Leah Doz plays a captive sex worker in La Ronde 2013 Soulpepper Theatre.
This is a Soulpepper Theatre debut for Leah Doz, which means she just joined the company this year. The twenty something actor was born in Edmonton Alberta, the only child of a single mom. Now she’s a bright light on stage in the Toronto Distillery District and is burning up the big city theatre reviews.
Leah Doz Has Been Performing All Her Life
Leah Doz was enrolled in ballet at age three and has the Dancer’s Turnout to prove it. “I am so grateful to my mom for enrolling me when I was young. Ballet taught me discipline, devotion, and physical awareness that has served all my work on stage.” Leah spent her childhood at a number of different performing arts schools, all over Canada, and today her educational credentials are impeccable. She’s a safe bet for Canadian film and TV producers primarily because she has natural talent, and also because she has great training; Leah studied at the National Theatre School in Montreal, and the Seacoast Theatre Centre in Vancouver, and in the Nightwood Emerging Actors Program and has won a Hnatyshyn Award for Developing Theatre Artist, and a Queen’s Golden Jubilee Performing Artist Award, and a Sterling Award Nomination. Its really impressive for such young talent. This girl is going places.
Leah has already performed at Stratford in 2012, in The Matchmaker, Much Ado About Nothing (Stratford), and before that in the Dora award-winning play Tomasso’s Party (Rooftop Creations). She’s appeared in A Raisin in the Sun (Black Theatre Workshop), and The Laramie Project (Citadel Theatre). Leah recently completed a BRAVO Fact short called ‘Issues’ (Insomniac Productions) which will air next year. She will be joining the National Arts Center’s English Acting Company in Ottawa this fall.
La Ronde is a play written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1897 that scrutinizes the sexual morals and class ideology through a series of encounters between pairs of characters (shown before or after a sexual encounter). By choosing characters across all levels of society, the play offers social commentary on how sexual contact crosses class boundaries.
Schnitzler’s play elicited violent critical and condemnation because of its subject matter and treatment in 1920 performances, which were shocking and became rather sensational failures that left the playwright very unhappy. The titles of the play—in German Reigen and in French La Ronde—refer to a round dance, as portrayed in the English nursery rhyme Ring a Ring o’ Roses.
Directed by Alan Dilworth, La Ronde takes a circuitous route through ten different sexual liaisons to question the nature of human contact, love and fidelity.
Leah confessed to me this play is incredibly challenging for her, because it’s so incredibly emotionally demanding. And she’s nude on stage for a brief spell but, as she describes it, “…every actor has to do something physically revealing and emotionally revealing. I have gotten used to the nudity, but the stakes for the emotionally revealing parts are stomach-turning every night, but I could not have asked for a more amazing cast. The mentorship I have encountered from Soulpepper’s founding stalwarts has been moving; I bike home every day counting my blessings. They are unconditionally generous and supportive of the younger company members; it is truly a gift to experience such a sense of camaraderie and equality here at the Young Centre. The company sets a high standard for an ensemble-based environment. It is a true theatre company. Everyone feels like family. And La Ronde requires that level of trust.””
You can buy tickets for La Ronde online at Young Centre for Performing Arts Theatre website or show up at box office and take your chances – you can buy $22 tickets a 1/2 hr before the show right at the box office which is a little known local secret.
Young Center for Performing Arts is the perfect springboard for Leah Doz into Canadian Film and TV. La Ronde ends May 4th 2013, after which Leah preps for Great Expectations at Soulpepper this summer. “I’m so excite to spend the summer here. The Distillery is an amazing location to spend time creatively. Great Expectations will also be a period piece, so it feels fitting to spend so much time in Toronto’s oldest locale.” at the other end of the Soulpepper Theatre’s 2013 Season.
Post by Robert Campbell on Apr 16, 2013
Now Joel has discovered there’s more awesome here yet. He’d made arrangements to meet Katie Saunoris, the publicist for 
Then I snapped these shots of Joel just hanging out at Soulpepper Theatre, getting his first look at the brickwall lineup of plays, so the many great stories that are waiting to be seen and experienced and retold with awesome sauce online.
There was lots to see in the Distillery during Nuit Blanche 2012
Trinity St. Plaza was a beautifully lit start to the evening with the 13” tall wheel made from 20 traditional school desks. At first glance you would not know the materials made to create such a visually appealing sculpture. It was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ that renders the functionality of the desk useless and forces the viewer to reconsider such a common object in an new intrinsic way. After I found out what The Next Desk sculpture, created by John Notten was about, I figured it challenged the nature of the educational system as an institution. This piece was commissioned by the Toronto Catholic District School Board and apparently stands and literally rolls as a symbol for interconnected, collaborative and experiential education in today’s society.
Another sculpture piece in tribute to Marcel Duchamp that we encountered in the Trinity St. Plaza was water fountain of urinals called Viva La Dada, Baby! Jolie Fejer and Viliam Hrubovcak created this contemporary work of art after the famous urinal in 1917 titled ‘The Fountain” which, back in that time, caused quite a stir.
“Come back in 15 minutes,” is what we told by Kurtis Herd of In’trinzic Dance Company when we entered the Pure Spirit Hallway and saw the MetaDance in’trinzik Dance Project. It was worth coming back to witness (and to make the above video) this physical art.
The Dada Kabaret Stage was constantly humming with a variety of performances. We happened to catch live painting performances by Rhonda Nolan while Sweetlandish sound poetry was taking place. Dadaistic Poetry didn’t seem to make much sense but the expressive live painting was in the moment and inspired although using a limited palette with textures.
Pure Spirit Condo Loading Dock hosts the Nefarious Porpoise video/performance piece. We didn’t get the timing right to see the performance piece to this art work but the visuals were stunning especially with my shadow added to the photo. It was apparent that the piece related to Dada to an apocalypse emerging. Images of contemporary Rob Ford even appeared in the video to illustrate that at various points of history Dada comes in different forms. The artists Rusiko, Zoe Alexis-Abrams, and Gregory Wayne Lindo, also used sound poetry and cut-up poetry in this art project that also revealed the reason for the apocalyptic state again.
Sixty two regional delegates, finalists in the 
The pink and grey gift cards were taped to windows and steel drainpipes, metal barrel hoops and plastic signs – anywhere the adhesive tape could hold the paper card. The girls raced to find them and collect them, and it was hairy in a few places.
Macaroons and gelato, ice cream, magazines and oysters were the prizes that awaited teens who found the little black and pink Miss Teen Canada – World greeting cards.
The chance to get a free Dance Current magazine and take a tour of their office was a supreme thrill for many delegates. Indeed Christina Logan 
The couple had divided earlier in the day to attend separate events and they chose to met up again in the Distillery for a reception hosted by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty inside the historic Fermenting Cellar building located on the south west corner of the property. It was here where throngs of eager supporters awaited their arrival and where the crowd was the loudest.
Today the Distillery is home to a thriving Arts Community and Tech Community and so it plays host to a wide variety of educational, motivational and inspirational public events. 
Our sincere apologies to Frank Ferragine, Weather Specialist on Citytv’s Breakfast Television and Gardening Specialist for CityNews. Frank was erroneously reported to be a host of CTV in a prior post in this blog, which has been corrected.
On Wednesday August 31st 2011 the cast and crew of Nikita descended on The Distillery District to shoot nine scenes from episode five of their second season. It is really fun watching a film crew come in and take over for a night. It’s neat to watch how they makeover the brick buildings and cobblestone lanes of The Distillery to resemble some other part of the world. Usually its a period piece or sometimes its Eastern Europe, or both… This shoot needed The Distillery to look like Russia.
At midnight, Patrick Tidy, the 1st Assistant Director marshaled the entire crew outside to fetch three exterior shots in Distillery Lane. They parked a white BMW right where building 12 and building 5 meet and the cobblestones were suitably wet down and lit up to provide a romantic backdrop for a tender moment between Michael and Nikita. Presumably they just escaped from somewhere and now finally had time for a kiss? Well dressed steam hoses were back lit by sources off camera to make this steamy moment even moister in the close-ups. You can see the exterior of Bldg 58 is nicely illuminated in the background, and all the metallic chairs and granite tables that usually adorn the courtyard have been packed away around the corner for this cinematic occasion. Rene Ohashi, the Director of Photography, gave the bricks a pale sodium lamp glow, ‘a queer yellow light’, while the foreground action was lit primarily with the overhead 6×6 bounce that you can see in the photo above.
At the tender age of 18yrs, Lauren Howe was crowned the 
Wearing her sash and crown, Lauren spent thirty minutes with Farid Omar explaining exactly how she wants to use her platform and her title to raise money and awareness for the plight in Somalia that so many young people are not even aware is occurring – there was more press for Amy Winehouse dying than the thousands suffering slow agonizing deaths in east Africa, for example.
While hanging out at the pool, the staff at 
Lauren Howe’s segway tour of The Distillery ended at a unique photography services store; at 
Lauren is going to get free publishing from Pikto – Jessie holds a blank book. Lauren will fill it and replicate hundreds of copies. She will use it to display all the great pictures from this ‘summer of her life’. There will be a lot of photos taken next week, August 1 – 5th, when she’s down competing in Houston Texas at the Teen World competition. Down there, and all across the southern United States, people take teen pageants very seriously. Whether she wins or loses, Lauren will have a stack of pictures to add to her memories from Toronto and her Miss Teen Canada World crowning achievement. It will be a good book.
For of course I used to work as a grip in the Toronto film industry and we shot a scene from The James Mink Story in this room. For three days in the summer of 1995 it was staged to look as it did in the 1800s. James Mink was played by Lou Gossett Jr and Peter Outabridge was a young villain who abducts Mink’s beautiful daughter (Rachel Crawford) to sell her into slavery in the deep south. So it’s really a personal story for me when I look around at this place and see how much better my own media contribution to society is now that I get to chronicle a visit from 2011 Miss Teen Canada – World to an amazing world class restaurant, instead of setting flags and lamp diffusers and humping sandbags… a personal anecdote. Some might argue that telling James Mink’s story in any capacity outweighs a visit by Lauren Howe to Pure Spirits, and I wouldn’t disagree, but so far I think people are enjoying this particular post so let me finish.
