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An Awkward Call to Arms

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Tweet sent by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard at the 2016 NASO Conference.
Tweet sent by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard at the 2016 NASO Conference.

As the leader of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance (IPAA), a national arts service organization that claims space for all Indigenous performing artists, I am proud to collaborate with Michele Decottignes of the Deaf, Disability & Mad Arts Alliance of Canada and Donna-Michelle St. Bernard of the ADHOC Assembly in an advisory role to the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) on the recently announced All In: A National Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Initiative. Our organizations presented this initiative, alongside PACT Executive Director Sara Meurling, to the artistic leaders at the PACT Conference on Treaty 7 Territory [Calgary, AB] in May 2016. The presentation instigated a discussion about historical inequities for Indigenous and culturally diverse artists within the theatre sector. Inspired to make change, PACT members committed to taking action in their forthcoming proposals to New Chapter funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. In order to galvanize this verbal support into action we created this Awkward Call to Arms / Appel aux armes.

It is no secret that the arts funders on these lands and waterways are making Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) projects a funding priority. At the 2016 Prismatic Arts Festival in Halifax during the Opening Gala Keynote Address Simon Brault Director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts spoke plainly about the Council’s responsibility, particularly in the context of a doubled budget, “We want to take a more horizontal approach where equity is made a reality – and diversity becomes a non-negotiable priority that we are all accountable for. Not just for one section of the Council. But across all our programs and activities.”

At IPAA’s recent Intertribal Gathering in Dakwäkäda [Haines Junction, Yukon], traditional and self-governed territories of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, Kerry Swanson (Cree-Ojibway) from the Ontario Arts Council reported that all jurors will be provided with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to consult when issues of cultural appropriation arise during deliberation. Supporting our artistic peers on the selection committee is key and it is vital that we find common ground around issues of access, privilege, sovereignty, and white supremacy (to name a few) in the pursuit of equity. The Awkward Call To Arms is an opportunity for our sector to develop a shared approach to New Chapter projects in the crafting of the grants before they reach the jury.

I had the privilege of attending the Theatre Communications Group conference in Washington, DC this June, thanks to the generosity of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. At this national event there was a groundswell of Indigenous and culturally diverse theatre artists gathering in affinity groups as well as featured throughout the conference. Anna Deavere Smith opened with a plenary session, including characters from her groundbreaking solo shows exploring race relations through performance. Within her presentation she referenced accomplishments by the late August Wilson and the dearth of African American Theatre companies active today. Staggering statistics about white supremacy within the performing arts combined with her powerful performance made an impact on the assembled audience. She closed stating, “those of you who feel moved, must move.”

Perhaps it is my habit to overthink, but following this clear and impassioned directive I felt my heart sink as the audience erupted with cheers and applause – is she asking this room of artistic leaders to vacate their leadership positions to make room for Indigenous and culturally diverse leaders? And further to that, are we all clapping in agreement? Turns out my interpretation of the word move – requiring a radical power shift via succession – was not the pervasive understanding in the room. Rather I suspect her words were taken as an impassioned call for the assembled gatekeepers to make change within their existing structures, status quo preserved. I bring this up in the context of Allies to highlight how perspective and self-interest has a direct impact on social justice in the arts. In the age of Truth and [re]Conciliation, directives for EDI are not all interpreted in the same way and this creates a potential for art-making endeavours that are eligible for prioritized funding without challenging the oppressive structures responsible for inequities within our sector.

NAC announces founding of a new department dedicated to Indigenous Performance.
NAC announces founding of a new department dedicated to Indigenous Performance.

I invite you to read the open letter from John Kim Bell (Mohawk) called Understanding Reconciliation in the recent issue of alt.theatre – Cultural Diversity and the Stage. Bell has been called “The First North American Indian Conductor” and in this letter he speaks of the ballet he produced, co-composed and directed In The Land Of Spirits. The systemic barriers he overcame creating this production with an all-Indigenous creative team in 1988, before touring it nationally in 1992, are juxtaposed by the 2014/15 Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) sponsored commission and national tour of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Going Home Star – Truth and Reconciliation that, to my knowledge, has not one Indigenous dancer on stage. In his open letter John Kim Bell states clearly how funding for [re]Conciliation from the federal government, “should go to building capacity within the Indigenous community directly.” Furthermore, he shares, “In my long career, I have learned that, unless extra money can be secured, mainstream cultural institutions will give little support for Aboriginal people and projects.”

Enter the $33.4 million of Canada Council New Chapter funding and our Awkward Call To Arms. The first deadline has come and gone and the second deadline is fast approaching (October 31st, 2016). IPAA receives one request a day from potential Allies looking to collaborate with an Indigenous organization or artist on a Truth & [re]Conciliation project. Regrettably, we are unable to adequately (and patiently) respond to every request given the short turnaround and the existing collaborations and commitments IPAA has underway. The timing of these inquiries is a symptom of artistic leaders seeking partnerships to secure funding – in my experience, meaningful collaborations are motivated by artistic compatibility with the needs of community at the centre rather than additional revenue sources.

IPAA has honed our Ally Membership criteria in response to this fervoured interest in Indigenous collaboration. Allies are now asked to tell the story of their previous engagement with Indigenous artists so our members can hear (in their words) how they self-identify as Ally. Stand out profiles include clearly articulated IPAA Member points of access from Made In BC: Dance On Tour and a reflection on the Ally’s responsibility to consider what they receive when collaborating with Indigenous artists (and what they are willing to offer in return) from Individual Ally Member Kristina Lemieux.

Each of us has parts of our communities we could be better advocates for through the development of meaningful collaboration. IPAA’s mandate of claiming space for all Indigenous performing artists implicitly includes artists with diverse abilities. Working with Michele Decottignes at The Deaf, Disability and Mad Arts Alliance of Canada on the All In Initiative reminds me how much work I need to do to become a better ally to the Deaf, Disabled and Mad artists within the Indigenous performance communities (and our organization’s mandate).

View for yourself the Ally Organization and Ally Individual application(s) and consider becoming a member of IPAA as a step in the process of creating relationships with Indigenous performing artists, organizations and communities.

Meaningful cross-cultural collaboration is the long game and it needs to start right now.

Artistic Director and Creative Catalyst

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Beginning January 15 2017, SpiderWebShow will transition to a new structure with Michael Wheeler as Full-Time Artistic Director and Sarah Garton Stanley as Creative Catalyst. The two are currently co-teachers of IDIS 410: Contemporary Cultural Performance in Practice at Queen’s University as part of SpiderWebShow Performance’s Residency there.

SpiderWebShow @ Queen’s University

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SpiderWebShow has been teaching a course  at Queen’s University (IDIS 410) as part of the our Residency at the University.  On December 2nd in The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, we will present student-led projects that will be the first rehearsed presentations using CdnStudio.

SpiderWebShow establishes board of directors

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The SpiderWebShow is pleased to announce the creation of our board of directors, which consists of…

boardLois Dawson is a Vancouver-based stage & production manager. Her stage management credits have ranged from original musicals to site-specific spectacle, from Swiss opera to the Fringe festival, and from one-person political comedy to the Olympics. She is the president of the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards, sits on the national stage management committee for CAEA, and is a graduate of Trinity Western University. She can be found online at www.LoisBackstage.com or @SMLois.
Yvette Nolan is a playwright, director and dramaturg who works across Canada and the United States. From 2003-2011 she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Her book Medicine Shows, about Indigenous theatre in Canada was published in 2015. She is an artistic associate with Signal Theatre.
Brian Quirt is Artistic Director of Nightswimming, which has commissioned and developed more than 30 new plays, dance works and musical pieces since 1995, and Director of the Banff Centre Playwrights Colony. He recently directed national tours of Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box, Anita Majumdar’s The Fish Eyes Trilogy and Same Same But Different. He has created and directed eight of his own plays, including his pop-up choral piece Why We Are Here! (with Martin Julien). He is the current Board Chair and a past-President of the Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas.

Thank you for supporting CdnStudio!

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86 investors from St.John’s to Whitehorse are shaping the future of #cdncult through CdnStudio.

 

 

 

PlayMe Summer Shorts Series: Chemo Sabe

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A man’s reflections on life, marriage, aging, and mortality while undergoing the surreal experience of chemotherapy.

Written by John Mullin, performed by Eric Peterson.

PlayMe Summer Short Series: Clutched By a Hair

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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After a teenager escapes her family home and abusive father, as an adult she discovers that she is vulnerable in ways that remind her strongly of her tumultuous past. It is a story of love, equality, and strength.

Written by Cindy Mathews, performed by Pamela Sinha.

Our Town: choosing a play for a landscape and a community

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A forest clearing at night. A large cast of actors in tableaux across the clearing, dressed in early 1900s clothing.
Our Town at the Caravan Farm Theatre. Photo by Tim Matheson

Caravan Farm Theatre is a 38 year old professional outdoor theatre company based on an 80-acre farm, 11 kilometers northwest of Armstrong BC. As a family-centric theatre company, our audience spans the age spectrum, and is comprised of residents of the communities in the Central and Southern Interior of British Columbia.

The Caravan experience is unlike any other; our 80 acres of land is our theatre – the ground our stage, the starry sky our backdrop, and our Clydesdale horses are used as stage machinery and character. Throughout its history, Caravan Farm Theatre has strived to present work that exposes our rural audiences to new, dynamic, and innovative outdoor theatre practices indicative of the rural experience, one they can call their own. Our audiences have become accustomed to Caravan productions exploring such themes or stories that culturally define this region such as the renegade freedom of dusty cowboys, or a homespun tale of a family’s struggles, or populist musicals and epic myths.

The majority of our shows are new play commissions. I typically come up with the idea, whether it be inspired from an existing story or I’m interested in exploring a certain theme or concept. I then pitch the playwright with a couple of different options and they bite on one. The concepts I present stem from my desire to provide our audiences with work that, in one form or another, reflects our surrounding rural environment. And they must be geared towards family audiences. You’d think this would be a challenge to find such stories, but it isn’t. It is incredibly creatively stimulating to think of shows/ideas that can lend themselves to such universality. The seed of the idea can grow into a cowgirl musical or a dreamlike winter myth realized on stage against the towering pines of our eighty acres. My artistic motivation and approach is always guided by the land; how can a story match, domineer, or be in antithesis to the natural landscape on which it is performed? How can it lend itself to the grandeur of the cinematic landscape to provide the audience a sense of wonder and magic? The idea, the characters, the themes of the piece must coincide with the majesty of its surroundings. It is the basis for everything. This is why we typically commission new work; it can be written specifically with an outdoor performance space in mind. At times though, we must take a break from the rigor of developing new work and program a classic. To that end, I look for work that has room for the natural to play a part.

Caravan has produced Brecht and Shakespeare before, and I wanted to find something different for our 2016 summer show. A modern classic. I was interested in Oscar Wilde as I believed his wicked humor and complex narratives could suit our audience’s tastes; witty, humorous, with huge potential for grand design. I asked some of the cast members of our 2015 summer production, The Night’s Mare by Kevin Kerr – a commissioned, beautiful, and very successful show for Caravan – to read a scene from The Importance of Being Ernest. I love this play and thought since a majority of the piece takes place outside in an English garden, it could be a nice fit for us. The actors, stage management, and myself took to the fields of Caravan and read the scene aloud. And it was an epic fail – the language was too heady and dense and the humor too wrapped in wordplay to resonate in a large, uncontrolled outdoor space. It was a worthy experiment and spoke to my suspicions that not all plays, especially classics, are suited to be performed outdoors.

I was eager to find something that spoke to Caravan audiences; something that could elegantly incorporate the natural environment and was significant and beautiful. I phoned my friend, former teacher, and Artistic Director of Studio 58, Kathryn Shaw. She said right away, “What about Our Town?” I hesitated. I first saw Our Town when I was an acting student at Studio seventeen years ago. The piece was directed by Jane Heyman and starred my talented fellow theatre students. As I was in my early years of training, I was the lighting board operator for the show so I watched the play every night, six performances a week. I studied the characters, the performances, the set, the direction, every detail of the show. I now felt, years later, that my relationship with the play, although important at the time, had grown stale and I was looking for something new. Kathryn mentioned another Pulitzer Prize winning play by Thornton Wilder called The Skin of Our Teeth. I was intrigued. So I checked out from the library a Thornton Wilder anthology that included The Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town.

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Charlie Gould as Emily, Laara Sadiq as Mrs. Webb. Photo by Tim Matheson.

One night, after I had put my eighteen-month old daughter to sleep, I started to read The Skin of Our Teeth at her bedside while she slept. It is a masterfully written play, but it didn’t feel like a fit for Caravan. It was too abstract and didn’t have a family-centric feel. I casually flipped to the back of the anthology and began to read Our Town, just because. I thought: “Hey…I haven’t read or even thought about this play for so long, I’ll give it a quick breeze through”. I couldn’t stop reading it. I read it again. I wept. My heart grew bigger because of it. My understanding of humanity and our struggles, joys, and sacrifices was a little deeper for it. I peered over the side of my daughter’s crib, watched the slow, steady breathing of this beautiful tiny human whom I love more than the world, and I thought: “This moment. This small, precious moment. Acknowledging this moment. This is what Our Town speaks to. This is perfect”. The quiet appreciation of the miracle of life, illuminated by a child’s night light at three o’clock in the morning is what made me fall in love with Our Town all over again.

That’s the emotional reasoning behind choosing Our Town for Caravan. The technical reason is that Thornton Wilder asks the audience of the piece to use their imaginations in his ‘no set, no props’ approach to the storytelling. Caravan asks our audiences to do much the same with all our work. Part of the appeal of our outdoor productions lie in the ability of the audiences to accept that the natural environment is a palette on which the dramatic action is performed. An actor can come onto stage from behind a bush that is supposed to be the backdoor of a house; a car can be driven through a field and over a hill, that represents the road to heaven; a lone tree in the middle of a snow drift is the quiet refuge of hermit; or in the case of Our Town, a simple wooden platform that bends to the curve of the land can become a graveyard. There is the space in the places and text of Our Town for the natural environment to play a part, to be the setting itself, to have a direct impact on the story.

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Our Town at Caravan Farm Theatre, photo by Tim Matheson.

Another technical aspect of Our Town that had much appeal to me was the size of its cast. Typically, Caravan has eight or nine actors in our summer productions. Our Town boasts twenty three characters and then some. My idea in dealing with this was to include local community members playing the smaller roles and townspeople of the show; as in, our town performs Our Town. This was an excellent opportunity to form relationships with our local talent and community and have a broad range of people on stage from children to seniors. The final result is a true representation of the people of a town and it is indicative of the plays themes and the need of our audiences to see themselves represented on stage.

Ultimately, if the land can inform the art, always informs the art, and then guides it from artistic inception to final product, the play is right for Caravan Farm Theatre. And the audience will enjoy it. They may not be able to articulate why they do, but they feel in their bones that the dramatic action, the drive behind each and every character, is large enough to reach them across a fifty-foot outdoor space with no walls, roof, or floor. What they feel is alive in the air, literally, and hits them the same way a stunning mountain view of our landscape does; with awe, magnificence, and the feeling you are closer to something spiritually larger than yourself.

Performance in Progress

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Tents with pink and yellow lights inside. In a grove of trees.
Photo credit to Dahlia Katz.

Trophy is an ever-evolving piece. What first started out as an awards ceremony performance has evolved into a performance and visual art installation consisting of 5 tents, which will shortly be evolving into an installation of 150 tents. Everything from our storytellers to our installation materials to the context provided by our location changes each time, creating a piece that is continually in flux. I used to think this was problematic until I realized that it makes sense that a piece about change and the turning points in life should itself transform each time, too. The question, as with all transitions, has become how to navigate this continuous change while still maintaining the integrity of the piece.

In its present incarnation, Trophy is five glowing tents, and inside each is a person telling a true story about a moment in their life when everything changed. Over the course of the performance, audience members go from tent to tent. After listening to a story, they’re encouraged to reflect on the turning points in their own lives and write down their own stories on colourful transparencies. These transparencies are then attached to the tents, transforming the tents over the course of the performances into multi-coloured translucent structures. In this way, the experience of Trophy becomes an expression of all participants’ stories, and an exploration and conversation about how we all experience change and how we are shaped by these experiences.

A woman hangs colourful pieces of paper along the inside of a tent.
Photo credit to Dahlia Katz.

We choose storytellers who live in the city where we are presenting the show. The storytellers are not necessarily trained performers – the primary criteria are that they have an interesting story, that they are willing to work with us to flesh that story out, and that we get along. We aren’t trying to literally tell the story of the area, but we do want to make sure that the people who make up the community are represented.

Trophy is very much informed by the site – our first two performances of Trophy were at Nuit Blanche Ottawa+Gatineau and In the Soil Arts Festival (St. Catherines ON). In both cases, we were in the middle of a busy downtown street, where people had to walk through our installation as part of their daily lives. We deliberately spaced out our tents, allowing space for people to move through the installation and create their own paths. Most of our participants were not traditional theatre or art goers, and had no idea of the rules we normally place on art attending, and so they happily broke every single one.

We didn’t charge admission, and there was no real or metaphorical fence around our installation, so the interaction with Trophy became deeply casual and community-oriented. After trying to maintain a certain performance structure, we realized that people really just wanted to manage their own experiences, and so we opened it wide up, allowing people to visit as many tents as they felt like, join in when they wanted to and drop out whenever they were done. We relaxed our time constraints, and let people linger in the tents with our performers, deciding that what was more important than having an official “performance experience” was the intimate moments and community-building that was happening inside the tents, as people connected with their neighbours, told stories that they had never shared before, and experienced those moments of connection which are what Trophy is really about.

A tent made of clear plastic with pinks and yellow lights inside.
Photo credit to Dahlia Katz.

And then we moved to SummerWorks – a totally different context altogether. We were in the CAMH park on Queen West on a hot summer day, and there was a cost for tickets. We decided to add back in the formal structure that had been evolved out. Being on Queen West, especially in the evening, we started to get a lot of attention as our tents began to glow. A number of people mentioned that they would not normally want to be in that park after dark, and so it was interesting to have created a space where everyone was welcome – both the people who normally reside in the park, and the people who would normally avoid it.

Being in a park instead of the middle of the street forced people to choose to come into the installation. It was not so much another part of the fabric of the city, and more of a special thing that had popped up in an unusual place. There was a completely different sense of ownership by the participants – this time, the format of the piece stayed the same throughout the day, as participants respected our structure, following the more traditional rules of performance going. And so in this case, while previously it was the audience that evolved the piece, this time it was us who actually started to change, as we repeated Trophy over and over. Trophy is to be performed multiple times in one day – at SummerWorks, we did the piece six times, with performers telling their stories up to 30 times each. Through this experience, our performers’ stories deepened and expanded, and as the facilitators of the performance, we found small ways to increasingly care for our performers and participants as we led them through the experience. It was more about guiding, ritual, and care versus being taken over and reshaped by the audience. The show expanded and deepened in a completely different way.

Group of people standing in a circle between colourful tents and trees.
Photo credit Dahlia Katz.

Allison O’Connor, Trophy’s co-creator and installation designer, and I often have conversations about what the point of Trophy is – are we creating something open and community-focused or is it about a polished finished piece? Can we create a piece that is porous enough for the audience to take it over and fully shape it, while still maintaining our artistic vision? How much control can you, or should you, exert in a piece that is about change? I like to think of Trophy as a ritual. In that context, the key moment of the ceremony is when the ritual itself takes over and we lose control. How do you create the possibility of that moment, while still having a space where the audience and performers can be guided and cared for?

As we start to prepare for our next version of Trophy, we are heading in the direction of even less control – we’re going to have 150 tents in a downtown street in Ottawa, where trying to control the audience experience will be even harder. In a world where so much is controlled, planned and processed, it feels both exhilarating and terrifying to create something that can literally be taken over. It feels exactly like those life turning points that we talk about in Trophy – it’s only in the relinquishing of control that the possibility of true change and transformation can occur. And so that’s what we’ll be doing – we’ll plan, lay groundwork, write proposals, make spreadsheets, have tons of meetings, rehearsals and conference calls, and then, when the audience arrives, we’ll let go, and see where the ritual takes us.

 

 

Shakespeare in Rural Newfoundland

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Large wood theatre building in the woods with bright colourful rainbow arching overhead.
View of outside the stage, a theatre modelled after Shakespeare’s famous open air Globe theatre in London. Photo credit: Danielle Irvine.

I am sitting in the woods, overlooking the ocean on the East coast of Canada’s eastern most province, in the tiny community of Cupids, Newfoundland Labrador (population 790).

There is wind, fresh off the ocean that blows through the trees that surround our Elizabethan inspired theatre.

Yep, I said it, Elizabethan-inspired theatre. In a rural area of a remote province nowhere near a major theatrical hub where you may expect to find such an oddity.

At first glance it is not exactly a match to pair Shakespeare and rural Newfoundland.

What has always drawn me to Shakespeare has been my love of language and the power of words. Words have a specific taste in your mouth, they sum up a feeling in your gut, words capture your inner most feelings and can become weapons or tools depending on how you wield them.

Growing up in Newfoundland, you are surrounded by storytellers, debaters and “characters” (what we call folks who really stand out). This is a place where language has a musicality, where telling a story is still part of many family gatherings, where everyone has an opinion and is not afraid to debate it. This is a place where people still say “ye” and “hark” and have turns of phrase that are strange to the ears of “come from aways”.

Founded in 1610, at the height of Shakespeare’s reign of the London stage, Cupids was the first colony in what would become Canada – the second founded in North America.   Those first settlers, in all likelihood, could have seen one of Shakespeare’s plays before sailing over.   They carried with them, along with their dreams of starting a new world, the seeds of a language and culture that came straight out of Shakespeare’s time.

What followed were hundreds of years of isolation that kept a bubble around our language, as not until the 1960’s was there an influx of TVs, better roads and travel. It has been the focus of great study at the linguistics department at our university as you can literally hear the bridge between the old world and the new in the older generation of outport Newfoundlander.

Man and woman standing on a wooden stage, with one hand reached towards the other's. Palms touching.
David Feehan and Erin Mackey in Romeo and Juliet, 2016. Photo Credit to Pam Whelan.

As a young artist, I was fascinated with the idea of allowing our NL accent to inform the Shakespearean text I was working with and found that it rolled naturally to my ear. In recent years, upon hearing Ben and David Crystal do their version of original pronunciation, it almost caused me to leap from my seat – as it sounded like home to me.

Now, not all Newfoundland accents are the same. To my grandfather’s generation – if you speak they can tell not only what bay you are from, but also what community; there are so many different accents. If you go to the Southern shore, you will hear the Irish accent, if you go to the West coast it is French, if you go Northeast, it is British. But all of them are old versions of accents that have grown and changed in their home countries. In the Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland and Labrador, you can click and hear these amazing sounds!

Allowing Shakespeare’s text to flow through our own voices in their natural cadences has been liberating for the artists and exhilarating for the audiences. People keep exclaiming about how easy it is to understand the text, how clear the story is, how the jokes really pop.

Now, I know that is also due to our rigorous text work and professionalism that we use to thoroughly explore the text and embody the story.

That accent, however, is the cherry on top of a layered and dense, flavourful cake – one that people are devouring in greater numbers. People, who had never thought of taking in a play, let alone Shakespeare, are coming to our theatre. They may be trepidacious upon entering but upon leaving they are shocked and excited to discover they like both theatre and Shakespeare.

These words, these characters, these stories are big on imagination, deep in meaning and resoundingly human. Our simple stage, surrounded by trees, with its breeze off the ocean lifting the sails over our heads is humble. But it is full of pioneering artists, forging a company that will draw folks from all over. A modern day echo of the pioneers forging a community that would become a toehold in the new world.

Goofy shot of large cast sitting infront of wood cabin.
Perchance Company 2016 on the stage. Photo credit to Danielle Irvine.

It is not easy. Raising money for theatre in an “austerity budget” province is hard, raising money and support for theatre in a rural area where that austerity is even more keenly felt is even harder. I am not just building an awareness of the theatre; I am educating people about the role that the arts play in the economy and in how they see themselves. It is excruciating to have to justify the existence of our work when people often don’t see its value. I faced many a raised voice of those who just couldn’t see why we would be doing Shakespeare here.

That is until I got brave members of their own community up speaking and doing the text in a fundraiser. Those brave souls had never spoken Shakespeare, and were not actors but were willing to give it a try. At first they were worried about how the work sounded in their “Newfounese” as one person called it. I told them to embrace it and the audience went wild.

Shakespeare was writing about the human experience, which is why we still love these characters 400 years later. By connecting to the text in this way, I am connecting to my community and they are seeing the work so much more clearly because they can finally hear themselves. The ivory tower that these folks had built around Shakespeare has dropped away and slowly but surely our company is being embraced.

This is the lens through which I look at my work; the guiding principle for picking my shows is that love of language and my love of place and the love of our stage in the woods on the coast.

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