Kick & Push Festival — Kingston Theatre Alliance

During my undergrad I took a Fringe theatre course in which one of our weekly topics was simply titled “jem rolls.” There is a good chance that anyone who frequents Fringe festivals will have met him, or at the very least have heard his name. This physical and poetic storyteller has travelled, as he puts it, “from concrete islands to concrete islands across this sea of green,” and landed in […]

In the uniquely Canadian wagon train that is the Canadian Fringe Festival, jem rolls is kicking off his tour in what might just be his favourite city on Earth: sunny, green Montréal. This one-of-a-kind high-energy English performance poet’s career began at the age of 31, when he semi-accidentally stumbled on stage at a ‘terrible’ open mic in North London and never stopped. Feeling liberated by the possibilities of spoken word […]

The tenth day of the tenth month. What better time to read about the Kick & Push Festival’s tenth season?  Although summer may be long over by now, the KTA has just finished wrapping up the necessary paperwork that must come with the annual Kick & Push Festival. As my colleague and Artistic Producer of the Kick & Push Liam Karry recently closed the books on this year’s busy run, […]

What parts of yourself are you hiding? What do you filter out? Is it safe to be heard? Listen, I’ll be honest—things weren’t going too well for me last Friday. After forgetting my glasses, taking the bus to the wrong venue, and discovering that the lone ballpoint pen at the bottom of my purse had run dry, I almost gave up on seeing What Brings You In.  Luckily, the Kick […]

Hysterical Historical Improv delivers on its promise of making history hysterical. From local group Improv Kingston, local history comes to life in a way you haven’t seen before. Dan Walmsley directs, writes, and performs, with the help of additional performers Jon Britton and Henry Korba-Babcock (as well as occasional promised special guests, although none appeared in the performance I attended).  The premise of this “historical improv” is that Walmsley has […]

It’s the last show of the 2024 Kick & Push Festival—Basement Girl, a play about PhD student Jovana navigating her new life in Canada while dealing with some eerie sounds in her apartment. Director, playwright, and actor behind Jovana, Bojana Babić was kind enough to sit down with me this past week for a Zoom interview about the show.  This interview has been edited for clarity and length.  Could you […]

A stage set with only a wooden cross draped in lingerie, Christian Slut puts the sexual content right back into a Christian upbringing. The show is a one-person “confessional” (not the Catholic kind), written and performed by Erik Karklins, about their experiences as a self-identified slut while also being a devout Christian. They tease (literally) out the nuances between these two seemingly conflicted identities, critiquing restrictive religious doctrine. Despite its […]

Artistic work that’s been a part of the Kick & Push Festival for several years now, the Cedar Island Residency returns for 2024 and this year’s creations will be shared today. By collaborating with Parks Canada to make this residency possible, the work on Cedar Island began just under one week ago on August 12th. With a busy past few days of creation, myself and B. Solomon—a creator in the […]

Taking the “sketch” in sketch comedy perhaps a little too literally, A Sketchy Kind of Show is a performance by Collected Novellas, who are self-described as focusing on “subversion, quirkiness and social commentary.” Unfortunately, I found the show itself a little lukewarm on all three counts.  The performance held potential with its interesting start—it begins with a framing device of God flipping through Netflix on the seventh day of rest […]

The 2024 Kick & Push Festival is well underway with their upcoming closing weekend ending on a bang. With just over half the programming still remaining in its final days, wonderfully fabulous artists and their innovative creations will be leaving their mark on the Tett Centre, Cedar Island, City Park, and more. Amongst them is Seymour Irons—a man who wears many artistic hats but we’ll dive into that later—and his […]

From singing goddesses to living sculptures, strange and striking works of art have been appearing downtown as the 2024 Kick & Push Festival rolls out its summer programming. Specializing in one-of-a-kind, immersive theatre experiences, the festival’s tenth season offers a range of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performances from July 25 to August 18.  Corpus Dance Projects’ Divine Interventions made a brief appearance at the start of the festival, bringing celestial wonder to three […]

Listen to the wind whisper the story of The Cape as Red as Blood—a loose retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood folktale as a folk musical. Written by Kathleen Greening, this is a contemporary version of the story with a powerfully feminine vibe—soft and caring, but not weak by any means, and not to be underestimated. The five storytellers—Nightingale (Syd Chinnick), Crow (Meg Gibson), Phoenix (Hailey Hatfield), Bluebird (Elsa […]