Workin Summer

Hillside Festival and Home County were both wonderful weekends full of fun workshop collaborations with great musicians, and hearing lots of good music…sharing stages with The Brothers Creegan, The Acorn, Rae Spoon, James Gordon, Jenny Whiteley, Oh Suzanna, Catherine McClelland, Melissa McClelland, Coco Love Alcorn, Brian McMillan…and getting to play with my whole band at Hillside, what a treat.

This week, on Augst 7, the SummerWorks Festival opens in Toronto — a festival of independent theatre and music which i have been involved in over the years (it’s where Clean Irene & Dirty Maxine premiered, and won the jury prize — so of course i have sweet associations..). This year, i am taking part in the festival with three different things, all of which i am pretty stoked about:

Number one! The festival is doing a music series this year for the first time, so on August 15th, I am playing (with band) as the opening act for Rock Plaza Central.

Number two! I am directing a show by my friend Morgan Jones Phillips, called The Emergency Monologues. It is all about his experience working as a paramedic in Toronto for the last 5 years — and his stories are AMAZING. you will pee your pants laughing, and be horrified and amused and amazed.

Number three! I am acting in The Pastor Phelps Project: a fundamentalist cabaret. Speaking of horrified, amused and amazed….I play Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of Pastor Fred Phelps, and a leader of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas: the hate-mongering, homophobic church who picket AIDS funerals and dead soldiers funerals…who will apparently be in attendance at the opening of the show this Thursday, picketing at our production (!) en route to Alberta where they’ll be picketing at a production of the Laramie Project.

Check out the media frenzy that has happened since we discovered the Westboro Baptists website that they were coming to picket our show…The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, CityTV, Global TV all covered it…and then they didn’t show (The Toronto Sun reports).

Come check out the live action: the show takes place in the back room of The Cameron House, August 7-17 www.summerworks.ca

Report from the left coast…

I’ve returned from such an amazing tour out west. Without a doubt, the highlight being the trip to the Yukon, and the very special and beautiful Atlin Festival.…back in Ontario now, i’m missing those long long days that never seem to end…walking home at 3 am wondering if it’s finally getting dark, or if it’s actually getting lighter….

Also a treat to be return to Edmonton, Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and Whidbey Island WA; plus first visits (but not the last!) to the Sunshine Coast BC and Canmore AB. Incredible physical beauty was a recurrent theme of the landscapes we drove and flew and sailed through…as well as delicious, wonderful and generous hospitality from so many old friends and new friends along the way.

When i have a few minutes, i will be posting some more writing and stories about the trip…for now, I am coming down from the west, followed by a lovely weekend at London’s Home County Festival, and getting ready for the big Hillside weekend.

Lots of nice press along the road, too: if you’re interested, check out the articles in the Georgia Straight and The Edmonton Journal

Happy Pride!

Pride Week officially begins in Toronto ..happy queer christmas, to one and all Let the rainbow-flaggin’ and the booty-shakin’ and street partying begin!

Begin? Where to begin? Well …for starters, check out the fun little video story that Xtra Magazine has up on their site, about me and my thing, promo-ing my upcoming western tour…

While still in Toronto for the big weekend, I’ll be performing at Cheap Queers at Buddies on Thursday the 26, and on the Proud Voices stage on Sunday the 29th at 5 pm, at the James Canning Gardens… though I’ll tell you, i feel I’ve been living and breathing the Pride spirit for weeks now,because of PrideCab, the big year-end youth cabaret show at Buddies- which, incidentally, sold out around the block last Wednesday! I’ve never seen such a long line up at Buddies, even on club nights. More than 100 people turned away! What a smash success — another great show by a great gang of youth: this marks year four that I have directing the project, and also my final year. Next year i take a step back from the youth programme, to concentrate more on my own work, and wear a new hat at Buddies: that of “Associate Artist”. I’ll be directing the Young Creators Unit again, directing Mark Shyzer’s new show “Fishbowl: a concise, expansive theory of everything” as part of the 30th Anniversay season, and…working on my own writing and other projects…actually i’m going to be writing a play for Buddies for 2009/10. So it’s exciting times for me. Sad to be letting go of the apron strings of my beloved youth programme…but the time is right. Chy Ryan Spain takes over, and that’s all good.

After we’re all done with being proud…next week I head out west for a two week music tour with the marvellous David Celia; he’ll be my one-man back-up band, and we’ll do a series of double bills together:  can’t wait.   Then back for more festivals back in Ontario. I am SERIOUSLY excited about the line up for my Hillside band: we had a jumpin’ show at the neighbourhood joint Not My Dog on Friday night, and it made me really really excited…there is a new sound developing, with David Celia on electric guitar, and the addition of upright bass (ahhh…the lovely Trevor Mills is back in the band!) and Beth Washburn on her little mini-tuba as well as the cornet…and of course Brad Hart playing drums. Adam Warner will actually be playing drums at Hillside, since Brad is on tour with Claire Jenkins Avec Band for a month…so Brad will be missed but Adam will be a great addition. With the new instrumental elements, and several new songs, i think things are really coming together in a slightly new and definitely exciting direction…and you know how i love new and exciting….

Dora Nominations for Breakfast! (and website probs)

The Independent Aunties are thrilled to announce that BREAFAST has been honoured with three Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations: For Outstanding Performance by a Female (Karin Randoja), Outstanding Sound Design (Richard Windeyer) and Outstanding Lighting Design (Laird MacDonald). The winners will be announced on June 30th….

And, in other news, apologies if you’ve been trying to navigate this site and finding strange pages in place of what you were looking for….we’ve been having a rather massive problem on our server — hopefully all will be fixed real soon. If there is something you can’t find that you need, please email evalyn at evalynparry dot com. Also if you’ve emailed evalyn and haven’t heard back, please try again.

Breakfast is served

Breakfast, the new Independent Aunties show, opened officially last Wednesday, May 21, after a week of previewing. We Aunties are feeling so proud and happy. The audience response has been exhilarating: it seems we have made something that is CONNECTING to people in exactly the ways that we hoped it would. A wonderful review in  Xtra Magazine:

“…a highly strung and expertly crafted script…Breakfast is a prime example of text and tech blending seamlessly into an hour of funny, painful and often gripping drama.” Xtra Magazine

and EYE Magazine:

” Moment by moment, this 70-minute creation is utterly compelling, even if Breakfast’s dark, absurdist progression eventually defies description….adventurers who surrender to this play about transformation will be rewarded by visceral theatre. Like an orgasm, it’s hard to describe but you know when you’ve had one” EYE Magazine

People are calling the show creepy, sexy, dark, fascinating, complex, gripping, suspenseful and moving…. It delves into the female psyche, explores ideas about self help, about transformation, intimacy, celebrity and voyeurism…and lots of other things, too. Through many, many ideas, creative collaborators, crazy physical explorations, fundraising, rewrites and hours and months later, we have created a one-hour show that we are all incredibly proud of. Even several friends that claim to generally dislike theatre have told us they loved it. We hope you, too, can come experience Breakfast with us before it closes on JUNE 1st.

Here are a coupla links to what is being said, both critically and in cyber-conversation:

Xtra Review of BREAKFAST by David Bateman

EYE Review of BREAKFAST by Gord McLaughlin

The Aunties in conversation with Chris Dupuis

Theatre Umbrella Blog

The new Independent Auntie production

It’s almost here.  The Aunties are in the thick of rehearsals for BREAKFAST, the show we’ve been developing through the Theatre Centre for the past couple of years.

We invite you over to Breakfast with us, while we ask the question:

“What do you need to do to truly tranform your life?”

Rehearsals are exciting.   We have a super fantastical production team.   We’re in the space now, with not only the usual suspects (Karin Randoja, Anna Chatterton, Brendan Healy and myself) but now also Julie Fox (set and costume design…yow!), Richard Windyer (sound design…ooooo it’s gonna be cool), Jim Ruxton (special effects….)  and more……the creative juices are cooking.  Opens May 14th (for the first week of “workshop”) and then we invite the press in on May 21, and it runs until June 1.   Book your tickets now…space is very limited.   www.theatrecentre.ca

Always

From Live At Lula DVD

yo facebook

i finally broke down, and got me a facebook group.  it’s kinda fun.  you can join if you like…click here!

Spring is here in Toronto.  How much do we love it? We LOVE IT.

BREAKFAST by independent auntie

So the Aunties are working on our new show.  I thought I would post this little “Artistic Statement” that I wrote, originally for a grant proposal, but i like it better than most grants i write. It speaks to what is driving us to create this show.

break·fast (noun) the first meal of the day, usually in the morning.

con·sume (verb): to eat or drink something, especially in large amounts  2. to use something in such a way that it cannot be reused or recovered afterward  3.  to fill somebody’s mind or attention fully   4.  to destroy something or somebody completely

We are a company dedicated to uncovering the hidden in boldly theatrical ways.  In our quest to discover how a theatrical exploration of space could reveal story, Breakfast set out to investigate what might be contained in the space of a kitchen.  As a company founded by women, and dedicated to producing work by and about women, the kitchen, this typically “gendered” domestic setting, this most traditional of women’s spaces, seemed ripe for examination.  An ordinary space, universal and ubiquitous, the kitchen is symbolically and literally connected to the sustenance of life, and to the act of consumption.  A room loaded with cultural and familial symbolism, memory, emotion and tradition, it is a place where legacy is manifest, especially between generations of women.  A place which, upon close examination, has revealed to us a strange and fascinating story, and provoked us to ask many questions.

We ask:
What does it mean to seek your “authentic self”, in an Oprah-Winfrey-world of obligatory self-improvement; where “new age” spirituality and self-help is consumed like take-out; where “happiness” is marketed in the form of a pill, where people are alone and lonely even within densely populated urban settings, physically isolated yet hyper-technologically connected; where talk-show hosts and self-help gurus hold more power than any church; where the cult of “I” has never had more members, or less meaning; and where women are the prime target and prime consumers of the self-help, 20-minute-workout, instant make-over industry.

Breakfast uses the everyday custom of “breaking the fast” to explore the notion of “a fresh start”: Can one ever really change oneself? Does society’s obsession with self-actualization really produce lasting change? Is it truly possible to start over?

We ask:
What does is mean to try and escape one’s past, in a consumer-driven, disposable world where it costs more to repair something than to buy something new, where hard-drives hold more stories than a grandmother and memory can be purchased in the form of a microchip; where human memory can be erased, replaced or distorted by well-meaning therapists, by digital technology; where we’re told we have it better now than ever before in history, that buying is the only power we need to succeed, and consumption is not only our right, but the ultimate satisfaction.

Breakfast poses the question, can one ever truly escape one’s past? In a fractured world, where can one find wholeness?

We ask:
What does it mean to have an intimate encounter with a stranger, in our paparazzi-close-up world of live webcasts and video phones where Photoshop can make anything possible, where YouTube can make you famous, “reality tv” is anything but, digital is the new magic, facebook is the new myspace, bloggers replace journalists, where opportunities to peep into the lives of others surround us at every turn, and the meaning of “real” becomes harder to discern with every passing day.

In the world of television and film, we constantly see “close up” shots used to dramatic effect:  but what about a theatrical “close up”? Our exploration of space lead us to the desire to offer our audience a live “close up”: a theatrical experience so intimate that it is compelling, unnerving and almost voyeuristic. A total and mesmerizing sensory experience in which the viewer cannot escape nor remove themselves from what they are seeing, because they are in fact inside of it. An experience which at first appears to be comfortingly and recognizably hyper-realistic, but which slowly and unaccountable morphs into a strange, magical and menacing scenario.

Breakfast will challenge the viewer to differentiate for themselves what is being manipulated, what is truly magical and fantastic, and what might be the wild imaginings of a mind that has crossed over from reality into delusion.

mystery of the crumbly spelt and…

Alright, three things.

Number one is that i was doing a bit of internet research about baking bread with spelt flour, and to my great delight, i discovered why my two previous attempts to make bread using spelt were extremely crumbly, and not as great as i thought they should be, considering my past bread baking successes. Those were always with wheat flour — and i had (mistakenly) been assuming that spelt flour functions very much like wheat flour. Oh, i knew that rice and soy and buckwheat and kamut and all those were really different to bake with - my partner is allergic to wheat, so for many years we’ve been using alternatives — but my past experience of cookies or cakes with spelt have been very easy! Seemed like it was very wheat-like. But apparently, the internet tells me, it’s not good to KNEED your spelt bread dough too much (unlike wheat dough, which you can kneed almost indefinitely, if you want to); it makes it crumbly. Because it’s gluten structures are fragile! Do not over-kneed! Mystery of the crumbly spelt bread… SOLVED! If you know me, you know how incredibly pleased i am when i solve these small but mysterious little every day mysteries. So the happy ending which i felt compelling to share, here, on my blog, is that i just made the best loaves of spelt bread EVER. I hope those of you who have been similarly plagued with spelt bread failures will be as excited as i am. Here’s the recipe i found, it’s good.

Okay, number two. I got a lovely piece of mail yesterday, which was a letter and a cheque from the Ontario Arts Council supporting this spoken word thing I’m working on. Hazah! Two Wheeled Words (the working title) will get a little workshop performance at the end of September….and i’ll get to spend some of the summer and fall working on it. Exciting. This is the piece that uses a bicycle as percussion, and metaphor. Ideas related to “spin” and “cycles”, that’s what I’m working with. You can see that I really must be pleased about my spelt mystery solving, since number two really is so good, it could be number one. Thank you Ontario Arts Council!

Number three: this is my laugh of the week. There is a nice little review of my record, Small Theatres, in Shameless Magazine this month. I really like Shameless, it’s an awesome publication, so i was pleased to be reviewed in there. What is hilarious is just one small but funny editorial misinterpretation. There is a comment about the song Honey, which is I sometimes introduce, when i’m playing live, as being a story told to me by my uncle-in-law, Rod, who was a wrestler with the WWF. That is, the World Wrestling Federation. You may be familiar with it. Anyway, in the review it mentions “a man who wrestles bears for the World Wildlife Federation”. Heh heh. I thought that was funny.

International Women’s Day

Happy IWD. Horrah for being a girl! hats off to all the people working world-wide to improve the lives of women and girls everywhere. gratitude to my foremothers. gratitude for living in a country that has a section 15 in their charter of rights and freedoms.

You can click here to read my attempt to turn the most recent edition of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law into a spoken word extraveganza. Debuted on March 6 at the Rewriting Equality Symposium put on by the Women’s Court of Canada…this was quite a little research project for me, but super interesting and fun. One of my critical-thinking-and-writing heros, Heather Mallick, served as the very fine host for the event, and she and all the lawyers seemed to like my new piece “Parry V. Revision: who will win?” , so i’m well pleased.

february

Well there’s been some “issues” going on with the website for the last few weeks — hope you haven’t been looking for things you couldn’t find…and hopefully i’ll have everything working all hunky-dory again soon. I’m heading off to see Veda Hille’s cd release tonight, can’t wait. It’s been a jam jam jam packed few weeks for me (perhaps the website’s problems are like a virtual representation of the inside of my head: too many things going on! everything gets jumbled! nothing links properly anymore! malfunction!) but it’s all been pretty fun. Girls with Glasses completed our tour, The Aunties held a very successful and fun fundraiser, and I directed a show at Buddies for the Young Creators Unit which had it’s one-night presentation last night as part of Rhubarb!. Extremely fun…and i’m a tired cookie. Now i hunker down and get writing.

Basket No. 2

F is for FEBRUARY and FUNDRAISING!

MONDAY FEBRUARY 11th The Independent Aunties present
The “Up Your Auntie” Fundraiser
at The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen (at Dovercourt, entrance on Dovercourt, south of Queen)
Doors @ 7 pm
Clean Irene & Dirty Maxine @ 7:30 pm
John Millard and Happy Day @ 9 pm
followed by cheap beer, cupcake bake sale and good times.

Tickets are by donation
(Suggested donation of $20;  all donations of $25 and over will receive a charitable tax-receipt.  This event is an effort to fundraise for the Auntie’s upcoming production “Breakfast” at the Theatre Cenre in May 2008.  Any and all donations are gratefully accepted.)

to reserve email info@independentauntie.ca  or call 416-538- 0988

About Clean Irene & Dirty Maxine:
Written and performed by Anna Chatterton and Evalyn Parry, directed by Karin Randoja and designed by Sherri Hay, Clean Irene has toured to great acclaim from Halifax Nova Scotia to Dawson City, Yukon…it’s our last time doing it EVER in Toronto!

“..beneath the show’s whimsy lies a subtle, satirical sting that spares no one.” ~ Eye Magazine”

“Wickedly funny…great physicality, smart satire and snappy, spot on performances!” ~ NOW Magazine

“You’d be hard pressed to find a better pairing of performers on stage than Parry and Chatterton.” ~  THE GLOBE & MAIL

“ …just the right mix of deadly earnestness and naughty knowingness.”  ~ The Toronto Sun

More about us at  www.independentauntie.ca

***************
About John Millard and Happy Day

“like a mixture of the Lone Ranger and Kurt Weill” ~National Post

“The music rolled out like a ballerina and a soldier from a Swiss clock, like a hodgepodge of stone and wood and rusty tin and cracked glass that somehow fit perfectly together. And the sound? Country and Kurt Weill, mazurka and bluegrass, Celtic ballad and marching band music, all at once. ” ~Globe and Mail

I say, hearing is believing — John Millard rarely plays in these parts, and although his performance with Happy Day really defies description,  it’s got to be both the happiest and the saddest music ever, one of the most original and wonderful things you’re likely to hear this February!

www.johnmillardandhappyday.com

Girls with Glasses 2008!

Catch the last of the GWG 2008 tour Feb 8 in London! Feb 9th is sold out! Karyn Ellis, Eve Goldberg, Allison Brown and I have had good times and great shows in Peterborough, Creemore, Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Ottawa… we’ve got ourselves a nifty Facebook group, if you’re the Facebook kind, you can join, and see photos and things…

Happy New Year

Here’s to a fresh start. To change, to inspiration, to joy, compassion and delight in 2008. My resolution is practice more gratitude.

It snowed, beautiful snow-ball snow on new years eve. I spent it dancing. It was good to dance, after spending days chained to the last Harry Potter book, which i finished on the 1st of January…don’t know exactly what this symbolizes for the new year, but it seems auspicious. Good conquering evil and all that….damn, that was a good read… Long live young adult literature I say! And please, read the Golden Compass before you see the movie (i will personally never see it)– you won’t regret it. The Phillip Pullman books kicks the pants off of Harry Potter…and I love Harry Potter.