Request from Daniel Mroz, University of Ottawa

[Yana Meerzon]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I’m writing to ask you to consider donating to a cause I feel is a good one.

A few years ago my former teacher, theatre director, actor and master teacher of acting Richard Fowler, lost all of his frontal vision to a condition called macular degeneration. This has made him dependent on others for assistance and ended both his artistic career and his work as a professional translator.

For those of you who might not know Richard, he is a Canadian actor who in the late 1970s travelled to Europe to work with the great mid-century theatrical modernists. He was a part of Jerzy Grotowski’s para-theatrical research in Poland. He then joined Eugenio Barba’s Danish company Odin Teatret where he worked as an actor and teacher for a decade. Theatre scholars will know him as the English-language translator of Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese’s The Secret Art of the Performer: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology and Eugenio Barba’s The Paper Canoe. He returned to Canada in the late 1980s to teach at the National Theatre School. There he founded Primus Theatre with a group of his former students. His influence on contemporary Canadian theatre practice is decisive.

This summer a group of us comprised of Richard’s friends and former students found an amazing invention online, the eSight glasses. This device consists of a camera that projects frontal images into tiny screens on the glasses that are positioned to be visible in the wearer’s peripheral vision. We brought Richard to Ottawa this summer to try out the glasses. Wearing them he saw his friends’ faces clearly for the first time in years.

These glasses cost $15,000.00 Canadian and we’ve started an online funding campaign to raise money to purchase them for Richard.

If you have a moment and can contribute, even the most modest amount will move us towards the purchase of this extraordinary device. If you are not able to contribute please do consider forwarding this message to those who might be interested.

http://igg.me/at/bk5GgTIRc-Y

There’s also more information about Richard and his situation on the site.

Thank you very much,

Daniel


Daniel Mroz, Ph.D.
Directeur des études de deuxième cycle en théâtre
Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre

Professeur agrégé
Département de théâtre
Université d’Ottawa

Associate Professor
Department of Theatre
University of Ottawa

Les Ateliers du corps
www.dancingword.org<http://www.dancingword.org/>

The Dancing Word
http://www.brill.com/products/book/dancing-word
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