Colonial Circus; currently playing at Aki Studio, is a hilarious and intermittently disturbing sideways look at colonialism. It’s a clown show performed by Two2Mango; Shreya Parashar and Sachin Sharma. So, we have two people of Indian origin in slightly bizarre white-face playing both “native” characters; a priest and his disciple, and representatives of the Raj; a British lady and her manservant.
I made a rare excursion into the world of dance on Friday evening to catch Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo’s one woman show What We Carry presented by Native Earth Performing Arts and A’nó:wara Dance Theatre. Barbara is Kanien’keha;ka originally from Kahnawake and as well as being trained in classical and contemporary settler dance traditions she’s also a powwow performer in a range of dance disciplines. She also has a pretty complex personal history. All of this bears on what happens in the 45 minutes or so of this show.
Before looking forward to next month I want to mention a couple of things this weekend that I haven’t previously noticed. Saturday (Jan 25th) at 12.30pm there is a Met HD broadcast of new production of Aida with a pretty interesting looking cast. Later, at 6pm there’s a rather special concert at the Arts and letters Club to celebrate the 100th birthday of Morry Kernerman (former assistant concertmaster of both the TSO and OSM). The concert is presented by Canzona Chamber Players and wiull feature Trio Uchida-Crozman-Chiu. Continue reading
Rougarou is a work in progress written and directed by Damion LeClair for unnecessary mountain theatre. On Saturday and Sunday it was given in a semi-workshop format in partnership with Native Earth at Aki Studio as part of Summerworks.
The format was basically a reading with one actor playing all the parts and a second person “setting the stage” as there were no sets or props, though the sound design, or at least part of it, was included. I think the intent at this point is for the finished product to use two (or perhaps more) actors; one playing the main character Renee and another perhaps playing everyone else but I’m not sure of that.
Francis Končan’s Women of the Fur Trade opens tonight (Thursday) at the Aki Studio in a production by Native Earth Performing Arts. I saw a preview last night. It’s not an easy play to describe. It’s a comedy. But with several twists. It has a historic setting. But it plays fast and loose with time. It’s funny, disturbing and relates events from a female point of view that rarely get seen that way.
Here are some upcoming shows for April:
Music
Seventh Fire, part of the SummerWorks Performance Festival, is an immersive experience currently happening at the Aki Studio. It’s a ceremony/performance in which the participants are invited into a prepared, dark space where they can sit or lie down on cushions or chairs (lying down strongly recommended) and experience 90 minutes or so of a carefully constructed 3D soundscape.
ARC’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2012 play Martyr opened at the Aki Studio last night. It’s presented in an English translation by Maja Zade and directed by Rob Kempson. I think it’s more than a just a direct German to English translation. names have been changed for instance and there are definite shifts in directorial approach from the Berlin production. I think the best way to understand what this is all about is to start with the original German version and how it may have looked to a Berlin audience and then look at how time, space and directorial decisions may affect audience reception.
This Is How We Got Here is a play by Keith Barker that opened at the Aki Studio last night. It’s about grief and how an event can affect multiple relationships at multiple levels. It’s very cleverly crafted with a non linear time line so I am going to be somewhat evasive about the plot because spoilers would spoil it.
Ho Ka Kei’s take on the last canonical part of the story of the House of Atreus; Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) opened last night at the Aki Studio in a production directed by Jonathan Seinen. It’s a very funny and very thought provoking take on the story that will likely be best known to opera goers as the plot of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. I want to start with the three questions that the playwright set out to answer:
This interests me especially because I’m not in any real sense a marginalized person. Indeed I’m almost “archetypically” of the group that has made the classical canon its own; i.e a white male with a traditional classical education(1).
operaramblings 