Spaces Still Available in our Summer Theatre Intensive

Looking for fun this summer?

Why not spend a week indulging your passion for theatre at Theatre Ontario’s week-long adult Summer Theatre Intensive, August 10 to 16 in Waterloo.  Spaces are still available in our courses for performers and directors:

• Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Acting...and Then Some! – Tom Diamond returns to lead one of our most popular courses, suitable for absolute beginners or more-experienced actors who want to get back to the basics
• More Hot Scenes: Building Acting Technique, with Brenda Kamino – Through scenes and monologues from world and Canadian theatre and group work led by the instructor, learn to apply your technique to every role you audition for, land, and perform
• Review your Revue: Creating a Musical Theatre Performance, with David Gale & Randy Vancourt – This fun and challenging workshop offers participants a practical approach to creating and performing a musical production
• How Do I Make This Play Happen?: Directing for Beginners, with Thom Currie – A class specifically designed for the beginning and intermediate director seeking to explore practical techniques and approaches to directing
• Whose Text Is It, Anyway? Adventurous Approaches to Performance, with John P. Kelly – Directors with some experience will find this course challenging and stimulating and will provide you with insightful skills to further develop the directing craft.

This year we’ll also be featuring Dave Carley and Marcia Johnson as our Playwrights-in-Person on August 11, reading excerpts from their plays.  Playwrights-in-Person is made possible by a grant from the Playwrights Guild of Canada, funded by the Canada Council.

The Summer Theatre Intensive is an amazing opportunity  to acquire new skills, meet new people, explore creativity beyond the classroom, and have lots of fun while doing it!

ICYMI: Murray Tilson of Timmins wrote on our blog about the courses as the bests way he can think of spending a week of vacation

Find out more about Theatre Ontario’s Summer Theatre Intensive

ONstage Openings for the week of July 14

In South Central Ontario
Jul. 18, Summer Salon: Art [staged reading] at Theatre 3x60 (Durham Region)

In Southwestern Ontario
Jul. 16, The Mountaintop at Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake), in previews*
Jul. 16, Wichita Lineman at Drayton Entertainment: St. Jacobs Country Playhouse
Jul. 16, Run For Your Wife at Drayton Entertainment: Huron County Playhouse (Grand Bend)
Jul. 17, Twist and Shout: The British Invasion at Drayton Entertainment: Huron County Playhouse (Grand Bend)
Jul. 18, A Midsummer Night's Dream at Elora Community Theatre (Fergus)

In Central Ontario
Jul. 14, The Last Resort at Highlands Summer Festival (Haliburton)
Jul. 15, Summer of Love at Theatre Collingwood
Jul. 16, I'll Be Back Before Midnight at Drayton Entertainment: King's Wharf Theatre (Penetanguishene)
Jul. 17, Frankly, Sinatra at Port Hope Festival Theatre – world premiere
Jul. 20, Billy Bishop Goes To War at Highlands Summer Festival (Haliburton)

ONstage Now Playing in Southwestern Ontario
Bingo Ladies at Port Stanley Festival Theatre
Laura Caswell, Lisa Horner, Mary Pitt, Mark Allan
PhotosbyMG

In Eastern Ontario
Jul. 16, The Two Gentlemen of Verona at St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival (Prescott) with a preview on Jul. 15*
Jul. 18, Marriage can be Hazardous to your Health at Seaway Valley Theatre Company (Cornwall)

Check out last week’s openings

For more information on all the theatre playing across Ontario, visit Theatre Ontario’s ONstage theatre listings on our website.

Theatre Ontario individual members can access discount ticket offers for shows marked with an * asterisk

Read more about our discount tickets program

“It’s Impossible, of course, but Try”

by Miriam Fernandes

Over the month-long training in Saratoga Springs, in each Suzuki class that SITI Company Member Akiko Aizawa would teach she would say to us, “It’s impossible, of course, but try.”  This is the perfect way to sum up my time in Saratoga Springs—chasing the impossible.  The impossibility of keeping my balance in Suzuki, of being aware of everything at once in Viewpoints, of creating a newly devised piece each week with a group of new people and with a list of thirty things that must be included in the composition.  This is the beauty of the SITI Training—it gave me the tools to engage with the journey of chasing the impossible. 

My mind is still reeling from the whirlwind month and I am still trying to absorb and process it all, but I will attempt, in this blog, to start to bring some thoughts to surface.

Here are some of the things I am thinking about:

1) Training is a lifelong commitment.

When I mentioned in my previous blog that I was going to train “with” the SITI Company, what I really believed was that I was going to be “taught by” the SITI Company.  In actuality, I was training “with” the company.  Every morning we would have a 90-minute Suzuki class and a 90-minute Viewpoints class—and along with the 30-odd international artists, SITI Company Members would also take the class.  Consistent training is a fundamental value of the SITI Company.  They all teach and they all take each other’s classes.  This was ground shattering to me because in my experience, there exists a hierarchy of knowledge between teacher and student.  The teacher “knows” and the student “learns.”  And while this was still true in a sense, as many of us were learning new training methods, the company members’ participation in the classes taught me that in order to be excellent at anything, one must practice. You’re never “done” training.  In the case of the SITI Company, the teacher “shares” and the students “practice.”

And of course, it makes sense; ballet dancers practice their pliés whether they’re in a show or not—it’s a reaffirmed commitment to their craft.  And over the month I realized what a strange thing it is that as a theatre artist, I don’t have a practice—something I do daily to work on my craft.  The Company’s commitment to their training—Suzuki and Viewpoints—is humbling.  Training with people who have been studying these forms for over twenty years and watching them do their work and approach it with the same curiosity and presence as if it was their first time is inspiring—it’s how I want to work. 

2)  If you don’t know what you’re doing, get really specific.  Make choices.   If they’re wrong you’ll know, but you can’t know until you get really precise about what you’re doing.

In any given creative process, I get to a point where I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.  There are so many possible roads I can take that I get overwhelmed and frozen at the crossroads.  One of my greatest joys this month was discovering that choice will set me free.  Making a choice, however arbitrary, will bring me closer to what I am looking for. 

I had never realized before how many choices I have to make for every minute that I am on stage—it’s infinite and requires a rigor and clarity that I want to work with.  Nothing I do onstage can be accidental or unconscious, because the audience makes meaning (subconsciously) of everything.  As Anne Bogart says, “Acting is consciousness”.  It is being hyper aware, hyper present.  Both the Suzuki and Viewpoints training give the actor tools to bring themselves into the present moment, often by raising awareness by physically engaging the body.  And with this awareness, one can make choices:  to increase the tempo here, to create a more extreme spatial relationship there, to bring more stillness into the work: all choices that give me a way “in” to the work when I feel paralyzed. 

3)  There is a lot more to telling stories than text.

Ellen Lauren, (SITI Actor and Co-Artistic Director of the Company) says, “Actors are like braille that the audience presses into to read the story.”  It’s not just the text that we speak but the entire experience of seeing our bodies move through space and engage in the situation of the play, that an audience reads. 

And this is one of the MOST exciting challenges for me—if the audience is making meaning of everything I say and do, then everything on stage must be a choice!  From the moment I breathe in a monologue, to the turn of a head, to the dynamic of my speech, to the speed of my walk.  There is so much to craft—and each choice participates in the telling of a story to an audience. 

4)  Be interested, not interesting.

Often on stage, especially in a Viewpoints improvisation, I felt the need to “perform.”  What does that mean?  To be interesting?  To give the audience something worth watching?  That means that I am deciding what I think is worth watching and imposing that on my audience.  That’s not so interesting.

Anne Bogart says, “The one thing you can’t fake is curiosity.”  If you follow your curiosity, it will take you on a journey.  What’s way more interesting to watch is someone on stage who is interested in something.  What they are interested in, the audience doesn’t even have to understand.  It can be the actor’s secret.  But the act of being interested brings the actor into the present moment.  It activates their body and mind in a way that makes it impossible to not watch them.

Site Specific location for Composition 1: Parking Lot

5)  Language is power.

While there was a diversity of artistic practice in the room (directors, actors, circus performers, writers, puppeteers, etc.) the Company trains everyone as a Performer.  And as we created weekly compositions together, we needed to collaborate.

So how do you deal with the impossibility of collaboration?  How do you put five people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, languages, artistic practices in a room and get them to make something?  One of the SITI Company’s answers to this is give them the same vocabulary: i.e.  The Viewpoints.

The Viewpoints provide an artistic vocabulary that gives order to the chaos that is the world.

If you give a company of artists a way of talking about work, a common language, you give them the power to articulate their ideas and understand each other’s proposals.  Anyone who has studied Viewpoints before knows about vocabulary like tempo, spatial relationship, shape, architecture, etc.  These are the tools of a director, given to an actor.  Giving the actor these tools empowers the actor to make choices.  In my own practice, I know it has made me more aware of, and responsible for the “whole” picture, because I can now name what I couldn’t before.  I can take care of the whole by knowing what I am serving within it.

SITI Company – 2014 Skidmore Intensive

I went to Saratoga Springs seeking Master teachers and that is exactly what I got.  The level of pedagogy was unlike any I had experienced before.  The way the SITI Company speaks about what they do and why they do it was inspiring.  Working with artists from around the world was a gift!  I can’t quite describe how I am changed, but I feel it—I feel the fire.  I feel more alive.  The experience was truly paradigm shifting and I cannot express my gratitude deeply enough to Theatre Ontario, Why Not Theatre, and the sponsors for this opportunity.

The Independent Theatre Creators International Training Scholarship is a partnership between Theatre Ontario and Why Not Theatre, sponsored by Nekison Engineering and Contractors Ltd with funds matched by artsVest Toronto.  artsVest Toronto is run by Business for the Arts with the support of Canadian Heritage and the Toronto Arts Council.

Browsing The Bulletin Board

Coming Up from Theatre Ontario

Spaces are still available in our Summer Theatre Intensive for performers and directors:

• Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Acting...and Then Some!, with Tom Diamond
• More Hot Scenes: Building Acting Technique, with Brenda Kamino
• Review your Revue: Creating a Musical Theatre Performance, with David Gale & Randy Vancourt
• How Do I Make This Play Happen?: Directing for Beginners, with Thom Currie
• Whose Text Is It, Anyway? Adventurous Approaches to Performance, with John P. Kelly

Check out all of our upcoming courses and workshops, including our Adjudicators Symposium

Upcoming on The Bulletin Board

Play by Play at the Shaw Festival
Photo by Cosmo Condina Photography

• Deadline for applications for the TELUS Newcomer Artist Award from the Neighbourhood Arts Network honouring artists who have moved to Canada in the past 1-7 years is July 13
• Deadline for applications for the Basement Installation Program at the On The Edge Fringe in North Bay is July 14
• Deadline for nominations for the Siminovitch Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Theatre, honouring Canadian playwrights, is July 15
• The Shaw Festival’s next Play By Play event for theatre lovers looking to go behind the scenes begins July 16
• Deadline for applications for The Grand Theatre’s musical intensive for teens in London is July 18

New on The Bulletin Board

• Spaces are still available in Carousel Players’ Shaw Acting Intensive Camp for youth in St. Catharines 10 to 13 years old; the program runs August 5 to 15

Check out these items, and other postings from our members of funding opportunities, workshops, calls for submission, awards, and more—on Theatre Ontario’s Bulletin Board on our website

Theatre Ontario individual members can also access auditions, job postings, and volunteer opportunities on our Theatre Ontario Individual Member Resources on our website

Browse for summer training opportunities for youth from our members

PTTP Profiles: Exploring Projects Funded by the Professional Theatre Training Program

Eight individuals were chosen as recipients of Theatre Ontario’s Professional Theatre Training Program grants during our Spring 2014 application round.  This month we feature three of the projects.

Pam Patel is training in Artistic Direction with Majdi Bou-Matar at MT Space (Kitchener)

Pam Patel

It was April of 2008. I had just completed my undergraduate studies in the music program at Wilfrid Laurier University. I could now call myself a classically trained vocalist. A sense of utter relief and pride came over me, along with a sense of utter fear. What was I to do now that I had officially entered “the real world”?

My good fortune led me to a good friend who was working for a local theatre company as a composer and musician. He suggested that I connect with this company, as they focus on creating and producing interdisciplinary and intercultural work, two ideas that greatly interested me throughout university.

Deciding that I had nothing to lose, I tagged along with my composer colleague to an opening performance and reception to meet the artistic director of this local theatre company called MT Space.

The day I met Majdi Bou-Matar is still quite clear in my memory. I walked into the theatre lobby and saw this Lebanese man in a beret with a presence that reverberated to the walls. While I felt somewhat intimidated, I was eager to meet Majdi face to face. When I was finally introduced to him after the performance, I mentioned that I was interested in working with him and his company. He took a look at me and said, “Can you act?” I could only reply, “I can try.”

Now, six years later, I find myself immersed in a world of theatre, combining my skills as a vocalist and actor with my experiences as a woman and culturally-diverse artist. I can now call myself a professional actor and theatre creator. Over the years, Majdi and I organically developed a relationship of mentor and mentee, and I am so excited to be able to train with Majdi as an apprentice artistic director.

Although I have been nurtured by MT Space and had opportunities to play various roles within the company, I look forward to being with Majdi and learning his craft, running a theatre company that has the potential to instigate social change. I look forward to learning how I can produce a theatre piece that speaks to my political issues, to learning how I can bring incredible art from around the globe to mingle with the incredible local arts community we have in Kitchener, to learning how I can make a presenting series happen after running an international theatre festival without missing the crucial details, all while helping to build arts and culture in the Waterloo region. We all have our vision of seeing art happen, but we seldom get the chance to sit with one of the trendsetters in Canadian theatre and pursue our dreams with proper guidance and the occasional safety net. I look forward to being the Robin to Majdi’s Batman!

MT Space helped to make me the theatre artist that I am now, and for that, I am deeply loyal and invested in the company. I have already made up a list of things to do for my first day in the office! I won’t reveal what’s on it now, but it does include embarking on some new relationships within Kitchener that I think may benefit MT Space. We’ll see how it goes… For now, I’ll keep my feet on the ground and brace myself for my new adventures at MT Space, changing the world one show at a time.

Thank you so much for enabling this apprenticeship, Theatre Ontario!

Rachel Penny is training in Producing with Aislinn Rose (Toronto)

After months of planning, discussion and waiting, I’m now very close to beginning my mentorship in theatre producing with Aislinn Rose at the start of July.

Rachel Penny

Aislinn and I decided to work on this project together because I had an interest in producing, and skills that she felt were a good fit for the job, but I needed to gain further experience in order to begin working on my own. Through our mentorship I’m looking forward to learning concrete skills and processes, such as contracting, budgeting, and time and project management within the context of independent theatre production. I feel especially aware that the most important pieces of learning are often things that you are not expecting, and so I will be careful over the upcoming months to remain open to new perspectives and to keep asking questions and taking risks.

I’m keen to add specific skills and competencies to my roster, but I know that my learning will not stop there. Much of the work of any professional in the creative field can’t be learned in a classroom. The beauty of the mentorship is being able to spend time with a professional on the job, learning not only the hard skills they need to do their job, but also the critical thinking, communication skills and relationship-building that make them excel.

The more I learn about the projects we will be working on, the more excited I feel about the mentorship. With Individual Desire by Susanna Fournier will be performed as a workshop production at the New Groundswell Festival at Nightwood Theatre in the fall. I’m looking forward to working in a festival environment, and observing a new work as it grows through its development. After one initial meeting with the team in late May, I feel lucky to be working with such a positive and collaborative group of people. My second project with Aislinn, The Art of Building A Bunker, will be presented as a part of Factory Theatre’s 2014-2015 season. Through this project I will be able to observe the work of a larger general theatre, and the ways in which independent theatre companies can work together with these larger companies to find new audiences for their work. The projects that we will be working on are quite distinct from one another, each with their own unique quirks and challenges.  I am looking forward not only to learning about managing each project individually, but how to balance multiple projects and obligations.

One exciting development since Aislinn and I initially planned our mentorship program is that Aislinn has been appointed as the General Manager of the new Theatre Centre. One of the elements that made me most interested in working with Aislinn is the diversity of environments in which she has worked. The Theatre Centre is yet another wonderful addition to this panoply of unique theatrical environments, and I look forward to being exposed through my work with Aislinn to the many artists and projects using this new and exciting space. A key element of our planned mentorship is the process of building networks and professional relationships for me that will allow me to continue doing fruitful work in producing once our mentorship is completed. I look forward to exploring new possibilities through The Theatre Centre connection.

I’m truly looking forward to getting started on my work with Aislinn. I’m sure the next few months will be full of learning, new challenges, and new relationships. I can’t wait to dive in. Nerves and apprehension are always a part of beginning a new project, and this is no exception. But I feel secure going into this project working with Aislinn. Since I met her while working together at the Luminato Festival last year, I’ve always been impressed by her ability to remain calm and professional while juggling a truly baffling number of projects. With Aislinn as my mentor and model, I feel confident that I can take on this challenge and push myself to succeed as a new producer.

Joseph Recinos is training in Producing with Marilo Nunez at Alameda Theatre Company (Toronto).

Entrando la oficina de Alameda, me encuentro en un ambiente que me pertenece—estoy en un barrio, una comunidad que me da confianza, motivación, coraje para practicar español y adoptar completamente la cultura de mi patria y también quien soy—Guatemalteco y Canadiense.

Aquí no hay barreras, Marilo y yo nos estamos comunicando y transformando nuestra relación. Ayude con la Crowdfunding video y ahora voy a tener más impacto y participación con la producción: Paradise Red by Bruce Gibbons. En asociación con Cocodrilo Triste, vamos a presentar esta obra en SummerWorks en agosto. Con una pandilla muy creativa Paradise Red se trata de una telenovela, en estilo blanco y negro, durante los 1970s bajo la dictadura en Chile. Un cuento que se concentra en un hijo que regresa a la casa de su madre después de la muerte de su padre un General. Un cuento de una familia con secretos obscuros.

Alameda Theatre Company filming
their crowdfunding video

Estoy estático para empezar los ensayos (en dos semanas) con los actores: Carmen Aguirre, Alex Muir Contreras, y Rosa Laborde. Hablando y soñando con todas las posibilidades que pueden pasar cuando se está jugando y haciendo arte.

¡Hasta luego y nos vemos pronto!

Entering the Alameda office, I find myself in the right environment—I’m in a neighbourhood, a community that gives me confidence, motivation, and courage to practice my Spanish and completely adopt the culture of my ancestry and of who I am—a Guatemalan-Canadian.

There are no barriers here—Marilo and I are communicating and transforming our relationship. I helped on set with the crowdfunding video  and I’m now going to be having more of an impact and participation with the production: Paradise Red by Bruce Gibbons. The production, in association with Cocodrilo Triste, is going to be presented in SummerWorks this August. With a very creative team, Paradise Red is set as a black and white Latin American soap opera, that takes place in the 1970s, in the days of Chile’s dictatorship, where a powerful military family has run amok. It’s a story of repressed sexual desire and political violence during a melodramatic weekend in the home of a mysteriously deceased General. His suspicious, estranged son returns to his alcoholic mother and Catholic sister, and their dark sordid secrets.

I’m super excited to be starting rehearsals (in two weeks) with the actors: Carmen Aguirre, Alex Muir Contreras, and Rosa Laborde. Thinking and dreaming of the possibilities that can only happen when your playing and creating art!

Until then!

Read more about Theatre Ontario's Professional Theatre Training Program


Theatre Ontario’s Professional Theatre Training Program is funded by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.