Double Image Contest and Adam's Touring Tips Vol. I

Double Image Contest

St Catharine's and some of the other cities hosting The Double tour have started contests with their audiences to send in images of themselves with their celebrity doubles.

The Double cast couldn't resist such a narcissistic endeavour and we sent them our own celebrity doppelganger list...here's what we came up with:

Viktor Lukawski and his double, Chris O'Dowd (Viktor's photo by Kadri Hansen)

And here's Cat Stevens and Adam Paolozza followed by Arif Mirabdolbaghi and Mark Ruffalo. But truly though, these last four are interchangeable, aren't they? More like a quadruple? (yes, I went there)

Send us photos of you and your double, celebrity or otherwise (inanimate objects, droids and other semi-human creatures are all fair game) and we'll post the funniest fare.

Send them to badnewdaysperformance@gmail.com

Touring Tips Vol. I

by Adam Paolozza

"Workshops = Great Outreach"

I can't talk too much about how important outreach is when you're on the road. It really helps you connect with the audience. I know this isn't the first time that anyone has said this but I'll echo it till my dying day. Nothing replaces good ole' fashion human contact when it comes to developping a relationship. The more you know people personally the more you start to become really connected to their community.

A great way to do this is through workshops and talkbacks. So, today Arif and I went to St. Catharines to teach a few workshops. We had the pleasure of meeting and working with two great groups of aspiring young artists in High School and University.

Part of what I love best about theatre is sharing it with young people. I remember the feeling of inspiration I got whenever professional artists came to my school. The memory of those talks or workshops comes back to me still, years after. Those profound experiences serve as signposts in my life experience, moments that I can pin-point in time that opened my mind up to another creative world.

I hope we did that today in St. Catharines. I hope we were able, in some small way, to inspire the potential in these students. I was particularly touched by Arif's last thought that he left them with: he gave them a piece of advice that he wished he had got when he was their age - be a paradox, stay complex, be more than one thing at once, embrace your vulnerability and help, in some small way, to create beauty in a world that seems (at least at the moment) to be inundated with ugliness.

Here's a pic of the two of us, Arif displaying his usual verbal and gesticular dexterity. I believe he was in the middle of this sentence, "Drink wine, read poetry and love cats!"

Adam and Arif at Winston Churchill Secondary School

Photo by Sara Palmieri

Stay tuned for our next blog post with more touring tips from Adam and a social media experiment from Arif where he gets tender with tinder, using dialogue culled exclusively from the play to make meaningful (and dare we say romantic) connections...

The Double Ontario Tour is made possible in part by funding from the Ontario Arts Council as part of the Ontario Connects initiative.