Choreographer Hari Krishnan presents Skin & Quicksand, a provocative dance performance in Toronto

In dance, as in poetry, I assume that every choice has meaning. In a novel or a musical, I might chalk certain things up to “that’s pretty,” but the more complex and nuanced a form, the more I expect that everything I see has a purpose, and my job is to understand it. This is how I found myself — at midnight, after a two-part dance performance at Buddies in Bad Times in which nine very athletic men leapt and danced about for an hour wearing outfits ranging from very little to almost nothing — researching mudras, the vocabulary of hand gestures employed in classical Indian dance.

Skin & Quicksand are both dances made by Hari Krishnan, an Indo-Canadian choreographer and as accomplished a homoeroticist as I’ve seen in recent memory. With a lot of skin on display and specifically queer themes, the Buddies audience may have come for the nearly-naked boys, but there was more than that to enjoy. Continue reading Review: Skin & Quicksand (inDance/Buddies In Bad Times) →

Ruff explores theatre life after a stroke, on stage at Daniels Spectrum in Toronto

I understood, sitting with my program at Daniels Spectrum, that Ruff is a show about making work after a stroke. And even still, when theatre legend Peggy Shaw limped onstage carrying an orange and one shoe, my heart sank. Were things so bad she couldn’t put on her own shoes? Then, when she handed the shoe to one audience member and the orange to another, I signed with relief. Just another in a long line of Peggy-Shaw-ignores-the-fourth-wall moments. Phew.

Shaw, whose list of awards and distinctions is longer than even the internet has room for, is a 68-year-old theatrical powerhouse  and lesbian trailblazer who has been making work for more than forty years. In 2011 she had a stroke, and  – as she quips in the show – “woke up a straight white man. I was missing half my brain.” The performance, on a green seamless strip with three video monitors showing the text and visual cues of the show, is classic Shaw: a series of beautiful and complex metaphors that wind around each other, eventually.

Continue reading Review: Ruff (Tangled Festival of Art & Disability) →

Featuring the best in female comedians, the inaugural SheDot Festival begins on May 1 at The Comedy Bar in Toronto

“What happens over and over,” explains Martha O’Neill from her home in Toronto, a week before the inaugural SheDot Festival of women in comedy, “is that bills tend to feature one woman. There’s the observational guy and the storytelling guy and the guy working blue  – sexually-oriented comedy, you know – and whichever other guys and then: The Woman. Just one.” Because of this, O’Neill says, many comedy fans never get a chance to be exposed to the range and breadth of women in comedy.

From this idea, SheDot was born. Originally a working weekend for women comics to develop new material, discuss work, commiserate and celebrate at O’Neill’s father’s cottage in northern Ontario (“we called it Festivag! But I didn’t tell my father that. He’s 80,”) the experience was mixed for O’Neill. On the one hand, she loved being able to work with so many women and all their styles and humour. On the other, so many of them shared stories of being abruptly dropped from bills or having trouble getting work because many show will only book one, or perhaps two, women in an entire lineup. Eventually, in frustration and hope, O’Neill announced her intention to launch a women’s comedy festival and the somewhat more tamely-named SheDot came to life.

Continue reading Preview: SheDot Festival →

New Jerusalem examines an outcast’s trials at the Harold Green Jewish Theatre in Toronto

It’s difficult to grasp, through a modern lens, what risks Baruch de Spinoza was taking when he refused to recant his early theories about body and mind, God and man, in Amsterdam in 1656. But indeed he was cast out of his community, and his city, from the affections of his family and his teacher and his friends during a time when most people never travelled more than 25 miles from their homes. New Jerusalem, at the Harold Green Jewish Theatre, re-enacts the final trial with bravado and style, if also perhaps a little more verbiage than necessary (not unlike Spinoza himself).

Continue reading Review: New Jerusalem (Harold Green Jewish Theatre) →