Fugard Writes America
For the first time in his long and tremendous career, South African Athol Fugard has written a play that is NOT set in his homeland. Have You Seen Us? looks at racism and the lives of four immigrants in the USA. It runs at Yale Rep through to December 20, 2009.
An amazing departure for one of the world’s finest playwrights…
Articles here:
New Haven Register
New Haven Advocate
Hartford Courant
- 108 days ago
A November of Wrecking Balls!
Two down, two to go…
This November, we’ve already seen Wrecking Balls in Toronto and Montreal.
Still to come..
OTTAWA
Monday, November 16, 2009 / Lundi 16 novembre 2009
Saint Brigid’s Centre, 7:30pm / 19h30
more… / plus…
VANCOUVER
Monday, November 23, 2009
Vogue Theatre, 8pm
more…
Check this space for details. We’ll post them as they come.
- 122 days ago
10 points to address common misconceptions about the cultural industries
by Kate Armstrong
1. Artists are not spending their time at champagne soirées at the taxpayer’s expense. Artists are among the most underpaid professions in our society.
2. Culture is an industry, not something that just “happens.” You’re thinking of people who make pictures of owls using bottle caps.
3. Art is not about artists-it is about communities and culture. This discussion is not only art, it is music, dance, film, heritage, publishing, video, media, sound, design, theatre, creative youth programs, social outreach, community festivals, animation, fashion.
4. Culture is not a hobby. Running the Children’s Festival or arranging an international visual art exhibition is not something we can do in our spare time.
5. Just because you usually experience the effects of our work in your spare time doesn’t mean we produce it in our spare time.
6. Artists are not “fancy.” Art is a hugely important part of our shared culture. Were the cave paintings fancy? Do you like written language? Have you ever seen a movie or worn a nice shirt or walked through a public space?
7. Even if you don’t like the art, understand what the art is, or know what is involved in making it, that doesn’t mean it has no value, or that it isn’t part of an economy, or that the person who produces the art should do it for free. Most people’s jobs are a mystery to people outside their industry, and no one questions the validity of those jobs or suggests that their children could do them better. Do we raise those questions about people who work in helium detection, vine training, or indoor advertising management?
8. The provincial grants we’re discussing do not entirely pay for the operations of these cultural associations, so extract the word “parasite” from your economic counter-argument. These grants represent a small but crucially important portion of total support and income for a range of organizations. The amount of money being cut from the provincial budget that will be so crippling to the arts community represents only 1/20th of 1 percent of the total provincial budget. To put it in perspective, the contingency fund for the 2010 Olympics is more than twice this amount.
9. People in these industries work hard, hold jobs and have families. Artists support themselves through their art and their work.
10. Was there a reason you chose to live in a city and not in a closet? Do you want to be from somewhere?
Write a letter. Send a fax. Email.
Premier Gordon Campbell
Fax: 250 387-0087
MLA: Hon. Kevin Krueger
Fax: 250 953-4250
MLA: Hon. Rich Coleman
Fax: 250 356-7292
Links to further information: www.stopbcartscuts.ca
- 122 days ago
One of our own...
We at the Wrecking Ball are tickled to report that Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End has won the prestigious Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, for the Royal Exchange Theatre Company’s production at this year’s Edinburgh Festival.
Why are we so tickled? Well, first and foremost, seeing one of Canada’s top playwrights lauded on the international stage for their political writing is a good thing by us any day of the week.
But second, we’d be hard pressed not to mention that the first of the three monologues about the Iraq War that make up Palace of the End, was commissioned for the inaugural Wrecking Ball way back on Nov 1, 2004!
From all of us at the Wrecking Ball, congratulations Judith!
Order your own copy of Palace of the End or pick up a copy at TheatreBooks.
- 189 days ago
“We need to engage with the world, not isolate ourselves.”
So says Said al-Bettar, writer/director/star of The Women of Gaza and the Patience of Job – now playing in Gaza City.
Mr. Bettar, who is not a follower of Hamas, is nonetheless being allowed to stage a play where the entire cast (apart from himself) is female, and women sing on stage, something that is frowned upon by religious Muslims. This is part of a new strategy by Hamas to turn away from rockets, and towards PR – culture being part of this push for world opinion.
See the article here in the New York Times
- 230 days ago
Political Theatre in Thailand: Makhampon
From 1973 to 1976, Thailand enjoyed its brief moment of “democratic sunshine” before behind crushed by a brutal military crackdown, known as the October Event. A small, but vocal political theatre movement emerged as part of the student democracy movement, but was largely dispersed following the crackdown, either to join the Communist Party of Thailand in the jungles, into exile overseas, or into underground activities in the urban centres.
The Makhampom Theatre Group was formed in 1981, less as a company of artists, than as a group of activists. They are engaged in education, youth theatre, devised theatre, production and touring. They actively combine Thai traditional forms with new international forms, and their director, Pradit (Tua) Prasartthong, was recently awarded Thailand’s prize for “Best Contemporary Artist”.
Impressive.
As Thailand confronts more political upheaval, we wonder how these artists will respond / fare…
- 332 days ago
Mr. Durang’s Funniest Play
Christopher Durang’s wonderfully titled new play has opened in New York at the Public theatre. “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them” gets a lovely review in the New York Times. The Epoch Times raves. The Wall Street Journal is less kind. Do we detect criticism cleaving to political allegiances?
All is not simply slapstick, as such a critical response might indicate. Ben Brantley writes in the Times, “But within the theatrical fun and games is the subliminal, creepy buzz generated by an addiction to violence that transcends cultures but is apparently coded in the male chromosome. Mr. Durang lets neither American nor Arabic men off the hook for their bone-breaking problem-solving methods and their treatment of their women.”
- 332 days ago
Augusto Boal’s 2009 World Theatre Day Message
The fiction we created day by day is over…
As posted on the International Theatre Institute site.
All human societies are “spectacular” in their daily life and produce “spectacles” at special moments. They are “spectacular” as a form of social organization and produce “spectacles” like the one you have come to see.
Even if one is unaware of it, human relationships are structured in a theatrical way. The use of space, body language, choice of words and voice modulation, the confrontation of ideas and passions, everything that we demonstrate on the stage, we live in our lives. We are theatre!
Weddings and funerals are “spectacles”, but so, also, are daily rituals so familiar that we are not conscious of this. Occasions of pomp and circumstance, but also the morning coffee, the exchanged good-mornings, timid love and storms of passion, a senate session or a diplomatic meeting – all is theatre.
One of the main functions of our art is to make people sensitive to the “spectacles” of daily life in which the actors are their own spectators, performances in which the stage and the stalls coincide. We are all artists. By doing theatre, we learn to see what is obvious but what we usually can’t see because we are only used to looking at it. What is familiar to us becomes unseen: doing theatre throws light on the stage of daily life.
Last September, we were surprised by a theatrical revelation: we, who thought that we were living in a safe world, despite wars, genocide, slaughter and torture which certainly exist, but far from us in remote and wild places. We, who were living in security with our money invested in some respectable bank or in some honest trader’s hands in the stock exchange were told that this money did not exist, that it was virtual, a fictitious invention by some economists who were not fictitious at all and neither reliable nor respectable. Everything was just bad theatre, a dark plot in which a few people won a lot and many people lost all. Some politicians from rich countries held secret meetings in which they found some magic solutions. And we, the victims of their decisions, have remained spectators in the last row of the balcony.
Twenty years ago, I staged Racine’s Phèdre in Rio de Janeiro. The stage setting was poor: cow skins on the ground, bamboos around. Before each presentation, I used to say to my actors: “The fiction we created day by day is over. When you cross those bamboos, none of you will have the right to lie. Theatre is the Hidden Truth”.
When we look beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed people, in all societies, ethnic groups, genders, social classes and casts; we see an unfair and cruel world. We have to create another world because we know it is possible. But it is up to us to build this other world with our hands and by acting on the stage and in our own life.
Participate in the “spectacle” which is about to begin and once you are back home, with your friends act your own plays and look at what you were never able to see: that which is obvious. Theatre is not just an event; it is a way of life!
We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.
Augusto Boal
- 339 days ago
Caryl Churchill’s Gaza Play
Here is a link to Caryl Churchill’s play: Seven Jewish Children. It’s magnificent. Download it. Read it. Think about it. Perform it.
- 393 days ago
Take a toonie. Look at the polar bear. Now rotate the toonie 45 degress to the right, and put your thumb over the polar bear’s nose. What do you see? A vicious Tyannosaurus Rex, that’s what. And that sums up the situation in the world at the moment: we’ve gone from the familiar to the exotic. Harper’s acting like a fifth-generation Xerox of a coalition leader, The US has gone all hopey and Yes-We-Can-y, David Miller is charging you 5 cents for a grocery bag. And Pinter is gone. It’s time for a what-just-happened, where-are-we-now Wrecking Ball. Call it Shoe Shine the Bovine in ’09, because for the moment, the rules are suspended and the Dadaists are running the show.
WB8: Happy Valentine’s Detonation is ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY
Monday, February 9, 2009
Box Office opens at 7:00pm
Show starts at 8:00pm
Theatre Passe Muraille,
16 Ryerson Ave
Toronto, ON
Pay what you can (No advanced sales)
Proceeds will go to the Actor’s Fund of Canada
- 404 days ago
