The new Gypsy Roar

The Hamilton-based theatre blog Gypsy Roar has relocated – with a clean new look, a bold new logo and an inspired new mandate: “Essentially I want to document my journey as a foreigner in a land I have no knowledge of, starting a theatre company with what I know and what I have, and see […]

A theatre blog’s first birthday

Wow. Has it really been a year since we started this blog? Yes. Yes it has. My, how time flies. It flies so far away. If there is anything that’s become clear during the first year of this exercise in cultural cartography it’s that we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can learn […]

A wake up call for the West

Vancouver-based playwright and theatre blogger Simon Ogden has thrown down an inspiring call to action for the “latent theatre town” he calls home: “. . . we keep plugging away, show after show, using the same marketing tactics and theatres and programs and street cards and posters and fundraisers . . . and theatre doesn’t […]

A chainsaw killer’s message of compassion

OK. This is not strictly theatre-related, but NYC-based playwright James Comtois is doing a wonderful series of short essays on seminal horror films at his Jamespeak blog. So far, he’s covered John Carpenter’s 1979 slasher classic Halloween, George Romero’s 1978 zombie touchstone Dawn of the Dead, and Tobe Hooper’s 1974 buzz-kill The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. […]

Re-membering the whole

“At its origin, theatre was an act of healing, of healing in the city. According to the action of fundamental, entropic forces, no city can avoid a fundamental process of fragmentation. But when the population assembles together, and a momentary healing reunites the larger body, in which each member, re-membered finds its place . . […]

Holy TAPA!

Back in early August (is the summer really over?) the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (TAPA) launched a new blog. Here’s the blurb from its About page: “Welcome to the TAPA Blog, your online source of industry information . . . The TAPA Blog has been created as the next generation of the TAPA […]

Not just for laughs

“After a close examination of the existing literature on performance art, it is remarkable to see how much of the emphasis has been placed on the grim, the intense, and the masochistic. Indeed, performance audiences have come to expect to be shocked, to witness artists being covered with bodily fluids, pierced, hung, confined, and/or mutilated. […]