Kick & Push Festival — Kingston Theatre Alliance

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 […]

With 23 characters, including two animals, Circus Gothic is a unique one-woman show. Jan Kudelka plays all the roles in a truly incredible performance, as might be expected given that she’s had fifty years (yes, fifty) of performing this particular show in order to perfect it. This fact alone makes it worth seeing and informs a really powerful performance.  The story is a memoir of Kudelka’s experience joining the circus […]

A self-identified bitch and a boss—Crazy Bitch/Boss Bitch is a one-woman show written by and starring Thea Fitz-James, and centering around a millennial woman’s experience of being a corporate worker. She has 18 people directly reporting to her and is on the executive track but lately, she’s been wondering if she might be a bit crazy. The show follows her struggles with work and the prospect of a promotion, while […]

“I was in the car the other day, listening to music and thinking about loss.” So begins Threshold Theatre’s ABD with Mark the C, a gently humorous memoir of the 60s and 70s delivered from inside a DJ booth. Written and performed by Mark Cassidy and directed by Hume Baugh, the show traces Cassidy’s journey through small-town Ontario as a child of hotel entrepreneurs.  Let’s tackle the title letter by […]

On Tuesday, August 15th I was invited to see the first viewing of the Cedar Island Residency performance taking place the following day. I was not told much about the performance, giving me a feeling of nervous excitement. This is the first performance I have ever attended where I did not have much information about it beforehand. The only thing I was told was to meet at the Kingston Marina […]

Feeling curious about seeing a mime roam the ins and outs of a giant translucent bubble? See La Bulle in Kingston this weekend.  La Bulle is a mime show produced by CORPUS Dance Projects and is being presented at the Kick & Push Festival by the Kingston Theatre Alliance and Le Centre Culturel Frontenac.  The show follows a lonely mime, Pierrot (David Danzon / Guy Marsan; the performer at the […]