The Company Theatre presents Allan Hawco in Amy Herzog’s play Belleville at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre

I’ve always been perplexed by people who marry in their early twenties. When you’re young, naïve, insecure and haven’t spent enough time figuring out who you really are or what you really want, isn’t it sort of an inadvisable time to get hitched? Belleville, produced by Company Theatre and Canadian Stage, is a new play by American playwright Amy Herzog which looks at the repercussions of settling down before finding yourself. Continue reading Review: Belleville (The Company Theatre/Canadian Stage) →

Sawah brings Middle Eastern music, dance and culture to the Fleck Dance Studio in Toronto

I try my best to stay away from descriptive words that have become horribly clichéd. But when it comes to certain art forms, in particular dance and music, I find myself at a loss for words and revert back to the classic yet overused. Case in point, for me, would be belly dance and Arabic music. As a westernized Chinese woman, I’m far from a connoisseur of Middle Eastern culture but nonetheless I’m drawn to its beauty and mystery. There’s a strong sense of sensuality, exoticism, and allure that I find captivating. It was just enough for me to acquire a couple coin scarves myself and sign up for belly dance classes at my local gym.

When I heard that Arabesque would be performing Sawah (which translates to “wanderer” in Arabic), an immersive experience of Arabic music and dance, this weekend at the Fleck Dance Theatre, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a bit of escapism.

Continue reading Review: Sawah (Arabesque) →

Canadian history as seen through comic book lenses, Videocabaret presents Trudeau and the FLQ

As we walked home after Trudeau and the FLQ, my guest turned to me, energized and excited.

“So this is the Jack Nicholson Joker fever-dream version of Canadian history.”
“Pretty much, yes.”

Trudeau and the FLQ is best described as a series of living editorial cartoons. Short vignettes, none longer than 2-3 minutes, depicting significant events, private moments, public revelations and occasional blowups in Canadian history. The cast moves at alarming speed through over 10 years of history, stopping to smell the roses, drink the cognac and drop the acid as they go.

We see Pierre Elliot Trudeau rise from philosophy professor to public intellectual to Minister of Justice to Prime Minister. We see the FLQ form, germinate, and start kidnapping cabinet ministers. And in this comic-book world of lurid colour and mounties in drag, we see Canada forming despite it all.

Continue reading Review: Trudeau and the FLQ (Videocabaret) →

The dark world of the sex trade comes to light in Soliciting Temptation playing at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre

Soliciting Temptation, playing now at Tarragon, pits an aging business man with a taste for young flesh against a fiercely ideological university student, both from North America, in the slums of an unnamed developing country. The context is sex tourism, specifically youth sex tourism. The man has hired the girl for the night, believing her to be local and younger than she is. She is posing as a sex worker, and as underage, in order to torment whatever man engages her for the evening. Continue reading Review: Soliciting Temptation (Tarragon Theatre) →

A study on the concept and theory of colour, I Send You this Cadmium Red is playing at Toronto’s Enwave Theatre

What do we talk about when we talk about color? Probably not the same things John Christie and John Berger did. The two men — one an artist, the other an art-writer — passed letters back and forth on the subject for more than two years, a beautiful correspondence that was later collected into the book I Send You This Cadmium Red. It’s a philosophical effort, but never fancy or arcane: just red, blue, and the rest. Beneath the simplicity, however, lies an astonishing depth.

Continue reading Review: I Send You This Cadmium Red (Art of Time Ensemble) →