Just caught the CBC National News story on Black Theatre Workshop, for which I was interviewed by Deana Sumanac last week. It was good to see two Quebec arts items within one newscast. (The other was on the Cirque du Soleil’s opening of Zarkana in Moscow.)
And it was interesting, from a journalistic point of view, to see what Sumanac made of the material she gathered while in Montreal. CBC cameras caught the action at BTW annual Vision gala last weekend, when the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award was given to soap star Tonya Lee Williams.
Archival footage of several BTW shows was included. BTW ‘s recently appointed artistic director Quincy Armorer was interviewed, as was Dr. Clarence Bayne who has been a part of BTW for decades. All that they used from my time in front of the camera was a comment on the funding difficulties of all English-language theatre companies in Quebec. This discussion is, of course, highly relevant to BTW which has been operating for over 40 years but can only afford to do one mainstage production per year. And this year’s show, an African-Canadian work, Stori Ya, by Joan M Kivanda, was a one-woman show, at that.
Sumanac’s main assignment while she was in Montreal was to do a story on the Moment Factory the company that’s working along with the Cirque du Soleil to help Madonna make half-time history at this weekend’s Super Bowl game.
Now, I see that CTV News has done more or less the same story, too. Montreal is definitely getting national attention tonight.
