We’ve been privileged enough to witness the birth of a brand-new artform: live digital performance. This art form can only grow and improve as the digital tools to share it grow more powerful.
I want to be clear here: I’m not trying to echo that theatre-bro you went to school with who kept posting about how Shakespeare wrote 31 plays and 80 sonnets during the plague of London.
Watching The Show That Changed My Life reminds me that theatre is what we make it.
This first experience taught me that theatre and ADR shared some vital purposes: storytelling, character expression and crucial believability in conveying dialogue.
Equity and access – the questions we keep asking during this time of remote theatre.
Equity and access – the ongoing puzzle Canadian theatre en masse has been unable to solve.
The live performance of Quiver seems a distant memory, a relic of the less suffocating weeks of COVID-19 restrictions. Almost like a miracle, Quiver was performed in the brief moment of time when it was possible.
Whether a dashing sword fight or full-out pummel, fight scenes often occur at pivotal moments in the script, revealing characters at their most primal, emotionally heightened states.
Most artists can take a tiny budget and produce magic. We’re constantly creating new worlds, images and stories with nothing but shoestrings and determination. That is both our superpower and our curse. When done well, most audience members will never know the difference between a show by a large theatre house and one from an … Continued
Despite myriad concerns about Zoom, the fusing of the performer’s body with the infrastructure of technology has allowed artists to create work even when performance venues are closed and physical gatherings impossible.
On a Zoom call that confirmed our students’ worst fears for their final year, I was there to provide a glimmer of hope: a partnership with Outside the March to commission original digital plays for our graduating class.
Next Stage isn’t happening this year. Like most arts festivals, it’s been halted by COVID. In this peculiar time of rest, many theatres have been re-evaluating their practises, seeing who they’ve left out of the programming and how they may better serve their communities.
The productions are captured by several cameras that allow the audience to see the performance from centre of auditorium—which is similar to watching a live performance from the best seats in the house.
“We could’ve just said we’re not doing a Fringe, that we’re just going to take this moment and not do anything. And we all thought, well, this is the mandate of Fringe, to support the artist, to be a platform for the artist. And this is an opportunity.”
Alan Dilworth is on a journey. An educator who became an actor who became a writer who became a director who became an artistic director, he articulates his relationship to theatre as one of continual discovery.
Institutions want to make us feel like they are doing us a favour by inviting us into their space… But I think that we have way more power to challenge these systems and institutions.
It’s just interesting that the size of the theatre and the size of the budget is a deciding factor. Stratford has yet to have a woman lead the theatre in a solo fashion. And that day will come, I have no doubt.