Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Since 2003 Abilities Arts Festival – now Tangled Art + Disability
- has employed hundreds of artists and welcomed audiences in the thousands to its annual festivals. Every year, the programming has grown in scope, scale and power and this year is no exception. With an outstanding program featuring renowned performing artists and companies from Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, New York and San Francisco, this is a festival you won’t want to miss!
APRIL 12
Krip-Hop Nation: Toronto
Krip-Hop Nation is a global movement of hip-hop artists with disabilities, founded by Leroy Moore. On April 12, 2014, Tangled Art + Disability will host Canada’s first Krip-Hop Nation event, featuring Leroy Moore himself, as well as a collection of local and international hip-hop artists with disabilities. In anticipation of the event, we have been given a grant to facilitate hip-hop workshops for youth with disabilities. The performance will be entirely accessible including ASL interpretation, wheelchair ramps, captioning, and attendant care.
MAY 2 & 3
THIRD EYE LOOMING: a showcase performance by Workman Arts.
Directed and devised by Ed Roy.
Third Eye Looming is a collaborative theatre piece created and performed by Toronto’s Workman Arts and directed by the esteemed Ed Roy. Combining imagistic theatre, movement, and multi-media, the performance delves into the mind of a man struggling to piece together the shards of his fragmented life after the onset of mental illness.
MAY 9 & 10
RUFF: by Split Britches, a Peggy Shaw solo performance, directed by Lois Weaver.
Peggy Shaw has always had a host of crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands, and eccentric family members living inside her. Ruff is a tribute to those who have kept Shaw company over the last 68 years, a lament for the absence of those who disappeared into the dark holes left behind by her recent stroke, and a celebration that her brain is able to fill the blank green screens with new insight.
Pioneers of the queer and feminist theatre movements, Split Britches’ Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver have defined a generation of performance. For thirty years, their work has challenged assumptions about femininity, sexuality, traditional theatre culture, and recently, ageing.
MAY 23
Pharmakon: A performance by Les Productions des pieds des mains.
Menka Nagrani’s dance-theatre production, featuring six performers, makes use of stop-motion video to address the topic of medicine with humour and sensitivity. Remedy or poison, drugs are part of our lives. The right dose for the right emotions, so we aren’t too afraid, so we smile just enough, so we don’t cry too much . . . Keeping us from being overemotional, drawing a line between normal and abnormal.
Tangled Art + Disability is a charitable organization dedicated to developing and showcasing the work of artists with disabilities. For over ten years, Tangled has been a leader and catalyst bringing together artists with disabilities and a diverse public through a wide range of performance, media and visual arts events. Tangled uses the power of art as a transforming medium to enhance the understanding and acceptance that people with disabilities can and do make significant contributions to all aspects of society, in particular the arts and an evolving cultural sector.
Photo: Andreina Pulido and Francis Gillis. ©2014 360 Screenings.
2014-02-12
Toronto: Productions announced for the Tangled Arts Festival in April and May