OTL Blog

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 […]

Sunday shoppers on Ste. Catherine street were startled by a cacophony of voices. Rising above the din of consumerism, a chorus of profound human anger and frustration arose, voiced by hundreds of demonstrators furious with the overnight death of over 270 people in Gaza, killed by Israeli bombs. Traffic snarled as the street was transformed […]

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.  […]

By now everyone has seen the video or at very least heard the story of how Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi threw not one but two shoes at George W. Bush.  Most people have probably also seen some of the parodies and offshoots (forgive the pun) circulating around the internet.  There’s even a game! What you […]

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 […]

Even though we’re known for guerilla-style culture jams and highly improvised performances like Car Stories, OTL also has also produced a significant amount of text over the years, some of it theoretical material and some of it scripts for theatre. We’ve started collecting some of this in what we’re calling the Optative Library.  Just like […]

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 […]

On the occasion of today’s Quebec election and in honour of the difficulties Stephen Harper is presently facing in Ottawa, we present a mock press conference we performed with UTIL (l’Unité Théâtral d’Interventions Loufoques) on the back of a flatbed truck before an anti-war march in the freezing cold, March 2006. First, the guest of […]