Welcome to the 5th Annual TaDa! Performing Arts festival!
The 2017 TaDa! Festival was a resounding success. Thank you to our sponsors and to all who participated!
The fifth annual TaDa! Festival burgeoned into a real “Gem Session”, combining theatre, dance and music as well as visual community arts. Sometimes serious, at other times whimsical, funny, gripping and thought provoking, TaDa! is a breath of fresh air on the festival circuit, featuring new playwrights and youth alongside seasoned actors and musicians.
Jack King, Ace Detective
By: Keith Davidson
It’s 1955, and the glory days of radio drama are fading fast, muscled aside by the upstart medium of television. This madcap comedy focuses on an oddball radio troupe suddenly forced to take desperate measures in an attempt to save their jobs.
Blind To Happiness
By: Tim Murphy, Toronto
Blind to Happiness explores the question – Is ‘happier’ a choice? – through the shared lives of three restaurant employees. First we meet Couks, the central character, who is a socially awkward dishwasher hoping to not live the life led by his father. Couks has a cat named Eisenhower, loves the Ottawa Senators, cheap beer, and telling his Dad’s jokes. Then we meet Mike, an on the surface put-together PhD Psychology student – cracks in his Irish charmed veneer appear. And Bliss, a side cook, and a lovelorn aspiring poet. Each believes the other is happy, each afraid to open up and tell their truth.
Blind to Happiness, hopefully, challenges the audience to look at their own life and happiness and choices that brought them to where they are. The show has been described as all at once as thought provoking, comedic, and moving – embodying the head, heart, and soul.
Wakeup Sleeping Beauty
By: Live Action Theatre Project, Montreal
A classic fairy tale with a twist! This exciting choose-your-own-adventure returns to Wakefield packed with surprises! We invite YOU into the middle of the action! Come help wake Princess Briar Rose from her slumber! Join her on a quest to break the curse and save the Kingdom. What does “happily ever after” look like? YOU decide!
2017 Summer Theatre Camp Performance
Opening Act: Alysann Foehring
This show is all about youth:
Alysann is a young musician from Chelsea who delights people with some wonderful music.
Camp Director: Julie Legal
Theatre Wakefield’s 2nd Theatre Camp: Our local youth spent creative time discovering new worlds, expanding imagination and gaining professional theatre skills. Imagine getting to perform your first creation at a festival!
Laura & Big Yellow Taxi
(Our Love Is Here to Stay)
A rhythm tap performance
Double Bill with Sweet Kate
By: Ottawa Rhythm Initiative, Ottawa
Tap dance is sound and movement that tells a story…of time, place…and feeling! The Ottawa Rhythm Initiative (ORI) Ensemble showcases three unique rhythm tap choreographies that are connected to love – unrequited love, lost love and love everlasting. A fun romp through the 1920s to the 1970s, each piece showcases music and rhythms of our time. Come and check out this time-honoured dance tradition, explore a piece of its history, and have some fun with the ORI!
Three Men in a Boat
By: Pea Green Theatre Group, Toronto
Three Men in a Boat is an award-winning stage adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s classic 1889 British travelogue. Adapted for the stage by Dora Mavor Moore award winning playwright Mark Brownell. Directed by award-winning director Sue Miner. Featuring the outstanding onstage talents of Matt Pilipiak, Scott Garland, and Victor Pokinko. Jolly Victorian Boating Song arranged by Rigzin Tute. Period costumes by Nina Okens
Join our three intrepid bachelors Jay, George, and Harris as they spend a disastrous weekend punting up the river Thames. Share their pain as they encounter many nautical hardships. Laugh along with their whisky fueled antics. Gaze in terror as they reach their inevitable tipping point!
This production of Three Men in a Boat has travelled to the Toronto Fringe, Best of the Fringe Festival (North York), Ottawa Fringe, Globus Theatre, Winnipeg Fringe, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Storefront Theatre, Edmonton Fringe, and the TATA LitLive Festival in Mumbai, India!
Silent Disco
By: Jacqueline van de Geer, Montreal
Silent Disco is a theatrical radio emission with dj Groovy Jack. Dance to an eclectic mix of music, and experience the joy, freedom and fun of The Silent Disco at Ta Da! The silent disco was developed in the Netherlands in 2002 to allow dance parties on the festival site without noise complaints—a concept now at many festivals the world over.
The Silent Disco is a concept, originally from the Netherlands, in which the participants dance on an eclectic mix, offering tunes from all over the world, crossing era’s and styles. 50 headphones, DJ Groovy Jack and Mister Steeve, who hands out the headphones, accompanied by two volunteers offer Wakefield a funky dance experience!
Presented as a two hours-radio emission, dj Groovy Jack takes the liberty to mix world music, rock, soul, funk, disco, reggae and oldies with house, techno, r&b and contemporary hits.
Ein Tanztee Mit Anita Berber
By: Jacqueline van de Geer, Montreal)
With: Mindy Amelotte, Dynamite Motel
Imagine you’re in a clandestine cabaret with a dancer in 1920s Berlin—the decadent Berlin before the war. Anita speaks and seduces with her wild dances, shares her recollections, exaggerates, and takes you on a journey into an era of excess and decadence. The show explores aspects of her life and themes of art, poetry and political changes.
Home Child
By: Laura Teasdale, Knowlton
A two-person outdoor theatre experience with Nicolas Retson-Fournier and Natalie Demmon. The year is 1894. One London girl is sent away across the vast Atlantic into the great unknown. One homegrown Eastern Townships boy, struggles to make room for her in his family and in his heart. Descendants of the home children make up 11% of our population, yet their existence is one of Canada’s best kept secrets.
A Summer… A Fair
A Summer… A Fair based on the famous Cantley Picnic (which ran from every summer from 1880 through to 2004). About 300 people attended the opening performance at the end of July, which took place at the site of the original Cantley Picnic. The event included fresh-baked pie sales and the God Knows What square-dance band with caller.