Complimentary tickets to Dissocia

[Sherilee Diebold-Cooze]

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The Open Ears festival is currently underway in downtown Kitchener.  Included in the festival is a played called Dissocia which is directed by Andy Houston in Drama.
A brief description is at: http://www.openears.ca/2011/dissocia.htm

We have 10 free tickets for each of Friday and Saturday's performance (April 29 and 30).  Performances are at 5pm.  If you would like a ticket please send an email to me by 3:30pm on Friday.
These free tickets are available on a first-come-first-served basis.
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The Waterloo Chronicle description of the play is as follows:
Dissocia helps kick off annual Open Ears Festival
Arts & Entertainment
Apr 26, 2011

The ghosts of gamers past will get a last taste of gambling this week when a group of Waterloo students takes a disused billiard and bingo hall and turns it into a virtual casino, a multimedia, interactive theatre space where the audience is invited to play along.

University of Waterloo drama professor Andrew Houston and his cast of UW drama students examine the mythology and ritual of gambling in Dissocia, a multi-media theatre event which opens this week as part of Waterloo Region's Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound. The students invite audience members to join the games at what was once Millsy's Billiards on King Street.

"All of us think about whether we're lucky or not," Houston said. "We build a sort of mythology around luck. But luck and gambling and the superstitions we associate with them also resonate in our relationships.

The families in this play, Dissocia, are immersed in that mythology, and we try to build an environment where our audience feels it too." Dissocia is a multi-media performance about two families dealing with fathers who gamble. The play includes a "virtual casino" soundscape by Laurier composer and student Nancy Tam, and one character who appears only by live video feed. Dissocia is a study of the relationships and interaction between family members and how the myths, language and technology of modern-day gambling play a role, said Houston.

"The technology that comes between these families and their relationships became a core concern in this work," Houston said.

"Gamblers spend a lot of time looking at digital slot machines, and the relationship between humans and machines is a big part of our world today.

"We are a society of people who spend more time relating to screens than faces, even though we call the screens Facebook. Dissocia examines how these people relate to machines, how their time in front of the screens is a kind of avoidance of real people at home, of the relationships those people demand." Millsy's Billiards at 29 King St. E. closed earlier this year, but the old pool tables and bar remain and contribute to the authentic feel of the students' performance, said Houston.

Dissocia will be performed throughout the Open Ears Festival, which runs April 27 to May 1 in Waterloo Region. For more information about Dissocia and the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, please visit www.openears.ca<http://www.openears.ca>.


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