Sheep No Wool Theatre Company
presents
presents
The Edward Bond Festival
June 13th - 19th 2012
June 13th - 19th 2012
Edward Bond - one of the greatest living playwrights of the 20th century - will be travelling to Canada for this 50th anniversary celebration and investigation of his work and ideas.
Edward Bond is one of the most important and prolific post-war playwrights. The Royal Court Theatre staged Bond's Saved in 1965. The play created a national scandal, which was instrumental in the abolition of censorship of the English stage, and established Bond as a major British playwright. He has written more than 50 plays, including Lear, The Sea, Bingo, The Woman, Restoration, The War Plays and The Paris Pentad. Many of his plays have attained the status of radical classics. Bond's influence on young writers is prodigious. The Abbey Theatre (Dublin) described him as the most influential English dramatist of all times.
Bond's plays are an MRI for the human condition. His body of work takes us deep into our hearts, minds, imaginations and social identities. Powered by his raw spare poetry, Bond’s drama dissects society and reveals to us our fear, delusion, brutality, and blindness. And as the abuses of authority and our own maladies are exposed, we are invited to exercise our imaginations to envision new possibilities. In doing so we encounter the potential for justice and social transformation. Bond’s work is a radical celebration of humanity, drama and the potential of the imagination to address the ills that plague us.
The focus of the Edward Bond Festival will be two-fold: the investigation of the evolution of Bond's vision of drama throughout his body of work and how this relates to present Canadian theatre practices, and an investigation of 'post-Stanislavsky' methodologies for interpreting and staging raw, spare, poetic texts.
The Edward Bond Festival is a four part festival: a Symposium, an Interactive Workshop of Bond's play Have I None featuring the collaboration of Bond himself, a Reading Series, and the Epic Student Showcase: a remounting of two epic Bond plays performed by the graduating classes of two of Canada's most prestigious theatre conservatories.
The Symposium- a discussion 'by practitioners for practitioners' of the works, ideas, methodologies and pedagogy of Bond's huge body of work. The symposium will feature expert panelists from across Canada, the UK and France.
The Interactive Workshop- a workshop presentation of Bond's dystopian play Have I None. In front of a live audience Bond will work with a director and three Canadian actors exploring Bond's theories, methodologies and pedagogy in a laboratory setting. Two open workshop days will be followed by a staged public workshop presentation.
The Reading Series- a reading series featuring a selection of Bond's work spanning five decades. The reading series will feature both some of Canada's most established theatre artists and institutions along with some of Canada's most exciting emerging and diverse theatre artists and companies.
The Epic Student Showcase- a remounting of Bond's Restoration by the graduating class of York University, and Bond's The Bundle by the graduating class of Ryerson University.
