Theatre Classes and Workshops at Hart House

In my last blog I wrote about Hart House Theatre, the theatre where we are going to produce Harriet's House in June 2010. I also mentioned that Hart House offers reasonably priced theatre classes and workshops for theatre artists and enthusiasts. Here is a list of theatre classes and workshops being offered this winter.

Theatre Dramatic Scene Study
The Art of Acting
The Art of Being Professional in Any Career
Improvisation
The Art of Giving a Speech or Presentation
Introduction to Voice and Speech
The Actor's Audition Technique
Clowning Around
The Shakespeare Experience
Musical Theatre and Opera
Creation - an Acting Class
The Organics of Acting for the Camera
Movement and Text

On-Set Experience For Actors & Directors
Actor's Introduction to Filmmaking
Director's Introduction to Filmmaking

For further information see: www.harthouse.ca/classes

All the best,
Tara

Harriet’s House at Hart House Theatre

It is very exciting that Gailey Road’s first production outside the Toronto Fringe Festival will take place at Hart House Theatre. The theatre opened in November of 1919 and became a leader in the Canadian “Little Theatre” movement of the 1920's and 1930's. During that time, Hart House Theatre cultivated and featured some of the country’s finest actors, directors, playwrights and designers of the Pre-World War II era, including Raymond Massey, Dora Mavor Moore, Lloyd Bochner, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, Wayne and Shuster and Merrill Denison.

After the war, Hart House Theatre, under the direction of Robert Gill, became an extracurricular student theatre and for twenty years turned out a new generation of stage professionals. William Hutt, Don Harron, Kate Reid, David Gardner, Arthur Hiller, Donald Sutherland, Norman Jewison and Lorne Michaels all got their start treading the boards on the Hart House stage. I can’t think of a better theatre from which to launch Gailey Road’s Harriet’s House.

In addition to putting on its own full season each year (this year marks the theatre’s 90th anniversary) Hart House Theatre also offers a range of theatre classes and workshops (www.harthouse.ca/classes). In my next blog, I will provide of list of these. Registration for the winter courses starting in January is now open.

Producing Harriet’s House: Episode 2-Finding a Venue at Hart House Theatre

My first attempt to find a venue began with the Al Green Theatre at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre (JCC). I had produced Lost Daughter there during the 2008 Toronto Fringe Festival and had a wonderful experience. Director Jocelyn Wickett and I already knew that we wanted to produce Harriet’s House during the Toronto Pride Festival and because the play featured a Jewish same-sex family, we thought that the Al Green Theatre would be an ideal theatre to approach. Although the cultural programmers at the JCC liked the play and wanted to discuss a partnership with us, the Al Green Theatre was not affordable for a small independent theatre company like Gailey Road. We had to look somewhere else.

I work at the University of Toronto as a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and decided to talk to Louise Cowin, the Warden of Hart House. Hart House is the Student Centre for the St. George Campus at the University of Toronto and a place that welcomes U of T faculty, staff and alumni as well as students. Hart House is also the home of Hart House Theatre, which is a focal point for the performing arts at the University of Toronto. Over a thousand students participate each year in its extra-curricular season of drama, dance, music and film.
Louise was pleased to discuss a partnership between Hart House and Gailey Road theatre and I am thrilled to announce that Harriet’s House, will take place at Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto on Thursday June 24, Friday June 25, and Saturday June 26, 2010. I am currently working with the General Manager of the Hart House Theatre, Doug Floyd, on setting up a contract. In my next blog, I will tell you a little bit about Hart House Theatre and its history.

All the best,
Tara

Research-informed theatre: The Pastor Phelps Project and Archival Theatre

Last week I attended a performance of The Pastor Phelps Project: a fundamentalist cabaret, which was presented by The Centre for Urban Schooling in co-sponsorship with The Graduate Department for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. Written by director/playwright Alistair Newton from “found text”, the play is an example of “archival theatre”. Archival theatre, a term created by Newton, uses found text to create political theatre. The text of The Pastor Phelps Project was created from news reports, on-line material from Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church, press releases, biblical passages, and quotations and transcriptions from Jerry Falwell, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, and The Tyra Banks Show. The piece also includeed religious spirituals and hymns, as well as song parodies such as “This Land is Fag Land”, and “God Hates the World”. Combined with music, dance, design and strong socio-political context, as it was in The Pastor Phelps Project, the use of found text created a powerful example of the potential to research-informed theatre to provoke dialogue and entertain at the same time.


All the best,
Tara

Research-informed theatre: Zero Tolerance

In May 2007, 15-year old Jordan Manners was shot and killed in the hallway of his Toronto school. In early June 2007, the Toronto District School Board (2008) commissioned an investigation into school safety, which resulted in a four-volume 595-page report entitled The Road to Health.

In an attempt to provoke discussion about the report and its recommendations among teacher candidates and teacher educators at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education of University of Toronto (OISE/UT) where I work as a teacher educator, playwright and performed ethnographer, I adapted The Road to Health into a performance script entitled Zero Tolerance

In September 2008 Zero Tolerance was performed as a rehearsed reading for 500 teacher candidates at OISE’s Safe Schools Conference. The performers included a group of teacher candidates, a teacher educator, and three researcher and development staff members from OISE’s Centre for Urban Schooling. The performance was followed by a set of prepared responses from a panel that featured Vice-Principal and Ph.D candidate Dean Barnes from the Halton District School Board, one of OISE’s partner school boards; Bev Caswell, an OISE teacher educator; Jeff Kugler, the Executive Director of the Centre for Urban Schooling, and Charis Lo, a teacher candidate who had participated in the reading. A further two-hour discussion for audience members who wanted to discuss the report in some detail followed the performance. About 30 teacher candidates attended this discussion. The other teacher candidates attended workshops on peace building, conflict resolution, and peer mediation that provided opportunities to discuss practical strategies for dealing with some of the issues raised in the performance.

Zero Tolerance will be read again at the University of Toronto on February 25, 2010, from 3-5 pm at Hart House.

All the best,
Tara