HarbourKIDS’ Monster Mash
With Thanksgiving upon us and Halloween dead ahead, this weekend’s HarbourKIDS festival at Harbourfront Centre is dedicated to the scary, funny and exciting potential of monsters. A wide range of family focused activities and performances explore ideas about monsters including an exciting headline program from Mammalian Diving Reflex.
Toronto’s Helen Yung, left, will be in the Studio Theatre most of the weekend with Gulliver, a larger than life puppet she developed for Montreal’s Festival Acces Asie. Yung’s highly interactive presentation, dubbed Playtime with Gulliver, is a blend of puppetry, new media and improv.
Like the Wizard of Oz, Yung is perched behind her creation, operating him with her feet and typing as fast as she can to put words in his mouth via text-to-speech software.
Greatness Becomes Daniel MacIvor
Daniel MacIvor is a fixture on the Toronto theatre scene for a very good reason, he never stops working. He confesses that it may be a bit of a problem, this workaholism, “but I love my work and it satisfies me so what am I going to do? The problem is that I’m really, really bored otherwise. When I’m not working it’s just the dog and me; being busy is better.”
MacIvor typically mounts at least one show per year in Toronto then works on two or three other productions elsewhere in the country. Following his current run at Factory Studio Theatre with His Greatness, MacIvor heads to Stratford to workshop a play scheduled for the summer season and in March he’ll mount a new show, Was Spring, at Tarragon Theatre, where he is this year’s playwright-in-residence.
MacIvor is clearly enjoying his turn as Tennessee Williams’s assistant in His Greatness, a play the writer premiered in Vancouver in 2007 but has never acted in himself. And being in the show has encouraged him to rethink a significant aspect of the show. READ MORE
Preludes for a Sister City
Toronto composer Omar Daniel has never met the players who’ll bring his latest work to life with a free concert premier tomorrow (October 1) at the Royal Conservatory of Music (273 Bloor Street West). And that’s one of the points of the exercise, initiated by Chicago’s Access Contermporary Music (ACM): “We’ve done this entire exchange using the internet,” says Daniel, “Facebook, email, etc.”
“I was required to provide them with four installments of the work and then they’d send me a recording that I could comment on. They’re very good players and I didn’t even know that until I’d heard the first installment. Then I understood what they’re capable of.”
ACM commissions a work this way each year as part of its Composer Alive series, always looking to a creator living and working outside the USA. Palomar, the performance arm of ACM (led by Francesco Milioto), is an octet dedicated to presenting ground-breaking works by composers of all eras but with a special interest in contemporary works.
A Bold, Boisterous Game of Chess
British lyricist, Sir Tim Rice, centre, was in the house at the Princess of Wales Theatre for yesterday’s opening night performance of Chess: The Musical. A big hit with critics, the show — which has never played in Toronto before — is boisterous and bold with a graphic stage set, camp costumes and virtually non-stop singing from a veteran West End cast. The show runs through October 30.
Photo by Tracey Nolan
The Heart of The Heart Machine
Christine Irving and her wild band of collaborators won a people’s choice prize at last year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche with Flux and Fire and this year they’re fanning the flames even harder. Irving is a leader of Toronto’s Interactive Arts, the amorphous collective behind The Heart Machine, a flame throwing, interactive sculpture built for the 2010 Burning Man festival (above).
The Heart Machine finally debuts for a hometown crowd this Saturday night and promises to be one of the more spectacular works on display. The piece features a 6-foot by 10-foot industrial heart surrounded by four 16-foot “arteries”. Control points allow participants to manipulate the rhythm and size of fireballs that shoot up to 25-feet into the sky. READ MORE
