LIP SYNC SLEEPOVER Comes to Crow's Theatre

On Thursday May 25, and Friday May 26 at 8:30pm, for two nights only, the "spellbinding" international artist Vanessa Smythe offers her new solo show: LIP SYNC SLEEPOVER at Streetcar Crowsnest, Scotiabank Community Studio, 345 Carlaw Avenue in Toronto for a special limited engagement. With a "genuine gift for poetic narrative", Smythe's poignant, funny, and deeply personal storytelling show tethers together poetry, music, and movement.

LIP SYNC SLEEPOVER emerged as a response to the current political climate and a "growing disenchantment with how we think our lives are supposed to go". Harkening back to a time of childhood wonder, the show is an effort to nurture some semblance of magic back into our adult lives.

"Seemingly innocuous memories of childhood sleepovers, or gutsy performances at a public school talent show can hold a greater significance - if we try to harness those memories, and take inspiration from the courage we felt as kids." Hopscotching between different moments in her life, and as Jordan Bimm of NOW Magazine aptly remarks of Smythe: "[S]he's able to quickly tack between the humour in everyday minutia, and grand, heartfelt observations about big life questions."

LIP SYNC SLEEPOVER follows an international tour of her previous critically and popularly celebrated show IN CASE WE DISAPPEAR (Critics Pick: NOW, Torontoist, Post City, In The Green Room, BroadwayBaby, also named one of the "best free shows" of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015). Smythe developed initial material for the show through a residency with All For One Theatre out of New York, collaborating with award-winning director Adam Fitzgerald. In this full length version, she collaborates with Siminovitch-protégé award winning director and developer Mitchell Cushman in what becomes a celebration of life's tricky disappointments - and its enduring, understated joy.

Smythe and Cushman also co-curate and host The Spoke Storytelling series and Podcast, a monthly live event at Crow's Theatre, and collaborated on the inventive Outside the March "100 Outside Voices" campaign (featured on CBC Metro Morning), where 100 local artists each read a line of poetry in a ode to Toronto, composed by Smythe.

In this new exploration of memory, storytelling, and the search for magic, Cushman and Smythe muse that the show is ultimately an ode to the childlike dreamer in all of us - for that dreamer, they contend, is the one who can most compassionately and urgently care for the world.

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