News: (Toronto) SummerWorks Launch Event (Report)

Launching SummerWorks: 
The countdown begins
by Lisa McKeown 
@lisammckeown

SummerWorks started, in the 90s, as a Fringe Festival, transitioning to a fully juried Festival around the turn of the century. It also now features predominantly new Canadian works, and is a great breeding ground for all kinds of Canadian artists working in dance, theatre, and performance art more broadly construed. Last Friday was their annual Launch Party for the Festival, comprised of the VIP portion in the early evening, and followed by a Pay What You Can dance party. 

Michael Rubenfield, the current artistic director of the Festival, was one of the hosts of the evening, amusing the crowd with his spontaneous humour. Peppered around the surrounding gates were the posters of the upcoming Festival's lineup, and throughout the evening the guests were treated to a sampling of some of the performances and exhibits that will be a part of the Festival in August. A Maracatu band (from the upcoming Maracatu You!) started off the night with drums, singing, and dancing. Passers-by on Queen Street even stopped to watch the band's lively anthems.

Review: (Toronto) Schützen (SummerWorks)

Ready, aim…Educate?
Schützen misses the mark
by Gregory Bunker

Schützen, a work making its North American debut from Berlin, is about shooting people. The mercifully charming Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt reports on her research about the aforementioned, with field-recorded effects courtesy of front-row assistant Matthias Meppelink. Fourth wall removed, Ullerup Schmidt tells the audience that no violence would be a part of the show in a backhanded way so-if-you-see-violence-it’s-real kind of way. The reassurance-turned-warning was a promising trick that—considering that the topic is guns—made me both anxious and excited. But the yoga quickly mitigated that and I started to feel like I was quietly rooting for a friend to slam-dunk her high school presentation in a strangely nostalgic, now-let’s-go-out-and-play kind of way. So went the first 30 minutes, and then we actually went out to play.

Review: (Toronto) Delicacy (SummerWorks)

From left, clockwise: Tennille Read, Andy Trithardt, Kelly McCormack, Kaleb Alexander (photo credit: ZAIDEN)

On a delicate subject...
by Zoe Erwin-Longstaff

Theatre Brouhaha promises to produce work that will wow the 'HBO generation'. This helps to explain why watching Artistic Director, Kat Sandler’s, new play Delicacy, at the Lower Ossington Theatre, I felt more like part of a studio audience than someone watching a play.  The set, suggestive of ones seen on sitcoms, a sea of white, done up with all the flourishes of crude wealth, from a tacky shag rug, to a hideously expensive phallic sculpture. 

Review: (Toronto) Murderers Confess at Christmastime

Just Damn Good
by Jason Booker

As the title might indicate, Murderers Confess at Christmastime gets a bit dark. 

Jason Chinn's play subverts the "most wonderful time of the year" into a chance for a cross-dressing kidnapper, a drug-addicted former model and a rejected office worker to let the crumbs of Santa's cookies fall where they must. The piece cuts between the three scenarios to expose us to the ever-delightful Amy Keating, the nebbish Aaron Willis and the tenderness of Tony Nappo delivering outstanding performances. However none of these seven actors should be shrugged off either.

Review: (Toronto) For Me? (SummerWorks)

Unconventional Questions
by Jason Booker

For Me? begins in one place and ends in another, like so many of the human relationships the piece seeks to explore.

The audience assembles in the lobby of the nearby theatre and walks (or cycles) the six blocks to the designated location, outdoors, beside some decommissioned train tracks, in front of an outdoor parking garage. There, Kate Alton and Luke Garwood stand, between a pair of audio speakers, stools prepared for viewers who care to sit.

Review: (Toronto) A Side of Dreams (SummerWorks)

I Dream a Dream
by Winna Tse
@tsewinna

A Side of Dreams, brought to us by Paper Canoe Projects, is indeed like a dream. It is about an emotional journey of one's spiritual awakening through the world of dreams.  A single mother, Katherine, searches for her cultural identity, as a Métis, through the spirit of the Dreamcatcher. Visually spectacular, the lighting, projection design, and rich sounds greatly enhance the overall essence of a dream like state. The feeling is ethereal and unusual where at times the plot can be a bit perplexing to follow just like many dreams. 

Review: (Toronto) Oubliette (SummerWorks)

Dead-Wringer
by Lisa McKeown
@lisammckeown

Entering the backspace of the Theatre Passe Muraille is like entering a kind of cave, the perfect setting for Think, Pig’s production of Oubliette. ‘Oubliette’ literally means ‘forgotten place’: a term used for the dungeon where captors would throw prisoners they wanted to forget. The lights come up on four such prisoners; four forgotten women, and all they can see is one small red light. 

Review: (Toronto) X (SummerWorks)

Technical Delight
by Jason Booker

Sunny Drake's X, a show that the performer claims is not autobiographical, combines puppetry, projections, song, stop-motion animation, dance, monologue and meta-theatre to tell the story of a pair of queer siblings, Jamie and Caitlin, in Australia each dealing with their own addictions: sexual and alcohol-related.

Review: (Toronto) Eating Pomegranates Naked (SummerWorks)

Secrets Will Out. 

by Ramya Jegatheesan

@RamyaJImages

Five friends are at a dinner party. There’s a discarded pregnancy test, a snoopy new wife, a single thoughtless off-the-cuff remark and the devastating revelation that follows. That’s all it takes to set off the chain reaction of confessions and confrontations that lays bare the internal organs of the play’s romantic relationships but also threatens to rupture them. 

Andrea Scott’s Eating Pomegranates Naked forces us to grapple with some deep questions. What does it mean to be a woman? To be married? To be infertile? And what place does truth have in a relationship? 

Sunday Feature: Nathalie Mathieson on Show and Tell Alexander Bell (SummerWorks)

Communication Takes Centre Stage
Show and Tell Alexander Bell is a lively, somewhat strange version of the story of Bell’s invention of the telephone.
by Nathalie Mathieson

Natalie Mathieson is a core member and co-founder of Ars Mechanica, a Toronto-based theatre company dedicated to exploring history, technology and magic. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing her dissertation on Holocaust representation, and has been supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Ms Mathieson has taught at the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo, the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, and is a part-time child and youth worker at a shelter for women and children.

On April 20th, 1877, Benjamin Peirce and 15 other people signed a petition addressed to Alexander Graham Bell. They weren’t petitioning against his contested telephone patent, or his controversial beliefs, such as those written in “Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.” Only a year after the invention of Bell’s telephone, the Bostonians requested that the inventor publicly demonstrate his fascinating invention in their city. 

In the letter, Peirce and the others—all men—pleaded not to be able to use the telephone themselves. They wished to hear the telephone…and to see it. It is likely that these men understood that time and other practical factors would have prohibited a more participatory interaction with the telephone. It is also likely that they knew that Bell made a habit of personally demonstrating his invention.

Review: (Toronto) Entitlement (SummerWorks)

Entitled to a Play
by Jason Booker

Entitlement: the fact of having a right to something. Is it wrong to hope that means a script that has been drafted and corrected, dramaturged or workshopped, thought through and questioned and, ultimately, rewritten? Does an audience have a right to expect that or is that simply a case of entitlement?

Review: (Toronto) Zero Visibility (SummerWorks)

Very Real and Personal
by Lisa McKeown
@lisammckeown

David Mamet once wrote that it’s in our nature to dramatize things as impersonal as the weather, in order to understand its personal meaning to us as the protagonist of the individual drama we understand our life to be. This show is about a snowstorm – but it’s also about much more than that.  It is about the havoc this blizzard wreaks on the lives of six young women struggling to find their place in what often feels to be a cold and disconnected world. As the characters attempt to get to an audition, a memorial service, and eventually a party, we’re given updates on the storm’s effects by a television reporter, making the storm less metaphorical and more concrete as we see the citizens who pass by, searching for what they’ve lost, both literally and figuratively.

Review: (Toronto) Utopia (Summerworks)

Utopia’s Planet-Sized Crutch

by Ramya Jegatheesan

@RamyaJImages

This is a story that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Karen (Rebekah Chassé) is a struggling Christmas-tree farmer and single mother in the Maritimes. She and her rebellious teenage daughter Jess (Sam Kamras) clash daily. Zach (Jake Martin), the farmhand cum drug dealer, is Jess’s questionable object of affection. They live in a place of desperation, a place without a future. “Miracles don’t happen to people like us,” says Jess. 

Review: (Toronto) Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains (SummerWorks)

WILD DOGS GIVE A HELL OF A BITE
by joel fishbane

Part Chekhov, part Christopher Hampton, Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains is an old fashioned play with a hell of a lot of bite. Written by Anthony MacMahon, a playwriting member of the Soulpepper Academy, Wild Dogs uses the 2011 Moscow Riots as a backdrop for exploring the lives of three young Russians lost in a city that, as one character describes it, is just a body on live support – a heart without a brain. Fortunately, the play is nothing like Russia. Wild Dogs has both a heart and a brain – and they’re working at full steam.

Review: (Toronto) girls! girls! girls! (SummerWorks)

THE CRUELTY OF CHILDREN
by joel fishbane
@joelfishbane

The great Satanic joy of Greg MacArthur’s girls! girls! girls! is how innocuous it all seems; what starts off as a comical look at precocious small town children quickly spirals into something much darker. It’s a bit of a sinister magic trick, one which the new production by Present Danger Productions, premiering at SummerWorks, clearly understands. A smart and elegant production, the cast – shepherded by directors Jessica Carmichael and Donna Marie Baratta – merrily lead the audience down the shadowy road. 

News: (Toronto) SummerWorks launch

Michael Rubenfeld

Guns, Magic, Space, Elvis
SummerWorks 2013 excites
by Gregory Bunker

“…Sounds of the sea,” were the words that ended a poem spontaneously composed by Four Words, an interactive experiment where party guests joined Sook-Yin Lee, Adam Litovitz, and Max Chandler in creating poetry, four words at a time. It was one of many interactive art pieces meant to entertain and intrigue the patrons at last night’s fundraiser bash in Toronto’s historic Campbell House. This 23rd season of the SummerWorks Festival will showcase over 70 original pieces of theatre, live art, and music from August 8th to the 18th in venues across the city. SummerWorks is the largest juried performance festival in the country, featuring boundary-pushers from Canada and beyond. Here’s a quick look at some of what’s to come.

One of the “and beyond” pieces creating buzz is Schützen by Danish performance artist Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt and German Matthias Meppelink, making its way from Berlin for its North American premiere at the festival. Schützen is a trilogy about the human ability to kill and its effects on the body. It is based on the artists’ interviews of American drone pilots, Israeli troops, and Berliners at a shooting range. Last night audio clips of these interviews were available for listening, as were clips of seriously slowed down shots from an AK-47. The former was raw interview material with the odd skip and cut; the latter sounded less like a gun and more like a spaceship taking off. What kind of marriage will these clips make?