Performance

The 2016 UpStart Festival is the latest edition in the University of Waterloo’s bi-annual one-act play festival, and features three new scripts written, developed, directed and designed by Theatre and Performance students working under faculty supervision.

Join the Department of Drama and Speech Communication for a performance by visiting artist-researcher E. Patrick Johnson, The Beekeeper: Performing Black Southern Women Who Love Women.

• Written by Kevin Kerr​
• Directed by Andy Houston
• Set & Props designed by Madeline Samms
• Costumes designed by Mark Haasnoot
• Lighting designed by Arun Srinivasan
• Sound designed by Colin Labadie
• ​Music composed by Megh

Rarely performed and little known, the first play in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy is more than a simple preface to the more famous, substantive pieces that follow it.  Hugely popular in its day and featuring memorable characters – brave Talbot, Joan of Arc – deemed worthy of mention in accounts by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Henry the Sixth, Part I

The starting point for the performance is an investigation of the stock market - traditionally a place where probability, ritual and intuition collide.  Increasingly, it has become the domain of algorithmic approaches, where decisions are made at speeds far beyond human capacity to evaluate or intervene.  Eventually the scope of the project will expand to include other aspects of contemporary capitalist culture where algorithms are having an increasingly deterministic effect, where algorithms approach mythic status and shape all manner of relationships, notions of value and thought.

Whenever Jack Worthing slips away to London from his Hertfordshire estate he says he is going to see his (fictitious) wayward brother “Ernest”. Once there he keeps his privacy by calling himself Ernest - luckily so, as his beloved Gwendolen declares she could only love a man with that name!