if . . .

Participated in ITI/UNESCO Network for Higher Education in the Performing Arts / 2nd Student Festival (Online) Monday - Sunday, 13 - 19 July 2020 Here is AeRan’s take as she was invited to co-host the Korean on-line after show discussion. Her primary role was translator for Director Ha Kyounghwa of the Korean show Desire  and provide additional commentary. Upon watching and reflecting on the show she wrote the following text. Desire : corporeal expressions especially those created by the Korean body and Korean movement to tell the story of Medea. It was interesting to see the combination of Korean body verses greek mythology. To relate to the theme of the festival Home: Greek mythology is home or mother of theatre and the Korean body is the local home of where the actors are trained. In addition, according to what the director indicated, she utilized sources from Stanislavsky, considered to be the father of an actors theatre training. In this respect, the theme Home bring...

... two of the most compelling works witnessed last year (2018) were Kamloopa  &  Kanata-Épisode 1 - La Controverse ... compelling to witness with compelling backstories ...  ... Kamloopa was co-produced by Persephone Theatre , Gordon Tootoosis Nīkānīwin Theatre and Western Canada Theatre (Kamloops) in collaboration with National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre by Fire Creator/Playwrite/Director Kim Senklip Harvey performed at The BackStage Stage (Persephone Theatre Saskatoon) in late October ...  Kanata photo from press kit ...  Kanata-Épisode 1 - La Controverse was a   Thèâtre Du Soleil production with le Festival Automne à Paris, a coproduction Printemps des Comédiens (Montpellier), Napoli Teatro Festival (Italia) developed from a Ex Machina project ; Mise en scène Robert Lepage with the actors of  Thèâtre Du Soleil performed at Cartoucherie (Paris) in late December ... ... not unusual and happening more & more in ...

... i missed my chance ... i had something to say ... sitting before me were ten performers and playwright ... the show had ended ten minutes ago and they had returned for a talk back session ... i didn’t really have a question or maybe i had a thousand questions ... but i did want to share something ... i wanted to tell them how i felt ... i didn’t ... ... what i might have said was their collective epic work about Métis history, struggle, identity, reclamation, exile and recognition  Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show  was a wonderful theatrical spectacle, carefully crafted and an exceptionally acted Wild West show ... i wanted to thank them and honour all their courage and vision ... i also wanted to tell them i was trembling ... ... trembling ... well because ... well that night i would have put it in words like i was full of tension ... one of the actors ... think it was cast member Gabriel Gosselin who played Louis Riel used the word "authentic"...  i would have ...

Kafka has a dear place in my history ... ... Metamophosis , read at age 13, was the first work of fiction that made sense of the nonsense I felt around me ... after reading decided to spend a whole day as a worm at the high school ... arms entwined, squiggling from class to class ... great fun ... ... an adaptation by Steven Berkoff of The Trial was the first mainstage university production I directed (Nov. - Dec. 1989) ... an exhilarating experience ... the students were thrown into a process of me sorting through my European studies ... the retiring stage designer for that show was cleaning up his office when he found the original Trial maquette offered it to me which i gladly accepted despite wishing to unload rather than collect stuff ... photo to the left is from Emry's Dreams : Greystone Theatre in Photographs and Words taken by David Maneville ... ... Kafka resides in the deep recesses of my memory haunting as he haunted the 20th century ... await his latest incarnation ....

(Photograph by: Submitted photo, courtesy Arthur Despins) “What I’m interested in is creating a relationship with an audience where we all say, ‘We don’t know,’” says Bentley-Fisher. “I find theatre often excruciatingly boring, because we all go there and celebrate what we know, and I find that really tedious — I want to go with people to where we don’t know, where we all take that chance. It’s not that we don’t care — we all want to know very, very badly — but it’s being willing to take that chance of not knowing. And colluding with an audience, saying, ‘This is well worth it, let’s all discover, let’s all try to find it out.’ “So, we’re very ambitious. We’re trying to get to the heart and the truth of something. That’s where our ambitions lie.” ( Planet S | From Catalonia With Love | May 19-June 1 Vol.9 Issue. 19 ) "Buffalos by Pau Miró dealt with the repercussions of an unstable family life, the physical abuse and the abandonment of a group of siblings who will have to fight f...

In their final journey with Greystone Theatre, it is fitting that fourth-year University of Saskatchewan drama students are taking on the epic journey of Homer's The Odyssey by American playwright Mary Zimerman. Photograph by: Gord Waldner, The StarPhoenix :: note :: ... the Cyclops & Athena were Romeo & Juliet this past summer ... not all of them are 4th year ... student newspaper The Sheaf article (Pdf) ...

:: note :: ... what goes around comes around ... forty years ago I performed on the Greystone stage in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ... tonight son Stefan performs for the first time on the Greystone stage in Büchner's Woyzeck ...

It was fun eavesdropping on the Temple rehearsals of Luff Actually directed by Curtis Peeteetuce. Simply a wall away I would often catch myself guffawing over the lines. To finally see the wonderful farce in performance was a joy. More joy was watching Lacey Eninew & Aaron Shingoose, actors I had taught as students. Seeing them move on in the theatre world is rewarding. Catch an excerpt on YouTube or read about it in Plenty of laughter and love in 'A Rez Christmas Story ' By Andréa Ledding Sage Writer Saskatoon. ’ Also attended Drew Hayden Taylor's Toronto At Dreamer's Rock produced by 4E Presentations from Saskatoon at Persephone Theatre's Youth Series with my high school students. Again to see students I previously taught was exciting. Lance LaRoque in particular has been forging a sustainable path in the theatre world. In fact all the artists of both productions where graduates of The Saskatoon Native Theatre Company (SNTC). The importance of SNTC is in...

Skit Skit III (if you will) at Persephone Theatre's Backstage Stage December 2 - 5 created intense excitement for their March shows (for me at least) ... " Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own"--Jonathan Swift ... not this company their cup runneth over as they ridicule their own foolishness with a disarming blend of humour, wit, nonsense, criticism, as well as some didactic intentions ... visit Facebook page to view some of the video clips: Mr. Groove, Tanorexia, School of Acting & more ... ... sketch comedy may sometimes be uneven ... not Skit Skit III ... the troupe (Ashton Francis, Tara Schoonbaert, Kristen Holfeuer, Ed Machete Mendez, Ashley Turner, Brent Mhic Pharthalain) tackles material with authority and a confidence that comes from experience and fearlessness ... to take time, endless time crossing the full length of the stage with gums flapping and crutch twitching or the sudden appearanc...

The Sleeper Awake A Tale from 1001 Nights Adapted by Paul Sills Cast Caliph ….. Sage Chartrand Abu ….. Ashley Zuniga Slave ….. Crissy Tamosiunis Singer ….. Kaitlyn Ledene Mother ..... Larissa St. Onge Sleeper Awake was presented to all our Feeder Schools in the month of October. We thank the Grade 3/4/5/6 classes of St. Edward, St. Goretti, St. John, St. Mary & St. Michael for their wonderful hospitality. - See: Theater , Plays , Teens :: note :: ... presented in Story Theatre style the players narrate their actions and create props by way of shaping & handling the space ... a special group of teens performing a valuable service ... it was our intention to increase awareness of the beautiful Islamic literary tradition ... it seemed to work ...

… a summer bracketed by Shakespeare … in early July attended Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan The Merchant of Venice performed by a seasoned cast of professionals in their large billowing white mainstage tent on the riverbank site … late August, the youthful Abridged City Players presented Romeo and Juliet on the small proscenium stage in the Father O'Donnell Auditorium of St. Thomas More College on the University of Saskatchewan Campus ... … both companies, Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan celebrating their 26th season and Abridged City Players with their 3rd annual Shakespeare summer production, first and foremost embrace clear, crisp language to create the scenography sharing these epic tales of the excessive character of love and revenge where interaction is driven by desires that overshadow all logic … both productions had hunger, urgency & were energy based … … the evening in the tent packed with a sold out audience of 282 was occasionally overwhelmed by electrical st...

Performance Originally uploaded by raYmon Performance disappears in the moment of its manifestation. It is an expression of the potentiality of the past and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. Performance is a restless visibility of imagination and embodies the invisible intensity for the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned unknown. Performance sculpts space creating temporary bursts of ‘now’-ness inside a form constantly vanishing. Performance negotiates action with breath, blood, bone & mind in fields structured by desire, power, gender, identity, narrative and memory in ways consciously deep & with nuanced understanding. Performance dreams wakefulness. - See: Writings Theater :: note :: ... what is performance? ...

"When someone is following the stream of transformation energy, doing it - performing - with the ancient vibratory songs, the resonators in the body can begin a very complex dialogue with themselves. A dialogue which is not at all guided consciously by the doer but led more by the "inner action" itself." (Thomas Richards Interviewer: Lisa Wolford. The Edge-Point of Performance) Bent Out of Shape Productions' The Drowning Girls recent Saskatoon performances March 24 - April 5 at Backstage Stage Persephone Theater surfaced a thought frenzy that always lays close to the surface. What do I witness in a performance? Daniela Vlaskalic, co-writer, actor and co-producer has stated "... we all ended up writing and creating the play together. That was 1999. " The ten year journey has been mostly lauded throughout as hugely entertaining and visually mesmerizing with positively sparkling comments. "From conception to execution and performance, all the elem...

The beginning of March offered Saskatoon audiences a rare sighting of two productions of plays by Judith Thompson. Recognized by some , “as one of the major playwrights in the English-speaking world ...", her profoundly dark and disturbing visions present challenges to mainstream companies. It is not surprising then both plays were performed by what may be described as outlier ensembles. White Line Productions performed The Crackwalker at The Remai Arts Centre's BackStage Stage and Goat Songs Theatre performed Lion in the Streets at The Refinery Arts and Spirit Centre. Director Kristen Holfeuer assembled her Crackwalker cast from the creative firepower of recent University of Saskatchewan Drama Department graduates while Bethani Jade directed her young, fearless group of high-school and current university students in the fragmented and disruptive narrative Lion in the Streets . Does it really take gender to recognize the common condition of oppression with the will to powe...

I am wary of performance and attend when obligated yet often am aroused to write. I prefer description supported by action. I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting to data, leaping in, constructing notes to [re]act on my responses instead of contemplating on them. I dislike a cursory summary of the narrative action and shy from offering judgemental impressions. I prefer to present details, referencing examples to illustrate an assembling attention. I try to situate the work within the context of the oeuvre of the playwright/director/ensemble or whatever seems appropriate: a close reading of content, form and working procedures, historical and biographical tidbits, the canonical vocabulary of theory, innovation or stated intention. I require an intelligence of feeling and academic rigour parallel with associative linking to create a complexity that blurs serious and playful thinking. My wish is to stimulate questions that encourage a working manifesto for all types of pra...

With warning as lightning heralds thunder love rumbles my heart. Textwork is a practice, not a product. It is praxis, part and parcel of the critique of the everyday creative life act. It invites something out of nothing. A source. TextwUrk is not a metaphor, not metaphorical. It is creative work. A passion. It exists precisely in the obdurate interstice between body and voice. It exists in the arrow - the connection. It is memory. It is invisible to illuminate. It is not a set of procedures or perceptions. It is the crisis noise in the system. It is not the encapsulation or object of the crisis noise or the system. It is continuous; it is parasitic; it is thetic. It seeks obstacle. It is of no interest except as cultural residue: it is of great interest to the actor's studies. It is nothing more than the continuous reification, territorialization and rendering of the actor's work/etude - as if the etude were always already cleansed, available for the taking - as if the etude w...

End of term high school student projects culminate with successful presentations. A filleted (25 minute version) of Shakespeare's MacBeth & a student translation of The Farce of Patelin by Moliere . We study the action of Shakespeare & the origins of Moliere. A great deal of independent work. Commedia masks, swords, props, costumes, light & sound with simple set allow for the exploration of image in time & space. The basement & the stage both used as rehearsed at the same time. End of year stress resolves into creative energy and a concentrated effort. - See: theater :: note :: ... congrats to all & wishing a wonderful summer ...

Presented by the E. D. Feehan Drama Club, Alice an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's 1865 classic Alice in Wonderland proved to be a savvy & skilled production of humour and delight. Director Pat Lengert must be commended for his astute manoeuvring of complex scenes and set changes as well as a sharp eye for economy of action. All actors rallied around his cartoonish style bringing depth and enchantment without losing any of the irony embedded within the text. The childish and whimsical images of this production transform the fantasy-ridden wonderland of Alice from a carefree or nostalgic escape from reality into imaginative distortions twined with the reality of childhood confusion. It is not illogical nonsense rather more the frustrations of youth making sense of the crazy "real" world. The students performed with boundless enthusiasm & intuition catching the allegory of the material with experienced innocence and most importantly with a sense of curiosity. Simp...

Georges Vanier Elementary Fine Arts School presented The Big Five Zero a wonderfully crafted piece pulled from the hat of teacher/musician/artist/Impresario Jeff Cunanan & admirably directed by Alyssa Deacon this past week. Written for the 50th Anniversary celebrations we follow two clever students, Vic (Jodie Lysyshyn) and Gerry (Mikayla Reschny), as they discover the long rumoured hidden school basement with its treasures and spirits. Jodi and Mikayla carried the action with energetic performances well beyond their years, always fresh and cheeky. Their parents played with deadpan irony & tongue-in-cheek caricature by Renelle Hunter and Christopher Bantle, remember the good old days of good ol'Vanier. Along the way we meet Music Teacher Mrs. C (Sarah Twa), Secretary (Robyn Peiffer), Hippy Man (Joey Schatz), and the Ghosts of Students past (Jonathan Forest, Nicole Opsal & Jayne Barrett) revealing snippets of school history and lore. The ultimate challenge for the two...

- clown posses for a photo behind a glass door during the International Day of the Theater celebrations in front of the Ruben Dario National theater in Managua, Friday, March. 27, 2009. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix) - See: theater :: note :: ... WTD blog ... put on a red nose the freedom & responsibility of unfettered play ... play behind reflective glass ... the street as stage ... the theatre building as backdrop ... open the door to be to see to dream ...