Broad Definitions: Adventures on Urban Dictionary

by Melissa D’Agostino

Welcome to the Fish bowl!

I am ever so excited to be developing my piece, BroadFish through Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH Program.  Over the next few weeks I will be documenting my journey, and giving you tidbits of creation, of inspiration and of information as I continue to build this solo adventure into the world of weddings, fairy tales, gender roles and relationships.

For my first post I thought I’d shed some insight on the show’s title.

BroadFish

It’s a little exercise in word play:

Broad is the derogatory term historically used to describe women (more on that in a sec)

Fish points to the idea of metamorphosis, and the allure of creatures like mermaids, and centaurs, but we’ll get to centaurs at a later date. My love for Centaurs needs its own post.

And finally, the Broad Fish is the largest human tapeworm and is transmitted to humans through the consumption of said fish. That’s right. The show gonna get messy. You’ll want to be there.

Now, in doing some research on these terms for this blog, I consulted several sources. And, being as thorough as possible, I meandered over to the gem of the Interweb: Urban Dictionary. How were modern-day folk defining the term ‘broad’, I wondered…

Here are some of my favourite definitions from that hub of information.

Enjoy.

Or don’t and instead understand my shock, horror and alarm.

Things began respectfully and educationally:

Then they got a bit colourful thanks, in part, to a Bette Midler quote.

Then someone decided to clarify…graphically*

*Much to my chagrin.

I sure am glad someone clarified for me the whole slut versus broad issue. Phew. That could have been awkward in future, horrific conversations.

Then things got succinct and culinary.

Incoherent when used in a sentence.

Still about meat of some kind.

I have yet to uncover the definition of Sausage in this context, but I’ll keep you posted.

And then, decidedly Vile.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure the definitions were far LESS offensive at the turn of the 20^th century when most of us women-folk weren’t even allowed to vote. Oh Internet: I should never take the first click down the awful rabbit hole of bad spelling, incoherent sentences and hateful speech. But I do. I always do.

I am continually puzzled at the gender politics of the world today, and most especially at how these politics play out on the Internet. There is often an undercurrent of misogyny in many threads, posts and articles, and certainly in a lot of video content, and it’s perpetuated by both genders. I say that I am puzzled, but sadly I’m rarely surprised. One simple search for the definition of, what I thought to be, a bygone word used to berate women turned up some truly nasty modern definitions.

Are we moving backward? Has the anonymity of the Internet made it easier to use horrible words against one another and define ourselves in narrow terms? Or are we able to keep a broad perspective? See what I did there?

I’d love to hear what you think.

Tweet me @melissadags and hashtag #HatchTO #BroadFish.

More soon!

#HatchTO takeover on praxistheatre.com

This April the four #HatchTO 2014 residencies at Harbourfront Centre will begin, taking over their Studio Theatre. Over the course of the next three months, all four #HatchTO projects will take over this digital space with their experiments.

Posts will be in all forms and sizes through writing, video, images and embedded social media tools. Starting next week, to see what each company has been up to, click their project images in the sidebar on the right to see the most recent posts by each one.

This is a big change to how praxistheatre.com has operated previously. We hope for the next few months this will make praxistheatre.com a place where people interested in how social media-integrated experiments can evolve, and will continue to check-in to see how things are developing.

When April arrives, and each residency is in-house at The Studio Theatre, this site will become a platform where various live-tweeting and other integrations as-will-be-necessary can be found.

#HATCHTO 2014: Welcome to the Theatrosphere.

HATCH 2014: The Artists

HATCH artistic teams, Harbourfront Centre Communications staff and us, getting together for a little pre-season potluck

As we announced earlier this year, Praxis Theatre is guest-curating Harbourfront Centre’s 2014 HATCH season of new performance experiments. As curators, we were particularly interested in looking at projects that would include experiments in how social media can be included in the development and/or performance of new works.

We’re very happy to say that we have selected our artists for 2014, and while Harbourfront Centre will be launching an awesome new web portal for these artists and their work at HATCH in January 2014, we’re providing you with a sneak peek today of who they are and what they’ll be working on over the next 5 months.

We invite you to take a look, and even engage with their projects online as they develop.

Week #1:
#legacy – Rob Kempson – Core Artist

Why do we yearn to leave a legacy behind? #legacy features Twitter and three women over the age of 65 who are looking to make the most of it.

This interactive performance project brings three women over the age of 65 up-close and personal with social media in general–and the Twitterverse in particular–in order to consider how we might leave a lasting impression—and how it should be hashtagged.

Follow the ladies on Twitter:

@judith_dove
@Joan_Belford2
@McCroq

Week #2:
BroadFish – Melissa D’Agostino – Core Artist

What happens when the promise of a perfect future hangs on the one thing out of your grasp?

BroadFish is a live theatre experiment by acclaimed performer Melissa D’Agostino that integrates folktales, music, improvisation, and motion pictures to explore the thin line between reality and fantasy, relationships and romance, and the power of myth in our everyday lives. By plunging into the wild world of female stereotypes, BroadFish considers traditional attitudes toward relationships, happiness, and romance, investigating how they’ve evolved and degenerated through the Internet, social media, and digital technology.

Week #3:
The Ballad of _______ B – Francisco-Fernando Granados – Core Artist

The Ballad of _______ B brings together a young refugee’s obsession with opera diva Maria Callas and the queerness of the imagination to centre stage.

The performance is conceived as a character study of _______ B, a once “clean-cut, fresh-faced 18-year-old” refugee whose story appears as a vocabulary lesson in the pages of an instructional ESL book. This work marks a radical departure for artist Francisco-Fernando Granados, from action-based, conceptual approaches to experimental explorations that incorporate digital media, narrative, and recitation.

Week #4:
Faster than Night – Digital BlackBox: Vanessa Shaver, Pascal Langdale, Alison Humphrey – Core Artists

Social media billionaire Caleb Smith is on a mission. Racing against a terrible terminal illness, he is embarking on a deep space voyage with the secret goal of cheating time and death. But when something goes horribly wrong, can you help make a gut-wrenching life-or-death decision?

Newly formed Digital BlackBox blends live performance with real-time 3D animation and audience interaction to hone a new approach to storytelling, the first of its kind in the world. The company includes RADA-trained actor, writer, and performance-capture specialist Pascal Langdale; writer, director, and 2009 Elliot Hayes Award-Winner Alison Humphrey; creative producer Vanessa Shaver; and executive producer Jo Singh Brar.

Talking to In The Greenroom About #HatchTO

Interview by Ryan Quinn

R: I’m here with Michael Wheeler and Aislinn Rose ofPraxis Theatre who are co-curating the HATCH program at the Harbourfront Center in 2014. Can you tell me a bit about the HATCH program?

A: The HATCH program is through the Harbourfront Center. We took part in it in 2010, and it was a really transformative period for Praxis theatre because it was really our first foray into integrating our online activities with our artmaking activities. That’s why we’re looking at projects for this year’s submissions that are going to be working on some of the same things: incorporating social media into either the communication about the project, integration into the actual creation of the project, or use of social media in the performance of the work. So, essentially what the program is, is an opportunity for a company, or a collective, or an artist to work on a particular aspect of a project that requires a space to experiment in. You get a week’s residency in the Harbourfront’s studio theatre. You really do have the use of that space for the whole week to work on something you couldn’t do in a rehearsal room, or someone’s back yard, or your own apartment. So, for our project, we worked on a piece called Section 98.

M: That was very concise. The only thing I would add to that as to core elements of the residency is that your one week of residency at the Harbourfront studio theatre has to end with some sort of public presentation. However, I think we’re adamant that it’s not about presenting a final work. Hopefully, people are experimenting throughout the week, then that presentation is more a revelation of what that week’s experiment was rather than “here’s our play”. A couple other things that come along with the residency are, firstly, a lot of support from the Harbourfront center that you wouldn’t necessarily get if you were producing your own show, you get marketing support, mentorship, publicity. So, a lot of things that if you were producing yourself, you’d have to come up with the cash for.

Click here to read the rest of the interview on inthegreenroom.ca

#HatchTO Twitter Chat

Winterreise Projekt–Winterreise Collective (HATCH 2013)

 Tune in @ 2pm today via #HatchTO to participate in a Live Twitter Chat about Hatch 2013.

Tweets about “#HatchTO”

#HatchTO Twitter Chat Tues July 2nd @ 2pm

With the deadline for HATCH 2014 applications coming up on July 12, Praxis and Harbourfront Centre will be hosting a live twitter chat to discuss the HATCH program this year, how work can integrate with social media (which is something we are specifically looking for) and also to field any questions that might be out there.

Praxis started incorporating an open source theatre approach as part of our HATCH residency in 2010, and we hope to add a little of this to how we curate as well. What are you thinking? What are we thinking? Let’s put it all our there and see what’s going on.

On Tuesday we will have a livestream of all the tweets using the hashtag #HatchTO here on praxistheatre.com.

See you back here after the long weekend. Happy Canada Day!