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on January 13
The Bridge
Posted project update #5“Cool, successful men choose Star Condoms.”
The final post from Matthew's Liberia blog, dated January 12.
Arriving in the Point Four neighbourhood where the Liberian Dance Troupe meet, we pass a group of young men shouting at one another under a billboard that reads, “Cool, successful men choose Star Condoms.” One of the guys is bleeding from his left eye – blinded maybe – with more and more angry guys joining the melee as we drive by. We stop across from Sandra’s Garden, the bright green drinking hole that marks where we enter the Point Four shantytown to get to the LDT’s practice space. Walking down the path between the corrugated metal shacks, we come upon two LDT trainers stretching hide tight as they fix one of their drums. These men are the same age as those we saw brawling when we drove in, but instead of terrorizing their community, they volunteer every afternoon with the children of Point Four, drumming and teaching. Streaming from all directions, the young dancers arrive, each greeting Uncle Jake and I as they pass into the practice space, all wearing their game face. The LDT members take performing very seriously, and just as I’ve learnt not to talk to my friend Simon Bracken before he performs, so too have I learned not to try to start a conversation with even the 4yr olds of the LDT before a show – they are “in the zone.” There is a distinct difference between the kids of the Liberian Dance Troupe and the other kids one sees in Point Four. Where most are shy and stand staring at a distance, the LDT kids walk right up to visitors (of which there aren’t many), and extend holiday greetings. The kids treat their costumes and make-up with great reverence; it is a little unnerving to see three year olds so focused.
The LDT’s practice space is too small to hold the dancers and an audience, so all performances at present must be held outdoors. Where they hold these is in a sandy square smack-dab in the middle of the slum, where vendors move their tables of dried fish and oranges to the perimeter, and the siblings of the LDT dancers who’ve had advance warning that there will be a show take the choice seats on the steps leading up to a community church. LDT drummers then begin warming up, the rhythms they establish reverberate off the walls around us. More and more onlookers come, mostly women and children as in Buduburam, but also some men curious about the program. Pouring out of the practice space, the dancers get into formation behind the drummers, youngest to oldest, making final adjustments to their make-up and costumes. Then they advance, recite the Liberian pledge of allegiance, before 11 year old Kindness – whose incredibly commanding presence is reminiscent of my former schoolmate Kayla Deorksen’s, leads the troupe a cappella in a traditional Liberian song of welcome. And then they dance. In a drum beat, they transform themselves and the place; they are no longer some of the poorest people in one of the poorest places on the planet – they leave me dumbstruck. They are magnificent. A little boy sits beside me, his hands on his knees, flies swarming around the open sores all over his body. But you wouldn’t know how sick he is if you were just looking at his eyes, because he is being transported as he watches; he is elated.
With the money that we were able to raise, the Liberian Dance Troupe has achieved many things.
They have set up a bank account, completing the requirements to legally establish their NGO status.
Negotiating on Christmas day with their landlord (in the hopes of finding him in a generous mood), they have paid the rent for their practice space for all of 2012 – with the agreement that the landlord will raise the roof so the LDT can more safely perform their acrobatics.
Still dancing in outfits made in the Buduburam Refugee Camp, they have commissioned a tailor to sew one hundred new costume pieces, and repaired four broken instruments.
As mentioned in a previous update, all trainers received a small honorarium for the important work they are doing; these honorariums have allowed for an expansion of cultural operations, with LDT trainers now going into schools to teach over a thousand Liberian students about their heritage.
Schoolbooks and pencils have been given to each new recruit of the Liberian Dance Troupe, and six senior members have received scholarships for the coming school semester.
And finally, in the developing Caldwell neighbourhood, a fifteen minute drive from Point Four, two plots of land have been purchased. This land will one day be the site of the new home of the Liberian Dance Troupe.
Without the support the Liberian Dance Troupe received from our many generous donors, none of the incredible things they have achieved would have been possible. Having spent six weeks with the LDT has been truly inspirational, and the privilege of being able to see with my own eyes what the LDT is able to accomplish when they have support has been amazing. We will be working diligently toward raising the money to build the new home of the Liberian Dance Troupe over the coming year, but the land has been purchased and the costs for the LDT’s 2012 season have been covered, so from the Liberian Dance Troupe, Cahoots Theatre Company, Charlotte and Matt, thanks a whole hell of a lot!
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on December 21
The Bridge
Posted project update #4Single mothers are doing damage in Liberia as well
Post CommentA post from Matthew's blog, dated December 20th.
A young guy, maybe 20, stands in traffic holding a piece of wood he shoots at oncoming cars with like it’s an AK-47. Dodging vehicles on either side, he beckons other imaginary fighters to join him, screaming at the top of his lungs, taunting his enemies as they speed by. The kids who are too young to remember the war are laughing and shouting, but the adults selling plantain and peppers on the side of the street aren’t smiling. He isn’t playing, he’s a veteran reliving the fighting, who would have been 12 or 13 when peace was declared. Beyond seeing these young men who seem to walk in an in-between world, a visitor who did not google Liberia first before visiting might not know that a brutal civil war was fought here. There aren’t hard stats about the destruction the war wrought, but in a place with a population roughly that of Alberta’s I’ve heard one in five were killed, one in three were displaced, and just about everyone else lost all they had. Most people I’ve spoken to have described the war as senseless, and I’ve only heard of two rules being observed. The first was that when Liberia’s national soccer team the Lonestars played, a ceasefire was respected by all sides. The second rule was that the Club Beer Factory, Liberia’s national brewery, was respected as haloed ground by everybody. One of the few other institutions to be left relatively unscathed was the country’s national cultural centre, which was built in the 60′s and showcased the incredible cultural diversity of a country so tiny. The centre though did not survive long after the war. In shady backroom deals, and to the dismay of many Liberians, the beachfront property the cultural centre was built on was sold to an American billionaire so he could build a 5 star hotel. Touted as an exciting step forward, the hotel’s opening was attended by such dignitaries as Canada’s Governor General Michele Jean, who somehow thought Liberians would be excited about a new hotel that virtually none of them could afford to stay in(just to sit on the beach costs $10, this effectively keeps most Liberians away). A new centre is being built slowly six years after its predecessor was demolished, we drove by the site on our way to see a member of the LDT James David’s mother’s land she had recently purchased on the outskirts of town. James read the lead role in the workshop Cahoots had of my play SIA here in Monrovia, was the MC at Sandra Lefrancois’s naming ceremony two days later, and was helping workers lay the foundation for his new house a few days after that–oh, and he’s making all the cards for the LDT donors, because in addition to being an amazing dancer with plans to become a doctor he’s also a gifted drawer . Not bad for a 15yr old. James’ mother Edna Martha Hutchinson has raised James and his sister alone. While many Liberians in the Buduburam Refugee Camp were hoping and waiting to be resettled in the United States or Canada during the war, Edna went about bettering herself in any way she could. Here in Monrovia she now runs a vocational school with several hundred students, the instructors she employs teaching everything from plumbing to interior design, and she is the only Liberian I’ve met so far who owns her own car. Like another single mom I know named Jess Carmichael, she’s pretty much kicking ass on all fronts(eat your heart out Anne Coulter). In two days James and the workers had laid the foundation for the new house, which is about the stage where the building of the new cultural centre is at, so needless to say it doesn’t seem like it’s an urgent priority. A man who is approaching the cultural rehabilitation of his country with great urgency is the LDT’s Emmanuel Lavelah. The same conditions that existed before the war still exist today; the vast majority of Liberians live in abject poverty, with children and young people running wild in the street. Health and Education are important, but Lavelah sees Culture as just as vital. Being a so called cultural worker from Canada, this assertion is tough for me to even swallow, but in the Liberian context it makes sense. Giving the kids an appreciation and love for all the different regions and tribes of their country means they are far less likely to fall into historical rivalries; members of the LDT perform different dances from tribes that were mortal enemies during the fighting. But what the LDT training also does is instill unwavering confidence in the kids, their socio-ecomomic status being irrelevant, as they are first and foremost proud Liberians regardless of what’s in their pocket. This is incredibly important, because even if every child in Liberia goes to school(which they aren’t), they will still graduate into a reality where 85% are unemployed. Meaning that even if people are educated, when the UN soldiers pull out, it won’t be too hard for Warlords to foment discord. In many ways the LDT recruits kids in much the same ways Warlords in the past did, targeting the most underprivileged, giving them a ‘family’ to be a part of when it seemed that no one else cared. And the training the LDT provides also gives rise to children who are forever changed, but rather than teaching them how to assemble an assault rifle and cutting and taping drugs into them so that they feel they are powerful, the LDT teaches the young ones to love their country and themselves, making them powerful for real. Since leaving Buduburam, Emmanuel Lavelah has been running the creative side of the LDT on no money. After we were so successful after our first stage of fundraising in the fall, I figured that if there were any funds left over after we’d purchased the land, Lavelah and his trainers would want some small compensation for the incredible work they’ve been doing. This hasn’t been the case. Instead, with the small compensation of roughly $50 we have been able to provide each trainer, Lavelah is expanding operations. Last week he and the other trainers began visiting four schools where they will be introducing Liberian culture, in addition to the work they do with the core Liberian Dance Troupe. In January, the LDT leaders will go from training 40 children to training over a 1000. Now that’s good news for the holidays I think.
Next week in my last update from Liberia I will detail all we have been able to achieve with the generous donations to the LDT we were so fortunate to receive.
Compliments of the season from the Liberian Dance Troupe!
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on December 12
The Bridge
Posted project update #3Alarming Developments in Liberia
A post from Matthew's blog, dated December 6th.
Hello all,
Nobody seems to swim in Liberia, even though there is water everywhere. On a day trip outside of the city, friends Emmanuel and Wiahdee took Sandra and I to a place called Blue Lake. Almost immediately after we had arrived, Emmanuel wanted to leave, terrified when Wiahdee and I stepped out on a roughly hewn kind of diving board. In the mid-90s, Emmanuel had been President of his high school in Monrovia when he wrote an article in the student newspaper critical of then Liberian President Charles Taylor. Taylor sent his head of security, Emmanuel was pulled from school — literally — and was taken to a secret location where he was held and tortured for two weeks. He was eventually released, but not before the head of security took a bowie knife and ran it down the length of Emmanuel’s left arm. Escaping with Wiahdee, his high school sweetheart at the time, he was whisked away by a Ghanaian gun boat to Ghana where he would marry Wiahdee and live the next 12yrs as a refugee. Others who fled Monrovia on boats during those chaotic times were not so lucky; Emmanuel and Wiahdee both lost family when boats on which their relations were fleeing sunk in the Guinea Basin, which is how Emmanuel developed his fear of water. So we stuck to the shore, with me and Emmanuel’s kids skipping stones while Sandra went to record jungle sounds. The lake was full of fish but nobody was fishing; I thought of returning with gear but decided against it; the urge to capitalize on untapped natural bounty is as strong in me as it was in white guys who have come to Liberia before me; I did not think about catching one or two fish, I planned to catch several hundred under the auspices they would be for the Liberian Dance Troupe.
The Liberian Dance Troupe have not asked for fish. They actually haven’t asked for anything. Other than telling Jake and Lavelah who run the troupe, we have not yet disclosed that we’ve come with support for the whole group, as we are first working to come up with a list of exact costs for the Liberian Dance Troupe’s short and long term needs. The money which people across Canada and the United States donated so generously during our first stage of fundraising may go further than we initially estimated. This is due in large part to the fact that the Liberian Dance Troupe is an arts oganization. While they do as much, if not more than any of the many other NGOs in the Monrovia area, they do so with absolutely no money. They, like arts organizations in Canada, are used to being undervalued, marched out for big country celebrations, and then forgotten (the Olympic celebrations in Vancouver come to mind, after which arts funding in British Colombia was put to the sword). For this reason, they are able to squeeze the maximum value out of every dollar they are given. Even if this means standing in the rain for seven hours at government offices to get their Article of Incorporation, having refused to pay the equivalent of 15 cents to corrupt officials who would have processed their request immediately. In addition, the Liberian Dance Troupe’s forty new recruits are mostly street kids, which makes it challenging for the goup to be taken seriously.
Last year, the Liberian Dance Troupe signed up to perform at an event showcasing cultural dancers. When they went to take the stage though, event organizers and security guards would not let the kids through, thinking they had mistakenly been put on the bill. Lavelah tells the story laughing, but apparently the kids actually fought their way onto the stage. After they had finished dancing, with the audience on their feet, Lavelah overheard the Liberian Information Minister ask the lead organizer, “Who are these guys!?” The lead organizer, whom the troupe had literally had to do battle with before they performed, proceeded to take full credit for the troupe.
At present, the Liberian Dance Troupe consists of two main groups, the 40 new recruits from the Point Four neighbourhood in Monrovia who have been dancing for over a year now, and the senior members who Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and I met when we were in Ghana at the Buduburam Refugee camp. To think that the senior LDT dancers used to be like the illiterate street kids of Point Four is tough to imagine. In my first update, I mentioned a Lutheran Church that was the site of a massacre in the early 90s. That same Church has a school attached to it now, and one of the senior LDT dancers is in grade twelve there. Of the 104 grade twelve students, Christina N’tow is the only student on the honour roll, and is something of a school superstar. Test scores are posted on the wall, and when we went to visit Christina, several members of the school’s administration excitedly pointed out her scores as if she were an elite athlete and they were showing off her medals. After school, she travels to Point Four, an hour by shared transport in the opposite direction of her home where she helps teach the new recruits and is in charge of pouring them juice. She then takes the two hour trip back home to do her schoolwork. She is one of those disturbing overachievers like my little sister Heather, but among the senior LDT members she is not an anomaly. Virtually every one of them is at the top of their class, they are school presidents, radio hosts, cultural ambassadors, parade leaders, corruption whistleblowers; where many girls their age are prostituting themselves, they are leading workshops about pregnancy and HIV/AIDS awareness, and taking part in anti-sexual violence campaigns. They have all come from different backgrounds and different tribes; the only through-line in these teenagers’ lives is that they have all been involved with the Liberian Dance Troupe starting at a young age. In 2009, a number of my schoolmates and teachers from the National Theatre School of Canada helped provide scholarships for some of the senior LDT dancers; Philip Nozuka, Will Greenblatt, Aley Ordolis, Sam Wan, Pippa Mackie, Partick Lundeen, Sue Williams and Jill Kiley among others. I am still having mothers come up to me to thank us for the school fees we were able to send two and a half years ago, because rather than prostituting themselves or making small money in the gutters, their sons and daughters are planning to attend University to become teachers and doctors. Christina won a small award for being her school’s top student. Rather than spend the money on herself, she is instead using the award money to transport her classmates and herself to another school across town with a functioning Chemistry Lab, which her school doesn’t have. Chemistry is her favourite subject, and Christina’s idea of a good time is to put her theoretical knowledge about the periodic table to the test. The Liberian Dance Troupe is scary. And in the slums of Point Four, I am alarmed to report that they are raising another overachieving army.
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on December 6
The Bridge
Posted project update #2"Have Survived First Week in Liberia"
A post from Matthew's blog, dated November 28th.
Hi all,
My first week in Liberia has been an exciting one. I arrived cautious about the political situation as international media reports had been describing a place near boiling. Having already paid the hotel for my first week in the Monrovian district of Sinkor, I was a bit alarmed when the U.S State Department issued a travel warning for that same district on top of the one already issued for Liberia a couple days before I took off. Landing at the airport, we taxied past the U.N fleet of helicopters in Liberia; the civil war ended in 2003 but the country still hosts the largest per capita U.N Peacekeeping contingent on the planet. The airport was small, reminding me a bit of the Greyhound station in Saskatoon, with a luggage belt that someone had programmed at turbo speed. With their baggage whizzing by, tired travelers were forced to dive in and out of the crowd to retrieve their bags, lest they never be seen again. Greeting me at the arrivals door were my friends Emmanuel and Wiahdee, with their children Robert, Emmanuel Jr. and Patricia, who I met in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana. Driving into the city on a 50km stretch of road that for a couple years was considered the most dangerous in the world, four year old Patricia talked animatedly non-stop in my ear the whole way in Liberian English, with me nodding and smiling but understanding nothing.
During the war, fighters would point their AK’s at the road and unload full clips into the asphalt, creating defensive potholes. Driving around the city over the next couple of days, we weave around these reminders, Emmanuel pointing out the various sights; the Presidential Residence which the current President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf refuses to reside in due to the horrific record of her predecessors; the never completed Defence Ministry which looks like a recently unearthed Romulan Battleship; the fortress like compound of former Liberian President Charles Taylor – currently on trial for war crimes – where his family still lives; the Lutheran Church where in the 80′s over 300 women and children from Nimba County (where Emmanuel’s family is from) were massacred by former military ruler Samuel Doe; a housing complex being built by the Chinese government where the Liberian kids shout hello at me in Mandarin thinking I am Chinese contractor. Not all the roads are in disrepair though, as the government has been slowly rebuilding them; we drove on one good stretch for quite some time before passing a few young guys with pick-axes making a fresh pot-hole (so that cars would be forced to slow down in front of their shop stalls), but then another two minutes further along we came across what looked to be a father and son fixing another pot-hole seemingly of their own volition, so go figure. Of all the roads though, the worst we encountered in my first few days here was the one leading to my hotel. Fortunately, city workers came and repaired the road with fresh dirt. Unfortunately, that night it rained, meaning that to leave the hotel the next day meant I had to walk through a sea of red mud. With my shoes caked in the stuff, I stopped to wipe some of it off, but managed to do so atop a hill of red ants. Going to meet Liberian Dance Troupe President William (Jake) Jacobs at the Royal Hotel Restaraunt for the first time, we greeted each other, when I realized mid-Liberian handshake that a red ant had made its way up my pant leg. While I sat and discreetly tried to kill the thing, he went and said hello to a woman sitting beside us. The ant dealt with, Jake sat down, informing me that the woman he had said hello to who had just left was Leymah Gbowee, the recent co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The media accounts of the situation here in Monrovia, I have learned, were completely overblown. Emmanuel and I walked through the supposed centre of the danger zone, but instead of encountering riot police and crazed former fighters, we encountered dancers. Led by Wesley, a young man who was trained by the Liberian Dance Troupe while living as a refugee in the Buduburam camp in Ghana, we happened upon his group beginning a performance. At first there were twenty children gathered to watch, but as the sounds of the drums grew, there were soon over a hundred.
Wesley gets things going with a quick series of steps, encouraging the drummers to redouble their efforts, then claps and nails a back flip. Grabbing a drum, Wesley then leads the other musicians, establishing a frenzied rhythm. Other dancers take the centre, there are familiar steps and sequences that I remember seeing in Buduburam, but these guys have a certain madness to them that the kids in Ghana didn’t have. Wesley was a refugee, but many in his group are former fighters, and there is a palpable fierceness to their performances. You see these young men, the former child soldiers, standing or walking in the streets. They’re identifiable, even when in a crowd, by their vacant expressions. As they dance though, this vacancy leaves them, and the memory of what was done to them and what they did to others seems to come screaming out of their every movement. Having spent a lot of time around dancers (my friends Alexis McKeown, Carly Roguski, Carmen Norris, Tedi Tafel and my brother Aaron), I have had the opportunity to watch quite a bit of dance. None of what I’ve seen in the past could I characterize as being frightening, but this is. It is as scary as it is breathtaking. What I have no stomach for, though, is the self-mutilation. An old man hands off his drum then takes a partially shattered Heineken bottle, breaks a piece off, chews, then swallows it, bowing after a bizarre sort of curtain call.
Thankfully the Liberian Dance Troupe do not practice self-mutilation, I can only imagine how my grandparents would react if they learned that their donation went toward teaching children how to ingest glass. Having met with Liberian Dance Troupe leaders Jake and Emmanuel – where I learned that the troupe has met every single day except Sundays for nearly a year with no financial support – we arrange for me to visit the group at their new temporary home in the Point Four neighbourhood. The group re-launched itself last April, with Emmanuel and Jake personally approaching NGOs around Monrovia, as well as Unicef and UNESCO offices to deliver invitations to their show. The Buduburam Camp was the largest Liberian refugee settlement during the war, and as such, was one of the country’s largest stationary populations. Lauded as a model refugee camp in terms of security and governance, the Liberian Dance Troupe was one of the camp’s most celebrated successes. Of the 250 NGOs and various UN agencies that have set up shop in Liberia (a country with a population roughly the size of Alberta’s) since the war ended, none of them thought to consult the Liberian Dance Troupe about how they were so successful. And not a single representative from any of the NGOs or UN agencies was in attendance at their inaugural performance in Liberia. However a single Senator did make the show and his enthusiasm gave the group some hope, even though the Liberian government has no funds currently allocated to the Arts. Hearing this, I prepared to visit a depressed and deflated version of the Liberian Dance Troupe’s former self.
Arriving in Point Four, the neighbourhood where the troupe is now based, I followed Jake into the shantytown through a maze of dirty paths and gutters. Like in Buduburam, we began to hear the drums as we drew closer to the Liberian Dance Troupe’s practice space. Rounding a bend, I saw a bunch of people clustered around the door to a tiny ramshackle building with a low roof – about twice the size of my living room in Toronto. Those watching at the door made way for Jake, and as we walked through the door, we were greeted by 40 cheering kids who were absolutely givin ‘er. In the stifling heat of the jam packed room – which was more like an oven than a studio – we watched as the newest recruits of the Liberian Dance Troupe performed incredible dance and acrobatics to the beating drums of their volunteer instructors. Flips and manoeuvres that required a dancer or four to stand on someone’s shoulders had to happen on the south side of the building where the roof was a bit higher. Ignoring the fact that there were forty kids dancing ecstatically in very close quarters, there were also two wooden pillars and a few toddlers that the dancers had to dodge and jump over. I don’t mean to describe the session as chaotic, because it wasn’t. There were snot nosed four year olds dancing like professionals, seven year olds with torn shorts and shirtless nailing incredibly complicated sequences as if they were on Dancing With The Stars. I took forty pictures and they’re all terrible, my hands were shaking and I was having a minor asthma attack from all the dust that was being kicked up. What I saw in the former fighters a few days earlier was frenzied and impressive, but it was also tortured. What I saw in the kids of the Liberian Dance Troupe was unmitigated joyful expression, the power of which left me trembling for hours afterwards.
Cahoots’ General Manager Sandra Lefrancois has now touched down, and needless to say we are both very excited about the coming days.
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b current on December 7
please bring me back 2 shark's cones, matt (stacked of course!)... well, mybe just intact.
i love seeing u there/thru ur eyes/thru ur words; thanx for the update & keep kool.
azm
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on November 22
The Bridge
backed a project
5 Countries, 6 Births, 7 Babies by diana paul
Filmed in Guatemala, Costa Rica, France, the USA & Bermuda, 6 women show what it takes to have a simple, satisfying birth experience.
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102% funded $15,885 pledged
- 160 backers
- Funded Nov 24, 2011
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on November 10Funded!
The LDT's Inaugural Season by The Bridge
Conceived during wartime in a Ghanaian refugee camp, the LDT are back in Liberia...and hope to produce their first full season.
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103% funded $7,248 pledged
- 72 backers
- Funded Nov 10, 2011
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on November 5
The Bridge
Posted project update #1Thank You
For backers only
If you’re a backer of this project, please
log in
to read this post.
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Tedi Tafel on November 5
Can't wait to receive updates when you can. All the very best to everyone involved!!!
Tedi
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on September 20
The Bridge launched a project
The LDT's Inaugural Season by The Bridge
Conceived during wartime in a Ghanaian refugee camp, the LDT are back in Liberia...and hope to produce their first full season.
- $7,000 funding goal
- 11/10/2011 Funding Ended
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on September 12
The Bridge
Posted project update #4Rewards!
For backers only
Post Comment
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on August 29
The Bridge
Posted project update #3That's a wrap!
Post CommentGreenland, the focus of your generous support, closed its FringeNYC run Friday, August 19th. Hundreds of people, many of whom braved heavy rain and wind, made their way down to Greenwich Village to catch our production of Nicolas Billon's award-winning play. Greenland made the TimeOutNY and Broadway World FringeNYC shortlists, was a Critic's Pick in Backstage Magazine and was featured in the New York Times as part of their Getting Noticed at the Fringe series for the wonderful artwork provided for the show by Jonathan Bartlett.
The post-script, however, was still being written as late as yesterday.
This past Friday, the New York Daily News' Joe Dziemianowicz declared in his Fringe wrap-up that our production "helped reaffirm my faith in stage samplers." This was followed by the best possible validation for Greenland from FringeNYC itself when the festival honored Nicolas with an Overall Excellence Award for Playwriting yesterday afternoon.
Critically acclaimed and award-winning. Not bad in a year that would see the Fringe end with two days of cancelled performances due to Ms. Irene.
With your help, we gave Fringe audiences what they wanted and raised the profile of an emerging (and silly-talented) Canadian playwright. Mr. Billon's work continues to earn raves north of the border and we can't wait to see what comes out of his sleeve next. As for the Bridge, look out for updates throughout the next couple of months as we build what is promising to be an exciting 2012 season. We're so proud of the production we mounted at this year's New York Fringe and honored that you, dear supporters, gave us the chance to continue the artistic dialogue we started in 2004.
Many thanks to our amazing cast and crew who rehearsed on both sides of the border and helped Greenland melt New York.
All the best,
The Bridge
The Bridge
New York, NY
Founded in 2004, The Bridge Theatre Company is a New York City-based organization that produces, workshops and champions new Canadian work. Dedicated to cross-border development between Canada and the US, the company examines the relationship between ... view more
thanx for the vicarious journey, matt
let me know when the work begins again this side toward supporting funds for the continuous work on ldt's side of this more gorgeous world!