Theatre That Rocks the Boat!

January 19-24, 2010

WWT’s alternative theatre performance festival is back – twice as big as last year with seven adventurous and critically acclaimed theatre pieces from Edmonton and beyond. Always entertaining and unique disciplines and styles, Canoe offers “white water theatre at its finest

 

PIG: A Peepshow of Forbidden Acts from the Farm

Cowgirl Opera Theatre – Edmonton 

- a rock music spectacle that dares us to consider what we consume as entertainment - MC

In a surreal prairie landscape, wayward girls are being lured into the tent-prayer meetings of a glamorous female evangelist. She and her bible-salesman boyfriend quickly groom their new devotees into peep-show players, presenting acts that delight, horrify, and ensure salvation. There is no who-done-it here, no crime to solve, no story to unravel. At this peep show nothing matters but everything has a price. It’s a backward world where public execution is a performance, and accidental necrophiliacs can find redemption in true love.  

After a sold-out run in Winnipeg, the world's worst peep show is back featuring the music of Curtis Ross (bebop Cortez), a five-piece band and eight performers.

PIG will implicate you in a world of faith, justice, public spectacle and non-Kosher meat.

"Its humour and comic timing are throbbing with hilarity, after my sides had recovered from the strain of constant laughter."                                                                             - SEE Magazine

“I've seen a lot of "out there" shows in my years as a reviewer. I can honestly say … I've never seen a show as appallingly offensive, sacrilegious, profane, or disgusting as Pig. It's also outrageously hilarious, and I loved it.”                                                                                     - Joff Schmidt, CBC Winnipeg

Pig… is the best musical to hit the fringe since Hedwig and the Angry Inch. – Five stars!  

- Bob Williams, Winnipeg Free Press

 "Not for the faint of heart, the squeamish, or anyone hoping to get into heaven.

- Brad Cartman, Winnipeg Sun

http://www.chalifouxprocktor.com/clients/pig

by Kristine Nutting

Music by Curtis Ross

Directed by : Eileen Sproule
Featuring: Jesse Gervais, Georgina Beaty, Joelle Prefontaine, Caitlin Fulton, Andraea Sartison, Ava Markus, Kristine Nutting

Lighting Design -  Russel Ault
The Band: Jason Kodie (le fuzz), Silas Grevis (James T Kirks), Curtis Ross (bebop Cortez, Bronto Scorpio), Cam Boyce (Str8 Up Gypsies)

 

Etiquette  

Rotozaza Theatre – London, UK

“Etiquette difficult to describe but unforgettable to experience.” – MC

You’re in a Paris café, a character in a Jean-Luc Godard movie. Or you find yourself an old man finding yourself in a conversation with a beautiful stranger. Or, onstage in Ibsen's classic play "A Doll's House"

Etiquette is an intimate half-hour experience for two people at a café table that people around the globe have experienced. It creates a private space in a public setting where the two people are its performers and its only audience. No one else watches - others in the cafe are unaware. The two wear headphones that tell them what to say to each other, what to do. Etiquette offers the fantasy of speaking to someone without having to plan what you say, and the thrill of disowning your responsibility for it. In the conversation the roles of 'audience' and 'actor' roles are imperceptibly assumed and exchanged.

 "Etiquette explores the gap between language and meaning. In creating an entirely private space in a public setting, something extraordinary happens." – Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

If the line between audience and performer seems blurred, Rotozaza's new drama, Etiquette, erases it entirely.                                                                                                         – Jason Zinoman, The New York Times

 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/arts/15iht-fringefest.1.7113896.html

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/01/16/theater/1194817112282/urbaneye-theater-and-pierogies.html 

Conceived Written and directed by Anthony Hampton and Silvia Mercurial

Presented in partnership with The Vancouver East Cultural Centre

Etiquette can be experienced in 13 different languages, including: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, Slovene, and Japanese.

 

Lauchie, Liza & Rory

Frankie Production, Mulgrave Road Theatre

 “a smartly acted piece that’s  technically dazzling” - Michael

After a woman marries the wrong twin a small town witnesses a twenty year, interrupted love story.  

Cape Breton coal miner Lauchie Macdonald lives a humdrum existence but his world turns upside down when the vivacious Liza dances into his life. The awkward courtship is sealed with a big win at bingo, until Lauchie’s daredevil twin brother, Rory, bursts into the scene. Two actors bring a whole town of characters to vivid life, delivering a tour de force performance. Adapted by Sheldon Currie (author of Margaret’s Museum) from his short story, Lauchie, Liza & Rory one of Nova Scotia’s most beloved comedies.

Lauchie, Liza & Rory premiered in 2003 at Mulgrave Road Theatre, touring Nova Scotia. In 2004 it was presented at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival. It toured New Zealand in 2005.

“A quirky, engaging, bittersweet yet humourous tale… brilliant theatre at its very best.”

— Greymouth Evening Star, New Zealand

“A moving tale of patience, loyalty and love. Highly Recommended.”

— The Toronto Star

2004 Merritt Theatre Award winner for Best New Play

By Sheldon Currie

Directed by Mary-Colin Chisholm.

Featuring Christian Murray and Natasha MacLellan

Designed by Stephen Osler

Lighting designed by Leigh Ann Vardy

Presented in partnership with The Yukon Arts Centre

Grumplestock’s

Surreal SoReal Theatre – Edmonton 

- a surreal high energy ride of physical theatre from one of Edmonton hottest young companies” – MC 

A traveling show of marionettes fall off their wagon and become fugitives, running from their mysterious creator, Grumplestock. Now Tilly, Cresh, Tubix and Morelle must hide away in the dark city Bowble, meeting an array of characters clinging to their rigid class systems. Grumplestock's marionettes feel the secret of Bowble creep closer as the truth of their creation becomes clear.

The wild adventure of Grumplestock's puts strings on the actors; marionettes who transform into over twenty-five characters in the world of Bowble. This mesmerizing piece of theatre brings the inevitability of fate and our constant search for escape to the foreground.

"Grumplestock's may be the most refreshingly different and sophisticated piece of theatrical creation at this year's [2006 Fringe]" festival – Vue Weekly

"...so new, so wonderfully fresh, that it takes your breath away" 4 and a half Suns – The Edmonton Sun

"...a slick, smart and magical little play that manages to be gritty and earnest at once. The writing and performances are endlessly clever" – Edmonton Journal

by Jon Lachlan Stewart, Kevin Jesuino, and Trish Lorenz

Directed by Clinton Carew

Featuring Jesse Gervais, Kristi Gunther-Hansen, Jon Lachlan Stewart, Vincent Forcier

Set, Costume and Lighting design: Cory Sincennes

Makeup by Tata Tuviera

 

Blood Opera: the Raven Tango Poems

Prosperous Tangueros Consortium – Edmonton

Tango - the definitive dance of sexual tension. Intense, deadly serious, multi-faceted.

Raven - does not give a fuck about complexity or dance. Takes a beak to the balloons humans blow out of their heads and asses. POP! Hop. Squawk.

Narrative, imagery and Argentine tango interweave in Blood Opera to create a luscious dance of word and flesh. The words come from award winning poet Jannie Edwards' book of the same title. The piece is structured like a songbook, so it can take us – from chats in the garden with Judas and Freud, to pornography and prairie family dinners, to suicides and epic prairie sunsets.

Each song/dance becomes more intense with the supercharged energies of money, lust, poetry, family, elopement, breakup, fatigue and ecstasy - which Raven hops in with his one-liners to take the piss out of.

Inspired by the Argentine tango, Blood Opera brings together mythic streams from the Old and New, North and South Worlds. It’s a fusion of forms, as is the tango itself. The tango was born of African slave music rhythms and European bandoneon and violin melody; of Old World classical ballroom and the hot Latin dances of the New World rhythms and European bandoneon and violin melody; of Old World classical ballroom and the hot Latin dances of the New World.

Awards for the Poet

Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems

Arc Poem of the Year contest, 2003, 2nd place

Lapointe Prize, Acorn-Livesay People's Festival, 2000 (1 st):

Poetry by Jannie Edwards

Directed & Dramaturged by Mark Henderson

Choreographed by Kathleen Ochoa.

Dedicated to the Revolutions

Small Wooden Shoe – Toronto

- “a completely different kind of show from some of Toronto’s most exciting new generation of theatre artists” – MC 

Gutenberg, Copernican, Newtonian, Industrial, Darwinian, Nuclear, Information: 7 scientific revolutions a grade 8 teacher once said altered the course of humanity.

Demonstrating the difficulty of demonstrating the effects of progress on our lives, six performers, not in any way experts in science, attempt to understand and question our notions of progress and knowledge. With unrehearsed questions and answers, live demonstrations, ukulele sing-alongs and a Staples catalogue worth of whiteboards things they found around the house they share that research with an audience. Absurd and delightful with a critical eye and a casual formalism, Small Wooden Shoe tries to help. And believes live performance might just be the best way.

“Dedicated to the Revolutions is the creative interpretation of how change occurs.” — Walrus Blog

“thought-provoking and aesthetically interesting, but most importantly, ... a sense of fun.” — The Globe and Mail

"Charmingly insistent on the right of non-experts and artists to grapple with what science means for how we understand progress … and how we understand ourselves."                             – Nora Young, CBC's Spark

" the kind of fun show that’ll also appeal to those who don’t usually go to the theatre." -- NOW Weekly, Toronto Review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED6zvB2w8sg

Conceived and Directed by Jacob Zimmer

In Collaboration with Ame Henderson

Created with and Performed by Frank Cox-O¹Connell Chad Dembski Aimée Dawn

Robinson Erin Shields Evan Webber

Created with and Designed by Trevor Schwellnus

Created with and produced by Erika Hennebury

Originally produced with the assistance of One Yellow Rabbit's High Performance Rodeo <http://> , Calgary’s International Festival of the Arts and in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre <http://> .

Presented in partnership with The High Performance Rodeo

smallwoodenshoe.org

 

Hedda Gabler in Rutherford House

Vault: Theatre of Invention – Edmonton

- A collective of Edmonton’s leading theatre artists re-imagine a 100 year old classic”– MC

 

Vault: Theatre of Invention is inspired by and dedicated to the creation of brutally authentic human beings, merging innovative physical theatre with traditional psychological realism.

This new adaptation reworks Ibsen’s great classic, cutting the stodgy exposition and integrating extended imagery into the modernized text while uncovering its sexy, mysterious, and ruthlessly insightful underpinnings.  Emphasizing the underlying sexual tension that torments and motivates Hedda, this production uses a site specific venue, Rutherford House, to embody the spirit of Victorian morality which traps Hedda in a relic of her own past; the house she admired as a girl.  She longs to create beauty and significance with her life; she burns with passion but has an absolute terror of activating her dreams.  All her energy turns to destructiveness and perversion when Hedda can discover no outlet for the force of her passion- sexually or expressively.

The imagination will not down.  If it is not a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest.  If it is not flamboyance, it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime.  Men and women cannot be content anymore than children with the mere facts of a humdrum life – the imagination must adorn and exaggerate life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. -William Carlos Williams

As Vault: Weiss and Thingelstad have collaborated on 2 previous projects: the 2007, site-specific Shoe! at Gravity Pope in Edmonton then at TN29 in London, England, and 2008’s Caught, directed by Kathleen and written and performed by Melissa.

“Thingelstad's precise physicality and sharp-edged delivery, as she ricochets through a stage hung with ropes, make for compulsive viewing… She's a kinetic performer with star quality.” – Liz Nicholls, Edmonton Journal 

“This isn’t the first time Weiss and Thingelstad have partnered up, and their shared comfort with each other’s way of doing things allows Thingelstad to play out Weiss’s more difficult choices with clarity, and lets Weiss tweak her script to best dress up the ideas within.” – Paul Blinov, Vue Weekly. 

http://www.qualitytheplay.co.uk/reviews.html

co-written by Melissa Thingelstad and Kathleen Weiss

Directed by: Kathleen Weiss

Starring:  Nadien Chu, Harry Judge, Ian Leung, David Ley and Melissa Thingelstad

Designer:  Snezana Pesic

Sound Design:  Heather Kremski

Presented in partnership with The Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation, Edmonton

This world premiere production is supported by

The President's Fund for the Creative and Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta & The Rutherford House Society