Madeleine Copp saw her first show when she was four years old and it was love at first sight. She pursued a bachelor’s in theatre production and design and English literature, culminating in a love for flexible, innovative, and diverse theatre artists that challenge all our preconceived notions of the stage. Her thesis, Printed Voices: Women, Print, and Performance pushed for new interpretations of closet drama from the early modern to modern period in the hopes of seeing more female playwrights included in the performance canon. Since graduating, Madeleine continues to seek out unexpected, startling, and challenging works that leave her angry, speechless, and wonderfully confused.
Presented as a lecture from the fictional Museum of Artificial Histories, Michael Dudeck’s The Messiah Complex 5.0, curated by Videofag for the Progress Festival, sets out to deconstruct the religious themes and narratives that permeate “Grand Narratives.”
Using movement, song, projections, and popular culture, Dudeck’s solo performance is compelling. He uses projections carefully, letting his audience make connections between his ‘messiah’ character and what the images depict. In fact, Dudeck, the centre of the work, is charming. Confident in his material, he lets his audience get swept away in his make-believe information.
Secrets are revealed when a couple discovers a body in Une Vie Pour Deux on stage at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre
Every so often a production takes a difficult discussion and uses it to reveal the flaws in our way of thinking. Une Vie Pour Deux (Love and Other Fragments) is a joint project by Espace GO and Theatre Francais de Toronto at the Berkeley Street Theatre is a work that dives into its subject and delivers a solid night of theatre.
Teatron Theatre explores oppression in Harvey Ostroff’s play Delimax at Toronto Centre for the Arts
Teatron Theatre’sDelimax playing at the Toronto Centre for the Arts‘s Studio Theatre is not the easiest play to watch. Following the enforcement of Bill 101 in Montreal, Harvey Ostroff’s play questions the meaning of oppression and how questions of sovereignty, independence, and power reveal darker truths.
While the subject is timely after recent events in Quebec, we actually travel back in time to confront an earlier vision of the province post-FLQ crises, after the rise and fall of the Parti Quebecois in the late eighties/early nineties.
A Christmas party gone awry lights up Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works in Theatre Columbus’ The Dog and the Angel
What exactly is the point of Christmas when your yearly party turns into a disaster, you find out the family dog destroyed your heirloom tree-topper angel, and your husband has never heard of glue? Theatre Columbus’s The Dog and the Angel by Martha Ross takes its audience through an evening of emotional chaos in the site-specific location of Evergreen Brick Works.
Rozel (Jennifer Villaverde) discovers her husband Barker (Courtenay Stevens) disposed of her family’s angel after it gets torn up by the dog. She goes on a quest to retrieve the tree-topper from the dump. Meanwhile her daughter tries to take the ailing dog to the veterinarian. Rozel’s parents Sampson (Paul Rainville) and Claire (Leah Cherniak) follow along in an attempt to help.
Opera Luminata defies opera stereotypes in its run at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre
Opera Luminata sets itself a challenge in its Toronto premiere at the Harbourfont Centre’sFleck Dance Theatre: presenting opera not as an aloof and complicated performance trapped by formality, but rather as a musical and theatrical spectacle. The end result is to change the perception of opera as an art form by making it accessible, exciting, and new.
Such an ambitious goal presents interesting questions about the future of historical genres on the stage, and whether the performance status-quo needs to evolve to capture a new audience. For opera, specifically, what happens when we remove the context of the opera to focus solely on the individual moments of the whole? What does it mean if there is no need for context to listen to operatic songs? And, if opera becomes more accessible by removing the conventional structure, how do we reconcile the traditional with the new?
