Stage Door News
Stage Door News
November 19, 2015, TORONTO – Artistic Producer of SummerWorks Performance Festival, Michael Rubenfeld, and the producing curators of Progress 2016, are pleased to announce the lineup of Canadian and international shows, workshops and conversations coming to Toronto in January/February 2016 for the second annual PROGRESS festival. Presented in partnership with The Theatre Centre and working in collaboration with local performance based companies, PROGRESS brings together international performances, companies and ideas under one umbrella, engaging in a larger conversation about language, identity and what progress means to Toronto’s performance ecology. Each project has been curated or developed and produced by a Toronto performance company. PROGRESS runs January 14 – February 7.
The success of the inaugural PROGRESS festival in February 2015 demonstrates Toronto audiences are hungry for contemporary performance and ready to engage in conversation around it. This is a festival of independent performance companies banding together to create something bigger than the sum of their parts - bringing work to Toronto that would otherwise not be seen by this city’s audiences. With performances accessibly priced, presented in a single venue and the opportunity to see multiple shows in an evening, this is a chance for Toronto audiences to be inspired by contemporary performance in a way PROGRESS curators were when they first experienced or presented the work. For three and a half weeks, PROGRESS turns Toronto into an international hub for conversations around performance practice, inspiring local artists and audiences.
SummerWorks, The Theatre Centre, Volcano Theatre, FADO Performance Art Centre Dancemakers and Aluna Theatre are the curators for 2016. These companies share a common desire to present and produce socially engaged works examining language, race, citizenship, gender and identity. UK based Forest Fringe is also staging a Microfestival, in collaboration with local artists, which will build upon these conversations providing an international perspective.
“Our programming partners and curators represent some of Toronto’s most diverse, creative performance makers. We come together to create a strong voice and engage in a conversation on what progress in the performance community means, in Canada and around the world,” notes Michael Rubenfeld, Artistic Producer of SummerWorks Performance Festival.
All performances take place at The Theatre Centre (1115 Queen St W), host venue and presenting partner in the festival.
“The Theatre Centre is excited to return as the partner and home of PROGRESS. Our theatres, gallery and café will be lit up with performance, conversation and debate,” notes The Theatre Centre’s Artistic Director Franco Boni.
www.thisisprogress.ca / #progressTO
Progress 2016 lineup
Riding on a Cloud (Lebanon)
Curated and presented by The Theatre Centre
Performed in English
Written and directed by Rabih Mroué
January 14-16, 2016
Running time: 60 mins
Artist and theatre director Rabih Mroué investigates the personal and political legacy of conflict and trauma in Riding on a Cloud. Intertwining fiction and non-fiction, his brother Yasser Mroué appears on stage as himself, recounting memories from his experience of being shot in the head during the Lebanese Civil War. Suffering from aphasia, Yasser was left with the ability to recognize people and things in front of him, but not in images. On his doctor’s advice, Yasser created videos as therapy, in an attempt to recover his understanding of the relationship between reality and representation. Yasser’s videos fuse with his recounted memories on stage to offer a reflection on the subjective nature of creating narrative.
About The Theatre Centre
The Theatre Centre is a nationally recognized live-arts incubator that serves as a research and development hub for the cultural sector. We provide artists with infrastructure and resources to make their art – from idea to production. The Theatre Centre is committed to new work and new ways of working. We are a public space, open and accessible to the people of our community, where citizens can imagine, debate, celebrate, protest, unite and be responsible for inventing the future. @TheatreCentre
El Refugio de Freidel | The Refuge of Freidel (Canada / Colombia)
Curated and produced by Aluna Theatre, co-produced with the Freidel Collective
Performed in Spanish with English surtitles
Created by Liliana Suárez Henao and Beatriz Pizano
January 20 – 23, 2016
Running time: 50 mins
From Colombia's Avant-Garde theatre to Toronto's after-hours service industry, Liliana puts a face and a name to the refugee experience. Liliana weaves her experiences of forced displacement, arrival, and her journey as an artist in Canada, with the plays of controversial Colombian theatre-maker, and her director, Jose Manuel Freidel: an artist who fought against his society’s indifference toward injustice. Freidel was assassinated a few blocks away from his beloved theatre at the age of 39.
What I learned from a decade of fear (Canada)
Curated and produced by Aluna Theatre
Performed in English with Spanish surtitles
Created and performed by Beatriz Pizano, Lyon Smith and Trevor Schwellnus
January 21 – 24, 2016
Running time: 65 mins
Are white privilege, second-class citizenship, surveillance and interrogation the market price we pay for peace, order and good government? What of the lives of others, whose countries are disrupted in the name of our safety and comfort?
In an idealistic act of penance, Canadian-born white male Lyon Smith submits to having Colombian-born brown female migrant Beatriz Pizano pull incriminating details from his more-or-less average life. Under a visual palette composited from live security cameras and found footage, what begins as a eulogy for the human costs of our collective safety becomes a ritual to atone for a decade of repression, war and paranoia.
Directed and designed by multi-award winning artist, Trevor Schwellnus, this daring piece showcases Aluna’s continuing commitment to risk and experimentation. The piece has been presented in New York City (La MaMa ETC), Bogota, Columbioa (Festival Alternativo), Montreal (The Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro) and Toronto (Aluna Theatre) and returns to Progress following a 2015 Dora nomination for Outstanding New Play.
About Aluna Theatre
Aluna Theatre is an artistically driven Canadian / Colombian theatre company based in Toronto. We create exciting new work that introduces audiences to diverse and rich performance practices from across the Americas. Aluna’s bold productions in English and Spanish are marked by a distinct theatrical language drawing from our heritages, cultures, and languages, including dance, physical theatre, and a multi-media design. In twelve years of production, Aluna has received 26 Dora Award nominations for acting, writing, directing, and design – and has won eleven of them. Artistic Director: Beatriz Pizano. @AlunaTheatre
Century Song (Canada)
Curated and produced by Volcano Theatre in association with the Moveable Beast Collective and Crooked Figure Dances
Created by Neema Bickersteth, Kate Alton and Ross Manson
January 19 – 23, 2016
Running time: 60 mins
Century Song is a live performance hybrid created by powerful soprano Neema Bickersteth, and Dora-award winning collaborators Ross Manson (direction) and Kate Alton (choreography).
Inspired in part by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Bickersteth seamlessly melds song and movement to inhabit a century of women whose identities are contained within her own.
This exquisitely unique show features music by some of the past 100 years’ most adventurous composers, as well as projections by Germany’s fettFilm – extraordinary visuals that bring to life major art movements of the 20th century. Both whimsical and riveting, Century Song is a wordless chronicle of the age, built from art.
History History History (Canada/UK)
Curated and produced by Volcano Theatre and SummerWorks
Performed in English
January 22 – 23, 2016
Running time: 65 mins
History History History offers an innovative foray into Deborah Pearson’s personal relationship with history as the daughter of displaced people – a British migrant and a Hungarian refugee. Debbie’s story involves (like so many of us) a multitude of people tossed by the winds of time, chance and change. This is a brand new work-in-progress, a piece that’s long been in her mind to create. A 1956 Communist football comedy, a shuffling parade of dictators, a writer who lost his name and an actor who lost his voice – all details that somehow, directly or indirectly, led to her being here today.
History History History was developed in part at the National Theatre Studio, UK. It is a House on Fire research and development commission with Theatre Garonne (Toulouse) and Bit Teatergarasjen (Bergen).
About Volcano Theatre
Volcano is an international award-winning theatre company based in Toronto. Using innovations in global and intercultural performance practice, Volcano creates theatre that is stylistically and socially modern, a theatre that explores identity, politics, history, and the contemporary human condition. Volcano is both cosmopolitan and uniquely Canadian, bringing this country the latest in international theatre trends while touring Canadian artists and works around the world. Led by Artistic Director Ross Manson, Volcano has been a vital contributor to the independent theatre scene since 1994, and continues to question what it means to be a purveyor of outward-looking, rigorous Canadian performance. @volcanotheatre
Forest Fringe Microfestival (Canada/UK)
Curated and produced by SummerWorks
All performances performed in English
January 30 – January 31, 2016
Four Forest Fringe artists pair with four Canadian artists to host a residency culminating in a two day Microfestival, taking over the whole of The Theatre Centre, featuring newly commissioned work from each Canadian artist alongside four acclaimed pieces of performance work from the UK, for a total of eight individual pieces.
The four Forest Fringe pieces coming to Toronto are:
O (Project O, UK)
Choreographed and performed by Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small
Refusing to be held down, O presents bodies that are negotiating histories, fantasies and assumptions. A dance that winds its way through the mess of identity politics in a physical unfolding of a realisation of difference. A duet about being black, mixed and female that addresses awkward and uncomfortable everyday experiences. Born out of the duo’s personal experiences of and conversations around culturally ingrained racism and sexism in the UK, O seeks to expose a tangible, yet often ignored, colonialist perspective which still prevails within Western European society.
As the Flames Rose We Danced to The Sirens, The Sirens (Sleepwalk Collective, UK/Spain)
Created by Sleepwalk Collective
Performed by iara Solano Arana
iara is starting to fear the worst. She’s looking for a roomful of strangers whose arms she can fall into. And while she knows that she cannot necessarily be trusted, and may not be entirely deserving of help, tonight she would like to put herself in your hands…
In an hour of troubling troubling intimacy and drunken excess, all played out in miniature, Sleepwalk Collective chop up and replay the iconography of B-movies and early cinema in a joyous and desperate attempt to re-work cinematic and cultural clichés into something heartfelt and profound. This is a cry for help, and it’s about me, and you, and the strange and sometimes frightening connection that is growing between us.
Blind Cinema (UK/Germany)
Conceived and directed by Britt Hatzius
In the darkness of a cinema space the audience sits blindfolded. Behind each row of audience members is a row of children who in hushed voices describe a film only they can see. Accompanied by the soundtrack (which has no dialogue) the whispered descriptions are a fragile, fragmentary and at times struggling but courageous attempt by the children to make sense of what they see projected on the screen.
Blind Cinema is rooted in the method of audio description. The film screened during the performance is seen by the children in a workshop prior to the performance for the first time. Each performance involves a new group of children between 8 and eleven years old.
This Is How We Die (UK)
Written and performed by Christopher Brett Bailey
Following sell out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Battersea Arts Centre last year, Christopher Brett Bailey (The Inconsiderate Aberrations of Billy the Kid) brings his award winning solo show to Progress. Filled with tales of paranoia and young love, ultra-violence and pitch-black humour, This is How We Die is a blend of spoken word, storytelling, caustic humour and gutter philosophy with echoes of Lenny Bruce, William Burroughs, beat poetry and B-movies. A prime slice of surrealist trash and a blood-soaked love letter to the depraved, depressed and death obsessed.
Christopher is joined by live musicians for an emotionally charged, unexpected finale of haunting violins and thunderous noise-rock, culminating in an ensemble attack on the senses, both delicate and primal.
Curated Canadian artists collaborating with Forest Fringe artists are:
Three time Dora Mavor Moore Award, Gemini Award nominee, and Métis-Anishinaabe artist Brian Solomon (commissioned by Native Earth Performing Arts); Ottawa based creator Julie Le Gal (commissioned by the National Arts Centre English Theatre); Shaw Festival ensemble member Kiera Sangster (commissioned by The Shaw Festival); and National Theatre School graduate and artist in residence at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (commissioned by the National Theatre School).
About SummerWorks Performance Festival
SummerWorks is Canada’s largest curated performance festival. Widely recognized as one of the most important agencies for enabling new Canadian artists in the country, SummerWorks annually features over 60 performance projects during its 11-day Festival in August. In 2015, SummerWorks celebrates its 25th Anniversary. @SummerWorks
MONOMYTHS (First Nations/Canada/Mexico/USA)
Produced by FADO Performance Art Centre
Conceived and curated by Jess Dobkin and Shannon Cochrane
Performed in English / ASL interpreted
February 3 – 7, 2016
MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars and activists to revision Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a feminist cultural, political and social re-vision of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey favours dispelling the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons–both inner and outer–in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration. Each MONOMYTHS stage stands alone, however the work of each presenting artist is interdependent and connected. These independent visions, when stitched together through the audience’s collective presence, form an exquisite corpse of a larger experimental narrative.
Radically interpreted by artists from First Nations, Canada, Mexico and the US, part one of MONOMYTHS: Part 1 at Progress presents the first five stages of the journey: The Ordinary World/Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Meeting of the Mentor, Crossing the Threshold, and Belly of the Whale.
Presenting artists: Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabe/Canada/USA), Ursula Johnson (Mi'kmaw) and Cheryl L'Hirondelle (Cree/Métis/German), Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (Winnipeg, Canada), Feminist Art Gallery (Toronto, Canada), Armando Minjarez (Mexico/USA), Jefferson Pinder (USA).
About FADO Performance Art Centre
Established in 1993, FADO Performance Inc. (Performance Art Centre) is a not-for-profit artist-run centre for performance art based in Toronto, Canada. Local in nature and international in scope, FADO exists to provide a stable, ongoing, supportive platform for artists who have chosen performance art as a primary medium to create and communicate provocative new images and new perspectives. @FADOperformance
Lift That Up (Canada)
Curated and produced by Dancemakers
Performed in English
Conceived and created by Dana Michel
Performed and created by Amanda Acorn, Ellen Furey, Simon Portigal
February 3 – 7, 2016
A world premiere featuring the work of Dana Michel, bringing two years of research to the stage amidst her three year-long tenure as Dancemakers Resident Artist:
I am and we then were thinking about: how to get your life and how to save these skins.
And then I and we thought: let’s live some specific micro moments in a glass box, okay. So then: is it possible to wear another person like a glove? Is it possible to inflate the glove, attach yourself to it by some string, light a fire under it and float with it to unknown but at least higher places?
And one of the forethoughts: it is not playdough. It would be too basic to assume that it is just here to be my son. He becomes bigger than me. And he’s not about me but I am a part, I am a big and small part. I’m the mom, but that’s just a word.
About Dancemakers
Dancemakers animates a space where contemporary dance creation, presentation and development provoke unexpected discoveries, sensations and meanings. Dancemakers invites artists and publics - locally, nationally and internationally - to engage in dance that mines the relationships between bodies, environments, sounds and images, all starting from the here and now. Dancemakers works through a rigorous meeting of collaborators who investigate the collision between dance, other fields and the questions that inform them. @DancemakersTO
Additional ancillary programming to be announced throughout the Fall. Please visit thisisprogress.ca for latest information.
About Progress
Progress is a new international festival of performance and ideas produced by the SummerWorks Performance Festival in partnership with The Theatre Centre. The festival is collectively produced by a series of Toronto-based curating companies operating within a contemporary performance context. Progress 2016 is curated by SummerWorks, The Theatre Centre, Aluna Theatre, Volcano Theatre, FADO Performance Art Centre, Dancemakers. #progressTO
Photo: Scene from Blind Cinema.
2015-11-19
Toronto: Line-up announced for second annual PROGRESS festival January 14-February 7, 2016