Archive for the 'News' Category

Mozambique

Shakespeare Link Canada is heading back to Mozambique for the 5th time and we need your help!

SLC works with the Mozambican dance company, Montes Namuli to use Shakespeare’s text alongside traditional Mozambican song, dance and storytelling to create HIV/AIDS and gender equality awareness plays. This year we will be adapting Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. We are excited to return after a two year absence and know that our being there is so very important to our Quelimane partners.

During our time on the ground we will continue our work with the PEDRA program (a girls after school program) playing theatre games and helping them to develop their voices and confidence.We have witnessed first hand that our work with them is a positive life changing experience at a crucial age and time in their lives!

We will be doing some great good with outstanding theatre artists from around the globe. This year 8 theatre artists will travel from Toronto, Stratford, Chicago, London (UK) to build this bilingual production. Think you might want to help change the world? We are looking for folks willing to donate to this project.

*HIV / AIDS is rife in this country, with an estimated 13% of the population living with the disease, approximately 110,000 people die from HIV / AIDS and related illnesses in Mozambique every year. Nearly 32% of the population where we will work, lives with HIV/AIDS. In addition to this, gender inequality is severe and women are held with much less respect than we can imagine. It’s time to make a difference.

Join us, if you can, in supporting The Africa Project: Dance with Us, Not with AIDS.

SLC Needs Your Help to Get to Mozambique…AGAIN!

Friends and Supporters of The Africa Project: Dance with Us, Not with AIDS

A warm hello to all of you with the hope this finds you enjoying this amazing spring weather. So much has happened at SLC since our last letter to you: we’ve had a new website built, changed our “home” location, became a registered charity, returned to Mozambique with an extraordinary team (including 8 fantastic recent Humber theatre grads) to make a bilingual production of Romeo and Juliet, made a show for the Veterans’ Centre at Sunnybrook Hospital and returned to the rehearsal hall to continue work on Romeo and Juliet – Signing the Bard (seems to be the show this year!). We are hoping you have had the chance to read the newsletter that we sent out back in the fall. If not, it is posted on the website and that will bring you up to date on all of our news.

And now, we find ourselves at “that time again”. It’s the time of the year that we turn to you, our constant supporters, to help us to return to Quelimane to grow this amazing project. This year’s trip, scheduled to depart June 21st, will see a reduced team with the task of planning for our most ambitious project yet scheduled to take place in the summer of 2011. Stay tuned for details on that. Karen and Bill, our long time hosts and “angels” on the ground in Quelimane are leaving their post and returning to Canada. They warned us this time would come and have stretched their stay longer to help accommodate us. This trip will help us set up the logistics of accommodation, transport, planning and contacts to facilitate our future work. While we are there this summer of course we will also spend time with Montes Namuli and with the PEDRA girls, and time providing, we will finally venture outside of Quelimane into the mountains to meet the rural PEDRA girls (the program now has 800 girls in total).

If you are able this year to help us, we would be very grateful. As we have said in years gone by everything helps – no donation is too small. Trasie, our web designer, has made it really easy to do online donations – one click takes you there. Simply visit www.shakespearelinkcanada.ca and you will be directed to CanadaHelps or Paypal. Of course, we still welcome cheques in the mail if that suits you better.

BYOBard

Please join us again in September – stay tunes for details about where and when!

Here’s how it works – we pick a play, you bring your Complete Works of Shakespeare, we draw names out of a hat and we read the play.  Then we all throw $5 into the hat to help pay for the room.

But most of all we have FUN!!!

See you there!

Signing the Bard

Kennedy talks about her inspirations for Signing the Bard at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Youth blog.

SLC obtains charitable status

SLC is happy to announce we are now a registered charity through Revenue Canada. We would like to thank Native Earth Performing Arts for helping us these past several years, as none of our work would have been possible without their support. If you would like to donate to our company we will happily issue a tax receipt for your donation. And thank YOU for all your continued support.

Please stay tuned for donations-made-easy through CanadaHelps.org.