The Theatre Centre’s annual Free Fall Festival is a showcase of experimental works, some more finished than others. Liza Balkan’s Out the Window is close to a full-scale production, and let’s hope that will happen very soon. The potency of the play did carry through despite actors being on script. Balkan says in her notes […]
I’ve coined a word for the US equivalent of Eurotrash, and that is Amerijunk. (FYI, the Canadian epithet is Canacrap.) Unfortunately, Amerijunk best describes the World Stage presentation with the ungainly title of The Wooster Group’s Version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré. (Apparently there were issues with the Williams estate over the production.) I have […]
The more playwrights coming out of Canada’s ethnic communities, the happier I am. They are truly the new Canada, reflecting the fact that we are an immigrant population. That being said, a flawed production can chip away at the enjoyment factor. My Granny the Goldfish by Vancouver’s Anoush Irani seems to be a crowd pleaser. […]
More often than not, in dance works that are very personal in nature, choreographers need a good editor. This is true of Yvonne Ng’s Frequency. I’m mentioning this point first because the length itself and repetitions within Frequency, mar a honey of a dance piece. Ng is not known for her ensemble work. Apparently her […]
Montreal’s Martin Bélanger is a philosopher of dance – by that I mean, his multidimensional works deal with cosmic topics. He likes the big picture. Grande Théorie Unifée, a work he created last year for Festival TransAmériques, is a case in point. By the time that the rambling 90 minute piece is over, Bélanger and […]