On Monday night over 50 masked protesters descended on City Hall for a Masquerade Ball protest – the Bal Masqué. Organized by an ad hoc collective known as Le Gros Bon Sens, the masked demonstration aimed to challenge the anti-mask bylaw the City of Montreal is attempting to pass as part of its larger “Public [...]
After it was announced here and other places that the city of Montreal was seeking to ban masks at protests, people opposed have not been silent and it seems that this issue will not go away. And why should it? This incursion on our rights to free expression has even garnered opponents in more conservative [...]
Of all the projects OTL has created, Car Stories is most certainly the longest-running, at times has been the most controversial and if it wasn’t for the infringement Festival, a true viral phenomenon, it would undoubtedly be the best known. In a nutshell, Car Stories is a play containing several shorter plays, a piece of [...]
Anyone who’s been outside in Montreal lately will be able to tell you that it’s cold out there. This is obviously most relevant to the city’s homeless. There are some in Montreal who are compassionate about their plight and others who take steps to empower them through art, namely those involved in the annual État [...]
It’s New Year’s Eve, so what better time to look back on the past year and the year ahead. 2008 was a busy one for OTL on several fronts: Sinking Neptune II: We adapted our verbatim theatre critique of Canada’s “first play” Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France and those remounting it, racism against [...]
Today is Boxing Day in Canada (also in Australia, New Zealand and Britain). While its roots date back to the tradition of wealthier people giving gifts to the lower classes the day after Christmas (having just exchanged gifts among their “equals” the day before), today it’s pretty much considered a shopping holiday. With prices slashed, [...]
Last week, OTL finally got a letter from the Ville Marie borough. If this is their idea of a Christmas present, it’s definitely one that we’d like to exchange. It’s in response to our question about the giant billboard from Time2Ad on The Main, asking just what the city was going to do about it. [...]
I’ve played in many culture-jams, but never as a videographer and never in a city I was visiting for the first time in my life. That changed last spring, when I was part of a culture-jam at Tim Hortons in Rimouski. Since 2002, OTL has offered a workshop called Revolutionary Theatre: Culture-Jamming and Theatrical Activism. [...]
Every activist knows that even the most anti-corporate jam can be co-opted by commercial interests. Usually this involves some sort of subversion or re-appropriation of the techniques used but every now and then, the co-option is nothing more than sticking a corporate identity where it doesn’t belong. A few years ago OTL culture-jammed PartyPoker.net who [...]
Well before Time2Ad’s giant billboard reared its obtrusive head on St-Laurent Boulevard, OTL’s Reclaim the Main campaign had been challenging corporate and monoculture intrusions our heritage site through culture jamming. Every summer during the street fairs we were greeted with a new corporate sponsor monopolizing a celebration that’s supposed to be for the people as [...]
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