Words & Vids

Nextfest 2010 Technation & Rise Up

Nextfest 2010 : Zombie Night & SMUT Cabaret

Spark a Revolution: SOMOV Episode 75

This week on SOMOV, we talk with the organizers and performers of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival’s fundraiser “Spark A Revolution”.
Watch video.

The Kitchen Sink Project

This is not news: The kitchen sink is the albatross of Canadian theatre, an invitation to the bleakest kind of voyeurism. This is news: a Megan Dart initiative called The Kitchen Sink Project, destined to redeem the object inquestion from its rap.
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Local Theatre Production Celebrates Edmonton’s Dead Zones

Will the curse of the Keys strike again?In this season of the scary, Catch the Keys Productions, specialists in unearthing secrets and exhuming ghosts, is poised to unfetter its fifth annual Dead Centre Of Town — and in an actual theatre this time.
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Dead Centre of Town Brings our City’s Hair-Raising Horrors into the Theatre

Edmonton may not seem like an obvious place to search for ghostly tales, but a little digging reveals the dark secrets of the city’s shady corners. Beth and Megan Dart, the sibling team behind the Edmonton-based arts organization Catch the Keys, are out to unearth these stories with Dead Centre of Town, a Halloween stage production filled with the “sometimes gruesome, sometimes horrifying stories of Edmonton’s past.”
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Homegrown Controversy

The Edmonton reading of Homegrown—directed by Spelliscy and featuring locals Michele Brown, Michael Peng, Jamie Cavanagh and Jason Chinn—is set to be focused on discussion more than outright protest: while Homegrown and SummerWorks’ funding seems to some like a cautionary warning of what could be in store for the arts in Canada, this reading is a chance for audiences to assess the work for themselves, instead of going by the buzz of hearsay and controversy.
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Smut Sounds: Nextfest’s Music and Nightclubs Embrace Their new Location

By now, Beth and Megan Dart have forged themselves a pretty indelible link to Nextfest. In the handful of years they’ve been involved (four for Megan; five for Beth) the pair, who together make up the arts production company Catch The Keys, have become entwined in the festival’s inner workings: but even with that in mind, this year marks a new watermark for involvement.
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The Dead are Restless

Theatre Garage’s inaugural Dead Are Restless party brought the most fervent Halloween lovers out in fully-costumed droves for an evening of performance and fun. Catch the Keys was proud to present scenes from Dead Centre of Town.
See the photo gallery.

 The Wrecking Ball

Catch the Keys’ Megan Dart talks Wrecking Ball
Wrecking Ball 2011: Putting Politics back into Theatre
Goldring’s Causes need to focus more on Edmonton

Dead Centre of Town: Dance with the Dead

For the past three years, Dead Centre of Town has dug around in Edmonton’s historical buildings and emerged with terror tales previously left entombed within their walls.
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A Travelling Haunted House: Theatre Troupe Unearths Ghostly Edmonton Stories

In this, the season of ghostly encounters, what could be more apropos than unearthing a buried chunk of forgotten Edmonton history, dusting it off and setting it in motion? Especially in a city devoted to demolition. This is what Catch the Keys Productions, specialists in theatrical exhumations, are all about in Dead Centre of Town, their annual theatrical dig and danse macabre in honour of Halloween.
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Triple Dare: Nextfest’s Niteclubs Return in Infamy

More than with the other curator jobs at Nextfest, running the NiteClubs carries certain notorious expectations alongside the title, expectations currently bearing down on Beth Dart. Not that she’s worried. Reassuming her role as, in her own words, the “Über-mistress” of the NiteClubs for a third straight year, she seems gleeful to be programming the trio of eclectic, multi-disciplinary parties scattered throughout the weekends of Nextfest to uphold their longstanding reputation for late-night malarky.
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NuMusic at Nextfest: aka the Big Fat Collaborative Chance

When NextFest Festive Director Steve Pirot approached me about adding new music to the NextFest lineup a mere two months before the 15th annual festival was scheduled to launch, his request was rather open-ended: there was once maybe a few years ago a new music event at NextFest that showcased works by emerging composers, he told me. I think there might have been someone who played a saxophone without a reed. Yeah. It was wild. Oh, and a marimba. There was a marimba. Think you could curate something like that?
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Art on Art: It’s a Process – From photos to score to movement piece, Art on Art wears its inspiration well

You hear artists throw around the word “process” all the time. “It’s about the process,” they might say when you’re wondering just why they went all the way across town to hang out in a strip club to research for a role. You might find that they get moody, or strange, or sometimes completely disappear from normal life during this “process.”
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