Photo: Courtesy of : Productions Nous sommes ici.
A highly charged meeting of Drag Queen burlesque cabaret, stand-up comedy, telereality show, docudrama, verbatim theatre, improv, audience participatory theatre, and an extremely perceptive reflection on sexual identity, makes The Changing Room a most surprising and exciting take on popular theatre that digs much deeper than one would have expected.
Poster from the production.
Lawrence Aronovitch’s latest play has an extremely interesting content. It revolves around the meeting between three eminent women mathematicians/scientists, emerging from different periods of western history (400 BC, the 19th century and the early 20th century) who find themselves together in a global space/time, on the upper level of the set, filled with books and records. These are remnants of Marie Curie’ archives. These woman have been summoned back from the past by a young girl, a factory worker who is dying of radium poisoning. She wants explanations.
Photo courtesy of the National Arts Centre.
Flamenco acquired an entirely new meaning with this Self-portrait choreographed by María Pagés. The evening was made up of various moments inspired by the development of her personal and artistic life, each moment emerged from one of several Flamenco rhythms that defined the form, the style and the atmosphere of her choreography so she was never at all removed from the Flamenco origins of her work which showed all the traces of its Sephardic, Arabic and Moroccan origins . What was exceedingly beautiful to watch was Mme Pagés herself unfolding like some gracefully wild creature reconnecting with the earth.
Her whole body flows to one sweeping movement as her arms curl up in the air, and then wrap themselves around her body as it appears to sink into the ground or expand into the air and then swoop back to the stage as she takes her cuadra in hand and lovingly imposes her domination on the group. Her solos took her somewhere between the natural elements of the earth, and an enchanting witch who dissolves into the shadows, bringing a highly sophisticated rereading of a dance form that is both graceful, wild, magic and animalistic, almost as if a new species had come to life.
Lawrence Evenchick as Sidney Bruhl Photo: Maria Vartanova
Ira Levin’s well known and very clever thriller about an older playright, a younger playwright and play that is in the process of writing itself during the performance, has become a great classic of repertory theatre. Deathtrap has been performed many times in Ottawa, in both languages, since it appeared on Broadway and as a film. Now, it is back at the Ottawa Little Theatre representing the hit from the seventh decade of the OLT since it first appeared on the OLT stage in 1983, directed then by Susan Taylor. Lets quote the Ottawa Citizen review from that period: “ ..to work properly (the play) must have perfect timing (and be ) a fast-paced, well executed production.”
Christian Lapointe as Sebastian. Photo: NAC.
A young man stands alone in the acting space and stares at us for few minutes. He is an actor called Christian Lapointe. The acting space is in a rehearsal room at the NAC where the audience is seated on several rows of steeply raked seats watching him perform like a strange animal. He provokes us, he confronts us, he seems confused, angry, aggressive, and under extreme stress. He leaps about on all fours; he licks a dish full of water like a dog. He finally tells us he cannot take this life any more. He tells us he has one more hour to live, the time of the performance. And after that we will see what happens. “We have been warned”. In fact, the news told it all a few days before because this play by Norén, is based on notes and a video made by Sebastian Borre, an 18 year old school boy who made all this information available on line the day before he went into his former school and shot the students and the teachers. All this took place in 2006. The play was written several weeks later.
Photo Barb Gray
Nick Di Gaetano and Katie Smith
Studio A at Arts Court is an open and flexible space that allows for multiple relationships between performers and an audience. In this production, the audience surrounds the acting space, which occupies a large area in the middle of the room. A tarpaulin painted a dry sandy colour is spread out on the floor and at one end of the space we are greeted by a large, solid form with four strong appendages, a back and a head shaped object. One or two people can sit comfortably on its back. It is not supposed to imitate a horse , obviously, but it does suggests a horse-like form, that is lifted up at various moments of the performance, and set down on different spots of the acting space.
Photo: Andrew Alexander
From top to bottom:
The Brewster-Wrights
The Jacksons
The Hopcrofts
Alan Ayckbourn, the master of British Farce, has certainly inherited the gifts of playwright Georges Feydeau who dominated the French theatre of the middle and upper classes at the turn of the century with his particular form of farce. As the doors slam, the dialogue bristles, split-second timing reigns and the characters enter and exit with the impeccable speed of a well-oiled machine, there is always a social commentary hidden somewhere in this mass of wound up humanity. However, contrary to Feydeau’s farces, this one cares less about who is sleeping with whom, although that does enter into the picture in a most class conscious moment where the “bit on the side” becomes a sign of upper class mobility that excludes the tradesman and his “vulgar” ways.
Prince(Tony Adam), Isobel (Ashley Rissler), Margaret (Jaclyn Martinez)
Photo. Marianne Duval
Written in Poland in 1938 but first published in 1958, Ivona (Princess of Burgundy) is Wiltold Gombrowicz’s first play. The author left Poland in 1939 and spent the rest of his life in Argentina, Germany and France, where he died in 1969. His plays would therefore seem to represent an amalgamation of European theatrical forms and experiments, filtered through possible contact with the very vibrant, expressionist oriented and politically conscious theatre milieu of post-war Argentina. It has been said that Gombrowicz never went to the theatre, but do we really know how he spent his days? In any case, telling about the hours spent with his Porteño friends in dark little cafés is much more romantic and adds to the mystery of this exceptionally brilliant playwright, about whom we really know very little.
Ekaterina Shestakova is a second year student in the M.F.A. directing programme at the University of Ottawa working under the supervision of Peter Bataklyev from Montreal. This play is her final directing project. She has produced a most exceptional staging of a highly complex play with a cast of twelve. At some points, one even forgets this is a student production, so meticulous is her directing, so clear is her artistic vision, that it is only the odd slip by the odd student, as well as the unexpected loss of energy at the end of the first part of the evening, due no doubt to the fragmented nature of the text, that one realizes where we are. But even then, such “slippage” would certainly not escape a local professional company (the NAC included) trying to perform this kind of theatre which is not normally the kind of challenge theatre groups undertake on Ottawa stages.
Photo:Erik Berg
The tragic story of Steven Truscott which played out in 1959, in the tiny town of Clinton Ontario, created all sorts of great theatrical expectations, especially with the media hype that accompanied the arrival of the play. Yes, it is a horrific story of a travesty of injustice! Yes, it involved the destruction of two young lives: the twelve year old girl whose murder was the most heartbreaking event, and the accused fourteen year old boy sentenced to be hanged but who had his sentence commuted to life in prison, before he was released in 2007. This is a true story that will haunt the annals of Canadian history forever.
Photo: Barb Gray. Trevor Barrette (Steven Turcott), Pippa Leslie (Lynn Harper) . (The critic attended the preview)
C’est l’histoire tragique de Steven Truscott, en 1959, à Clinton , une petite ville du sud -ouest de l’Ontario. Le jeune homme de quatorze ans avait été condamné à la peine capitale pour le meurtre brutal d’ une amie de douze ans, Lynne Harper et cette parodie de justice avait laissé une blessure profonde sur toute la région. La Cour d’appel de l’Ontario a fini par acquitter Truscott en 2007. Aujourd’hui, âgé de 66 ans, obligée de vivre une partie de sa vie sous un nom d’emprunt, il n’e cesse de clamer son innocence.