It’s clear that the cut of the Heritage Canada funding to SummerWorks a few weeks ago (see our report on it when it happened) hasn’t dimmed the festival’s determination to move ahead with its annual presentation.
After a call for financial help was put out, artists, audiences, organizations and arts patrons responded with generous support. Festival organizers asked for a $21 donation from supporters, since 2011 is SummerWorks’ 21st anniversary. This year’s fest runs August 4 to 14.
And it’s not just been local support, either people have contributed from across Canada.
To date, over 400 individuals and groups have contributed over $35,000 to the $48,000 shortfall SummerWorks faces because of the cut.
The Canada-wide support is appropriate, in part given that the juried festival includes a national component that lets local audiences catch some of the best theatre from around the country.
This year’s visiting troupes are Edmonton’s RedtoBlue Productions and two companies from British Columbia, Vancouver’s Solo Collective and Victoria’s SNAFU Dance Theatre.
But there’s another way you can support SummerWorks: attend a staged reading of Catherine Frid’s 2010 SummerWorks show Homegrown. The script, which caused a ruckus with conservative forces (including the federal government), deals in part with a lawyer’s friendship with Shareef Abdelhaleem, convicted for terrorism as one of the “Toronto 18.”
Aluna Theatre, which staged the production in SummerWorks, holds the pwyc reading at the Berkeley Street Theatre Friday (July 15), 8 pm (doors, 7:30 pm).
Again, the support is national – other companies around Canada are holding a similar reading at the same local time.
That’s solidarity.
Shocking theatre
If you want to see a piece of really subversive theatre, check out the Soup Can Theatre’s staging of Peter Weiss’s extraordinary Marat/Sade.
The play’s full title is a mouthful: The Persecution And Assassination Of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed By The Inmates Of The Asylum Of Charenton Under The Direction Of The Marquis De Sade.
Set in a Paris madhouse where de Sade resides, the play traces the history of French politics before, during and after the French Revolution. It’s filled with song, grim humour and lots of deviant behaviour on the part of the actors/inmates.
In the original production, the audience became period aristocrats who visited the asylum for a little theatrical treat.
In the Soup Can adaptation, opening Tuesday (July 19), director Sarah Thorpe has changed period and place, setting the show at McGill University’s psychiatry department in the late 1950s, where Donald Ewen Cameron performed experiments using electroshock and various drugs on non-consenting patients as part of a covert CIA operation.
Should make for a powerful production.
See listings.
stage@nowtoronto.com
