Local theatre makers Nicholas Leno (a 2016 U of O MFA directing alum) and Norah Paton have created an immersive, site-specific, audio production of A Christmas Carol to be delivered to audience’s houses in a convenient box.
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Stéphie Mazunya’s monodrama will be the only French selection in the upcoming 21 Black Futures season at Obsidian Theatre in Toronto.
The cinema is where I had my first big birthday party. It’s where I saw my first horror film. And it’s also where I went on my first date. Even though the pandemic bars me from the cinema, I hold onto the notion that the cinema is a place of inspiration where I learned to empathize with people with stories different from my own.
To motivate students, one theatre professor has made bubonic plague-era masks mandatory for all of her classes.
The undercurrents theatre festival bills itself as “theatre below the mainstream.” It’s a festival of boundary-pushing theatre by both emerging and established creators that gives creators a chance to stage their new works.
High school students are using theatre to keep the stories of abuse and perseverance at Bell High School alive at Ottawa’s Fringe Festival.
A member of Greenland’s Inuit community, Vivi Sørensen said she was compelled to properly tell the stories of Indigenous Peoples. “My main reason for wanting to direct is the fact that our stories … are always told from outside. And I felt like there’s a misportrayal, there’s something that’s wrong.”
There is enough personal and professional intrigue to earn the play’s description as being about “the abuse of power, political expediency, and the masks we wear to carry on as if everything is as it should be.” I think, acutely aware of my privilege as a white cisgender male, the key word here is abuse.
Although improv is, well, improvisational, there’s a lot of work that goes into preparing for a show. Campbell described it as tools to keep in your back pocket—knowledge of how stories progress, different genres and styles to perform, and other tricks and tools learned from plenty of practice.
“It’s a release—it’s very different from what I normally do at school … I just get to come to forget everything—here I can be some crazy, wild character.”—Sarah Robach, fifth-year biology student.
