Angela Sun is a Toronto-based fat East Asian performer, theatre creator, poet, and writer. She is currently a member of the environmental theatre company, Broadleaf Theatre. In her spare time she enjoys reading and writing about art, feminism, pop culture, identity, body image, mental health, and social justice. Ironically, she fell in love with Canadian theatre after seeing a televised production of Kristen Thomson’s I, Claudia on CBC. (She finally saw the remount on stage 5 years later and was over the moon.) You can follow her exploits on her sporadically-updated Twitter @21sungelas.
Monologues for Nobody, currently playing inside the Fringe Club at the Toronto Fringe Festival, is exactly as advertised: Participants have five minutes to perform a monologue of their choosing in the shed. Alone. As creator Jordan Mechano puts it in his description, “Like singing alone in the shower…No audience, no cameras, no pressure. Just play.” While it really was as simple as that, I didn’t expect to be so moved by the experience.
You Are (Not) Dead, a one-woman Shed Show about first loves, first heartbreaks, and mental illness, is currently playing inside the Fringe Club at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Performer/Director/Writer Katie Bell packs a lot into this 30-minute show, but her sensitive and heartfelt delivery of the difficult material shows a lot of promise.
Pulitzer-prize winning play comes to Toronto, presented by Soulpepper
The Heidi Chronicles, now playing at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, is a sweet, nostalgic rendering of an American woman’s personal, political, and cultural coming-of-age through through a twenty year period. The show follows the journey of the titular Heidi Holland as she constructs an identity alongside the momentous changes that came with the onset of second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution.
The Watah Theatre presents the second installment of The Orisha Trilogy in Toronto
Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve attended a production from the internationally-celebrated Toronto-based dubpoet/playwright-monodramatist/arts-educator/theatre director/scholartist d’bi.young anitafrika. It turns out there was no need for me to worry about my high expectations because the performances from anitafrika and frequent collaborator, Amina Alfred, exceeded all of them. She Mami Wata & The Pussy WitchHunt is a profound exploration of the intersections between personal identity, sexuality, gender, religion, and the consequences of colonization.
HERstory Counts is a collection of seven autobiographical monologues that explores a range of issues from in vitro fertilization to mental health. Artistic Producer Jennifer Neales created the show in collaboration with a diverse group of female performers as a response to the lack of diversity from the creation level in film and theatre. We recently got the opportunity to ask Neales some questions about the production and representation in Canadian Theatre:
Pulitzer-prize winning play comes to Toronto, presented by Soulpepper
Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve attended a production from the internationally-celebrated Toronto-based dubpoet/playwright-monodramatist/arts-educator/theatre director/scholartist 