Minor Expletives

I’ve been thinking about maker culture and theatre lately. Briefly – “Maker” gets used to describe a hacker/DIY culture that values getting involved in building tech and stuff from the ground up (see: Wikipedia, CBC’s Spark.) There’s a leaning towards digital, robots and 3D printing, but I might toss in the resurgence of craft and […]

I’m in with Public Recordings at the Theatre Centre working on an Encyclopedia, so that’s where most of my writing energy is going, but I came across quote from Brecht that doesn’t fit there: Brecht on Realism: Now we come to the concept of realism. This concept, too, must first be cleansed before use, for […]

Freemind screen capture of a talk on other relationships to other populisms. Full length video I

The first in a series of posts I’ve wanted to do for quite awhile – a post-internet, probably more mangled with logistical concerns, response to Walter Benjamin’s Author as ProducerSheila Heti’s Back to the World post on artists talking art is worth a read (click here), but a useful sample to start us off is: […]

Recently I was asked for some thoughts and red flags for moments of “casual” performance and audience interaction. This is a slightly edited version of what I wrote, in case it can be of use to anyone else. First, I mostly try to replace “casual” with “conversational” these days, since there’s little about casual about […]

This is a long removed continuation of the conversation with Holger. But takes no account of the comments section which looks really good, but editing this post is more procrastination than I can afford. For the other ways I deal with theses questions: – Please join us at Koerner Hall any time (come and go) […]

One of the troubles of Dedicated to the Revolutions (and maybe many Small Wooden Shoe projects) was reconciling some of the big idea thinking with the often absurd, stupid and/or plain silly stuff that happens on stage. But in this trouble is something important to me – part of the big idea itself. A goal […]

Some recent (slightly cranky) thoughts on attention and good audience behaviour: Be interesting enough to take photos of and record If the person next to me taking photo is more interesting or too distracting compared to what is on stage – that’s the performances problem not the audience members. That person is a fan – […]

“The fundamental challenge remains: How can you foster both a deep and applied understanding of how things currently get done in a professional field, while also deeply questioning those standards of practice?” — Traditions of the calling – The Artful Manager Can we both “play the condition” and work to change those conditions? It’s a […]

In Toronto Theatre: Five Points of Contention Holger Syme raises a lot of good questions and makes his arguments in a clear way. There are things I agree with and things I don’t — but thanks so much to Holger for bringing them out in a non-hysterical mode that allows for generous disagreement. Below I go […]

Working on Antigone – I’m aware that generation divides have a long history in the western world and in the theatre. [Patti Smith Video] That children desperately want distance and difference from their parents is so engrained in modern western thought as to be cliché when spoken aloud. The field of psychoanalysis is built around […]

“…they’re not wrong” Funny, Catchy and Not Too Challenging, or “At some point, you’re just an elitist f*ck.”: “…Which got me thinking about snobbery […] I’ve got to say that, for me, those middlebrow shows form a disturbingly large portion of my early memorable theatrical experiences—42nd Street, Miss Saigon, Les Miserables. If I had to […]

“The problem is not, fundamentally, to get people to slow down, or to move without being toxic to their environment. The problem is to make people aware that anonymity is as toxic to the ecology of heart as hydrocarbons are toxic to the atmosphere. The problem is how to restore intimacy, curiosity, trust, and play […]

The fear is that it is “natural conservatism of age.” But I am certainly thinking along similar lines: Anne Bogart: “As a theater director and a child of postmodernism, during most of my career I avoided the charge of storytelling.  I was more interested in subverting stories, turning them on their head, reversing them, twisting […]

I had the honour of being the first Toronto Fringe Festival Research Chair – part of the amazing work that Gideon and the people at the Fringe are doing to support the theatre scene year round in the city, including the new and exciting Creation Lab (I’ll be at the Open Jam tomorrow – maybe […]

Brendan Gall during rehearsals for Galileo. thanks to Sky Gilbert for prompting me to write this by thinking I had written it before. It is something I’ve been thinking about performing again in Perhaps in a Hundred Years. *** “Realism” in theatre is often used to mean “realistic portrayal” – a style of acting in […]

I like genre pieces. which shouldn’t be surprising. I learned to read and imagine in the worlds of pulp fantasy and slightly better science fiction. Even now, when I read fiction, it is usually some clear genre – sci-fi and fantasy have been joined by mysteries (the harder boiled the better), spy novels and historical […]