News & Reviews — Kingston Theatre Alliance

On October 2nd, I had the privilege to enter the immersive world of Virtual Reality to attend the 2020 Performance & XR Conference, co-hosted by Electric Company Theatre and Single Thread Theatre Co. Performance & XR is a conference discussing the unique intersection of XR and Performance. With respect to the conference, XR is an umbrella term that can refer to Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality. While the […]

At the inaugural Performance and XR Virtual Reality Symposium, award-winning lighting, set, projection and mixed reality designer Beth Kates guides us through an experimentation of creating performance in XR.

First performed on a picnic table at the 2000 Toronto Fringe Festival, the play has made quite a journey to its 2020 conception at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning. While playwright and director Dickens seeks to explore how even ancient stories can have surprise endings, it’s more of a poetic rendering of the classical Greek myth than it is a reimagining.

Set in 1965, the production could not feel more relevant in today’s political climate. In the midst of the chaos that is 2020, The Meeting serves as a perfect antidote. The play, written by Jeff Stetson, and originally performed in 1987, could not have felt more timely and appropriate in the wake of BLM and rising racial tensions in the world. In essence, the play is a piece of revisionist […]

This is how playwright and storyteller Ned Dickens describes why a bunch of strangers are collected together on a conference call. From Kingston’s Breakwater Park to my stepdad’s deck in Toronto to the bedrooms of a youth theatre group in India, Luke and the Big Circles is a cycle of four stories in verse and over the phone.

immersive and inter-disciplinary theatre company Outside the March returns to the Kick and Push Festival for their fourth year with The Itinerary: Playtest. Broadcasted through Zoom and enacted through your phone, the performance is literally in the hands of the audience. Players select from a series of actions to be carried out by performers Amaka Umeh and Sébastien Heins, taking us through the death, life, then death again of the one and only: Elaine.

Given the chance to create utopia, what would it look like? Would it be possible? And would we even want to? Fusing strategic gameplay with a theatrical narrative, the Vancouver/Toronto-based company Re:Current Theatre has created an experience that is as immersive as it is interactive.

In Kingston, most performances have either been cancelled or rescheduled, educational training programs have been restructured and venues have been closed until further notice. However, performers in Kingston are resilient and have adapted by moving performance and other content online.

The Harrowing of Brimstone McReedy welcomes you into the room with a few carnival games—one in particular, ‘fast and loose,’ asks audience members to make bets on a piece of rope. Pick a side, any side, and if the knot tightens around your finger, you win. If you’re not caught, you lose. This sets the tone straight away for the show about to be played: either you’re caught, or you […]

When you walk into Stupidhead! at the Central Public Library, the floor is covered in zig-zags of candy-coloured tape that suggest—thanks to a paper mâché brain that gets wheeled out when the show begins—the wavelengths of the brain.

In his song “We All Try”, the brilliant songwriter Frank Ocean echoes the sentiment, “you must believe in something”, because it is this belief in something that drives our need to try.

Strap yourselves in for a wild ride at Butcher by Nicolas Billon, the fall installment of Theatre Kingston’s 2018/2019 season. This strong and dedicated team of Canadian theatre artists, guided by seasoned director Kathryn MacKay, succeed in bringing to life this complex narrative and the even more complex themes that come along with it.  The first thing audiences see when walking into the alley space is Steve Lucas’s meticulously designed […]