basis for recommendations made to City Council somewhere down the road.

So what is going on here?

There are three co-chairs of a lightning-fast pair of consultations done outside of the downtown core that will be used to inform a re-imagining of Toronto’s culture plan:

• Robert Foster – an investment banker who specializes in mergers and acquisitions.
• Karen Kain – Canada’s Prima Ballerina and Artistic Director of The National Ballet of Canada.
• Jim Prentice* – a recent Alberta MP and Harper government Environment Minister.

This panel will have two “special advisors” separate from five other advisory council members from arts and business: Richard Florida – a controversial U of T theorist and pop culture guru who has postulated that Canada’s Social Compact should be replaced with a “Creative Compact”, and Jeff Melanson – the National Ballet School’s Executive Director and Rob Ford’s Arts and Culture Advisor.

For some more context on why this could get interesting in a hurry, read this recent CBC article on a panel held by the Canadian Conference of the Arts, attended by arts advocates from across the country in Ottawa. Titled, “Artists: Powering the Creative Economy?” it rejected the Martin Prosperity Institute proposed “creative economy” logic to advocating for arts funding. The centrepiece of the article: Richard Florida’s own statistician laments, “It’s been a trap.”

RSVP quickly if you would like to participate as spots are likely to fill up fast.

*Also the subject of a classic Yes Men action to highlight Canada’s inaction on climate change.