You are coming here, to Griffintown. We do not know you, we do not know where you are coming from, we do not know what you will do. The four of us do not even know each other. We are here. We have been here for a day and a night and we have made something. A place to live, for a while; a community that will disappear when we are gone.
(a 24 hour residency at NEW CITY GAS/ performance , by Squat — Greg MacArthur, Chad Demski, Joanna Donehower & Alan Reed.)
DATE AND TIME TBA.
Artist Bios
Chad Dembski is the Artistic Director of surprise performance; an experimental performance company based in Montreal, Canada. The company recently presented Hamletown, a re-working of the project (from 2008 at the Harbourfront Centre) for the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Wales. Chad also frequently collaborates and performs with other contemporary dance and theatre companies, including; Small Wooden Shoe – Dedicated To The Revolutions, Perhaps In A Hundred Years and Public Recordings – relay, /Dance/Songs/, Manual For Incidence
Joanna Donehower is a Seattle-born playwright, dramaturg, and graduate student (PhD in Humanities – Site Specific Theatre and Research/Creation) at Concordia University. Her current research and creative work stages spatial consciousness as a dialectical encounter of competing discourses, inhabiting the limen between mythology and materiality and trading in familiar and forgotten histories. She began her professional career at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she served as a dramaturgy intern during the ’05-’06 season, and later as a dramaturg for the 2007 Humana Festival of New American Plays. In New York, she worked in development of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (dir. Mark Wing-Davey), and with Chay Yew, Lisa Kron, and Liz Duffy Adams on the Las Vegas inspired collaboration Neon Mirage (FringeNYC 2006). World premiere credits at Actors Theatre include Charles Mee’s Hotel Cassiopeia (assistant dramaturg), Alice Tuan’s Batch! An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle with New Paradise Laboratories (assistant director), and Rolin Jones’ Sovereignty (dramaturg). This summer, she completed her full-length Masters thesis play adrift: petites histoires / little stories for children and lovers and renegades of the american revolution at Concordia, and is beginning work on a full-length commission from the city of Greenfield Park. She recently dramaturged the FQRSC-funded project “Hypertext and Performance: A Resonant Response to Joanna Baillie,” an assemblage of original scenes from the Romantic drama Witchcraft and contemporary playwrights’ responses to that text. Her latest play The Finger Play of Katherine Nipsy (or Bundles) was among those responses, and was staged this spring in the Hexagram Blackbox as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Greg MacArthur is a playwright, dramaturg, and, occasionally, a performer. His plays have been produced extensively across Canada, as well as in South Africa, Germany , the UK, Hungary and have been translated into numerous languages. His work includes: Tyland: The Toxic Bus Incident; Recovery; Get Away; Snowman; Stem (a collective creation), and girls! girls! girls!. His plays are published by Coach House Books. He is currently Artist-In-Residence at Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal , where he is developing a new work based on The Decameron. This winter, two new French translations of his plays will premier in Montreal: Toxique (Theatre d’auJourd ‘hui) and Recovery (The Other Theatre). In January 2011, he will begin a two-year position as the Lee -Playwright –In-Residence at The University of Alberta .
Alan Reed studied semiotics at the University of Toronto and writing at Dartington College of Arts (U.K.). He is the author of Isobel & Emile, a novel, For Love of the City, a collection of poems, and two plays: Apartment #604 and The Typist: a Modern Romance. Since 2005, he has been working as an experimental writer, making things that sit somewhere between text, installation and performance art.
