The tunes of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash are brought to life in dance in Elvis and the Man in Black at Toronto’s Citadel
The Citadel was packed tight on the opening night of Coleman and Lemieux’s Elvis and the Man in Black. There was even a waitlist to see this dance show about two great musicians. The space was certainly lively, with everyone chatting up a storm before the show started. My neighbour, whom I met as I sat down, was eager to chat with me about the show we were about to see.
While not a traditional theatrical venue, the basement room of a community centre is a perfect environment for Ambrose’s one-woman show. The low ceiling, fluorescent lighting and walls full of crafts are an ideal backdrop for the story. Rosemarie has returned to her home island of Dominica (in the Caribbean, between Guadeloupe and Martinique) to teach a class in head-tying. Continue reading Review: The Art of Traditional Head-Tying (East End Performance Crawl)→
Watching Glory Die is a story of a teenage girl’s struggle in prison, on stage at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre
Watching Glory Die is written and performed by Judith Thompson and is playing upstairs at Berkeley Street Theatre. The play is based on the story of Ashley Smith, a teenager who was put in prison for assault and held there until she choked herself to death with a ligature. Ashley Smith was the victim of systemic abuse and negligence and stands as a testament to the ineffective and deleterious prison system in Canada.
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)→
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 