Café DaPoPo Bounces Back

We moved into the comfortable back seating area at Menz Bar – including the new Music Room – for this November Café. This was a change from the main bar space: more private and more like Mollyz Diner, our original Café venue in 2007.

Our Berlin cast (Kristi Anderson, Zach Faye, Keelin Jack, Andrew "Droodles" Chandler, Amy Reitsma, Kim Parkhill and Garry Williams) was reunited, and reprised performances from the past three months, adding some new ones, and rediscovering some old ones.

A highlight for me was declaiming Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments…" for a rapt table of six, dressed in my Pride '08 T-shirt, a pink tie and a rainbow triangle pin. The words had such weight, as well they should, in this unexpected new context. "Love is not love/That alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove…"

That is why I love Café: the joy of play, the constantly unfolding possibilities.

Café DaPoPo Returns to Potsdam

Café DaPoPo at Potsdam's museum FLUXUS+, Friday Nov. 12, 2010, was a beautiful evening. The museum extended a warm welcome to us again, and our audience was incredibly responsive, moving about the room to catch all of the performances. We saw several returning audience members, as well as some first-timers.

The 10 DaPoPo performers (Kristi Anderson, Clara Bullock, Andrew Chandler, Zach Faye, Jackie Hanlin, Keelin Jack*, Kim Parkhill*, Matthew Power, Amy Reitsma* and Garry Williams) sang, improvised, and performed scenes and monologues at patrons' tables.

(Photos will follow.)

* Courtesy of the Canadian Actors' Equity

From Our Ducky's Café Menu

Prologues

Prologues are available for the table, shared, or intimate.

Shakespeare's Sonnets $3

Ye olde verse, performed with your choice of Duck Puppets, pretentious or plain.

Delicious Ditty $3

A monthly variety of simple unaccompanied songs, performed right at your table.

Duck of the Draw $3

A surprise pick performed by our talented Duck Puppets!

One free Prologue per table! Choose from a variety of sonnets, ducks and ditties.

Songs

Suitable for sharing, comes with accompaniment available with Duck Puppetz.

Chanson du Jour $4

Ask your server about this month's featured song.

Pretentious Song $5

Heady, songs in exotic tongues, accompanied with a generous touch of passion, melodrama and Sturm & Drang.

For Translations add $1

Broadway Belter $5

Catchy tunes, sharp lyrics and a wide range of emotions, your choice of comedy or torch song.

DaBIG Ensemble Number

A generous performance of melody with enjoyable lyrics, performed with pizazz by the ensemble for the entire room. No extra cost!

Speeches

Ye Olde Monologue $4

Seasoned prose or verse with hints of character, situation & emotion.

Modern/Contemporary Monologue $4

Strong, modern characters with mixed intentions, rich subtexts & a hint of urbane and universal themes.

Canuck's Corner $5

Teary or cheery Canadian Content with worlds of meaning, a variety of local flavours and hints of maple.

DaPoPo Rant $3

Home-made rants and local beefs, performed with outrage and genuine disbelief, and a side of social commentary.

Enjoy any three menu items at a special table rate for only $12! Extra charges may apply for groups of five or more patrons.

Entr'actes

Conversation Piece $4

Outrageous characters, improvisation and fresh humour, shtick & moxie.

Happening $4

Performance art stylings with more than a hint of the avant-garde.

Sextangle $5

Improvised musical fun with a harmonious blend of melody, counterpoint, theme & variation.

DaPoetry $4

Carefully crafted text, declaimed with finesse.

Scenes

Selections will be performed for the entire table.

Ye Olde Scene $6

A medley of emotions, conflict, aged language, poetic inflection and a monthly variety of humours. Ask about our world-famous Shakespeare selections.

Slice of Life $5

Modern or contemporary scene with fresh, relatable themes and subjects, your choice of comedic or dramatic.

DaBIG Ensemble Scene

A blend of characters in juicy conflict, for the room, varies monthly – this one's on the house!

Epilogues

Bed-Time Story $4

Variety of tuck-me-in fare read at your table with pictures, narrative and loveable, huggable friends!

Please pay for your performances with cash. Remember to tip your food server separately.

DaPoPo Descends On Dartmouth!

Starting this September, DaPoPo Theatre will be bringing their signature performance event to Ducky's On the Waterfront on the second last Thursday of the month! We'll be serving up our unique blend of high and low brow fun right at your table: songs, sonnets, scenes, soliloquies, rants, lectures, bed-time stories… you name it! Look out for Duck Puppets and the singing actors' dulcet tones, as the popular troupe descends on Dartmouth, singing and acting their way into your hearts.

The menu will include delectable sonnets, monologues, scenes, rants, sextangles, bed-time stories and songs, but also excerpts from our up-coming play The Halifax Hearings, as well as DaPoPo Theatre Oldies from Julius Caesar, R.U.R., our original musical revue So… What About Love? and Amanada Jernigan's Drinking Song.

DaPride 2010

"WOW! Last night was amazing. Congratulations to you and the entire cast. The pieces I ordered/had the fortune of enjoying last night were superb."

– Aaron Andreino

"What an exceptionally good time we had last night at Café DaPoPo – you guys are really dynamic and original and you continue to blow me away."

– Holly Arsenault

"My large table of friends had a great great time! I am sure that many more will be attending the next Café DaPoPo."

– Brendan Sangster

"The crêpes [courtesy of Crêperie Mobile]… yum!"

– Anonymous

"Café allowed me to play in a way that I never had before. I did all that I could, maybe more than I should, and now oh, how I want to do more."

– Ira Henderson

"I really enjoyed being able to share an incredibly personal performance with friends and enthusiastic strangers. It was the most energetic audience I've ever had. And I loved the ensemble numbers!"

– Zach Faye

"The performances I cherish are the unpredictable ones. Filling an order for a 'song by Cole Porter with vocal harmonies', unrehearsed, I found myself improvising a sextangular homage to Cole Porter with Keelin and Eric."

– GaRRy Williams

"As someone who has been involved with Cafe for three years, it was amazing for me to see a house jam-packed with so many new patrons… I enjoyed experiencing the Cafe through them and re-appreciating it's novelty, quirkiness and fundamental awesomeness. Also great were the decidedly communal moments in the otherwise buzz of individual table talk and performance - the shared laughter over the surprise reveal of Ira in drag or the princes in Faux Disney, the implicit agreement in the room to be quiet during singing performances and the erupting and enthusiastic applause after the ensemble pieces. My favorite performances of my own were a boisterous Miss Congeniality improv with a crowd of eight and, in stark contrast, a quiet recitation of Pam Calabrese McLean's poem 'Dragons' for Hugo at the bar."

– Kim Parkhill

The Sex Play: Actor and Politician scene. Ira and I were able to perform the double seduction of the actor and the politician at the small bar at the back of Menz. The audience all stood behind, almost like bartenders, while we performed the scene. It was very intimate – quiet flirtation for the audience/voyeurs. A very strange experience, and an interesting one for all.

– Eric Benson

Queer Actz/DaPride Café

In preparation for DaPride Café on July 19th, 2010, I luxuriated in the pages of Orton's celebrated, irreverent farce Loot again last night ("I'd like to get married. It's the one thing I haven't tried.") immensely, and dipped into Bryden MacDonald's deliciously stark While Riding Weather for the first time with the great joy of discovery, like finding a hundred dollar note in the pocket of your old jeans (which has never happened to me). Letting my lips and tongue once again roll over the Bard's words: "A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted/Hast thou, the master-mistress of my soul…". Letting them heat up in the mental slow cooker.

As always, we are seeking ingredients for an eclectic menu of scenes, songs, speeches, monologues, poetry and improvisation to be plated and delivered to culture-hungry patrons at Halifax's Menz Bar. This will be the first time we will be included in the official Halifax Pride events line-up as part of Queer Acts. Replete with song & dance, strip-tease and whipped cream and excerpts from the classics, DaPride Café menu has been one of our most outrageous, quirky and exuberant ones, seasoned with wit, camp, titillation and served with great abandon.

Canada supports a rich and integrated queer arts culture – where would theatre be without the innumerable homosexual men and women who spend their lives creating, designing and presenting plays? –, including staples of the thespian diet such as Daniel McIvor, Michel Tremblay and Timothy Findlay, but also such stark sides as Marie-Claire Blais, Tomson Highway, Brad Fraser, Sky Gilbert, Don Hannah and Ronnie Burkett. As Lana puts it so eloquently in Sky Gilbert's play Drag Queens on Trial: "Why do you think so many homosexuals have become famous writers, artists, crusaders–because a passion to dare to be different, to live dangerously is the most enthralling disease in the world. And it's catching."

Mayworks Café x 2

For our two back-to-back, ostensibly labour-themed Cafés, we had prepared a variety of carefully chosen material, tailored to taste, including Political Speeches, DaBIG Ensemble Happeningz, Monologuez, Scenez and Songz. On the night, we performed by request two DaSexTangles – musical improvisations on The Rocky Mountains and Indecision, respectively –, a "Songologue", and an Improvised Scene & Song on polyamoury. (Coincidentally, we have actually written a song about polyamoury for our musical revue 'So… what About Love?', but we were missing performers.)

The sock puppetz came out en masse at Menz Bar. Hamlet's grave diggers returned to ponder the injustices of "great folk" verses "their even Christians". My favourite: a large ensemble rendition of The Log Driver's Waltz. We premiered "The Worker's Chorus of Dissent", an interactive piece during which members of the audience must make noise when they disagree with statements about work, art and wages.

Attendees were boisterously appreciative. Performing for a politically-minded audience – and our friends from the PPTP – was thrilling. We all felt a sense of solidarity from the deliberate applause, the hoots and the politically sensitive responses to controversial and topical issues. Too often art is reduced to a form of entertainment, devoid of any sense of positive social change. The Mayworks Café at JustUs on Spring Garden and its reprise at Menz Bar put back in mind the power of the word, and a living culture.

SPECIAL ENCORE PRESENTATION!! Café DaPoPo returns to Menz Bar!

After a rather long hiatus (and a much-needed rest and re-charge period) Café DaPoPo is returning to our most regular venue, the most supportive and endearing Menz Bar on Gottingen Street.

Come check out our encore presentation of labour-themed Mayworks material on MONDAY MAY 10TH, 7PM. Or even better, come to both events, since you never know what will happen and who will order what!

Also, check out mayworkshalifax.ca for more info on the awesome Mayworks Festival.

MAYWORKS Café

Café DaPoPo: the next endeavour. Creating a tailor-made menu for Mayworks 2010 Halifax, preparing our favourite political performance scripts, poems, songs, rants and shtick about workers and workers' rights. I recall the Justice Camp Café in the Ward Room at Kings last summer, that was interrupted by a fire drill, and our collection of poverty-themed material.

Theatrical performance and social issues, always married, are always vying for singular attention. As Boal puts it, 'all theatre is political.' Often the actual political content is invisible, in camouflage. Our job for Mayworks is to unpack that content, reveal it.

Romain Roland suggests "joy, energy and intelligence" as necessary ingredients for a true People's Theatre. DaPoPo's interest, in Café especially, has been to pursue these qualities in our work. Or, as W. B. Yeats describes his work towards a Popular Theatre: it is "the making articulate of all the dumb classes each with its own knowledge of the world, its own dignity… with the objectivity of the office and the workshop, of the newspaper and the street, or mechanism and politics."

3rd Year Anniversary Café

We're back, friends, after a brief hiatus, with a special Café DaPoPo celebrating our 3rd anniversary: Saturday, February 13, 2010, 7:30pm, at the Sound Market Studio Café on Quinpool. We will be featuring selections from past DaPoPo productions, some special guests and our favourite selections from past Cafés. Plus: warm and delicious crêpes courtesy of Sarah Schwarz and the Crêperie Mobile!

Here's what The Coast's Tara Thorne had to say in January, 2007: "Always-innovative local troupe DaPoPo Theatre begins a cool new venture this week with the launch of Café DaPoPo, a new monthly peformance series… You will be able to order specially priced performances, ranging from poems to songs to scenes to improv, to your own table for a private show. (Not like that.) ... 'Like much of DaPoPo's work, Café DaPoPo explores ways of bringing theatre to its audience, eliminating the fourth wall and redefining the relationship between performer and spectator,' says Williams."

Now, three years later, we're still exploring and redefining. It all began in 2007, when Doug Melanson offered we use the now defunct Mollyz Diner space for a fundraiser. Accepting the limitations of the space, we cooked up the idea of a Theatre Menu with individually priced performances you could order to your table. Intimate Shakespeare. Sock puppet Schumann. Bed-time stories. DaPoPo classics. Reinvented to confront, embrace and involve the audience.

While patrons eat and drink, our theatre-baristas serve songs, sonnets, monologues, rants, lectures, bed-times stories, striptease, happenings, improv, Big Ensemble numbers and pretty much anything else we can think of. For special events, we spice up our menu with queer, local and political material. We continually vary our flavour with an ever-changing cast, and special guests.

Enthusiastic audiences have played along at the Good Food Emporium; Just Us! Café; Alderney Landing Farmer's Market; Menz Bar; museum FLUXUS+ in Potsdam; as well as Halifax Pride; Queer Comedy Night; OutBid!; and, most recently, Halifax' inaugural MayWorks Festival. More than 50 performers have performed at Café DaPoPo to approximately 1,000 patrons.