Stage Door News
Stage Door News
SummerWorks Performance Festival returns for its 27th year August 3-13, 2017, and is thrilled to announce the full 2017 schedule today with a program that continues to push the boundaries of performance. This year’s Festival brings audiences and artists together through new programming and initiatives to increase access and inclusion at the Festival, a major increase in curatorial partnerships with innovative Toronto companies and artists, and with a program of work inspired by the question, “How do we come together?”
SummerWorks 2017 features 52 performance works encompassing Theatre, Dance, Music, Live Art, and Interdisciplinary Forms that will take audiences through the city streets and parks, into theatres, galleries, and studios, into a community pool or a hospital gurney, and right back home again.
In announcing the programming, Festival Artistic and Managing Director Laura Nanni remarks, “The curatorial focus for this year began with the question, “How do we come together? I was drawn to artists and works that consider how we come together for social gatherings and rituals, how we connect across cultural and geographic divides, as well as the nature of collaboration and the performer-audience relationship including how artists use technology to mediate artistic experiences.”
Highlights this year include:
•Internationally celebrated performance artist Terrance Houle will develop a new showing of the project Ghost Days in residence throughout the Festival and present it in a final performance on August 13.
•Small Wooden Shoe teams up with Toronto band Rock Plaza Central on the 10th anniversary of the concept album Are We Not Horses to make a new musical based on the watershed album.
•In the second year of an exchange between SummerWorks and the Tiger Dublin Fringe, comes Reassembled, Slightly Askew, an auto-biographical, audio-based work by Shannon Yee that uses binaural technology to create a soundscape that immerses the listener in Yee’s experience of falling critically ill with a rare brain infection.
•Veteran writer and director Judith Thomson co-directs The Waves - a sonic experience about birth and motherhood - with Fides Krucker, written and performed by Laura Quigley.
•Alphabot creates an eight-episode interdisciplinary experience with Crush On Humans, featuring a stellar roster of indie music innovators such as Kurt Marble, Zoo Owl, Anna Horvath, and Wax Mannequin.
•Remounts of seminal work from queer choreographers Gerard Reyes and DA Hoskins. Hoskins revisits his 2009 study of the artist’s dialogue with creation in Portrait, and Reyes brings his work, The Principle of Pleasure, a seductive, interactive work set to the music of Janet Jackson, which most recently played at FTA in Montreal.
•In The Unpacking Erin Brubacher and Christine Brubaker create a new performance piece while driving home from a family reunion in Pennsylvania, to be performed at a potluck event the moment they arrive back in Toronto.
•Daniele Bartolini returns to the Festival with The Invisible City, a new 24-hour interactive experience that begins with a late-night phone call.
•Adrienne Wong and Dustin Harvey bring the acclaimed Landline to Toronto and Hamilton; part radio play, part walking tour, Landline connects a participant in Toronto with another in Hamilton for a transformative experience that collapses distance.
As has always been true of SummerWorks, many projects this year speak provocatively to the most pressing conversations of the moment. Particularly topical works in 2017 include The Archivist, an exploration of expectations around identity and race from 2016 Siminovitch Prize protégé award winner Shaista Latif; Broadleaf Theatre presents The Chemical Valley Project, a documentary theatre piece about an Indigenous community smothered by the petrochemical industry, created by Julia Howman and Kevin Matthew Wong; Divine, an apocalyptic, all women western about a future Ontario without water by Natalie Frijia; Erased: Billy & Bayard, an exploration of the intersection of music and storytelling illuminating the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Bayard Rustin by The Queer Songbook Orchestra; in Explosions for the 21st Century, Chris-Ross Ewart and Graham Isador conduct a real time experiment using sound design to explore contemporary culture; Pandemic Theatre offers The Only Good Indian, a provocative meditation on otherness by Jivesh Parasram, Tom Arthur Davis, and Donna-Michelle St. Bernard; Jasmyn Fyffe brings What Do You See?, a new dance work that explores the female black body; and Ed Roy directs newcomer Darla Contois in her taboo-busting script White Man’s Indian, the story of a Cree teenage girl named Ava navigating the alienating world of a White Man’s high school.
This year’s Festival also seeks to push the boundaries of performance by introducing a vital program of interdisciplinary work that includes participatory sound installation Lulling Time; a mashup of live music, video and synchronized swimming in Bodies of Water; and works commissioned for the SummerWorks Mobile App from Jordan Tannahill and Cara Spooner.
One of the largest shifts enacted by Nanni in her second year, is a marked increase in the number of partnerships with local and national organizations. Building on a tradition of youth-focused partnerships that includes working with The AMY Project and Sears Ontario Drama Festival, this year’s SummerWorks will work with the School of Toronto Dance Theatre to present a new work from Jocelyn Mah - winner of the inaugural Winchester Prize. The Festival is also working with groundbreaking artists and organizations such as Anandam Dance Theatre, Bonjay, Cahoots Theatre Projects, FADO Performance Art Centre, Girls Rock Camp, Mammalian Diving Reflex, SpiderWebShow, Syrus Ware, Toronto Dance Community Love-In and more to present community-focused artistic programming in the SummerWorks Lab and SummerWorks Late Night series.
Partnerships also play a key role in the Festival’s commitment to access and inclusion that will see SummerWorks partnering with local organizations b current, Generator, and Tangled Arts + Disability to present a re-envisioned SummerWorks Leadership Intensive Program (SLIP) that includes a series of four free public workshops on topics including integration of Indigeneity and decolonizing performance practice, theories and practices of anti-oppression, arts and accessibility, and relaxed performances.
In addition to the SLIP programming, the 2017 Festival will include ASL Interpretation at more events and performances than ever before, including the free Opening and Closing Night Parties. The 2017 program also features Community Meal: Organic Community Gathering, a silent meal hosted by d/Deaf artists Tamyka Bullen, Ralista Rodriguez, and Sage Willow presented in partnership with The Theatre Centre, and Boys in Chairs a workshop presentation about the intersections of disability and queer sexuality.
SummerWorks continues to offer relaxed performances and for the first time ever ensure that all venues are wheelchair accessible for audiences, including those in non-traditional spaces (a full list of access offerings will be posted on the SummerWorks website in July).
The Factory Theatre returns to serve as the Festival Daytime Hub and will again host the Central Box Office, programming in its two performance venues, the Opening Night Party, and Closing Awards Ceremony. At night, the action will move to Pia Bouman School for Ballet and Creative Movement, host to the new SummerWorks Back Patio that will feature free programming every night August 4-12. Theses two venues bookend a Queen Street West packed with performance, including The Theatre Centre, which hosts a full program of work, as well as several studios at Artscape Youngplace, and non-traditional venues including a public pool, two parks, a community greenhouse, and even your own home.
The complete SummerWorks 2017 programming list can be downloaded HERE.
For the 2017 Festival, SummerWorks is introducing a sliding scale ticket model allowing audiences to increase their support of Festival artists while maintaining financial accessibility. Called Pay What You Decide, single tickets can be purchased for $15, $25, or $35 (all seating is general admission and there are no limits on any price level), and many events are either free or by donation. There are also money saving 7-Show, 10-Show, and Long Weekend Passes available. Tickets are on sale now at summerworks.ca. Festival Passes go on sale July 6. The Central Box Office and Box Office Line (647-335-5516) open at 125 Bathurst Street on August 1.
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Website: summerworks.ca
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2017-06-14
Toronto: SummerWorks Performance Festival announces its 2017 programming