Today’s Globe & Mail Article on the various Wrecking Ball events can be found here. You can read more about the Toronto artists here, and you’ll find more information on other Wrecking Ball events across Canada here.
For those of you who like to tweet, and for others who can’t make it to the event in person, you can follow along and join in via the hashtag #WreckingBall2011. Observers are invited to be in conversation with the work, the ideas, and with each other, both during and after each event. With Wrecking Ball events happening across the country, we look forward to the conversation going national as well. For those of you who don’t have twitter accounts, click here for a live feed of tweets from across the country, or simply search #WreckingBall2011 at www.twitter.com.
Exciting news from the Wrecking Ball team in Toronto yesterday revealed that there will be 7 Wrecking Ball events taking place across the country on Monday the 25th at 8pm local time.
Click here for more information on the cities and venues playing host.
If you can’t attend in person but don’t want to miss out entirely, be sure to join virtually on Twitter via the designated hashtag #WreckingBall2011.
You can follow this tag with out without a Twitter account, and there will be Wrecking Ball tweeters at all of these events to fill you in, including @praxistheatre at the Toronto Wrecking Ball at the Theatre Centre.
Tonight, as part of the Theatre Passe Muraille Buzz Festival, The Original Norwegian and Praxis Theatre will be presenting a 20 minute reading from our new collaboration, You Should Have Stayed Home. After tonight’s reading, the piece will be developed further with a workshop in May, and we are proud to announce that we have been offered an opportunity to present the full piece in August this year as part of the 2011 SummerWorks Festival.
Based on a Facebook note called “How I Got Arrested and Abused at G20 in Toronto, Canada”, You Should Have Stayed Home details how Tommy Taylor experienced the billion dollar G20 in Toronto in the summer of 2010, with the good times including processed cheese slices, condom balloons, and the total dismissal of his civil rights. You can read the entire Facebook note here.
For more information about tonight’s reading at the Buzz Festival, take a moment to RSVP to our Facebook Event. If you’d like more information about the team collaborating on this piece, you might be interested in an earlier Google Chat between the writer Tommy Taylor, and the director Michael Wheeler, which can be found here.
Tommy was also the subject of a 5th Estate Episode, which can be seen in its entirety here. We hope to see some of you at the Buzz Festival tonight, and look forward to receiving feedback on the work. If you can’t attend, but would like to be kept informed about the show as it is developed and presented, send us an email to info@praxistheatre.com.
The essentials for tonight:
Theatre Passe Muraille
16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto
7:30pm
Come out and support the other great artists showing there work tonight as well!
Most theatre school students do not graduate to a career in the theatre.
While theatre may be an important part of their experience, it simply does not have enough employment opportunities for all theatre school graduates. It has, in fact, very few.
Lwam Ghebretariat, 2011.
If we can accept that premise moving forward, obvious questions spring to mind.
What is theatre school for? What is its value to the great masses of us that it has produced who, for many different reasons, are not in the theatre’s employ?
Lwam Ghebretariat is a graduate of Canada’s most reputable theatre school, and yet he has never pursued a career in acting. He has persued a very different career, which he says has a unique connection to theatre.
Lwam and I sat down recently to try to answer these questions and others. Here’s how it sounded…
Lwam stared in the 2010 Summerworks hit, Homegrown
(If you would like to download this Exit Interview as a podcast, click the arrow above on the right.)
After graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in 2003, Lwam stayed in school, completing a BA (Honours) in philosophy and French at the University of Alberta. He is currently in his final semester of law school at the University of Toronto.
As an undergraduate student he spent his summers researching Eritrean/Ethiopian literature and culture (some of that work can be seen here). As a law student he has worked and volunteered at Downtown Legal Services, representing low income clients in criminal court and disciplinary hearings, and at the African Canadian Legal Clinic, in the area of human rights litigation.
As an actor he most recently appeared in Homegrown (by Catherine Frid, directed by Beatriz Pizano/Aluna Theatre, Summerworks 2010), a play which received national media attention. Other credits include Twelfth Night (Canadian Stage) and Ministry of Love (Theatre Rien Pantoute).
Since this interview, Praxis has learned that Lwam was recently voted Valedictorian for his graduating class. So congratulations Lwam! We’re pretty sure your theatre training will come in handy.
One Block examines how each of us is shaped by our physical environments, by the people who have surrounded us, and by the histories that swell under our feet. Unspun Theatre imagines an investigative romp that explores a convergence of ideas about landscape and story. Part of the Harbourfront Centre HATCH season.
Project 3/2/1 is an evening of dance that features three choreographies and a cast of six dancers, who perform all six roles on an alternating basis throughout the run of the show. I was very fortunate to have been able to sit in on a rehearsal of Ame Henderson’s piece, this body is another body, late in its rehearsal process.
As a response to the process that I observed, I made this piece using watercolour, ink, found text, a photograph of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and an image of the night sky.
Project 3/2/1 runs from April 6 – 17, 2011 at Dancemakers Centre for Creation. You should probably go twice.
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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.
Click here to see “Your process is showing: an introduction”.
Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH season continues with Mrtvolka from Daniela Sneppova and Penn Kemp. Exploring the space between light and darkness, between presence and absence, Mrtvolka presents a multimedia phantasmagoria that will travel the obscure borderlands separating recorded and live performance. Click here for ticket into.
Andy Bichlbaum on the BBC set in Paris where millions viewed him as "as "Jude Finisterra" a 'Dow Chemical Spokesperson' who took full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster
Who are the The Yes Men?
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who couldn’t hold down a job until they became representatives of Exxon, Halliburton, Dow Chemical, and the U.S. federal government. As the Yes Men, they use humor, truth and lunacy to bring media attention to the crimes of their unwilling employers.
Their film, The Yes Men Fix the World, won the audience award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the Grierson Award for Most Entertaining Documentary, and went on to become a smash box-office sensation, only just barely surpassed by Avatar.
They also hope what they are doing is in some way a modern version of The Invisible Theatre. (See Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.)
How much are tickets?
By donation at the door to Project Democracy at The Royal.
In advance of tomorrow’s final public culture consultation at City Hall, this one focussed on youth issues, Praxis Theatre is continuing its series of hockey cards introducing the team putting together our next culture plan. Today we introduce to you the Advisory Council working with Co-Chairs Robert Foster, Karen Kain and Jim Prentice.
For those of you interested in attending tomorrow’s consultation, it is being held in Council Chambers at City Hall from 6pm to 8:30pm. We are encouraging as many young artists, arts workers and arts lovers to either attend this session, or follow the Twitter feed using hash tag #creativeYTO as we’ll be there tweeting via @praxistheatre. Hope to see you there!
And stay tuned for tomorrow when we release the final cards in our series, rounding out Rob Ford’s Creative Capital Initiative team.
Nichole Anderson, Business for the Arts. Click to Enlarge.
Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival. Click to Enlarge.
Claire Hopkinson, Toronto Arts Council. Click to enlarge.
Che Kothari, Manifesto Community Projects. Click to Enlarge.
Gail Lord, Lord Cultural Resources. Click to enlarge.
“After the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations, we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”
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