#CDNTimes

Making art is easy. The only difficulty is trying to make money from it.The history of art is intricately connected to the history of capitalism. Is it even possible to have one without the other?

When I first took over editing the Praxis Theatre website in 2008, the thearosphere as I knew it was bustling and largely made up of North...

A week of 'best of' Facebook posts from my heavily theatre-biased news stream.

But in moments of great need, such as now, traditions change. The theatre reconstructs itself. Today it becomes a civilizing square where true citizen engagement and discourse can occur. Troubling times breed Citizen Story Theatre.

We lost the fight, and now we fight each other. I’m willing to take my share of the responsibility for losing that fight. The revolution that theatre makers of the 60’s and 70’s made seem so real and available shuddered and stopped around the time I was hitting my stride.

Some time ago I was introduced to the concept of Cathedral Thinking. The notion stretches back through the centuries to medieval times, when architects, stonemasons and artisans laid plans and began construction of the soaring, cavernous structures that served as places of worship, community gathering spaces and safe havens. Since then, the concept has been applied to space exploration, city planning and other long-term goals that require decades of foresight and planning so future generations can enjoy their full realization.

Thatcher famously remarked, "There is no such thing as society". Welcome to an edition of #CdnCult Times that evolved into something entirely different than originally...

I never mean to be cruel but I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. My husband doesn't let me post pictures of you on Facebook. He thinks that you should be the one to decide what personal content you share on the web. I’m a bit less generous. I think I made you, you are my cells and flesh, you radically altered my life and it’s my right to talk about it.

Moreover, these colleagues and I have control over our means of production: we are the means of production. We have the ability to adjust timelines and meetings to accommodate due dates, parental leaves, illnesses and naps. These are the gifts that we can give each other when we recognize, collectively, that we don’t need to adhere to standard models of scheduling or rehearsal – models that have more to do with industrial production than the creation of art.

How do we do it? With volatile schedules and 16 hour day work days, ‘Daycare’ in the traditional sense doesn’t work for us. So we do our best not to double book gigs. We try not to have overlapping projects and we use Babysitters! Lots and lots of baby sitters. We hire, mostly, young actors to watch Aaron as well as some help from my in-laws. We spend as much time looking for sitters as we do conceiving ideas for shows, at least that’s how it feels.