and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max
and he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.
And when he came to the place where the wild things are
they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
till Max said “BE STILL!”
and tamed with the magic trick
of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once
and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all
and made him king of all wild things.
“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”
“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper.
And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
~ Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
Image:
Sound:
FeverGraph Theatre Company
Presents a variation of
John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
A physical and auditory deconstruction of John Osborne’s classic text
Continues this week – EXTENDED BY 1 DAY!
Wednesday, September 25th – Sunday, September 29th, 2013
Wednesday-Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 2pm
1093 Queen St. West
Tickets: $20 regular $15 arts worker/student/senior plus applicable service charges
The #G20Romp team in Carcross Desert – the smallest desert in the world, Yukon
by Aislinn Rose
We’ve just arrived in Vancouver from Whitehorse, after an incredible week touring our #G20Romp, You Should Have Stayed Home, to The Yukon.
I have to admit we were all a bit nervous about whether we would find enough detainees from the Whitehorse population to join Tommy in his cage during a pivotal scene in the show. I’m happy to report we had am amazing turnout of over 50 participants over the course of 4 shows, many of whom participated in several, or even all of our performances at The Yukon Arts Centre. With daily rehearsals before each performance, we were able to incorporate new participants for each show, including audience members who felt compelled to take part after hearing Tommy’s story.
Many thanks to the participants of Whitehorse:
Kim Hawkins, Josh Regnier, Zoe Verhees. Liza, Donald Watt, Lianne Maitland, Mallory Pigage, Jeccyka Brown, Mathew Guimond, Brian Fidler, Luc Laferte, Jim Gilpin, Simon Lacombe, Hazel Venzon, Jeff Nordlund, Jennifer Solomon, Katherine Alexander, Linda Leon, Jess Macdaniel, Simon, Maureen Conway, Mary Simon, Shauna Jones, Sarah Johnston, Kate Andre, Lee Ash, Mayuko, Kim Beggs, Ryan McCallion, Marlene Walde, Todd Vanderlinden, Moira Sauer, Conrad Bishop, Sally Wright, JP Pinard, Tracy Allard, The Wheeler family from Dawson City, Matt Guimond, Bianca Martin, Carly & Ashley, David Skelton, Colleen Segriff, and the students from the Music, Art & Drama (M.A.D) program: Danielle, Kat, Sana, Megan, Kestral, Mary, Tory, Kylee, Loughlan, Claire, Caitlyn, and Brooke, and anyone else we may have missed.
Big thanks to our Toronto-based participant coordinator Scott Dermody for helping to make all this happen.
A major thank you is also owed to YAC Artistic Director Eric Epstein and Associate Artist Erin Corbett of the Yukon Arts Centre, who were incredible hosts and truly went above and beyond to make the show a success.
Having demonstrated many superhero skills over the week, Erin even looked after the children of some of our detainees one night to ensure the Wheelers of Dawson City could participate in the show. We were also thrilled to have Eric join the show as a detainee not once, but twice during the run. This tour would not have been possible without our first invitation from Eric Epstein after he saw our original production at SummerWorks in 2011.
Of course, while we were in The Yukon, it was a mix of work, rehearsals, performances, travel, and planning for the other stops on our tour. We each took photos as we made our way, and we’d like to share some of our favourites with you here:
Welcome to Whitehorse!
Gettin’ stuff done, Praxis style
We spotted the Yukon Arts Centre’s awesome poster all over town!
Lighting magic, in progress
Our volunteer detainees play a game of condom ball
The Nothern Lights came out for opening night
On the way to Carcross we came across Emerald Lake…
We met some German tourists who took our photo by the lake.
Stopped by the smallest desert in the world.
Ended up in Carcross to enjoy the view.
Awesome photo from the booth on Saturday night with a great group of detainees
Even on a cloudy last day, the view of Whitehorse from the Arts Centre is amazing
Our view from the plane as we fly away.
Next stop: Vancouver – Firehall Arts Centre!
We’re looking forward to our weeks ahead in Vancouver at The Firehall Arts Centre, before we head back for a Toronto run and then Montreal and Ottawa. We can still use your help to make this entire tour possible. Check out our Indie Go Go campaign here to make a $10 donation. Every $10 helps!
Ready to hit the studio and shit all on your mixtape
Nah, literally, shit all on your mixtape
Wipe with the credits, leave stains on the Jewel case
In just two takes, dog, the booth’ll get souffléd
You’re hiding something like a toupee
Truthfully, my friend: touché
You gon’ get exposed like an up-and-coming model
And to me your label seems like one of them pageant mommas
So guess who’s the little bitch? That’s you
You must suck a lotta dick: That’s true
Praxis Theatre is thrilled to announce their upcoming presentations of You Should Have Stayed Home, the staged adaptation of Tommy Taylor’s viral Facebook note, How I Got Arrested and Abused at G20 in Toronto. The show is a one-man piece of storytelling in the tradition of Spalding Gray, as Taylor recounts 48 hours in his life as a citizen on the streets and eventually caged in the detention centre.
DETAINEES NEEDED!
Part-way through the narrative, there is a scene that incorporates up to 25 participants that can be played by actors and non-actors when the action arrives at a cell in the Eastern Avenue Detention Centre.
In order to incorporate each community on every leg of the tour, Praxis is proud to be working with the support of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Council of Canadians and Amnesty International Canada’s Community Groups, Action Circles and Youth Activism branches, who are putting calls out for participants in each of the cities we visit.
Participants only need to attend one or two short rehearsals and as many performances as can be accommodated by their schedules.
You Should Have Stayed Home is a play about Tommy Taylor’s experience over 48 hours at the 2010 G20 in Toronto. While trying to return home from his first ever protest as a law-abiding citizen at the “Free Speech Zone” at Queen’s Park, Taylor was swept up in a mass arrest, caged with 40 other people in a ten foot by twenty foot cage and denied drinking water until he passed out from dehydration.
Taylor’s Facebook note, How I Got Arrested and Abused at G20 in Toronto went viral in 2010 and has since been translated into seven languages and appeared in twenty-one countries – a detailed, frightening and often funny account of the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. Tommy’s story has been covered by national and international media, including a Gemini-nominated CBC documentary named after the production.
After winning the largest cash award at the 2011 SummerWorks Festival, and becoming one of the festival’s highest grossing shows, Praxis Theatre is about to embark on its largest project ever: a cross-Canada tour to Whitehorse, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.
Ontario Councillors Mark Brownell, Vinetta Strombergs, Aaron Willis and Hume Baugh talking Equity with Praxis in 2012
ONTARIO EQUITY MEMBERS: You are cordially invited to attend this year’s C.A.E.A. Ontario Regional General Meeting!
Where: Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario
When: Monday, September 9th at 7 p.m.
This year’s agenda is packed with many important issues that directly affect you as a member.
1: A preliminary status report from the Executive Director on CTA Engagement Levels 1 & 2
2: A new dues referendum on the horizon
3: Panel Discussion – The Incredible Shrinking Rehearsal Period
A timely examination of best practices in rehearsal. Why are we putting up with less and less rehearsal time in English Canada? How can the situation be improved? What can our association do about it?
Make sure you present your current membership card at the door. Drinks to follow. Join us!
Andrew Coyne is questioned about the role of expertise in the cultural sector. Photo: Dahlia Katz
As moderator of the ‘An End To Arts Funding?‘ debate at SummerWorks, it seems unethical for me to engage in any sort of critique of the arguments presented Wednesday.
I hope to moderate more debates in the future, and I can’t have debaters wary that although I am quite pleasant in person, I’m storing their arguments for digital deconstruction post-event.
However, there have been a number of responses from people who were in attendance and have posted their thoughts online:
Tangentially, a conversation came up at the debate connected to an ongoing discussion in this space: performance and memory.
Mr. Coyne conceded there was probably some role for the state to play in archiving and preserving great works, noting that mark of a great writer is their words survive themselves and their era.
As theatre artists, we can’t aspire for our work to be preserved in the same way. You were either there, or you weren’t, and you missed it. Gone forever. We can archive notes, programs, props – even scripts – but the work itself cannot be preserved (as Holger Syme also notes in his post to makes a different point) in a way that it can be reproduced .
This is neither here nor there with regards to the substance of the debate, but it reminds me that part of what makes live performance distinct is it is ephemeral and I am cool with that.
Photo Credit: Kaz Vorpal via Creative Commons (click for profile)
by Maggie MacDonald
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), predator drones, or just plain drones: we’d better get to know them, as they are soon to know us.
The use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Yemen has sparked ongoing debate in the US, and amongst policy-watchers and academics elsewhere. Artists such as filmmaker Omar Fast have been analyzing the role of the drone pilots, who deliver remote controlled strikes on targets thousands of miles away, against a hazy object that may or may not have been a threat to national security.
Journalists and political scientists alike are asking: even if an individual poses a threat, does extra-judicial killing do anything more than set a dangerous precedent, and inspire survivors to plot a counter-attack against the enemy in the sky?
A computer can already beat a human at chess; when will a computer beat a human at moral reasoning? The musical Young Drones is about two war machines who do just that. From their motherboards springs consciousness, from consciousness, conscience. The UAVs see rabbits attempting to hop across a busy highway, and feel a terrible pain at not being able to rescue the animals from certain death or mortal maiming under the wheels of oncoming cars. Without knowing the rabbits, the drones feel a love for them, and once this love is stirred, it extends to all living things, and to each other.
Through the medium of science fiction rock opera, Young Drones breaks down an all-too-present topic into its most basic, melodic elements, in a way only pop lyrics can do. Take matter, break it down, simplify it, hold it to the light. Underneath the questions about US foreign policy, and unfolding dramas in the War on Terror epic combat theatre, the character of the predator drone is the hero of an ancient storyline about technology itself, one that began when humans first turned wood and stone into weapons in order to gain a fleeting advantage over fellow human rivals.
Image: Amy Siegel
After sticks and stones came hammers and swords. Like the sword, the predator drone calls to question the notion of technological neutrality. Recent attempts to market drones as restaurant helpers, beer delivery devices, and possible pizza-man replacements are similar to the Atomic Energy Commission’s “Atoms for Peace” campaign, which proposed nuclear weapons as tools for dam building and mining. Someone even had the great idea, never realized, to use nuclear bombs to liquify the tar sands, before recent extraction techniques were developed.
Young Drones tells the story of two UAVs developed with one purpose in mind: “Protect the Oil.” That is the anthem the humans sing when launching the devices. But these drones are equipped with something scientists and engineers have long sought to create, but only science fiction writers have succeeded in producing: artificial intelligence. The humans believe that it will make the drones better at securing the landscape, since they are able to assess threat level, strike, and destroy, with minimal human input.
In science fiction film and television, cyborgs like the Terminator are depicted as the zenith of human achievement: killing machines… with a cause. Robocop, T2, the “good” Cylons of the new Battlestar Galactica. Even when the androids do the right thing, they do it by killing the bad guys. Where are the conscientious objector robots? With Young Drones, we propose that if humans created something more intelligent and stronger than our species, that creation would do better than our species. Once in love, the Young Drones refuse to kill.
The androids, robots, cyborgs, and autonomous agents of cinema reflect our self-myths of superman and homo economicus. Greed, the tragedy of the commons, these are stories we tell, though usually with bigger budgets and less special effects than the hits of James Cameron, and Damon Lindelhof (call it denial, but I won’t drag Ridley Scott into this– that’s a fun example cognitive dissonance for you.)
In “Happy Birthday, David” a “viral clip” created to promote the blockbuster Prometheus (the latest in the Aliens franchise), the interviewer asks killer cyborg David, “What makes you sad?” At minute 1:25, he answers, “War, poverty, cruelty, unnecessary violence. I understand human emotions, although I do not feel them myself… This allows me to be more efficient and capable…”
The notion that rationality (and related economic idea “rational self-interest”) is divorced from emotion, empathy, sensitivity, and a feeling of mutual responsibility, has been turned on its head by advances in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science. Yet this myth persists, against the evidence, and it is reflected in the cyborg films that audiences flock to see, where killer robots are born of a confluence of bad ideas from eugenics, to neoliberal economics. The only things our “Young Drones” are willing to destroy are these bad ideas. And the humans cannot order them otherwise.
The drones in our musical are young; like most teenagers, they defy the human parents who create them, to design their own future. It’s never too late to rewrite your program, and aim to be better than the myths of your species.
Image: Amy Siegel
Young Drones
Music: The Bicyles and John Southworth, Writer: Maggie MacDonald, Director: Stephanie Markowitz, Visuals: Amy Siegel
Showing August 15th at Summerworks, Black Box Theatre, 1087 Queen Street West, Doors 9pm
This week SummerWorks Artistic Director Michael Rubenfeld asked me to moderate today’s debate on the question: An End to Arts Funding? Of course I agreed.
It looks to be an exciting discussion, and I look forward to facilitating a fair and rigorous debate on the future of public investment in the arts.
PARTICIPANTS:
PRO: Andrew Coyne
CON:Nadia Ross
Moderator: Michael Wheeler
Andrew Coyne
FORMAT:
INTRO
Bios and Format introduced by Moderator
PRO
Opening statements 7 minutes
CON
Asks any clarifying questions 3 minutes
CON
Opening statements 7 minutes
PRO
Asks any clarifying questions 3 minutes
PRO
Responds to CON arguments and/or connects to their own 7 minutes
Nadia Ross
CON
Responds to PRO arguments and/or connects to their own 7 minutes
PRO
Closing Statement 5 minutes
CON
Closing Statement 5 minutes
AUD
5 x Questions From Audience:
2 minutes max per question, 3 minutes max to respond. 20-ish minutes
The Summerworks Festival has begins today here in Toronto. Already, I am definitely not going to be able to make it to everything I want to see. The lineup of “crazy-ass shit” is pretty phenomenal.
To aid you in your picks, here’s some trailers by companies that are really on top of their marketing and producing, and thus have created short exciting video trailers for their productions:
Camilla’s Bones
Enough Rope
girls! girls! girls!
How Can I Forget? A Multimedia Dream
iShow
The Art of Building a Bunker or Paddling the Canoe of My Self Down the River of Inclusivity and Into the Ass of the World
Most of our revenue at STO Union comes from international festivals. But any creations that we’ve made at STO Union, usually started with a small grant.
When I look at what STO Union has accomplished over the years, on paper, it looks amazing: we’ve toured to the top festivals in the world, we’ve created small pieces that have long shelf lives and that bring in more revenue from fees than any grants they ever receive. But the reality of the job is that it has been more of a vocation than anything else.
I left Toronto officially in 2004. What propelled me out of the city was that I couldn’t stand seeing up close the capitulation of the art world to the market.
I had to find some kind of psychic ‘space’ that was still ‘free’, so I moved to a village in Quebec.
When I think ‘market’, I think of the square in my village where locals go to see their produce and wares. Down the block, there are two churches, restaurants, entertainment venues and a community centre. There are places of business, places for contemplation, places for entertainment, and a place for the community to gather. There’s also a post office, a fire department, and a hospital. I can see more sharply how society functions through the lens of the smaller scale that a village offers me.
What I am seeing is that the separation between what occupies human time is being eroded: when you’ve placed ‘money’ at the top of your priorities, then everything becomes the ‘market’: it affects the way we relate to each other, what we do with our time, how we work. All interactions become subtly, (and sometimes not so subtly), defined by this.
The market takes over the territory and empties it out of its most precious and unique qualities, turning everything into ‘work’. It’s like an invasion or an infection: slowly taking over our relationships, our time, our attention until that is all that we see. For me, as an artist, now is the time to respond to this, with all hands on board.
A recent letter from a professor to the students of Goldsmiths (University of London) to the students sums it up:
“Perhaps you disagree with my point of view – I can understand that you might be entirely resigned to the notion that capitalism will never be overcome. Maybe you have moved beyond this resignation into a full-blown cynicism. The impression you as artists give is often that everything has already been recuperated, that all radicalism is produced broken, that all resistance is already integrated into the capitalist whole. Your works often make the claim of regretting this, but it is a false claim insofar as it is a process to which they happily contribute. Clearly, few of you are actually interested in a critique of capitalism (but a pseudo-critique that sells will have to do), but for those of us who care about art, for those of us who think that art’s critical capacities have not been exhausted and extinguished, for those of us for whom the abolition of capitalism is not a choice but a necessity, you are the enemy.”
The debate I am having with Andrew Coyne is based on completely insane premises:
it doesn’t matter any more whether we go to the governments or to the business community for money to do our Art projects because the government is now too deeply influenced by the business community and corporate state. The liberal class failed to confront the rise of the corporate state and now it ceases to function.
Ultimately, the concept of ‘we don’t feed those who bite the hand that feeds them’ makes all funded art-work ultimately impotent. If it becomes too potent the funding will be withdrawn.
For myself, capitulation to the market has nothing to do with what ‘the people want and are willing to pay for’, it has to do with surrendering our last strongholds, the last bits of territory that the market doesn’t fully control. Without those free and open spaces, we are all just slaves in denial.
Nadia Ross is the artistic director for STO Union, one of the company’s at this year’s SummerWorks Performance Festival (7 Important Things). She lives in Wakefield, Quebec.
*Note the printed SummerWorks Guide incorrectly lists this debate as being on August 11th – it is in fact on August 14th at the Performance Bar at 5pm.
“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.”
FeverGraph Theatre Company
This week SummerWorks Artistic Director Michael Rubenfeld asked me to moderate today’s debate on the question: An End to Arts Funding? Of course I agreed.
On August 14th, as part of 
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