iawl-ypt-1

C’est la vida! uses mime, dance, and electro beats to remix classic rom-com tropes

“Having endless talks with David about love, and our respective relationships, while creating and touring this show has definitely helped me grow,” says dancer Liesbeth Kiebooms. “It’s given me a more subtle understanding of love.”

Five theatre directors offer advice to the next generation — and the programs training it

The artists on this call were candid and vulnerable. They spoke openly about their professional frustrations and challenges — and they weren’t shy about pinpointing the ways that mainstream anglophone Canadian theatre practices fail directors and artists more broadly. That said, I didn’t leave our chat feeling hopeless or cynical.

Ahead of Canadian Stage’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Ann-Marie MacDonald reflects on Shakespeare — and power skating

“Sexism kept me out of hockey as a kid,” says Ann-Marie MacDonald. “But sexism also shut me out of Shakespeare."

How can theatre directors forge a sustainable career in Canada?

It’s increasingly unlikely that directors will hone their craft through formal training. Relatively few post-secondary programs devoted to directing exist, and it seems to me that directing-specific mentorship programs are less common than similar initiatives for actors or playwrights. To convene a roundtable about director training, I reached out to five very different artists on a continuum of early- to mid-career.

Eric Woolfe’s inventive horror theatre is a monster mash of artistic influences

For the past 26 years, Eldritch Theatre’s director of the uncanny has given ghoulies, ghosties, and long-legged beasties of all kinds a spot in the limelight, in productions that serve up puppets, magic, and a crumbling castle’s-worth of uncanny influences, including schlock-horror B-movies, Shakespeare at his bloodiest, and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. 

This year’s SummerWorks Performance Festival strives to make accessibility intrinsic

The curated festival’s 36th edition features a range of works by Disabled and neurodivergent artists where the medium is very much the message.