Results tagged “performance”

Michael Ondaatje, with Art of Time violinist Julia Wedman.

If you're coveting a secret fetish for adventure novels, now's your chance to live one out. Grab your flashlight and your keen intuition and head to Extermination Music Night VII (half the fun is finding it!) While the plot of an adventure novel might lead you to that secret, special cave to call your own, this night of music, visual art, and performance will take you to an undisclosed location that may or may not be cavernous, but will certainly be cultured. The venues are quite remote and the instructions on how to get there kind of cryptic. Just think of it as a scavenger hunt, where the prize is an amazing show.

The sheer volume of free art film screenings in the city is enough to make even the most consummate buff's eyes glaze over, but this Thursday at DeLeon White Gallery, those same eyes might just pop out of their sockets.

Last night at the beautiful Winter Garden Theatre, the winners of the 28th Annual Dora Awards were announced in a ceremony hosted by the hilarious Rick Miller (of MacHomer and Bigger Than Jesus fame). The Doras are basically Canada's version of the Tonies, except you can't watch them on TV and see Molly Ringwald and John Stamos jazz-hand their way through a radical new interpretation of Hello, Dolly! As one might expect, the whole affair is generally more sedate and even less people care about the results. But we do! It's also somewhat validating to see shows that Toronto reviewed positively get the respect they deserve (and occasionally shocking to see the same respect lavished on things we thought were crap). Now, there were a lot of awards being handed out last night, so let's be a jerk and ignore the hard work of all the behind-the-scenes people and focus on the flashier trophies.

You know all those flashy LED lights on the CN Tower? Apparently they're going to get flashier by this Thursday.

For the entire month of May, the Deep Wireless festival will be taking place at various venues, from the west end to your very own living room. Presented by New Adventures in Sound Art, this is the sixth edition of the annual festival that explores the medium of experimental sound and radio art.

This week's biggest opening was surely Mabou Mines DollHouse, which kicked off the 2007 New World Stage International Performance (the reboot of the old World Stage Festival) over at the Premiere Dance Theatre. The New York-based company's interpretation of Ibsen's A Doll House is bizarre and at times confusing. It is also as vital and thrilling a piece of theatre as you are likely to see this year. Torontoist urges you with all its mightiness to see this show (which has a rather brief run) if at all possible. The tickets are expensive, but there are afforable rush seats available.

Photo by avp17 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The big news this week in theatre (well, other than that) was the announcement of the newly revamped New World Stage International Performance line-up for 2007. World Stage disappeared from the radar for a while when Ontario decided DuMaurier wasn't allowed to sponsor it anymore - the last time it was here it existed on a much smaller scale, consisting of solo shows. But now, it's back and bigger than ever with 17 full productions taking over the Premiere Dance Theatre and the newly re-named Enwave Theatre (formerly the Harbourfront Centre Theatre, formerly the DuMaurier Centre Theatre...) as well as various other locations in and around Harbourfront Centre. Here's a rundown of the most exciting-sounding shows on the bill:

"Goodness," a play by Toronto playwright and novelist Michael Redhill (pictured) has been picked as the best play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The play was produced by Volcano and Tarragon Theatre last year but it shone at Edinburgh beating out over 1500 other plays to take the Carol Tambor Theatrical Foundation award.

Theatre people often get a bum deal. Humiliating auditions, selling the car for acting classes or singing lessons or to fund a play, producing blood, sweat and tear-filled work and for what? To end up emotionally drained, penniless and with nothing but a collection of tap shoes and wigs to keep them warm at night? So is life on the stage. And, damn it, they deserve recognition for it.

, a movement-based piece of puppet theatre based on the life and art of Frida Kahlo. Torontoist has only seen bits of the show workshopped, but we were particularly impressed by a sequence where Frida (played by Brandy Leary, also the company's founder and artistic director) dances a tango with a life-size skeleton. Anandam performed the show to great acclaim at the New York Fringe Festival, making good enough to merit a mention in The New York Times.

Wonderwoman Lisa Pijuan-Nomura has been curating and hosting RED for almost three years now, when she decided there weren't enough venues for performers and artists to simply play. Pijuan-Nomura, a dynamic performer in her own right who often uses these evenings to workshop pieces of her own, has always been adept at gathering an interesting blend of artists - where else can you catch quirky Brampton band the Lollipop People, spoken word artist Wakefield Brewster, and a tap dancer all in the same night?

Good news. Eastern Front Gallery is up and challenging Bruce Mau's massively-hyped and masterfully-disorganized EPCOT AGO show with a rebuttal called Massive Response. The show, which opened yesterday, presents works by twenty-three artists, which run from the humorous to the mildly profound. The gallery is also presenting a series of lectures in tandem with the show. Tonight "curator Ron McKay delivers a provocative keynote address: “Spitting on a Hummer as Performance Art,” which will be followed by a screening of Soylent Green. Who knew Charlton Heston and Bruce Mau would ever find themselves in the same paragraph? And who we knew could spit on a Hummer and call ourselves Picasso?

It was a lean, mean and ruthlessly efficient Pixies that opened up a two-night stand at Arrow Hall last night - okay, maybe Frank Black Francis wasn't quite so lean. A long time coming – more than seven months since the shows were announced and tickets went on sale – the sold-out crowd of 9,000 composed of equal parts present-day indie kids and aged hipsters was pretty damned anxious by the time their heroes finally took the stage just after 9.