Stageworthy

Following their 2015 Fringe hit SwordPlay (Winner, Just For Laughs Best Comedy Award), Sex T-Rex is raising the bar with their most ambitious show yet. Masters of genre parody, this year their sights are set on Post Apocalyptic mayhem in Wasteland. This action-packed thrill-ride makes its Toronto premiere at the Randolph Theatre from July 1 to July 9, 2016.

Also joining in: Kyle Allatt of The House of Style’s The No Bull$#!% History of Invention also playing at the Toronto Fringe.

Sex T-Rex
https://sextrexcomedy.com/
@sextrex

Kyle Allatt
http://the-house-of-style.tumblr.com/
@houseostyle
@KyleAllatt

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The week 1 Toronto Fringe Roundup with producer of Damn Tank (@damntankTO), Laura McCallum (@lauramcsee), Nisha Coleman (@NishaColeman) of Self-Exile, and Scott Garland and David Kingsmill (@dragonliterate) of Romeo and Juliet Chainsaw Massacre (@RJMassacre) joined me bright and early on Saturday morning (by Fringe standards) to talk about Toronto Fringe, what they’ve seen, what they are looking forward to seeing and much more. Recorded Saturday, July 2 2016 @ 10AM

Stageworthy:
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Shira Taylor is a performer, director, producer, and doctoral candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at U of T. For her dissertation, she created SExT: Sex Education by Theatre to explore the use of theatre for sexual health education among youth in Toronto’s Thorncliffe/Flemingdon Park. Shira obtained her BSc. (Psychology) and MSc. (Epidemiology) from Queen’s University, where she performed with Queen’s Players, Queen’s Musical Theatre, and Existere, and co-founded and directed the social action theatre program, Excetera. Shira and her puppet doppelganger Lucy perform with the multiple award-winning theatre company, Shakey-Shake and Friends, which uses puppets and popular culture references to make Shakespeare accessible to young audiences. She also works with Indigenous girls in the Northwest Territories as Evaluation Consultant and Drama Facilitator with FOXY and is a Research Coordinator at SickKids on the cross-Canada, Art for Social Change (ASC!) project, working closely with artists and change-makers to further the use of the arts in social justice agendas.

SExT: Sex Education by Theatre empowers youth from a community where sexuality is a cultural taboo to take centre stage. SExT is a collaboration between Toronto theatre artists and a diverse group of youth from Flemingdon and Thorncliffe Park - two immigration destinations in Toronto and the recent hub of protests opposing sex education reform in the wake of the first curriculum update since 1998. Check us out at the Toronto Fringe and SummerWorks 2016 to hear what these youth have to say about growing up in the age of cyberbullying, sexting and rape culture. It’s time to let TEENS give THE TALK!

www.sexeducationbytheatre.com
SExT Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWP6RQkx0yA
SExT @ Toronto Fringe: http://fringetoronto.com/fringe-festival/shows/sext/
SExT @ SummerWorks: http://summerworks.ca/2016/artists/sext/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/sextedshow
Twitter: @SExTEdShow #SExTEd
Instagram: @SExTEdShow #SExTEd

Twitter: @ShiraTaylor
Instagram: @theshirataylor

Stageworthy:
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Record your album, make your film, open your restaurant, pursue your passion – what’s stopping you? Confronted with this question and unable to finish a script, playwright Katherine grapples with the voice in her head that’s controlling her life. In a race against the clock, Katherine works her way through the detritus of her half-finished plays in search of resolution. Scenes From Plays I Never Wrote is a comedy about what drives us forward, what holds us back, and how to achieve your dreams!

Ayesha Mansur Gonsalves
INSTAGRAM - @lostsouthasian
TWITTER - @ayeshalives

Greta Papageorgiu
INSTAGRAM - @meisnergal
TWITTER - @meisnergal

Brittney A. Filek-Gibson
INSTAGRAM - @bfg85
TWITTER - @bfg85

Full Circle Theatre
INSTAGRAM - @fullcircleTO
TWITTER - @fullcircleTO
FACEBOOK - www.facebook.com/fullcircleTO
WEBSITE - www.fullcircletoronto.com

Stageworthy:
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Nisha Coleman was born in a swamp near Huntsville, Ontario.

She studied music and psychology at McGill and Wilfrid Laurier University. Once school was out of the way, she went to live in Paris as a street violinist. Her memoir about these years is called Busker: Stories from the Streets of Paris and was released with Hagios Press in November 2015 to critical acclaim (Montreal Gazette. 49th Shelf, Pickle Me This).

Nisha is a regular storyteller as well as co-producer of the storytelling series Confabulation in Montreal. Her stories have been broadcast on the CBC (WireTap) and No More Radio. In 2015, she teamed up with Jeff Gandell to co-write and perform Things Drugs Taught Me, a show that combines storytelling, theatre, and comedy. Her solo show, Self-Exile, explores isolation, flatulence, selective mutism, music, human connection, and what it means to be yourself. Self-Exile will be featured at the 2016 Montreal and Toronto Fringe Festivals.

TO Fringe Link: http://fringetoronto.com/fringe-festival/shows/self-exile/
Trailer for Self-Exile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usyIg39pf_s

Website: nishacoleman.com
Faceboook: facebook.com/NishaColemanwriter
Twitter: @NishaColeman
Instagram: @NishaColeman

Stageworthy:
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Amy Blackmore is the Executive & Artistic Director of MainLine Theatre and the St-Ambroise Montreal FRINGE Festival and the Artistic Director of the Bouge d’ici. An award-winning creator, she has produced, choreographed, performed and assisted the work of many companies, including The Montreal Highlights Festival, Kidd Pivot, Just For Laughs and RUBBERBANDance. Her work has been seen in MainLine Theatre's The Mid-Life Crisis of Dionysus, MTL Shakespeare Theatre Company's Macbeth, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Unseamly by Infinitheatre. Amy sits on the board of Quebec's English Language Arts Network.

twitter: @_amyblackmore

Mainline Theatre
@mainlinetheatre
http://www.mainlinetheatre.ca/

Montreal Fringe
http://2016.montrealfringe.ca/
@fringemtl

Stageworthy:
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Alexandra Simpson is an interdisciplinary theatre artist with a background in dance, music, documentary, play writing, installation and directing. She has created and produced a number of audience-immersive and site-specific shows that focus on the role of the individual within collective society. Alexandra is interested in how artistic practice and activism converge and how degrowth environmentalism can be applied to consumer cultures. She is on the board for Common Boots Theatre (formerly Theatre Columbus and a member of their Devised Theatre Lab.

Terra Incognita = unknown or unexplored territory. We live in a world in which economic and personal growth is a prerequisite to being human. The alternative lies in what has yet to be explored. Confined by what we are told and know as the good life, we must choose, will we degrow on our own initiative or will we continue until the biosphere forces us to stop? This is a site specific performance documentary work that involves collective creation and theatre mask technique to explore our complicity within growth culture and the potential degrowth alternative. The work uses interviews from researchers at Research & Degrowth collected from prior research, the collective’s own experiences creating the piece, improvisation, documentation of pop-up performances around the city of Toronto (we have a performance coming up this Sunday at the Indie Exchange) and community partnerships with Greenpeace and Toronto350.org.

www.terraincogco.org
Twitter: @terra_incogco
Facebook: facebook.com/degrowthcollective

Stageworthy:
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Christel is an Actor, Comic, Writer, Teacher, and Solo Show creator living in Toronto. She is a graduate of the Second City Conservatory Program, Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts and has studied Clown extensively with John Turner & Michael Kennard (Mump and Smoot) as well as Sue Morrison, Philippe Gaulier and Francine Cote. She had the pleasure of performing with Mump and Smoot in “Something” at the Westbury Theatre in Edmonton.

She is a member of Faustwork Mask Theatre/Prologue for the Performing Arts and performs the show The Mask Messenger in schools regularly.

In 2008 she developed her first solo show “CHAOTICA” which went onto to win numerous awards and garnered rave reviews. She developed 2 other solo shows “ONEymoon” & “Significant Me” and all three solo shows have been nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award “Best One Person Show”. Christel continues to tour her work, and has toured across Canada, to the US & the UK. She has been teaching for over 15 years. She has taught Improv at the Second City, teaches Mask, Clown, Dance, Movement, independently to schools all across the GTA and currently teaches Clown/Movement at the Toronto Film School and teaches and directs Clowns at Humber College in the Comedy & Writing Program.

http://christelbartelse.com/
Twitter:@cbartelse

Stageworthy:
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Choreographer Alysa Pires has created works for Ballet Jorgen, Citie Ballet (Edmonton, AB), Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre, Cadence Ballet, Ryerson University, Dancestreams Youth Dance Company, Victoria Academy of Ballet, McMaster Dance Company, Helix Dance Theatre, the Parahumans, Kalos Collective, and her own company Alysa Pires Dance Projects.

Her work in theatre includes choreography for ten musicals, a series of world premiere plays by Judith Thompson (CAN), Velina Hasu Houston (USA) and Timberlake Wertenbaker (UK) that toured through Greece (The Women and War Project) and the first workshop of a new commission for the Los Angeles Opera. In July 2014, Alysa represented Canada and performed as part of the Tin Forest Theatre Festival in Glasgow, Scotland in celebration of the Commonwealth Games.

Her work ...keeping in mind they may be behind you was reimagined for the 2014 Emerging Artist Intensive in Toronto. Alysa was the sole North American and the only female selected from a pool of international applicants as one of four choreographers to participate in DanceEast's ChoreoLab in Ipswich, UK in April of 2013, where she developed “i am vertical.” The work recently received its Canadian premiere at the dance:made in Canada Festival in Toronto.

She is the Heliconian Club of Toronto’s 2015-2016 Dancer-in-Residence. Alysa is an Honours BFA graduate of Ryerson Theatre School. Look for a full-length work from Alysa Pires Dance Projects at the 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival. For more information go to www.alysapires.com

Alysa Pires Dance Projects is a Toronto based contemporary dance company. Founded in 2015 as a home for choreographer Alysa Pires, APDP aims to utilize the extreme physical ability of the dancers while maintaining their humanity so that the audience can see their own trials and tribulations expressed through a heightened but relatable physical language. Through highly dynamic physicality and tender intimacy, Alysa Pires makes contemporary dance works that aim to transcend their abstraction and connect to an audience beyond dedicated dance lovers. For more information, visitwww.alysapires.com/APDP or follow us on Instagram @alysapiresdanceprojects.

INSTAGRAM - @alysapiresdanceprojects
TWITTER - @alysapires
FACEBOOK - www.facebook.com/alysapiresdance
FUND WHAT YOU CAN - bit.ly/APDPFringe

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Daniel Pagett and Jason Maghanoy talk about Jason's play Hangman, opening May 13, 2016 at the Storefront Theatre.

An examination of how we are shaped by our circumstances, Hangman follows the story of Alistair, a murderer who survives hanging for his crimes and finds unexpected salvation in a mysterious drifter named Winston. Winston takes what he needs to survive and has the town searching for him, greatly endangering the paralyzed Alistair who has been left for the rats under the gallows. As Alistair begins to realize he can rise above his dire situation and past life, Winston sinks deeper into the violence that is consuming the town, leading to a tragic and explosive ending. Written by Jason Maghanoy and directed by Daniel Pagett. Starring Prince Amponsah, Alexander Thomas, Vanessa Trenton, Jon Blair, and Vince Carlin, with puppeteer Kaitlin Morrow.

Danny Pagett
Twitter: @spoonydan
Instagram: @danquo

Jason Maghanoy
Instagram: @jmaghanoy
http://jsquaredtheatre.blogspot.ca/

Storefront Theatre
@storefrontTO
https://www.facebook.com/TheStorefrontTheatre
http://thestorefronttheatre.com/

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