![Photo: Elizabeth Logue]()
Photo: Elizabeth Logue
Earle’s Hall Live (2011 – 2016)
Small shows can be beautiful and impactful. Small Projects with Big Intentions are shows or art projects that are not huge in scale, but have merits beyond their size. Whether they are the seeds for larger projects to come or they exist forever as small gestures in our communities, our small projects may be small in size, but they are big in intention.
2017/18 Small Projects with Big Intentions:
MOVIE NIGHT
Nadia Ross’s three theatre production videos are works that stand on their own, yet also, when viewed together, form a larger narrative. The first two videos of the trilogy were created as components of past shows What Happened to the Seeker and Good News from the Sun (part 2) (2013-2016). The completion of The Twilight Parade signals the conclusion of the video trilogy.
Join us in the fall of 2017 for our Movie Night, when we put all the videos together, throw in some popcorn and an open bar, and follow the adventures of a theatre director as she tries to navigate the many challenges the artist faces when trying to make a show.
SWITCHER
Explorations of the ‘Live’ in a digital age
Switcher is the technical name given to the person who edits, in real time, a live television show. They ultimately are responsible for pushing the button that decides what you, the audience, is going to see. This project, artistically, is about the ‘point of view’ or ‘curator’ in our world, and how, ultimately, we are in a perpetual state of editing.
STO Union has been exploring this idea for the last few years. Virtual Bar Buddies (2012) and Earle’s Hall Live (2011 – 2016) are both angles and influencers on this next level of research, an incarnation we are calling Switcher.
In this incarnation, Switcher is a three-camera TV studio set up around a ping-pong table. The cameras feed into a switching console. The public takes on the roles of players, judges, announcers and tv crew. The switcher has to choose what angle makes it to the final cut and is ‘published’. Switcher happens around an event where the public is mingling, like the PAF/FAS Open House and are prompted to play the Switcher game. The game, at a minimum, needs only three players.
In the future, audiences will be able to select which narrative to follow in a series of narratives that make up one story. Switcher allows us to explore how audiences react when they control a story’s narrative through a device. Do audiences want to control the narrative? Or would they rather that be left to someone else? These simple questions are the backbone of our current research.
The Alistair Trilogy was created through three workshops during 1993. Each workshop was performed publicly at Rhubarb!, The Toronto Fringe and SummerWorks that year. Peter Hinton, who was then working at Theatre Passe Muraille, invited the trilogy to be performed in TPM’s backspace in 1994. The final production was nominated for Dora awards and won the Chalmers Award in 1995. The Alistair Trilogy is recognized as the production that launched STO Union onto the national scene.
