SummerWorks Guide: Connecting Across Divides
SUMMERWORKS SHOWS
Connecting Across Divides
CDN STUDIO
CdnStudio is an online ‘room’ that uses internet technology to bring collaborators from across Canada together. This digital tool takes separate video streams and blends them together in real time, allowing users to see and hear each other in the same digital ‘space’. This technology effectively removes one of the core requirements of theatre: that audience and performer must be present physically with each other. What does this mean for performance?
COMMUNITY MEAL: ORGANIC COMMUNITY GATHERING
Come to a community meal where you gain the experience of communicating non-verbally, tracing back to the roots where words are not spoken and community togetherness forms organically. This community meal will feature nourishing, healthy meals that will just fill you right up. You will learn more about non-spoken communication and unity by taking care of others through nourishment and food.
CRUSH ON HUMANS, by Jake Roels
Welcome, Sensation-Seekers, to the origins of Alphabot, a robot boy with a human heart. Join our hero and a mashup of Toronto music scene notables as they attempt to save humanity from its tyrannical robot oppressors. In an eight-episode story that unfolds over the course of the festival, our hero battles the insidious seduction of the machine, tries to differentiate between human babies and pets, and explores the desolate wasteland of 2017.
LANDLINE, by Dustin Harvey
A performance that takes place in two places at once, Landline is a curious exposure to the feeling of being alone, together. You will become both the audience and the performer as you converse in real time via text message with a fellow participant in Hamilton and go on an audio-guided, experiential walking tour. As the experience unfolds, you are prompted to share stories, memories, and secrets as the urban landscape transforms into a backdrop for the relationship forming between two strangers.
PEARLE HARBOUR’S CHAUTAUQUA, by Justin Miller
Toronto’s beloved bombshell, drag queen Pearle Harbour, returns in Chautauqua. Come gather under the milky folds of her beautiful tent, and be sheltered from the inharmony of our post-Truth world.Created by Dora-nominated writer/performer Justin Miller, Chautauqua is an immersive extravaganza: part cabaret, part tragicomedy, and part tent revival. The world may be falling apart, but Pearle will show you that there’s more that unites us than divides us.
THE PRINCIPLE OF PLEASURE, by Gerard Reyes
Inspired by the pleasures found in a Montreal trans bar, Manhattan vogue balls, Berlin fetish parties and Portland strip clubs, the virtuosic dancer-choreographer Gerard Reyes forges intimate connections with the audience by breaking the rules and conventions of these spaces. It’s a celebration of freedom, glamour, seduction and the unifying power of pleasure—set to the songs of Janet Jackson.
ROOTLESS, by Alexandra Barberena, Bilal Baig, Saba Akhtar, and Phoebe Hu
Using a blend of physical theatre, shadow puppetry, and projections, Rootless traces the path of a young woman cut off from the land she loves. As an outsider in her new home and facing loss, she travels through a world of dreams, djin, talking animals, a mermaid in the desert, and the moon to find solace.
SOMEONE BETWEEN, by Chantria Tram
Beginning with the story of her family’s escape from Cambodia, playwright and performer Chantria Tram chronicles her struggle to balance the traditional values of her Khmer parents with her own emerging beliefs. Someone Between is a humorous, emotional, and vulnerable contemplation of cultural adaptation, migration, and the place between who we are, who we were, and who we are becoming.
See the rest of the guide here.
The SummerWorks Performance Festival is on in Toronto from August 3 – 13.Click here for tickets or more information
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