One of the great things about going to smaller events—club concerts, fringe theatre, and the like—is the chance to actually meet and talk with the people you’ve just seen perform. At last summer’s London Fringe Theatre Festival I had the opportunity to do just that with Rachelle Fordyce, an actor from Winnipeg who performed a clever, surreal mythologically-based play called netherwhere : etherwhen. Since then I’ve been reading her weblog about being in and around the Canadian theatre scene.
She’s currently in Toronto attending a Clown Through Mask Workshop, which has given rise to an interesting series of posts. Friday’s entry describes two exercises, the first of which sounds like a variation on a meditation technique I learned years ago. At the ’05 Fringe I had a short discussion with a director (also from Winnipeg, although he’s moved here) who’s familiar with the structure and etiquette of using masks in the theatre; from Rachelle’s descriptive journals it sounds like this course is very much about teaching and preserving that tradition.
