The Corner Written and directed by Jason Maghanoy

The Corner is a highly theatrical, violent, and ultimately touching story about friendship, and all of the different ways we can respond when we lose a friend to violence. Set in Toronto, The Corner follows friends Jon and Gabe from the classroom, to the club, to the arcade, as they cause trouble, meet girls and come of age together. When Gabe is shot by the police after an altercation between his friends and a group of white teenagers, it sets off a cycle of violence thatdevastates lives, and changes friendships forever. Written and Directed by National Theatre School of Canada graduate Jason Maghanoy, The Corner features some of the most exciting young talent of diversity in the city of Toronto, including Darrel Gamotin, Byron Abalos, Andrea Mapili, Edward De Juan and Brandon Coffey.

Big Stories, Little India presents a rare opportunity to hear first-hand narrative accounts about the Gerrard Street neighbourhood and to view contemporary art projects inspired by these stories. Initiated by SAVAC in partnership with [murmur], this project engages aspects of oral history alongside the process of art making. Artists Ambereen Siddiqui, Amin Rehman, Avantika Bawa, Brendan Fernandes, Rashmi Varma and Zaheed Mawani use a variety of approaches to visualize the stories of South Asian immigrants to the neighborhood. Launching on August 25th, Big Stories, Little India highlights the best-kept secrets of the Gerrard India Bazaar.

Flamenco Festival

Lionel and Alexandra Felix are following their dream. They have quit their day jobs and put up $70,000 of their own money to mount what they hope will become the annual Toronto International Flamenco Festival. Running Aug. 10 to 15, their festival is the first of its kind in Canada, and only the third in North America after New York City and Albuquerque, N.M.Flamenco festivals are very specific in nature, be they in France, England, Germany, Italy, Japan or Spain. Concerts by top-notch and emerging flamenco artists anchor the evenings, but the days are devoted to intensive workshops. Says Lionel Felix: “Touring flamenco shows are teasers. They come to town for a single concert, but leave nothing in the local market. A flamenco festival showcases top artists not only as performers, but as teachers who provide professional development and personal enrichment.

Hot and Spicy Festival

Part of the Rhythms of the World series, this savoury festival, sponsored by the palate-cooling Mexican beer Sol, is one event that heats up the summer at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Located in the waterfront district of the city, at Queens Quay and York, this interlude pays tribute to the tangy sensations of the Indo-Caribbean and South Asian cuisines. Five-star celebrity chefs from some of the finest restaurants show off their fusion recipes and edible delights, while the other senses stir with island rhythms of the ‘hot and spicy’ nations. The free admission includes musical concerts featuring Canadian and international artists, an Iron Chef competition, films and other activities.

Taste of Danforth

Taste of the Danforth, which occurs in the middle of August, has become one of the largest outdoor events in Toronto.

The first Taste of the Danforth was in 1994. It was organized as an event to celebrate Greek Culture and their cuisine. At first, the celebration was small, but because of positive feedback, it has quickly evolved into a huge street party and carnival where all restaurants, cafés, bars and merchants feature items and dishes at unbeatable costs.

As the Cirque du Soleil raises the curtain on its latest show, Kooza, Toronto audiences are set to take in a spectacle that returns the world-famous company back to its classic circus origins.

Kooza opens inside the Cirque’s blue-and-yellow Grand Chapiteau set up at Cherry Beach in Toronto’s portlands neighbourhood on Thursday, after having premiered in Montreal and Quebec City in the spring.

For the company’s 20th production, Kooza writer and director David Shiner wanted to give audiences a bit of a surprise by focusing the spotlight on some of the more traditional circus arts, including clowning and acrobatics.

The show will put about 50 circus artists from all over the world through their paces.

Composer Jean-François Côté has opted for a score featuring North American-style rock with some touches of Indian music. (According to Cirque officials, “kooza” is a Sanskrit word that roughly translates to ”box.”)

The new show is “fun and funny, light and open. The show doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s very much about ideas, too,” Shiner, a professional clown who has performed on Broadway, said in a statement.

“Kooza is about human connection and the world of duality, good and bad.”

Kooza is scheduled to run in Toronto until October 7.

When the vivacious, spirited and intelligent Sonia Vedi, hailing from a chaste Brahmin family of Indian origin, introduces a tall, dark and handsome young Jamaican-Canadian as her future husband, clichéd as it sounds, all hell breaks loose. SAWITRI THEATRE takes you on a behind-the-scenes look at this hilarious play studded with music and movement -Bollywood style. SAWITRI’s projects focus on issues regarding women’s mental health, violence against women, women’s search for identity, women’s freedom to make their own choices.

 Written and Directed by Jasmine Sawant, the play debuts Sunday, July 29, 2007 at Masala! Mehndi! Masti!

City Surf, founded by Ali Karbassi, is a set of self-guided mp3 tours for people who want to experience and interact with a city’s local culture - the audio-tours are full of rich local knowledge, hints and advice on where to go and not-to-be-missed spots, and even tips on where NOT to go. The experience is like having a local friend show you around their city and take you to those hidden local treasures that most tourists miss.

“For those of you who will be vacationing in the city,” there are some exciting events happening in Toronto.

Acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner’s (who gave us Angels in America) play Homebody/Kabul previews this weekend and opens on Monday at Berkley Street Theatre.

Set in London and Kabul in August of 1998, Homebody/Kabul explores life in Afghanistan, its history, its long troubled relationship with the West and its ongoing political and humanitarian crisis.

Homebody/Kabul offers a mature playwright’s compassionate, illuminating and provocative take on the East/West tensions which animate the lives of various inhabitants of Kabul. It’s a suspenseful and intriguing drama which bears witness to their struggles to make sense of lives caught in the cross-fire of an historical ordeal.

The story centers around the disappearance of an eccentric British woman (the Homebody) and the search for her by her husband and daughter in a Taliban-ruled Kabul. In their quest for the truth and closure, the lines between real and unreal, and the political and the personal become blurred and painfully ambiguous.

Homebody/Kabul is a dynamic portrait of lives in chaos which evokes a dangerous collision between cultures. Despite being set in 1998 , the play’s relevance and resonance has not dated.

The cast features Fiona Reid (recently Order of Canada inductee), Sanjay Talwar and Deena Aziz (both from Bombay Black), rising Canadian film star Kris Holden-Ried (Touch of Pink), Lesley Faulkner (Léo) and Michael Spencer-Davis.

Nightwood Theatre plays the one and only stage reading tonight at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. Maja Ardal directs.

By Aparita Bhandari
May 16, 2007

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/hamid.html

In Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a Pakistani man named Changez sits with a silent, anonymous American in a Lahore bazaar and recounts his time in the U.S. Over the course of the narrative, we learn of Changez’s rise from Ivy League student to globetrotting New York business star, as well as his decline — his failed romances with both the corporate world and a woman named Erica. The Sept. 11 attacks and the rhetoric surrounding them compelled Changez to leave New York and return to Pakistan. What are Changez’s true feelings about the attacks? What is he planning? Therein lies the novel’s tension.The London-based Hamid, 36, was born in Lahore. Like his protagonist, he attended Princeton University and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. Unlike Changez, he also studied at Harvard Law School, worked as a freelance journalist in Lahore and published his first novel, Moth Smoke, in 2000. A charming, bespectacled man whose accent hovers between posh Brit and upper-class Pakistani, Hamid sat down with CBC Arts Online to talk about life as a hyphenated Pakistani post-Sept. 11, the politics of art and his writing muse.

Q: Tell me about growing up in Lahore.

A: My teens were in the Zia years. In the 1980s, Pakistan was ruled by a dictator of the name of Zia ul-Haq. He was a big American ally, got billions of dollars of American money, and his mission was to [Islamicize] Pakistan. There was an atmosphere of repression when I was growing up. There were also — because of the Afghanistan war that Pakistan was allied with the Americans on, against the Soviets in the ’80s — all these bearded men with guns that had begun to appear. There was this flood of heroin into the city. Pakistan went from no real heroin addicts to a million heroin addicts in the space of the ’80s, because heroin was used to finance the Afghan war. Similarly, there were just weapons everywhere — Kalashnikovs and automatic rifles — that filtered back into the country from Afghanistan. The blowback, it was called. [All that] really shaped my teenage years.

Q: Were you always interested in writing, or was this something you discovered later on?

A: I discovered writing later on. I was always a daydreamer as a kid. As a little boy, I could sit on the branch of a tree and imagine the grass underneath me was the big sea, and I was on the prow of some ship. When I got to college, the idea of writing about Lahore, which I missed while living in America … I really enjoyed it.
(Random House Canada)

Q: Were you writing to keep Lahore alive in your mind’s eye?

A: It was more than that. It started off as missing Lahore, and then it became trying to make sense of this place I was going back to every summer, looking at it with my somewhat foreign eyes, but also as an insider. The reverse of which is what I did in my book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is looking at America, where I have lived for all these years, but as an insider. But also as someone with foreign eyes.

Q: How did The Reluctant Fundamentalist come to be a one-person narrative?

A: Well, it’s this dramatic monologue where this Pakistani man is speaking to this American man [and they are suspicious of each other]. I like that frame, because it parallels the way the world looks at each other. Pakistan, or the Muslim world, looks at America and the West, and wonders exactly that: Are you out to get us? Are you a bunch of completely aggressive maniacs or are you people we see on Seinfeld and Friends? Similarly, America wonders that about the Muslim world: Are you a bunch of terrorists, or just regular people with families and kids? That sense of ambiguity, or not knowing, I think, is what the frame allows me to capture.

Q: Is there some of you in Changez?

A: No, he’s not me, actually, at all. The big difference between me and Changez [is] by the time I was 30, I’d basically lived exactly half my life in America, and that’s when Sept. 11 had happened. I was a relatively more formed man. Changez is a very young man, almost a boy, of 22, who has lived his entire life in Pakistan. So his reactions are very different from my reactions. His vulnerability and sense of confusion is much more than mine. What he feels and [how he] reacts is very different from how I felt and reacted to things. But the worlds he lives in — the worlds of Princeton, of corporate New York, of Pakistan, even the trips to Chile and the Philippines and Greece — are things I have done, and so I write about things that I know. But I don’t necessarily write about myself.

Q: Where were you on 9/11?

A: I was in London, actually, when it happened. My ex-roommate worked in the World Financial Centre and my first reaction was to call her and see if she was alive, or if she was OK. I had just moved then. I didn’t feel particularly at home in London, I was missing New York already, and I thought, this is a disaster. In my heart of hearts I thought, please, don’t let it be Muslims who are responsible, but I thought probably it will be. And then I thought, the reaction is going to be terrible. I thought life for people like me was going to be hard because these two worlds are going to be increasingly split.

Q: How do you feel when you are called on to talk about the Muslim world?

A: [I have tried to] separate religion from politics, in a way. Changez’s experience in America is not primarily a racially defined one. He hasn’t really encountered heavy racism, maybe a little here and there. Nor is it a religious one. He’s not particularly religious, actually. It’s a very personal and political story, and [I tried to] separate the religious aspect … this is not about Islam; it’s not about Christianity, either. It’s about very real political differences. We tend to confuse the idea of religion with people’s very real and pragmatic struggles, and so I try to move away, really, from the conversation about religion.

If we want to talk about religion, we should talk about, how does one live one’s life in a just way, which is what religion is about. How does one make sense of the fact that one will die one day? How does one negotiate the relationship with God, and feel closer to the divine? Those are religious questions. But those are the things we are never talking about when we talk about Islam.

Q: Do you consider yourself a political novelist?

A: Some artists say the art and the political must not mix. That strikes me as a very peculiar concept, and it often feels very rooted in a Western, middle-class world, where perhaps politics is not that important. In much of the world, politics is life and death. How you live a life without politics is like saying, “How do you live without eating?” If politics means your house will be bombed by some other country and your parents will be dead, to say that your art won’t reflect that seems absurd. So for me, it’s impossible to write without thinking politically, even in the most quietly, non-political sort of settings.

Q: What do you hope readers will get out of this novel?

A: Well, if you get nothing else, I think the idea one should get is that things are complicated, and we have been living in a world where a belligerent simplicity is deployed. It’s us versus them. There’s an axis of evil. It’s Islam versus Christianity or the West. All of these things are absurd. We’re not talking about conflict between peoples or conflict between religions. We’re talking about simple politics and billions of people with differences of perspective running around inside it. What the novel tries to do is hold up a mirror to the reader and say, “Look, you’re complicated. The way you are reading this is complicated. And the characters are complicated. That is the world.”
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is published by Doubleday Canada and is in stores now.

Aparita Bhandari is a writer based in Toronto.