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.
