Theater of War: The Waste Land Project

Bryan Doerries, Kathleen Chalfant, Madhur Anand, A.F. Moritz, Iryna Shuvalova, Halyna Kruk, Alex Averbuch and Erin Robinsong

Theater of War: The Waste Land Project

Bryan Doerries, Kathleen Chalfant, Madhur Anand, A.F. Moritz, Iryna Shuvalova, Halyna Kruk, Alex Averbuch and Erin Robinsong

4:00pm

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Register to watch in person
Register to watch online

Poets from Ukraine, Toronto, and other parts of the world come together across borders and boundaries to present readings and reflections on each other’s poems as a catalyst for dialogue, healing, connection and community.

The Waste Land Project is a live, hybrid exchange to help frame a powerful, global discussion about some of the timeless themes of T.S. Eliot’s 100-year-old poem The Waste Land, including the impact of war on families and communities, environmental and societal collapse, colonial violence and pandemics.

Originally published in 1922, following the devastation of both WWI and the Spanish Flu, The Waste Land reflected the challenges of its time. With its clear present-day parallels, such as growing inequality, the war in Ukraine, the ongoing impact of the pandemic, and the ever-present threat of climate change, the poem resonates deeply with the challenges of the present moment.

This free, public event, presented by Theater of War Productions and Toronto International Festival Authors, will feature dramatic readings of selections from The Waste Land by prominent actors, followed by a group of poets, in person and on screen, reading poems in response to the poem, culminating in a guided audience discussion, facilitated by Bryan Doerries (Artistic Director, Theater of War Productions), aimed at cultivating healing, connection and community.

The Waste Land Project will feature readings by Madhur Anand (Canadian poet and professor of ecology and sustainability), A.F Moritz (poet laureate of Toronto), Erin Robinsong (poet and interdisciplinary artist), Kathleen Chalfant (award-winning actor), Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk (poet, translator, professor of Medieval Literature at Lyviv State University), Alex Averbuch (poet, translator) and Iryna Shuvalova (poet).

Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 25 at 4pm ET
Where: Harbourfront Centre Theatre & Online (via Zoom)
Duration: 90 minutes
This event is free to attend with registration.

This event is presented as part of the Here + There Project.

TIFA Logo   Theater of War Productions Logo   Bristol + Bath Creative R+D logo

Performance
Register to watch in person
Register to watch online

Poets from Ukraine, Toronto, and other parts of the world come together across borders and boundaries to present readings and reflections on each other’s poems as a catalyst for dialogue, healing, connection and community.

The Waste Land Project is a live, hybrid exchange to help frame a powerful, global discussion about some of the timeless themes of T.S. Eliot’s 100-year-old poem The Waste Land, including the impact of war on families and communities, environmental and societal collapse, colonial violence and pandemics.

Originally published in 1922, following the devastation of both WWI and the Spanish Flu, The Waste Land reflected the challenges of its time. With its clear present-day parallels, such as growing inequality, the war in Ukraine, the ongoing impact of the pandemic, and the ever-present threat of climate change, the poem resonates deeply with the challenges of the present moment.

This free, public event, presented by Theater of War Productions and Toronto International Festival Authors, will feature dramatic readings of selections from The Waste Land by prominent actors, followed by a group of poets, in person and on screen, reading poems in response to the poem, culminating in a guided audience discussion, facilitated by Bryan Doerries (Artistic Director, Theater of War Productions), aimed at cultivating healing, connection and community.

The Waste Land Project will feature readings by Madhur Anand (Canadian poet and professor of ecology and sustainability), A.F Moritz (poet laureate of Toronto), Erin Robinsong (poet and interdisciplinary artist), Kathleen Chalfant (award-winning actor), Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk (poet, translator, professor of Medieval Literature at Lyviv State University), Alex Averbuch (poet, translator) and Iryna Shuvalova (poet).

Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 25 at 4pm ET
Where: Harbourfront Centre Theatre & Online (via Zoom)
Duration: 90 minutes
This event is free to attend with registration.

This event is presented as part of the Here + There Project.

TIFA Logo   Theater of War Productions Logo   Bristol + Bath Creative R+D logo

Performance

Featured Authors

Bryan Doerries
Bryan Doerries is a New York-based writer, director, and translator who currently serves as Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions, a company that presents dramatic readings of seminal plays and texts to frame community conversations about pressing issues of public health and social justice. A self-described evangelist for ancient stories and their relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help individuals and communities heal from trauma and loss. He is the author of: The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today; All That You've Seen Here Is God; and The Odyssey of Sergeant Jack Brennan.

Read more about Bryan Doerries

Kathleen Chalfant
Credits include: Broadway: ANGELS IN AMERICA (Tony and Drama Desk nominations); RACING DEMON, DANCE WITH ME, M. BUTTERFLY. Off-Broadway: PROPHECY, FAMILY WEEK, VITA & VIRGINIA, DEADMAN'S CELL PHONE, SPALDING GRAY: STORIES LEFT TO TELL, WIT for which she won the Drama Desk, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Awards. Regional Theater: Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, Long Wharf Theatre, Hartford Stage Company, Mark Taper Forum, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Sundance Playwrights Lab, Mlwaukee Repertory Theatre, Paper Mill Playhouse and others. Film: DUPLICITY; THE PEOPLE SPEAK; THE LAST NEW YORKER; MURDER AND MURDER; BOB ROBERTS; FIVE CORNERS; JUMPIN’ AT THE BONEYARD; DREAM WORK; A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES; THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO; SIDE STREETS; RANDOM HEARTS; COMPANY MAN and KINSEY. TV: Mercy, Rescue Me, One Life to Live, Book of Daniel, The Guardian, The Laramie Project, Benjamin Franklin, A Death in the Family for PBS Masterpiece Theatre, Law & Order, House of Cards, The Affair. Select Awards: 1996 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance; 1998 Connecticut Critics Circle Award (Wit); 2000 Ovation, Garland, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards (Los Angeles) for WIT. Ms. Chalfant was Artist in Residence at the Weill College of Medicine of Cornell University for 2005 – 2006, was the Beineke Fellow at the Yale School of Drama in the spring of 2006, the fall of 2008, and the fall of 2010 and is a member of the Board of Advisors of MSF/Doctors Without Borders. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Cooper Union in June 2010.

Read more about Kathleen Chalfant

Madhur Anand
Dr. Madhur Anand is the author of the experimental memoir This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, the poetry collection A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes and several other literary works published in national and international literary magazines. She is a professor of ecology and sustainability at the University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.

Read more about Madhur Anand

A.F. Moritz
A. F. Moritz is widely considered one of the defining and most beloved lyric poets of his generation. His many honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize and an Ingram Merrill Fellowship. He currently serves as the 6th poet laureate of the City of Toronto.

Read more about A.F. Moritz

Iryna Shuvalova
Iryna Shuvalova is a poet and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine, based in Nanjing, China. She is the author of five award-winning books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells and Stoneorchardwoods (2020) which was named book of the year by Ukraine’s Litaktsent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. She co-edited 120 Pages of ‘Sodom,’ the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into 23 languages and published internationally. Her forthcoming academic monograph 'Donbas Is My Sparta': Identity and Belonging in the Songs of the Russo-Ukrainian War explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian society. She holds a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright scholar.

Read more about Iryna Shuvalova

Halyna Kruk
Halyna Kruk is a poet, translator, and Medieval literature professor at Lviv State University. She has been recognized as a significant voice in Ukrainian poetry since her twenties. She has published five collected volumes of poetry and two volumes of prose fiction. Her children’s fiction has been rendered into fifteen languages. She has won numerous Ukrainian and European awards for her writing.

Read more about Halyna Kruk

Alex Averbuch
Oleksandr (Alex) Averbuch, a native of Novoaidar, Luhans’k region, Ukraine, is a literary historian, poet, and translator. He is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. His poetry deals with the issues of ethnic fragmentation and in-betweenness, multiple identities, queerness, cross- and multilingualism, documentalist writing, and memory. He has organized numerous poetic performances and festivals, such as the International Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry. In 2022 he organized a series of bilingual (Ukrainian-Hebrew) literary events dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation, involving prominent Ukrainian and Israeli poets and translators. Currently he is compiling and editing an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation. He earned his PhD in Slavic and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto. Since 2022 he has been an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta.

Read more about Alex Averbuch

Erin Robinsong
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is the author of Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022), Rag Cosmology (Book*hug, 2017), which won the AM Klein Prize for Poetry, and several chapbooks including Liquidity (House House Press, 2020). Collaborative performance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident, Facing away from that which is coming, and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. Originally from Cortes Island, Erin lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. www.erinrobinsong.org

Read more about Erin Robinsong

4:00pm

Sunday, September 25

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