Coming up… music etc
Yolanda Bonnell’s White Girls in Moccasins, presented by manidoons collective and Native Earth Performing Arts opened at the Aki Studio on Friday night. Co-directed by Bonnell and Carmen Alvis, it’s a play about identity and and recovering roots. The principal character Miskozi, like the playwright, is Indigenous but I don’t think the play is entirely about Indigenous identity. The other two roles are Ziibi, played by a Bermudian Trans Woman of African ancestry and Waabishkizi; played by a second generation Settler woman. So while the focus is on Indigenous identity I think it raises a lot of other questions too.
Aotearoa based ensemble UPU Collective are currently touring a show called UPU (“upu” means words in many Polynesian languages) co-created by Grace Iwashita-Taylor and Fasitua Amosa. It’s an hour long sequence of vignettes dealing with the historical experiences of the people of the islands; their journeys of exploration and settlement, their encounters with Europeans and, ultimately, their experience with capitalism and colonialism. It’s playing a short run at Aki Studio before moving on to Brantford, Fredericton, St. John, Prince Albert and Camrose.
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.
operaramblings 