Programming the Americas
October 2, 2018
Hello, Toronto. Welcome to RUTAS 2018!
Bea has spoken about her vision for this year’s festival as an offering of “encounters between the contemporary and the ancestral”. As I’ve worked with each of these artists over the past many months, it’s been revealed just how accurate that description is, and just how beautiful it’s going to be to see Toronto introduced to these incredible artists and their work. Collectively, these pieces speak to current conversations we’re having here in Toronto, and they also speak in conversation with one another, revealing common themes of community, ritual, ceremony, and questions around ‘who gets to tell whose story.?’
We open RUTAS on Wed Oct 3 with Conchi León’s Del Manantial del Corazón, an intimate piece that Bea and Trevor encountered two years ago at ENARTES, Mexico City. Incorporating the stories she’s documented from Mayan women about traditional ceremonies that welcome a newborn into the community, Conchi here invites the audience to participate in a Mayan ‘baptism’ of a different local baby at each performance.
On Thursday, we open Lukas Avendaño’s Réquiem para un alcaraván. Lukas is a Zapotec performance artist who identifies as muxe, a non-binary term particular to their birth state Oaxaca that describes the community’s understanding of a third gender. Lukas’ work is a transformative exploration of the ‘traditional’ rituals attached to ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles in Mexican society.
Hometown favourite, Liz Peterson, also opens her piece Performance about a woman that night. After years of collaborations, we’re thrilled to finally have her with us as part of RUTAS’ national series. You may have seen this piece previously at SummerWorks, which Liz has now expanded with collaborators Oliver Husain, Rose Plotek and Matt Smith. This iteration premiered in Montreal (FTA off-site) last spring, and now Liz brings it back to Toronto.
Internationally acclaimed choreographer and dancer Wilson Pico opens week two of RUTAS with Los Materiales de la ira y el amor, in which he represents a triptych of female characters. Wilson’s piece is very interesting when viewed next to Lukas’, as Wilson seeks to embody the female experience and traditional expectations put upon women in Ecuador, whereas Lukas confronts and dis-mantles these same expectations in Mexico.
The next night, we open Vaca 35’s The only thing a great actress needs is a great work and the will to succeed (winner of this year’s coveted ‘longest festival show title award’). Vaca 35 has been touring the world with this amazing show, and this will now be their Canadian premiere. Performed in a cramped performance space in close proximity to the audience, the piece unravels the world of Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’. It’s beautiful, messy, and off the chain.
For the first time this year, Bea has programmed a family friendly show: Teatro Rodante‘s Cero Aguacero (water no water), and it’s a very special one – a ‘one puppet’ hero journey of a little boy whose village is lacking clean drinking water. Watching the archival makes me think of all smart works that engage children – it’s layered, and also offers adults an entertaining experience on their own level. My favourite scene involves an amazing 2001 Space Odyssey reference involving a 10 gallon water jug & hazer.
Also on Friday, our good friends from MT Space premiere their latest work, AMAL, that asks: what does it mean to occupy, to resist, to survive? In development since 2013, the piece has involved a tremendous roster of artistic collaborators along the way. The story of a Syrian family who end up refugees on Turtle Island invites us to reflect on our shared histories of displacement and colonization. If you were wowed at SummerWorks this year by Adrenaline, its lead artists Majdi Bou-Matar and Ahmad Meree are both involved in AMAL, as director and performer respectively.
Throughout week two, Boca del Lupo’s Red Phone is also on-site in the Daniels Spectrum lobby galleries. Part theatre and part social intervention, Red Phone is a unique opportunity to have a conversation with someone new, through the script of a playwright prompted by the provocation: “what is the most urgent conversation you think everyone should be having?” For RUTAS, Aluna has invited Keith Barker and Susanna Fournier to write new scripts that will join Red Phone’s cannon. Both of their pieces will be available to experience in both spanish and english.
And, throughout the festival, our first ever festival artist in residence, Dani Zelko, will be roaming the neighbourhoods of Toronto talking to strangers. Evan Webber of Public Recordings first directed us to look into Dani’s project, Reunión, which perfectly aligns with the spirit of RUTAS. Dani documents stories of local communities across the Americas, and then presents these back to us, in various formats, as verbatim first-person poems. During RUTAS, he’ll add voices from Toronto to the project, that will then travel on with him to his next project location. An exhibition of the previous seasons of Reunión will also be on display in the lobby galleries.
And, of course it wouldn’t be RUTAS without a jam-packed slate of free cabaret nights, conversatorios, meals, film and master classes:
Our cabaret line-up is pretty amazing this year, with performances by Mas Aya and Lido Pimienta, La Rumba Buena, Baobá, and DJ Firecracker, as well as evenings hosted by Rhoma Spencer, Nano Valderde, Victoria Mata and Sebastian Marziali (aka El Toro), who we’ve each invited to envision a night of programming featuring artists from their own artistic circles who might be new to RUTAS.
Our conversatorio sessions will unpack the intersections between this year’s work. Each session will offer our international artists and members of the local artistic community a provocation to open up conversations around creative process, inspiration and local contexts.
There’s a lot more over on our website, rutas.ca.
Plan your festival schedule and come see us soon.
Our incredible, tireless, and only slightly harried (at time-of-writing) RUTAS team can’t wait to share all of these incredible artists with you.
– Sue Balint
Festival Producer