The event, Queering Theatre in Toronto, will take place Thursday, Jan 5, 2012, from 2 to 4pm in Winters Senior Common Room, 021 Winters College, Keele campus.

Right: Marie Rickard

Newton, a recently appointed Winters College Fellow, is the founding artistic director of Ecce Homo Theatre. His newest musical, , is scheduled to run from Jan. 5 to 15, 2012, as part of the 2012 Next Stage Theatre Festival at the Factory Theatre in Toronto.

Written and directed by Newton, Loving the Stranger or How to Recognize an Invert, introduces the audience to Montreal’s Peter Flinsch, a theatre designer, visual artist and gay survivor of Nazi Germany, who was arrested in 1942 for kissing a friend at a Luftwaffe Christmas party. It takes in everything from the cabarets of 1920s Berlin and the battle over gay marriage to the office of the Prime Minister, and is billed as a provocative expressionist cabaret.

“The goal of my work is to balance politics and entertainment, to combine dance, music, text and design into a total theatrical experience in the hopes of challenging my audience intellectually and emotionally,” says Newton.

“I agree with Schiller's notion of the stage as a moral institution and I endeavor to create work on big themes for troubled times. My output as a playwright and director with Ecce Homo Theatre seeks to achieve intimacy through artifice using a queer aesthetic as a tool for destabilization, to draw attention to hypocrisy and deflate the un-ironic. As one of my former teachers, Charles Marowitz, once said, “Laughter can be a hammer-stroke in the hands of deft satirists.”

Newton is a contributor to the forthcoming collection, TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work (Intellect Ltd.), edited by 91ŃÇÉ« theatre Professor Judith Rudakoff.

His previous work includes three consecutive productions for the SummerWorks Theatre Festival in which he was playwright and director of The Pastor Phelps Project: a fundamentalist cabaret, The Ecstasy of Mother Teresa or Agnes Bojaxhiu Superstar and Loving the Stranger or How to Recognize an Invert. Newton’s work has also been performed at the Rhubarb Festival – Leni Riefenstahl vs the 20th Century – and the Victoria Fringe Festival – Woyzeck Songspiel.

In addition, Newton was a participant in the inaugural presentation of The Ark at The National Arts Centre English Theatre in 2006, and is a past member of the BASH! Emerging Artist Program at the Canadian Stage Company, the Ante Chamber Creator’s Unit with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the Director’s Lab of the Lincoln Center Theater.

He has also served as apprentice director for the Ensemble Studio of the Canadian Opera Company for its 2009-2010 season, where he directed a production of Pergolisi’s La Serva Padonra. Newton’s recent work includes a stint as director/dramaturge for Bella: The Color of Love with Teresa Tova and Mary Kerr at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. It was a commission for the 2011 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.

The show is being supported by the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Next Stage Theatre Festival and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Uppal (BA Hons. ’97, PhD ’04) is the guest editor of this year’s Best Canadian Poetry in English series (Tightrope Books) set to launch Wednesday, Oct. 26, at 7pm at , 783 College St. at Shaw St. in Toronto. The 91ŃÇÉ« launch will take place Monday, Oct. 31, from noon to 2pm, in the Paul Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune College, Keele campus.

As the series’ fourth editor, Uppal follows Governor General’s Literary Award-winner Stephanie Bolster, Griffin Prize winner A.F. Moritz and Lorna Crozier. The 2012 guest editor will be announced at the first launch. Poet Molly Peacock, the author of six volumes of poetry, is the series editor.

“We write a lot of humorous poetry,” says Uppal. The problem is there seems to be a bias toward the more serious poems. “Humour and comedy are not always appreciated for how hard they are to write.” Take John Creary’s poem “Horoscopes”: “that’s the kind of poem people would share with others and would put up on their bulletin boards.”

In addition to humourous works in the 2011 edition of Best Canadian Poetry, Uppal was determined to look beyond lyrical poems to some more avant garde work. “This is the first anthology in the series with collages of text and images, as well as visual poetry by Christian Bök.” There is even a sound poem on the long list.

The short list of 50 poems is what’s published in the anthology, while the long list is bibliographic information for an additional 50 poems of note. “I’ve tried to include a vast range of poems that would please any poetry reader,” says Uppal.

To come up with the 100 poems, however, was no easy task. Uppal read everywhere. “I dog-eared any poem I was interested in,” says Uppal. “I had two to three hundred poems by the end.” And those had to be whittled down further still. “I reread that stack several times. There were poems that were shoo-ins because they just stood out that much.” She tried to choose a range of styles, subject matter and writing traditions that represented Canadians writing today. “It was a really satisfying and interesting process,” says Uppal.

Left: Priscila Uppal

As for the Canadian penchant for bears and guns and fruit, Uppal decided to include the best poem for each category. So there is a poem, a philosophical mediation, by 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize-winner Karen Solie, who taught at 91ŃÇÉ« last year, called “Birth of the Rifle”. Another is a delightful ode to fruit by Al Rempel, called “We Love Bananas”, and a beautiful parable by Tom Wayman, “Fable of the Child Who Went into the Mountain”, about a girl left alone at a cottage who is forced to kill a bear that breaks in. Later in life, it’s a man who comes after her.

Also in this year’s anthology are poems by Steven Heighton, Dennis Lee, Eric Ormsby, Patricia Young, 91ŃÇÉ« humanities Professor Richard Teleky, Shane Rhodes, Jonathan Ball, as well as emerging poets Peter Chiykowski, who wrote “Notes from the Canary Islands” about doing environmental research, Andrew Faulkner, who wrote the drinking poem “Bar Fight” – what Uppal calls a “playful and surreal poem” – Julie Cameron Gray, who wrote the tongue-in-cheek “Widow Fantasies”, Sean Howard and Andrea Ledding.

“I now have some new favourite poets,” she says.

Uppal is the author of eight books of poetry, including Winter Sport: Poems (2010) and Traumatology (2010); the novels To Whom It May Concern (2009) and The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002), as well as a critical study on elegies, We Are What We Mourn (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). In 2010 she was CANFund poet-in-residence during the Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics.

For more information, visit the website.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The AGYU invites you to "surge out there" as it joins with Raqs Media Collective: technological poets for an India in transition, to present their newest exhibit  Surjection.

Of the current generation of Indian artists, the from New Delhi (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) are among the best known and most widely exposed in the west – and certainly the most media conscious. Having started as documentary filmmakers, over the past 20 years they have evolved a sophisticated, and sometimes performative, practice that combines film, media, audio and text, all of which draw upon philosophy and political theory, in installations of an unresolved poetics.

Right: Members of the Raqs Media Collective, from left, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula

The Raqs Media Collective exhibition, Surjection, opens with a free public reception tonight, from 6 to 9pm at the Art Gallery of 91ŃÇÉ«. The artists will be at the reception.

The collective describes their AGYU exhibition this way: “Raqs Media Collective delights in transposing the plenitude of the incalculable onto the fabric of the ordinary. By counting to infinity, sensing animation in stillness and speaking in the language of silence, Raqs will breathe numbers, figures, proverbs and stories into the galleries of the Art Gallery of 91ŃÇÉ«.”

In this exhibition of entirely new work, the artists start with traces that are minimal but that contain great amplitude within them, such as the palm print of Raj Konai – the ancestral trace (from 1859) of the entire history of forensic identification – that hovers over the exhibition. Now animated, this image of a counting hand initiates a series of moves that the viewer animates through the exhibition. At the same time, the viewer witnesses other evolutions in video projection where stillness itself slowly is animated. Surjection begins outside, in AGYU Vitrines and occupies both galleries.

The elements of the exhibition are in a surjective relationship to each other. “Surjection” is a mathematical concept devised by the Bourbaki Group, whereby the elements of one set are applied, transposed, or mapped onto those of another set. Surjection continues until Sunday, Dec. 4.  

Surject yourself onto the Performance Bus

It’s an entirely different experience of numbers and letters on the Bingo Dilemma Bus. The game starts tonight at 6pm sharp when the Performance Bus departs the Ontario College of Art & Design University campus at 100 McCaul St.. Riders gather the clues to the game on the way to the Raqs Media Collective exhibition opening at the AGYU. Artist and game host Oliver Husain will be on the bus calling out the game clues. Performance Bus returns downtown at 9pm.

Math too tough for you? Go back to school with AGYU @ Art Toronto

The AGYU tricks or treats fair patrons with one of its specially commissioned installations featuring Toronto novelist Derek McCormack and Toronto artist Ian Phillips. The haunted schoolhouse is the outcome of an  four-year project supported by the AGYU of H.A.M.S. (Holiday Arts Mail-Order School), which is a correspondence course (for the 1936-1937 school year) devoted to the holiday arts. Hallowe’enologists will be on hand to take your questions and offer demonstrations. Alumni are welcome.  

Virtually AGYU

The surjective relations continue online with the  as independent Toronto curator Su-Ying Lee visits the studio of New 91ŃÇÉ«-based artist Alexandre Singh, whom she met in Paris this past summer while travelling in Europe. on her travels through Europe.  

Writing from the ash-filled Grimsvötn sky, Toronto artist counts down the rest of her days in Iceland as she writes about contemporary art and generous helpings of never-ending splendour, mind-blowing sunsets, migratory birds, half-shorn sheep, geothermal pools and more. 

For more information, visit the AGYU website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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