Tag: theater

heart of my world

Hours blank at work today, schedule says I’m sitting pretty as the only one in the building until the Sunday Salsa class arrives. Things like small mercies are coming alive in the absence of noise. I wonder who’s where and what’s happening outside in the world. The clock ticks behind me and occasionally the elevator makes a hesitant noise, as if it’s second guessing what floor it should be resting on.

Now, I want you to imagine this next bit being said seriously. I want the habitual laughing irony that characterizes my voice replaced by something like the phrase ‘terrified sincerity’ carved into heavy stone.

The movie theater near my house has a FOR SALE sign on it. I’m calling the number on the sign tomorrow and asking for details and a walk-through of the space. I know that the B.C. Government has grants both for first time buyers and to help young entrepreneurs with their first businesses. You can see where I’m going with this.

I want to know what kind of support I can get, who’s interested in being part of this investigation. I need information about writing business plans, the details of those grants I mentioned and of commercial mortgages. I want to how to get ahold of Alex McKenzie, (see: the Blinding Light Cine), and what are the rules about memberships that let you skirt certain kinds of licensing, (see: Pacific Cinematheque, the Railway Club).

I don’t want to be a non-profit. I don’t want to be a first or second run theater. I want to be a mainly art house repertory, showing all the things that the old place ran. I’m talking everything from original work to old films where the copyright’s run out, and double-bills like Marc Caro nights, (Amélie, Delicatessen, City of the Lost Children), everyone’s favourite director they never knew the name of.

There’s another thing too, when I was younger and lived in the building adjunct to it, the theater was then a venue. Rick Allen gave me a pair of his drumsticks, Neil Young played there with Sonic Youth. If the stage is still there, it might be a viable venue too. A place for plays, short performances, concerts, the coffee house cabaret evenings I miss so much from back east. I work in a Dance Center, I’m passing friends with half the local theater folk, there is no lack of performers who want intimate venues.

Your thoughts? I would very much appreciate in-put.

itinerary cut & paste from the website

7:45 pm -8:45 pm : The Unbreakable Popsicle Stick Gang [details]
From the people who brought you such past fringe smash hits as How I Learned To Drive, A Closer Walk With Jean Chretien, Nucklehead Fever, Bonnie Dangerously and Ice Cream comes a true story about Mom’s, Magic and Miracles. You’ll laugh…you’ll cry…but most of all…you’ll believe!!! PS. Come help One Crazy Frenchman celebrate 20 years @ the Fringe!

CLOSING PARTY: Sunday, Sept. 17th 8pm, Fringe Club.
Celebrate the closing of the Festival with, the Raffle Draw, the Scavenger Hunt results and the Georgia Straight’s Critic’s Choice Award, presented by the Straight’s own beloved and feared theatre critic, Colin Thomas.

11:00 pm -11:59 pm : The Excursionists [details]
England has sunk! Two English Gentleman, Lord Necksycracksy & Professor Goggins are sans country. Equipped with their whimsy, their wit, and their Britannic bravado, they set off on an adventure of aristocratic proportions. WARNING: This show is performed at a depth of 20,000 leagues. Contains strong themes of Imperialism and Victorian science fiction. May cause scurvy.

cut and pasted from rumble.org

I do these every year and I have yet to regret it. The Eye of Newt Collective is an exceptionally good group of musicians, I’ve been an avid fan of the NOW Orchestra ever since I was a little kid. The people who come out to these tend to be of the fun and educated sort. I’m going to be at this tonight, you should be too.
Also, in lieu of a Friday night party at my house, we’re having another Sunday Garden party at my night-time house,so drop by this Sunday, at Victoria Drive between Grant and Graveley, anytime between 2 pm and 8 pm. Bring instruments, and food if you like, we’re stocking up at the farmer’s market tomorrow, and we can throw together a meal for 6-ish. (And of course there will be copious amounts of red wine.) Then, at 8:00, we’re trooping down to Grandview park for the outdoor screening of the 1927 silent classic Metropolis, (see below).

Silent Summer Nights

Celebrate the End of Summer in Style

Grandview Park, Commercial Drive at William Street, Vancouver
September 1 – 3, 2006
Screenings begin at 8:15pm – FREE !

Do something a little different this Labour Day weekend—stroll into Commercial Drive’s Grandview Park for the sixth annual Silent Summer Nights, three glorious evenings of the best in silent film. Park your blanket under the stars and enjoy great cinema, all to the thrilling accompaniment of original live music by Eye of Newt and special guests. A Labour Day classic.

Weather Update, Sept 1, 2006: It’s Sunny—see you there!

The Gold Rush

Charlie chaplin - the gold rush

(1925) Friday, September 1, 2006

The film Charlie Chaplin most wanted to be remembered by – The Gold Rush is the quintessential Chaplin film, with a balance of slapstick comedy and pantomime, social satire, and moments of tenderness. A Lone Prospector, a valiant weakling, seeks fame and fortune in the mad rush for hidden gold in the Alaskan wilderness.

Featuring live accompaniment by Stefan Smulovitz (viola/laptop), Viviane Houl (voice), Pepe Danza (winds/percussion), and Peggy Lee (cello).

Three Monks

A da - three monks

(1980) Saturday, September 2, 2006

Winner of a Golden Rooster and a Silver Bear, A Da’s animated Three Monks is an adaptation of a Chinese folk proverb:

“One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch the water.”

Featuring live accompaniment by Stefan Smulovitz (viola/laptop), Viviane Houle (voice), Pepe Danza (winds/percussion), Peggy Lee (cello), with narration by Andrew Laurensen.

Metropolis

Fritz lang - metropolis

(1927) Sunday, September 3, 2006

Possibly the crowning achievement of silent cinema, Fritz Lang’s blockbuster fuses the frenetic storytelling of twenties pulp fiction with Lang’s personal fascination with the dark side of human nature. A vast towering city’s exploited subterranean workforce threatens to overthrow the technocratic elite who callously rule them from above – even if it means destroying the city itself. Lang’s dystopian vision of the future pits science against religion, love against death and revenge against redemption.

Featuring live accompaniment by Chris Kelly (sax/laptop), Randall Schmid (guitar), Pete Schmitt (bass), Skye Brooks (drums)

Eye of Newt’s Silent Summer Nights is a Rumble and Radix co-presentation.

This event is supported by Black Dog Video, The Wise Hall, Artrageous, and Now Orchestra.

I’m training the other guy today. he’s awesome because he’s not a keener



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

A Quartet Of Clips From Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

Does anyone know of some quick pick-up jobs? My days off sick from work last week, added to my place of employment deciding this month to haul our pay-period back a week, have left me painfully scrambling. They’ve never paid enough for me to have a buffer for this sort of thing. Taking out a week of pay is like assisted suicide. After buying a required bus-pass, I only managed to pay rent by using up my birthday money from my family, leaving me only $20 until the 15th, which will also be wretched, due to my being half a month behind now on all of my bills. It’s this sort of thing that’s been leading me to seek employment elsewhere, somewhere less financially murderous. I’ve been tracking down bagger & tagger jobs, the removal of corpses from crime scenes, but most of them want me to have a drivers license. Something else I don’t have money for.

What do you regret?

The Virtual Stage is putting on a free workshop presentation tonight 7pm at the Roundhouse, Spank! – a new absurdist sci-fi comedy by Andy Thompson (writer of The Birth of Freedom), starring John Murphy, (the Heretic). Ed of techno_fetish and Sam and I are going, maybe a few other people. As it’s free, you should too.

felix culpa


presents WarPlays

The war over there. The war right here.

Felix Culpa offers you three nights of plays, readings and dialogue on the topic of war and its consequences. This event is presented in the same spirit that created the monumental staged reading of Howard Barker’s The Possibilities three years ago on the dawn of the Iraq invasion. Then, Felix Culpa brought together over 50 of Vancouver best theatrical talents at the VECC as a benefit for the Canadian Red Cross’ relief efforts in Iraq. Today, that conflict has no end in sight. We pose the question – why are we unable to eradicate war?

May 26th, 27th, 28th @ 8 pm
Playwrights’ Theatre Centre Studio
Tickets by donation, at the door only
Proceeds to benefit The Canadian Red Cross

Friday, May 26th and Saturday, May 27th @ 8 pm – Double Bill

Raw
Written and performed by Una Memisevic
Inspired by events in Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict, Una Memisevic’s RAW is an honest, unsettling and grimly humorous look at life in a city under siege. Trapped in her apartment by a sniper she may or may not know, a woman builds herself an impossible means of escape.

My Holiday Photos from Afghanistan
Written and performed by David Bloom
The challenge – We give playwright David Bloom precisely 68 hours to write his version of Canada’s war in Afghanistan.

Sunday, May 28th @ 8 pm

Howard Barker’s The Castle
A reading, featuring Vancouver most dynamic emerging and experienced talents
After a seven year absence at the Crusades, warriors return to find that the womenfolk have overturned the old system of feudal patriarchy. There follows an appalling conflict that destroys a society. With Rukiya Bernard, Bill Dow, Alex Ferguson, Kevin Loring, Linda Quibell and Veena Sood.

Felix Culpa is Vancouver’s première language-based company. The mandate is to produce work that explores contradiction, conundrum and moral ambiguity. Recent past productions include Howard Barker’s Und, Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner and the Governor General’s Award winning The Monument, a co-production with Rumble Productions.

For information contact Linda Quibell at 604.251.7889 or office@felixculpa.bc.ca

-note- I was assistant stage manager for the Canadian Red Cross benefit, and it remains one of the more defining moments in my brief career in theater. Felix Culpa put on a damned fine show, to the point where I still have a placard from The Designated Mourner up in my room. Support these guys if you can, folks. There’s not enough people like them.

frank zappa masquerading the best mad captain ahab

!Fellow Enthusiasts!

Michael Green

of Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit

performs his stupendously ridiculous

THE WHALER

featuring nudity, water, music, burlesque and probable carnage

one night only March 15 @ 10pm

Performance Works @ Granville Island

Part of HERE BE MONSTERS Carnival of the Arts

604-257-0366

feel free to circulate

This will be prefaced by a clever short by the puppetry masters of Fidel Castro’s Birthday Party at 8 PM and Lazy Susan at 8:30, a short play about accidental murders.

when a priest walks into my bar

Old music on, the sort of stuff I associate with far away from here, though nowhere in particular. Songs rarely on my playlist and only in the middle of a lot of other things. Canada midwest, this music, feeling nostalgic for a period that was over before I was born. My mother as a young girl, listening to records and wearing lambskin jackets. Older men. It almost goes without saying these days.

Flow, an artistically minimalist, highly addictive flash game, easy to control. mouse determines direction, hold down the button for speed. eat anything smaller than you, pick away at anything bigger until you can that too. blue bugs take you up a level, red takes you down

Perspective shift, we’re writing about different things for similar reasons. Low basement ceiling, low furniture that obviously came with the suite. It’s late. He has a pen and a lined paper book, I have the clacking-engine. I steal glances, theft in the air between us, and study the social interaction. I wonder if he’s aware how someone else would stumble here, silence being unusual in new friends, how they would feel awkward and too assuming, not used to the habits of long cohabitation as tightly woven as silk. I notice because mine have been eroding, evaporating away with my depleting intimacies. I notice and realize how generally unexpected I must be. Mental note: ask before you use the toothbrush or become a secondary mother to someone’s child.

Google Mars, exceedingly pretty, far more detailed that Google Moon. there are marked sites with links to corresponding articles.

Tonight is unknown territory. Korean Movie Night’s been replaced by Don Giovanni at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre this week, leaving me to vacillate between a gift-swap dinner, the Cafe Du Soliex poetry slam or the stitch-&-bitch that sprung out of Navi’s head last night. Though there is a certain temptation involved in going to Don Giovanna with super-feminists, I have to pass. A concrete solid week of theater will take me into the back alley and rough me up. This is my night off, my ducking out the back for a metaphorical quiet cigarette, and though I’m not responsible enough to go home and righteously wrest my bed from the ferret, neither am I entirely stupid.

Wednesday night Here Be Monsters presents Fidel Castro’s Birthday Party opening for Lazy Susan with Michael Green performing The Whaler after. There will be puppets, murder, nudity and water. Everything starts at 8pm and goes to approximately midnight. Tickets are $12.

did you just call me ‘baby’, mister bloom?

A drunken devil shaking ass in my face, people made of masks that are taken apart and fed to fish, someone downing a mason jar full of bodily fluids, and Pestilence complaining that his Avian Flu has turned into the Avian Rash. Everything new, self mocking beautiful.

Theater Under the Gun, Theater of Fear. Tuesday a graceful priest shall admit how he used his parish as vessels for empty lust. Wednesday, the actors will be ignored for the coats they carry, the characters they create from their hands. Michael will be there from Calgary. Something to do with nudity and buckets of water. It’s always precious and insane. It’s true. Triumphant. It swallowed me the way I prayed it would, the way I wanted it to. When it spat me out this morning, my bones had been replaced by lead. Today should be recovery, a due time taken out and away, but instead I feel like I’m going to die. I need to sleep, I need to remember to eat, not go swimming with crazy englishmen before breakfast. Too late.

Getting home at six:thirty, falling into bed at seven. Dawn approaching, hours ticking by, and we’re not noticing. We’re stretching out, our feet under the coffee table, playing I Never. Somehow at the after party, the birthday of one of the directors. She reminds me of Karen. She reminds me of sitting on the roof of the Cultch, crawling out the tiny cupola and leaning against the harsh black angle of the shingle. The smile I gave my life, seeing the city like that for the very first time, the karaoke inside that not even actors would sing. BBQ’s and crying backstage. The Felix Culpa Red Cross fundraiser, the show that for the first time called me on stage for a bow.

I should have kissed that man. His tawny coat, his tawny hair. The only time I would have left my life then.

She and I were standing on a picnic table on the roof, a pool to our left, a drop of fifteen stories to our right. Starry night, orange lights, the red ember of her cigarette. If I had leapt, I could have cleared the edge. Elegance in casual movement, flicking the flame to burn. She admires my sacrifice she say, my bravery at leaving when I needed to. It’s been so nice to see you again. The same drifting from conversation to conversation, It’s Been So Nice To See You, It’s Been So Long. Are You Working Again? and I’m considering it. I’m not sure how to break back in, except for this, except for here. Barcley street. Picasso scrawl on the palm of my hand. This is where I wanted to be, this is where I’m glad. Changing the conversation from young little admissions about sex to the political shift encapsulated by the internet, by raves, by sex meaning death to the newer generations. Thinking that one of these days, I have to learn how to get drunk. It felt really good not to be recognized by Kevin Conway. Score the only point for my new hair.

I thought I had a long walk ahead, a slender goodbye slipping into a taxi behind me, but instead I stayed up with DK’s scratchy sweater, no way to return it to him except for his address. Apartment 301. Crows, Dali posters, paintings that look familiar. A private rooftop deck. I answered the phone barely lucid enough to cancel my gamelan rehearsal. I dreamed of actors this morning, I woke with lines of dialogue wrapped around my hands and tongue, the image of an upside-down church, my pillows being books and a ferret, a pile of crushed velvet clothes. I almost fell asleep in the hot tub, leaning on Stephen’s shoulder. I almost thought about canceling tonight.

Titus tonight, by the way. Titus Andronicus at the Jericho Arts Center, 1675 Discovery, at 8pm. Admission by donation.

holy hells is good theater inscestuous

The Vancouver Art Gallery has switched cheap day from Thursdays to Tuesdays. This week, luckily, that’s the day the Ad Mare Wind Quintet premiere music written especially for the rotunda’s unique, reverberant acoustic qualities. They’ll be playing new pieces by three local composers, Jennifer Butler, James Beckwith Maxwell, and Jordan Nobles.

AD MARE
7:00 pm
Tuesday, March 7

Rotunda of the Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street, Vancouver

Admission by Donation
Information: 604-730-9449

I haven’t seen the current exhibition, though I’ve been wanting to, (Brian Jungun being snazzy and all), so I think this will be a perfect opportunity. It’s always a treat to have someone provide sonic landscapes to compliment the gallery’s exhibits. Wandering the vast rooms in silence just isn’t as kind.

Also, and more personally important, Theater Under The Gun is this week. What happens is that 10 to 12 theatre companies and/or ensembles are given an inspiration package that contains an image, a prop, a sound bite, and a line of text, all of which must be used in the final performance. They have 48 hours. When I worked in theater, this was one of the most twisted, intensely fun things I ever took part in. (I will carry the mental scars of John Murphy, (he of The Heretic), fucking a plant on stage to the end of my days.)

This is splendid news, because as far as I was aware, Theater Under the Gun had died this year. Chris McGregor and Trever Found, the two folk I used to know who ran it, hadn’t been able to find time for it. Apparently, though, it’s been taken over by two fairly-strangers-to-me, Heather Lindsay and France Perras, and they’ve stuck it into the new Show-Off Festival, Here Be Monsters, (here’s a flyer), which is being run by Monster Theater, a group who work occasionally with my Calgary friends, One Yellow Rabbit.

Tickets are $12, unless you’re interested in checking out a few shows, then a pass is $25. I’m planning on getting a pass and letting the festival take over my life for days at a time. Anyone care to join me? It starts tomorrow at Performance Works at 8pm. You’ll miss the Low concert, but that’s forgivable. I promise.