Power plays

The year in theatre has been fascinating and full of energy – not so much spectacular as it was thrumming with a deep, constant pulse of building momentum that promises a great future for this city.

Most important to the theatre community as a whole was the opening of the new Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, housing one of Ottawa’s oldest enduring companies, the Great Canadian Theatre Company.

Beguiled by the siren’s song

Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air is almost too good So I have a problem this week. Late Nights on Air landed in my lap about three weeks ago. And it sat on my desk, waiting patiently with a tinge of desperation, like someone rendezvousing with a new lover. I no sooner…

Reeling in the big fish

Ottawa International Writers Festival’s growing rep lands it a prize catch The simple and powerful idea that fuels good writing is that language is more than the uncomplicated vehicle by which information is delivered. Words act in concordance with each other to actually shape meaning, to give it structure. Words are formative things. They don’t…

The Man From The Capital at the GCTC

Theatrical rebirth

It’s finally time to see what the GCTC can do inside its new home It’s a simple thing to say: There is a magic to beginnings, an insistent tug of the spirit like a great inrushing of breath. It fills you to think about witnessing things growing, changing, evolving, and that the immediate present translates…

Dead poets

Latest issue of Arc Poetry Magazine resurrects the “forgotten and neglected” The unseen wisdom of the world tells us that life is sometimes awful. Man is always subject to the ultimate vicissitudes of death and decay; it is the single constant star in our often carefully navigated lives. We feel this most keenly when it…

Throwing punches

Some of Decalogue 2’s authors break wood effortlessly, others use brute force I have no idea what good writing is. But in my limited experience, I usually liken it in a very particular way to martial arts. In the correlation of joints, sinews and mind there are a thousand different ways to throw a punch.…