HomeImpact Strategic Initiatives Panamania Recipients

Strategic Partnership

Toronto Arts Council is partnering with the Pan Am Festival of Art and Culture to support 15 Toronto organizations for the new works they are creating for the Panamania multidisciplinary arts festival, a high-profile PanAm initiative that will showcase Toronto as a leading international city of the arts. TAC funding will help ensure the successful execution of these projects, which will receive national and international exposure.

 

Panamania recipients (2014): 

*2014 funds support Panamania projects taking place in 2015

  • Appledore Productions: The Postman, a play about Toronto’s first African Canadian postman, which will take place on a number of porches along Brunswick Avenue.
  • Crow’s Theatre: The Watershed, a play about an artist, a family, and a country struggling to chart a sustainable course between two seemingly irreconcilable goals: steady economic growth and sound environmental stewardship. 
  • Design Exchange: An exhibition exploring the history of sportswear and its wider cultural, social and aesthetic contexts.
  • Gallery 44: North-Sur Norte-South is a collaborative cyber-photographic pen-pal project between Gallery 44 (Toronto) and PH15 (Buenos Aires) in which artists and youth from Canada and Argentina work together to create photographs on the theme of local culture/s.
  • Harbourfront Centre: Rez Car is a unique collection of large-scale installation pieces, gathered from nations around the world. This gathering of works will be a part of the InterNations/InterSections visual arts exhibition to be featured during the Planet IndigenUS 2015 Festival, the largest presentation of contemporary First Nations multi-disciplinary works worldwide.
  • Kaha:wi Dance Theatre: Santee Smith and Kaha:wi will create a sport/dance performance exploring traditional sport and Indigenous dance styles.
  • Lula Music and Arts Centre: Grammy Award-winning Panama-born pianist and composer Danilo Pérez and Toronto-based bassist and bandleader Roberto Occhipinti will gather some of the brightest lights in contemporary Pan-American jazz to form a unique Pan Am Lula All Star Jazz Band.
  • Necessary Angel Theatre Company: Stay (a) Wake is an interactive, site-specific performance that takes place on Toronto Island. Participants canoe out to the Island to experience an expansive participatory performance exploring our communal rituals around loss and grieving. Created by acclaimed theatrical innovators bluemouth inc,, director Jennifer Tarver and playwright Jordan Tannahill.
  • Nightwood Theatre: Obeah Opera (working title) synthesizes the breadth of black music into an unprecedented a capella theatrical epic. An all-female cast animates the story of the legendary Salem witch trials, from the unique perspective of enslaved African women.
  • No. 9 Collective: The exhibition Water's Edge will feature the works of six celebrated fine-art photographers, each originating from a Pan American country, including photographs by the award-winning artist Edward Burtynsky. Exploring the important and tenuous relationship that we have with our natural water supplies, this exhibition will showcase large-scale photographic works that focus on the intersection with land and water.
  • Studio 180: A concert staging of David Rakoff’s posthumously published novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Cherish, Perish, incorporating sound, music, images and choral speaking. The production will not try to impose a traditional theatrical structure on his narrative, which was written in rhyming verse, but rather, in collaboration with artists in several fields, will present the visual and aural life of the novel on stage as an homage and tribute to one of Canada’s – and Toronto’s – most respected and cherished literary talents.
  • Tangled Art + Disability: Play ON is a unique theatrical event based on personal stories by a company of 7 elite para-athletes who perform in this "seated spoken opera." Conceived and produced by Tangled Art + Disability, Play ON will be a collaboration with the renowned New York City Ping Chong + Company, and will involve interview-based performance incorporating personal storytelling, athleticism, original live music and video projections.
  • Textile Museum: For Watercolour, the Textile Museum of Canada (TMC) will commission 41 textile designs from artists originating in Pan American countries, a flotilla of customized sails that will navigate Lake Ontario’s shoreline from Oshawa to Welland. The sails will highlight the significance of sailing as sport and a way of life throughout Pan Am nations.
  • The Power Plant: The Power Plant will present an exhibition that explores the work of important artist collectives from across the Americas, creating architectural or infrastructural interventions in both public and private spaces. The presented collectives will question the limits of these differing spheres and challenge the organization of such cultural systems.
  • Why Not Theatre: Gimme Shelter is a playful adaptation of the famous folk tale of the Three Little Pigs that tells the story of refugees fleeing conflicts in their homelands, in order to seek shelter in “safe” countries. One actor brings to life characters from all over the world through masks and physical storytelling.