April Anne Viczko

April Anne Viczko

Protégé, 2006

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April Anne Viczko is a set, costume, lighting and projection designer based in Calgary. She is currently working on several productions including designing the performance of a book, Bitter Medicine by Clem Martini. Earlier this year she designed the costumes for the three mainstage productions at Alberta Theatre Projects annual playRites Festival, – Drama: Pilot Episode, Thinking of Yu and Ash Rizin. Recently she has worked with Vertigo Theatre, Citadel Theatre, The Belfry and Kill Your Television. She was nominated for a Dora Award for Outstanding Costume Design for the critically acclaimed Last Days of Judas Iscariot produced by Birdland Theatre.

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Dany Lyne

Dany Lyne

Laureate, 2006

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2006 Laureate

In selecting Dany Lyne as the recipient of the 2006 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, the Jury was particularly impressed by the evolution of her work. “While sensitive to the metaphors of words and music, Ms. Lyne’s work sustains the narrative logic of the piece. She rises to the demands of working in the realm of opera, while also being able to deftly apply her creative vision to productions for both small and large theatres. Each project is a laboratory in which she collaborates with her fellow artists, while exploring and applying her vision. Poised to fully realize her creative powers, Ms. Lyne is an artist who establishes a visible and highly unique creative signature in Canadian theatre and beyond.”

Ms. Lyne has been involved in 72 productions in Canada, the United States and Europe, from new plays, to opera, from small independent theatres to large international theatres. Her work has been seen at the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Canadian Opera Company, Theatre Français de Toronto, Necessary Angel Theatre Company, Soulpepper, National Arts Centre, Tarragon Theatre, Elgin Theatre, Tapestry New Opera Works, Pacific Opera, Cincinnati Opera, Central City Opera – Denver, Nationale Reisopera – Netherlands, Opera North – England, De Vlaamse Opera – Belgium, among others.

Acceptance Speech

Merci infiniment aux fondateurs du Prix Siminovitch de théâtre. Merci à vous, Lou, ainsi qu’à votre regrettée épouse Elinor. Merci à Tony et Elisabeth Comper et à BMO pour cette magnifique soirée qui célèbre la scénographie canadienne. Et finalement, merci à vous Peter Hinton, pour avoir proposé ma candidature et pour votre collaboration remarquable et passionnée à nos projets.

I must also give a big thank-you to my chosen family – to my parents-in-law, Helga and Gerhard Rudolph, who have been unfailingly enthusiastic about and interested in my work, and to my partner, Katja Rudolph, whose unflagging support has helped to get me to this podium. She has never once questioned the sacrifices required to do art, and I am inspired by her own artistic journey as a writer. Hers is the best novel I’ve read this year – still in manuscript form, but hopefully to be picked up soon by an agent or publisher!

Theatre has saved my life… and it has also almost killed me! As melodramatic as this may sound, I mean it quite literally.

I have wanted to be an artist ever since I was very young. Growing up in a family ravaged by violence and abuse, the mythos of the artist was like a beacon to me. It was an identity that I could aspire to, one that promised more from existence than the pitiful prospect around me. I even dressed up as an artist for Halloween – it was a clichéd caricature that I created, including black beret, suspenders, round glasses, gray mustache like my beloved Monsieur Bertillon, my Grade 4 art teacher. But even at that age I knew the artist to be a potent force in society, to be a poetic investigator and a political agitator. I saw the artist as a creator of beauty, as a challenger of beauty, as a consummate observer and reporter, as a committed iconoclast and visionary. Somehow, even as a young child, I knew that it is the artist who takes on the role of relentless story-teller in our culture and society. It is the artist who takes up the narratives in circulation there – dominant narratives, lost narratives, narratives of desolation and despair, narratives of hope and redemption – and transforms them into a poetic, stylized form that an audience can encounter like a mirror. It is the artist whose sole purpose is to experiment, expose, propose, engage, uplift and challenge us to confront ourselves. Challenge us to confront our own humanity and inhumanity and thereby perhaps support a united attempt to reach for a peaceful, spiritually vibrant future for us all. For someone suffocated by a deathly familial silence within a worldview that had no meaning for me, this vision of a life of conscious, purpose-driven story-telling kept me going. It kept me literally, too many times to count, from plunging off the Jacques Cartier Bridge into the St. Lawrence River. As melodramatic as that sounds.

During my tumultuous twenties, I was a fine-arts student at the Ontario College of Art and Design. It is there that I met Dr. Paul Baker, the professor of an introduction to theatre course. I instantly fell in love with theatre. I also fell in love with Paul as a teacher. I was 26, and had already worked in interior decoration, graphic design, font design and was attempting to become a painter. It clearly took me a while to find my medium!

There had been no theater in my childhood. So, when I found it, I was stunned and amazed. The sheer multi-dimensionality of theatre filled me with incredible awe: not only is it three-dimensional visually, it is space-specific, unfolds in real time, includes spoken or sung word, explores the truths and lies of existence through narrative, and engages the soul of the musician and the expressiveness of the human body. Further, it miraculously weaves together the passion and vision of many collaborators – and I emphasize the word “miracle” here – from the psychological, spiritual, and political insights of the writer to the musical vision of the composer to the interpretive will of the creative team – director, conductor, designers, stage manager – to the generosity of actors and singers and musicians to the technical and artistic skill and dedication of the production teams. Finally, and equally miraculously, it demands the commitment and openness of an audience. The artist in me saw in theatre and opera the most exciting, complex and ambitious of mediums. I succumbed fully to the rich world of words, music and images and through this began to understand my own personal world, to finally see it reflected back at me. Translating the texts into images empowered me to engage in my own act of transformation.

Set and costume design allows me to turn a physical space into a psychological and symbolic setting. In close collaboration with the director, I strive to create a visual poetic-arc that best supports the unfolding story and best represents the emotional landscape of the characters. Focusing on the scene-sequence and the metamorphosis of the protagonists, I search for a central visual metaphor that emphasizes underlying themes and resonates with the author’s symbolism. Whether the text is about the politics of war or the most modest of personal events, one striking image can, in my view, encapsulate the drama. Within this one cohesive poetic visual field, my goal is to articulate the story in such a way that the impact of each scene is accentuated. Subtle and transformative set and costumes convey what is at stake in the unfolding story.

Process plays a critical role in the creation of this represented world. I invite directors to work with me in my studio for days at a time at several stages of the design. We sit at my desk and go over the text line by painstaking line. We discuss everything under the sun in relation to this text – our political views, our aesthetic longings, our own biographies. And we order a lot of Thai food! Eventually, we develop a shared understanding of the story and its mythic relevance to us and to our time and place. The electricity that is generated from such a design-process can, if all goes well, carry through to the rehearsals and technical rehearsals. The actors, singers and lighting-designer participate in this creative act and the accumulation of their insights refines our dramatic world further.

It is hard to convey the euphoria of a perfect opening night. One experiences that a handful of times in a career. I felt it once in particular at the Cincinnati Opera House with a production of Strauss’s Elektra directed by Nicolas Muni. At the end, there were several seconds of absolute silence, then an enormous rushing sound as a conservative Midwestern audience rose as one to their feet and began clapping and shouting, applauding a crazed, atonal, out-of-control, exquisite operatic rant. They clapped for ten minutes. In that brief time, everything expended in the creation process and more was given back to me. As empty as I’d just been feeling – I was exhausted and already mourning a finished project – I was filled instantly, and knew in that moment that I had my creative fuel for the next few years.

So what about theatre almost killing me? As I said, very early on I clutched onto the arts and later specifically theatre as a lifeline. For me, it became part of my daily life-and-death struggle for a better existence. Everything was invested in the creative process and the journey required to put something substantive, beautiful, and poetic on the stage. The sheer effort of doing this is indescribable. I myself can never fully grasp how it can take so much time and energy. I fear that sometimes the intensity – the very life-and-deathness – that I bring to theatre makes me less than relaxing to work with at times!

But in addition to my own life-story and personality, there are very real obstacles to great theatre and opera design in Canada. Theatre really does kill you a little bit every day while it is saving you from yourself, lifting you up. It’s just so damn hard. Firstly, in Germany, a designer makes an excellent living designing two shows a year. Here it is impossible to make a living designing two shows a year. One has to book oneself absolutely solid and overlap projects to make a moderately decent living. This is exhausting and unsustainable. The PACT minimums set by ADC, which are the current industry standards, do not in any way recognize the expense of maintaining a studio and the incredibly time-intensive occupation that design is. If broken down into payment per hour, designers probably make amongst the least in theatre in Canada. I once actually calculated that I’d done a design for $6.35 an hour. Quite a big design, too, for a big company. Where others in theatres have contracts that last a few weeks, designers often have contracts that last many months over a period of years and their lump-sum payment does not reflect this. Secondly, designers cannot experiment, cannot push their art, test their materials, without having a theatre support the essential research and development required to grow and develop. Theatres are often reluctant to pay for this risk and the designer finds her or himself fighting for resources. Therefore, the designer is always in the end, unlike other theatre artists, inextricably linked to money, to the pesky, unpredictable financial figures of set, prop and costume production and can rarely simply be an artist attempting to push themselves to greater artistic heights. Thirdly, the financial burden of the ever-growing administrative side of theatre shifts the focus away from the stage to the office and to other programs theatres now offer. The corporatization of theatre is a real concern of mine. I hope we don’t go too far down that road, where theatre is run like a value-added business. Businesses sell products, but theatre isn’t selling a product: theatre is a participant in the life of the people. Theatre is the heart of a nation, a place where we can face ourselves, we can tell our stories, break our silences, save a few lives, literally and spiritually speaking. Or so it should be. Governments need to realize this, and it will take inventiveness for theatres to balance the books while at the same time building creative, artist-friendly, democratic administrations. We have to remember that without the stage, and the artists who fill that stage, theatres could not run their other programs and arts administrators would also be out of luck.

The above struggles push designers perilously close to burn-out. Burn-out is death to an artist, and for me, this means also a kind of death of myself. The struggle to get my vision on stage really has been kind of killing me in the last little while, with notable exceptions. Young designers are not lasting long enough in the business to become the great designers they could be. If the artist is to continue to be a beacon to generations coming up, if these generations are to continue to aspire to that mythic persona, we need to make sure that artists don’t all drop out and take jobs in banks. We need people to work in banks, but we also, as a society, need artists. A prize such as this tonight is a huge symbolic boost, as well as, to a few of us, an incredible material boost when it counts the most, mid-career when energy is flagging, and all artists here tonight are very grateful for it – Let’s have more of them! – but we also need systemic change.

I never cease to be in awe of the theatrical endeavor. It is my hope that this miraculous collaborative act can itself be a kind of exemplary metaphor for life outside of theatre. It is a source of hope to me to see what people can accomplish together in the spirit of a shared creative vision. Let’s bring what is vital and transformative in theatre to the outside world, rather than let the norms of the outside world run our theatres. We need to decide that we are a nation that values the art that enriches the life of the nation, the art that sometimes even saves individual lives, literally and spiritually speaking.

This is the really fun part. It’s an unbelievable pleasure to be able to honour two designers whose work and commitment I admire very much: April Anne Viczko, a discerning, architectural and poetic artist. I have worked with April a great deal in the last two years. Her passion, skill and unsurpassed sense of humour go a very long way to making a project fly high. And Camellia Koo: a meticulous, sculptural and symbolic interpreter. She brings precision, patience and great theatrical vision to her work. It’s been my pleasure to work with her over the last four years.

We also wish to encourage a recent theatre design graduate: Jung-Hye Kim, whose talent and determination to become a designer are remarkable. I’ve been really impressed by her hard-working ethic and initiative.

2006 Protégé

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Camellia Koo

Camellia Koo

Protégé, 2006

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Camellia Koo continues her association with the Shaw Festival where her designs include set and costumes for Trifles, Topdog/Underdog and When the Rain Stops Falling and sets for Peace in Our Time: A Comedy, One Touch of Venus, and The Stepmother. Other collaborations include companies such as fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company, Fujiwara Dance Inventions and The Second City. A multi-award winning designer, Camellia is a graduate of the Ryerson Theatre School (Technical Production), completed her M.A. in Scenography at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design (U.K.) and was also a member of the 2005 Lincoln Centre Director’s Lab. Camellia has a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

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Brigitte Haentjens

Brigitte Haentjens

Laureate, 2007

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2007 Laureate

In selecting Brigitte Haentjens as the recipient of the 2006 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, the Jury wanted to recognize the prodigious virtuosity of her “écriture scénique” [her work as a director/creator], as well as the profoundly human character of her mission “In Brigitte’s world, ideas bleed, bodies think, space throbs. This is écriture scénique that defies classification; that displays a breathtaking tension between meticulousness and brutality; and wherein people, even as they are excited and inspired by the show itself, will find themselves forced to question the very foundations of their existence, of their identity, without any possible escape.”

Ms. Haentjens studied theatre in Paris before moving to Ontario in 1977, serving as artistic director of the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario for eight years. From 1991 to 1994 she was artistic director of Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale in Montréal, and from 1996 to 2006 she was artistic co-director for the Carrefour International de Théâtre de Québec. Ms. Haentjens has also run her own theatre company, Sibyllines, since 1997, intended as a vehicle to further explore her artistic approach with greater freedom. She is currently working at Sibyllines on a French production of Blasté by Sarah Kane, translated by Jean Marc Dalpé and starring Paul Ahmarani, Céline Bonnier and Roy Dupuis, scheduled to open in the spring of 2008.

Acceptance Speech

First of all, permit me to express my profound gratitude to the founders of the Siminovitch Prize. Thank you, Lou – and thanks as well to the late Elinore Siminovitch. Your work inspired this prize which is so unique, so generous, and so prestigious.

Thanks to BMO Financial Group for supporting this prize, and to its employees for organizing this evening. A very special thank to Andrew Soren.

All my gratitude to the members of the jury: Leonard McHardy, Geneviève Billette, Katrina Dunn, Valerie Moore, and Carlo Guillermo Proto. A very special thank-you to Carlo Guillermo Proto and Geneviève Billette who worked very hard to produce the video that you just saw.

I would like of course to thank Paul Lefebvre, who presented my nomination, and did it in such an eloquent and generous fashion.

Finally, permit me to thank my companion Stéphan, who over the last fifteen years has so often shown me love, support, and encouragement. Without his company, his pride in my work, and his encouragement in difficult moments, I probably wouldn’t be here tonight.

When they told me that I was the winner, I couldn’t sleep for a week!
This prize truly means an enormous amount to me.

It honours me and it honours all the communities that have given me love and support over the last thirty years of artistic work: the Franco-Ontarian community of course — those of Ottawa, Hawkesbury, Rockland, Timmins, Hearst and of course that of Sudbury, and more particularly the one that surrounds Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario; but also the community of Toronto, where we played Le Chien in English. The French-Canadian community, within which I have so often been active.

And finally, the communities of Montreal, of Quebec City, and of Quebec in general.
I dedicate this prize to them, and to all those who, like all of you here this evening, believe that art — if it doesn’t change the world — at least relieves the deafening silence of solitude.

As far back as I can remember, theatre has been a part of my life.

In the audience, as a child, I had the good fortune to experience certain powerful aesthetic shocks. I remember the one occasioned by the Marat-Sade that Peter Brook directed in 1963: the show, which I probably didn’t understand, struck me as hard as a whip all the same. I also remember Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1789, which made me float on a little burning cloud for weeks.

Since then, I can’t count the strong emotions that I have experienced while sitting in a theatre, here or elsewhere.

Theatre has the effect on me of a cut, of a burn, of a punch, of a lash. Theatre stimulates me, upsets me, and can even enrage me.

Theatre has always given me the desire to live, to create, to stand up and fight.
In short, theatre inspires every feeling in me except that of comfort.

Since childhood, I have belonged to amateur, school, and community theatre groups. And yet, I never imagined myself directing. In fact, when I was young I didn’t know that directing could be a job!

(And even today, I sometimes doubt that it is one!)

In the family environment in which I grew up – my parents had received only a cursory education – there could be no question of an artistic or intellectual life. Moreover, I belong to one of the first generations of women who had access to higher education.

In the era in which I entered university, I had before me almost no models of women choosing a career, never mind an artistic career.

To make theatre for a (more or less successful) living – to define oneself as an artist – thus seemed to me both completely mysterious, and totally unattainable.

In fact, thanks surely to wonderful teachers who understood how to share their passion for words, I was awakened very early to literature, and my secret adolescent fantasy might have been to become Simone de Beauvoir: for her books, her intelligence… and maybe also for her crimson nails, her cigarettes, and her relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre and St-Germain-des-Prés!

It may be that even then, it was the necessity of speaking that motivated me. In any case, words and ideas were the substrata of my artistic life.

The words of writers and poets: from William Faulkner to Antonin Artaud, from Flannery O’Connor to Krista Wolf, from Marcel Proust to Carson McCullers, from Sylvia Plath to Margaret Atwood, from Ingeborg Bachmann to Michael Ondatje, from Jean Marc Dalpé to Louise Dupré.These words – and those of playwrights, of course. But when I make theatre, I turn first of all to literature and poetry.

I don’t remember at all how I found myself at the Ecole de théâtre Jacques Lecoq. It was relatively late: I was already almost 25, and had my university studies behind me…

I don’t know what I was looking for there. In any case, certainly not to make a career, in the traditional sense of the word.

I hadn’t imagined my future after school, either. Nor that I would have to leave my country of origin in order that theatre could become my whole life.

The shock represented for me by my first contact with the Franco-Ontarian artistic community was immense. At that time (1977-), theatre was intimately linked with a wide-ranging societal project. It was linked to a collective desire to speak.
We had the impression that the sky was wide open before us, and in the words of the poet Robert Dickson (who was taken from us much too soon), our landscape was the one from his poem:

In the north of our lives
Here
Where distance wears down hearts full
of the mineral tenderness of the
land of stone, forests and cold

We
stubborn, underground and together
let fly our rough and rocky cries
to the four winds of the possible future

It was about speaking; giving a voice to those who didn’t have one; putting characters onstage who belonged to the race of the forgotten. It was about naming the country, the people, giving them pride and confidence.

We spent an enormous amount of time in the working-class communities of Hawkesbury and Sudbury, meeting textile workers and miners, listening to their stories, in order to write them down and put them onstage.

I directed the stories that we were writing, but I did it a bit by default, as no one else wanted to do it. What was important to me at the time, and still is, was the simple need to speak;to express a world; and to share it with someone… with some… well, with the audience.

Now, of course, we are no longer in a period where it seems indispensable to name ourselves and to put ourselves onstage as a community. Since that time, I have brought to the stage many texts of very diverse origins, from Camus to Beckett, from Feydeau to Koltès. I have worked in many theatres, large and small.
Since that time, I have left Ontario, for Montreal; Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, for the Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale (NCT); and institutions, for liberty.

I founded the company Sibyllines ten years ago in order to bring to the stage contemporary works of a theatrical or literary nature, and to make other voices heard. In order to do so in the best possible artistic conditions. The quality of the process of creation is, it seems to me, as fundamental as its result.

Over the years, and (perhaps to an even greater extent) in the context of the liberty that Sibyllines permits me, directing has thus become for me a form of writing. Through the words of others, or through the silences that are left to me.

Today, I love more than anything to make silence be heard. The silence of writers who paid with their lives for their violent combat with words: Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann, Virginia Woolf.

The silence between words; that of bodies. The silence of powerlessness; the silence of violence.

Actually it seems to me that theatre is, in a completely paradoxical way, as much a place of silence as of speech. One of the only places where you can still think as a community.

After thirty years of active work, directing always seems to me to be an enormous privilege. A privilege to promote the circulation, in the collective imagination, of words and signs that will perhaps open the hearts of the audience, and perhaps give them cause to reflect on the world in which we live.

A privilege to have such a fruitful and enriching relationship with the audience.

A privilege to find myself in a rehearsal room surrounded by books, scripts, actors, and designers, in an incredibly intense atmosphere of sharing and of solidarity. To have the pleasure of discussing, of delving into the scripts, of searching for the best way to represent them onstage. To spend hours with the actors searching for the best gesture, the best movement.

Permit me to salute here all the artisans, designers, and actors who have shared my road for the last thirty years, and particularly for the last ten years. All those who have put their talent, their energy, and their openness into the service of the works and the projects, with complete confidence and complete abandon.

But this privilege and this liberty have come at a price: and it is, I won’t deny it, a high price. We live in a country where art is disappearing from public and governmental priorities. We live in a country that sometimes copies its workings and its concerns from those of its great neighbour, and that abandons its responsibilities for the development and support of artists to the laws of the market or to the vagaries of private sponsorship.

In this country, very few individuals can live from their art, and of course only a few can live from directing. In order to devote myself exclusively to the theatre, I, like many others, had to make choices, among which were to run a company, to take on numerous responsibilities alone, from writing press releases to accounting, fundraising, and other activities, each one more creative than the last.

Faced with the amount of work I need to accomplish in order to properly carry out the projects that I take on; faced with the price to be paid for the privilege of being a director who chooses her own adventures – sometimes I feel discouraged and exhausted. Sometimes, also, I feel like I can’t breathe.

A prize like the Siminovitch Prize is a wonderful stimulant, a wonderful encouragement, both symbolic and material. Perhaps this encouragement is even more intense when it arrives in the middle part of your life, at the moment when you are mature and in full possession of your artistic means.

Let us hope that the provincial and federal governments uphold their responsibilities as much as generous donors like yourselves do.

It’s our job – all of us – to demand a fair place for art, for theatre, for writing, for dramaturgy, for creation, so that we as a community can sustain our hope of a society that is more just and more human, more mutually supportive, more open, and more intelligent.

One of the marvellous aspects of the Siminovitch Prize is the possibility of supporting individuals or groups in order to salute their talent. This opportunity is even more important given that this period is particularly perilous for all emerging talents. Today, access to resources for young creators is, in large measure, out of reach.

It’s extraordinary to be able to play fairy godmother!! So I have the pleasure to present to you my laureates. I have chosen two of them, full of talent and energy.

First of all: Francis Monty, Olivier Ducas, and David Lavoie, who for years now have been running a company called La Pire Espèce, dedicated to théâtre d’objets ; a theatre that is inventive, playful, and extraordinarily infectious. La Pire Espèce puts words at the heart of its approach. They are a talented, brilliant, and incredibly dynamic company. Unfortunately, they are currently on tour in France!

My second protégé is Christian Lapointe. He is a creator originally from Quebec; he studied directing at the National Theatre School; and it was at this time, while serving as his mentor, that I discovered his talent, his intelligence, his rigour, and his pugnacity. He thereafter founded the company for which he so successfully writes, directs, and acts. He devotes himself completely to his art, and he does it with brio to spare. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure of introducing to you, Christian Lapointe.

2007 Protégé

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Christian Lapointe

Christian Lapointe

Finalist, 2016, 2019

Protégé, 2007

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Theatre director, author, actor and musician, Christian Lapointe is the artistic director of the Théâtre Péril and cofounder of the Canadian theatrical collective CINAPS. He studied theatre at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Québec and the National Theatre School. Since 2000, he has mostly worked on symbolist plays and In-yer-face theatre. Lapointe is also the author of a cycle of plays grouped together under the title Théâtre de la Disparition. He has put on his own plays, including CHS (short for “combustion humaine spontanée”) and Anky ou la fuite / Opéra du désordre, with the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, the Carrefour international de théâtre de Québec and in the official selection of the Festival d’Avignon.

Finalist, 2016, 2019

After founding le Théâtre Péril in 2000, Christian Lapointe has run le Théâtre Carte blanche, in Québec City, since 2013. Since 2001, he has directed some thirty productions, drawing principally on the symbolist repertoire (Yeats, Maeterlinck, Villiers de l’Isle Adam) and the contemporary repertoire (Crimp, Viripaev, Duras, Arsenault, Handke, Sauvageau), while also directing productions of his own plays. The signature of his productions, where the presentation of the text holds a preponderant place, borrows from performance art and they are conceived from theatrical settings that often approach installation video. He also devotes part of his time to passing the torch to younger artists through his masterclasses, his courses and the directing he has done at various places, including at l’École supérieure de théâtre, where he is a professor, an at l’École nationale de théâtre du Canada. In 2009, he took part in the official programming for the Festival d’Avignon. In 2015, he gave a 70-hour on-going performance reading of the works of Antonin Artaud within the framework of the Festival TransAmériques. In 2018 and 2019, in coproduction with some ten Québécois theatres, he directed,in collaboration with l’Institut du Nouveau Monde, the project Constituons !. In that project, an assembly made up equally of men and women chosen at random and representing the Québec population, from all across the Province, was brought together to write the first Consitution of the citizens of Québec. This was officially delivered to the Assemblée nationale du Québec on 29 May, 2019. The play, Constituons !, performed and directed by the artist, relates the ups and downs of this vast adventure, which juxtaposes art and citizenship in the testing ground of the theatre as a popular agora.

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Medina Hahn

Medina Hahn

Protégé, 2008

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Medina Hahn is an actor, singer, writer, and a co-producer of DualMinds. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre from the University of Victoria, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Alberta. She has been a performer since the age of three, when she started dancing in order to become a Solid Gold Dancer. She came to writing and creation after working extensively as an actor on new Canadian plays, although she has kept journals since she was nine years old. A gypsy at heart, when not writing or working as an actress with other companies, Medina can be found travelling.

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Daniel MacIvor

Daniel MacIvor

Laureate, 2008

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2008 Laureate

According to the jury, “the theatre of Daniel MacIvor, protean and perpetually changing, plays out on that fine line between presentation and representation. His playwriting brings to the stage moments in life for which there are no words, exploring those things that escape categorisation by language. Preoccupied by exclusion, MacIvor gives voice through his plays to those for whom solitude provides a perception of the world through a different set of optics.”

Daniel MacIvor was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and has written almost 20 productions in 20 years and has 15 publications to his name. His plays include See Bob Run, Wild Abandon, The Soldier Dreams, You Are Here, How It Works, His Greatness, and A Beautiful View, and with long time collaborator Daniel Brooks he created the solo performances House, Here Lies Henry, Monster and Cul-de-sac. His play Marion Bridge received its Off-Broadway premiere in New York in October 2005, and his play Never Swim Alone won the 1998 New York Fringe’s Overall Excellence Award. In 2002 he won a GIAAD Award and a Village Voice Obie Award for his play In On It (PS 122). Mr. MacIvor also has two Chalmers New Play Awards to his credit, and his collection of five plays called I Still Love You won the 2006 Governor General’s Award for Drama. Mr. MacIvor is also a screenwriter and filmmaker (House, Wilby Wonderful, Marion Bridge, Past Perfect, Whole New Thing), and from 1987-2007 he was Artistic Director of the international theatre touring company da da kamera.

Acceptance Speech

When I was asked to speak to you tonight I was asked to talk about how transformative the Siminovitch Prize has been to my life and about how important this Prize is in this country at this time, about how crucial it is to keep this Prize going, and it was suggested that I might refer to us almost having lost the Prize and what a terrible thing that would have been. And then it was mentioned that it wouldn’t hurt if I could be funny.

So in thinking about how truly transformative the Prize has been for me by allowing me to be a mentor, and thinking about how important the Prize is nationally by bringing together theatre practitioners and supporters and patrons, and in thinking about how crucial it is that theatre keep a place at the media curated table of cultural relevance and how essential the Prize has been in manifesting that – in thinking about all those things about the Prize there was a word that stood out to me. Prize.

And I got to thinking about the difference between a Prize and an Award, so between mulling, meditating and google-ing on it I’ve found a very simple difference perceived by many people who mull, meditate and google on such notions: an Award is for a thing and a Prize is for a person. Certainly this is true of this Siminovitch Prize. It is not given for a play or a production or even for an idea, it given to a person. For a person. Now in the case of an award, like a Dora Award or a Sterling Award or a Governor General’s Award – the sort of thing you might get for a play – the writing of play, the direction of a play, the design of a play – there is always the sneaking suspicion in the receiving of such an award that maybe you were just lucky. Maybe it was just the right team or the right subject or the right cultural moment. Maybe I was just lucky.

When I won the Siminovitch Prize in 2008 I didn’t feel lucky. I didn’t feel like there was that one good show with the right team in the right cultural moment. It was something different. I felt honoured. And I realized that was a feeling I hadn’t felt very much before. I am a little saddened to say that we live in a country that does not honour its artists. And in that there is always this niggling feeling that perhaps to our compatriots the work we do is not seen as being important. Now I know, in my DNA, that this work is important, as a service to the culture of this country, as a service to the human spirit, but sometimes when all the messages one is getting is to the reverse of that, it’s only human to question our place in our land. To be hounoured is to be told that what you do is important. To be reminded, to have confirmation of that fact. That your work matters. And that’s another reason why Colleen or Hannah or Michel Marc or Olivier shouldn’t feel lucky tonight, because this houour is based on work. It is earned. Luck isn’t earned. This Prize is earned. And maybe that feeling of earning has something to do with the money, perhaps it has more to do with being able to give money away. We’ve earned that honour through a life of work. And at least that’s one thing that we value in this country, hard work. And making theatre is very hard work. So tonight I will not say to the nominees, Good Luck. I will say congratulations on this amazing, important, necessary, crucial honour. Well earned. Well deserved.

2008 Protégé

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Daniel Arnold

Daniel Arnold

Protégé, 2008

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Daniel Arnold is an award-winning Canadian actor and writer for the stage and screen. Most notably, he recently starred as Holloman in the 2013 movie Lawrence & Holloman which he co-wrote with director Matthew Kowalchuk, based on the play by Morris Panych. Daniel also starred in the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway production of Any Night, which he co-wrote and performed with Medina Hahn, and published by Playwrights Canada Press. It won Outstanding New Play at Toronto’s Summerworks Festival, five awards in Toronto’s Now Magazine, including Outstanding Performance, and was hailed among the Best Productions of the Year in Toronto and Vancouver.

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Ronnie Burkett

Ronnie Burkett

Laureate, 2009

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2009 Laureate

Ronnie Burkett has been captivated by puppetry since the age of seven when he opened the World Book Encyclopedia to “Puppets”. He began touring his puppet shows around Alberta at the age of fourteen and hasbeen on the road ever since. Recognized as one of Canada’s foremost theatre artists,Ronnie Burkett has been credited with creating some of the world’s most elaborate and provocative puppetry. His work has stimulated an unprecedented adult audience for puppet theatre, continuously playing to great critical and public acclaim on Canada’s major stages and at international theatre festivals. Ronnie has taught puppetry at universities and colleges in Canada, the UK and Australia, and presents masterclasses, workshops and keynote presentations at numerous festivals and conferences. His current production Billy Twinkle, Requiem For a Golden Boy follows the now-retired 10 Days on Earth, Provenance and the “Memory Dress Trilogy” of Tinka’s New Dress, Street of Blood and Happy. When not touring, Ronnie can be found surrounded by over 1200 books on puppetry, plasticene and woodworking tools in his Toronto studio where he is designing his next two productions.

Acceptance Speech

Thank you Dr. Siminovitch. Thank you to the founders of the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, BMO Financial Group for sponsoring the prize and this evening, to Mary Adachi for nominating me, and thank you to the jury for their gigantic leap of faith.

I am thrilled to finally be invited to one of those elite cocktail parties our Prime Minister says artists go to all the time. I personally don’t know many working artists who crave putting on a suit, but maybe I just run with the wrong crowd. Nor do I call myself an artist, yet. Hopefully before I draw my last breath that word will escape my lips in a meaningful way, but for me, an artist is one who creates a piece of work that cannot be discussed, only felt. And I don’t think I’m there yet. However, the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre does make me think that perhaps I’m on the right track, so I thank you all for the vote of confidence.

It’s interesting being in the middle of a career, of life, of experience and understanding, of practice. In a world gone mad for all things young and new, I’ve been feeling somewhat invisible the past couple of years. Too old to be the hot new thing, too young to be the revered old master. It’s a beautiful place to be, actually; I’m quite content to just make new work without the annoyance of having to be the a press-mad bad boy drumming up my own persona. If anyone is lucky enough to stand mid-career, it can imply that the technical has been learned and mastered and the second part of that career is about exploration of ideas and content. That’s what excites me most, poised here in the middle of it all. I’m more surprised than anyone to be selected for this magnificent honour. But thank God, and the Founders, there is indeed a prize for simply being here, in the middle. And I can assure you that middle, in this case, means the beginning of the best part.

My chief mentor in puppetry, Martin Stevens, said that “art is the personal contribution to the ever-continuing conversation about life”. Here in the middle of my career, the Siminovitch Prize will allow me to continue that discussion in a significant way.

I think the jury has made a bold choice. An historic choice, that perhaps they are not even aware of. I am a designer; I’m also a writer, an actor, a producer, a roadie, a boss, a collaborator, a huckster and a hustler, a mold maker and a woodcarver, but more than anything, and first and foremost, I am a puppeteer. And there is no category in the Siminovitch Prize three year rotation for my kind. And yet here I am. I thank the jury for that, not only in a deeply personal way; I thank them for the message they send to my odd little sub-community in the arts that puppetry is an artform to be recognized in the theatre. I didn’t have that message when I began, so I hope it encourages some kid building puppets in their parents’ basement to dream large.

To the Founders, I thank you very personally for creating this Prize in honour of the Siminovitchs. I know what it is to want to keep a cherished spirit alive, a significant person remembered. The last time I spoke publicly was just over a week ago when I gave the eulogy at my Mother’s memorial service in Alberta. I learned about being this year’s recipient on the same day she died. She and my Dad, who passed away just last year, would have loved this. I wish they could have seen a bunch of bankers throwing me a party. They were the most loyal, spectacular, funny, simple people I’ve ever known and their support and pride in me was boundless. Not without condition, but endless. And in a world with lowered standards, I appreciate their expectations more than ever. When I was still a teenager, my Dad said to me: “Why is it that any horse’s ass in the room can say they’re an artist and no one challenges them on that? If you’re gonna say it, then prove it. And if they have to say it at all, there’s your proof they probably aren’t.” That, in a nutshell, explains my Dad…and all of Alberta.

What were the chances of a kid from the prairies becoming a puppeteer and having an international theatre career? Actually, the chances were pretty good. When I was emerging, and by emerging I mean young and interested, there was a lot of little money for the arts.

I got a thousand bucks from Alberta Culture when I was fourteen to go to a Puppeteers of America Festival in Lansing, Michigan. The total madness of my parents putting me on a plane and allowing me to cross the border alone to associate with a bunch of old dolly wigglers is one thing; but even better, Alberta said go. Listen. Learn. Bring it home. And I did. I met the masters of marionette craft at that Festival and they took me in. And I, in my own way, brought them home.

When I was eighteen I quit university and with another small grant from Alberta Culture I went to an international puppet congress and festival in Moscow. I can still tell you images I saw in those theatres that changed my life, changed my view of design and performance. And, in my own way, I brought them home, and in another way, I’ve been taking them back to the world on tour with a Canadian perspective.

And several years later, when I had a crazy idea to do marionette theatre for adults, the Canada Council had a little Explorations grant that allowed me to do it. And Theatre of Marionettes has been touring for twenty-three years because of that first investment in a small arts business by my country.

What was the chance that a puppet mad kid from the prairies would ever have an international theatre career? Chances were good. And simply because I was from Canada and part of a generation that was able to not only go into the world and experience my artform there in order to bring it home, but also because the Canada I grew up in had touring theatre and dance and music criss-crossing this country when I was being formed.

I saw the play Ten Lost Years and realized for the first time we were actually interesting onstage. I saw The Canadian Opera Company’s La Boheme. I saw Danny Grossman perform “Higher”. I saw all of that and so much more in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

I agree with our Prime Minister. The arts in Canada are elite. Unlike the Canada of my youth, now, unless you live in a major city and have a lot of disposable income, you can’t see ballet and opera and theatre or hear a symphony orchestra. And while other countries have identified that the very best way to brand yourself as distinct and vibrant in the global marketplace is through the ongoing export of culture, our current government has cut the international cultural export program altogether. Our audacious, unique, new-world voice has been silenced on the world stage. So, even when the kids from Abbottsford, Wawa, Antigosh and Medicine Hat manage to get themselves to a point of international attention, Canada says no. So, in a year of death and destruction, in a year when I looked seriously at the prospect of my little touring company having to fold, and when I was hearing no no no from my country, I’d really like to say thank you to the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre for saying yes so loudly.

This is not the only loud voice I’ve heard recently. The other day I was in the Roncesvalles Starbucks when a woman came in, sat down, and started talking to herself, to the customers, to ghosts, to God, to whoever. She was, for lack of a better description, a Burkett marionette waiting to happen. Toothless, ancient, with that mysterious drape of skin that occurs when lips, chin and neck become one. Blunt cut white hair, far too many shopping bags, asking various young women in Starbucks if they worked at the home she lived in. I tried to ignore her, but my perverse puppet maker desire to study her face, her ankles, her hosiery, the contents of her bags, willed me to look. And she caught me.

She looked right at me and screamed, “You didn’t need the surgery in the first place!” I tried to ignore her, focusing all my attention on my grande skinny vanilla latte. She screamed again, “You didn’t need the surgery in the first place!” This was incredible. Who was she? Witch? Psychic? Madwoman? “You didn’t need the surgery in the first place!” Who told her? How could she know my plan to spend the Siminovitch money on so much cosmetic surgery that by next April my face would be as tight as a Marine Corps cot? Damn the gossiping theatre community!

I fled Starbucks and found refuge on a bench outside. But she followed me. Standing there on the steps of Starbucks she stared at me and yelled, “You’re the finest dentist there ever was!” What an odd thing to say. She yelled it again, “You’re the finest dentist there ever was!” This was awkward. This was crazy. This was potentially dangerous. I mean, what if the Siminovitch jury got wind of this? What if they heard I was a dentist, not a designer? They’d strip me of the prize before I even had it in my grasp. “You’re the finest dentist there ever was!”

Standing to leave, I looked at her and said, “You know full well I am not a dentist.” She replied, “You’re the finest dentist there ever was!” Staring back at her for a split second, I realized two things. One, who was I to argue with her? I can assure you I’ve never dabbled in amateur dentistry, nor do the letters DDS appear anywhere alongside my name. But if she wanted to scream to the world that I was the finest denist there ever was, what harm was there in that? Who knows, maybe there’s a prize for being the finest dentist there ever was too. I could double my windfall!

The second thing I realized was that she was not a witch, or psychic or a madwoman. She was that strange, magical being I search for on the streetcar, in airports, in coffee shops. This beautiful, screaming, flawed creature of inspiration was my muse.

For years, people have said to me, “Geez Ron, how do you think up your characters?” Well, I do keep a cauldron of BS and invention simmering in my studio, but the source of my characters is us. Many puppeteers build fantastic creatures, gargoyles and monsters, angels and devils, elves and talking animals. But I build little people, smaller representations of all of us; for within my species are angels and demons enough.

So that glorious, mad, damaged woman who proclaimed me the greatest dentist there ever was, will no doubt find her way onstage in my next show, a shrunken wooden icon whose madness and despair speak of the human condition. An iconic vision of us onstage who perhaps cannot be discussed, only felt.

I am the product of my mentors and their belief in me. The grand, flawed, beautiful bullies of puppetry who taught me to draw and sculpt and carve and see, but moreso, who insisted I stretch my craft beyond the facile, the cute, the mindless babysitting diversion it had become. I am also the product of my country and its belief in me. And while English Canada might actually not be one of the best places to try and create theatre right now, I still believe I stand here this evening simply because I was a puppet mad kid from Canada. I think perhaps we all have a responsibility to leave our world one step better than we found it; I hope as a puppeteer, as a son, and as a Canadian I will indeed do that in return for huge favours rendered.

I owe a huge debt to the colleagues and artisans who have worked with me over the years to create my marionettes. Their friendship, passion and attention to detail have repeatedly made me better than I am, and kept me going when I found myself sitting in a pile of sawdust facing yet another impossible deadline. I am also grateful and indebted to countless designers, writers, actors, dancers, technicians and musicians who have inspired me, challenged me and moreso, extended their genenoristy of spirit to me. No one has been the recipient of more kindness.

To quote my mentor Martin Stevens again, who, aside from my Dad was the most influential man in my life and certainly one of the most quotable, his definition of a puppet was “the shape of an idea in motion”. He insisted that all three parts be present in order to make a puppet; the physical form, the thought or impulse for the character and the movement of it onstage. I realized the other day it’s a pretty good description of a person’s life too. So I’m grateful for the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre and the promise it brings to keep me thinking and moving along. I have been touring my shows since the age of fourteen. I’ve had a longer career than any prime minister, so this insane act of goodwill and continued belief in the puppet mad kid which the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre represents will only ensure that this audacious, unique, new-world, and very Canadian voice will continue.

Thank you.

I’m pleased that, in return, I get to extend my vote of confidence and a portion of this spectacular prize to a young Canadian puppet designer and performer. A young woman who is probably a thoroughbred; who happened upon a puppet show by a Canadian – this Canadian – a few years ago and thought, hey, I want to do that. Who got herself to the International School of Puppetry in France, graduated and brought it back home. A young woman who, when I phoned to tell her that she was winning part of this prize, started crying and said “I can build a new show”. I couldn’t have chosen better than her. She is Clea Minaker, and I am so happy to introduce her to you as the protégé of this year’s Siminovitch Prize in Theatre.

2009 Protégé

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Clea Minaker

Clea Minaker

Protégé, 2009

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As a performing artist, designer and director, Clea Minaker brings the language of contemporary puppetry to creations for theatre, film, music videos and musical performances. From 2002-2005 Clea trained as a student of the sixth promotion at L’École nationale supérieure des arts de la marionnette, located at the International Institute of Puppetry Arts, in Charleville-Mezières, France. In 2007-2008, she toured internationally with Feist, designing and performing live shadow puppetry and projections for close to one hundred concert performances. Her original theatrical creations include: The Living Lantern (Festival Casteliers ‘carte blanche’ 2009), Beauty (Commissioned by Youtheatre 2010), Oh! What a Feeling (Festival Casteliers 2007), and Immobile (Rhubarb! Festival of New Works, 2006). Clea has taught puppetry as a visiting artist at McGill University, Concordia University, The Deer Crossing Art Farm (Gibsons B.C), and at M.a.i in Montreal. Clea Minaker lives in Montreal and grew up on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

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Kim Collier

Kim Collier

Laureate, 2010

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2010 Laureate

Prior to her career as a director, Kim studied acting at the University of Victoria, physical theatre at Mime Unlimited in Toronto and in 1994 graduated from the 3 year acting program at Studio 58 in Vancouver. A year later she co-founded Electric Company Theatre whose work quickly became recognized nationally as a driving force behind the resurgence of activity in Vancouver’s independent theatre scene. Under the direction of Collier, the company has created a dozen original works through an intensive collaborative process including three landmark site-specific productions. Kim also has a growing presence on major stages and festivals across Canada with productions at Theatre Calgary, Festival TransAmerique, National Arts Centre, the Citadel Theatre and Canadian Stage. In 2011 her live-cinematic interpretation of No Exit is being presented by the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Kim is the recipient of multiple awards including three Jessie Richardson awards for directing, a Betty Mitchell for Best Production and in 2009 the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award.

Acceptance Speech

What an incredible honour this is to accept the Siminovitch (sim-in-ove-itch) prize for directing. I would like to send a heartfelt thank you to the founding donors of this prize for creating this remarkable opportunity in my life and the lives of other recipients and for what it means to our Canadian Theatre Community. Thank you to BMO (BeeMo) Financial Group for supporting this prize and organizing this evening. I extend my gratitude to the jury chair Maureen Labonte and jury members Marcus Youssef, Marti Maraden, Marie Clements, Alain Jean, and Jillian Keiley. As well, thank you to Matthew Jocelyn who took such care with my nomination.

It is really beautiful that this award celebrates the remarkable story of Lou and the late Elinore Siminovitch, and the conversation between the arts and science that existed between them. In the spirit of what this Prize celebrates I want to mention some years ago my collaborators and I at Electric Company were commissioned by Dr. Michael Hayden from the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics to create a play called The Score that would later become a feature film for CBC’s Opening Night. The commission was for a project that would create dialogue around the ethics in the advancing field of genetics. We dove into our research with full access to Michael’s lab and his team of researchers. And what was so surprising to us at the time was that we found a reflection of ourselves as artists in this scientific community: the same passion to move towards the unknown, to explore ideas and articulate questions, to pioneer projects towards the greater good of humanity and driven by a bottomless curiosity for the work. We made some wonderful friends and I believe helped create meaningful dialogue within the larger community. So a special thanks to Lou and Elinore who saw into one another’s hearts, who understood the shared ideals of these two fields that are more alike than different, and in whose honor this award continues.

When I received the call from Maureen that I was to be the recipient of this remarkable prize I was stunned and rather overwhelmed, and when I hung up the phone the first thing I thought was “How did I get here? What was at the origin of this obsessive passion I have for the theatre?”

And right away I found myself considering my family and how they raised me with such dreams and so much faith in life.

I grew up amidst an abundance of practical, essential acts of creation: Grandma’s prolific pottery, her weaving, embroidery, paintings and pastries. Dad working away in the shop at night making jewelry or furniture or carving personalized cutting boards for all the women in the family. His garden. My cousins, my brothers and I making hand made cards, haunted houses, radio programs, super 8 films and forts. Grandpa’s Garden. Grandma playing the piano, me playing the piano. Grandpa bursting into song upon meeting someone, always finding one with their name in it. And the songs at family campfires led by my Aunts and Uncles, handed down from generation to generation. In this incredible application to living, to being together, I was given a head-start by now knowing what was the real material for life.

I come from a powerful family. Powerful in the sense that the family is charged with love; for good or for bad, we put our hearts out, we choose to stand by one another, and we speak our truth.

Growing up my Mom always said “you can do anything you want in this world” My Dad said, “don’t rush to where you are going in life because once you get there, you are going to be there a while, make sure you enjoy yourself on the way” My first theatre training was at the University of Victoria. I quit before finishing and went to the Yukon to perform vaudeville at the Palace Grand Theatre. My Dad suggested I use some of the money they had saved for university to buy a Volkswagen Van. When I wanted to make it into a camper to live in, he helped me pull out the seats, build a bed and cupboards and drawers. A month or so later I called him from Dawson City saying I really wanted to paint drawings on the outside of the van but I was worried it would lower the resale value. I received a box of paints in the mail general delivery. They made me feel that anything was possible. A permission to recognize that the right choice isn’t always the practical choice. And with this, a gift of freedom.

My family is a beautiful, complicated, political, passionate community and I felt so much a part of something, so clear about who I was as a result of this tribe I belonged to. As a kid, I was aware that this made me different from other kids. I was an outsider in that respect; an outsider because I was an insider. But it was this difference that compelled me to create community.

And I believe that ultimately, at the bottom of it all, beneath the love of artistry, beneath my ambition, beneath the sweat and tears and worry and excitement and pressure and doubt, creating community is what my theatre work has been about. To create moments in time that will be undeniably present and shared. To engage audiences directly. To jump-start their emotional or intellectual connection to the material, to themselves and to each other. To provoke or inspire or even insist on dialogue after the show. To give the audience an incredible opportunity to feel alive. Alive because they just participated in an event they had not experienced before and which they never expected.

I believe all people need to feel this quality of being an insider, being a part of some entity larger than themselves, where there is true physical, emotional and spiritual connection to others.

For me, live performance is a rare place where we share the investigation of who we are, what we believe, and find a collective experience in an increasingly mediated world that pulls us apart and forces us into isolation.

Over the past 15 years I have been part of a remarkable renaissance in creation-based theatre in Vancouver. It is one in which many creation-based companies have made a conscious and public choice not to treat each other as competitors, but instead as collaborators and colleagues, as a shared resource, and, most importantly, as friends. I believe it is this choice more than any other that has allowed our theatre art to grow into such a vibrant scene, create new cultural institutions, and help independent theatre artists in Vancouver develop shows that are traveling across the country and around the world. I accept this award in celebration of all the wonderful theatre artists I have worked with in Vancouver, as we have together pursued a dream: the creation and dissemination of theatre art unique to our city, our country, and our place in time.

It has always seemed natural to me that together we are stronger. This has been a great source of motivation for me. It has been my experience that we can effect profound change within this community simply by having a vision and inviting others to join in the vision and then allowing the vision to belong to everyone.

But in Vancouver we face challenges. It is a young city, and a province in which the essential function of arts and culture is not yet widely enough appreciated or understood. The massive and unapologetic cuts to provincial investment in the culture sector over the past year are clear evidence of this. We need our provincial colleagues in culture, government and business to help decision makers in BC understand what many of our citizens already know: that art isn’t a frill. It is central to the development of a literate, engaged and active citizenry; one which, in the context of a market-defined society, helps us actively define the values of the world we wish to live in.

It is so important that major national awards like the Siminovitch Prize recognize excellent work across this enormous country and help communicate the value of the arts. That this prize draws attention to our community inVancouver this particular year of cuts is really valuable.

I now want to speak about a few of the deepest professional relationships that have played a pivotal role in my career.

ODE to Jan. The poetry and magic of ‘Calling’.

The Stage Manager is the maestro at centre of a piece of live theatre, sitting at the helm of a play conducting the machinations of the stage into living stories, illusions, and dreams. A Stage Manager breathes with the audience, sensing with actors the shape of a show, bringing it to life night after night. I love that in the year 2010 when so much around us has become automated, in the theatre, no matter how high tech, there is always a live person calling the show. That beautifully old-fashioned term “calling”. A simple whispered code of ‘standbys’ and ‘goes’ forming a person to person chain of imperceptible physical actions: heaving on ropes, drawing curtains, changing clothes; objects passed from hand to hand, bodies moving in darkness and silence, and all with the threat of detection, of crashing together and grinding to a halt. And then? The stage manager must step up, think fast, and save the day.

I’ve had the immense good fortune to work most of my career with one remarkable Stage Manager who I’d like to celebrate tonight for her phenomenal and superhuman ability to ‘call’ a show and manage a creative process. The beautiful and talented Jan Hodgson. I have so often fallen to my knees in appreciation of her wizardry. She has an artist’s intuition and without it the projects we have created together would be bereft of her grace and timing and style. Love you Jan – see you tomorrow back in tech.

For more then 15 years I have been creating shows with my long time collaborators Kevin Kerr and Jonathon Young. We founded a theatre company back in 1996 with David Hudgins called Electric Company. And for years and years and years we have been creating theatre together. How can I begin to express what we have meant to each other and what we have done together. But this prize of course is shared with Kevin and Jonathon, for their ideas, creatively and smarts that penetrate my work. We have been truly brave with one another and dedicated to making the best work possible. We have pushed our own boundaries and at times the boundaries of our art form. I wonder if there will ever be a time we won’t work together because we share an artistic synergy that is rare and … I just want to say how much I have been inspired and challenged by you both, you have both been my greatest theatre allies and my greatest theatre education and my greatest friends. Thank you Kevin and Jonathon for your integrity and your humanity and your relentless complexity. It is truly remarkable that we have withstood the intensity of the creative process across time and call ourselves the greatest of friends.

Today my daughter Azra North Young would have been so proud of her mom. She so beautifully supported me in my work and spent huge chapters of her life beside me in the rehearsal hall, in theatre seats, in script meetings, board meetings, on tour, and she loved all our shows. We always said she was the fifth member of the Electric Company. She was a baby when we started, and I became a director as I became a Mother. And truly that push and pull emotionally for me, between my passion for the work and my desire to be a very good mother, was never resolved. In a lot of ways I felt like a pioneer–creating ways for these two huge commitments to live together. And I believe one of the great gifts Jon and I gave to our theatre community was an example that it was possible, that family can be the centre of your life while your theatre work is too. To all women director / creators with children: bravo, be brave and break the mold–carry them in the hall, breast feed between the seats, go on tour together, whisper about process and actors and what worked and what didn’t. Include your kids in your life, let them learn from your passion.

We lost Azra and her cousins in a tragedy just over a year ago. And this is not the time to speak of these things…but it is…because as one moves through the most painful and impossible loss I rediscovered how vitally resonate art is at these times. Only words arranged in poetry can recognize and give voice to your sorrow. Only music can communicate the spirit of the divine. Only dance can express the essence of my daughter in spirit. Only the community building a Mandela together in an act of ritual could bind me to any kind of hope and faith. Theatre is ritual, theatre is poetry, theatre is communal. Theatre has been my reason to go on in some small hope I can be part of a making life worth living for others–to create a sense of meaning, or hope, or catharsis.

Theatre is that bottomless place of discovery where we can always find the new, the curious, the remarkable, the insight, the wisdom. It is the muse of my questing life.

There is something divine about receiving this prize at this time in my life. I don’t think there could be a better year, month or day. And I pledge to honour this prize, to not forget this gift and how, through this opportunity, I can strengthen my heart, my vision, my knowledge, and my understanding. I vow to bring this inspiration into the work, and may that work ultimately reach and inspire the larger community.

A beautiful part of this Prize is the chance to choose a theatre artist to award twenty five thousand dollars. Wow, what a fantastic opportunity to celebrate a woman who I greatly respect as a director and who is pioneering her own work in the theatre. Some years ago she assisted me on two projects and I knew right away she was a true director; her insights were smart, her intuition keen, her creativity bursting. Last year I attended her latest collaborative creation Kismit and loved its humanity and innovative staging. She is a recent graduate of the National Theatre School in directing. It gives me enormous pleasure to support another creation-based director who is bringing her own vision to the stage. Please allow me to introduce Anita Rochon.

2010 Protégé

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Anita Rochon

Anita Rochon

Protégé, 2010

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Anita Rochon works as a director, writer and actor in Vancouver and across the country. She’s been involved in the development of more than 25 new works of theatre, ranging from movement-based pieces to verbatim theatre to traditional scripts. With The Chop she directed KISMET one to one hundred, co-wrote Townsville, a piece written with second-year acting students from Studio 58, performed in 2 Truths + 1 Lie = Proof (HIVE) and directed the second two shows in the Patti Fedy trilogy. She performed in Theatre Replacement’s BIOBOXES which has toured to OYR’s High Performance Rodeo, the PuSh Festival, BC Scene, The Theatre Centre and the FTA. In Vancouver she directed for Vancouver Opera, Théâtre la Seizième, Theatre Replacement and at her acting training alma mater Studio 58. She is a graduate of the National Theatre School Directing program.

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Simi News

Subscribe today to the monthly e-newsletter.

> Be the first to know about current artistic projects of the Siminovitch Prize community.

> Learn about emerging artists who are shaping the future of Canadian theatre.

> Stay informed about upcoming opportunities and calls for nominations.

Stay in the know.