Margaret Evans plays Eugenia "Jim" Watts in Section 98
by Simon Rice and Michael Wheeler
Like any good tyrannical minority government gearing up for a fall election, Praxis is shaking it up! Nothing beats a cabinet shuffle to temporarily boost polling numbers for an independent theatre company.
Kidding… Sort of. We are making some changes at Praxis and they are lateral, but you know in the theatre world lateral means diagonal.
We wouldn’t have the wiggle room to be so obtuse if Margaret Evans, Maggie as we all know her, had not been General Manager of Praxis for the last 2 1/2 years.
Under Maggie’s tenure Praxis produced four shows, the scope of which were our largest thus far, both creatively and budget-wise. She also oversaw the creation of our board of directors, and was steward of the most successful fundraising campaigns in the history of the company.
Despite these skills and accomplishments, her greatest asset is actually as a performer. Margaret will be retiring from her role as GM of Praxis and will be taking a more front and central role as an actor/creator in our production of Section 98, continuing her work playing Eugenia “Jim” Watts, the legendary 1930s political artist and Spanish Civil War ambulance driver and radio host.
Aislinn Rose - Praxis' new Artistic Producer
Continuing in the diagonal tradition, Aislinn Rose will be rewriting the books as Artistic Producer at Praxis. Over the past year she has acted as Script Supervisor on our 2009 Toronto Fringe production of Tim Buck 2, as well as Director of the Open Source Theatre Project for Section 98, presented as part of Harbourfront Centre’s 2010 HATCH season. As Artistic Producer she will be handling Praxis’ day to day operations as well as developing a new creative project… More on this soon.
We should also mention that she has a non-Praxis show running right now, Amy Zuch’s Key to Key, which she directs for this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival at the Royal St. George venue until Saturday July 1o.
We’ve all been part of the conversation, the one about theatre criticism in Toronto and what works and what doesn’t; the desire to label it all as cartoonish super-vilainry, the exceptions to the rule, and the wonderful discussion we know can be had if only there were a place for it. I was having one of these conversations last month with a few artists at The Hub (don’t worry if you haven’t heard of us… yet) and we decided to put that fancy website of ours to some use.
With Fringe and Summerworks and so much else happening in Toronto this summer, we wanted to create a space for artists and audiences to have a real discussion about the work. Something to redistribute the power and voice of theatre criticism that has become increasingly centralized in this city.
It’s called Constructive Criticism – basically it’s a wiki-critic. Artists can send us info about their show (theatre, dance, performance, anything artistic) and we give them a free listing on our site complete with a discussion board for people to share their thoughts and reactions – and where people involved in the show can have a dialogue with the people who saw it.
We have some simple, and perfectly reasonable (rules) that we expect everyone to follow. They basically boil down to: try to be constructive, even if you didn’t like the show; speak in complete thoughts and sentences; and try not to be a dick about it. And if you don’t follow our rules, we delete your post.
We’re not trying to be mean or to censor anyone, but we are trying to foster an intelligent discussion.
And this is not done to wage a war on print or online journalists. For every idiot out there there are is at least one thoughtful and informed voice to match. All we want is to bring the power of criticism back to the community so that they can become more informed, knowledgeable and critical of the art they engage with. Your show may not be for everyone, but it is the perfect show for someone – and this is the tool we can all use to make those connections happen.
All of the Fringe shows are now up on the site, so check out hubtheatreproject.ca and talk about all the amazing shows you see this summer.
And if you’ve got a problem, a suggestion or just want to say hi – please (drop us a note)[mailto:mark@hubtheatreproject.ca]. This is still new, always growing and we love love love to get feedback.
Approximately 100 people were penned into the intersection of Spadina and Queen from 5:30pm to 9:42pm on June 27th. A number of them were unsuspecting passersby in the wrong place at the wrong time. During most of this saga there were severe thunderstorms. No one was given access to washrooms, many complained their cellphones broke from immersion in such a heavy downpour for such an extended period of time. They were all released unconditionally without charges.
As hopefully even a casual observer of this website knows, Praxis Theatre has been spending the past year working on a show called Section 98 (see the icon in the top right corner?). This show began by looking at artists who responded to members of the Communist Party being jailed under Section 98which allowedauthorities to jail and harass anyone they wanted really for “unlawful associations”. In particular, we focused on The Progressive Arts Club, who created a play addressing the erosion of civil rights called Eight Men Speak. The show had a single performance for 1200 people before being shut down by order of Prime Minister Bennett. The performance took place at the Standard Theatre, which was located a few blocks north of the picture above on Spadina Ave.
In both our Fringe Show and Harbourfront Centre HATCH workshop, we looked also at a number of different challenges to civil rights in Canada, including The FLQ crisis, The Air India bombing, the Afghan detainee situation and yes, Omar Khadr. After this weekend, it seems there is another episode in Canada’s civil rights history to add to our list: G20.
CBC reports that there have now been more arrests this weekend than at the WTO Protests in Seattle or during The FLQ Crisis in Quebec. 900 Canadians found themselves jailed by the largest mobilization of police and equipment in Canadian history.
This video documents police assaulting a journalist and taking his equipment.
Already this law will be subjected to a Charter challenge and both the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star penned scathing editorials condemning the secretive limiting of civil liberties by the Liberal Government without notice or debate. Just to drum in what kind of pre-hysteria consensus there was on this topic, even reactionary columnists like Marcus Gee agreed that this time the state had overstepped its bounds.
News of their decreased access to Charter rights reached Torontonians on Friday morning, one day before small cells of approximately 70 black clad activists using subterfuge and misdirection hijacked a march by more than 10,000 advocates for global justice. I attended the march on June 26th by myself, arriving late for the speeches but just in time to march with my bike and camera phone in tow. The vast majority of the experience was what I would call upbeat, peaceful and extraordinarily well attended. The hundreds of police outside the US embassy just seemed obscene, free hugs were given out at Dundas and University, somebody was smoking a joint, Tibetan activists marched with labour activists who marched with just plain old citizens with no evident affiliation. The number of police visible between Queen and Front at north-south intersections seemed comic at the time.
These are some of the shots I took with my camera phone during the march
The first signs of trouble began at the corner of Queen and Spadina where activists were asked to turn away from the summit site and begin marching back to the provincial legislature at Queen’s Park at College and Spadina. A group of hooded activists began to set off flares near the south-west corner of the intersection. Immediately you could feel the mood of the crowd change. I heard a number of plans to vacate the area be made quickly by many, but huge amounts of curious onlookers remained: The whole thing was so crazy it was hard to turn away -hundreds of cops marching like stormtroopers (the Star Wars kind), fireworks, people who looked like ninjas – there was a lot to take in. I was jolted out of this display by a number of individuals running east with purpose down the back alleys that run behind the north side of Queen St. There was an energy to their movements that spooked me and reminded me of protests run amok from my youth. I knew I didn’t need to be there anymore. Got on my bike, started riding home.
Didn’t get there before my Mom and brother both called me and asked me the same question: “Where are you?” They were watching the news and vandalism had begun. (No not violence, vandalism.) I rode home faster to turn on the television. In front of me on the television, where I had removed my k-way pants in front of Steve’s Music not 45 minutes earlier, something terrible was happening: The message that so many of us had just marched to give a voice to was superseded by a small number of what the media are calling “anarchists”, but I think are more accurately termed “nihilists”. I write this because true anarchists have a value system that allows them to determine the effectiveness of their tactics. Orwell fought in Spain against the Fascists with anarchists – these folks are disaffected youth that are into extreme sports and clearly they don’t care if they do Stephen Harper a really big favour.
The other favour they did was to give motivation to the most militant aspects of Toronto Police leadership to mobilize their massive security resources to crack down on Canadians in a way the streets of Toronto haven’t seen since Section 98 was still on the books. Journalists were arrested and had their equipment confiscated on Yonge St., peaceful protesters sitting on the lawn of the sanctioned and designated protest site at Queen’s Park were clubbed and pepper sprayed, demonstrators whose provocation was singing the national anthem were charged and beaten on Queen St. W.
This video shows police beating and pepper spraying activists who returned to the provincial legislature, which was the designated protest zone. This area is in the opposite direction from where the summit took place.
All the places we normally hang out, grab a coffee, do some shopping, became violent zones where the state machinery could capture you, process you, and ship you to a cage. These are simply the incidents we have immediate video footage of hours after G20 has concluded. Reports from those released from the makeshift jail at the film studios on Eastern Ave. paint a grim picture of “pens” crammed with activists that had no access to a lawyer for up to twenty-four hours. Female inmates reported being forced to use the toilet in front of male guards and not having access to toilet paper.
There is virtually no silver lining to hosting G20. None of the things that Canadians consistently say matter to them made the agenda at the G20. The environment, foreign aid, our responsibilities to one another as global citizens – these things all took a backseat to the images and incidents that ripped across the city. No one talked about Why the banks were bailed out. No one talked about Why we refuse to fund life-saving drugs for HIV positive patients in Africa. No one talked about What principals underpin maternal health. No one talked about Why if it costs the U.N. $1.9 Billion to run year-round and Why it will cost almost the same to host three days of meetings that could have happened at the U.N. anyway. No one talked about What effect climate change will have on the world’s poor.
Every newspaper and media outlet spent the weekend throwing together exposes on “The Black Bloc” and their tactics. Less than 1% of the demonstrators hijacked an entire conversation and thousands of voices. Elements of police leadership jumped at this opportunity and used tactics and laws never before deemed acceptable against law-abiding activists.
Canada has a long history of struggling to secure national and public security while attempting to balance the public’s right to the basic freedoms that are assumed in a Western democracy. This weekend is full of bad omens for those who believe that Charter freedoms should be protected for all Canadians and that those in power can be trusted to preserve them. We have seen the state become a weapon against its own citizens – and the only correct response should be outrage that our leaders don’t safeguard our freedoms with the reverence and respect they deserve. We have lost much and gained nothing.
This video shows police attacking peaceful protesters singing the national anthem.
The Thief and the Cobbler was conceived by Canadian animator Richard Williams, who worked 26 years on the project.
“[Williams is] an incredible animator, though. Incredible. One of the biggest problems we had was trying our desperate best, where we had brand new footage, to come up to the level of quality that he had set.”
—Fred Calvert
The first time that the Miramax version of the film appeared on DVD, was in Canada in 2001 as a giveaway promotion in packages of Kellogg’s Froot Loops cereal.
Amy Zuch is the solo performer and writer behind “Key to Key.” A regular improviser at the Bad Dog Theatre, Amy has also appeared on stand up comedy stages across the city, in musical theatre productions, and in the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival.
Amy Zuch’s Key to Key, the true story of an animator pulled from fantasy and dropped into the real world, opens at the Toronto Fringe Festival on July 2nd at the air conditioned Royal St. George Auditorium, 120 Howland Avenue (North of Bloor). More information available here on Facebook, and buy advance tickets here.
inFORMING CONTENT Workshop Leader Deborah Pearson leads a workshop exploring immersive theatre and its relationship to ethics.
FREE EVENT June 19: 10am – 1pm
A series of brief “ethics talks” on a range of topics from post-graduate ethicists from the University of Toronto. current . urgent . compelling.
FREE EVENT June 20: 7pm – 9pm
Workshop participants will respond to the “ethics talks” by creating site-specific theatre. immediate . experimental . intimate .
Performances will be directed by Team Leaders Claire Calnan, Susanna Hood, Ravi Jain, Michael Rubenfeld, Mumbi Tindyebwa.
More information available here and here on the Africa Trilogy Blog, and here on Facebook.
Deborah Pearson is co-director of the artist-led experimental Edinburgh Fringe venue Forest Fringe. In January she and her co-director Andy Field were named in the Stage List of the 100 most influential figures in UK Theatre.
In his 1999 provocation, True and False: Common Sense and Heresy for the Actor, David Mamet asserts, “most teachers of acting are frauds, and their schools offer nothing other than the right to consider oneself part of the theatre… Formal education for the player is not only useless, but hurtful,” says Mamet. “It stresses the academic model and denies the primacy of the interchange with the audience.”
Let me be clear, while I believe Mamet’s edicts to be wonderful conversation starters they are limited in their worth, not to mention hypocritical—he is himself an acting teacher.
Theatre schools are indeed strange places, seemingly full of contradiction. They are almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t attended one. At my earliest (and unsuccessful) audition for a prominent Toronto theatre school, I and the other nervous applicants were treated to a half hour lecture on why we shouldn’t go to school for acting. Perhaps this was an attempt to weed out those who didn’t have the conviction or depth of character required to survive three years of physical and emotional turmoil.
Theatre schools, not unlike some other training programs for highly competitive fields, seem to have adopted the baptism by fire approach. If you can survive it, you can survive anything, with the exception, perhaps, of a career in acting.
When I was finally, after several attempts, accepted into a three-year program, it was explained to my class that our “journey” would be structured more or less in three parts.
First year we would be pulled apart, literally and figuratively. All of our preconceptions about the craft would be exposed to the light of day, all of our “blocks” opened, both physically and mentally. Much of this, “opening” would occur while lying prostrate on a studio floor. We would, we were warned, find this process both painful and confusing.
During second year we would slowly and carefully be pulled from the floor and put back together, so that we could hit the stage on our feet in final year, which would consist primarily of full scale productions.
I suppose, beyond sounding slightly cultish, if it worked it would all be worth in the end.
Six years after graduating I look back at my theatre school experience with a mixture of emotion, which ranges from sweet nostalgia to blinding rage. But when I take a deep breath and the feeling passes I start to wonder.
Do theatre schools in all their various contemporary forms serve young aspiring actors well?
My guess is that the answer to that question depends on individual experience. What school, what teachers, what students etc. And there is no doubt, that from school to school, while there are often great similarities, there are also vast differences in styles, methods, approaches and philosophies.
And so it is in the spirit of genuine open-minded investigation that I will begin a series of conversations here on the Praxis website, called Exit Interviews. I will talk to former theatre school attendees, graduates, non-graduates, as well as former students who are now teachers, from a variety of schools across Canada and North America. My hope is to broaden our understanding of the contemporary theatre school, its strengths and weaknesses, through the honest reflection of those who survived it. Stay tuned!
If you attended theatre school and would like to weigh in on this conversation, please leave us your comments below or send us an email to info@praxistheatre.com. I look forward to the debate!
(l-r) Maev Beaty, Muoi Nene, Araya Mengesha, Dorothy Atabong, Trey Lyford and Milton Barnes in Glo by Christina Anderson directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo
If I promise to incorporate “World Class City” into my lexicon can we keep making shows like this?
by Michael Wheeler
I have been working on this show for a long time.
I started in late 2008 as Artistic Producer in Training with Volcano – and then later as Assistant Director of Peggy Pickit Sees The Face of God by Roland Schimmelpfennig and Social Media Coordinator for the whole Trilogy. These different roles have afforded me a really broad perspective on a how a major international collaboration comes together – in the office, the rehearsal studio, and in the theatre. Thanks Theatre Ontario.
It has been a wild ride – I don’t think anyone involved in the show would argue it’s been an easy process. Ethically, theatrically, collaboratively, creating three new works of theatre that all deal with the contemporary nature of the relationship between Africa and the West has been a challenge that has pushed some top international and domestic artists to reanalyze themselves and their process. There have been few simple questions – so along with that has come complicated answers. From dramaturgy, to casting, to design, to scheduling, to marketing, to ensuring three separate works are having a contemporary conversation with each other – virtually every decision had to be made weighing the consideration of a huge number of factors.
Nothing will melt your mind faster than a production meeting with three directors, three assistant directors, six designers, four stage managers and two production managers.
Sipping my morning coffee on Opening Night Day it has really hit me how much I’ve learned from this process and how much I’m willing to stand behind this production. I am a much more knowledgeable artist because of it and I want to continue to be involved in projects like it: productions that combine top international artists with the best from Canada. I have a track record of being heavily critical of Luminato in the past – specifically because of the lack of opportunity the festival initially held for Canadian artists – and frankly it seems a little strange to be a physical embodiment of a change I was arguing for, but I’ll take it.
The words “World Class” and “City” get thrown around a lot here. It might even be fair to say we are unhealthily obsessed with whether or not Toronto and these words have a positive relationship. Certainly Luminato was born out of the sense it could contribute to this definition. Separate from whether the critics deem this show a hit or a miss in the days to come – shows likeThe Africa Trilogy are most likely to put Toronto on the map in terms of international culture. If we really want to play with the big boys and girls on the world stage it requires these kinds of resources both financially and in terms of the people we can attract to work with us. The surest way to become “World Class” is to make shows WITH other World Class artists.
“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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