Jury members. Chair. Board of Directors. Founders. Everyone at the Siminovitch Theatre Foundation: Thank you for this honour.

Adrienne. Anne-Marie. Ravi. Your commitment to your craft is inspiring and galvanizing. I am
honoured to have shared this journey with you.

The Siminovitch Prize is a gift of encouragement – for who among us in the theatre has not doubted or despaired in the midst of plying their craft? But, this national recognition, and the opportunity to share my practice with a broader public has seismically shifted my sense of possibility.

As an artist, I am deeply grateful.

But more than that, the Siminovitch Prize proclaims to Canada that theatre matters. And as a Canadian, I am fiercely grateful. I want to live in a country that values the theatre, because it means we value the act of collaborative creation. Of seeing together. Of being in community.

If I am standing before you tonight, the jury is recognizing, in me, all who create theatre on the
outskirts, the margins, the spaces beyond the traditional theatrical norms. I have devoted much
of my career to creating outdoor, site specific theatre on a farm in the Okanagan, for a local,
national, and international audience.

And if there is one thing I have learned in my years of practice in the literal fields it is this: The
magic we seek, the enchantment we desire is found in community. But only if we recognize that
our community is more than our peers – it’s also the people with whom we do not agree. That
our community is more than our fellow humans – it is the brilliant unfolding creative act that is
the natural world.

I believe that our art form’s way forward is about entwining more strands of relationship into
our theatre practice, creating more tensile strength in the social fabric so that we can withstand
the buffeting winds and the pelting hail of this great transformational storm.

We must be bold.

We must take our theatre out into the streets. We must meet our communities where they are
at. We must access the deepest oldest stories where the eternal truths are hidden, and
reimagine them for these times. Our theatre can be the thread to follow, the lamp that lights
the way, the horse that carries us home. As theatre artists we are most equipped to do this
work because our art is the cauldron of all arts. The crucible of artistic expression and embodied
experience. Not everyone paints or writes – but everyone acts.

And it is time to act.

I am here today because a group of theatre artists dared to leave the city – traveling from town
to town by horse and wagon with ideas that challenged the conservative status quo. I was a six
year old kid in love with nature and art standing in a field by the side of the road in Westwold
when the Caravan Stage Company rolled by. My mother and my siblings and I had just landed at my aunt’s farm, our chevy malibu packed with our belongings. We were poor – welfare mom
three-kids-in-tow poor. My life till then was a story penned within the narrow confines of our
socio economic status.

And as I watched those gypsy wagons and Clydesdale horses pass by like some fabulous mirage I suddenly understood that the world was full of mystery and possibility. That vision has
sustained me throughout my life, and I will forever be grateful for the gift that those artists gave
me that day. And I will carry this vision forward, in search of a theatre that seeks nothing less
than to be an encounter with the mystery at the heart of existence and entertainment and a
community practice, alive and expressive and accessible to all.

To my daughter Violeta, partner Ivan, and all of the artists who have and continue to shape me,
I share this honour with you.