Marilyn Field remembers her first taste of the arts. “I used to sneak out at night, over to the farmer’s field across the road and dance,” recalls the former teacher, “because I could sense I was dancing with my mother in the sky.” It was through that childhood experience that she came to know the…
Use Your Imagination
Finding connection in the messy days of March is a challenge. There’s a dirty order to the snowbanks lining Toronto streets, exacerbating the isolation winter brings. People are packed away under layers of sweaters, riding alone in cars, subways, and streetcars; they’re lost in their i-pods, glued to their Blackberries, stuck to television screens. Roads…
Odd or not…
There is nothing in the world like the feel of a blank canvas, its promise of possibility still fresh, potent and palpable. As a painter, I enjoy bringing that sense of promise to my other passion in life: theatre. So instead of walking into productions with preconceptions or ideas, I prefer to approach each work…
Hamlet (solo)
Raoul Bhaneja is nothing if not audacious. The Toronto-based actor, writer, director and musician, recounts the time a former high school saw his one-man production of Hamlet. “One of my high school teachers came to to me afterwards, and as if he quoting Obama, he says, ‘the audacity… to do that!’. It was meant it…
riding the salt water waves
You begin to understand how meaningful the work of David French is to Newfoundlanders when his characters are likened to Shakespeare’s. “Mary is a Newfoundland girl’s Juliet”, says Krystin Pellerin, currently playing Mary Snow in Soulpepper’s production of Salt Water Moon at the Young Centre. Growing up in Mount Pearl, just outside of St. John’s,…
salty soul
Soulpepper Theatre Company symbolically opened its 10th anniversary season lastnight with the sort of theatre it does best: elegant, intelligent, heart-felt, and entirely Canadian. Set in 1926 Newfoundland, Salt Water Moon tells the story of Mary Snow and Jacob Mercer, two lovers reunited after the latter vanishes off to Toronto for a year. It’s spiked…
eternal hydra
Lest you think mythology is some vague laborious thing you vaguely recall from grade 9, involving monsters and snakeheads an gods hurling thunderbolts from the sky… well, me too. How many times did I go through the Greek and Roman pantheons, trying to keep the names, functions, and connections straight? But the success of the…
spirits, sufis, soulpepper
When the last dervish quietly walked offstage at Roy Thomson Hall Friday night, a cool silence decended for a moment before the applause began. The sema was over, the whirling had stopped, time to go back outside to mundane reality. Beautiful as the Sufi religious ceremony was, my companion turned to me and wondered aloud…
a spicy soulpepper season to come
There aren’t many Canadian companies that would have the balls to mix the likes of Neil Simon, William Shakespeare, and Caryl Churchill, all within one season. Even fewer who would add Chekhov, Congreve, Anouilh, and Stoppard. Cries of “it’ll scare people off”, and “it’s too weird”, comments like “there’s no consistency” and “there’s nothing to…