CAMINOS 2017 ~ Programming Announcement
August 29, 2017
Aluna Theatre announces full programming lineup for CAMINOS 2017
a festival of new work by Pan-American, Indigenous and Latinx artists
Aki Studio and Artscape Daniels Spectrum, October 4 – 8
TORONTO (August 29, 2017) – Building on the success of the inaugural festival in 2015, Aluna Theatre, in partnership with Native Earth Performing Arts, is pleased to announce the full programming lineup for CAMINOS 2017.
Inclusive, discursive, daring and unapologetic: CAMINOS 2017 is a festival of new works-in-progress by local Pan-American, Indigenous, and Latinx artists, who are pushing the boundaries of theatre, dance, performance art, music, visual arts, installation, and film. CAMINOS is presented in alternating years with Aluna’s RUTAS panamericanas International Performing Arts Festival.
“The response to our first CAMINOS in 2015 exceeded our expectations,” said Aluna Artistic Director Beatriz Pizano. “We saw an increase in mixed audiences, English and Spanish speakers, enjoying themselves equally.” “The pieces we’ve curated for this year’s festival explore issues of diversity, inclusion, gender, and trans-lingualism. I am in awe of how much these artists from the Pan-American diaspora are shaping and transforming performance practices. With CAMINOS, we make our contribution to their development of new works – work that we hope will go on to have future presentations.”
Notably, the premiere of Rosa Labordé’s Marine Life, which has been developed in residency at Aluna Theatre over the past five years and presented at CAMINOS 2015, will now be co-presented by Aluna and Tarragon Theatre as part of Tarragon’s 2017.2018 season.Each night of CAMINOS features a different offering of works-in-development. Aluna’s popular late-night cabaret programming follows on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Tickets are sold for the entire evening of programming, and are $18.
Cabarets are free and open to all audiences.
CAMINOS 2017 will also feature an international conference on Performance and Human Rights: Unsettling the Americas: Radical Hospitalities and Intimate Geographies.
Programming and schedule:
WED OCT 4
In Sundry Languages: Toronto Laboratory Theatre, Director Art Babayants
“…a compelling critique of Canadian inclusiveness.” NOW Toronto
After playing to sold-out houses in 2015, 2016, and a highly successful run at this year’s Toronto Fringe, this one-of-a kind experiment in multilingual theatre returns. In Sundry Languages weaves together a series of comical vignettes about immigration, language learning, accents, and what you really mean when you ask: “Where are you from?”
Dividing Lines |Líneas Divisorias: Writer/Performer Beatriz Pizano, Director/Scenographer Trevor Schwellnus
Líneas divisorias is a multi-lingual dialog between modern and ancestral relationships to living and dying. The Aluna team continues to push their highly visual design, original music, and poetic narratives created through a ceremonial dramaturgical structure.
The Playwright acknowledges the assistance of the 2016 Banff Playwrights Colony — a partnership between The Banff Centre and the Canada Council for the Arts.
THURS OCT 5
CHICHO: Creator/Performer Augusto Bitter
Chicho attempts to reconcile being queer, Venezuelan, and Catholic. Transforming before his audience, Chicho embodies the symbols and characters that have shaped his young adulthood. Spanglish, song, movement, stand-up comedy, embodied storytelling, and lecture-style projections all scramble together in one young, diasporic body.
Take d Milk, nah?: Creator/Performer Jiv Parasram, presented in association with bcurrent performing arts
Jiv is “Canadian.” And “Indian.” And “Hindu.” And “West Indian.” “Trinidadian” too. Or maybe he’s just colonized. Parasram blends personal storytelling and ritual to walk an audience through the Hin-do’s and Hin-don’ts at the intersections of these cultures. The show is a refreshingly candid and delightfully funny look at race, religion and nationalism(s): What divides us – and what we’re willing to accept in the desire to belong. Oh, and there’s a cow.
The Cunning Linguist: Writer/Performer Monica Garrido
“Ms. Garrido is a delightful performer, overflowing with warmth and fun. Beatriz Pizano’s direction is sharp and uncluttered” – Review: Queer Acts Opening Salvo: Emerging Artists’ by Hugo Dann
The Cunning Linguist tells the story of Monica, a Mexican girl who realizes at a young age that she is a lesbian. Believing that God made her this way, she is happy to be one, but her father makes it clear that it’s wrong to be who she is. Thanks to a famous TV show, Monica decides to move to Toronto, where she begins to learn about sex and freedom.
This piece has been created with support from the Emerging Creators Unit at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and winner of the 2016 Queer Acts Audience Award.
Cacao: Creator Victoria Mata
A multisensorial interactive installation that provides a window into the pressing global issue of food sovereignty and cultural preservation in the Americas by recounting of the harvest journey of cacao, better known as chocolate.
FRI OCT 6
Everything is Everything: Spirit of Five: Poet charles c. smith, Dancers Lilia Leon and Yui Ugai
This work connects to ancestral voices that challenge contemporary Western values of knowing, offering ways of seeing that draw on Indigenous and African diasporic aesthetics and body memory to see each piece as a voice to each other and to all worlds.
We’re in a Non-Relationship Relationship: Writer/Performer Lido Pimienta, Director Gein Wong
“I can cope with rejection. I am an independent woman, I need my space, I need more time for myself, you know what I mean? Like I feel as though life has something in store for me, something bigger than myself, I can reach so high and far you know?” A live graphic novel performance from multidisciplinary artist (and Polaris Prize short-lister) Lido Pimienta.
Unipersonal para un interprete miope: Creator/Performer Gabriela Guerra Woo, Special international guest (Mexico City)
A psychological portrayal of “Morusa”, a migrant character facing a city of 21 million, and the evident difficulty to connect. She is the product of forced exile in pursuit of better conditions, opportunities and survival. This is Morusa’s intimate self, an isolated character that loses touch, manifesting a distorted perception of reality.
Road Warrior: Creator/Performer Martha Chaves
Veteran of the Canadian stand-up comedy scene, Chaves was born and raised in Nicaragua during the tumultuous years of a dictatorship, an earthquake that destroyed her family’s home, and a revolution. After becoming “stateless”, Martha became a refugee in Canada, where eventually she found her “Rebel” voice, as a Latin-Canadian, doing stand-up comedy.
SAT OCT 7
Skin: Creators Leslie Baker, Emma Tibaldo and Joseph Shragge, Special guests (Montreal)
Born out of a fascination with the image of an illuminated doorway, Skin is a meditation on boundaries, borders and the shortness of life. Using body, image, text and sound, Skin explores the significance and insignificance of the human experience within the vastness of earth and its atmosphere.
desconocida: Creator/Choreographer Irma Villafuerte
Abduction, Confined, Vanished, Murder… Villafuerte’s desconocida speaks to femicides in the Latin American context. This is a study of women who have vanished and their possible experiences in confinement, unveiled by the state of their bodies upon discovery. Even after they are found, many women’s identities remain unknown.
Lxs Llamas Gemelxs: Creators Aemilius Milo and lwrds duniam
As non-binary, Black, Indigenous, people of colour, the ways we love and live have survived generations of erasure and trauma; we are the legacy of colonization and the genocide of stolen bodies of Africa and the original peoples of Abya Yala. Through ritual storytelling, this piece reveals what was thought to have been lost forever, or perhaps what was never known to have existed.
Jamaican (film screening): Co-Directors Peter Chin and Jeremy Mimnagh, Presented in association with Tribal Crackling Wind
Through interviews and dance, Jamaican is a futile exploration of “Jamaicanness”. Shot in Kingston and the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, Jamaica, Panamá City and Bocas del Toro Panamá, and Toronto Canada.
SUN OCT 8
Daughters of Lilith: Playwright Dainty Smith
Sister Wolf is on a soul journey to heal and remember her magic; and that on the other side of her pain, grief, and loss lies her freedom – and true power. Daughters Of Lilith is about six sister-witches looking to heal who reunite in a forest, recover from heart loss and love, and rediscover their magic.
La Cama Cósmica: Playwright Nawi Moreno-Valverde
An assimilated Latino named O’Higgins José begins to explore his cultural roots when he becomes obsessed with the essay, La raza cósmica, which favors Latin America for its racial mixing. His bed becomes as much a space for his white partner and her (multi-ethnic) lovers as it is for his own ideological contemplations.
Multiple Choice – Fragment: Created by Grupo Teatro Libre, Director Luis Rojas
A young woman and her four alter-egos fight for survival. This is a fragment from an adaptation of Mexican playwright Luis Mario Moncada’s Opción Múltiple that tells the story of Diana, a young woman who has five contrasting personalities, born out of childhood trauma. With the help of a therapist, she learns to master her alter-egos, and discovers the truth about the trauma that disturbs her. With live music.
Sunday’s performances will be followed by a free community meal and celebration to close CAMINOS 2017.
CABARETS
Stay with us late at the festival for a drink and a dynamic showcase of music, dance, burlesque and performance work. Free admission.
Featuring performances by Rumba Buena, DJ Firecracker, Martha Chaves, Sebastian Marziali, Jessica Zepeda, Bruce Gibbons Fell, Paulie McDermid, Coco Guzman, Gay Jesus, and more.
Thursday Oct. 5, Friday Oct. 6, and Saturday Oct. 7 at 9:30pm
CONFERENCE
CAMINOS 2017 will also feature an international conference on Performance and Human Rights. Unsettling the Americas: Radical Hospitalities and Intimate Geographies, offers three days of conversations reflecting on histories of settlement, displacement, and resettlement. Unsettling the Americas is presented in collaboration between Aluna, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’s Graduate Student Initiative Convergence Conference, York University’s Graduate Program in Theatre & Performance Studies and Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, and the Performance Studies (Canada) Project.
Afternoon conference sessions are free and open to the public: Thursday Oct. 5 & Friday Oct. 6 from 2pm – 5:30pm
Tickets ($13-$18)
Performances Wednesday – Saturday at 7.30pm & Sunday at 2.00pm
Saturday matinee film screening at 2.00pm
No latecomers admitted
Box office 416.531.1402 or purchase online at nativeearth.ca
About Aluna Theatre
Aluna Theatre is an artistically driven Canadian / Colombian theatre company based in Toronto. We create exciting new work that introduces audiences to diverse and rich performance practices from across the Americas. Aluna’s bold productions in English and Spanish are marked by a distinct theatrical language drawing from our heritages, cultures, and languages, including dance, physical theatre, and a multi-media design. In thirteen years of production, Aluna has received 26 Dora Award nominations for acting, writing, directing, and design – and has won eleven awards.
About Native Earth Performing Arts
Native Earth Performing Arts is Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Currently in their 35th year, Native Earth is dedicated to creating, developing and producing professional artistic expressions of the Indigenous experience in Canada. Through stage productions (theatre, dance and multi-disciplinary art), new script development, apprenticeships and internships, Native Earth seeks to fulfill a community of artistic visions.
CAMINOS 2017 is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Department of Canadian Heritage, The City of Toronto’s Latin American Community Legacy Fund, The Metcalf Foundation and McAuslan Brewing,
For more information and interview requests:
Suzanne Cheriton, RedEye Media, suzanne@redeyemedia.ca, 416-805-6744
Jenn Perras, RedEye Media, jenn@redeyemedia.ca, 416-525-7625
www.caminos.ca
#alunaCAMINOS