Free Fall ’12 @ Theatre Centre

by Michael Wheeler

This March will bring Free Fall ‘12 to The Theatre Centre, an eight-day biennial national performance festival featuring new and boundary-testing works by emerging and established artists from across Canada.

This iteration of Free Fall investigates shared and individual experiences through theatre, installation, performance art, new media, lectures and online performance.

Co-curated by Theatre Centre Artistic Director Franco Boni and myself, there are works from across the country and also the City of Chicago. The relationship between our two cities will play an important part in this iteration of the festival, which will also host the Chicago-Toronto Performance Summit, an exchange that brings together cultural players from both cities for a sharing of ideas, trends and experiences.

The works are fairly disparate, and many embrace online technologies as we began discussing at Social Media Week at The Drake Hotel, which also serves as one of the venues for the festival. Some of these online components to Free Fall ’12 are:

• The Online Brain created by Aislinn Rose (also of Praxis Theatre) for Out The Window.

• An interactive mixed reality presentation that will begin online at at babylonia.ca starting March 19 and unfold in real time at performances of Babylonia.

• YouTube video comments performed live in Wee Tube 5400.

• Mashups of old videos for internet broadcast/live party by Everything Is Terrible.

• A Twitter-hosted tour of Queen St. on a TTC streetcar via Route 501 Revisted.

Babylonia Trailer from radix theatre on Vimeo.

Local Toronto artists at Free Fall ’12 include, Jonathan Goldsbie, Falen Johnson, Coman Poon, Liza Balkan, the Toronto District School Board Media Arts Co-op program with Charles Street Video. This is the last time Free Fall will be based out Theatre Centre’s current home at the historic Great Hall, before it moves to its new home, half a block down Queen Street at the soon-to-be transformed Carnegie Library.

It’s a true honour to be a part of putting this festival together and I hope you’ll visit the Free Fall ’12 site to see which events and performances are ones you would like to check out.

If you make any decisions, you can click here to Buy Tickets and Festival Combo Passes or call 416.538.0988 to book them the ol’ fashioned way.