Only one week left on the incredible early bird pass discounts on both public and Cultural Industry passes!
OPENING NIGHT CELEBRATION
The Magnetic North Theatre Festival is returning home to Ottawa and you are invited to help us celebrate at our opening night Celebration on Wednesday, June 3, 2009. Come raise a glass of champagne and toast Canada’s National Festival of Contemporary Canadian Theatre.
6:00 p.m. Opening Night Celebration at National Arts Centre Salon
53 Elgin Street
complimentary hors d'oeuvres, champagne and a cash bar is available for your convenience
8:00 p.m. Performance of Nevermore at the National Arts Centre Studio Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe is a whimsical and chilling musical fairytale for adults from the creative team with a flair for visually inventive productions, Edmonton’s award-winning Catalyst Theatre.
10:00 p.m. Opening Night Party at Club SAW | 87 Nicholas Street
Club SAW: where the audience meets the artists, makes friends and revels the night away.
Tickets are $100 and include a $25 charitable receipt. Please contact Gayle Diguer at 613-947-7000 ext. 738 or gayle@magneticnorthfestival.ca for tickets.
Can’t attend but still want to support an amazing festival? Why not donate your ticket to someone who can and receive a 100% tax deductible donation receipt. Simply tell Gayle that you want to donate your Opening Night Celebration ticket when you purchase it. We will donate your ticket to a local emerging theatre artist or student so they are able to attend PLUS provide you with a charitable receipt for the full amount.
BECOME A VOLUNTEER!
Come and join our energetic volunteer team and connect with other like-minded theatre lovers from across the country. You might end up driving an award winning director to their opening night, welcoming an international theatre presenter to your home town, or hob-knobbing at the festival bar with the actors whom you just saw onstage.
Once again, we are looking for 150 enthusiastic volunteers to make this amazing festival a great success. Your time and energy will assist Magnetic North in operating this outstanding festival, while supporting some of Canada’s finest theatre artists. You can look forward to an entertaining and rewarding experience.
Volunteer benefits include:
One pre-booked, guaranteed seat per 8 hours of volunteer work,
Access to all other festival productions and Magnetic Encounters events on a stand-by basis.
A collectible Magnetic North T-shirt
An invitation to our opening and closing night parties
Eternal Hydra reunites the playwright Anton Piatigorsky with director Chris Abraham in a literary mystery of the highest order. Abraham was chosen as the protégé of Canadian director Daniel Brooks when he won the prestigious Siminovitch award; Piatigorsky was chosen as the protégé of John Mighton when the playwright won the prestigious Siminovitch award the following year.
Eternal Hydra by Crow’s Theatre of Toronto is set in motion by the discovery of a long lost manuscript, the pages of which spark an academic controversy that reaches as far back as the American Civil War.
Anton shares his experience writing this piece.
Eternal Hydra was originally commissioned by the Stratford Festival as a one-act play for the opening of their Studio theatre in 2002. I was eager to write a piece about my long obsession with modernist writers, about their egoism and ambition, as well as about race and religion in modernism. I was intrigued by the relationship between unbridled, ambitious literary works, like Musil’s The Man Without Qualities or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wage, and ominous political movements, like Nazism or Stalinism. Somehow, in the decades between wars, it wasn’t ludicrous either for a person to write a book about ‘everything’, or for a political party to create a society that fit the entire world into strict racial or economic categories. While I admired the bald ambition of modernist writing, I feared the bald ambition of totalitarian politics. I couldn’t help but wonder, are the two related? Are the impulses behind the projects the same?
I had strong feelings about these questions. Growing up just outside Washington D.C., I was always aware, as a child, of the racial tension that defined that city, that defined the entire United States. In many ways, that ubiquitous tension defined my personal relationships as well, whether I liked it or not. As an adult, I didn’t want to let the racial barrier of my youth persist in my work. I didn’t want to write a play for Stratford that would feature only white actors. Like a modernist writer, who tries to tackle everything in his or her world, I wanted to take on the biggest conflicts I knew. Race. Power. Ambition. Hubris. I wanted to think like Joyce and Musil. But as a relatively wealthy white suburbanite, I also worried that I had no right to write about a black person, to tell her story. I worried that no matter what story I wrote, it would feel like an appropriation of another person’s history, a person on the other side of a racial barrier that I – somehow, inexplicably – had some responsibility for creating. Wouldn’t writing the story of a black woman make me a monster? How could I do that?
Instead of resisting or denying that fear, I made it one of the main subjects of my play. I devised a plot that would heighten my own anxiety, make it more explicit and dramatic. Yes, I decided, an empowered white man writing a story about a disenfranchised black woman makes that writer a monster. Even if his ambition is pure and his intention is good. So what do you do with that? What does that fact – if it even is a fact – mean about my play? The desire to think like a great modernist writer is similar to thinking like a totalitarian monster. So what does that make Gordias Carbuncle? What does that make me? I didn’t have clean answers to these questions. I still don’t. But I’m proud to have written Eternal Hydra, no matter what it might say about me.
MAGNETIC YOUTH ACCESS PASS
We are thrilled to be bringing back the Magnetic Youth Access Pass which offers youth aged 12-19 years of age entry into Festival performances for $2 per show! The Festival reserves 15 Youth Access seats until 15 minutes before every performance, making them exclusively available to Youth Access Pass Button holders on a first-come, first-serve basis. Some restrictions apply. For more information on how to get your FREE Youth Access Button, e-mail outreach@magneticnorthfestival.ca.
Magnetic Youth Access Pass is sponsored by
DATES TO REMEMBER
APRIL 21-25 | BodySchool: Contemporary Theatre Creation Intensive APRIL 30 | Last day for early bird prices on all Festival Passes MAY 1 | Single Tickets go on sale MAY 15 | Is it Time to Tour Workshop JUNE 3-13 | Magnetic North Theatre Festival JUNE 6 -10 | Presenters Window JUNE 8-10 | Industry Series JUNE 8-12 | Industry Series
