Before I was anything else, I was a writer. I was probably eight or nine years old the first time that I sat down and wrote a story on my own, not for a school assignment, not because anyone asked me to, just because I wanted to. I still remember most of it, it was…
Like any intelligent, cultured human being, I’m a huge fan of Star Trek. My early experiences watching Trek had a profound influence on my cultural and social ideas. It was Star Trek that introduced me to Shakespeare and to humanism. When I start looking for the seeds of the philosophies that have shaped my identity,…
This week, my boss Jan Powell announced that she would be stepping down as artistic director of Quill Theatre due to an illness in her family. Although I know it will not be the end of our friendship, and hope it will not be the end of our collaborations together, I thought that the end…
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “The Chase,” Captain Picard’s archaeology professor gifts him an ancient artifact called a Kurlan Naiskos. A sculpted bust of a humanoid, it opens to reveal a number of smaller humanoid figurines inside. This represents the Kurlan belief that a person’s consciousness is made up of a chorus…
Saturday I flew to Cincinnati to see the Cincinnati Shakespeare production of Othello.I should begin by saying firstly, that I am not a theatre critic by trade, so this shouldn’t be read as a review per se, but more a writeup of my personal and very subjective experience. I should also say, in the interest of…
A couple years ago, I was asked to write an article for a straight edge zine that never came out. Rather than let an interesting piece languish unpublished, I recovered from the depths of my hard drive and present it here, a loosely organized meditation on being a straight edge bardolator. No More Cakes and…
I’ve written about ballet on the blog before, and about my reticence to speak about a subject that I feel unqualified to speak to in any great detail. But I’ve made a commitment to worry less and write more, especially on the blog. I also have a larger writing project planned which will require me…
There are few things more unpleasant to watch than a director who thinks he or she is going to “fix” Shakespeare. Canadian Stage’s production of King Lear demonstrates all the pitfalls of thinking that you know better than the Bard. Director Alistair Newton displays a rare degree of arrogance, playing so fast and loose with…
This is a guest post by my friend Alex Lammon. Alex is a blogger who just finished the trainee program at the Richmond Ballet. Since Alex’s previous two posts on her blog have been about a theme and issue that matter to me and relate to our friendship, and since my most recent post was about…
I love the ballet but I don’t often write about it because I am intimidated by its technical nature. I can be moved to tears by a performance but when I sit down to try and describe what it was that affected me so deeply, I lack the vocabulary to effectively describe anything I’ve seen….