Menu

Aluna’s 2014-15 Season: Outspoken, Classic, Intimate – Toronto

September 18, 2014

After eleven years of production, we finally have a season, with four full shows and many other events to share with you.

Theatre is a communal experience: for Aluna, building bridges and communities is primary. Without the artistic partnerships and collaborations of the last eleven years, we would not be here. It is because we come together to create theatre in these Times of Austerity that we can keep our art alive.

Aluna offers a 2014-2015 season of intimate, timely, and compelling theatrical experiences. It begins with the surprise remount of True, the sold-out site-specific hit by our 2013-14 playwright-in-residence Rosa Labordé. For the first time we present work in the Aluna studio, premiering the provocative What I learned from a decade of fear, and the one-woman odyssey, El Refugio de Freidel | The Refuge of Freidel. We return to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre with the modern classic of Spanish theatre, Lorca’s Blood Wedding, co-produced with Modern Times Stage Company.

This season our plays and co-productions consider how an inability to understand the past and forgive perpetuates conflict and war. From Toronto, with a family trying to work through trauma and create a clean slate, to the world stage, where a friendship must bear the weight of the ‘war on terror’. We look at lost passions through Lorca’s eyes to remind us that love, even when it fails us, can be inescapable. Finally, a refugee actor claims the stage back after seven years of absence, where she learns that a life she lost comes back to her in unexpected forms.

Still to come this season:

What I learned from a decade of fear

DOF-2221-Beatriz-Pizano-and-Lyon-Smith-photo-Trevor-Schwellnus-650p

created by Beatriz Pizano, Trevor Schwellnus and Lyon Smith
October 30 – November 30, 2014 (Thurs – Sat at 8pm, Sunday 2:30pm), Aluna Theatre
TICKETS

Guilt isn’t what it used to be. But is trust? Beatriz Pizano tests her friendship with Lyon Smith by culling incriminating details from his average life. Under a rich visual palette composited from live security cameras and found footage, what begins as a eulogy for the human costs of our collective safety becomes a ritual to atone for a decade of repression, war, and paranoia. Directed and designed by multi-award winning artist and Aluna Artistic Producer, Trevor Schwellnus, this daring piece best showcases Aluna’s continuing commitment to risk and experimentation. After successful development and presentations in New York City (La MaMa ETC), Bogotá, Colombia (Festival Alternativo), and Montreal (The Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro), the piece returns for its Toronto premiere at Aluna Theatre.

“It’s not often that a show so rooted in the scariest sorts of political misappropriation of power offers thoughtful character development and humour as well.”
– Dani Phillipson, Royal Holloway University, UK

Aluna Cabaret
Friday, December 5, 2014 at 8pm, Aluna Theatre
Join us for Aluna’s popular annual cabaret, showcasing work by the amazing resident artists we’ve supported over the past year. Featured artists to be announced this Fall.

Blood Wedding | Bodas de Sangre

BW-postcard-image-650p

by Federico Garcia Lorca, translation by Langton Hughes, directed by Soheil Parsa
a co-production with Modern Times Stage Company
March 11 – 29, 2015, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
TICKETS

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding is a classic of 20th Century theatre. Inspired by a fragment of a newspaper story found by the playwright, it tells the story of a family vendetta that comes to a boil when a bride-to-be runs away with the son of the enemy. As they flee the oppressing forces of their family’s histories, death pursues them through the thick of the forest under the light of the moon.

El Refugio de Freidel | The Refuge of Freidel 

friedel-red-pants-650p-photo-by-Beatriz-Pizano.jpg

a collective creation by Liliana Suarez Henao and Beatriz Pizano
May 7 – 23, 2015 (Thurs – Sat at 8pm), Aluna Theatre

One woman’s journey from Colombia’s Avant-Garde to Toronto’s after-hours service industry. Liliana looks at her own experience as a Colombian refugee through texts from her director, the controversial Colombian theatre-maker, Freidel, who was brutally assassinated in Medellin in the early 90s. Before this Toronto presentation, Beatriz and Liliana will be traveling to Quito, Ecuador in October 2014 to present this piece at the internationally renowned Magdalena Festival.

All Season Long
Aluna Theatre presents a regular reading series, the Aluna Café. In the Latin American tradition there has always been a place to talk about and learn from the work of other artists. Our first Café is Friday, September 26, 2014 at 7.30pm and features a cold script reading (by our own artists and volunteer audience members) of Stuff, a bold exploration of the links between Latina women, food and the erotic by Chicana performance artists Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante. More events to be announced.

Also this Fall, Aluna’s Young Panamerican Vo(i)ces: Youth Training program continues. We offer youth and emerging artists, aged 17 – 27, of Latin American and Caribbean descent a theatre training program that recognizes their unique cultures, skills and challenges. Classes in acting, dance, text and movement are taught in English and Spanish. With the support of Theatre Ontario.

We invite you to be part of these accomplishments – the audience, our ultimate collaborator.

See you in the theatre,

Beatriz Pizano
Artistic Director

Back to Blog