Volume 3

The Fringe is basically the only time of the year you’ll see straight theatre, stand-up comics, sketch comedy, improv, live music, dance, musicals, even opera sharing spaces and audiences. These are all integral parts of a healthy performance ecology, and yet the practice in Canada is to keep them far, far, apart – different venues, different time slots, different audiences, different pages in the shrinking Arts sections of newspapers.

Anything goes. ANYTHING. From a solo spoken word show to a company's debut production to inspiring contemporary dance to saucy burlesque to reading a phone book aloud onstage to puppetry for all ages to stand-up comedy to a musical to a complete train wreck to the next big thing in Canadian theatre. Anything really goes (as long as it stays within the law of course!).

With the growing intention to offer a narrative as opposed to present an exposé on the source material, Clare and Philip continued to find themselves in conflict. Clare was reluctant to engage with the source material in a way that would require her to embody King Lear’s experience. She described finding the uncanny resemblance of the character’s circumstances to her own circumstances disturbing.

Him: "I heard your looking for stories..." Us: Yes .. about this street. Him: "Well you should talk with Laurence Smith he's got keys to half the buildings on this here strip. He comes by at 10, 12 and 2 o'clock everyday and parks right over there in the lot." Us: Great

For a city and a theatre community that I think sometimes feels isolated from the Canadian Theatre Community as a whole, having an influx of theatre makers from all corners of the country here and being encouraged to meet and mingle is something that I wish could happen in Halifax more often.

In the late winter of 2010 two life-altering things happened to me: I received my first smartphone. I received my first ever grant from the Canada Council.

Designer Lindsay Anne Black presents an image-based representation of the creative process.

Actresses Melissa Hood and Kimberly-Sue Murray recently spent five days on the road, driving from Toronto, ON to Los Angeles, CA, stopping overnight in Chicago, IL, Omaha, NE, Glenwood Springs, CO, and Zion National Park, UT, before passing through Las Vegas and landing in the City of Angels.

One of the main reasons why I am here is because I get to do projects that would be unimaginable in a bigger city center: projects that I make with the locals, where we all work together to create something wild, fun and free. And it’s in those moments of unmediated creativity and fun, where my ideas for STO Union get formed, ideas which turn into projects that I am lucky enough to bring to audiences in Canada and abroad.

For close to two decades I thought Toronto was the centre of the universe. As a teenager growing up in the small and somewhat repressed city of Kitchener, I couldn’t wait to escape to the fantastic bohemian freedom of Toronto. I finally moved to the Big Smoke the summer of my twentieth year.