But That’s Another Story is a “gimmick-free focus on genuine human connection”
After only three performances, a new storytelling series is packing them in at the Free Times Cafe. It’s called But That’s Another Story and it gives space to a wide cross-section of genres, including fables, comic essays, and more contemporary works. Its producer-hosts, Briane Nasimok and Christel Bartelse, are two well-established voices in the Canadian performing arts. Nasimok is a Canadian Comedy Award winner who appeared in classic 1980s films like Gas and The Funny Farm. Bartelse is a Canadian Comedy Award nominee known for her internationally-acclaimed one-woman shows.
Themes of imbalance and renewal characterize Dancers of Damelahamid’s Mînowin
Dancers of Damelahamid’s new work, Mînowin, is a mesmerizing session of song and dance about reconnecting with ancestral Indigenous knowledge, easing the struggles of Indigenous people, and exploring how progress is a continuous process of imbalance and renewal. Staged in the cozy Harbourfront Centre Theatre, this DanceWorks production flirts with epic themes in the most intimate of spaces.
Broken Tailbone “challenges us to change for nobody’s benefit but our own.”
In Broken Tailbone (Nightswimming Theatre/Factory Theatre), playwright and star Carmen Aguirre treats us to a history of how music and dance have changed her life, culture, and community. She regales us with stories of steamy nights in Latinx clubs, her Chilean upbringing under revolutionary parents, and episodes from Latin America’s rocky history with dictatorships. She ties them together with the common thread of shaking booties to a beat. To set the mood, Factory’s Studio Theatre transforms into a dance hall with smoke, flashing lights, and a bar for good measure.
Cultures collide in Non Gratas at Bad Dog Theatre Company
Non Gratas, A Latinx Comedy Show With a Lot of Melodrama, is an improv comedy show that does its name proud. Produced by Alma Matters, and staged at Bad Dog Theatre Company, it’s loosely built around two young Latin American women who become friends after immigrating to Canada. As they struggle to connect with a new culture, they highlight the gap between two stereotypes—Canadian humility and Latinx passion—with jokes that kill but also let me into their devastating longing for home.
This outdoor adaptation of The Winter’s Tale – produced by Shakespeare in the Ruff – is playing at the bottom of a little hill in beautiful Withrow Park. It boasts a superlative cast, comedy with improv’s unpredictability, and monologues that will run your heart through the emotional gamut, then give it back refreshed for the real world.
The play tells of a king’s jealousy getting the best of him, how it leads him to lose his wife and children. And how finally, the universe conspires to grant him one final chance to atone for his paranoid, authoritarian ways.
But That’s Another Story is a “gimmick-free focus on genuine human connection”
Themes of imbalance and renewal characterize Dancers of Damelahamid’s Mînowin
Broken Tailbone “
Cultures collide in Non Gratas at Bad Dog Theatre Company