Former Mayor David Miller faced some tough interviews during his two terms as Mayor of Toronto, but perhaps none quite like this 2008 interview with one Lupe Dominguez (aka Melissa D’Agostino).
Since that time, the City of Toronto elected a new Mayor, Rob Ford, and Lupe would like to get to know him better. She’s having a Christmas party this year and has put out a passionate plea to ask Mayor Ford to join in the festivities:
Lupe extends an invite to current Toronto Mayor Rob Ford
Click to Enlarge
Mayor Ford is a tweeter, so perhaps he’ll attend Lupe’s A Very Lupe Xmas this Wednesday, December 14th, at 8pm? It will be a twitter-friendly performance, complete with tweet seats.
As Co-Producer of Lupe’s party, I will be there tweeting from my personal account @AislinnTO.We’ll be using the hashtag #LupeXmas, and I’d love to be able to add another hashtag: #FordXmas. See you there Mayor Ford?
Click here for all the relevant production details on the A Very Lupe Xmas Facebook event,
Click here to see the entire offering of promotional videos highlighting each of the “wise men”, and her right-hand man, Pepe, on their Indie Go Go page.
Aviva Armour-Ostroff as Dee. Set and Costumes by Scott Penner. Photo by Will O'Hare
“Jesus Chrysler is currently onstage at a re-imagined Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace. It is an important Toronto story about our history. My jaw dropped and I said “wow” out loud when I entered the transformed theatre. I was immediately transported into another world and welcomed by fellow comrades. It was like a child seeing Santa’s Village at the mall for the first time.”
George Perry- Mooney on Theatre
No matter what night of the week, you can see Jesus Chrysler for $20. Only $15 for weekend matinees.
As a follow-up to last week’s post, here are the two pieces that I created as a response to The Aftermath and The Debacle. The three workshop productions that are featured at the New Groundswell Festival this year are so incredibly different from one another – in content, style and approach. Nightwood Theatre’s New Groundswell Festival runs until Saturday December 10th. So you’ve still got time to get there!
The Aftermath Materials: Toy Bird’s Nest, Paint, Newspaper Text
The Debacle Materials: Mason Jar, Found Images, Tape, Music Box Blueprint
The Aftermath, by Lisa Codrington, is directed by Audrey Dwyer and features Lisa Codrington and Ijeoma Emesowum.
The Debacle is by Ann-Marie Kerr and Susan Leblanc-Crawford (Zuppa Theatre, Halifax)
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Shira Leuchter makes performance stuff and other art stuff. She recently worked with UnSpun Theatre on a new piece that was performed as part of Harbourfront’s HATCH program.
Her website is here and she collects all of her shallowest thoughts here.
Inspired by the time Eugenia “Jim” Watts’ spent as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War, the game has seven levels of increasing difficulty as you pick up wounded comrades (pinkos), which earns you points while you avoid fascist soldiers, their bullets and boulders.
Cecily got her start making games through The Difference Engine Initiative, which “aims to diversify what kind of videogames are made” by “introducing new gamemakers from under-represented groups”.
What is your high score? Can you finish Save a Pinko? Only Cecily has completed the game so far, so it is difficult to complete but it is possible…
The budget brought forward on November 28 recommends a 10% cut to arts grants totaling $1.94 million. Budget deputations will be heard on December 7 and 8, and the final budget will be approved by City Council on January 17.
Friends of the Arts and its 20,000 supporters from every Ward calls on all City Councillors to support sustained investment in grants to artists and arts organizations in the 2012 budget.
The impact of a $1.94 million cut (10%) to arts grants will be extremely serious for Toronto residents, arts organizations and artists while offering very little short-term savings for the City’s bottom line. It will directly cause:
Reduced investment in Toronto: for every $1 granted by the City, $17.75 is raised from other sources in support of arts organizations. If a 10% cut were applied to Toronto’s arts organizations (large and small) it would translate into a $25 million loss of investment in Toronto, affecting jobs, performances, festivals and exhibitions.
Fewer arts projects in neighbourhoods across the city: TAC currently supports 250 arts projects annually with grants totaling just over $1 million.
Fewer individual artists will receive support: TAC currently supports 200 individual artists including writers, composers, visual and media artists with grants totaling just over $1 million.
Over 20,000 Torontonians from every ward in the City have signed the Friends of the Arts petition, calling on Toronto City Councillors to maintain investment in the arts.
In May 2011, Toronto City Council voted unanimously in favour of the Creative Capital Gains report recommending increased support for the arts to $25 per capita.
The current recommendation would reduce the city’s support for the arts to just $17 per capita, much less than competitive North American cities.
Arts and culture are essential to Toronto’s economy, generating $9 billion every year. The city achieves this economic return on a relatively small arts investment.
130,000 people work in the sector – and many more depend on related businesses, including those in hospitality and tourism.
Toronto’s arts scene is a big part of what makes Toronto a great place to live, work and visit – yet Toronto invests less in the arts than other major cities; City Council has been working to change that, and it must stay the course.
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Friends of the Arts is a network of arts supporters including the following organizations: Arts Vote Toronto, Arts Etobicoke, BeautifulCity.ca, Business for the Arts, Creative Trust, Lakeshore Arts, Scarborough Arts, Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts, Toronto Arts Foundation, Urban Arts.
Margaret Evans as Jim (r) with Jeffrey Wetsch as Nate (l). Photo By Will O'Hare
With a 40-person capacity and a run that closes December 11th, Jesus Chrysler is presented in a special Sunday night performance with Pay What You Can tickets available at the door on Sunday December 4th @ 7:30 PM.
Guess what? Nightwood Theatre’s Groundswell Festival opens today! This year, Nightwood has re-envisioned the festival as a national festival of contemporary women’s theatre. The festival offers masterclasses, workshops, readings and more, and it’s all about process, so it’s really fitting that I’ve been invited to sit in on rehearsals for all three workshop productions for this series.
To start, I sat in on a rehearsal for Jordi Mand’s Between the Sheets. It’s directed by Kelly Thornton and features Susan Coyne and Christine Horne. There’s some really lovely work being done here, and I’m not just saying that because Jordi is my cousin. This is the piece that I created as a response to their process. I’ll share the pieces I make based on both The Aftermath and The Debacle very soon.
Shira Leuchter makes performance stuff and other art stuff. She recently worked with UnSpun Theatre on a new piece that was performed as part of Harbourfront’s HATCH program.
Her website is here and she collects all of her shallowest thoughts here.
As the artistic leaders of The Worker’s Theatre movement in Canada during The Great Depression, Dorothy Livesay (Dee) and Eugenia Watts (Jim), upon whom Tara Beagan’s new play Jesus Chrysler is based, grew up as good friends and were some of Toronto’s original radical organizers. Based out of U of T’s Hart House Theatre, the two were part of a group that staged agitprop plays that traveled throughout South-Western Ontario in Jim’s car, which they called The Jesus Chrysler.
Members of The Progressive Arts Club including Jim Watts top left. Click to enlarge.
These performances were sometimes done for a handful of interested onlookers and sometimes performed for thousands: When they performed in solidarity with mostly immigrant women cannery workers on strike in St. Catharines they were run out of town by the police. When they performed during the Stratford furniture strike at The Brooks Steam Motor plant they did so for an audience of 3,500, or twice the number that would pack a sold-out Stratford Festival Theatre today.
Eventually these artists went on to stage Eight Men Speak, widely viewed by cultural historians as a key event that motivated the release of Communist leader Tim Buck and his colleagues from the Kingston Penitentiary and signalled the end of the use of the draconian law Section 98, which could be used to jail anyone the state deemed “seditious”. Later in the 1930s, they became inspired by NYC’s Group Theatre and the works of Clifford Odets. Founding a new theatre group called Theatre of Action, they presented the Canadian premiere of Waiting for Lefty and a number of anti-fascist works.
By 1937, Jim had left for Spain where a civil war raged and she hosted a radio show, wrote articles for a progressive newspaper and drove an ambulance. Dee went on to become a major poet after the war, winning two Governor General awards and eventually becoming an officer of The Order of Canada.
Jesus Chrysler explores the complex relationship between these women and focuses on an imagined episode in and around the founding of the Theatre of Action.
Alan Filewod’s Committing Theatre begins with a single event from June 1919. Unable to get a response from his government about how the upkeep of city properties are impacting his private garden, a man goes to City Hall and presents the Mayor of Vancouver’s secretary with a bouquet of flowers picked from properties that adjoin his. The bouquet is covered with caterpillars.
This is an important refrain throughout the book. Filewod starts before the 1920s radio sermons of Social Credit founder and eventual Alberta Premier William Aberhart, and takes us all the way to the current Toronto-based practices of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Darren O’Donnell. Throughout, Filewod keeps returning to the caterpillar episode he considers an example of what Bertolt Brecht would later call gest, “a theatricalised action that embodies, enacts and watches a social critique.”
Reading much this expansive history of Canadian political theatre sitting in and around Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in NYC, I couldn’t help but speculate that these occupations of public spaces have something in common with the man who walked into Vancouver City Hall a century ago. Both are frustrated with a perceived injustice their government will not listen to, and both are determined to express this frustration through a non-violent gesture that exists physically in the real world. Both the Occupy protests and the man with a bouquet of caterpillars commit a consciously theatrical act.
Click below to read the rest of the review on Rabble.ca
“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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