Revisiting a hot December night in a boggy Hamilton sweatbox with MVLL CRIMES, Fight on Sight, Lowheaven, Monk, and Single Mothers that capped off the action for Wood-stein.ca in 2023. It’s time to crawl out of the mire and prepare for a productive 2024.
The stage of the Axis Club in Toronto was transformed into the landscape that ended up focusing the global eye on an artistic band of Russian activists. Although Pussy Riot has yet to topple Putin’s regime, the notoriety they achieved in 2012 has made them an activist force to be reckoned with.
Riot Days is a play based on the memoir of Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina. Although the performance maintained the original Russian language, the story of resistance, repression and revolution has been cleverly presented in a multi-media blitz that even allows those of us who are unfortunate monolinguists to follow along and feel a part of the concert, rally, theatre and political happening. After all, as they say, “anyone can be Pussy Riot.”
“We come together with this common caring of respect for animals and our planet,” states Sue Spahr, one of the founders of the Wishbone Animal Rights Lab in Toronto, which opened its doors at the end of March.
This episode features a conversation with Spahr about the lab’s role as a hub for animal rights activists, a lending library of equipment and information and a studio for making animal-positive podcasts and videos.
Episode 16 features a conversation with Toronto comedian Bonez Poley, who learned their performance chops in the Ontario punk and metal music scenes before crossing over into stand-up.
Poley’s debut comedy album is set for release on May 30, and in the discussion, there are hints at several other surprises to be announced soon.
This episode features a conversation with Sam Tecle about what is meant by the call to defund the police. Tecle works with Success Beyond Limits, a collaborative, youth-led, community-based movement providing youth with holistic support to complete their education and experience success in their lives and Jane and Finch Action Against Poverty, a resident-led grassroots coalition of community residents, activists, workers, organizations working to eliminate poverty. He is also an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research and scholarly work span the areas of Black and Diaspora Studies, Urban Studies, and Sociology of Education.
On episode five, artist and poet Roshan James talks about how her creativity has helped her deconstruct societal norms, allowing her to turn everything she was taught on its head and re-examine it to find out what little things might have been true or make sense and could be helpful to carry forward and what things are just the chaff that needs to go into the wind.
As pandemic-related restrictions loosen, many people across Ontario and beyond hope to lace up their roller skates and hit the roller derby track again. This series of articles will check in with teams as they prepare for some action in 2022-23. This time, Hogtown Roller Derby’s Emily Fowler, whom some people in the derby community might know better as Holly de Havilland, shares an update on the rebound of roller derby in Toronto, or if you prefer, Hogtown.
This is the final feature in a three-part series diving into aspects of the opioid pandemic, the overdose crisis, whatever you wish to call it. It is a public health crisis which became exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Canada’s Public Health database, there was a 95 percent increase in apparent opioid toxicity deaths from April 2020 to March 2021, with a total of 7,224 deaths, compared to 3,711 deaths from April 2019 to March 2020. Since then, deaths have remained high.
These statistics were published in March 2022 and only went as far as September 2021, but by that point, 5,368 apparent opioid toxicity deaths had occurred. This is approximately 20 deaths per day. For a similar timeframe in the years before the pandemic, there were between 7 in 2016 and 12 in 2018 deaths per day.
She might seem like just another comedian who has found her way to Toronto, but as her website boasts, Bonez Poley is a multidisciplinary artist, an activist, and a seasoned adventurer who leads a colourful life.
She spoke to Woodstein Media about everything from her wild antics on and off stage fronting thrash bands to her self-deprecating humour. She offered a lot of discerning opinions in between.
As pandemic-related restrictions loosen, many people across Ontario and beyond are hoping they can lace up their roller skates and hit the roller derby track again. This series of articles will check in with teams as they prepare for some action in 2022. This time, sharing the progress of their league is Tri-city Roller Derby’s President Ivy Courtney, who some people in the derby community might know as Aggrosaurus.
Wood-stein.ca Media 