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Dancing a score: Mark Morris Dance Group’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato”
Reviewed in this essay: L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Mark Morris Dance Group, which ran June 2013 at Canadian Stage as part of the Luminato Festival During the most recent Luminato Festival, the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) finally reconnected with Canadian audiences after an absence of nearly two decades. L’Allegro exemplifies Morris’ commitment…
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Sensing Silence: Ars Mechanica’s “Show and Tell Alexander Bell” at SummerWorks
Reviewed in this essay: Show and Tell Alexander Bell, Ars Mechanica. Ran August 8-18, 2013 at the SummerWorks Performance Festival. I need to start this review with an apology to Mary, the lovely telephone operator played by Sasha Kovacs who politely, if a little desperately, asked for my digits upon entering the theatre. I obliged,…
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Fringe, Florence, and the Female Eye: T.O. Events for June 20-July 4, 2013
Book Self-Publishing: Production, Marketing, and Distribution is a crash course for writers looking to bypass the traditional trade publishing route. Learn about design, E-books, ISBN registration, and the legal avenues available to protect written works. 6:30-8:15 PM. June 24. Brentwood Library. Free. The 2013 Fringe Festival is a theatrical spectacular that stages 148 performances ranging from…
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Futuristic species love irony too: A review of Marie Chouinard’s “The Golden Mean (Live)”
Reviewed in this essay: The Golden Mean (Live), Compagnie Marie Chouinard, which ran May 8 – May 12, 2013 at Canadian Stage Canadian Stage recently welcomed Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s The Golden Mean (Live), a repertory piece first mounted at the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad. This was the first presentation of a major Marie Chouinard work in Toronto…
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Da Vinci and The Circle at Hot Docs: Science, art, and the imagination
Reviewed in this essay: Da Vinci and The Circle at Hot Docs. “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” So states the Albert Einstein epigraph that prefaces Bram Conjaerts’s documentary The Circle, which is currently playing at the…
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Pussy Riot at Hot Docs: Punk Feminist Performance Art on Trial
Reviewed in this essay: Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, directed by Maxim Pozdorovkin and Mike Lerner, United Kingdom, 2012. Always difficult for a film reviewer is what to do with a film that’s got a really great story, but is not itself a particularly great film. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t run out and…
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Health Care in America: Reichert and Zaman’s Remote Area Medical at Hot Docs
Reviewed in this essay: Remote Area Medical, directed by Jeff Reichert & Farihah Zaman, 2013, United States If there’s a single, insurmountable psychic obstacle to a Canadian’s long-standing fantasy of one day moving to New York it is this one: health care. No other facet of American life (save sometimes guns and prisons) makes the…
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Streamed Theatre, History Mapped Online, and James Reaney’s First Play: Inbox No. 1
We get lots of notices about intriguing events and projects each week. Here’s a sampling. ▶ Nathan Ng describes the Historical Maps of Toronto as follows: “If you’ve ever wondered what ‘Muddy York’ looked like 200 years ago, and then wanted to trace the city’s development over the following century, this ought to pique your…
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Hell in the Round: Soup Can Theatre’s A Hand of Bridge and No Exit
Reviewed in this essay: A Hand of Bridge & No Exit, Soup Can Theatre, which ran Mar. 27-30 at the New Tapestry Opera Studio Soup Can Theatre’s double bill of A Hand of Bridge and No Exit in theatre-in-the-round style emphasizes the blunt reality that we can never get away from other people. No Exit…
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Diplomacy in the doghouse: Dachshund UN
I am a fully grown adult. At 24 years of age, I read heavy books, pay taxes, drink whiskey and, when called upon, can grow a very serious beard. Even so, I have absolutely no immunity to wiener dogs. I find them highly adorable. In their presence, my insides go all fluttery. I make noises along…
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Staging history: A review of Susan Steudel’s poetry collection, New Theatre
Reviewed in this essay: New Theatre by Susan Steudel, Coach House Press, 2012. A high school teacher once passed an antique book of fairy tales around our creative writing class, asking us to make new poems by blacking out and decorating the printed words. Susan Steudel’s debut book of poetry, New Theatre, reminds me of…
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Danger Music: On the Intimacy of Screaming
Reviewed in this Essay: Dick Higgins’s “Danger Music #17” performed by Jenn Cole and Didier Morelli for The Future of Cage: Credo conference at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto, Oct. 26, 2012 Didier Morelli said that when he plunged his head into his kitchen sink to recite Dante’s Inferno,…