Chipped Off returns to the stage

Chipped Off returns to the stage

Local theatre group brings unique production to the Isabel.

By Anne Craig

June 13, 2017

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For the fourth year in a row, Chipped Off Performance Collective is welcoming the community to another unique production at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts.

Opening this week, the local theatre group, headed by Kim Renders, a professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music, presents Rhinoceros or What’s Different About Me? The play revolves around the 1959 avant-garde play penned by Eugene Ionesco, in which each of a town’s residents is replaced, one by one, by a rhinoceros.

Joining the production of Rhinoceros are (l to r): Amie Bello, Kim Renders and Hannah Smith.

The collective first took shape five years ago, when Queen’s student Dan Vena approached Renders about directing a play he wrote.

“He said he was tired of not seeing himself or his community represented on Kingston’s stages,” Renders explains about staging How to Bake a Pie in Ten Steps or less: A Transgender Fairytale in 2013.

This year, Renders decided to mount an adaptation of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, shortly after the election in the United States.

“The play provides the skeleton for the production but it’s the community pieces that actually fill it out,” she says . “It’s going to be a very eclectic show with many different components including multi-media, monologues and poems among other performance pieces.”

While the production brings together community members from 14 to 80-years-old, Renders says this isn’t just a local talent show.

“There are about 50 community members involved in the show, including a significant numbers of professionals providing the artistic support,” she says. “The show is also all about creating a voice for individuals from all corners of the community and bringing them together through artistic expression, to be a part of something bigger.”

The show runs Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, June 14-16, at 7:30 pm, and Sunday, June 18, at 2 p.m. Admission is $15.

Chipped Off Performance Collective believes in the power of art and performance to surprise, enlighten, provoke, astonish, challenge and change. We are committed to presenting work that speaks to the needs and concerns of underrepresented or marginalized communities in Kingston. Embracing a feminist and queer perspective at all times, Chipped Off Performance Collective works to grow and diversify the range of local artistic, cultural, and theatrical production available to Kingston audiences.

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