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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

My very fun show at the Tranzac last week was followed immediately by getting struck down by a merciless flu, which had me bedridden for several days.  Got up from my sickbed to go into CBC to play a fun game of “Just a Minute” (fans of BBC Radio may know this game…check out the rules here) between me, Tom Howell (the word nerd) Jane Farrow (host of And Sometimes Y) and Russell Smith (past host of the show.  The game (which i did rather badly at… but did get a chance to wax eloquent about “clogs”) will be broadcast on CBC Radio One in on December 31, as part of the final episode of the very delightful “And Sometimes Y“.

In other news…it’s christmas and I have to go do my final shopping…as i write this, I hear the radio saying “on this, the busiest day of the shopping season”.  Wish me luck…and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

A very fun show was had at the Tranzac Club in Toronto: with band and bicycle: ..the opening set was trying out a new series that I’m working on called “Two Wheeled Words: a spoken word cycle” or maybe it’s a song cycle, I’m not totally sure yet what it is, but it includes playing the bicycle as a percussion instrument and it’s all about the idea of “spin”.

Brad Hart plays the bicycle like a pro!  Second half of the show was songs with the band.  David Celia, his beautiful voice and magic guitar were a brilliant addition…Jenn Gillmor did birthday bass duty, and Suzie Vinnick sat in for a couple of songs on the fly.   Always a treat to have the mini-tuba, played by Beth Washburn.   Thanks to all who  played and those who listened for a lovely time.  There will be a monthly show in 2008…find out all the details here.