Thanks to your support and the determination of our artists in the face pandemic challenges, One Little Goat has great news to share from 2022 and for the year ahead. Read all about it (and enjoy photos) below, and if you can, please support One Little Goat's programming with a tax-deductible donation — as a registered charity, we depend on individual donations to realize productions, and we want to thank you for helping us make them happen. See you in 2023! In the meantime, wishing happy holidays and a healthy new year, —Adam Seelig, Artistic Director
ONE LITTLE GOAT'S DEBUT MOVIE
FINNEGANS WAKE BY JAMES JOYCE
Stein (Picasso 1906)
“Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him.”
Ogre reads Joyce (Baalbuddy 2021)
Grudging though her admiration may have been, Gertrude Stein was right: Finnegans Wake (1939) is that very incomprehensibility that anyone can understand because Joyce’s notoriously gnarly dream-novel is oddly, absurdly, obsessively funny. It is, in short, a comedy — a comedy that, in Joyce’s words: “is all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all [they] need do is read it aloud.”
Joyce (Irish currency)
On August 31, 2022, One Little Goat Artistic Director Adam Seelig and theatre artist Andrew Moodie worked with video producer MXL Media, sound recordist William Bembridge and production designer Jackie Chau to capture Dublin-born actor Richard Harte reading Chapter 1 of the Wake for an intimate, live (masked) audience in Toronto. Harte’s performance is awesome, and we can’t wait to share it with you.
90 minutes long, Finnegans Wake, Chapter 1 is now in postproduction. In addition to Harte’s magnificent reading, the film includes Irish-Canadian singer Kevin Kennedy’s superb rendition of the “Finnegan’s Wake” folk song that inspired Joyce’s title, plus several montages echoing themes in the novel.
Poster for Mary Ellen Bute's 1996 film adaptation
One Little Goat’s production marks the first ever audio-video book of this extraordinary novel, boasting numerous aspects that will make it a golden resource for current and future audiences of Joyce’s incomparable work. Our Wake:
—> will be freely available online from inception.
—> is filmed in front of a live audience, enhancing the novel’s comedy — there’s a reason standup comedians aren’t recorded in studio.
—> by virtue of being a video (in addition to audio) recording, allows audiences to see (in addition to hear) the reader’s tongue-twisting virtuosity.
—> includes subtitles and page numbers, enabling readers to ‘flip’ to their desired spot in the novel (page and line numbers are standardized in all editions of Finnegans Wake).
Above all, our Finnegans Wake is a serious pleasure. Thank you to the Embassy of Ireland in Canada for supporting production of Chapter 1. With 16 more chapters to shoot, our work has only begun!
THE VAMPIRE AND THE NYMPHOMANIAC
Book Cover: The Vampire and the Nymphomaniac / Le vampire et la nymphomane
Years in the making, Ray Ellenwood’s “expormidable” translation of Le vampire et la nymphomane (1949) by revolutionary Montreal poet-playwright Claude Gauvreau (1925-71) is finally out in a bilingual, French-English, tête-bêche (flip book) edition published by One Little Goat with Nouvelles Éditions de Feu-Antonin. Augmented by photos and essays, the book is a beauty.
>> Order the book!
Read the review by David Olds in WholeNote Magazine p.48 Dec 2022-Jan 2023 issue
Listen to interviews by CIUT Radio’s donna g with:
* Adam Seelig (Nov 13) — online podcast, Spotify
* Ray Ellenwood (Nov 20) — online podcast, Spotify
Toronto launch: Ray Ellenwood, author Beatriz Hausner, Steve McCaffery, editors Adam Seelig & Thierry Bissonnette
Launched this November to full (masked) houses in Toronto and Montreal, Gauvreau’s wild libretto is now reaching English audiences for the first time. world, Steve McCaffery (of legendary Four Horsemen fame), for joining us from NY for the Toronto launch to perform his tour de force rendition of Gauvreau’s final suite of sound poems (Jappements à la lune) and thanks to the Bureau du Québec à Toronto and Canada Council for the Arts for their support.
Françoise Sullivan (right) with Ray Ellenwood & Adam Seelig (Montreal)
For our Montreal launch we are grateful to renowned artists Janine Carreau (sister-in-law of Claude) and Françoise Sullivan (Order of Canada, signatory to the Refus global manifesto of 1948) and opera singer Pauline Vaillancourt for joining us, and to director Lorraine Pintal (of Canada’s leading French-language theatre Théâtre du Nouveau Monde) for lauding the publication. And thanks to you for engaging with and supporting this rare, exceptional work.
Janine Carreau (2nd from right) with Thierry Bissonnette, Adam Seelig & Ray Ellenwood (Montreal)
Coincidentally…! In November, Canada Post issued a stamp of actor Monique Mercure, who played The Vampire’s Mother in the 1996 production of The Vampire and the Nymphomaniac.
PLEASE SUPPORT ONE LITTLE GOAT
Student response to One Little Goat's PLAY: A Mini History of Theatre for Kids (Fall 2021). On the flip side, Molly writes: "Thank you for acting in the Play today. My favourite part was when Mavis actid out the cat."
As an official charity, One Little Goat, North America’s only company dedicated to poetic theatre, depends on individual donations to make productions possible. Your financial support is tax-deductible and greatly appreciated! Our office is volunteer-run, so 100% of your donation goes directly to programming.
How to donate:
1. Online through Canada Helps
2. E-transfer to onelittlegoattc@gmail.com
3. Cheque to One Little Goat Theatre Company, 422 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5R 2Z4, CANADA
