Volume 7

How can a story match, domineer, or be in antithesis to the natural landscape on which it is performed? How can it lend itself to the grandeur of the cinematic landscape to provide the audience a sense of wonder and magic?

Being in Queen West, especially in the evening, we started to get a lot of attention. A number of people mentioned that they would not normally want to be in that park after dark, and so it was interesting to have created a space where everyone was welcome – both the people who normally reside in the park, and the people who would normally avoid it.

Founded in 1610, at the height of Shakespeare’s reign of the London stage, Cupids was the first colony in what would become Canada – the second founded in North America. Those first settlers, in all likelihood, could have seen one of Shakespeare’s plays before sailing over. They carried with them the seeds of a language and culture that came straight out of Shakespeare’s time.

Summertime means summer theatre. Across the nation, actors, technicians, audiences and 50/50 ticket sellers are braving mosquitos, sudden downpours and less-than-ideal seating to make theatre happen in the great outdoors...

I have been dreaming about this project for the better part of two years. The balance of the time was spent trying to find terms of reference to explain my dream to my colleagues. At several points along the path I abandoned hope. My desires far outstripped my technical acumen and it was only through a kind of patience, that has been a major part of SpiderWebShow’s success, that I was able to hold on.

SEX. I realize now I prefer to write about sex. Maybe I can meander my way from technology to my preferred topic. Facebook friends chimed in on my wall with ideas. Many offered up suggestive descriptions of banal tasks, like “plugging in” USB keys, or “turning on” electricity. Techroticism, I’ll call it. Aside from the innuendo, people seem to believe that technology is mostly about sex anyway, that our interactions with it are laden with sexual gestures and motifs.

Ultimately, players of Pokémon GO are taking on roles and those roles are emboldening, inspiring, and driving them to action. The city is no longer the site of day-to-day transactions and travel: it is now the setting for adventure. As gamers move away from static positions locked to screens and into physical intervention in the real world, their role expands from player to performer. They are performing actions, interacting with other players, and – knowingly or not – are watchable. And trust me, you’re being watched (unless you’re Justin Bieber).

Last month, Elon Musk (whose current projects include Hyperloop trains, Tesla electric cars, and Space X missions to Mars) stated it was more likely...

I bounded up to my theatre teacher and told him I couldn’t wait to audition for the next season of plays at our high school. “Don’t bother auditioning, Andrea,’ he said, ‘there are no black parts.’ Well, at least he said it out loud. Eventually my school produced ‘The Crucible’ and guess which role I played? No, not Abigail, but nice try.

The NAC is a theatre that is dedicated to celebrate and strengthen Canadian voices and our unique way to tell stories. It’s an impossible goal – to make a theatre that attempts to give voice to a Canadian ideal – but the trying is everything. So I was pretty surprised (and heart-kicked I admit) to learn from Kate Taylor in her Globe and Mail article of July 24 – that Canada doesn’t actually have a National Theatre. But not being in Toronto, and not being completely mobile in our seasons doesn’t mean that we don’t exist.