Some Shakespeare With Your Carrot Cake?

DaPoPo Theatre began a new 5-month series of its signature event Café DaPoPo on Tuesday, March 29 at 7:30pm at the Grad House. We played to a full house, and were excited to present Café DaPoPo in a new venue.

Originally conceived as a fundraiser in 2007, Café DaPoPo has become a performance event in its own right. Performing in diners, restaurants and bars, the cast take orders from the patrons, and practice their craft at individual tables. This month's cast included many of the core collective members: Kristi Anderson, Andrew Chandler, Zach Faye, Keelin Jack, Kim Parkhill, Garry Williams and our fantastic accompanist Emily Shute. We also welcomed Griffin McInnis and Liz Johnstone as guest performers from the KTS. Scenes, songs, monologues, conversation pieces, rants, puppets, poetry – all of these staple ingredients are on the theatrical menu.

(Depicted here at right are Kristi Anderson, Zach Faye and the carrot cake.)

2011 - Transformations

On Sunday Jan 23, most of the 2011 DaPoPo Collective met at the new Casa DaPoPo on Kaye Street to discuss the immediate future of Café DaPoPo.

How can we write the inherently unpredictable performance elements of Café DaPoPo more profoundly into the event? Unlike a traditional performance, there is no illusion of a repeatable Café performance. Every time a certain scene or song is ordered, the set necessarily changes. Often the costumes change. Props reveal themselves in performance: a beer glass; a patron's hat; a butter knife. Often the parameters shift: add a sock puppet; make it 'saucy', make it 'queer'; sing your Hamlet. By donning a pair of sun-glasses last-minute, the performer experiences a total transformation.

How can we devise more original material for Café performances without the monthly task becoming an overwhelming one? Each performer becomes a writer, a director and a dramaturge, if they choose. How do you use a picture frame, a shower cap and a rubber duckie effectively, in what is essentially an open rehearsal, performing a two-person song? In fact, the audience, who is at times almost indistinguishable from the actors, influences the performance, unknowingly. They laugh. They turn their heads away. The lean forward in their chair. These immediate cues bring about another total transformation in the performer. The entire theatrical moment disrobes and becomes naked, intimate dialogue.

What do you do with a theatrical form like Café DaPoPo, which relies heavily on audience interaction, non-traditional locations and an ever-changing cast (and therefore available performances); a form that doesn't fit into the conventional theatre model in terms of finding audiences, choosing venues and generating revenue? Again, the performer can find Café transformative. The reason for performing in Café DaPoPo is not the pay check. In fact, there usually in no pay check. It is to experience the performance, the audience and the impulse for art with an immediacy that is too often lost in the big theatres.

Our plans to perform once monthly from March through July (including performances at the MayWorks Festival, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic's Flagship Fridays series, as well as Halifax Pride) gave us an excuse to refocus our interests, and possibly effect a few transformations.

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