Harbourfront’s World Stage season kicks off this weekend with Everything Under The Moon, but that’s just the beginning.
At the end of the month, UK choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance troupe arrives with Entity (February 28 to March 3), a work for 10 dancers that fuses movement and technology, all scored to music by Coldplay and Massive Attack collaborator Jon Hopkins. You won’t want to miss it McGregor’s Chroma, featuring music by the White Stripes, was a huge local hit for the National Ballet last season.
New York’s legendary Wooster Group helped launch the careers of artists like Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe. It breaks down walls between disciplines, frequently using multimedia and playing with autobiography and existing texts. Their Vieux Carré (March 28 to 31) reinterprets one of Tennessee Williams’s final plays. Should be fascinating, especially after the glimpse we got last season of another late Williams play in His Greatness.
So far, 2012’s hottest theatre is Greek mythology. Margaret Atwood reimagined The Odyssey in The Penelopiad and Martin Crimp adapted Sophocles’ Women Of Trachis in Cruel And Tender. In Ajax & Little Iliad (April 4 to 8), Canadians Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell rework Sophocles’ tragedies to take a look at contemporary wars and how to make theatre from them. An earlier version of Little Iliad showed great promise at the Free Fall Festival two years ago. Can’t wait to see the final version.
And that’s just the first two months. Other shows include new work by the Dietrich Group, the only local dance troupe to make it onto my Best of Dance 2011 list, former NOW cover troupe Compagnie Käfig, and the return of Dance Marathon, the thrilling interactive show by bluemouth inc.
Get info at harbourfrontcentre.com/worldstage2012 or 416-973-4000.
