Friday Sept. 13 at 8:00PM

Nun of it

Black Sheep Inn

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​Written by: Ian Tamblyn

Directed by: Directed by Rae Maitland

Ian Tamblyn’s latest comedy offers a satirical look at religion, the foibles of the artistic temperament, and our oft-beleaguered relationships with each other. Though Zephyr Fallutin – our hero — is a desperate poet, some of the subjects he targets are prescient, or at least he thinks they are! You could say Nun Of It is a serious spoof on performance art – there’s also a dash of the romantic confusion found in A Mid Summer Night’s Dream. Above all, Nun of It is a comedic romp where no one and no topic is left unscathed.

(For audiences 18+/70 min/English)

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Biography

Ian Tamblyn has been a working musician since 1972 the same year he moved to Old Chelsea with companion Amanda Shaughnessy.  Since that time he has released 44 albums as well as producing over 30 albums for other Canadian artists.  He has won several awards for his work including English Songwriter of the Year Award for the CFMA in 2010.  He has composed over 100 theatrical soundtracks and sound designs. 

Nun of It is Ian’s 16th play.  His plays have had productions at the National Arts Centre, Great Canadian Theatre Company, Carleton and Bishop’s Universities,  Geordie Theatre, Green Thumb Theatre for Young People as well as several North American tours with Green Thumb Theatre.  He has had a lengthy association with Theatre Wakefield including the Gatineau Trilogy.  Last year he received a special commendation from the Gatineau Valley historical Society for those productions.

Saturday, Sept. 14 11:30AM – 1:00PM

Kids: Come inside the Centre for an art project!

Saturday, Sept. 14 at 1:00PM

Family Show: Bella

Gwen Shea Hall

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Choreographed by: Danny Grossman and Judy Jarvis

Danced by: Eddie Kastrau and Mairéad Filgate

Bella is a dance duet about the painter Marc Chagall and his wife, Bella Rosenfeld. Danced to the music of Puccini – in, on and under a horse coloured in the palette of Chagall’s paintings and resting in front of a bower of lilacs — Bella is a poetic observation about love.

(For all audiences/70 min/English) 

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Choreographer Biographies

Danny Grossman was born in San Francisco in 1942. In 1963, he joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company in New York City and spent the next 10 years performing and touring with the company. In 1973, Grossman joined Toronto Dance Theatre in Canada, and became a faculty member at York University. In 1975, he choreographed Higher to tremendous praise leading to the formation of the Danny Grossman Dance Company in 1977. Grossman has since created a repertoire of more than 60 works, touring across Canada and internationally. His choreography has been in the repertoire of Toronto Dance Theatre, The Paris Opera Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and The National Ballet of Canada and has also been performed by modern dance training institutions such as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, New York State Summer School of the Arts, Adelphi University, City College of New York, Brown University, York University, School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Ryerson University, and Canadian Children’s Dance Theatre. Grossman has been the recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious Toronto Arts Council Foundation’s William Kilbourn Lifetime Achievement Award and was recently inducted into the Canadian Dance Collection Danse Encore! Hall of Fame. In 2008, the company embarked on a new initiative, the Danny Grossman Dance Foundation, as a means of reconstructing and licensing his repertoire. The Grossman repertoire has been represented at New York State Summer School of the Arts for almost thirty years, and has added immeasurably to both students and faculty who have had the rich experience of dancing these works. In June of 2018, in honour of his 75th birthday, Danny presented a full evening of his own works, including three world premieres.

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Judy Jarvis was one of Canada’s important modern dance choreographers. As a young dancer in the early 1960s, she moved to Germany to become one of the last protégés of the iconic modern dance choreographer Mary Wigman. From then on, Jarvis’s innovative choreography combined the stark expressionist aesthetic of her training in German modern dance with her own genius for creating memorable theatrical characters. Because she worked outside the modern dance mainstream, however, Jarvis struggled for most of her professional career to achieve acceptance for her unique choreographic vision. Her talent was finally recognized in 1974, when she became the first recipient of the prestigious Jean A. Chalmers Award in Choreography.  When she died in 1986, the Judy Jarvis Dance Foundation was created to preserve Jarvis’ legacy.

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Dancer Biographies

Mairéad Filgate is a contemporary dance artist currently dividing her time between Toronto and Montreal. She has performed extensively throughout Canada and beyond with the Danny Grossman Dance Company, tiger princess dance projects, Public Recordings, Dusk Dances, BoucharDanse, Chartier Danse, Bill Coleman, Gabby Kamino, Laurie Raymond, and Kaeja d’Dance, among others. As a choreographer, Mairéad creates both independently and collaboratively. She is a founding member of Throwdown Collective, a collaborative trio that has presented work at Jacob’s Pillow Festival, MA and The Sony Centre (Fall for Dance North). She received a prestigious Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Choreography in 2016.  Mairéad makes regular sojourns to New York City to study the work of Trisha Brown, and explores dance communities around the globe whenever she finds the  opportunity. She recently received a Bachelor of Arts with High Distinction in Women & Gender Studies and Sociology from the University of Toronto, served as the Chair for the Board of Directors of the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists (2016-2018) and was a K.M. Hunter Award nominee. 

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Eddie Kastrau, a dancer with the Danny Grossman Dance Company since 1986, has performed most of the featured roles with the company, and has been a muse for many of Grossman’s original roles. Through the Grossman company he danced in major modern works, including Paul Taylor’s Aureole, Lester Horton’s The Beloved, Anna Sokolow’s Rooms, Charles Weidman’s Lynchtown, and Canadian classics by David Earle, Patricia Beatty, Peter Randazzo, Robert Derosiers, Paula Ross and others. Kastrau has also danced independently for numerous choreographers in Canada and abroad. Recent tours include China, Mongolia, South Africa, Kuwait, Oman, India and Germany as well as Canada and the U.S. In 2010, he spent three months in New York setting three of Grossman’s works on Adelphi University students, culminating in a full evening’s Tribute to Danny Grossman. He has been setting Grossman works on students of New York State’s Summer School of the Arts for the past 20 years. Kastrau is a strong advocate for dance preservation and has created computer software to digitally store the rich heritage dance. Dance companies throughout North America use his Performance History Database. Recently Kastrau has begun choreographing his own works, and looks forward to new opportunities ahead.

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For an interesting article about Marc Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld, click here.

Saturday, Sept. 14 at 3:00PM

New Works (play reading)

In the Studio

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(adult content/50 mins/English)

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Biography

Guy has been writing for several years, with success coming at the 2016 Austin Film Festival when he surpassed 8,000 other entrants to reach the second round with his first full length screenplay.  Guy is also an actor, with several film and television credits: he particularly enjoyed the television role of Jonas Grottke in Designated Survivor (2016), and William Weaver in the 2013 film, Crook.  As well as developing this play, A Matter Between Life and Death, Guy is also working on two other feature length film scripts.  This past January, the opportunity to write a novel in 12 weeks presented itself, and he is now in the near-end stages of first re-write.  Writing had to take a back seat this summer, however, with his performance of Oberon in Midsummer Night’s Dream in the parks of Ottawa.  The reading at the TaDa! Performing Arts Festival is the first public showing of his work and he is excited and frightened by the prospect!  Thanks to Peter Haworth for moving the script forward and to Katie Betts for all her support.​

Saturday, Sept. 14 at 7:30PM

Balancing Gender

Gwen Shea Hall

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Featuring: Candy Palmater (30 minutes, stand-up comedy)

Dance: Female Warrior Wu (Peking Opera Dancer William Lau)

Dance: Nobody’s Business (excerpt – a dance duet choreographed by Danny Grossman

A Mix of dance and stand up comedy exploring our male and female sides.

(For all audiences/70 mins/English)

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Candy Palmater (stand-up comedy)

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Biography

Candy Palmater is one colourful individual. “When I’m asked to describe myself, I always say I’m a gay native recovered lawyer turned feminist comic, who was raised by bikers in the wilds of northern New Brunswick,” she says. 

​ Come let this fast-paced comedian make you laugh as she puts her spin on all things gendered.

Candy Palmater is a Canadian comedian and broadcaster who currently resides in Halifax. She was the creator and writer of her own national TV show for APTN, The Candy Show, and hosted the daily interview series The Candy Palmater Show on CBC Radio One in the summer of 2016.

Palmater was born in 1968 in Point La Nim, New Brunswick, and grew up the youngest of seven children. After high school, she attended Fredericton’s St. Thomas University and then completed a legal secretary’s course at Maritime Business College. She was inspired by the legal failures of Donald Marshall Jr., and in 1996 she went to Dalhousie University in Halifax to study Law at the Schulich School of Law, where she graduated in 1999 as the valedictorian of her class. She was also president of the Dalhousie Aboriginal Law Students Association.

She got a job with the now defunct Law firm Patterson Palmer Hunt Murphy, but soon realized she didn’t want to practice corporate law, and subsequently left her job and began working for the Nova Scotia Department of Education.

She was a regular contributor to CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera and an interim host of Q, and was a columnist for the now defunct Halifax newspaper The Daily News, where she wrote a series for Mi’kmaq History Month. CBC Newsworld did a one-hour documentary on Palmater titled The Candy Show.

The Candy Show is also the title of a regular comedy series that airs on APTN. Palmater is a regular performer on the comedy club circuit in Canada, as well as a frequent host of entertainment galas and events.

Palmater produced her first film, Building Legends: The Mi’Kmaq Canoe Project, in 2011.

As an actor, she has had roles in the television series Forgive Me, Sex & Violence, and Trailer Park Boys.

Her daily CBC Radio summer series The Candy Palmater Show debuted on May 30, 2016. Following the end of that show’s run, she did another stint as guest host of Q for several weeks in September and October, between the departure of Shad and the debut of permanent new host Tom Power. In 2017 she was a panellist on Canada Reads, advocating for Katherena Vermette’s novel The Break.

Awards: She was nominated for an East Coast Music Award for Media Person of the Year in 2013. The Candy Show was also nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Best Direction in a Variety or Comedy TV Series, for director Trevor Grant. For her work on the television series Forgive Me, she was nominated for an ACTRA Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2017, Palmater was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for her contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.

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Female Warrior Wu – Preparing for Combat

Danced by: William Lau

Music by:  Jiangsu Province Peking Opera Company

“I am Wu San-niang, the lady in blue. While playing in the garden, my guard came to inform me that Sung Jiang is leading his gang to invade my village. Therefore, I quickly armoured myself and prepare to fight against them. Ah Sung Jiang, this is like picking hairs from the tiger’s head!”

During the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD), a courageous female warrior named Wu Sanniang learns from her guard that the Song Army’s General will invade her village. This operatic dance describes her armament (military weapons), and depicts her competence in the martial arts. It consists of stylized gestures, precise compositions and aggressive rhythmic movements.

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Biography

William Lau was born in Hong Kong and raised in Montreal. A graduate of York University’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Dance, he was trained in both Chinese traditional dance and Western classical ballet. Currently, William specialized in the arts of Nan Dan (male playing female roles in the Peking Opera). Not content with being a refined and accomplished classical performer, William pushes the boundaries of his traditional arts practice by collaborating with professional artists of different artistic disciplines and diverse cultural backgrounds. William has performed nationally and internationally, including the United States, United Kingdom, China, Mexico, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Indonesia. He has also developed and promoted the richness of Chinese dance and opera to a wide range of audiences across Canada as well as mentored a new generation of cultural workers. With a deep passion for the arts, his professional experience includes artist, producer, researcher and administrator; he is currently a manager at the Canada Council for the Arts. 

To read more about William, click here.

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Nobody’s Business (excerpt)

Danced by: Ryan Kostyniuk and Yiming Cai

Choreographed by:  Danny Grossman

Nobody’s Business, driven by the music of jazz greats Jelly Roll Morton and Joe Turner, is a light-hearted look at sexual preferences and stereotypes. Conventional movement characteristics are swapped between genders, with a gay duet anchoring the piece. The content of the work is tame by today’s standards, but in 1980, when the piece was created, the subject matter was regarded as too taboo for the theatre crowd. Danny says, “Back then I would hear that certain presenters didn’t want us to bring ‘that gay dance.’ Over the years this happened less, but by then I had produced a few dark dances exploring sexuality perhaps prompting presenters to appreciate the accessibility of Nobody’s Business.”

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Choreographer Biography

A native of San Francisco, Danny Grossman has been active in Toronto as a choreographer since 1975 and was the long-time director of the Danny Grossman Dance Company. Influenced by his upbringing in a politicized household, his repertoire of some 50 plus works is infused with themes that provide social commentary on issues related to class, race and sexuality. His first work to overtly portray homosexuality came in the form of an autobiographical narrative dating from the late 1970s titled Portrait. Every few years since, he has revisited themes relating to sexual identity, sometimes light-hearted or by turns gritty. Beyond his declared queer-themed works, many different kinds of sexuality are woven through his repertoire, as he cleverly subverts the traditional portrayals of love and relationships.  For more information, see Danny Grossman’s website at www.dannygrossman.today

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Dancer Biographies

Originally from Singapore, Yiming Cai grew up competing in Wushu and started dancing while completing his bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies at the Nanyang Technological University. Cai went on to dance in The Human Expression Second Company and moved to Canada in 2016 to study at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre where the Kathryn Ash Scholarship and the Lindy Green & Sam Chaiton Bursary made the completion of his training possible. He has since also worked on projects with Little Pear Garden dance company, Sharon B. Moore, Sashar Zarif and Jane-Alison Mckinney. Cai has also participated in intensives such as One Body One Career, Gaga, Alias Dance Projects and Springboard Danse Montreal, where he performed in the creation of MA.ZE (Hungary) and the repertory of Göteborgsoperans Danskompani under the direction of Stephan Laks. Cai is currently based in Toronto dancing in various projects and is delighted to be dancing the work of Danny Grossman.

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Ryan Kostyniuk is from Sylvan Lake, Alberta. He is a recent graduate from the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. While studying there, he performed works by Jennifer Dallas, Danny Grossman, Hanna Kiel, Ryan Lee, Sharon Moore, Julia Sasso, Darryl Tracy, and more. He attended Proarte Danza’s 2017 summer intensive where he performed in works by Robert Glumbek and Tori Mehaffey, as well as Springboard Danse Montreal 2018 summer intensive where he performed works by Vim Vigor Dance Company and MA•ZE Dance Company.

Sunday, Sept. 15 at 4:00PM

Nun of it (repeat performance)

The Black Sheep Inn

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Written by: Ian Tamblyn

Directed by: Rae Maitland

(For audiences 12+ due to coarse language/70 min/English)

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Bars in Quebec are restricted by law to admit only adults (18+) to all evening events; however, the Sept. 15 show of Nun Of It is at 4pm and technically open to all ages. We recommend 12+ due to coarse language.