my battery is pure love

This is the first thing I see when I reach the Cell Biology Lab at the Hospital for Sick Children. After fumbling my way through security and fobs and confusing elevators, I meet the director of the lab in this beautiful lounge. This is actually what we spend the first 15 minutes talking about: the architecture, the way this vista and lounge area connects three floors of research in a communal space of air and light. Dr. John Brumell speaks about watching the Nobel awards, FIFA World Cup and the action of city in this space. How all of this space and light induces collaboration, new ideas, and quick problem solving. Dr. Brumell is Co-director at the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Centre at the Hospital for Sick Children, Head and Senior Scientist at the Research Institute for Cell Biology, a Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto, and the Pitblado Chair in Cell Biology at the Hospital for Sick Children He is also the father of one of my ...

Visiting a rehearsal is like stepping through the looking glass. It is a world of curiosities, peculiarities, frustrations and unripened temperaments, which are all part of the process of honing a wild idea into a wild performance. The resulting production or performance will have all these characteristics, sometimes latent, sometimes frothing over. But where you start is never where you end up.  This is why, of late, I love sitting in on rehearsals and observing before I see a production. And I was honoured when Jesse Dell and Jordana Deveau invited me to sit in on a rehearsal and write about it. The origin or spark of new performance work has a sweet evolution, no matter how painful or painstaking the process is. Sometimes it's a breeze, but those processes are whimsical anecdotes. The real function and work of art and art-making is living in the shit. Artist or not, we all experience that inescapable point of living in the shit. We work hard to create beautiful provocative, ...