INTERVIEW with Heather Redfern, by Charlotte Baker (PDTA, 2023)

BIOGRAPHIE

A graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada, Heather Redfern (Set and Costume Design, 1984) is the Executive Director of The Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch), where she curates a program of live and digital presentations and an extensive community engagement program. Using the stage as a tool for challenging assumptions, creating dialogue, and making change, the performances at The Cultch, celebrate the rich and diverse communities that populate this country and the world.

Heather has dedicated her career to serving a diverse group of artists and audiences, she is particularly interested in the creation of new forms and in putting creative teams together that are working outside of their comfort zones. Working locally, nationally and internationally, she believes in the transformational powers of the arts.

Ms. Redfern previously worked as the Executive Director of the Greater Vancouver Alliance for Arts and Culture, the Artistic Producer for Catalyst Theatre in Edmonton and as a freelance theatre designer. She has been honored with the City of Edmonton, Business and the Arts Award for Excellence in Arts Management and the Mallory Gilbert Leadership Award for sustained, inspired, and creative leadership in Canadian Theatre.

In June of 2019 Heather Redfern and The Cultch were awarded the Vancouver Now Representation and Inclusion Award, at the Jessies, for “working to deliberately curate and program shows that present the city that we live in onstage while also continuously working towards the inclusion of and visibility of a spectrum of minority and marginalized communities.”

Here is Heather RedFern’s speech at the Gascon-Thomas Award Ceremony on March 17th, 2023.

Hello all,

I am Heather Redfern, my family origins are Swedish and English and I am a sister, a mother and a grandmother. I reside on the unceded Indigenous land of the xwməϴkwəýəm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (TsleilWaututh) Nations. I am grateful today to be on the unceded Indigenous lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka/Mohawk Nation.

First of all, thank you for this honour and opportunity. I was lucky enough to attend this remarkable school in the early 80’s. The facilities were not nearly as fancy as they are today. In this building, the area where the bar is now, was a mish mash of disreputable furniture scavenged from props storage, overflowing ashtrays and paint-stained coveralls. It smelled of melting Styrofoam, acetone and slightly rotting latex paint. It was a busy stinky messy workshop and I loved it. All of it.

I went through the design program under the very watchful eye of Francois Barbeau, a man who said what he thought, very bluntly, especially when he was speaking in English. He was a perfectionist, and when you received an odd bit of praise, it made your year. I relished conversations with him, it always felt like he was pushing to make us better artists. He and many of the teachers I had here, changed me forever. They fed the fire inside me that was my passion for theatre, they gave me the tools I needed to make that passion something real and tangible, and they helped me to figure out how to use those tools to change the world, one performance at a time.

And then, there was living in Montreal. One of the greatest gifts this school gives to all of us is the opportunity to live in one of the best cities in the world. It took me awhile to figure that out though. I was so lost the first fall that I was here, I actually asked Francois to give me more work to do. He told me to walk the streets, to watch people and listen to the city, to go to the theatres in cafes and found spaces, and that even if I didn’t understand the language, I would learn something. Since that time, any time I travel, I do exactly that. I walk kilometres, I watch, listen, go to galleries and performances and I always learn something.

A lot of living has happened since then, and every step of the way, I have had my theatre family. The nature of the work we do in the theatre requires us to be vulnerable and open to each other. The work of creating collectively binds us like a family and those bonds become a part of us.

Throughout your careers you will grow your theatre family, The beginnings of that group are here in this room. You are not alone, you are part of a continuum, you are supported by peers, elders and mentors, by those who have come and gone before you. These are the people who will give you the courage to take risks in your work and when you go somewhere you have never been before, all of us here will be there and see how brave you’ve been, whether you succeed or fail.
It will be you – all of you – that invent the future of theatre in this country. We need only to walk the streets, look and listen to see that the way forward has inclusion at its centre.

For the past 16 years I have been the Executive Director of the Cultch in Vancouver. The Cultch holds a unique place in English Canada. It is a presenting, rather than a producing venue, and it is multidisciplinary. Part of our job is to support artists and their work by providing fees, technical support and marketing for their shows, but that is not the most important thing we do for artists. What we do is connect artists to audiences and communities to artists. This is our passion and it has driven us to try and figure out what different communities need to feel welcome and safe when they walk in our doors to see a show. That might seem like a simple idea but it’s one that is complex to realize. It is one that each one of you will have to work through at every step of your career, wherever it may take you.

You will need to walk, watch, listen and learn. If you do that artists and audiences will tell you what they need to come together and that is when the hard work will begin.
There is no manual on how to do this, the work is a product of a willingness to listen, a drive to do better. At the Cultch, we are working to decolonize a creation space that has both Indigenous and non-indigenous artists working together. One that is reaching out to a diverse audience. This requires everyone to be involved: Box office staff, volunteers, technicians, artists, marketing and development people. For the organization to be successful, each individual needs to look at their bias and prejudices and acknowledge them as a starting point. There has to be enough trust that people can be honest with each other and respectful of boundaries. Everything that happens in the process has to be genuine. Because many of our preconceptions, the things we learned in school about how to make theatre, and bring an audience to it, were and continue to be, harmful.

If we are going to embrace a diversity of worldviews, of ways of art-making and art-sharing, we need to be willing to challenge everything we believe about how art can and should be done.

This effort at decolonization. At mutually respectful and beneficial artistic exchange is an ongoing project for us. This is hard. It creates friction and discomfort. We make mistakes. Working together is complicated and it takes time, but it is worth it.

One of my favourite ways of nerding out about what it takes to be genuinely inclusive is to obsess about bathrooms. As trans and gender fluid people have become increasingly out, proud and visible in much of in much of our society. Bathrooms became the battlefield.

Our priority at the Cultch was making sure the trans and non-binary people on our staff and in our audiences felt safe, so the first thing we did was cover our gendered washroom signs with Universal Washroom signs. This did not work. Femme patrons did not always feel safe walking out of a stall to find a cis-man standing outside it. And I can’t tell you the number of cis-women who walked into the washroom with urinals and turned around and walked right back out again. Our goal of making everyone feel welcome and safe was not achieved for all the good intentions.

So instead, we put up a sign on each gendered washroom door indicating explicitly that trans and gender fluid people were welcome. This was not enough. It solved the problem of cis- discomfort, but did not feel truly inclusive.

So we listened to each of these groups about what they needed to feel safe, and they gave the same answer, a real universal washroom, with private stalls. One where the doors go from the floor to the ceiling and sinks that were in a genuinely public space.

It’s a simple solution. But it took a lot of planning, it was expensive. It took a long time. We faced barriers we weren’t expecting around all kinds of things that I won’t bore you with, but I obsess over, like ventilation, fire suppression systems and city permitting.

It feels like a lot for something as simple as going to the bathroom. But it’s not, because thousands of different people will use that bathroom now that it’s built and they will feel safe in a gender-neutral bathroom for the first time, and a second time and a third time and the fourth time until they won’t even think about it.
This is what the team accomplished! We created the conditions for everyone to feel safe and stopped the bathroom wars.

It feels simple, but it’s not. It wasn’t. It required us to set aside our assumptions, build relationships and listen to the needs of the people we were trying to serve and overcome systemic barriers, ones we knew were there and ones that were invisible until we ran up against them.

And as you move forward in your career, a generation of artists driven to do better, this is the pattern you will follow whether you are decolonizing your practice, developing inclusive spaces or radically rethinking how you make work.

I am sure you have heard a million times how hard it is to make a living and have a good life working in this business. Those things are true, but the main reason it is so hard is because we all love it so much. We see the power it has; we know how it makes us and others feel to be in a room together having a shared emotional experience. We know that we could be changing someone’s life and never know about it.

You’ve spent your time here learning a very specific set of skills for a specific role in the theatre. My training here was in design. And at a point in my life, I had to make the decision to put my career as a theatre designer and scenic painter aside and take on a role in the arts that was about supporting the work of other artists.

It wasn’t actually a hard choice. I found the best way I could express my love for this work and its power to heal was to provide artists seeking an audience tools – and hope.

Each of you has a super power. Collectively you tell stories. You invite people into these stories in a way that activates their psyches as memories that trigger their own stories and emotions. This is the ultimate exercise in empathy and community building.

This is why what we do will always exist and will always be relevant. All of the people teaching you right now understand how important you are to the future of live performance. As theatre makers, we live on an edge and they are giving you the tools you need to thrive there. This school produces artists yes; it also produces creative leaders.

You have an important job to do. You will decide what comes next in our profession. You will take the lessons I am learning now and decide whether we can work better. Kindlier, more inclusively, more sustainably.
Take risks, be honest, acknowledge yourself, give yourself a break, and love and care for one another. You will keep track of the people in this room, your classmates, all of your life. You may not see each other for a long time but you will keep tabs on each other and many of you will work together and make incredible performance.

And some of you will make the choice I did, you will raise the money and run the building and, most importantly, create the culture that supports those performances. And you will use the tools that you learned here at NTS to do that. You have been trained to be open and to work together. I challenge you to create the future of theatre with passion, honesty, trust, risk, fierce love and hard work.

One last thing, do me a favour, we are terrible to our elders in this profession, so find them and listen to their stories. You might not agree with their ideas but they have stories to tell, with lessons that are worth taking to heart. I appreciate you listening to mine.

INTERVIEW with Guy Simard, by Béatrice Germain (Création et Production, 2023)

The video is in French

BIOGRAPHIE

The artistic and professional career of Guy Simard (Création et production, 1975) is replete with experiences and projects in theatre, dance, opera, circus, architecture, scenography and teaching. Through his involvement in hundreds of productions as a lighting designer, technical director, stage manager, production manager or technical consultant, he has acquired a strong reputation in Quebec, in the rest of Canada and around the world.

In Montreal, his collaborations with several theatre companies have earned him three Masques awards and ten nominations from the Académie Québécoise du Théâtre. He also received the Fondation Jean-Paul Mousseau award in 1996 for his innovation, his constant research and the high quality of his artistic work.

In the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, some thirty prestigious institutions have appreciated his skills and artistic vision for many years in opera.

Alongside his artistic and technical work, he has always made room for teaching and training, in particular by giving courses and workshops at the National Theatre School of Canada and the Institut Supérieur des Techniques du Spectacle in Avignon.

Guy Simard is also one of the founding members of Trizart Consultations, a company offering design and consulting services for the development and rehabilitation of public and performance venues (Espace Go, Monument-National, the Capitol Theatre in Québec City, La Licorne).

Here is Guy Simard’s speech at the Gascon-Thomas Award Ceremony on March 17th, 2023

I would like to thank the Board of Governors for creating this award, as well as the staff and jury members who accorded me this honour.

I am very touched and honoured to be part of such a select group of people who are passionate about theatre.

Having worked with many of them, including André Brassard, Jean Louis Millette, Paul Buissonneau, Janine Sutto and Jean Pierre Ronfard, I can speak to their characteristic generosity. They have never spared any effort or counted the hours spent bringing a show to fruition. Their work was always done with the utmost respect. They have all, in their own way, paved the way and I have learned a lot from them.

The Great Adventure

I first set foot on this stage at 9:30 a.m. on September 4, 1973, to begin “La semaine de pratique au théâtre.” I was one of eight students starting our first year at the Section technique française. It was the beginning of an adventure that lasted two years. At that time, José Descombes, originally from Switzerland, was in charge of the section and demanded discipline, rigour and punctuality. Normal for a Swiss!

Technically, we were supervised by Freedy Grimwood, a Brit who was the Technical Director of the Monument National. He and I had some fascinating discussions over wine in his office. In fact, I learned my passion and love of wine from him!

I would be remiss not to mention the work of Stanly Wegging, Head of the Carpentry Workshop, Léo Poulin, our ghost at the Monument National. He was the caretaker and lived right by the stage where the cafeteria is now located. He was always ready to help us, day or night.

Michael Eagan, a technical drawing teacher who spoke French with a southern New Brunswick Anglophone accent, was a lover of Patsy Galant, the disco queen of the day, and designed the sets for her shows.

Jean-Claude Germain, of course, for the history of Quebec theatre. He could talk for hours, even days, without stopping.

Jacques Languirand talked about the new technologies of the time that had been developed for Expo 67, namely slide projection and 16 mm films, audiovisual and mechanized set movements.

We were in very close contact with the Interprétation section, which was under the artistic direction of André Pagé, who came from the world of television, children’s programs. His team was made up of young and dynamic artists, including Michele Rossignol, Roger Blay as director and performer, poet Michel Garneau, and musician André Angelini.

And finally the great costume designer, François Barbeau, as set design manager.
In short, we were in good hands.

Francis Reid, a British lighting designer, teacher in London, author of several books on lighting and lighting manager for the prestigious Glyndebourne Festival Opera, delivered our lighting courses as a series of lectures and workshops. He taught me that a lighting engineer should behave with discretion, philosophy and humour. He also introduced me to going to London pubs for fish and chips and beer.
And on May 9, 1975, on this very stage, together with Charles Maher, Louise Lemieux and Pierrette Amiot, we received our diplomas.

The Teaching Years

Initially, as an instructor, I mainly taught technical courses.
There was no lighting designer at that time. Usually, the head electrician handled the lighting under the guidance of the director or set designer and adjusted the lights to obtain the effects requested by the latter.

Towards the end of the 1970s, I was called in to train production students who were to use the lighting console for the big set at the Monument National. At that time, the rather rudimentary lighting system consisted of about 40 dimmers and a console with two preparations.

In the early 1980s, I was asked to create a course in electricity for the stage.
A very technical course that took us “from the hydroelectric plant to the socket in your home,” including the main connections and circuits used in the theatre.

At the same time, as technical director at the Compagnie Jean Duceppe, I noticed that the lighting designers’ plans differed considerably. The visual organisation of the plans and the symbols the lighting designer were using varied from one to another, causing frequent confusion for the chief electricians who had to decipher the various codes. This caused many misinterpretations and often caused delays during installation weeks. Also working outside of Quebec, I learned that there were North American standards that all American lighting designers used for lighting design.

All their plans were drawn in accordance with USITT standards. So I proposed that the School set up a course called “Standards graphiques” to ensure that the lighting plans would meet these standards.

In the mid-1980s, I became technical director and resident lighting designer for Opéra de Montréal. It was an opportunity to welcome and assist great American lighting designers.

They used new database software created by lighting designer John McKernon who worked regularly on Broadway. This software, called Lightwright, was used to compile and generate detailed information for all the projectors drawn on the plans and to maintain an inventory of the projector circuits and control numbers required for the show. It also meant that a plan’s various gelatin colours, lighting devices and circuitry requirements could be assessed quickly and monitored throughout the installation process. A true revolution. I started using this software and then suggested a course, which became the Lightwright course, to the School.

Then, in the early 90s, I was asked to develop a course to help third year students draw and design lighting plans for productions taking place on large stages.

I knew of hundreds of books on stage lighting, the majority of which were either American or British.
These books all have the same structure and they all develop, more or less, the same themes. Tracing the history of theatrical lighting methods used from Antiquity to the modern era of the 1980s by way of the candle, the oil lamp, gas and finally electricity. Next come chapters on lamps and optics intended to help determine which wattages and lenses to use, how to position lighting fixtures, and which systems and basic rules are relevant to achieving constant, even and hole-free lighting. The same goes for using colours to achieve specific atmospheres.

But this would all be stated in a technical, mathematical way.

Very few of these books talk about the quality of the light, the atmospheres created and the dramaturgy of the light. Most of these books give recipes for successful lighting, and the greater the reputation of the author, the better the reputation of the book.

We might draw a parallel with cookbooks.
The success of the book derives directly from the reputation of the chef who signs it.

When it came to structuring the course, I asked myself: what should I relay and how should I relay it? Intuitively, I wanted to pass on what I had learned that could not be found in the books.

How to design and use light so that it becomes a unique, relevant and important component of a show. While I was reflecting, a director reached out to me.

He proposed that I form a group with his colleagues and give them a course on lighting techniques. They wanted to learn the basic rules of lighting, the different types of projectors, which gelatin colours to use and where to put the projectors—in short, how to communicate with lighting designers using technical language. I found this request peculiar: learning the technique to obtain an artistic result. I quickly decided that this was not the best way to go. It was at this point that the idea of creating a lighting design workshop for students in the Production section, those potential future lighting designers, came up. A specific three-day workshop which quickly summarized, at the beginning of the workshop, what was taught in the books.

In order to structure my lessons, I asked myself again: what should I relay and how should I relay it? Intuitively, I wanted to pass on what was not written in the books, but to pass on the basics of light creation. This workshop was followed by another, week-long production workshop dedicated to giving the students a basis for expressing their artistic ideas and visions and to enabling them to interact with other creators and directors. A lighting designer guided the participants in this workshop and a director stimulated discussion and conveyed the artistic vision of the project to the actors.

I started from the principle that “a picture is worth a thousand words” in order to create, with my collaborators, the beginnings of a discussion based on visual representations that illustrate a specific vision of space, a desired atmosphere and the state of mind of the characters.

In summary, most of the course derived from the students’ artistic visions and how to bend the rules, through trial and error, to realize the full potential of light.

I am very grateful that, over the decades, the various directorates have been able to find the budgets, the space and time in the schedule to enable all of these courses to exist.

Many thanks to Pierre Phaneuf, Michel Gosselin, Louise Roussel and Catherine La Frenière. I am also very pleased that lighting training is currently being provided by a great team consisting of:

Martin Labrecque and Alexia Burger, Laboratoire conceptuel d’éclairage,
Nicolas Descoteaux, Atelier d’éclairage—Photométrie et colorimétrie,
Saturnin Goyer, Initiation à la console d’éclairage ION-ETC,
Chantal Labonté, Initiation aux techniques d’éclairage,
Zacharie Filteau, Initiation à la console d’éclairage Grand Ma,
Anne-Catherine Simard-Deraspe, Standards graphiques and Électricité Logiciel Vectorworks.

Yvette Nolan is an Algonquin playwright, director, and dramaturg from Saskatchewan. Since her first play “BLADE” she has written dozens of plays, long and short, including “Annie Mae’s Movement”, “The Unplugging” and, as a co-writer, “Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show”. From 2003 to 2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre.

It is for her contribution to Canadian theatre that Yvette Nolan receives the Gascon-Thomas 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award. Her compelling and profound works contribute to highlight the claims and issues of Indigenous communities in Canada and to denounce the social injustices they are still experiencing.

Here is Yvette Nolan’s speech at the Gascon-Thomas Awards Ceremony on March 19th, 2021

It is humbling to receive an award for Lifetime Achievement. Has it been a lifetime already?

I suppose it is only natural on the occasion of being honoured with such an award to look back and see what it is you have done, what are the choices and actions that have brought you to this moment in time.

There are these moments that stick in your memory, moments that become touchstones, reminders of who you are, reminders of how you are seen in the world. When I was fourteen or fifteen, my new high school friend Margie Langer looked over her coffee cup at me and said “you just say things, eh?” In my first year of university, my English prof Keith Fulton gave me back a paper on Riddley Walker with a note that said “you have what Yeats called ‘the fascination of what’s difficult.’” In my twenties, a man I adored looked over his coffee cup at me and said “why are you so mad all the time?” I have thought of those observations about me so often, they might as well be tattoos. They have all served me in this life in the theatre.

It took me a long time to figure out how to use this form that I love – the theatre – to tell the stories that really matter to me. I knew that telling stories on the stage was powerful, transformative, empowering, but I was in my mid-twenties before I ever saw a play written by an Indigenous writer, performed by Indigenous actors. Living in Winnipeg, which has a huge Indigenous population, created a kind of cognitive dissonance in me – Indigenous people being both visible and invisible. I myself – daughter of a residential school survivor and an Irish immigrant father – lived in both worlds, visible and invisible. I learned to love Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and Tom Stoppard and Sam Shepard.

And then my alma mater – the Manitoba Theatre Centre – brought the Native Earth production of The Rez Sisters to town. And that changed everything. Here were seven Indigenous women onstage, here was the rez, here was a trickster character that transformed and transformed and was the agent of transformation for others. It was like spiritual chiropracty; all the things I knew suddenly aligned.

Gil Desautels, Gilles Renaud, Valérie, and Gideon Arthurs at the Gascon-Thomas

Thank you to the governors and the administration of the School for this immense honour.

I’ve been connected to the National Theatre School for 55 years, first as a student when I spent what I consider to be the best years of my life here. In 1964, the School was located on St-Laurent at the corner of St-Paul. I remember that first morning, sitting in the bus on St-Laurent (the metro didn’t come until the following year). We had to show up to our first class with the complete works of Molière, the Garnier edition. I noticed the girl sitting across from me had the same books in her hands. I gave her a smile and showed her my books, and we both burst out laughing. It was Odette Gagnon. She would be my best friend for years afterwards.

The three years that followed were extremely important to me. I discovered in myself the young artist that was just starting to come alive. I was fascinated by everything I learned. I couldn’t get enough. Would you believe me if I told you I never missed a single class in three years? In my time as a student at the School, I met some of the people who would have the biggest influence on my artistic life forever after: Jean-Pierre Ronfard, Marcel Sabourin, Paul Hébert, André Pagé, Powys Thomas.

“We all at one point dreamed of being part of the artistic scene. And we are the lucky ones who got to make that dream come true”

During our time at the School, we’re in contact with 5 cohorts: the two classes before us, our own class, and the two class that follow us. This is our artistic generation. We keep bumping into and working with these people. They are without a doubt the biggest influence (along with certain professors) that we will encounter. Myself, I was influenced during my training by Sophie Clément, Nicole Leblanc, Michel Catudal, Robert Charlebois, Mouffe, Odette Gagnon, Réal Ouellette, Jean-Yves Laforce, Jean-Roch Achard, Jean-Claude L’Espérance, Véronique Leflagais, Yves Sauvageau, Michael Eagan, Guy Neveu, Claude Deslandes, Paule Baillargeon, Gilbert Sicotte, Pierre Curzi. Fifty-five years later, I am still working with many of them. As theatre people, we are privileged. I hardly know a single person who didn’t dream as a child of being an actor or actress, writing plays, directing or creating sets and lighting. We all at one point dreamed of being part of the artistic scene. And we are the lucky ones who got to make that dream come true.

Gilles Renaud as the Director of the Interprétation and Écriture Dramatique programs

It is therefore important to give back. After a few years, I came back to the School as an instructor. That’s when I really caught the bug. I taught a lot, for a long time. I even served as director of the Interprétation and Écriture dramatique programs. And I relived the same passion I felt 25 years earlier, thanks to the people around me. I think that’s my strongest asset as an artist and a teacher: I know how to surround myself with the best people. At the very beginning of my career, I had the tremendous luck to meet two incredible artists with whom I’ve often worked since: Michel Tremblay and André Brassard. From Hosanna (well, Cuirette) in 1972 right up until Bonjour, là, bonjour, in 2018, I’ve been blessed to be part of a dozen different Michel Tremblay plays. I’ve even had the honour of playing the character of Jean-Marc, Michel’s own alter-ego, several times. There is no greater joy for a Quebecois actor from the Plateau-Mont-Royal than to play Tremblay! For André Brassard, I was one of his principal actors for 30 years. In addition to the Tremblay plays he directed, I had the great pleasure of acting in pieces by Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Dario Fo, Racine, Brecht, Jean Genet, Tchékhov and so many others. Working with André Brassard means working with the most intelligent and brilliant stage director I’ve ever had the chance to meet.

Soon, the siren song of television will come calling for you. It will be tempting, and will pay very well. Go for it. Be on television, do some dubbing, variety, comedy, circus, whatever comes your way. But please, don’t abandon the theatre. I encourage you, I beg you to pursue a career mainly on the stage. That’s the source. That’s where you will find the creative energy that lets us keep learning and renewing ourselves. Go to the theatre, talk to directors, put on shows with your friends, start your own company, figure it out, BUT MAKE SOME THEATRE. As Jean-Pierre Ronfard, who I consider a mentor of mine, said: “I’ve done many things in my life in order to live, but I made theatre so that I wouldn’t die.”

Thank you.

Weyni Mengesha receiving her Gascon-Thomas for Innovation

I am so thrilled to be the recipient of this year’s award for Innovation. To be recognized in this way alongside such an incredible line of recipients is a true honour. I have always wanted to share stories with audiences. I have made a life of this because I believe that stories have the power to change lives. They can make us feel like we belong, connect us, teach us to love, to forgive, and to strive to be better. In theatre we are preserving one of our oldest human rituals. It feels like sacred work to me. It has the ability to frame how we see our past and, most importantly, how we envision our future. It can also act as a bridge. Being an only child of parents who came to this country as Ethiopian immigrants, I was a bit of a bridge. The stories my parents told me about our country were very different than the narrow portrayal of the country through the media.

I became a translator between my hybrid reality as an Ethiopian-Canadian girl. Theatre is my way of amplifying that work and doing it for a number of different voices. Multiple perspectives are integral to a healthy community. It helps build bridges in cities across culture, race, gender, and class. I think this is very important work—especially at a time when we can feel divided on so many key issues facing our world. I feel we, as artists, hold an important gift in this moment to ensure multiple narratives are heard, to get us off our devices and be in a dark room to face each
other.

“When auditioning to get into theatre school, it was almost impossible to find a monologue that was specifically about me, an African Canadian girl”

I grew up in Scarborough with modest means. Nobody in my family was into theatre. I never went. I came to this work because I wanted to empower my friends and community members who I know didn’t see themselves positively in the media. So I wrote stories and put them on at my high school. Luckily, a teacher advised me to continue in University as an actor. When auditioning to get into theatre school, it was almost impossible to find a monologue that was specifically about me, an African Canadian girl. In my second year, I switched from the acting programme to the directing programme so I could learn more about how to help develop voices that I was not finding in our scripts and textbooks. But the method of learning these skills still came from a very Eurocentric cannon.

So, in my third year, I walked into the Chair of the Theatre department’s office and said, “Sir, in my final year, I would like to propose an independent study. I want to do a course called: ‘in search of the African Canadian theatre’ and I want to go across the country and interview people about our theatre history here and our traditions.” He thought about it. Then said. “Ok, that sounds good”. I met writers and actors from across the country and learned that we have had Black Canadian theatre that traces as far back as the early 19th century in places like Vancouver and Halifax. It led me to meet the mentors I still have today, to get my first job, and my first professional production. Today I get to experience my dream fulfilled when I hear people come in and audition for me with monologues from shows I helped create.

“Write what you know. Write the details of what makes you come alive; no one else in the whole world can do it”

To you who are now studying at NTS, I thank you for dedicating these years to your practice. I look forward to working with you as an artist and as an Artistic Director embracing you as brave and bold artists of the next generation. Keep pushing to keep empathy, curiosity and wonder alive in our cities. You might come across roadblocks or roads that are just too narrow to hold all that you are. Do not be afraid to build another path entirely. We need you to be expanding the world so you can stretch and share. Your unique voice ultimately gives us all more room to breathe. Your very specific and unique journey will always be more appealing to an audience then trying to convey a sense of universal Truth. Write what you know. Write the details of what makes you come alive; no one else in the whole world can do it.

Thank you to National Theatre School and the Gascon-Thomas Selection Committee for this incredible honour. Wish I could be there in person.

Have a great evening!