Festival Production

Report on 37.8ºC

Living Dance Studio | China

Sept. 24, 25, 2009 @ 8pm | Conrad Centre

This show is inspired by the reality of daily life in China during the SARS period. It presents what fear brought out in the society when Beijing changed completely and turned into a very cold and unfriendly place. Everybody was scared and had no trust even in family members and friends. People hardly left their homes; personal contact restricted itself to talking on the phone or sending e-mails. All felt abandoned and very much alone.

See Report Sep 25 or
Purchase Impact 09 Festival Pass

Festival Production

Fiúk

Compagnie Pál Frenák | Hungary

Oct. 2, 3, 2009 @ 8pm | Conrad Centre

Beyond being a powerful work about the masculine body, Fiúk uses space as a tool for choreographic expression. The show is an immersion in the unconsciousness of men and boys. By calling up alternately male chauvinist violence, stupid pretentiousness and the balance of power that structures our exchanges with others, both men and women, Pál Frenák offers us a radical vision, somehow desperate, of human relationships.

WARNING: This show contains full male nudity and graphic sexuality.

See Fiúk Oct 2 / Oct 3 or
Purchase Impact 09 Festival Pass

International Production - Solo

An Attempt to Understand
my socio-political disposition through artistic research on personal identity in relationship to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Part One

Tarek Halaby | Palestine/ Belgium/ USA

Sept. 25, 26, 2009 @ 8pm | The Registry Theatre

This is a 40 min solo on the edge of performance and stand-up comedy, about how art can NOT save the world. An Attempt to Understand is the result of a research process in which Tarek Halaby looks into the varying and matching points between collective and personal stories, inside the choreographic creative processes. By presenting this piece as a "product" in process, to finish or resolve, Tarek relates the work to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In this solo, Tarek questions and explores the ironies and paradoxes of art works with a deliberate political content.

See Attempt Sep 25 / Sep 26 or
Purchase Impact 09 Festival Pass

Festival Production

Hallaj

Modern Times Stage Company | Toronto

Sept. 29, 2009 @ 8pm | Centre in the Square

Mansur el-Hallaj was a Sufi poet who travelled throughout Persia and India looking for a spiritual destiny. He saw society's evils as rooted in human greed and the betrayal of religious and humanitarian ideals. Walking through the streets of Baghdad, he told his listeners to stop wasting their time and money attending services in the mosques or making pilgrimages to Mecca in search for God. Hallaj won the admiration of the public and the rage of the orthodox system. In the end, four words uttered in a state of ecstasy brought him to political trial and a brutal, untimely death.

One Night Only!

See Hallaj Sep 29 or
Purchase Impact 09 Festival Pass

Festival Production

The Last 15 Seconds

The MT Space | Kitchener

Sept. 30, Oct. 1, 2009 @ 8pm | The Registry Theatre

Using movement, dance, video, vocals and text, this project explores the topic of terrorism. It starts with the tragic death of Syrian-American filmmaker Mustapha Akkad and his daughter Rima in a series of co-ordinated attacks that hit three prominent hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman in 2005. The work constructs an imagined physical and verbal dialogue between Mustapha Akkad and Rawad Jassem Mohammad Abed, the suicide bomber who carried out the explosion. The work also looks at the imagined lives and memories of both the victim and his killer as they revisit each other's lives after their fatal encounter.

The Last 15 Seconds sold out its two nights of the festival. If you didn't get a chance to see it or know someone who would like to, remember the show will continue its run after the festival October 8, 9, 10, 2009
at the Registry Theatre. Call Centre in the Square 1-800-265-8977.

See The Last 15 Seconds Sep 30 / Oct 1 or
Purchase Impact 09 Festival Pass

Workshop Presentation

Benu

d'bi.young, anitAFRIKA! dubtheatre | Toronto

Sept. 27, 28 @ 8pm | The Registry Theatre

Having recently given birth and now negotiating her own mortality, Benu, a 30 year old African-Jamaican- Canadian woman contemplates life and death. Her blood pressure mysteriously rises, like a Phoenix, in a Toronto hospital, triggering a series of strange physical and mental ailments that lead her down a path of fear, discovery, and renewal. Reality meets myth, magic meets ritual, and a bio-myth-o-graphical narrative unfolds in firesome ways, paralleling the mythology of Egyptian predecessor to the Phoenix, the Benu bird. The piece uses a combination of movement/dance, multimedia, poetry, and dubtheatre to tell its tale.

This show will be followed by a Q & A session

Benu is PWYC (Pay What You Can) at the door
or included in a Purchase Impact 09 Festival Pass

Edna's Archive
Learning to Perform Memory/
Learning to Perform Forgetting

Andrew Houston & Lisa O'Connell
A co-production of IMPACT and CAFKA | Waterloo

Sept. 24 - Oct 3, 2009 | 8PM | PWYC
Critical Media Lab (PUC Building) / 191 King St. W.

Edna's Archive is a performance installation about memory. The story begins with a cardboard box abandoned by a dumpster at a Toronto apartment complex. A Colombian immigrant woman finds the box, labelled on all four sides 'Edna Bear' in bold, black lettering. Inside, jam-packed and arranged meticulously, are more than 1700 artefacts from a life lived in Kitchener, Ontario! This work invites a consideration of how life is given value, of how it is marked and unmarked through various rituals of the archive, where the traces of what remains offer sublime contemplation of what was and what might still be.

www.ednasarchive.ca

Benu is PWYC (Pay What You Can) at the door.

Play Reading

Salt Baby

Native Earth Performing Arts / Toronto

Oct. 2, 3 | 8 pm | The Registry Theatre

“Well my mom's half Mohawk her dad was a chief, a hereditary chief. He married a white woman. And my Dad is Tuscarora. Full. So fractions, right? Three quarters. I guess. The government doesn't really agree with my math.”

Three seasons since it was first seen as part of the Weesageechak Festival Young Voices presentation, Native Earth presents a workshop production of Falen Johnson's heart wrenching, side-splitting play about blood quantum.

Salt Baby is PWYC (Pay What You Can) at the door.

Short Theatre

AHA!
Moments on the Way to the Rum Runner

Flush Ink Productions | Kitchener

Sept. 24 - Oct 3, 2009 after each festival production

Down town streets and alleys where you never expect it!

Brief moments of site-specific theatre to indulge you on the way to the daily after-show party at the festival bar. Things like this never happened on the way to the forum!

FREE after every show!