Review: Humans

(photo credit: Jaclyn Turner)

The Breath of Theatre
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois


Tonight, when the audience arrived to pack the house for the premiere of Tableau D'Hote's production of Daniel MacIvor's Humans, the weather was mild...almost balmy. When we left the theatre, there was a raging snow storm, visibility was damn near nil and the wind was mocking us all.

Oddly, the weather was like a mirror reflection of the evening I had just gone through at the Segal Centre. Inside the stories MacIvor tells began in a gorgeous explosion of energy taken up by the ensemble of ten—a flurry of stage-movement, dance and mime, a fable told about sheep and lions—and the evening ended with a beautiful, crystalline whisper of pure theatricality.

CharPo's Picture of the Week, February 3, 2011

Tableau D'Hote's production of Daniel MacIvor's Humans which opens at the Segal Centre, Saturday (photo credit:  Jaclyn Turner)

The Upstage Interview: Director Liz Valdez

Today we are beginning a new CharPo weekly feature, fruit of our partnership with Upstage: Theatre on Radio (CKUT). Each week we will be sharing with you the highlights of an interview done by an Upstage contributor with one of Montreal's theatre practitioners.

CKUT Upstage contributor and CharPo senior contributor Sarah Deshaies conducted an interview with Director Liz Valdez. Below is an abridged version of the interview transcribed by Estelle Rosen, CharPo Editor-in-Chief.

Humans is a collection of fifteen short stories. Asked to sum up Humans

into a  couple sentences, Valdez sees it as a look into the human spirit…the human condition, the thing that links us all, encompassing the dark or light that lives within human nature. There is beauty in the fact we have both dark and light in us.