Cooking Fire Theatre Festival at Dufferin Grove Wed. June 23 - Sunday June 27

THE SEVENTH ANNUAL COOKING FIRE THEATRE FESTIVAL

Dinner is served from 6:00 PM, performances begin at 7:00 PM

Each evening, host company The Spee Society will lead the audience from site to site throughout the park to see performances ranging from the tale of a giant carrot to an opera about the nature of place. Delicious organic meals will be served to the audience over cooking fires and from Dufferin Grove Park’s two wood-fired outdoor bake ovens.

PROGRAM:
Clyde Umnie Co (Toronto) and NACL (Highland Lake, NY) The Little Farm Show
The Little Farm Show tells the story of an eccentric farmer named Millicent, and a giant, over-grown carrot hepped up on hormones, who has escaped the industrial carrot farm because she is too big to sell. Realizing her destiny is to be broken up and sold as a bag of ‘mini-carrots’, the Carrot makes a break for it, but soon discovers her freakishness out in society.

Théâtre Populaire d’Acadie (Caraquet, NB) & Satellite Theatre (Montreal) GRUB
In a glorious feast touching sometimes upon the clown, sometimes upon the burlesque, yet always the urge of an empty stomach, Grub speaks of food and all its substitutes, linking it all by a simple but true fact: eating is killing. Like the digestive system and all its mechanics, every species serves the planetary lunch. In the great jungle, eat... or be eaten!

Theatre Smith-Gilmour (Toronto) GRIMM too
This poignant and stunning piece of absurd theatre finds its inspiration from the tall tales unearthed by the Brothers Grimm. Faithful to the original Grimm stories, GRIMM too is a whimsical and moving piece filled with romance, tragedy, and comedy. These strange, mythical stories speak to us about our own experiences of fear, courage, love, hope, joy and wonder in our daily lives

The Hinterlands (Milwaukee, WI) The Dead Road
Inspired by the language of Cormac McCarthy and William S. Burroughs as well as the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1950’s and 60’s, The Dead Road is equal parts Wild West Show and cultural scavenger hunt, balancing the stillness of the open range with the rowdiness of a barroom brawl, and weaving vaudevillian comedy, live music, campfire songs, puppetry, and the smell of frying bacon into a passion play for the North American frontier.

The Alchemical Opera Project (Easthampton, MA) Come and Sleep
Using music from Schubert's 1827 song cycle Winter's Journey and poetry by Mary Oliver, Come and Sleep is an operatic fantasy between voice, cello, and silence, using sources as wide-ranging as Japanese fox folklore and the writings of polar explorers to explore the relationship between identity and place, and the consequences of transformation.

Performances begin at 7:00 PM, admission is pay-what-you-can ($10 suggested donation).