Through My Lens
Artist: AMY AMANTEA WITH THEATRE REPLACEMENT (Vancouver)
Mainstage Presentation
January 25 @ 6pm, January 27 @ 4pm, January 27 @ 5:30pm
Duration: 55 minutes
Through My Lens – Amy Amantea with Theatre Replacement
Photo by Nico Dicecco
Image description: In a dark space, a large black and white image of a forested landscae is projected onto a screen. A woman stands in the middle of the image looking at the screen. Amy stands close to the image to the left hand side, also looking at the projection screen.
Through My Lens is a new intimate work by theatre artist Amy Amantea that combines conversation, hospitality and portraiture.
Amy is an artist with a lived experience of blindness, specifically having a total of 2% vision in one eye. She is also a photographer with a practice that involves walking the city at twilight looking for interesting light patterns and capturing them with her camera.
Through My Lens brings these life experiences into one small photography studio where Amantea shares her work as a photographer with a single participant who then describes her images — images she has never “seen” — back to her. The photos reveal themselves in accordance with the conversation and open up new realms of perception — a reciprocal collision of visual and non-visual experiences.
Written and Performed by: Amy Amantea
Writing and Direction by: James Long
Media Design and Operation by: Nico Dicecco
Dramaturgical Support: Anita Rochon
Lighting and Set Design by: Sophie Tang
Technical Direction: Daniel O’Shea
Produced by: Theatre Replacement
Through My Lens is a commission of SpiderWebShow Performance and is supported by the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Trailer by Nico Dicecco
AMY AMANTEA is a settler on the stolen lands of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-waututh Nations. Living with blindness and dyslexia, Amy aims to increase representation of disability within the Canadian theatre landscape. Although her background is in acting, having attended VFS and private acting academies before her sight loss, Amy has had to reinvent herself as a performer and integrate access, advocacy, and activism into her work. Amy is Accessibility Coordinator for Arts Club Theatre Company, Associate Director of VocalEye Descriptive Arts Society and a media personality with AccessibleMediaInc. Amy also works with other theatre companies and theatre makers across the country and beyond as an accessibility consultant.
Her most recent credits include: Through My Lens (2023, with Theatre Replacement), directed by James Long; Emilia (2021, United Players of Vancouver), directed by Lois Anderson; Wheel Voice: Tune In (2021, Realwheels Theatre), directed by Shawn MacDonald; and Sequence (2019, Realwheels Theatre), directed by Rena Cohen.
Information for Presenters: Available for touring. Next presentation is at Undercurrents Festival in Ottawa in February 2024.
CONTACT
James Long
jameslongconnect@gmail.com