The Ottawa theatre community's smash Hot Ticket event is BACK! 

On January 19, all Ottawa theatre enthusiasts are invited to a free evening of socialization and hijinx, presented by the Ottawa Fringe Festival, the Rideau Awards, and the Magnetic North Theatre Festival. 

Hot Ticket is a great opportunity to blast the ice and snow off the beginning of 2009! Join us for a night of light-hearted game-show-style theatre trivia, with emcee Alan Neal, host of Bandwidth and Canada Live on CBC Radio. We’ll separate the Marlowes from the Mamets, the upstage from the downstage, and the Renaissance from the Restoration!

You can play, or you can just watch... but great prizes will be available to be won. You’ll get one awesome prize just for coming to celebrate with us: you’ll be the first to hear about the nominees for the 2nd annual Rideau Awards! Don't miss this terrific opportunity to come together, toast the successes of 2008, and kick off another terrific year of theatrical art in Canada's capital city!

The hottest ticket in town takes place at The Mercury Lounge, and it’s absolutely free! Doors open at 7:30 PM, and the action gets underway at 8PM on Monday, January 19. Be sure to arrive early, as space is limited!

Hot Ticket is brought to you with the support of McAuslan Brewers.

James from Skydive shares what it’s like to fly

The 2009 edition of Magnetic North will host Skydive from Realwheels in Vancouver. Skydive is a tale of two dysfunctional brothers and their attempt to heal one another’s emotional wounds through “para-therapy” … an experiment that goes horribly, hilariously wrong.  Skydive is written by Governor General Award-winning playwright Kevin Kerr and co-directed by Centaur Theatre Artistic Director Roy Surette and Stephen Drover. The action-adventure-comedy opens at Vancouver's PuSh Festival this month.

But the play has a backstage story too. The two performers, James Sanders and Bob Frazer were pals in theatre school; in his third semester James became a quadriplegic from a spinal cord injury. After years of recovery, James founded a theatre company to produce plays to deepen the audience’s understanding of the disability experience.

In Skydive, James and Bob use a unique apparatus to fly, hang upside down, spin in circles and generally defy gravity in all sorts of visually stunning ways. In the magic of theatre, disability is represented in innovative and exciting ways that beg the question: does it matter which actor can walk when both can fly? 

James Sanders shares some of his experience with us:

I’m in absolute awe of where the journey of Skydive has taken its artists and audiences. Bob and I started it some five years ago with a simple “no crap on stage” approach to storytelling. We are now in the midst of a Canadian tour and in June we will wrap our first season with an appearance on our national stage in Ottawa as part of Magnetic North. Wow. How did we get here? I feel like the kids from ‘The Bad News Bears’ walking into the major league stadium: excited and trembling with the rush of giddy excitement to play our crazy little show. Or “The Little Engine that could” with all the funders and supporters shouting “I know you can, I know you can!” Make a quadriplegic fly? Really?
 
I remember the first time I was strapped into Sven Johansson’s ES Dance Instrument after months of planning and grant-writing. I remember feeling the physical pain from the straps cutting into my hips which made me fear that using this unique apparatus this might not be possible. Then I remember a near sold-out preview night in Theatre Calgary where I started to giggle, an actor not quite prepared for the energy of 650 people laughing. I remember talking to a teenage student in Montreal, a fellow person with a disability, who shared the same ideas, the same reasons for telling stories that matter, that make a difference. I remember her smile. I remember getting ready for a show with ‘Team Skydive’, warming up with an inspired pep talk: “This is show number 60… let’s make it the best one yet!” I remember being on vacation in a resort in Cancun, Mexico, where a guy approached me and said, “You’re not the guy from Skydive are you?” I remember a talk-back at PuSh in 2007 when a recently injured quadriplegic asked, “What’s it like to fly?”

When I think back on all this and reflect, I realize: "this doesn’t normally happen". Actors don’t just get together a bunch of their friends and create a hit. First time producers don’t get national awards. Quadriplegics don’t fly. And who ever heard of two guys lip-syncing to Madonna and getting seventy-four consecutive standing ovations? Yeah, right, dream on… Wait a second, that’s it. Dreams. On stage and off, dreams DO come true. And I’ll never take them for granted.

I write this a week before a run of 19 shows for PuSh at the Arts Club in Vancouver. Every show now becomes part of the dream. In reality, the world may be shifting into uncertain times, economically and politically. So I will revel in every moment and I will cherish every chance I get to jump out of a plane. 

The Ottawa team is growing!

We’re gearing up for the 2009 Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa and have new team members in place. Kris Nelson from Montreal returns to the team in a new role as the Encounters Curator; Niki Guner joins us from Toronto as the Senior Development Strategist; and from Ottawa we have Heather Hanson, Administrative Assistant; Ines Kruscica, Marketing Coordinator; Nathalie Marshall, Outreach and Encounters Coordinator; Amanda Doiron, Industry Series Coordinator; Carrie Manship, Volunteer Coordinator; and Cyrille Loreau, Logistics Coordinator. A great big welcome to all of the new staff who recently joined our growing team!

Dates to Remember
January 19 Hot Ticket at the Mercury Lounge in Ottawa
June 3-13 Magnetic North Theatre Festival
June 7 -10 Presenters Window
June 8-10 Industry Series