Stage Door News
Stage Door News
February 17, 2015, TORONTO – With 86% attendance and 13 of 18 performances sold out, the inaugural Progress festival closed on Sunday, February 15, 2015, far exceeding all expectations. Progress featured a curated model, with local companies, FADO Performance Art Centre, Videofag, Dancemakers, Why Not Theatre, Volcano Theatre, Canada’s National Arts Centre English Theatre and SummerWorks, selecting international performances, workshops and conversations from Israel, Poland, Ukraine, Tunisa, Brazil, Ireland and Canada for the festival. Progress was produced by SummerWorks Performance Festival in partnership with The Theatre Centre.
“We set out to explore a new model for community to gather around global questions of performance,” says Michael Rubenfeld, Artistic Producer of SummerWorks. “We didn’t know how Toronto would react and I’m overwhelmed by just how enthusiastic the response was.”
“It’s such a joy to see new communities coming into our space. We’ve already started planning for next year,” notes Franco Boni, General & Artistic Director of The Theatre Centre.
In an effort to further the conversation around community led performance cultures, the SummerWorks Performance Festival is pleased to announce a new multi curatorial model for its 25th anniversary SummerWorks Festival in August 2015.
In combination with adding a new dance series, this evolution is a move to building a truly multi-arts festival where the curatorial responsibility lies in the hands of the performance community itself. Each series (Theatre, Dance, Music and Live Art) will be curated by local artists who will build the Festival program. Each series will be open to the public for submission.
“We remain deeply dedicated to the value of collaboration,” says Rubenfeld, “and this new model creates opportunities for Canadian artists across multiple platforms to find each other and grow together.“
The 2015 curators include:
Theatre Series - Bea Pizano, Philip McKee and Rosa Laborde
Dance Series - Amelia Ehrhardt
Live Art Series – Cathy Gordon
Music Series – Andrew Pulsifer and Adam Bradley
Audiences can continue to expect boundary bending, challenging and meaningful new works from Canada’s most dynamic performance festival.
SummerWorks is also pleased to announce Nick Hutcheson as the festival’s new General Manager. Hutcheson is a Toronto based producer and co-founder of RARE Theatre who’s past works include Hooked (SummerWorks, 2011), White Loop (Nuit Blanche Toronto, 2011), The New Yorker (Luminato, 2011), RARE (Toronto Fringe, 2012), Borne (Soulpepper, 2014) and Complex (SummerWorks, 2014). Nick was the founding Artistic Producer of Spur, a national festival of politics art and ideas and co-founder and associate editor of boulderpavement, an award winning, multi-disciplinary magazine of art and ideas published by the Banff Centre Press.
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About Progress
Progress is a new international festival of performance and ideas produced by the SummerWorks Performance Festival in partnership with The Theatre Centre. Progress offers world class performance at accessible prices. In curatorial collaboration with Toronto’s leading performance-based companies, Progress presents global dialogues driven by local voices. The inaugural Progress is curated by SummerWorks, The Theatre Centre, Why Not Theatre, Volcano Theatre, Videofag, FADO Performance Art Centre, Dancemakers, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Canada's National Arts Centre English Theatre.
Photo: Enrique Diaz. ©2015 Dahlia Katz.
2015-02-18
Toronto: Inaugural Progress festival a smash success