The festival brings together international performances to engage in a larger conversation about language, accessibility, and what progress means to Toronto’s performance ecology. Progress features seven international shows, six languages and five free artist workshops and talks with programming having been curated by nine different companies.
Here’s a preview/review of the first of a few performance pieces happening throughout the festival.
Friday night was buzzing at The Theatre Centre on Queen West, with productions happening throughout the night at both performance spaces.
I chose to check out Marathon, a thought-provoking look into the minds of three Israeli individuals addressing some of their internal struggles with present day Israel conflicts. In typical Toronto tardiness fashion, the performers were left on stage waiting 15 minutes after scheduled start time while late-comers casually strolled in to their seats. The audience is circled around the central performance area, which is used as a running track, hence the title Marathon. This circling within a circle is reminiscent of the constant change/no change that the country has to deal with on a daily basis.
Loved by some, hated by others, these individuals are representative of many within one of the oldest places on earth, yet still trying to find a foothold. What would appear as a typical running track meet turns into recollections and questioning of the past, present, and future. Quotes like, “You started something, so finish it” and “This circle seems like life is forever” could be taken in many different contexts, but here is is revealing the wounds of contemporary Israeli society. One of the performers is left asking, “Where is my home”, seemingly questioning the state of Israel as a homeland, and his state of existence in general.
Combining dance, text, theatre, and grueling physicality, Marathon uses the autobiographical stories of the performers to reflect a state of constant emergency. This is the North American English language premiere. Following Toronto dates, the work will tour to Public Energy (Peterborough), the undercurrents festival (Ottawa), and the Chutzpah Festival (Vancouver).Performed in English and Hebrew (with surtitles). Currated by Summerworks
Margarete is a low-key, pleasant, and suitably nerdy performance. I dropped by 4pm on a Thursday thinking I might be one of only a few, but was surprised to see a fairly good turnout for this event. Again, there was a 15 minute delay starting as the presenter said we were “waiting for other guests to arrive”. This was the third time in a week theatre had started quite a bit past curtain call. The other was at the Winter Garden Theatre, where you think things might be run a bit stricter. Alas, on with the show. At an outdoor market in Berlin, theatre artist Janek Turkowski finds a set of private 8 mm films and a projector. For the low cost of 20 Euros, he takes the bargain home to Poland and begins to pour through the material. The films show a woman in East Germany, from the fifties and later, the sixties; the same woman on a bus ride, at work, in the woods, parades, scenery, parties – the sorts of things people film. Turkowski systematizes, digitizes, and looks for connections, and slowly he finds his way to the owner of the material.
Turkowski places a small audience on chairs and cushions on the floor. He serves coffee and tea and lectures on his own slightly intense interest for this relatively coincidental and rather unsensational material. With humor and irony, Turkowski talks about the amount of time he has put into slowly uncovering and constructing stories from the material, leaving us with a reflection on the recording of memories and a private investigation into the identity of a person who left only a slight mark on silent film. It’s only a hour long, but does seem longer at points, as I felt I was more in a lecture class than a theatre. It was more about the presenter telling us this and that about how he spent the last four years of his life, and I’m sure everyone in the audience could have told their own similar stories given an hour of free time. The presentation combining old reel-to-reel footage transferred and manipulated to video was interesting, the story was not.
Brazilian actor and director Enrique Diaz performs in a critically acclaimed adaptation of Canadian Daniel MacIvor’s “Monster”. Alone on stage, Diaz transforms himself into a series of MacIvor’s characters whose lives seem eerily related. There’s the young boy who tells the story of the neighbour lad who hacked up his father in the basement. There are alcoholic Al and whiny Janine, the lovers who quarrel, make up, and decide to marry after seeing a movie about a lad who…well, same thing. There’s the ex-drunk who dreamed up the movie, but got no credit because he was said to have stolen the idea from a famous unfinished film, a claim that so angered him that he went back on the sauce. And there’s the movie maker who made that incomplete epic. Cine Monstro represents a rare opportunity to see Canadian theatre through a different lens. For a one person production, Diaz carried himself well, but perhaps this one should have clocked in at 60 minutes as well.
All performances are at The Theatre Centre (1115 Queen Street West) until February 15th, 2015 with times and days organized chronologically on this page:
A full schedule can be found here. #ProgressTO // @SummerWorks
