I love Harbourfront’sWorld Stage series. Every year the shows I see as part of the series tend to make it on my list of most memorable performances of the year. Still Standing You, performed by Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido and presented by CAMPO, is no exception to that statement. I left Enwave Theatre on Tuesday night knowing that it would be a long time before I ever forgot what I had watched over the past hour.
Not all performance is meant to make you comfortable, it is simply intended to make you feel. For me, there was an excess of emotions which I felt while watching Still Standing You. At moments I was laughing hysterically, at others I was cringing with discomfort or disgust. Though Still Standing You is listed as contemporary dance I personally would also consider classifying it as performance art. Ampe and Garrido have a very interactive and engaged relationship with the audience. Also, their movement, though probably greatly facilitated by their training, showed the kind of physicality and pushing of the body’s limits which is frequently present in the work of performance artists.
Suburban Beast streams theatre in their latest live internet production based in Toronto
Suburban Beast refers to rihannaboi95 as “a viral performance”. The show invites viewers to watch a live performance from the privacy of their own computers, broadcasted as it is on Ustream. rihannaboi95 will be streamed nightly from a Toronto bedroom at 8pm from April 23rd – April 28th, 2013.
Owais Lightwala plays Sunny, a teenager who creates YouTube videos based on Rihanna’s music videos. He makes himself up and emulates her dance moves. Sunny deals candidly with bullying, queer identity, and the pain of self-invention via art. Lightwala performs the piece wonderfully, embodying the character completely. It’s much like film, as the performance is all in the eyes. With a lesser actor the show would read false.
Salome returns to the stage as part of the Canadian Opera Company’s latest season in Toronto
After seeing the opening of Salome at Canadian Opera Company, I headed home just in time to make our family’s regularly scheduled Skype date with my parents in the States. Upon hearing that we’d been to see Salome, my father asked what it was about. “Well,” I said, “If you leave out all the parts I don’t care to discuss in front of a three year old, they ate fruit.”
The debate between Creationism and Evolution heats up the Scarborough stage in Inherit the Wind
The Scarborough Players take on the classic story, Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a tale that evaluates the ongoing debate between the theory of evolution and Christian dogma. This fictionalized dramatization of the Scopes “Monkey” trial in 1925 puts a school teacher, Bertram Cates (Josh Mott), to trial for teaching his class Darwin’s Theory of Evolution which violates Christian state law. The story boils down to one debate, one that’s still argued out to this day, progressive science vs. the Bible.
