Greta chats with Nigel Shawn Williams, half of the Interim Artistic Team (IAT) of Factory Theatre about what he would like to accomplish during his term.
Every Letter Counts opens January 31st 2013 and runs until February 24th at Factory Theatre. Click Here for ticket info.
Greta Papageorgiu is an actor, writer, teacher and director. She performs and teaches throughout Ontario and Quebec. Greta loves the theatre and hopes to share some of her love with you through 2 Minutes With Greta Papageorgiu.
GHOST DANCE by Yvette Nolan, directed by Clare Preuss, concluded Wrecking Ball T.O 14 with a round dance that included most of the audience.. Photo by Alex Williams.
Click the image to see the full gallery on the new National Wrecking Ball Website with information on Wrecking Ball Events across Canada. Do you have it bookmarked yet?
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure….. Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?”
~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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CATALPA follows the true story of a band of Irish expatriates in Massachusetts, and their hair-brained scheme to sail a whaling ship to the colonial Prison in Fremantle, Australia to free six Fenian prisoners. Full of intrigue, suspense, and a tour-de-force solo-performance in which one actor plays over twenty different characters (not to mention a seagull, a whale and a storm!), CATALPA is a theatrical thrill-ride.
CATALPA runs at the TPM Backspace, Tues-Sat. 7:30pm, and Sat. at 2:00pm (PWYC), until Feb.2. Click here for tickets or call 416-504-7529.
Andrew Musselman is a Toronto-based actor, writer and producer who dreams of one day being able to afford a small cottage in Ireland.
In December last year we announced a new joint initiative with The Theatre Centre called Civil Debates: an opportunity for two speakers from opposite sides of an argument to debate their perspectives for a liveaudience. It will also be a forum for attendees to participate and vote for their preferred argument.
The topics for the first four debates of the series will be suggested by YOU, the community, via a live installation on January 12 & 13 at the Next Stage Festival’s tent at Factory Theatre.
Click on the image above for all the details, and see you at the beer tent!
“What about identity? I asked.
He said: It’s self- defense…
Identity is the child of birth, but
at the end, it’s self invention, and not
an inheritance of the past. I am multiple…
Within me an ever new exterior”
Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet. 13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008
From a Birthright Trip to the camps in Nablus, The Peace Maker explodes with live music and contradiction as a Canadian visitor tries to bring peace to the Middle East in all the wrong ways.
The Peace Maker is being presented as part of the Next Stage Festival from January 3rd to the 13th. Tickets are $12 for matinees and $15 for evening performances. To purchase tickets, call 416-966-1062 or click here.
A graduate of the National Theatre School, Natasha is an actress, writer, educator and director. She is currently facilitating the Paprika Creator’s unit, acting in the television show Bomb Girls, and preparing to direct her first play as part of The Playwright Project in May, 2013.
If you run a web-influenced theatre company for 10 years, you will accumulate some ridiculous photos.
Michael co-curated FreeFall ’12 at The Theatre Centre with AD Franco Boni, and spent seven months at The Shaw Festival, where he assistant directed Ragtime, Helen’s Necklace,A Man and Some Women and directed Brecht’s Senora Carrar’s Rifles. This fall, he returned to Toronto as an assistant director with The Electric Company at Canadian Stage and Associate Artist at Theatre Passe Muraille.
Aislinn produced a two-week festival of theatre for human rights with Aluna Theatre and five shows for other companies including Modern Times Stage Company’s production of The Lesson, and the electroacoustic opera Julie Sits Waiting with Fides Krucker. She also created online content for Liza Balkan’s Out The Window, and Michael Healey’s Proud.
Throughout the year, we wrote, hosted, curated and moderated a number of essential and vigorous conversations online at praxistheatre.com. Traffic from unique visitors is up 48% from 2011, and after beginning the year as Torontoist People to Watch in 2012, we finished up as an end-of-year pick by The Grid as a 2012 Toronto Theatre MVPs for providing “informed, well-reasoned debate… for the community of independent theatre artists in Toronto and beyond”.
In 2013, we’re moving to build upon these successes with live performances directly connected to online content:
Civil Debates
Debates Winter/Spring 2013
Civil Debates is a monthly series we are creating with The Theatre Centre that invites two speakers from opposite sides of an argument to debate their perspectives for and with a live audience.
It is also a forum for all attendees to participate and vote on who and what they agree with. We hope this will be an opportunity to extend the online community we have developed over the years in a face-to-face setting, bringing those conversations into a physical space.
The topics for the initial four debates will be curated via a gallery installation January 12 and 13 at The Next Stage Festival at Factory Theatre. Debates will take place monthly at The Theatre Centre at 1095 Queen St. W (Queen and Dovercourt) in February, March, April and May 2013. The First Debate is on Thursday, February 7th. Go put it in your book or iCal etc. right now.
Praxis 10th Anniversary Party
Party Summer 2013
Yes. Praxis Theatre has been around for 10 years!
Our first production, Eugene, a modern original adaptation of the epic poem Eugene Onegin, opened at The Theatre Centre in June 2003. Since then we have created 12 original plays, built a website and started combining the two.
Come join us for a big party we are throwing at a TBD location to celebrate. If you just know us online, this is the time to come out. If you have ever been to or been in a Praxis show, we hope you’ll come too. It seems crazy. For real. A DECADE.
Some details are still pending, but the production will be performed in several Canadian cities, including a new production for Toronto.
We’re pretty excited Tommy Taylor’s original adaptation of his Facebook note is our first show to tour, after ten years as a company. The damage done to civil liberties by the G20 Summit in Canada was a failure of all three levels of government. Thanks to the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts for their support.
Other Stuff We Don’t Know/Can’t Say Yet
? – What Else – ?
The great thing about being a small company with an adaptable communications structure is that we can take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves.
We have something we are working on with Videofag we hope to tell you about soon, there are probably some blog posts coming up, and other live events we will be involved with. We’ll let you know, just as soon as we know what they are.
Thanks to everyone who helped make 2012 a success. We feel really lucky to be making work that excites us with great people in 2013.
“We were barely there. Our feelings could not be hurt because they lay elsewhere, off-campus, aurora borealis. I drew pictures of it on my binder, a smudge in a heart. A smudge and me in interconnecting hearts. Me and a smudge and a half human/half-smudge baby…What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.” – Miranda July, “Making Love in 2003”
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WITH LOVE AND A MAJOR ORGAN plays at the Next Stage Theatre Festival, Jan 2nd-13th at Factory Theatre: Studio (125 Bathurst) Click here for schedule and ticket information.
Julia Lederer is a playwright and actor who enjoys playing small instruments- for example, the mini-harmonica and the ukulele. She has always been drawn to the colour purple. Since the dawn of time, probably.
Critic Susannah Clapp looks at some of the most compelling set designs that defined modern theatre over the past century. Beginning with Gordon Craig’s Hamlet at The Moscow Art Theatre where Stanislavsky and Chekhov were busy transforming directing, acting and playwriting at the same time; dropping in on Peter Brook’s era-defining Midsummer Night’s Dream; and hitting up Punchdrunk’s Faust, created just before their perpetual immersive hit Sleep No More, this visual list is a palpable study of how design has impacted where we came from and where we’re going in modern theatre.
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Jeff Elder for going meta with his 10 Best “Best of 2012” List
This year we’re going super meta by including a list of the 10 Best “Best of 2012” lists in our Top 10 of the Top 10 lists of 2012. Still with us? Storify user Jeff Elder has collected his favourite lists of the year, including Weird Weather, Tattooed Olympians and Best Memes .
If this keeps up, next year we’ll have to put together a Top 10 of the Top 10 lists of Top 10s.
Last year Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin was number one on our list of the Top 10 of the Top 10 for 2011 for posting his highlights from the year and bringing attention to his damning report on the Toronto G20. His 2012 highlights include a recent notice from the Law Society of Upper Canada questioning how lawyers could ever represent multiple segregated witness officers in SIU cases. Marin had reported on this problem in 2011 and 2008.
Liza Balkan’s Out The Window, co-produced this year by The Theatre Centre, asked hard questions about lawyers representing more than one officer in SIU cases. (l-r: Matt Murray, Jason Siks, Brett Donahue, Zahir Gilani and R.H. Thomson)
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The Toronto Star for its Top cultural gaffes of 2012
Fab Magazine for celebrating the work of Nina Arsenault in their 2012 Queer in Review
Starting the list with “We won everything!”, Fab Magazine has put together a list of “Everything and anything gay that was a thing in 2012”: the successes of the US election, Anderson Cooper coming out, the death of Whitney Houston, and Obama’s joke about replacing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” with “It’s Raining Men”. Toronto Artist Nina Arsenault was called out for her many projects of 2012 in a section entitled “Meanwhile, I cleaned my room”.
Maev Beaty explored the issues and process behind The Africa Trilogy on Praxis in 2009.
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Pretty much every Toronto theatre list for loving Maev Beaty, with a special nod to The Grid for including her work on the Edward Bond Festival
From the Toronto Star’s Five Faves of 2012, in which Cate Blanchett became known as the “Maev Beaty of Australia”, to The National Post’s The Year’s Best Performances, to Jon Kaplan’s Top 10 Theatre Artists in NOW Magazine, Maev Beaty was everywhere in this year’s plethora of best-of lists. Not content with starring in a number of Toronto’s biggest hits this year, Beaty also co-produced the hugely successful Edward Bond Festival with her husband Alan Dilworth, as pointed out in The Grid’s end of the year list.
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David Mirvish & the Off-Mirvish Season in Blog TO’s theatre news from 2012 and Torontoist’s 2012 Heroes
We have made it prettyclear in this space we think the new Off-Mirvish Season launched with the hugely successful Terminus is an exciting development for our theatrical ecosystem that has the potential to create a bridge between the sweat-subsidized indie world and commercial theatre. Blog TO’s Keith Bennie and Torontoist’s Carly Maga both recognized this in their year-end round-ups as well. Next up in the Off-Mirvish season: TO indie powerhouse Studio 180 gets a new audience for their critically acclaimed production of Clybourne Park.
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The Globe and Mail for raising big issues in Year’s Most Memorable Players in the Theatre Community
When Canadian Press reporter Jen Ditchburn wrote a story on the worst attendance records among Canadian Senators, Senator Brazeau was at the top of that list. Brazeau took to twitter to say what would happen if Ditchburn changed the D in her name to a B. The reporter assured Brazeau that he was absolutely, most definitely the very first person to have ever made fun of her name in this way.
Brazeau also made news earlier in November for collecting the $20k housing allowance that Senators receive if their primary residence is more than 100 kilometres away from the capital, despite the apartment he rents across the river from Ottawa.
To finish off a great year, Brazeau has gone on to suggest that Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence doesn’t set “a good example for young Aboriginal youth” with her hunger strike. We’re not sure the thousands rallying across the country agree.
Marjorie Chan’s stunning twitter image of hundreds of Canadians setting an example in support of #idlenomore and Chief Theresa Spence at the Toronto Eaton Centre December 30, 2012
“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.”
Greta Papageorgiu is an actor, writer, teacher and director. She performs and teaches throughout Ontario and Quebec. Greta loves the theatre and hopes to share some of her love with you through 2 Minutes With Greta Papageorgiu.
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