Author: Aisling Murphy

A Life Once Lived: A Doesnt Live Here Anymore

A Life Once Lived: A Doesnt Live Here Anymore

By |

“What should you know?”

That the capstone project for the MA in Collaborative Theatre Production and Design at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was never supposed to look like this – squeezed into the proscenia of laptops around the world.

That COVID has forced us to confront our preconceived notions of what theatre is in times of crisis.

That you, clad in pajamas and cotton face mask, are still an audience. You’re alone, a little confused, a little nostalgic for plays as once we knew them, but you’re the audience digital performance has trusted to pay attention. …

Read More Read More

A Mid-Pandemic Letter to the City of Ottawa from a Young Theatre Critic (cc: GCTC’s Daisy)

A Mid-Pandemic Letter to the City of Ottawa from a Young Theatre Critic (cc: GCTC’s Daisy)

By |

It’s been a strange few weeks.

Despite the unprecedented scope of this cultural wound, I write to my city from a place of optimism – from an internal ache for community and togetherness. I write in knowing regard of the healthcare professionals sacrificing their wellbeing for my own; I write with gratitude, from the comfort and safety of my Centretown living room. 

I write to express how deeply I miss theatre. It has taken these two-ish weeks to grieve its former omnipotence in my life; no longer can I (like many of my friends and co-saboteurs) define my personhood solely by its business, its preoccupation with dramaturgy and semiotic resonance. My evenings aren’t spent in the dark of the Babs Asper or the GCTC; they’re occupied with growing anxiety at the abysmal state of my arts-sustained bank account.

I write, though, because I know that we will survive this – that our theatre will evolve, and perhaps even thrive. A few displaced productions will be lost to the panic, and for this I express the most supreme of empathy and commiseration; the precarity of my beloved art form does not escape me at this time. Some productions, however, saw the briefest glimpse into COVID-19; they opened in its earliest days of panic, with a surplus of crinkly gloves and hand sanitizer. We can’t be sure such shows will come back to the fullest of their imagined capacities, but we must still acknowledge that they happened – that even in their truncated state, they are ever-deserving of archival within the critical sphere.
…

Read More Read More

The Assembly – NAC: In Search of a Middle Ground

The Assembly – NAC: In Search of a Middle Ground

By |

 

photo Maxime Côté   The Assembly

No longer is there a “safe place” on the Canadian political spectrum; to be moderate is to be a mere bystander to fascism and anarchy, while to cling to either ideological extreme is to engage in bigotry or naïveté. Trump’s America leaves no room for a middle ground, nor does it open adequate space for level-headed debate; Trudeau’s Canada, according to Porte Parole’s unnerving verbatim play, The Assembly – Montreal, isn’t far behind. Gone, seemingly, are the days of the Canadian theatrical identity – sentimentality for its own sake, polite facades spackled over mid-left political leanings.

…

Read More Read More

undercurrents 2020 : Crippled – a necessary intersect between grief and hope

undercurrents 2020 : Crippled – a necessary intersect between grief and hope

By |
Crippled Photo Chris Hibbs

undercurrents Festival Director Patrick Gauthier and Associate Director Brit Johnston have discussed openly their curatorial strategy for this year, one which stems from an urgent problem: mid-winter Ottawa begs for joy. The city has resigned itself to being stuck squeezing as much life as possible from short, frigid days. In programming undercurrents 2020, Gauthier and Johnston have searched Canada for beacons of theatrical joy, even if the performances fit that moniker in ways that defy convention.

…

Read More Read More

undercurrents: under development series

undercurrents: under development series

By |

undercurrents theatre festival, in its landmark tenth year of operation, has offered to its audiences the ultimate mid-winter treat: works-in-progress by some of Ottawa’s brightest emerging voices that have matured beyond a Fresh Meat framework but that still understand the extent to which they have room to explore. This year’s under development series featured three mid-journey works: Beth-Anne (created by Monica Bradford-Lea and Nicholas Leno), Honey Dew Me (created by theatre decentred), and Home Sweet…Something (created by Litera Pro).  

These projects have been marketed as works with aspirations beyond the Arts Court Library; in truth, all three will likely make reappearances in Canada’s coming Fringes. In an admirable move on undercurrents’ part, the shows have not been marketed any less than the “mainstage” performances in the much-larger Arts Court Theatre; they’ve been granted equal promotional weight, plus the added bonus of dramaturgical and developmental support from undercurrents mentors. 

 I’ve grouped the under development series together for the simple reason that these projects form an astounding triptych of the Ottawa “emerging artist” mentality: these voices in conjunction with each other speak to an Ottawa that’s starved (but ever-so-slowly recovering) from lack of representation of backgrounds and genres. This cohort of (for the most part, recent uOttawa Theatre graduates) paints a portrait of a generation willing to carry the dramatic torch through the hallowed halls of the well-loved Arts Court; for every moment that might need polishing, there are two more that speak to a dazzling maturity, awareness, and hunger for vibrancy onstage.

…

Read More Read More

On Guts and Astonishing Effect: GCTC’s Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools

On Guts and Astonishing Effect: GCTC’s Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools

By |
Photo Jeremy Mimnagh

There’s a danger to hasty reaction.  To act on instinct is to perhaps ignore a bigger contextual picture; a gut-reaction, after all, is only as informed as its bearer. Sometimes that initial shock needs to be bottled – fermented within the larger scope of discourse, self-education, and reflection. 

…

Read More Read More

Cold refreshing Identity: Take de Milk, Nah?A Bold and Necessary Success at the National arts centre

Cold refreshing Identity: Take de Milk, Nah?A Bold and Necessary Success at the National arts centre

By |

 

photo Andrew Alexander

The National Arts Centre’s website calls Jivesh Parasram’s Take d Milk, Nah? a “highly-hyphenated story about the search for identity.” This is certainly the case: Parasram’s burst onto the national scene is a not-quite identity play, an Indo-Caribbean-Hindu-Canadian hour-and-a-half of reconciling experience and impact, and a nearly-incredible solo show. Take d Milk, Nah?, in its insistence on the in-between, is a landmark piece of theatre for the NAC – if not for dramaturgical finesse, then for unmistakable, commendable certainty in itself and in its own importance. …

Read More Read More

A Light in the Dark: Unikkaaqtuat a Joyful, Moderate Success at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre

A Light in the Dark: Unikkaaqtuat a Joyful, Moderate Success at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre

By |

From the pre-show announcement, we know we won’t catch all that is said onstage during Unikkaaqtuat; in being honest, we won’t have to. In freeing ourselves from the tethers of language-anchored “theatre,” we give ourselves over to a looser, more vibrant performance – one not without flaws, but one with absolute power to inspire and captivate its all-ages audience.

 

Unikkaaqtuat’s storytelling is a blend all its own of dance, circus, music, and pure athleticism, accompanied by untranslated Inuit language. This joint collaboration between NAC Indigenous Theatre, The 7 Fingers/Les 7 doigts de la main, Artcirq, and Taqqut Productions offers to us an impressive collective of artists capable of astonishing physical feats; what lingers beyond the piece’s final (melancholy, beautiful) chord, though, is not these artists’ physical capabilities, but indeed, what seems to be their ability to transcend the laws of gravity, recovering even from evident missteps or mistakes. Performers navigate complicated choreography through masks and stilts – they are evident masters of humour and grace, surprise and fluidity. They become rabbits, polar bears, glaciers, hunters, the unborn – vibrant symbols of Inuit culture, often accompanied by throat singing and guitar. …

Read More Read More

A Case for Hadestown.

A Case for Hadestown.

By |

To escape the mundanity of our own everyday.

To revel in the ephemerality of storytelling.

To imagine, to empathize, to learn, to transmit.

The reasons we still attend, enjoy, and review theatre are remarkably similar to the those for which we recycle Greek myths, even in a 2020 beyond what our predecessors could have conceptualized. We can attribute this cycle to the comfort of habit, or perhaps, more grandly, to an ideological belief in intergenerational storytelling, regardless of the tellers’ own bittersweet understanding of fate. We, for the most part, know how the myths end: Icarus loses to his pride, Achilles to his brawn, Orpheus to his crippling self-doubt. We also know that a curtain designates onstage space as sacred, that imminent dramatic action is the sensationalized product of artistic collaboration, that seemingly-alive lights have a consciousness somewhere in a small booth in the ether of a given auditorium.

…

Read More Read More

Baltimore, MD: Everyman Theatre’s Murder on the Orient Express a Seductive Spin on Agatha Christie

Baltimore, MD: Everyman Theatre’s Murder on the Orient Express a Seductive Spin on Agatha Christie

By |

 

Photo Teresa Cachacane.  Murder on the Orient Express

Christmastime in Baltimore calls for afternoons spent immersed in the city’s ever-improving cultural scene, from indie concerts in Fells Point to touring musical theatre at the Hippodrome. This year, Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre contributes to its local theatre scene an excellent take on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, a perhaps-welcome break from more “seasonally-appropriate” onstage fare. Murder on the Orient Express,adapted by Ken Ludwig and  efficiently directed by Vincent M. Lancisi, offers to its audiences an aesthetically-gorgeous voyage into snowy Europe, one populated by a cohesive ensemble of could-be murder culprits.  

Murder on the Orient Expressis a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery, one helmed by famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Poirot (played by Bruce Randolph Nelson), en route to Paris on the Orient Express, encounters a strange collective of train staff, royalty, aristocrats, and exiles – each with a peculiar connection to the unsolved murder of an American little girl, Daisy Armstrong. Tragedy inevitably strikes aboard the Orient Express, and Poirot must work quickly to uncover the killer of not only his fellow passenger, but young Daisy as well.   

…

Read More Read More