Outstanding Overall Performance - Die Roten Punkte (Tobias and Bartholomew)

Outstanding Comedy - Joe: The Perfect Man (Crowning Monkey)

Outstanding Drama - Sorrow (The Vanishing Point)

Outstanding Concept - Inferno Sonata (August Assembly)

Outstanding Ensemble Performance - Crude Love (Big Smoke Productions)

Outstanding Solo Performance - Boat Load (Stars and Hearts)

Outstanding Original Work - Singing at the Edge of the World (Chanting Raven Productions)

Spirit of the Fringe - Petit Pont Productions

Outstanding Venue Technician “The Ron Award” - Ron Ward

Congratulations to our winners and thank you to all who participated in this years festival!

Describe the origin of the Ottawa Stilt Union.
I taught a workshop at the U of O in the winter of 2005 and then the next winter when my friend Jennifer Brewin was directing the Snow Show at the NAC we thought it would be fun to include a stilt element – Jennifer and I worked together for a long time at the Caravan Farm Theatre where she was artistic director for eight years and we used in stilts in their outdoor snow shows. So I brought six of my stilt students to do the snow show with me and while we were rehearsing we decided to call ourselves the Ottawa Stilt Union: no pay, dangerous work conditions, membership is its own reward… Then we made BEOWULF for the Magnetic North Festival co-produced by the University of Ottawa theatre Department.

What inspired you to get into stilt walking and that area of performance?
A theatre company called PRIMUS based out of Winnipeg – I sat in on one of their rehearsals in 1991 and saw stilts used for the first time in a theatrical (as opposed to a circus or carnival) setting. It was such a surprise – an awesome surprise in the true sense of the word. Several years later I went back to Winnipeg to apprentice with that theatre company and they taught me stilts and since then it has become my favorite way to perform and my favorite theatrical tool.

Describe the development of the current show (This is a very old story).
This show developed over the course of several months of work – I would ask the performers to make an action based on, for example, death. Then I take their actions and combine them into scenes. Originally I had more ambitious plans for this show, but ultimately I didn’t have the time and resources, so I left it without text and without a linear story, just as a physical expression of my ideas about war and death and the cyclical nature of our relationship to these things. In its next incarnation it will have a text.

How has the audience responded to your show? Do they want to get up and try it?
Some do. When I talk to audience members after the show they tell me all sorts of things that they saw and thought while watching it that are wonderful to hear – the great thing about a show with no clear story and no text is that the audience are free to make up their own story. And some people ask how they can learn stilts and I tell them that I’ll keep them informed of upcoming workshops if they give me their contact information, so here is my email address and if you are interested in stilts, either learning or booking a stilt performance, you can contact me: lastwood@look.ca

What is next for the OSU?
Well we have a show in Wakefield on Monday June 30th at 5:00pm on the field across from the post office on Valley road. Then we’ll be in Wakefield on Canada Day, in the parade and then doing a public workshop for people who want to give stilting a try. We have a show on July 24th in St. Laurent Park at noon – it’s through the City of Ottawa and you can find out about it through their website. Then we’ll be at the Lumière Festival on August 9th.

I’d also like to mention that the Ottawa Stilt Union is grateful for the support of the U of Ottawa Alumni Association, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa Arts Funding Program.

Previous interviews:
Interview with Alex Eddington (Old Growth)
Interview with Gemma Wilcox (Shadows in Bloom)
Interview with August and Frieda Strindberg (Inferno Sonata)
Interview with Shelley Liebembuk and Dylan Ryan (Raven for a Lark)
Interview with Vision Theatre (4Play: One-Acts by David Ives)
Interview with Weeping Spoon productions (Greed)
Interview with Brigette DePape (She Rules With Iron Stix)
Amy Salloway (Circumference)
The Absinthe Collective (A Leave of Absinthe)
Peter Hayes (The Tricky Part) and Greg Landucci (Mr. Fox)
Penny Ashton (MC Hot Pink / Busty Rhymes)
Keir Cutler (Teaching the Fringe)
Celeste Sansregret (Wonderbar!)
Jem Rolls (How I learned to stop worrying and love the mall)

What follows is the five questions with my Best Friend Forever.

Venue 1Alumni Auditorium- Sunday June 29, 10:00pm

Garkin Productions

"Without a Clue"

Venue 2 Academic Hall- Sunday June 29, 9:30pm

Silent “Quemb” Productions

“The Wedding Night”

Venue 3-Studio Leonard Beaulne- Sunday June 29, 10:00pm

Insensitivity Training

“Naked Famous People”

Venue 4- Arts Court Library- Sunday June 29, 9:30pm

By the Book Productions

“Wooster Sauce”

Venue 5- Arts Court Theatre- Sunday June 29, 9:30pm

Scheherazade Productions

“Making Deal With Gods”

There are no Best in Venue shows for Mercury Lounge or SAW Gallery.

The Hangover Breakfast at Elgin Street Diner is short term gain for long term damage. Be warned; this is a breakfast that will require multiple high impact, high cardio workouts to get through your system. That said, nothing will absorb the sins of the night before quicker than eggs, meat and poutine. That is not a misprint. A large pile of poutine sits on the plate where lesser restaurants would serve hashbrowns. It’s gluttonous, it’s self indulgent and it will prompt looks of jealousy from the tables around you when it arrives. Skip the coffee and get a Banana Chocolate shake as a beverage. The potasium in the shake will help you recover, and the ice cream in the shake will remind you how ridiculous it is to be eating poutine for breakfast.

If you want a healthier recommendation, you can ask. This breakfast is not indicative of the types of meals we eat in Ottawa, or even the other breakfasts at the Diner. This is a meal that you will start to regret with the first bite but not enough to stop eating. You’ve got all summer to jog, let’s live for today.

Brad here.  With the final two days of shows get started in an hour, I thought now would be a good time to reflect and encourage.  Yes, the shows you’ve heard are great are all going to sell out, but don’t let that discourage you from trying to get in.  The nice thing about the online ticket purchasing is that it only accounts for half the seats in a venue.  Even if you get shut out in advance, you can still get in by showing up early.

I’m proud of how active the community has been in reviewing the shows.  Special thanks go out to Brian and Ian who are more prolific on this site than I am with their reviewing.  Be sure to check out the show listings before you head down to the festival.  I tend to mistrust the shows that have only positive reviews.  I want to see that a few people hated it; it let’s me know that the artists were trying to say something.

Tonight is Volunteer Appreciation night in the tent.  If you see someone in a lime green shirt, give them a hug.  Also, tonight is the return of Eventbot to the tent.  For those of you who came down last weekend, this is a great way to record your thoughts and feelings about the festival to show up here at ottawafringe.com.  For anyone who is planning a conference or wedding, this column of technology would be a great replacement for the traditional guestbook.  I cannot stress enough how much the off button and the lens look alike.  Please treat it with respect.

More later.  See you at the tent.

In 1997, Grant Hadwin, a former logger with previous schizophrenic episodes, cut down the tree in the middle of the night. He was charged and meant to be tried, but disappeared in a kayak accident. There were many threats on Hadwin’s life.

Alex and his co-star Aura Giles met four years ago - he was her T.A. when they were both taking music at the University of Alberta. “Old Growth is my artistic way of dealing with this story. I came up with two fictional characters who become obsessed with this story; they read the articles about this, it’s an epiphany for them, and they eventually decide to go to the site where the tree has been cut down. So the story takes place on the site of the golden spruce in this bit of old growth forest. We imagine the tree is lying across the front of the stage between us and the audience, we’re playing flute and drums, speaking to this tree. As the hour unfolds, you realize why we’re there and what we hope we’re going to accomplish.”

“There’s a lot of other stuff thrown into the mix; my character is an amateur magician, and has become really fixated on shamanism. He thinks that by visiting this tree he’s going to trade in the trick magic for a magical ability to speak to the world.”

I ask Eddington about the genesis of his show. “I started thinking that this show should be an opera - Grant Hadwin and the Golden Spruce. And I might write an opera about it someday. I originally was going to make it a one-man show, a monologue from my perspective. But I’m working with the same director/dramaturge I worked with last year on the Fugue Code, Alison Williams. She insisted that I have someone else on stage with me, and insisted that person be a woman, and that that person should be the quiet counterpart for all the stuff I wanted to say. All the way along she’s been pushing to make Aura a more important character, the centre that holds my character together. She’s very important to the play; she says a lot less than I do, but what she says speaks volumes. She kind of saves me from myself at the end. We hope.”

After their first three shows in Ottawa, the cast went back to the rehearsal hall and made some cuts, which emphasized the importance of Aura’s character. Response to the show has been very positive on the ottawafringe website, and CBC’s theatre reviewer, Alvina Ruprecht, gave the show a glowing review. Alex isn’t letting it go to his head. “It’s hard to say yet; we’ve just started. This is a show with some pretty extreme violence in it, with some potentially polarizing views, but the way I write about it and the way my character speaks about environmental stuff is meant to be very common sense. Anybody could develop this argument themselves, you’re meant to do it with him as the play goes on. That this is a controversy I personally think is ridiculous, but I know it is. And that is why I needed to write this play. These things should be part of our daily discussions. So potentially some people are off-put by some of that stuff, by the strength of the message, by the violence at the end, there’s nudity in the show as well. But on the whole, I’m talking to people and people are seeming to like it. I think we have tweaking to do, to keep the balance between these characters. My character can be a little overwhelming.”

When people ask Eddington if he’s a tree-hugger, he says “No, but I do hug trees. This show is about taking those things and twisting them, and seeing that there is absolutely no reason there should be scorn for someone who cares about maintaining our ability to eat, breath, reproduce and live in our own habitat. That’s why I say it’s a common-sense argument. If people are feeling that way, I will never be able to change them. If the show is labelled as the eco-show, then I think that’s okay. It is. I’ll take that label. Not in the same way that Crude Love is, it’s a show about eco-terrorism. I think my show is a little more ambiguous about what it’s trying to say.”

Old Growth has just one more performance, tonight at 11:00pm in the Academic Hall.

Previous interviews:
Interview with Gemma Wilcox (Shadows in Bloom)
Interview with August and Frieda Strindberg (Inferno Sonata)
Interview with Shelley Liebembuk and Dylan Ryan (Raven for a Lark)
Interview with Vision Theatre (4Play: One-Acts by David Ives)
Interview with Weeping Spoon productions (Greed)
Interview with Brigette DePape (She Rules With Iron Stix)
Amy Salloway (Circumference)
The Absinthe Collective (A Leave of Absinthe)
Peter Hayes (The Tricky Part) and Greg Landucci (Mr. Fox)
Penny Ashton (MC Hot Pink / Busty Rhymes)
Keir Cutler (Teaching the Fringe)
Celeste Sansregret (Wonderbar!)
Jem Rolls (How I learned to stop worrying and love the mall)

Her play at this year’s fringe, “Shadows in Bloom,” is actually the fourth installment of a four-piece cycle, but the pieces stand alone - you don’t need to have seen the previous three to understand the fourth. “The very simple version of this play is it follows the life of Sandra - it’s a little complicated - I don’t want to give too much away. Basically, she goes through a marriage and a divorce. This is chapter four of a four-part series. I wrote each of them two years apart. In the first story, chapter 1, she’s eighteen; she’s now turning 30. So it spans a long time.”

I ask her if what we’ll see on stage is the canvas of her life. “There’s a lot of things that are autobiographical, for sure. Including marriage, divorce, exploring a new relationship. I play twenty characters - a little girl who grew up with her father, because her mother is a drug addict - that actually is true for me - and so there are definitely pieces in there. There’s a guy in one of my plays who’s actually an amalgamation of my father, and a boyfriend, and a friend.”

Does she break the fourth wall in her plays, by interacting with the audience? “Yes, I do. Not all the time. A lot of it is quite natural; there’s more audience interaction in this show than the previous ones. A lot of people have commented that really like that. They don’t feel too threatened. I don’t pull them onto stage or something weird like that. But I’d say there were some … sexy moments with the audience. There’s a sexy cabaret singer, so there’s some interaction there… I turn my audience into a garden, so I water them. With an imaginary water can.”

Wilcox often starts writing her plays by jotting down lists of things that she loves and hates about people, but she’s careful to include things specifically to challenge herself. “I don’t know if there’s anything I felt I can’t do; I like to try and challenge myself. I do alot of accents and I think I’m terrible at accents. The Canadian, I’m terrible at it. I can’t do Canadian, only the eh… and aboot. And American as well, but I’ll do an American as well, because I feel I’m not very good at it. I’ve got Scottish and Welsh, and Irish… a little bit closer to home. Obviously not everything gets in, but not because I feel like I can’t do it.”

“For as long as I can remember I wanted to be an actress. Since I was five, or something. I went to this great after-school drama club that was fantastic. I trained mainly from the age of sixteen and up. Around eighteen I worked with a teacher called Jonathan Kay, who’s actually done the Canadian Fringe circuit ten years ago. He’s a professional fool, who does completely spontaneous work. Often in order to help other performers to be spontaneous, he has people draw on their own personal experiences, and gets them to play all the different characters. It’s kind of Gestalt-type work, and he’ll get them to play the cat, or the table, or your mother… and what does the table say about the mother? So that’s where alot of my inspiration has come from - playing inanimate objects, and animals, with a simple set, very clean.”

Gemma got her indoctrination into what you have to do to put on a successful fringe show by touring ten years ago with UK-based comedy group the Weird Sisters as a stage manager. “That’s how I learned to do fringe. They were a very good theatre company and they did really well in the UK. We all trained with the same teacher. And I totally understand and learned how to do fringe, which is way beyond having a good show, from them. It’s not just about the promotional aspect, but having your stuff together.”

There’s a long pause after I ask her what she hopes people will take away from her show. “I personally like to be emotionally moved when I see a show. It’s a very simple gauge for me, and I’d love to be able to offer that to other people, through authentic performance that people can relate to. I just want their hearts to be stirred, to feel more than they did when they walked in. I feel that theatre has the opportunity to do that, because it’s a live interaction, to actually surprise us into feeling deeper than we thought we could.”

Shadows in Bloom, by Gemma Wilcox, plays tonight (Friday) at 7:30, and Saturday night at 11:00, in the Arts Court theatre.

Previous interviews:
Interview with August and Frieda Strindberg (Inferno Sonata)
Interview with Shelley Liebembuk and Dylan Ryan (Raven for a Lark)
Interview with Vision Theatre (4Play: One-Acts by David Ives)
Interview with Weeping Spoon productions (Greed)
Interview with Brigette DePape (She Rules With Iron Stix)
Amy Salloway (Circumference)
The Absinthe Collective (A Leave of Absinthe)
Peter Hayes (The Tricky Part) and Greg Landucci (Mr. Fox)
Penny Ashton (MC Hot Pink / Busty Rhymes)
Keir Cutler (Teaching the Fringe)
Celeste Sansregret (Wonderbar!)
Jem Rolls (How I learned to stop worrying and love the mall)