Stage Door News
Stage Door News
SummerWorks Performance Festival and The Theatre Centre are thrilled to announce the fourth edition of Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas that brings together progressive performance work from across the globe that responds to urgent issues of today, and is reflective of contemporary approaches to form.
Innovative in its programming model, Progress is collectively curated. Abandoning the traditional notion of singular, top-down artistic direction, the Festival brings together a different collection of curatorial partner organizations each year, enabling a diversity of perspective and representation that reflects the complexity and diversity of contemporary society.
In 2019, Progress welcomes new curatorial partners the red light district, Native Earth Performing Arts, Uma Nota Culture, and The Power Plant, who are presenting the performance based element of their winter programming as part of the Festival. Progress also welcomes FADO Performance Art Centre, SummerWorks Performance Festival, The Theatre Centre, and Why Not Theatre as returning partners to the Festival.
“In 2019, Progress continues to evolve and introduce new elements while maintaining the multiplicity of voices and global perspectives that define the Festival,” shares SummerWorks Performance Festival Artistic and Managing Director Laura Nanni. “This year, through new partnerships and guest curators, we introduce a music night, a photo exhibition foregrounding the history of black dancers in Canada, and for the first time we are also presenting an award-winning piece from SummerWorks 2018.”
Nanni continues, “What continues to excite me about Progress is what the collective curatorial model enables us to do – we are bringing together a range of work that I don’t think could or would be presented within the context of a single festival otherwise.”
The Theatre Centre’s Artistic Director Franco Boni adds, "Progress holds space for those artistic voices less heard, those who make work on the edge of the practice. Progress is an exciting movement away from the singular vision of an Artistic Director to a shared, more inclusive approach to programming. It disrupts the gate-kept festival structure. The result is a thrilling collision of ideas and experiences for both the artists and audiences."
The expansive 2019 program, while representing a broad array of themes and subjects, unifies around questions of visibility and invisibility in society, our relationship to memory and the importance of unearthing buried histories. The Festival kicks off with an excoriating feminist take-down of empty political rhetoric, Cock and Bull, conceived and directed by Scotland’s Nic Green. Audiences can experience both the 60 minute performance and the 7 hour and 41 minute durational iteration of the work. Also in the first week, Selina Thompson, who brought Race Cards to the 2018 Festival, returns with salt., a journey retracing one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle.
In the second week of the Festival, award-winning Canadian ex-pat Haley McGee returns to Toronto from the UK with her latest critically-acclaimed solo The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale, directed by Mitchell Cushman. 2018 McArthur Fellow, dancer/choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and director/designer Peter Born bring Poor People’s TV Room SOLO, a reclamation of the buried history of movements of resistance and collective action in Nigeria. Performance artist Autumn Knight stages a one-night only performance of Documents, a public reading of documentation that serves to authenticate or legitimize citizenship.
In the final week of the Festival, the critical and audience hit, as well as winner of the 2018 SummerWorks Festival Production Prize, Lost Together from Shira Leuchter and Michaela Washburn, returns with fifty performances including public sessions. Indigenous, Australian ILBIJERRI Theatre Company brings Blood on the Dance Floor, written and performed by Jacob Boehme, a piece that explores the legacies and memories of our bloodlines, our need for community, and what blood means to each of us. Finally, at a moment of redefinition for the queer community in Brazil, Uma Nota Culture responds by presenting an intimate evening of new music and video from Brazilian/Canadian artist Bruno Capinan.
Free programming includes a Festival-long photo exhibition in the The Theatre Centre gallery, It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900- 1970. Curated by University of Toronto’s Seika Boye, the installation illuminates the largely undocumented dance history of Canada’s Black population before 1970. Open daily throughout the Festival, two curator tours are also scheduled.
For one night only, F-O-R-M (Festival of Recorded Movement) has curated a free screening of Moving/ Forward co-presented by New Blue Emerging Dance and SummerWorks. The film night will feature a five-year survey of dance created for the screen by artists based in western Canada. From Flamenco to street dance, this program provides a chance to experience myriad dance forms from a new perspective.
As always, ancillary programming that continues the conversation complements programmed performances and installations. Two community meals are scheduled - one of which invites international presenters to share and compare local contexts. Audiences can enjoy a night of ping pong on opening weekend, the red light district and Generator presents Arm Yourself with Capitalism’s Tools – A financial literacy crash course, thematically linked to The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale, and a Performance Curation talk will also be presented in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario.
New in 2019, Progress and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre introduce The Performance Bus! On February 13th, following the performance of Blood on the Dance Floor, audiences are invited to hop on the Performance Bus to shuttle to the Rhubarb Festival Opening Night Party. On the 16th, Rhubarb audiences can take the bus down to The Theatre Centre to join the revelry of the Progress Closing Weekend Bash. The Performance Bus will feature a host and pop-up performances along the way, curated by SummerWorks and Rhubarb.
For full details on Progress parties, meals, talks, and workshops, please visit progressfestival.org /#progressTO.
More information on accessibility can be found at progressfestival.org/accessibility.
Tickets for Progress (single and 3 show passes) are now on sale and available at www.progressfestival.org or by calling The Theatre Centre box office at 416-538-0988.
For curatorial notes, images & press inquiries please contact:
Suzanne Cheriton, RedEye Media, suzanne@redeyemedia.ca, 416-805-6744
Progress 2019 lineup
All events take place at The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St. West
Cock and Bull (Scotland)
Conceived and Directed by Nic Green
Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
Duration: 60 mins (Jan 30), 7 hrs. and 41 mins (Feb 2)
BMO Incubator for Live Arts
Originally conceived for the eve of the 2015 UK general election, Cock and Bull sees three females convene to perform their own, alternative, party conference.
Exploring power, voice, agency and sustainability, they use the most heard phrases from Conservative governmental rhetoric, to dismantle and redress dominant paradigms of power and Politics. Responding to the meaninglessness and repetition of empty political promise, the privilege of the governmental elite and the deep discontent of an increasingly disproportionate and divided society, this work is part protest, part catharsis, part exorcism. It becomes, in part, a demonstration of togetherness. Cock and Bull is a transforming choreography of words and a passionate speech of the body, underpinned with the real-time energy of political dissatisfaction and tory tongue-speak.
For the Toronto premiere of Cock and Bull, two iterations are performed: the original short version (one hour) and the long version lasting the length of an average sitting of the House of Commons (over 7 hours). Presented as bookends in the first week of Progress, audiences are afforded the unique opportunity to investigate the performance’s structure and form as it expands (and contracts) over time.
Winner of the Total Theatre Award for best visual/physical theatre, Edinburgh, 2016.
It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1977
Exhibition curated by Seika Boya
Presented by SummerWorks
Gallery
Jan 30 - Feb 15, 12pm - 7:30pm, excluding Sundays
It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 illuminates the largely undocumented dance history of Canada’s Black population before 1970. Featured are individual performing artists such as Leonard Gibson, Ola Skanks, Ethel Bruneau and Joey Hollingsworth. The exhibit exposes the representation of Blackness on Canadian stages by non-black artists through blackface, as well as audience and media reception of Black performance in Canada during this era. It’s About Time explores legislation and leisure culture, dance lessons and the role of social dances at mid-century.
It’s About Time was first commissioned by Dance Collection Danse Archives and Gallery and opened in January of 2018. From June-August 2018, it was at OCAD’s Ignite Gallery.
salt. (England)
Produced by Selina Thompson Ltd.
Written and performed by Selina Thompson
Curated and presented by The Theatre Centre and Why Not Theatre
Duration: 65 mins.
Franco Boni Theatre
"... Where our real home might be is tricky to say. In a way that is the point. Some people say that is the body, but I think the body is more a channel that leads us home. Ultimate reality is our home. It is here and now, and it is not a special piece of what is happening. We imagine that we are on a journey, that life is a journey, but we are home from the beginning. This is not an easy thing to accept."
- Selina Thompson
A journey to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
In February 2016, two artists got on a cargo ship, and retraced one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle – from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica, and back.
Their memories, their questions and their grief took them along the bottom of the Atlantic and through the figurative realm of an imaginary past.
It was a long journey backwards, in order to go forwards.
This show is what they brought back.
salt. is about grief, ancestry, home, forgetting and colonialism.
It’s about being part of a diaspora.
It’s a show that creates a space for us to talk about all of these things, to see where we fit, and to think about the changing and healing that is still to come.
★★★★ “offers the gift of seeing the world through different eyes”
– The Guardian
Poor People’s TV Room SOLO (USA)
Created and performed by Okwui Okpokwasili
Directed and designed by Peter Born
Curated and presented by The Power Plant
co-presented by Civic Theatres Toronto
Duration: 50 mins.
Franco Boni Theatre
Feb 5, 7:30pm (followed by a post-show talkback)
Okwui Okpokwasili is a performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces that centre the African and African American woman in divining vocabularies to explore the unruly interiority of the human condition. As the child of immigrants from Nigeria, born and raised in the Bronx, the reconstitution of memory and the slippery terrain of identity as a particular condition of the African diaspora features prominently in much of Okpokwasili’s work. Her productions are highly experimental in form, bringing together elements of dance, theater, and the visual arts (with spare and distinctive sets designed by her husband and collaborator, Peter Born).
Poor People’s TV Room SOLO is a performance installation that considers duration and urgent complaint as critical aspects of an embodied protest practice. Text from the report commissioned by the British Colonial Government in 1930 to investigate the uprising of women in Nigeria, serves as the primary source material. This uprising, known as the Woman’s War of 1929 was also referred to as the Woman’s Egwu. Egwu, in Igbo, one of the Indigenous languages of Nigeria, means dance. The linguistic tie between performance and protest is an especially compelling and fruitful exploration in this work.
“…part of the grand narrative about politics, the body, and place that Okpokwasili is building, gesture by gesture, whisper by whisper, brick by brick.”
—The New Yorker
The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale (UK/Canada)
Created and performed by Haley McGee
Curated and presented by the red light district in collaboration with Outside the March
Duration: 90 mins
BMO Incubator for Live Arts
Feb. 9, 7:30pm (followed by The Broken Hearts Auction at 9pm)
Can we turn sentimental value into cold, hard cash?
Haley McGee was on the phone with Visa, promising to pay off her bill by having a yard sale, when she realized all the things she could sell were gifts from her exes. Inspired by this call, The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale is a hilarious and daring show about the cost of love… or what love costs us.
The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale smashes together personal divulgences, math, recorded interviews with Haley’s exes and economics in a quest to determine what are romantic relationships are actually worth. This autobiographical show features eight objects — all gifts from Haley’s exes — and introduces audiences to a mathematical formula (created by mathematician Melanie Phillips) for the cost of love.
The Progress run will also include several bonus events that expand to conversation around love, money and what it’s all worth. Join us for Haley’s interactive Cost of Love installation, a financial literacy crash-course in partnership with Generator, and the premiere of The Broken Hearts Auction, a one-night only presentation in which audience members can have gifts from their exes appraised and auctioned off.
“★★★★ Joyful, funny, excruciating … A powerhouse performance.”
– The Stage
Documents (USA)
Conceived and performed by Autumn Knight
Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
Duration: 75 mins
Franco Boni Theatre
Documents uses dialogue, gesture and the voice of both the artist and the audience to uncover and critique structures of power.
Troubling the division of labour between the performer and the audience, Documents involves a public reading of the documentation that serves to authenticate or legitimize citizenship. Central to this work is a filing cabinet that both holds the props required for the performance, while also serving as a portrait or trace of the artist.
The interactive reading of the documents in the files addresses the embodied specificities of race, class, gender, and sexuality to contest whether these categories accurately reflect the bodies they are meant to represent—while underlining how different audiences and relationships to power may influence this reading.
Moving / Forward (Canada)
Curated by F-O-R-M
Presented by New Blue Emerging Dance and SummerWorks
Duration: 75 mins
Franco Boni Theatre
Moving / Forward brings a five-year survey of dance created for the screen by artists based in Western Canada. From flamenco to street dance, this program provides a chance to experience a lot of types of dance from a new perspective. The narrative format of the screen breaks down barriers and provide another avenue of appreciation for dance. The program includes work by Deanna Peters, Ralph Escamillan, Nancy Lee, Kattie Coolidge, Francesca Frewer, Karissa Barry, Sabrina Comanescu, Heather Lamoureux, Nita Bowerman, Miriam Colvin, Company 605, Kim Sato, Nathan Boey, and others.
Lost Together (Tkaranto)
Conceived by Shira Leuchter
Created and performed by Shira Leuchter and Michaela Washburn
Produced by UnSpun Theatre
Curated and presented by SummerWorks
Duration: 30 mins. (timed entries, one audience member at a time)
BMO Incubator for Live Arts
Tues / Feb. 12
12:00pm-4:00pm (private) & 5:30pm-9.30pm (public)
Wed / Feb. 13
12:00pm-4:00pm (private) & 5:30pm-9.30pm (public)
12:00pm-4:00pm (private) & 5:30pm-7.30pm (public)
Sat / Feb. 16
12:00pm-4:00pm (private) & 5:30pm-7.30pm (public)
Sun / Feb. 17
12:00pm-4:00pm (private) & 5:30pm-7.30pm (public)
An offering. An act combatting the loneliness of loss.
Lost Together invites you to share a story about something you’ve lost. Throughout the conversation, Shira and Michaela will work together to recreate that lost thing for you. The objects we create will become part of an ever-evolving exhibition, reminding us that loss doesn’t have to be a solitary reckoning.
Winner of the 2018 SummerWorks Festival Production Prize.
Blood on the Dance Floor (Narangga / Kaurna / Australia)
Produced by ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Written and performed by Jacob Boehme
Curated and presented by The Theatre Centre with Native Earth Performing Arts
Duration: 55 mins.
Franco Boni Theatre
We hold memories in our blood.
It connects us. It defines us.
Blood on the Dance Floor explores the legacies and memories of our bloodlines, our need for community, and what blood means to each of us – questioning how this most precious fluid unites and divides us.
A choreographer, dancer and writer from the Narangga and Kaurna nations of South Australia, Jacob Boehme was diagnosed with HIV in 1998. In search of answers, he reached out to his ancestors. Through a powerful blend of theatre, image, text and choreography, Boehme pays homage to their ceremonies whilst dissecting the politics of gay, Blak and poz identities.
Blood on the Dance Floor is an unapologetic, passionate and visceral narrative that traverses time, space and characters. A story of our need to love and be loved, Boehme’s striking monologue reveals our secret identities and our deepest fears, seeking to invoke ancestral lineage in a contemporary quest for courage and hope.
★★★★1/2 “Theatre and dance don’t usually achieve such compelling synergy as they do under Isaac Drandic’s direction. And Boehme is marvelous: his charismatic presence and easy smile, graceful movement and the emotional intelligence behind his storytelling make this an entertaining, moving work that elicits as much empathy as laughter.”
– THE AGE | Cameron Woodhead | 2 June 2016
real real (Brazil)
Performance by Bruno Capinan
Curated and presented by Uma Nota Culture
Duration: 60 mins.
Franco Boni Theatre
At the crossroads of sexuality, race, gender, politics, and art, we find the creative resistance of Brazilian artist Bruno Capinan. An intimate first offering of new music and video that explore the impacts of embodying a marginalized identity in a country in the throes of a right wing populist wave.
This is a moment of redefinition for the queer community in Brazil. Bruno seizes this time of violent political division in Brazil to reassert identity, educate and evolve in order to positively impact a society locked in a vicious battle with itself.
About Progress
Progress is an international festival of performance and ideas presented in partnership by SummerWorks Performance Festival and The Theatre Centre. The festival is collectively curated and presented by a series of companies, operating within a contemporary performance context. This year’s collaborating companies are F-O-R-M, FADO Performance Art Centre, Native Earth Performing Arts, The Power Plant, the red light district, SummerWorks, The Theatre Centre, Uma Nota Culture and Why Not Theatre. #progressTO
2018-12-12
Toronto: 4th Annual Progress Festival runs January 30-February 17, 2019