My play It Started With an Allergy will soon have an entirely made-for-online production! Check out Spoonie Theatre on Facebook for details.
Tag: drama
Thank you to the audience!
THANK YOU to everyone who attended the reading of Alex and Michael and Hannah last night. A play isn’t a play without an audience, it’s truly impossible to know if a play works until you can hear the reaction to it, so you will be a huge help in improving the script, and getting it onstage!
Thank you to Script Salon, Holy Trinity, Playwrights Guild of Canada, and Alberta Playwrights Network for putting on the reading.
AND to the amazing director and cast for making the reading happen…ESPECIALLY Jake Tkaczyk for stepping in 30 minutes before rehearsal began yesterday!
small update to AMH
Listen on Facebook Live!
Here’s to confirm that the reading of Alex and Michael and Hannah will be live-streamed, here, at 7:30 pm Mountain Time on October 17, 2021. Tune in and behold!
Script Salon Cast of Alex and Michael and Hannah
I’m happy to confirm the cast and director of the upcoming public reading of Alex and Michael and Hannah !
- Hannah, Ellen Chorley
- Alex, Andres Moreno
- Michael, Brennan Campbell
- Kathy, Ellie Heath
- Director, Janine Waddell
Sunday, October 17 at 7:30 pm Mountain Time, Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 10037 84 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB T6E 2G6.
In-person: Wear your mask! The event will also be on Facebook Live the day of!
A Zoom production!
My play It Started With an Allergy, which I last performed at the Edmonton Fringe in 2015, is getting a production via Zoom! Spoonie Theatre in Ocean, NY, USA, will be doing the show this fall. Stay tuned…
meet Janine Waddell – intimacy co-ordinator
A director and certified movement instructor since 1991, Janine has drawn from her experience in dance, theatre and film to develop her stage combat and intimacy practices. She is an internationally certified Advanced Actor Combatant with Fight Directors Canada (FDC) and the Society of Australian Fight Directors (SAFDi) and a certified Actor Combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD), the British Academy of Stage and Screen Combat (BASSC) and the Nordic Stage Fight Society (NSFS.)
Janine is an active member of the Alberta Theatre and Film Communities and was recently award the first Alberta ACTRA Intimacy Coordination contract after having choreographed the violence and intimacy for over 75 plays and films in the past decade. Her passion lies in teaching new talent and the joy of discovery in safe spaces. Janine graduated from the MacEwan Theatre Arts program and is a proud mother of four.
Playworks Ink 2013 at Banff – in pictures…
Kabuki Theatre and Oiwa #theatre
I am a theatre junkie. Kabuki is at least as old as Shakespeare. It’s one of THE drama traditions I heard about as soon as I decided theatre was my life. Going to a kabuki play was on my must-do list while I was in Tokyo, but it was also felt, for me, like going to a cathedral and I hadn’t been to confession.
It was utterly amazing. It was actually four short pieces I saw, which — with intervals when you could get full meals and beer to have at your seat! — was three and half hours long. The style of acting and the men playing women (I’ll need to post about that separately—because) took some getting used to, because it’s so utterly different from any show I’ve ever seen before, and that’s part of the reason it was enthralling.
Everything I felt seeing my first kabuki was wrapped up in what I’d felt earlier that day while trying to track down Oiwa…the main character in one of Japan’s creepiest ghost stories, most famous kabuki plays (I didn’t see that one, sadly), and many of the country’s successful horror films.
There are a few different versions of Oiwa’s story: here’s one of the shortest, yet best and scariest. Horror and/or Japanese film fans will recognise her likeness from the Ringu series.
I have presumed to put her into one of my stories…the short film I started work on in France over the summer, and the related feature-length screenplay I just drafted. They both concern domestic violence, culture clashes, racism, sexism, revenge, and guilt.
Theatre people are, put mildly, superstitious. We call it “The Scottish Play” or “McBoo”. We leave a “ghost light” on in the middle of the stage when the theatre is otherwise empty and dark. And in Japan, whenever an actor onstage, or an actress on film, takes the role of Oiwa, they go to her shrine in Tokyo and ask Oiwa’s permission to play her.
And that’s what I did too.
The trope of the Maiden Ghost, based on Oiwa, has appeared in so many incarnations now that she’s thrown the first pitch in a baseball game. Which sounds silly, but I find it actually shows that Japan takes her as seriously as kabuki; she is embedded in Japanese culture — everyone knows her, and everyone, in a strange way, loves her. She embodies something genuinely wrong — vengeance — but it’s something everyone understands and has, at some point, wanted against someone else. I’m frightened by and enthralled by her.
I hope it’s not cultural appropriation — Gore Verbinski’s remade Ringu, quite well, I thought. Yes, I went to visit Tokyo to see the city, yes I met up with an old friend who’s been in Japan 14 years. However…I also went to Tokyo specifically to visit Oiwa’s shrine and ask “is this okay?” I hope it is.
Photos of #Japan : The East #Imperial Gardens, #Tokyo
The East Gardens of the Imperial Palace of Japan…distinct from THE Imperial Gardens because those are immediately around the current Palace, and are off-limits. And what you do get to see is utterly magnificent, and huge — I was there nearly three hours and didn’t see everything.