Praxis continues its partnership with The Canadian Civil Liberties Association to use our play as an access point to contribute to the broader discourse surrounding civil liberties in Canada.
The CCLA has messaged members through email and social media encouraging participation in staging the play, and has partnered with us to create panel discussions on broader issues facing civil liberties in a number of the cities we are travelling to.
This Tuesday, following the 8pm performance of #G20Romp, we will continue the discussion about G20 Toronto with a discussion of many of the issues the play raises. Years after the largest mass arrest in Canadian history there are many unanswered questions, developments, and non-developments with regards to police actions at the Summit.
Abby Deshman – CCLA: Director, Public Safety Program
Abby graduated from University of Toronto faculty of law in 2008 and has an LLM from New York University law school. She has been a program director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for four years, and is currently the director of the public safety program. Her program area touches on all aspects of CCLA’s work on criminal justice, police powers, police accountability and privacy.
Leading up to the G20 she coordinated CCLA’s advocacy efforts on policing and protest, and during the meetings she led a team of independent observers monitoring police conduct. She interacts regularly with police forces across the country on issues of protest and policing and oversees the CCLA’s involvement in the struggle for post-G20 accountability.
On Tuesday, she will begin the day by heading up to OPP Police College to give a lecture to new Public Order Unit Commanders on protest rights.
Jan Borowy – Cavalluzzo
Jan Borowy’s practice areas include labour relations, human rights, pay equity and professional regulation. Jan brings to her practice a longstanding commitment to the promotion of workers’ rights and human rights. Her experience gives her an understanding of the importance of a clear strategy in union negotiations, campaigns, strikes, organizing and educational programs.
Jan is the former Research Co-ordinator at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, where her work focused on a campaign for fair wages and working conditions for garment home-workers. She further developed her advocacy skills as the Worker’s Rights Community legal worker at Parkdale Community Legal Services. At law school, Jan developed an expertise in Aboriginal law and issues facing Aboriginal workers.
Jan’s experience within the firm has included close involvement in the representation of private sector and public sector workers before labour arbitrators, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, the Pay Equity Tribunal and the Ontario and Canadian Labour boards. Jan is a member of the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers and the Canadian and Ontario Bar Associations.
Tommy Taylor – Writer/Performer: You Should Have Stayed Home
Tommy is a theatre artist, activist and NGO fundraiser living in Toronto. Recently Tommy was assistant director/video designer on The Belle of Winnipeg (Dora Winner), adaptor/director of Dear Everybody at the CanStage Festival of Ideas and Creation and director of Kayak at The SummerWorks Festival. He is a graduate of the Centre for Cultural Management (University of Waterloo/ CCCO), The Vancouver Film School and Humber College’s Community Arts Development Program.
Tommy was arrested (but never charged) and detained during the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto. He has since turned his account of the experience into You Should Have Stayed Home. The show is on a cross-Canada tour for Fall 2013, playing in Whitehorse, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.
Watch the above video to hear from CCLA’s Abby Deshman Director, Public Safety Program on G20 Toronto, policing at protests and You Should Have Stayed Home.
The CCLA has messaged members through email and social media encouraging participation in staging the play, and has partnered with us to create panel discussions on broader issues facing civil liberties in several of the cities we are travelling to.
The first of these panels will take place in Vancouver at The Firehall Arts Centre after the October 3rd 8pm performance.
Praxis will be livetweeting the discussion via the #G20Romp Hashtag: Civil Liberties, Activism and Surveillance:
Micheal Vonn is a lawyer and has been the Policy Director of the BC Civil Liberties Association since 2004. She has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the Faculty of Law and in the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies where she has taught civil liberties and information ethics.
She is a regular guest instructor for UBC’s College of Health Disciplines Interdisciplinary Elective in HIV/AIDS Care and was honoured as a recipient of the 2010 AccolAIDS award for social and political advocacy benefitting communities affected by HIV/AIDS. Ms. Vonn is a frequent speaker on a variety of civil liberties topics including privacy, national security, policing, surveillance and free speech. She is an Advisory Board Member of Privacy International. bccla.org
Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and researcher based in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. She has been active in grassroots social movements for over a decade, including with No One Is Illegal, Women’s Memorial March Committee for Missing and Murdered Women, Radical Desis and more.
She was one of the many leading up to both the Anti-Olympics Convergence and the G20 Protests in 2010, facing arrests and trumped charges at both. Harsha has been named one of the most influential South Asians in BC by the Vancouver Sun and Naomi Klein has called Harsha “one of Canada’s most brilliant and effective political organizers.” Her first book Undoing Border Imperialism is forthcoming in November 2013 by AK Press. Find her @HarshaWalia.
Greg McMullen is a litigation associate with Branch MacMaster. He focuses on class action work concerning privacy and access to information. Greg was one of the organizers of the BCCLA’s Legal Observer Program during the 2010 Winter Olympics, which trained more than 400 citizen-observers to record police interactions with the public (and especially with protesters) during the 2010 Games..
Tommy Taylor is a theatre artist, activist and NGO fundraiser living in Toronto. Recently Tommy was assistant director/video designer on The Belle of Winnipeg (Dora Winner), adaptor/director of Dear Everybody at the CanStage Festival of Ideas and Creation and director of Kayak at The SummerWorks Festival. He is a graduate of the Centre for Cultural Management (University of Waterloo/ CCCO), The Vancouver Film School and Humber College’s Community Arts Development Program.
Tommy was arrested (but never charged) and detained during the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto. He has since turned his account of the experience into You Should Have Stayed Home. The show is on a cross-Canada tour for Fall 2013, playing in Whitehorse, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.
The post-show discussion will be an opportunity to reflect on the play and the G20 experience, to talk about the frailty of police accountability mechanisms and to discuss broader issues surrounding law enforcement.
Photo from CCLA's June 2011 Panel at U of T's Faculty of Law - G20: Lessons Learned, Messages Lost
Tommy Taylor, playwright/performer of You Should Have Stayed Home Ajamu Nangwaya, labour lawyer specializing in police accountability Nathalie Des Rosiers, General Counsel of Canadian Civil Liberties Association
Free // Snacks and drinks will be provided.
7:30 Performance: The Theatre Centre
Post-show panel: Conversation Room at the Great Hall
1087 Queen Street West
Wednesday, August 10th
7:30pm show
9pm panel
Moderator:
Emily Burke, managing editor, The Mark News
Panelists: Tommy Taylor, playwright/performer of You Should Have Stayed Home Ajamu Nangwaya, labour lawyer specializing in police accountability Nathalie Des Rosiers, General Counsel of Canadian Civil Liberties Association
Midnight Show: 40 people in the cage
Aug 12th @ midnight
Photo by Will O'Hare
About a month ago we made the decision to put forty people in the cage with Tommy for a portion of the show. Our approach to the piece changed in a lot of ways after that, including putting a desk in the middle of the stage, so we ended up needing about 27 performers to make room for our new approach.
Beyond the practicalities of bodies in space, we felt it was the right decision artistically as what we were creating wasn’t living anywhere close to realism.
Why 40? Because that is the number of people who were in Tommy’s cage, which is the exact same dimensions of our set at The Eastern Avenue Detention Centre.
So we have decided to pursue this approach for one show only – The Midnight Show! Joining our volunteer detainees will be members of the production team, friends of the show and some members of the theatre community. For one night only, lets look at what 40 Canadian citizens stuffed into a metal cage with no access to water looks like.
Final Show
August 13 @ 10pm
This is probably our best show time and the last show of the run. It’s gonna be packed. Buy in advance, or show up early to get in. They hold 1/2 of the tickets to be available at the door 1hr before the performance.
Photo by Will O'Hare
2 – The critical response thus far
Globe and Mail theatre critic J Kelly Nestruck tweeted immediately following the opening night show
So far we have received two reviews for the show and they are, well, contradictory. Meyerhold would be proud!
NOW Magazine‘s Jordan Bimm reviewed the show, giving it NNN, but was disappointed with the show’s choice to have Tommy tell his story instead of live it in terms of performance style.
“The adaptation could go further – with more parts acted than recounted – but as it stands this is a sad but important piece of Canadian history.”
Meanwhile S. Bear Bergman reviewed the show for Mooney on Theatre (which does not rate shows out of 4 or 5) and was enthusiastic about the choice, comparing the performance style to Spalding Gray:
“Tommy Taylor’s You Should Have Stayed Home, which has more than lived up to its pre-SummerWorks hype…YouShould Have Stayed Home is in many ways the truest testament to the power of a likable narrator.”
So there you have it, the only way to weigh in on this is to come check it out.
Back in the winter, Tommy was interviewed as one of four subjects that were focused on in a CBC Fifth Estate documentary about G20, during which Tommy told CBC about his plan to make a play about his experience. Low and behold – when the show airs, it shared the same name as the play Tommy was planning on creating (plus the word AT).
We’re not complaining – this was a great publicity boost for the show and the documentary was very well received. So much so that it was just nominated for a Gemini award for best writing in a documentary. Congrats to journalist Gillian Findlay on her nomination for bringing some of the consequences of G20 Toronto to viewers across the country.
“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.”
Jan Borowy’s practice areas include labour relations, human rights, pay equity and professional regulation. Jan brings to her practice a longstanding commitment to the promotion of workers’ rights and human rights. Her experience gives her an understanding of the importance of a clear strategy in union negotiations, campaigns, strikes, organizing and educational programs.
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