Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Aluna Theatre is pleased to announce programming highlights for their upcoming 2017.2018 season. This fall sees the return of the CAMINOS festival, and a co-production of Canadian theatre darling Rosa Labordé’s Marine Life. In the new year, Aluna co-presents a new work by the multi-talented Anita Le Selva and The Stones Ensemble.
2017.2018 will also see Aluna Theatre expanding their outreach activities. Thanks to new funding, the company will have the capacity to produce a consistent stream of broadcast, online and in-person plays in translation, directed at Spanish speaking communities, as made popular by their previous Aluna Café evenings and Radio Teatro presentations on Radio Voces Latinas 1610 AM.
First up for the company: Inclusive, discursive, daring and unapologetic, CAMINOS 2017 on stage at Daniels Spectrum October 4 – 8, is a festival of new works-in-progress from local Pan-American, Indigenous, and Latinx artists who are pushing the boundaries of theatre, dance, performance art, music, visual arts, installation, and film. The CAMINOS 2017 lineup includes works by Leslie Baker with Emma Tibaldo and Joseph Shragge (Montreal); Augusto Bitter; Martha Chaves; Peter Chin and Jeremy Mimnagh; Monica Garrido; Beatriz Pizano; Ximena Huizi; Victoria Mata; Aemilius Milo and Lourdes Duniam; Jivesh Parasram; Lido Pimienta and Gein Wong; Charles C. Smith; Toronto Laboratory Theatre; Nawi Moreno-Valverde and Melissa Anne Fearon; Irma Villafuerte; and Gabriela Guerra Woo (Mexico City).
CAMINOS 2017 will also feature an international conference on Performance and Human Rights. Unsettling the Americas: Radical Hospitalities and Intimate Geographies offers four days of conversations reflecting on histories of settlement, displacement, and resettlement. Unsettling the Americas is presented as a partnership between Aluna Theatre, York University’s Graduate Program in Theatre & Performance Studies, New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics 5th annual Graduate Convergence Conference, and its Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas.
Full programming details for CAMINOS 2017 will be announced in late August.
This season, Aluna Theatre is pleased to co-present premiere works by Rosa Labordé and Anita La Selva. Both Labordé’s Marine Life and La Selva’s The Stones Project have been developed through the company’s RUTAS and CAMINOS festivals and artistic residences over past seasons.
Written and directed by Rosa Labordé and designed by Aluna’s multi-award winner Trevor Schwellnus, Marine Life was a hit at CAMINOS in 2015 with both Latin American and Canadian audiences singing along to “Juan’s” Mariachi songs. With a cast that includes Nicola Correia-Damude, Fabrizio Fillipo and Juno Award-winning musician Justin Rutledge, this piece follows Sylvia, a tree-hugging activist, her new corporate lawyer love interest, and her emotionally dependent Mariachi-playing brother, "Juan". Presented in collaboration with Tarragon Theatre, this tragic, romantic, black comedy is a delicate piece about complicated intimacies set against a backdrop of apocalyptic, environmental proportions. Select performances will include “dynamic titling”, offering Spanish speaking audiences the opportunity to enjoy the show as well. Marine Life, onstage at the Tarragon Extraspace November 8 – December 17, 2017, is the first play written and directed by a Latin Canadian woman to be produced at Tarragon.
In the new year, The Stones Project by Anita La Selva brings together an ensemble of multi-award winning artists from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds to offer a unique perspective on the challenging and heart-wrenching roles women play in a culture of violence. The Stones Project examines the practice of stoning from a historical, mythical and contemporary perspective, combining physical theatre, music, dance, journalistic text, choral chant and digital media. Also designed by Aluna Theatre’s Trevor Schwellnus, and with composition by Roula Said, the piece moves fluidly from abstract images and movement into choral chant, song, journalistic text, testimonials and historical fact.
Finally, Aluna Theatre is renewing their commitment to engage communities and reach new audiences through a regular series of community driven readings, radio broadcasts and new digital technologies. Over the next three seasons, the company will be translating and presenting important works from the Latin American Canon and other contemporary Canadian plays, to be recorded and distributed as a series of radio plays, in collaboration with Radio Voces Latinas CHHA 1610 AM. Plays will include Madre by Beatriz Pizano (winner of two Dora Awards), Leo by Rosa Labordé, and translations of new Canadian works into Spanish including Alien Creature by Linda Griffiths and Ajax & Little Iliad by Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell. The plays will also receive staged readings as part of Aluna Theatre’s popular Aluna Café in communities throughout the GTA and Southern Ontario, and recordings will also be made available as podcasts in both English and Spanish. These initiatives will allow the works and artists to reach new audiences, and provide opportunities for new audiences to discover the Pan-American artistic community that lives here.
#alunaCAMINOS
2017-07-26
Toronto: Aluna Theatre announces its 2017/18 season