da-kink-review
Kemi King
Kemi King (she/her) is a writer, director, and performance artist. Her work has been produced by Obsidian and Canadian Stage. She has also created and performed works with Soulpepper Theatre and as a part of the Paprika Festival. She is one of the co-founders and artistic director of YIKES, a theatre company founded in her second year of undergrad. Kemi is passionate about the arts and how they can be used to help shape social consciousness.
LEARN MOREAt Next Stage 2024, two shows complicate the meaning of a night out
Gemini, by Louise Casemore, and Prude, by Lou Campbell, explore the hospitality industry and bar culture from different perspectives.
REVIEW: In Ronnie Burkett’s darkly intelligent Wonderful Joe, gentrification hits like a meteor
When Siminovitch-winning puppet virtuoso Ronnie Burkett chose the focus of his latest play, was he thinking of TO Live’s $421-million plan to redevelop its St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts?
REVIEW: 13 Plays About ADHD All At The Same Time is true to its title
While the play’s structure may occasionally leave you feeling as scattered as its protagonists, its heart, humour, and raw honesty will keep your thoughts churning well into the night.
Speaking in Draft: Byron Laviolette
“Right now, the creation-to-production process for a lot of people is from the Toronto Fringe to — hopefully — some theatre recommender grants, to a workshop production, to maybe an actual production,” says What The Festival co-founder Byron Laviolette. “But the realities of mounting a show at the Fringe don’t translate to a two-week run at the Extraspace at Tarragon. Peoples’ appetites are different. Yet we don’t train or support people to translate their shows into those different contexts."
REVIEW: Goblin:Macbeth might just leave you gobsmacked
While most of the entertainment comes from the goblins’ antics whenever the Shakespearean text is paused or subverted for comic effect, the secret sauce to this whole endeavour is that it really is an honest-to-goodness staging of that text, designed to showcase the performers’ near-virtuosic mastery of the material.
REVIEW: The Thanksgiving Play wriggles in performative wokeness
In 2024, is there a way to produce an engaging, culturally sensitive play about the first American Thanksgiving for elementary schoolers? The Thanksgiving Play, penned by Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse and now playing at Mirvish’s CAA Theatre, poses that question in its first five minutes, then throws the query out with the cranberry sauce in its madcap exploration of a devised theatre piece at an unnamed primary school.
REVIEW: Wedding Band at the Stratford Festival
The piece is not a “love triumphs” story, because sometimes love just isn’t worth it.
REVIEW: Cabaret Noir at MAYDAY/dance Immersion/Canadian Stage
Black histories and calls to culture within media (theatre, song, film, theory, poetry, language) ensure the culture endures as a living memory.
The Flight's storytelling warmed my heart: we do not often see stories of Black people accomplishing things without their trials and tribulations at the forefront.
REVIEW: ‘da Kink in My Hair at TO Live/Soulpepper
Black women have been going through the same shit for a stupid long time, yet through it there is also space for joy.
REVIEW: Is God Is at Canadian Stage/Obsidian/Necessary Angel Theatre Company
As Black folk we often deal with our pains with laughter: both the text of Is God Is and its delivery afford space for that.
“Breaking, But Not With Age”: In Conversation with Crazy Smooth on In My Body at Canadian Stage
"The timeline of your body is different from the timeline of your spirit, and there's a world where if everything is aligned right, certain rules don't apply anymore," says Yvon Soglo, AKA Crazy Smooth.
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