Praxis Theatre

Toronto Mayoral Arts Debate @ The AGO

Director in Training – Return of Tear The Curtain!

This is a trailer for a play! (sort of)

by Michael Wheeler

During the film shoot last winter the stage of The Stanley Theatre was used to get a almost a hundred extras into period hair and make up. This fall the show premieres on the same stage.

Last winter I wrote about my trip to British Columbia to learn more about the work director Kim Collier and The Electric Company are doing combining live and recorded performance as part of my investigation into the relationship between direction and design as Director in Training at The Tarragon Theatre. On my first trip to Vancouver in February 2010 during The Cultural Olympiad, I spent two weeks on the set of the film shoot for the production Tear The Curtain!

As of today I’m back for round two of this project, attending rehearsals and learning as much as I can in the lead-up to opening night of this hybrid film and theatre piece production that will have its world premiere presented by The Arts Club Theatre Company at The Stanley Theatre on September 15. Stay tuned for more about this project as opening night approaches!

SummerWorks 2010 Awards

This year's SummerWorks Awards designed by OCAD student Chao Gao.

SummerWorks Prize for Production:

Winner: Ride the Cyclone

Contra Guys Award for New Work:

Winner: Post Eden

National Theatre School Award for Set or Costume Design:

Winner: Theory

Honourable Mention: Iphigenia at Aulis

Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation:

Winner: Avatar

Canadian Stage Award for Direction:

Winner: Steven McCarthy, Bliss

The Spotlight Award:

Winners:

Edwige Jean-Pierre, Even Darkness is Made of Light

Adam Lazarus, Wonderland

Honourable Mention: Rosemary Dunsmore, Kayak

The Steam Whistle Emerging Artist Award:

Winner: Johnnie Walker, Redheaded Stepchild

Honourable Mention: The entire crew of Countries Shaped Like Stars

RBC Arts Professional Award:

Winner: Foster Child Play

The NOW Magazine Audience Choice Award:

Winner: Ride the Cyclone

Where will you be on Monday morning?

On Monday, August 16th, City Council’s Executive Committee will be meeting to decide on a long-term plan to increase funding to the arts, with new money made available from the recently implemented billboard tax.  Join BeautifulCity.ca in Committee Room 1 at 10am to show your support.

Background information on the 10-year battle of public space advocates to create a Billboard Tax for Art in Toronto can be found here, here and here on the Praxis website, and here on BeautifulCity.ca.

See you there!

Next Stage 2011 Line Up Announced

The Next Stage Festival is a juried uber-fringe held each January at The Factory Theatre. It offers audiences and industry programmers the chance to see both new and reworked productions by successful Fringe artists as they take the leap into the Next Stage of their careers.

Next Stage in the Factory Theatre Mainspace:

At The Sans Hotel
Created & performed by Nicola Gunn Designed by Nicola Gunn with Rebecca Etchell, Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist and Luke Paulding

In a deserted Hotel strewn with familiar remnants, a woman is marooned in a bathtub. She suggests something terrible has happened or is about to happen…

Duel of Ages
by True Edge Productions (with a cast of 21)

This anthology of duelling scenes begins in the 16th century and goes, all the way to its impact on the modern psyche in the age of cinema.

Fairy Tale Ending: The Big Bad Family Musical
Presented by Role Your Own Theatre from Toronto
Music and Lyrics by Kieren MacMillan & Jeremy Hutton

Fairy Tale Ending is a topsy-turvy yet touching tale of a young girl coming to grips with loss and the reality of growing up. NSTF’s first family show for kids and grown-ups – matinees and kids pricing TBD.

The Grace Project **World Premiere**
by Judith Thompson & the ensemble

The Grace Project features courageous young adults sharing their true, life-shaping experiences living with chronic illness.

Next Stage in the Factory Studio Theatre:

The Apology
by Darrah Teitel
Directed by Audrey Dwyer, Performed by: Brendan McMurtry-Howlett, Natasha Greenblatt, Sascha Cole and Daniel Chapman-Smith.

Teenage sexuality coupled with inspired political ideology fan the flames of this anachronistic work set in early 19^th century British high society that discusses the tensions between maternity and feminism, ideology and love in an original story of sexual revelation.

Eating with Lola
Presented by Sulong Theatre
Written and performed by Catherine Hernandez, Directed by Ann Powell

Part confession, part revelation, Lola’s epic tale unravels the entire modern history of Manila from the time of the Thomasites to the second wave of Filipino migration to the United States – one spoonful at a time. A one woman (and one puppet) tour-de-force.

Swan Song of Maria (A Tragic Fairy Tale)
By Carol Cece Anderson
Directed by Mark Cassidy, Music Performed by Hilario Duran, Featuring Lili Francks, John Blackwood and Bridgett Zehr

Inspired by Swan Lake, the piece combines Afro-Cuban-Latin-Jazz, various dance styles and story to navigate a the forty year relationship.

Tom’s a-cold
By David Egan
Directed by Daryl Cloran, Featuring Shane Carty & Brendan Gall

In 1845, HMS Terror and Erebus set sail from England seeking the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. Neither ship was ever seen again. Three years later, two men sit in a lifeboat.

Variation #23: Laurel Green

TEXT:

“It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? It’s so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly toys and send myself a greeting card saying, ‘Congratulations on your Engagement’. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me.”

IMAGE:

SOUND:

(don’t watch…just listen!)
______________________________________________________________________

Laurel Green is an Associate Producer with the 2010 SummerWorks Festival. She is spending her summer vacation helping to organize their first-ever Performance Bar: a collision of theatre, music, and performance hosted by improv heroes The National Theatre of the World.

Fiasco Playhouse runs August 5 – 14th at 9PM on the Ground Floor of the Lower Ossington Theatre (100A Ossington Avenue). PWYC. Full Bar. Air Conditioning

Some thoughts from the internet on the future of theatre

Hipster dance classes are taking off in LA. Photo credit nytimes.com

by Michael Wheeler

The past week has hosted some novel conversations on contemporary theatre and how it is developing. Most interesting is how all of these perspectives are contributing to a larger conversation about what form theatre can take to engage, well, anyone under 40 who isn’t already in theatre. Here are some recent highlights:

In The Guardian, Lee Hall laments that the 20-30% arts funding cuts will bring down the curtain on British theatre’s golden age. At the core of his argument is that the new budgets will leave theatres unable to take artistic risks or be able to nurture and mentor the next generation of artistic talent:

“The post-1945 consensus understood this completely. The need for municipal theatres, the need to fund the experimenters (who of course become the next establishment), the need for national institutions, the need to represent the rich diversity of our society – allowing a place where we can all become richer by including the excluded – was centrally important to the interventions made. But more than this, there was an implicit understanding that our greatest talent could not be nurtured without support.”

Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Huffington Post critic Monica Westin has a decidedly more upbeat perspective on Why Hipsters Will Save Theater in her review of David Cromer’s Cherrywood. Her thesis proposes that the ironic disengagement that permeates hipster culture has the potential to create a new kind of  theatre, that combines both “alienation effect” and “happening”. They (we), are capable of creating and enjoying this new approach to art as “the first generation of bohemian youth culture that’s not going to look like idiots–like the hippies and the punks–later for pretending to have all the answers, when all we had was a new way of dressing stupid.”

“But it’s the combination of the alienation effect and the happening that makes Cherrywood so important. In 1968 Peter Brook declared in The Empty Space that “The alienation effect and the happening effect are similar and opposite–the happening shock is there to smash through all the barriers set up by reason, alienation is to shock us into bringing the best of our reason into play… leading its audience to a juster understanding of the society in which it lived, and so to learning in what ways that society was capable of change.” How does alienation work? According to Brook is can use any rhetoric: “It aims continually at pricking the balloons of rhetorical playing–Chaplin’s contrasting sentimentality and calamity is alienation.” Brook couldn’t imagine a theater piece in which both could happen at once; life now demands this of theater, and Cherrywood delivers it.”

The TKTS iPhone Ap

Of course you can’t be a theatre-conscious hipster looking for the latest, coolest, cheapest tickets you can find without this new Ap for your iPhone, which lists all the Broadway and Off Broadway shows and discount rates that TKTS has available each day. This sort of technology is probably much better suited to attract the new generation of potential theatregoers that make same-day plans and aren’t looking to fork out an arm and a leg for a night out on the town. Is there the potential for indie companies to collaborate through this same technology? Now that we have thrown out the notion that we have to perform in the same space to have marketing/ticketing alliances shouldn’t we be all over this?

If you used your iPhone to get tickets, maybe you should keep using it once the show starts? Over at 2amtheatre they had a multi-perspective post and conversation about the type of interactive, invite the audience to communicate with their PDA during the performance type of stuff Praxis was experimenting with in March at Harbourfront Centre.  The consensus opinion seemed to be that imposing tweets on pre-existing scripts was a recipe for disaster, but that tweeting during shows had the potential to expand the medium if the pieces were built with this level of interactivity in mind. Travis Bedard provided some questions that should be considered while choosing to make work this way:

“But what can this technology enable for a playwright or deviser creating NEW work?

This is another possible tool on the utility belt for writers. It is indeed another entire plane of existence for characters.

Can extra-stage characters exist only in the Twitter-verse? Can the audience team up with one another for or against the stage characters?

What does the interaction between the sequestered, in-space audience and the free range Twitter audience look like?”

How well can the playwright and director control that?”

This last question is probably why there hasn’t been a HUGE amount of experimentation with this sort of thing. It is a process that confers less power to both playwright and director. Unproven methods that reduce the influence of the artistic leaders of a project are tough to get off the ground. I’m also a little confused about why Twitter is the only option being discussed as a technology to do this sort of thing. Facebook statuses, texts, tweets, IM, email, skype – we’re all using interactive digital technologies to improve our capacity to communicate. Why stratify it to a single tool exclusive to, well, hipsters? If we’re going to save theatre, we’re still going to do it with everyone else. It’s also important to remember what can happen when we get obsessed with a particular brand of technology.

Despair and redemption: one man’s journey recovering from IAS

Every year IAS destroys the lives of thousands of performers. This short video is proof positive that no case is hopeless and that this syndrome is treatable if spotted early enough. Watch this video for early warning signs – do you know anyone showing signs of IAS? Identification and treatment may be their best chance for recovery.

Variation #22: Ellen Bayley

Text:

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Image:

Sound:

______________________________________________________________________

Theatre creation workshop led by Jeremy James

One of Ellen Bayley’s many jobs as the The Metcalf Foundation Arts Management Intern at Volcano Theatre, is organizing and promoting The 2010 Volcano Conservatory, which offers intensives and master classes taught by industry leaders for actors, dancers and theatre-makers.

Classes offered between August 16th – 29th in Mnouchkine Technique, Fearless Dancing, Lecoq Red Nose Clown, Viewpoints, Chekhov Technique and more. Don’t miss out!

An open source artistic response to G20?

Normally we like to keep things on this website theatre related, but this video released five days ago by Broken Social Scene relates to two ongoing conversations on praxistheatre.com:

1 Open source collaboration with your audience to create art?

The video was released with the following statement by BSS:

“This video was made as a response to the G20 Summit in Toronto June, 2010. The rest speaks for itself. It was sent to us by a lover of our music who wants to remain anonymous. We are very proud to share this mash-up with you.“

In our March 2010, Harbourfront HATCH workshop of Section 98, which also looked at civil rights abuses, Praxis used an open source development process that solicited feedback and material from our audience over the web. Some of this informed our process and discussions, while some feedback ended up making the final text we staged. Looks like in this case the band has received a great video from the internet, and adopted it as part of their artistic process.

What do you think: Is this “open source” method of creating art a passing fad or a new development in how the interweb will be impacting the creation of contemporary art?

2 What is the artistic response to G20 Toronto?

Well here ya go. Here is a world-renowned group of Toronto-based artists making a statement about what happened here during G20. Well actually someone else made the statement, and they agreed with and approved it. It begs the question, “What was the song Meet me in the Basement about to the band BEFORE the video?” Or does it ? Does music even get made that way? I don’t know, I’m in theatre.

What do you think about the combination of this song and this video? Is it effective, accurate, insightful? Any other positive or negative adjectives you would attach to this work?