National Theatre School offers a Special One Year Directors’ Program.
deadline: February 15, 2009

SPECIAL EDITION - ONE-YEAR DIRECTING CERTIFICATE PROGRAM

Exceptionally for the 2009-2010 school year, the National Theatre School will offer a one-year Directing Certificate Program.

The 2009-2010 NTS Directing Program will offer one experienced theatre artist the opportunity to further his/her knowledge of the craft of directing. It will provide a unique laboratory setting for the theatre director to collaborate with actors, writers, designers and technicians devoted to the art of making theatre.

Collaborate: This highly individualized Directing Program will be aimed at an emerging or early career theatre director who wants to develop his/her practice, by posing specific artistic and practical questions, and exploring the ideas and visions that personally inspire the director, while developing the tools to communicate a unique vision.

Throughout the year the directing student will be mentored by prominent theatre directors and practitioners.

Inspire: The aim of the Directing Program is to develop future theatre leaders who will have a solid grasp of the director’s craft, experience with both contemporary and classical texts, and the skills to engage the imaginations of designers, writers, actors and audiences in a spirit of adventure and risk taking.

Application deadline for the one-year Directing Program Certificate: February 15, 2009

Note: The regular two-year directing certificate program will be in place for the 2010-2011 school year, coinciding with the National Theatre School’s 50th anniversary.

for more info check out: http://www.ent-nts.ca/en/programs/directing/

No Name Dance - Saturday February 7, 2009

A special evening of improvised music and dance featuring Allison Cameron,
Castlemusic (Jennifer Castle), Eric Chenaux, Nick Fraser and Aimée Dawn Robinson.

Saturday February 7, 2009, The Music Gallery, 8:00pm, $10 (with a PWYC option)
Box Office: 416.204.1080  info@musicgallery.org

For complete info, please click here: http://www.musicgallery.org/

No Name Dance consists of two sets. The first set is an improvised dance solo by Aimée Dawn Robinson, without music.The second set will feature four musicians who will, one after another, perform duets with Aimée without pause in between. These musicians are: Eric Chenaux (melodic material amplified through extremely small speakers), Castlemusic (Jennifer Castle — singing and guitar), Nick Fraser (percussion)
and Allison Cameron (toy piano, toys, keyboards, beat-box, banjo). The accumulative outcome will be improvised dance mini-marathon as Aimée experiments with the space, the shifting music and the possibilities of improvised dance in a durational context.

Aimée Dawn Robinson is an improvising dancer, musician, gardener, writer and visual artist. She has performed, studied and taught dance in Canada, the United States, Malaysia and Japan. Aimée co-founded Up Darling Contemporary Dance and is the director of multi-disciplinary performance series, A Month of Sundays. Aimée has performed with improvising musicians, songwriters and composers including Martin Arnold, Jennifer Castle, Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver, Nick Fraser, Alex Lukashevsky, Kurt Newman, The Reveries and Doug Tielli. While she has danced with artists such as Terrill Maguire, Viv Moore, Ame Henderson, Motaz Kabbani and Seika Boye, Aimée most often improvises solo as mother drift. She has been performing installments of her ongoing dance series, mother drift dances to the songs in her head, since 2003.

Aimée holds her Master’s of Arts (Dance) from York University. Her current research explores the radical political potentials of memory (body memory, cultural memory, personal memory) and forgetting in dance, specifically experimental improvising, butoh and Canadian Aboriginal dance.
Aimée has participated in butoh workshops with artists such as Yoshito Ohno, Yukio Waguri, Denise Fuijiwara, Joan Laage and SU-EN. She spent the summer of 2008 in Hakushu, Japan, farming and studying dance with Min Tanaka. Aimée plans to return to Hakushu in April 2009. In March 2009, Aimée will be performing with Small Wooden Shoe at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in the final installment of the series, Dedicated to the Revolutions.

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Wrecking Ball 8 - Monday, February 9, 2009

Take a toonie. Look at the polar bear. Now rotate the toonie 45 degress to the right, and put your thumb over the polar bear’s nose. What do you see? A vicious Tyannosaurus Rex, that’s what. And that sums up the situation in the world at the moment: we’ve gone from the familiar to the exotic. Harper’s acting like a fifth-generation Xerox of a coalition leader, The US has gone all hopey and Yes-We-Can-y, David Miller is charging you 5 cents for a grocery bag. And Pinter is gone. It’s time for a what-just-happened, where-are-we-now Wrecking Ball. Call it Shoe Shine the Bovine in ’09, because for the moment, the rules are suspended and the Dadaists are running the show.

WB8: Happy Valentine’s Detonation is ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY

Box Office opens at 7:00pm, Show starts at 8:00pm

Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave, Toronto, ON

Pay what you can (No advanced sales), Proceeds will go to the Actor’s Fund of Canada

classes at Hub 14: February = Adam Lazurus + Meagan O’Shea + Stephen Thompson

Adam Lazurus – For the love of it
February 2 – 6, 2009 / 10 – 12 / HUB 14 / / $40

Meagan O’Shea – Contemporary Dance Class
February 9 – 13, 2009 / 10 – 11:30 / HUB 14 / $40

Stephen Thompson – Contemporary Dance Class
February 16 – 20, 2009 / 10 – 11:30 / HUB 14 / $40

www.hub14.org

THE 30TH RHUBARB FESTIVAL
February 4 - February 22, 2009

Festival Director Erika Hennebury
check out out blog: rhubarbfestival.wordpress.com

Posted: February 4th, 2009 under Feb 2009 newsletter.
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All of you who dare to blog for The Theatre Centre will automatically be entered into a draw for 2 festival passes for next year’s Free Fall festival.

And although I’m sworn to secrecy….  so I can’t tell you about the artists we are talking to, experience has shown that the line-up is always killer.

Saving $60 couldn’t be more fun…

Get involved!

email blog ideas / submissions to Cathy@theatrecentre.org

Posted: February 4th, 2009 under Feb 2009 newsletter, Uncategorized.
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I’m still getting comments on what a great show BANG [Block In One Spot] was so good on you sister. (SS)

hey cathy - GREAT night!! I was saying that that was the best collective shows i’ve seen in a looong time. No joke. I went to Switzerland (basel art fair to be exact) last year, saw 4 different art festivals there, and other galleries - literally saw thousands of pieces of artworks, and not one of them was as good as the last BANG was. so, good stuff. (CB)

thanks again for the other night.  true fun! (KC)

Good work last night!  Was it me or did everyone seem kind of drunk and aggressive last night.  Not aggressive in an angry or frightening way but sort of feisty and sort of crazy.

I had an awesome time.  Thanks for asking me to be a part of it. (CW)

Posted: February 4th, 2009 under Feb 2009 newsletter.
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PERFORMANCE CREATION CANADA

APRIL 3 - APRIL 5, 2009

The host/organizing companies for PCC-Toronto ‘09 are Images Festival, Harbourfront Centre, The Theatre Centre, Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, Dancemakers, Small Wooden Shoe, and SummerWorks Festivals. This the first time these organizations have joined together and first time that a film and video festival will be one of the featured attractions.

The Toronto conference will ask the question: What Has Changed? There is a lot of talk of change right now, from Obahama to our own political scrimmage. Politically, economically, and culturally, there’s been a lot going on since PCC came to Toronto three years ago.
We are interested in looking at what has changed, what hasn’t and how these changes (or lack thereof) are manifesting in the way art is made locally, nationally and internationally.

Why These Companies?

At first it may seem a disparate group, however, all seven companies are recognized for their roles in the avant-garde - either as programmers, producers, developers, or creators. This awareness of what is “new” (what are the new trends, who is breaking convention within a local and international context) is a vital attribute in a curator/organizer for Canadian performance creation.  Each organization will curate one of the series of panels and/or events over the three-day conference. This year’s proposed panels  include:

Waffle Breakfast - Can we slow down and just enjoy the coffee and the strawberries. An exercise in our ability to not always be doing something.

The Flipside of Change - The flip side to questions of change, the need to look at history and through-lines of artistic practices and methods of production has never been more important than in these times of information overload and an amnesia of depth.

Dancing With My Parents: a practical guide to inclusion creation. Using “Family” as a metaphor for global community, artists describe their process of creating new performances with strangers in foreign cities/countries.

Isadora: How A Dancer Inspired a Revolution in Video. Practical tips on how to maximize your camcorder and your laptop computer.

Enough About Me, What Do you Think About Me? What kind of perspective and/or advise do the top international presenters of contemporary film, art & performance have to say to us (Canadians) about our work, our process and our attitude?

Contemporary Performance - What Does That Mean? We live in an art system that requires constant written and verval justification from both the artists and the producers. Finding ways to contestualize new work can be a painful process, so what happens when that language gets co-opted by larger institutions?

Check back next month to for a finalized list of panels and workshops.

Daniel Barrow’s Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry (part of Images Festival 2009)

Posted: February 4th, 2009 under Feb 2009 newsletter, PCC.
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The Theatre Centre and The Goethe Institute of Toronto are pleased to present the darlings of German avant-garde theatre, Theaterlabor and their provocative work Body Fragments. The haunting paintings of Francis Bacon gave inspiration to this visionary production, commissioned by the Venice Biennale (2005), and performed to acclaim across Europe. In town for two nights only, The Theatre Centre is the last stop on their three-city Canadian tour that includes Calgary (High Performance Rodeo) and Montreal (Theatre La Chapelle). An ensemble of stellar actors explore the edges of theatre practice in Theaterlabor’s first Canadian tour.

Theaterlabor im Tor 6 is a professional OFF-Theatre with its own performance space in Bielefeld, Germany. Since 1983 the group has produced contemporary and experimental theatre performances including Body fragments, inspired by the work of Francis Bacon (2005), Double, physical theatre inspired by Antonin Artaud (2006) and Winterreise, music-theatre on the base of the songs of Schubert and the poems of Müller (2007).

Theaterlabor is exploring different fields of theatre: visual-, physical-, music-theatre and performing arts. They are especially known for producing spectacular outdoor performances. Besides producing in- and outdoor performances, the ensemble has been commissioned for specialized projects such as performances that focus on historical context, created for the anniversaries of certain towns, or for the grand opening of a museum.

www.theaterlabor.de

Posted: February 4th, 2009 under Feb 2009 newsletter.
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Chris Leavins, the creator of the popular internet show Cute With Chris, is now featured in the LA Weekly.

Read Article

Posted: February 2nd, 2009 under Feb 2009 newsletter, Uncategorized.
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