Tag: archive

“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 […]

There are more interesting things to talk about. Part of the problem with the side bar to the article on Peggy Baker that people are talking about, is that it deflects from some of the very important and difficult things about gender and dance production that Baker raises. Baker made a point in her speech […]

part of a series (never said it was going to be in order.) 5_There is good and bad fun. Good fun is essential. To get it out of the way: Bad fun includes (but may not be limited to): fun that re-enforces, re-enacts or otherwise supports existing oppressive, mean and otherwise shitty power dynamics. Good […]

Mission Paradox is rolling out a bunch of big questions. Out of appreciation of that kind of thing, I’m going to try and answer Adam’s questions. I will probably fall behind.First question (abridged): Why would someone want to work with you? (Whole thing here) A while ago, I was thinking a lot about the community […]

Mission Paradox has these to very good posts – the first on the sports to church to theatre analogies (those Bears examples still hurt – redemption on Monday?) and then followed it up with Not nearly enough “The implication is this: Art isn’t enough. If you want a career as an artist, or a strong […]

A question that’s been poking at me for a while now. That I need (and maybe I’m not alone) a way to make performances quickly and outside of the structures laid down by the current status quo. To be clear: the status quo, to me (now, here) includes most “working artists” – since we are […]

This seems true. And something I’m trying to figure it out in the theatre. (Galileo, What Keeps Mankind Alive) Beyond the excitement and buzz factor, what’s the value of doing this project so fast? Magazines don’t have money to pay anyone anymore. A lot of people are expected to invest a lot of time to […]

We mean what we say, we also mean other things.I’ve been having a problem with irony lately – especially here in Toronto. I want to keep working on it, since I used to like it a lot and felt like it could do some useful things. But recently I’ve been seeing it as a defensive […]

These days (or maybe in the days just passing) there is a desire for truth and/or authenticity that gets worked out in verbatim theatre (also dance) – at the same time as these claims there’s backlash when we find out someone was lying and historical accuracy seems important. David Hare has written a nice piece […]

More from 99 – this time as a guest at Parabasis it puts into my mind a bigger question: is there a difference between writing to an audience, writing for an audience and writing about an audience, particularly if you’re engaged in anything at all activist in your work? And should there be only one […]

Tim Etchell’s blog at the Guardian continues to be very good: It’s watching this small fraction of inspired improvisations (maybe 3% would be more accurate) that reminds me how lucky I am to work with performers who can do this – this very strange combination of tuning and turning, doing and waiting, acting and not […]