News: (Toronto) World Stage Announces details of 2012 Season

Their press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“World Stage is an amazing portal into the current state of international theatre.  It provides a visionary perspective which is risky, urgent, and provocative.”

- Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan

THE WORLD BEGINS IN 2012

Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage 2012 productions and dates announced

TORONTO, ON (Wednesday, July 27, 2011) – Harbourfront Centre today announced the artists, companies and performance dates for the World Stage 2012 series. The series opens February 2012 and continues to offer select works of provocative and cutting-edge international and Canadian contemporary performance.

“I’m excited to present an array of contemporary performance that showcases work from some of the globe's modern masters along with Canadian artists also making a splash in the international performing arts milieu,” said Tina Rasmussen, Artistic Director of World Stage and Director of Performing Arts, Harbourfront Centre. “As the continuing authority in introducing Torontoaudiences to innovative performance, World Stage brings meaningful, thought provoking and relevant work to our stages, for audiences to experience and explore deeper engagement in the ideas of our time.”

A highly acclaimed and diverse programme of artists will perform at Harbourfront Centre’s two first-rate venues – the Fleck Dance Theatre and Enwave Theatre – from Feb. 18 through

May 12, 2012. A selection of artists will be returning to World Stage while others will make their debut in the upcoming season. Seven hand-picked productions from the U.S., the U.K., France, Brazil and Canada will take the stage augmenting decades of progressive world-class performance found only at World Stage; as part of Harbourfront Centre’s commitment to presenting works at the forefront of contemporary artistic practice across disciplines.

Hot on the heels of the 2011 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Production in the Dance Division for Alain Platel/les ballets C de la B’s Out of Context – for Pina, World Stage 2012 presents unrivalled works from world renowned artists Wayne McGregor, The Wooster Group, Compagnie Käfig and Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, in addition to local Canadian artists Shary Boyle and Christine Fellows, Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell, and D.A. Hoskins’ The Dietrich Group.

Additional information for World Stage 2012 will be available in the fall. Tickets to the seven World Stage productions will be on sale to the public on Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011.

Full season listings follow.

World Stage 2012 Season: Productions and Dates

Everything Under the Moon

Shary Boyle and Christine Fellows (Canada)

In association with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Part of Fresh Ground new works, Harbourfront Centre’s national commissioning programme.

Feb. 18-23 (Enwave Theatre)

World premiere. Canada’s celebrated multimedia and visual artist Shary Boyle and renowned musician Christine Fellows have been collaborating since 2005 on works that combine Boyle’s live drawings and projections set to Fellows’ original compositions.Everything Under the Moon follows two small, winged creatures as they set out on an urgent quest to save themselves. The production was commissioned by Harbourfront Centre as part of the Fresh Ground new works programme and was created for audiences of both children and adults.

Entity

Wayne McGregor | Random Dance (England)

Feb. 28 & March 1-3 (Fleck Dance Theatre)

Wayne McGregor, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), is a multi award-winning British choreographer known for his physically testing choreography (including Radiohead’s most recent music video) and ground-breaking collaborations across dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science. An hour-long imagining of post-human beauty through a soundscape created by Coldplay and Massive Attack collaborator Jon Hopkins and award-winning composer Joby Talbot (The Divine Comedy), Entity is a staggering blend of bodies, technology and film that place McGregor at the cutting edge of contemporary culture.

The Wooster Group’s Version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré

The Wooster Group (U.S.)

March 28-31 (Fleck Dance Theatre)

Canadian premiere. Since 1975, New York City’s The Wooster Group has defined experimental and challenging theatre, dance, and media. Last featured at Harbourfront Centre in the 80s with LSD (…Just the High Points), the company now returns to World Stage with their remaking of one of Williams' last plays, Vieux Carré (1977). In the New Orleans boarding house where he stayed as a young man during the Depression, the writer, as narrator, remembers his artistic and sexual awakening among the house’s inhabitants – archetypal Williams characters, longing for release and haunted by thwarted dreams. Appropriating the visual styles of Paul Morrissey and Ryan Trecartin, The Wooster Group finds a kinetic expression of Williams' lyric voice.

Ajax & Little Iliad

Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell (Canada)

April 4-8 (Enwave Theatre) NOTE: Limited capacity of 28 people per performance.

World premiere (Ajax). Toronto creators Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell offer an intimate double bill of works for a small audience. Little Iliad is a multimedia work that tells the story of a writer and his old friend, a soldier soon to be deployed inAfghanistan, who together try to create an adaptation of Sophocles’ war story of betrayal and forgiveness, Philoctetes. Ajaxexpands on the theme, presenting a series of letters addressed to the doomed classical hero. The work shifts the roles of audience and performers, questioning both the responsibilities of civilian and military actors and the surprising relationship between producers of art and producers of military violence.

Paris 1994/Gallery

The Dietrich Group (Canada)

April 25-28 (Enwave Theatre)

Founded in 2008, The Dietrich Group challenges perceptions of the interplay of mediums in live performance; choreographer D.A. Hoskins creates visual art through the medium of dance.

Paris 1994/Gallery explores memory through time. Beginning in the past – a heightened moment between lovers – it moves to the present, looking at how memory offers a constantly changing perspective.

Agwa/Correria

Compagnie Käfig (France/Brazil)

May 2-5 (Fleck Dance Theatre)

Artistic director Mourad Merzouki and Compagnie Käfig, last featured at Harbourfront Centre in World Stage 2004, create hip hop with a complete range of emotional expression. Agwa/Correria is the meeting of Compagnie Käfig’s hip hop with urban dance fromBrazil. Agwa explores the power of water: supply, consumption and contamination – and its beauty, mystery, sensuality and unpredictability. Correria is athletic and acrobatic – a stylized endurance piece about the rush of running and the pleasure of speed.

THE SHIPMENT

Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company (U.S.)

May 9-12 (Enwave Theatre)

Canadian premiere. New York City’s Young Jean Lee became a celebrated new voice in theatre with THE SHIPMENT. The Korean-American playwright/director re-defines satire in her fearsome and fearless exploration of the Black American experience.Suitable for ages six and up.

“Ms. Lee sets you thinking about how we unconsciously process experience — at the theater, or in life — through the filter of racial perspective, and how hard it can be to see the world truly in something other than black and white." — Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage 2012 gratefully acknowledges the support of the Department of Canadian Heritage, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and Westin Harbour Castle, the official host hotel of World Stage.

ABOUT HARBOURFRONT CENTRE
Harbourfront Centre is an innovative, non-profit cultural organization which provides internationally renowned programming in the arts, culture, education and recreation, all within a collection of distinctive venues on a 10-acre site it operates in the heart ofToronto’s downtown waterfront.