Small Wooden Shoe

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Antigone: A Clean House for the Dead Season
by Evan Webber
2011-12

Ismene: Antigone, our family has really serious problems.

Long time Small Wooden Shoe collaborator and co-founder of One Reed Theatre, Evan Webber has written an Antigone full of characters, living and dead, who want this story to end but don’t know how to make it happen. A story of a sister who wants to bury her brother despite the civil war it could reignite and an father who understands very well, but is also a leader. A story of generations and Western history.

We are interested in finding residencies, production partners.

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Perhaps in a Hundred Years
Summer 2011
created and performed by: Chad Dembski, Ame Henderson and Jacob Zimmer in collaboration with: Kilby Smith-McGregor

A performance about the future, optimism, and maybe being stuck in space.

Three friends sit in a small room waiting for their future to arrive. In the meantime they tell stories, sing songs, pass notes, and try to answer some questions. They are surprisingly optimistic, given the conditions outside, armed as they are with cheerful pop songs and over a millennium worth of utopias. Dancing, lip syncs and quiet beauty all fill the space as our heroes pass some time in the company of an audience.

Six years after their first collaboration Jacob, Ame and Chad return to the show they love and that nobody saw. 2004 styles.

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Upper Toronto – A science fiction design presentation.
On-going Development.

Small Wooden Shoe proposes the building of a new Toronto above the current one (imagine the CN restaurant with a ground level entrance) called Upper Toronto. When Upper Toronto is finished, all residents of Lower Toronto will move up and Lower Toronto transformed into some combination of intentional ruin, national park, and farmland.

This is, of course, a terrible idea. But it is a terrible idea that might let us imagine and perform possibilities and questions about what kind of world we might want if we could start fresh.

Made with geographers, urban planners, architects, engineers, marketers and real estate folk creating both the city and the show, Upper Toronto will be a developers’ presentation – a vital form of performance rapidly changing our world one condo complex at a time. We will follow a simple value – it must be a city we’d like to live in. No dystopias or technophile visions, but a livable human-centric city in the sky. The second phase will be the preparation and performance of the presentation, using scale models, PowerPoint, virtual tours and a fair dose of rhetoric. The project will be performed by appropriate experts rather than by trained performers.

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Life of Galileo
by Bertolt Brecht in a new translation by Birgit Schreyer Duarte with Jacob Zimmer
On-going Development.

Following on a momentous reading at Convocation Hall in Toronto when 35 or so of Toronto’s theatre, music and film community came together to read, Small Wooden Shoe wants to continue developing the translation and our production.

Life of Galileo is an ever-relevant story about the complicated relationships between power, history, individuals and freedom of thought. The new translation is simple and clear with a surprising humour and lightness. Brecht’s play pushes beyond the story of Galileo that we all know – that of a great scientist prosecuted by the ignorant Church and nobly recanting in order to write his ‘world-changing masterwork’ in secret – to question the legend that has emerged around this controversial figure. It proposes a social and ethical responsibility for scientists and intellectuals that remains radical in these days of venture capital science and economic justifications. Forcefully asking what the role of the intellectual and thinker is in relation to power and the status quo, Life of Galileo stands as a vitally important drama.

In these times, it’s easy to back away from big plays and big ideas though the presentation of this new translation we grapple with and re-imagine our theatrical and scientific traditions, and approach Brecht and Galileo for what they might tell us now, about our lives today. Life of Galileo thrills and excites with its examination, reflection and provocation on contemporary issues of authority.

While loyal to the text and the intent of the work, we will continue to work with a woman in the role of Galileo and other non-traditional casting and staging potentials as we bring together the spirit and approach of Small Wooden Shoe with the text of Brecht.

We are interested in Zimmer directing university productions starting in the 2011-12 season; translation support and publishing and conversations about future productions. (2012-). Script available on request.

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Small Wooden Shoe Reads Difficult Plays and Sings Simple Songs
Given our love of the staged reading and our belief that it is a viable form of theatre itself, and that there are plays that we can serve by reading them at stands. An on-going series in Toronto beginning Fall 2010. Suggest a play by emailing Jacob

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What Keeps Mankind Alive? A Small Wooden Shoe Christmas Concert
We sing songs from The Threepenny Opera. Tickets, in fact, cost three cents at the door. Singing the songs often as a choir and always with allowance for singing along, we hope to fulfill the function of singing together, like in Elf, when it causes the “Spirit of Christmas” to fly Santa’s sled (@1:30), with no need to sugar-coat, nor accept, the darkness of the songs. They are beautiful and horrible songs and so are perfect for singing together with friends and accomplices on December 29 at Buddies in Bad Times. Nothing wrong with that.

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IDEAS THAT ARE ONLY IDEAS

Sedition – an Small Wooden Show agit-prop about 1920′s Cape Breton labour activist J.B. McLachlan and his trial and conviction on charges of sedition. A performance about power, how it’s used and by whom. A performance about right now.

Live-to-Tape Podcast – the audience watches from outside a sound proof both as a radio show, sounding not at all live (think This American Life, Radio Lab, Spark) is performed for them. Complete with dance numbers and other things the radio audience can’t even imagine.

Variety Show – Satire, comedy, the Living Newspaper. A constantly changing show able to respond, in a bar, to the world around us in surprising ways.

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OTHER THINGS SMALL WOODEN SHOE DOES

Teach – workshops in creation, performance and debating for theatre artists and maybe anyone else. Single day or longer.

Meetings and conferences – Plan and facilitate people coming together to talk and do.

Talks – Jacob Zimmer (email) gives lectures and talks on performance making, collaboration, why things are worth thinking about and how art might be a useful way to do that. Other topics would be welcome also.

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