Jason Hand

Jason Hand

Protégé, 2012

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Jason Hand has created the lighting for the world premieres of The Trespassers at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, The DeChardin Project for The Quickening Theatre, and Tijuana Cure for Theatre Smash, and for the Canadian premieres of The Ugly One for Theatre Smash, and The Silent Serenade for the Royal Conservatory of Music. He developed innovative lighting for site-specific productions Peer Gynt and Gorey Story for The Thistle Project, and the co-op production of Vacancy. He also lit the sold-out productions of La Bohème and Turn of the Screw for Against the Grain Theatre.

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Robert Thomson

Robert Thomson

Laureate, 2012

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2012 Laureate

Robert Thomson is one of Canada’s most versatile and active freelance theatre, opera and dance lighting designers. He designed Much Ado About Nothing and Cymbeline this year for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Over eleven consecutive seasons, his 27 Stratford projects include Caesar and Cleopatra and King Lear both starring Christopher Plummer, The Homecoming and Krapp’s Last Tape starring Brian Dennehy, Dangerous Liaisons, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet and Into the Woods. Robert served as Resident Lighting Designer for The National Ballet of Canada for twelve seasons. His company projects include Swan Lake, The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. He has also designed for the Shaw Festival Theatre for twenty-four seasons, including a ten-year term as Head of Lighting Design for St. Joan, Man and Superman, Cavalcade and Cyrano de Bergerac. He designed the lighting for Robert Lepage’s award winning, first opera Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung, which has been performed by numerous companies in Canada and around the world. He has designed for numerous companies including ABT at The MET; Lincoln Center Theatre; The Goodman Theatre, Chicago; Stuttgart Ballet; Canadian Stage; NAC; Citadel Theatre; Manitoba Theatre Centre; Centaur Theatre and the Segal Theatre. Over his 35-year career Robert has received numerous awards including a Sterling Award for Edmonton Opera’s mounting of the Bluebeard’s Castle and four of Canada’s coveted Dora Mavor Moore Awards. Mr. Thomson is a member of the Associated Designers of Canada and L’Association des professionnels des arts de la scène du Québec.

Acceptance Speech

I would like to begin with thanks.

  • To Joe Rotman and the other Founding Donors, for their vision and generosity in establishing this prize.
  • To Andrew Auerbach and the staff at BMO, for orchestrating this fine evening.
  • And to Lou and Elinore Siminovitch: I’m sure that Elinore would be delighted with the legacy of the last 12 years; how many lives she has touched — not just the prize winners, but the ripple effect, as that impact is shared with colleagues, the community, and ultimately the audience.
  • Maureen Labonté and her distinguished jury: Alison Green, Shawn Kerwin, and Jock Munro, who are here tonight; and Claude Goyette and Leigh Ann Vardy. No one would envy the task that you were given.
  • And to Jennifer Tarver, who submitted such an elegant and persuasive nomination — which is surely the reason I am here. You have been my director, collaborator, champion and sparring partner on many projects now, and I am very proud to call you friend. (And the box of enchilada sauce you got me to smuggle across the border? – it wouldn’t fit it in my carry-on, so I’m holding it ransom until the next time we work together.)

My fellow designers! I value your experience, am inspired by your vision, and delight in your accomplishments and success. It has been such a great honour to be shortlisted for this prize with Richard Feren, Anick La Bissonière, Richard Lacroix, and my lighting colleague, Alan Brodie.

I would like to acknowledge the previous winners, some of whom are here today: John Mighton, Ronnie Burkett, Kim Collier. It is very humbling to see myself in such distinguished company. (I was hoping one of you would buy me a drink and tell me what to do with my nerves.)

And to everyone else here this evening who makes theatre a part of their lives – either through practice, or through support and appreciation – I salute you.

The medium of my work and creativity is light, not language, so this is more than a little daunting for me. Ironically, though I work with spotlights, I am rarely in them. In fact, lighting designers are often the last to join the rehearsal process and the first to leave, so it’s easy to feel on the fringes; that people you meet in the hallways aren’t quite sure who you are … or what exactly it is that you do. So thank you for noticing.

I fell in love with theatre in high school. I suspect it had as much to do with discovering the “community of theatre” as it did with having an excuse to miss class. This was abetted by the Math teacher (Mr. Hurst) who, seeing something in me that I did not yet recognize, wrote me an all-access hall pass: a license to skip class at will … to spend even more time in the auditorium.

For a summer job, I applied to work at the Ontario Place Forum. My dad suggested I ask our MPP (George Kerr) to write a letter of support, which I did, and, miraculously… he did. More miraculously: I got the job … which must have stunned the seasoned crew, who couldn’t know that this high school keener was effectively a political appointment.

At the age of 18, trying to figure out what you’re going to be when you grow up, is a daunting task. My younger daughter is in the throes of this deliberation right now, and I want to tell her – as my father told me – “Do something you love!” After a wasted semester in agricultural science, I knew I wanted to study theatre design. My father, ever the engineer, knowing I would need drafting skills, gave me a pad of graph paper and told me, “Learn how to print: one letter per square”. (He also told me to be prepared for unemployment … which, miraculously, has not been a major concern in my career. For the most part, I’ve been steadily self-employed for 35 years … one month at a time.)

I was incredibly blessed in my formative years. In my third summer at Ontario Place, I was farmed out to the Shaw Festival to run sound (the beginning of a 25-year long relationship). Then I was accepted to the Studio and Forum of Stage Design in New York City, where I studied under Lester Polokov for two years (thank you, Canada Council). Lester, probably my greatest teacher, taught me to see the world with fresh eyes, and to imagine how others might see and perceive things. I learned from some of Broadway’s best designers, and was exposed to the American theatre scene in a huge way. Yet this only served to make me appreciate my identity. I wanted to learn all I could, but more and more, I felt the imperative to return to Canada and apply that knowledge in a Canadian way. Working in Canadian theatre. It’s a decision I’ve never regretted.

My career in lighting started here in Toronto – like so many, at the Tarragon Theatre. Bill Glassco took a characteristic leap of faith and made me his Resident Lighting Designer. Two and a half years of steady employment … working with writers … on new scripts … discovering this extraordinary family of creative people — I learned by doing. (I still take pride that a Tarragon survey of audience favourites once listed my lighting designs alongside the concession cookies.) (Which were great.)

When Christopher Newton arrived at the Shaw Festival in 1980, he radically transformed the entire theatre. He brought his wonderful team of designers and together they retooled the visual landscape of design and its importance on the Festival’s stages. As a young designer, this was likely the most transformative experience of my career. This is how I met lighting designer Jeffrey Dallas who became one of my most significant colleagues and mentors. (He is still so sadly missed.) I had the honor to design many shows with Christopher, each a truly unique experience with memories that I will always treasure.

New York had been filled with Assistant Designers, apprenticing in the trenches to learn their craft. But in Canada, in the 70s, there were few role models to turn to. So my peers and I began to create structures for the future: establishing positions for Assistants; keeping a watchful eye for new talent.

Theatre is a journey of perpetual apprenticeship — to my colleagues, to my craft, to the work itself. Over the years I’ve had the privilege to work with many great artists and artisans on theatre, ballet, and opera projects, large and small. I’ve especially been fortunate to work with, and be influenced by, some great directors and choreographers: Robert Lepage, who exploded my preconceptions of opera; Robert Carson; Peter Hinton, who never feared the dark; William Forsythe; Jonathan Miller, who taught me how to light Shakespeare; James Kudelka; Neil Munro, who set the standard in research; Eric Bruhn; and Derek Goldby, who introduced me to Berlioz and taught me to light with panache! This is not an exercise in name-dropping. I just want to acknowledge my extraordinary blessings. And of course Jennifer. Who is so intensely collaborative, loves process, and lets me try crazy things.

The challenge of talking about lighting design— to paraphrase Martin Mull — is that “talking about lighting is like dancing about architecture”. My medium – light – is conjured and crafted for the human eye. It is elusive, difficult to document, and virtually impossible to articulate. (Hard enough with my colleagues, let alone a room as diverse as this!) The fact is, that theatrical lighting design only exists in that moment of time. It expresses time, exaggerates time, and, like the characters who people the stage, is intrinsically performative. Alive.

And the beauty of lighting design is its capacity – like sound design – to have an emotional impact on a production – ergo, the audience. But it’s no simple trick to quantify. I come home at the end of the day and what can I say…? That I’ve spent 14-hours making something more beautiful. More suggestive. More sinister. More provocative. More alluring. More … what it needed to be.

I’m currently working in Montreal on a production of John Logan’s play RED: the fictionalized story of American painter Mark Rothko, and his young assistant. It’s a fabulous cantata, exploring the nature and definition of art. As I’ve been considering what to say this evening, the themes of this discourse have continued to resonate. And it’s made me reflect on whether I can ever call myself “an artist”. Which is not false modesty, or some cliché of insecurity — though I do live in constant fear of the gig where I’ll be found out!

The other trick about lighting is that it only exists in concert with the other creative elements. Theatre is surely a true concert of artists. Lighting only has meaning in the elaboration of an idea, or a vision … be that a director, another designer or the story … or the emotional moment that wants shape, or guidance.

Each production is unique. My approach, as much as possible, is to have no approach at all … seeking all my inspiration from the text or score, the rehearsal hall, and the collective journey of my fellow artists. My preparation is that of a voyeur: everyday obsessively collecting images and observations of nature, architecture, media and visual art. Noting the effects of light on people, their lives and environments… and the emotional interpretations these evoke.

I try to reinvent myself with each new project – disconnecting from previous experience. I see my work like any other performer: discovering, with the director, the world of the play, and what we’re trying to say with it. This is the allure and great joy of the work that we do: with each new project, the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a new ocean of experience.

Of course it’s not all “swimming with dolphins”. Few artists can survive solely on their theatre earnings. The rigours of freelance life, the perpetual pursuit of employment – it can be grueling. You’re forced to make choices, wear too many hats. And for me, the night before a lighting plot is due – which is always too soon – never gets easier.

And the world in which we create is getting tougher and colder. One community mourns the loss of a major institution. Another grapples with governance scandal and a shoddy dismissal. Theatres are tightening their belts and it’s reflected in the programming… and in our shrinking vision. How do we compete with streaming video and reality TV?

In RED, the fictional Rothko rails desperately against the rising power of market-driven culture. More than anything, he abhors the commodification of art: work that seeks to be decorative, or fashionable, or simply convenient.

Of his own painting he says, “Not nice. Not fine. Real. And whatever it is, it’s not pretty. I am here to stop your heart, you understand that?! I am here to make you think!”

It’s important, theatre. The capacity to reflect on our experience, and tell our stories. To challenge society’s perceptions, assumptions, superstitions. And to do this in a live medium, in collusion with an audience. Now more than ever — as borders are shifting and distances shrinking, when the need to participate in a global exchange of culture is so urgent — we have a responsibility to share our stories with each other, and the world.

The Siminovitch Prize represents the highest level of peer recognition in Canadian theatre. How truly humbling! And beyond recognition, its purpose is to support the recipient in furthering their craft. How wonderful! In a world that fetishizes youth and newness, it’s reassuring to hear that I’ve still got something to give. Something to do.

In Red, Rothko instructs his assistant to spend time with the masters. He says…”Courage in painting isn’t facing the blank canvas. It’s facing Manet. It’s facing Velasquez.”

I’m excited by this gift, to spend time with some “masters” myself. Thirty-five years later, it’s like being given another hall pass.

From the other side of the footlights, the Siminovitch Prize has stood for the passion and commitment of donors and patrons. In the face of increasing government indifference, to see that there are still individuals and organizations who care deeply for the arts … gives us hope. The importance of an award like this in communicating the value of culture to the country cannot be overstated. And for this, I applaud you.

The very best part of being the Siminovitch recipient is the delightful task of selecting a rising talent to share a portion of this prize. I have selected two emerging designers to share the Protégé Award. It has been my honour and pleasure to have mentored and worked with both, and I believe they will soon be at the forefront of Canadian Lighting Design.

The first is a young man I met when he was an Assistant Designer at Stratford. I was so impressed with his talent, astute eye, calm manner and wonderful potential that I could not help urging (along with others) for his promotion. The following season, I shared a Rep Plot with him as one of the company’s Lighting Designers.

The second is a young woman who first assisted me on the transfer of a large musical to Canadian Stage — this while she was still finishing her final year at Ryerson Theatre School. She supervised the setup in my absence, and by the time I arrived, she was running the crew with the aplomb of a seasoned veteran. She has since assisted me on several projects and I have been so impressed with her bold ideas and design vision. We recently co-designed a production, and she will be taking over the completion of my current project in Montreal.

In RED, Rothko eventually fires his assistant. He says: “You don’t need to spend any more time with me. You need to find your contemporaries and make your own world, your own life. You need to get out there now. Into the thick of it. Shake your fist at them. Make something new.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my great privilege to introduce you to my colleagues: Jason Hand and Raha Javanfar.

2012 Protégé

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Raha Javanfar

Raha Javanfar

Protégé, 2012

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Raha Javanfar is an Iranian-born, Toronto-raised, self-employed lighting and projections designer and musician. As a designer, she works primarily in theatre, opera, concert production, and international touring. As a musician, Raha’s main focus is playing the violin in several Toronto-based bands, as well as composition/arrangement and teaching privately.

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Annick Lefebvre

Annick Lefebvre

Finalist, 2020

Protégé, 2014

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Annick Lefebvre holds a degree in playwriting and theatre critique from UQAM (2004). She is the founder of Le Crachoir, a company dedicated to placing the author, female or not, at the centre of the creation-production-performance process. She has written several plays, including Ce samedi il pleuvait (shortlisted for the 2013 Michel-Tremblay Award); La machine à révolte (shortlisted for the 2015 Louise-LaHaie Award); J’accuse (shortlisted for the 2015 Michel-Tremblay Award, the 2015 Critics’ Choice Award from the Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre [AQCT] and the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award); Les barbelés (shortlisted for the 2019 Critics’ Choice Award from the AQCT); ColoniséEs (winner of the 2019 Michel-Tremblay Award and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award); and several short scripts for collective events. She adapted J’accuse twice, once for a production in Belgium, and once for a French production. Annick Lefebvre was chosen as protégée by playwright Olivier Choinière, laureate of the 2014 Siminovitch Prize. Her plays are published by Dramaturges Éditeurs.

After graduating from UQÀM in 2004, Annick Lefebvre founded Le Crachoir (The Spittoon), a company that questions the role of the author at the heart of the creative process, as well as the process of production and performance of a work. She is the author of Ce samedi il pleuvait (It Was Raining That Saturday), a finalist for the 2011 prix Gratien-Gélinas and the 2013 prix Michel-Tremblay. In 2013-14, she was among the group of emerging writers in “Contes Urbains” at La Licorne. This season, she will be on stage at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in the cast of 26 lettres: abécédaire des mots en perte des sens, a new play by Olivier Choinière, and the same theatre where her own play, J’accuse, will be directed by Sylvain Bélanger in April, 2015. Meanwhile, in France, her first play for adolescents, La machine à révolte, will be produced in Alsace and in Basse-Normandie. Annick is about to complete Prends-moi, which she is co-writing with Guiseppe Lonobile (Belgium) and Olivier Sylvestre (Québec), in addition to beginning work on ColoniséEs, her next dramatic projectile.

In September, 1999, I am doing my B.A. to become a high school French teacher. Some friends who are studying theatre take me to see the first production of le Théâtre du Grand Jour. The play is called Autodafé and is written by Olivier Choinière. I’ve never heard of Olivier Choinière but I do know the play makes me discover writing that’s like a punch in the face and to which I respond. Along with seeing the show, the audience can take part in a contest: “Write your own Revolutionary Manifesto.” I try my hand. A full year later, I get a call from Sylvain Bélanger, Artistic Director of the company, telling me “In the end, we commissioned manifestos from professional writers, but we’ve organised an event that will take place at Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui and we want your piece to be part of the show.” That’s how, in 2000, when I couldn’t be further from thinking I would ever write for the theatre, Olivier Choinière staged To Shout From All the Rooftops wherein my words were heard by an audience for the very first time.

Next, we jump ahead thirteen years. Thirteen years, during which I ditch my B.A. in teaching, become an apprentice in the creation of the play Incendies (Scorched) by Wajdi Mouawad and I write my first play. Olivier Choinière offers to mentor me in the rewriting and production. On April 9, 2013, at the opening of my play, Ce samedi il peuvait (That Saturday, It Rained), Olivier’s girlfriend, Mélissa, comes to sit beside me and asks if I’m nervous. I say yes. She tells me Olivier is, too. I say impossible. I can’t imagine Olivier could be stressed. Olivier arrives and Mélissa takes his hand and puts it in mine. The clammy palm confirms that he’s a mess, but I know he believes in the work one hundred percent. And in the play… And, I think, in me.

In the spring of 2015, my second play will be produced at Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, on the same stage as new works by Wajdi Mouawad and Olivier Choinière, which moves me deeply. This season, I will also take part in a collective orchestrated by Olivier. For it, I have dedicated the text I will read to Marianne Dansereau. Marianne is a young actor of 23, but most of all, she is someone who writes plays that blow me away. And, like Olivier once did with me, I will do whatever it takes to ensure that audiences can hear her voice as soon as possible. Just last week, I got a call from Marianne, telling me that Olivier has offered to mentor her in the writing of her next play. I immediately ran out to buy champagne because all these threads meet with a confluence that still moves me deeply.

Thank you, Olivier Choinière, for guiding all my flights; I never thought I’d use the metaphor of a bird to thank you, but I’m sticking to it: thank you for my wings. And “my wings” is also the term we use for a licence to fly, and to me, that feels just right. Yes. To thank you for having taught me to pilot the machine that lets my words take flight in a way that I can make them land wherever I choose, that indeed feels absolutely right!

Thank you, Paul Lefebvre, thank you Marcelle Dubois, thank you Marie-Ève Milot. And thank you to the Siminovitch Prize; thank you for creating an award that encourages real mentorship across multiple generations of artists. I am happy, blessed and honoured to be among you tonight.

Merci à vous tous! Bonne fin de soirée.

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Olivier Choinière

Olivier Choinière

Laureate, 2014

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2014 Laureate

Olivier Choinière graduated in Playwriting from the National Theatre School in 1996. He first made a name for himself with Le bain des raines (1998) followed by Autodafé, created by André Brassard in 1999. Félicité was created in 2007, and subsequently done in English at London’s Royal Court Theatre, under the title Bliss, in a translation by Caryl Churchill. It has since been performed in English Canada, Scotland, Australia and Switzerland. Venise-en-Québec (2006) and Nom de domaine (2013,) were both short-listed for the Governor General’s Award. Mommy (2013), won four awards at the Cochons d’or gala, in addition to being a finalist for the prix Michel-Tremblay. Olivier Choinière directed 50 actors in Chante avec moi (2010), a play that won a prize from the Association Québécoise des Critiques de Théâtre, before going on to play at the National Arts Centre, the Festival TransAmériques and the Théâtre du Trident. His latest play, Ennemi public, will be created in February at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui. The Canada Council has recently awarded him the prix Victor-Martyn-Lynch-Staunton in theatre.

Acceptance Speech

The honour bestowed on me allows me to speak to you tonight.

And this honour demands a certain honesty. So, I will be honest with you: very often, I detest theatre. I detest theatre, one could say, in order to love it more deeply. That which has driven me away from it, often wanting to abandon it, is also what draws me to it and allows me to make it my own. To be hard on theatre is, in my estimation, what makes it healthy. To become aware of the context in which this art form is practiced here, today, is to become aware of the way in which we live here, and today. What infuriates me about theatre is also what makes me furious with life.

Right now, in my corner of the country, theatre is thriving, it’s boiling over. New spaces open up, new companies are born and productions multiply. The theatre is exploding; one could even say it’s having “une crise de croissance.”

This growth crisis is happening at precisely the time when budgets shrink and government programmes disappear. It is accompanied by disengagement in politics which, if some fine but unlikely day, were to choose to defend things cultural, it would only be to repeat the argument for the all-triumphant economy.

In my corner of the country, it’s not only politicians but artists who engage in the merchant discourse, using vocabulary gleaned from marketing without an ounce of shame, which is frightening. Our large and small stages are monopolised by a way of doing business, clearly imposed by financial restrictions, but also by a product-driven
logic that has become ingrained in our minds as if it were evidence incarnate. The administration of our theatres takes precedence over the creative work we do in them, turning us into small, bustling entrepreneurs, smiling in defeat because “what can you do, we no longer have the luxury to dream.”

The dominion of the economy over our lives, especially in the discourse of power, seems nothing less than a tragic fatality. Despite all efforts, we cannot escape it. It would seem it’s a law of nature when in fact, it’s but an idea, a convention, imposed upon us like a truth.

When I write a play, it is these pre-determined conventions I want to illuminate. It’s the power structures, beginning with those I impose upon myself or to which I feel bound without even realising, that I hope to derail. And because theatre cannot escape these structures –after all, it’s the art of convention!—it is first and foremost with theatre that I take issue. For me, this duty is borne in the form. With each play, I strive to build a new way of reading the world, in the hopes that, if it’s new for me, it will also be new for others. My efforts, however, are not to make me look clever, or even to make my cultural product more appealing, but rather to address each audience member as directly as possible. If I try to make him or her active, an actor, and to assign them a role, sometimes even the lead, it is absolutely to recognise his or her presence and to declare loud and clear that without the audience, theatre cannot happen, and to allow each spectator to escape, however briefly, from the usual codes of entertainment that obliterate her or him, making them passive, even invisible. Because this escape, however small, tiny, is still one more step towards his or her own freedom.

I don’t want to preach to anyone. I seek, as honestly as possible, to share my fears. I find sense in theatre when it makes me free. I hope to write plays that will have an echo in the lives of others and which ultimately answer the questions that I ask myself when I take my seat: “Why am I here? What do these people want to tell me? And why now?”


Theatre is an art form from another era, which is why it reveals something unique about our own. As if we tried to bear witness to our modern reality by painting the walls of a cave with our fingers. It’s this time warp that allows it to be our contemporary: to rendezvous in a real place, to gather there for a given time, an hour, two hours, to breathe the same air, to live the same “now.” To take all that keeps us from an awareness of our own power and to put that on stage; to try to see it, to understand it, and to go back home with a bit of freedom, perhaps minute, but which remains, and will endure.

Thank you to the Jury members and to all who work for this extraordinary prize. Thank you to Paul Lefebvre, Caryl Churchill, Maureen Labonté and André Brassard who have not only supported my nomination but have encouraged and inspired my work for almost 20 years. For over and above the money or the time and means it provides, the real significance of this prize is this: to encourage the pursuit of an ever greater freedom, among those few that last and endure.

2014 Protégé

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Anusree Roy

Anusree Roy

Protégé, 2011

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Anusree Roy is a Governor General’s Award nominated writer, and actor whose work has toured nationally. Her plays include: Brothel # 9RoshniLetters to my Grandma and Pyaasa. Her Opera librettos include: The Golden Boy and Noor over Afghan. Her latest librettom Phoolan Devi, premieres in New York in the fall of 2014. She holds a B.A from York University and an M.A from the University of Toronto. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Theatre Jones Roy and has been published by the Playwright’s Canada Press. Her plays and performances have won her three Dora Mavor Moore Awards along with multiple nominations.

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Joan MacLeod

Joan MacLeod

Laureate, 2011

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2011 Laureate

Joan MacLeod’s plays include Jewel, Toronto, Mississippi, Amigo’s Blue Guitar, The Hope Slide, Little Sister, 2000, The Shape of A Girl, Homechild and Another Home Invasion. Her work has been translated into eight languages. She is the recipient of two Chalmers Canadian Play Awards, the Governor General’s Award, the Betty Mitchell Award, Dora Mavor Moore Award and the Jessie Richardson Award. For seven years she was a playwright-in-residence at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. Joan also writes poetry, prose and for television. Since 2004 she has worked at the University of Victoria as an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing. The Tarragon’s production of Another Home Invasion is currently on a national tour. The Shape of a Girl is also back touring with Green Thumb this year. It has been produced continuously since its premiere in 2001.

Acceptance Speech

Thank you Dr. Siminovitch . Thank you to the Siminovitch family and to the founders of this beautiful, life-changing award. Thank you to the BMO Financial Group who sponsors the award and organized this evening and who clearly didn’t check my very short record of employment at BMO Whitehorse in 1977, when I was your friendly and incompetent receptionist.

I am so honoured to be this year’s recipient, to come back to this city that I love, where I came of age as a playwright, to have this opportunity to say thank you to the good people who made this award possible and to my community, my big borderless community that extends all the way to Vancouver Island. To the jury — Yvette Nolan, Carole Fréchette, Craig Holzschuh, Scott Burke, Vanessa Porteous and the jury chair Maureen Labonte – thank you for your hard work, for selecting a short list of remarkable artists. I have the good fortune to have a rich relationship with many theatres across the country – fabulous theatres where I return again and again. ATP, the Belfry, the Arts Club, the Vancouver Playhouse and Green Thumb to name but a few. But it feels entirely right that this nomination came from the Tarragon. Even though I live three thousand miles away it is still my home. Thank you Richard Rose – who I want to work with again and again — and my dear friends who wrote letters in support of the nomination, and in particular to my former student – playwright Sally Stubbs who I’m so pleased is here with us tonight.

I always wanted to be a writer. My parents gave me lined paper for Christmas and birthdays and dozens and dozens of notebooks. I survived high school, probably like a lot of people did, by writing reams and reams of terrible poetry, by reading profusely and listening to Joni Mitchell as much as was humanly possible. Thank you Joni Mitchell. Thank you Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. You were my introduction to great writing and you carried me right through my adolescence on your strong and splendid backs. I studied Creative Writing at UVIC and UBC and was blessed with many great teachers. I first started publishing with poetry and went to The Banff Centre as a poet in the mid-eighties and two important things happened.

I asked an actor from the playwrights colony if she could read a poem of mine at a public reading. So for the first time I was in an audience and watching an actor lift my words off the page and transform them into something beautiful. I was astounded. I didn’t know then that actors do that all the time – that they are in the business of making writers look good. The second event took place in the third floor lounge of Lloyd Hall when Alan Williams, the brilliant monologist, performed The Cockroach Triology for us one magical and snowy evening in June. I wasn’t quite thirty and I had been to the theatre twice in my life. After watching Alan I understood with absolute certainty that I was supposed to be a playwright. And within a year I had moved to Toronto and become part of the playwrights unit at Tarragon.

Flukey. I guess. But here’s what I know for certain. That I wouldn’t be here tonight if I hadn’t gone to Banff, if funding for places like Banff didn’t exist. And Banff is there because governments, corporations and individuals, just like so many of you in this room tonight, value art and understand that sometimes the creation of art can’t exist without a hand. More than twenty-five years after that snowy night in June, with ten plays and a libretto behind me, significant portions of all those scripts were written at the Banff Centre – and most of them at the Playwrights Colony. Thank you — I am your most grateful genre-swapping participant. I truly don’t know how to write for the stage unless I can look out the window, at some point in the process, and lock eyes with an elk.

So I discovered theatre in Banff but I went to theatre school – or at least my version of it — at the Tarragon. I started work on my first full length play in the playwrights unit. I went to first reads, dress rehearsals, opening nights of all the plays at Tarragon. I went to every pay-what-you-can in the city. I lived and breathed theatre. I started understanding what directors and designers do, what actors do – and how we really are all in this together; the script is simply the start of something. On a December afternoon, after I had just completed the first act of my play Toronto Mississippi, artistic director Urjo Kareda – who I was still a little scared of — called me into his office. He told me that he wanted to open the season with my new play. And then he told me he was going to find the grant money to keep me writing plays and offered me a residency in his theatre. I stayed for seven years and during that time premiered four works there. Urjo became my dear friend – and his family became my friends — and unquestionably he is my most important mentor. Thank you Urjo.

I met and worked with extraordinary people during that time and I am here because of it. Many friendships have endured – my dear Don Hannah and Ken Garnhum, Leslie Toy and Alan Williams. Bill Gaston – 30 years now of reading one another’s first drafts. Many more of you are in this room tonight or on the road working, or back home in BC – you know who you are. This year’s award also has a focus on work that was produced in the past decade. So I want to thank in particular the fabulous Jennys — Jenny Young and Jenny Patterson – Shape of a Girl – and the supremely gifted Nicola Lipman – Another Home Invasion — and the ATP-Green-Thumb-Tarragon connection that resulted in those beautiful productions. And to Canstage who produced Homechild with a remarkable cast under Martha Henry’s direction — and at Iris Turcott’s insistence – Iris who helped so much with the script. Thank you.

Last year, Daniel MacIvor, the last playwright to receive the Siminovitch Award – besides Ronnie — was in Victoria working when I was on sabbatical. For two months we walked our dogs together every morning for hours sometimes and got to know each other again and formed a friendship that endured even when my dog beat up his dog over a carrot. And Daniel talked to me about this award, this night, the great meaning that it had for him and how that had lingered. I was so happy for Danny. And I was sick with envy too of course. I think it’s important to acknowledge that there are remarkable writers across this country, hard working artful souls who have a strong body of work and somehow they fly under the radar. I really am fortunate to be here. But back to Daniel. I know that he wrote about theatre as family in his speech and, well, it is just that. Not all writers seek community. But I did. And I found it when I found the theatre. Family.

So. Let me tell you about my family. My parents, Fred and Muriel MacLeod, were from neighbouring farms in Glengarry County in eastern Ontario. Like me they married and had children late in life. My mother went to Normal School and began teaching in rural schools in Ontario when she was seventeen and then in North Vancouver where my folks raised my brother Doug and I. My mum was so proud to be a teacher. It would’ve meant so much to her that this award comes from not only a renowned scientist but a remarkable educator and mentor as well in Dr. Siminovitch. My father was a postal worker. And a brilliant story teller. He was also really funny. He mailed jokes in to the Readers Digest that were much funnier than the ones they actually published. As a senior citizen he took courses in Creative Writing at the local community centre and wrote a memoir that I typed and edited. My parents brought their rural values with them when they moved to the city – they were neighbourly, they were deeply involved in their church, they were frugal but they knew how to have a really good time. My gosh – how they would have loved this night. They taught my brother and I, by example, to stand up for what is right and to lend a hand to those who need it. We watched hockey not plays but we also read newspapers, argued politics – they kept up with things – these old-fashioned parents of mine were surprisingly current and political in a profoundly, spectacularly ungroovy way. From my very first play at the Edmonton Fringe when they showed up, unannounced, in their tent trailer, they supported me. If there really is humanity or tenderness or compassion in my work it is because of my family. It is because I was raised with such love.

So. My husband Bill is with me tonight. Bill who never hesitates, who never says anything but Yes – I’ll look after things — when I say I’d like to go to Banff again or actually this one rehearses in Toronto or Vancouver or always somewhere that isn’t home. And our daughter Ana, nearly sixteen years old. I’m so glad you’re here, our beautiful girl. We are so proud of you. I know what it was like to have a mother who loved her work; for the child left at home it’s not always easy. That we three are a family means everything to me. And this award is going to change our lives as a family.

I’m a professor in the Writing Department at UVIC with remarkable colleagues and gifted, extraordinary students. But for well over a decade now my time to write has been steadily diminishing. The Siminovitch Award changes all that. It will allow me to step down from teaching full time. What a generous and perfect gift. What a great reminder of what drew me to write in the first place; there is joy to be found in creating a piece of writing –and that is something that Elinore Siminovitch seemed to have known intimately. Thank you once more to her extraordinary family, to Dr. Siminovitch and to the founders. The pace of my life and my family’s life is about to change. This award allows me to return me to some vital part of myself. I promise to use it well. Thank you.

So now on to my first duty as tonight’s recipient – and what a splendid duty it is– giving $25,000 to an exceptional young theatre artist. We met last year at the fall residency for playwrights at the Stratford Festival and we come from very different worlds. But as writers we share so much. This young playwright writes from the personal and the political. She gives voice to characters we aren’t used to seeing on our stages, who are all deeply human. She writes with extraordinary craft and beauty — in English – her third language. What a great pleasure to introduce you to the lovely Anusree Roy.

2011 Protégé

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Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham

Laureate, 2013

Protégé, 2001

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2013 Laureate

Chris Abraham is Artistic Director of Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre and is creating a permanent home for the theatre in the city’s East End. He’s made a name for himself through his highly successful productions seen in theatres ranging from the smallest to the largest. Recent productions include the classics The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Stratford Festival, and The Seagull for Canadian Stage. He’s developed and directed hit new plays such as I Claudia with Kristen Thomson, SEEDS and The Watershed by Annabel Soutar, and Winners and Losers by James Long and Marcus Youssef, all of which have toured widely. He was the first person to both win the Siminovitch Protégé Prize (selected by recipient Daniel Brooks in 2001) and be the Siminovitch recipient in 2013. A graduate of the National Theatre School, he later served as co-director of its Directing Program.

Acceptance Speech

I want to start by thanking Lou Siminovitch and the other founders for your initial vision, and the rest of family again for your great creativity, tenacity, and grit in finding a way to save and sustain this incredible prize. I also want to thank John Van Burek, and the rest of the jury for this tremendous honour. And, of course, I’d like to offer my congratulations to my fellow finalists Benoît and Marie-Josée. Felicitations.

When Daniel Brooks called me in 2001 to tell me that he had selected me as his protégé for the inaugural Siminovitch Prize, I was 26 years old. That year I had directed the premiere of Kristen Thomson’s I, Claudia at the Tarragon Theatre — a work and a collaboration that cemented my commitment to making new plays, and one that sharpened my understanding of, and obsession with, creating artful precision without destroying the beautiful and unwieldy chaos at the centre of a piece great of theatre. This pursuit still remains my particular white whale.

Given that I have the honour of being the first Siminovitch Protégé — and hopefully not the last — to also win the prize, I found myself thinking a lot about its impact and the distance I’ve travelled since then. And that’s what I’d like to speak about tonight.

Before I do, though, I want to thank RBC for stepping forward to support this vital component of the Siminovitch Prize — the protégé award. The protégé award is the heart of the prize and what, I believe, makes it unique amongst arts awards.

It was because of the protégé award that a door opened for me to mentorship, collaboration and friendship with director Daniel Brooks — someone whose work I had admired at a distance, but did not know personally. I want to thank the founders for their great insight in recognizing the centrality of mentorship in the ecosystem of our profession and embedding it in the DNA of the prize. I’ve had the privilege of being involved in the training of directors at the National Theatre School of Canada for many years, and now with the Canadian Stage and York University MFA program, and it’s been easy to see the pivotal role that mentoring plays in forming directors and sustaining them in the early stages of their careers — it’s essential.

So in 2011, When Daniel called to tell me that he had selected me as his protégé, I didn’t know him personally — as I said — but being selected by him nevertheless meant a great deal to me, because he was the first director whose work truly spoke to me. His productions inspired me and taught me — for example, the way a good design reveals itself over time and in relation to other elements of a play experience — the text, the performance, the lighting and the sound. My time as audience member in Daniel’s theatre also sharpened my appetite to make work that was both personal and political.

At the time, I was working at the Theatre Centre on a project called The Vindication of Senyora Clito Mestres — another one-woman show. I was about to open the play in Toronto before taking it to the National Theatre in Belgrade, Serbia. This was only two years after the NATO led bombing there. The play was produced and performed by a Serbian-Canadian actress who had spent many years as a member of National Theatre in Belgrade. She left for political reasons and emigrated to Canada. Not only was the play itself about vindication, but I also felt the ways in which taking the production back home was intended as a kind of vindication for her — that she had survived, that the artist in her had prospered in her new home. But looking back on it, I don’t think I was able to fully appreciate her courage in in the moment — in part, because, I was suffering from an acute desire for vindication myself.

In the fall of 2001, I was five years out of the National Theatre School directing program and had just had the worst experience of my life, directing a play. After five years of initiating projects on my own, I had finally been offered the opportunity to direct a great classic text by a great theatre company in Toronto. So it was especially difficult to have the experience blow up in a such a dramatic fashion — and blow up it did. In fact, I did quite a bit of the blowing up myself. The lead actor and I clashed continuously and, to make matters worse, I felt alone in my feeling that it was all his fault.

So, even as I was standing up on this stage 13 years ago, getting the protégé award, only months after the show had closed, I was still feeling confused and embarrassed and didn’t understand why things had gone so terribly wrong and why the whole thing had happened to me. Receiving the protégé award from Daniel gave me a great sense of validation when I really needed it — but it also made me feel a little like a fraud. My recent disaster had left me with a lot of scar tissue.

Pretty much right after the Siminovitch ceremony, I went off to Belgrade to open the show. The theatre itself was an amazing place. It was a massive block of buildings anchoring the town square. Built in 1869, the National Theatre was the only state building open to the public during the 78 days of NATO air raids. Also on tour to Belgrade was my lighting designer, Jan Komárek, another great artist who had also left Europe to make a life for himself in Canada. His sense of the tactile qualities of light, its musical and mystical properties, had a big impact on me. His sensitivity to the difference between a 9 percent and 10 percent on a cheap Fresnel, and the way he played the lighting board like it was a musical instrument, helped shaped the way I see lighting design.

When we arrived at the National Theatre, we were given the tour of the massive building. We walked through the set storage facility with 100-year-old painted drops stacked side by side. I was shocked to see what seemed like hundreds of crew people still working at the theatre, as they had done for most of their lives under a communist regime, but now for only a pittance. At night I went out and met other young people, who were all highly educated and unemployed. I didn’t meet a single young person in Belgrade who wasn’t planning their escape to places like Canada where they saw more opportunity — and they weren’t looking back. Their ambition and fearlessness inspired yet frightened me, and made me think about how the safety and stability of home had made me fear loss, had made my art timid.

The days leading up to the opening of the show were filled with nightmares. The sizeable, but moderately drunken, crew didn’t seem to appreciate the difference between the 9 percent and 10 percent in lighting levels that Jan and I were so passionate about, much less that all the lights we asked for get hung in the air. My actress was contending with the stakes of the homecoming, and I wasn’t able to help her, as I was busy trying to figure our how to ensure that my vision of the show was realized to my standards. The day of the show’s opening, I was asked by the theatre’s Associate Artistic Director to leave the leading actress to herself. I was pissed off. “We are opening today and I needed to speak to her,” I said. I was told she was being attended to by the country’s surgeon general in her dressing room. “I’m sorry, the surgeon general?” Was I living in a Bulgakov novel? I was told she had suffered a kind of nervous collapse due the pressure I was placing on her. I was outraged! I wanted to speak to her but the surgeon general forbade it. This was crazy. After trying several times to speak to her, I decided that I was going to quit the tour the next day. The show opened and what followed was a caviar-, vodka-, and tear-filled celebration in the Artistic Director’s office, overlooking the town square. My actress was there, crying and singing with her old friends and colleagues; songs that seemed as much about losses in the war as anything else. It was beautiful and strange and ridiculous all at the same time. I now felt sure I was living in Bulgakov novel — except I didn’t understand why I was there.

I walked home feeling embarrassed and confused about my need for the show to be just so. I went back to my hotel and went to bed. When I woke up, I knocked on my actress’s door and informed her that I wouldn’t be continuing on the tour. She didn’t seem all that shocked and didn’t really try to convince me to stay.

That day I got on a bus to Budapest to visit a Hungarian director friend, Láslzó Marton. Láslzó showed me around his theatre and took me to lunch. I told him about my experience in Belgrade and my scar tissue in general, and this feeling of injustice that I felt plagued by. He thought about my situation for a few minutes in silence, had a few bites of soup, and then he said to me, with a sobriety and weight that was uncharacteristic for his jovial self — “The theatre is crazy, actors are crazy. If they weren’t crazy, they couldn’t do it. There is no such thing as fairness in the theatre. Don’t expect it.” He went on to tell me that it took him a long time to realize that, and that it was one of the most important things he had to come to terms with as a young director.

I believed him, and what I took from his advice was that there is only so much order, only so much control, that you can exert on the theatre, only so many rules. That the theatre, like life, is in its fundamental nature something wilder, that resists too much control and that this isn’t a bad thing. He went on to say that if actors, writers, and — only very occasionally — directors, didn’t behave irrationally, that the theatre would be poorer for it. That it’s the director’s job to accept this as part of the reality of the art form and that’s what the art form has to teach us about life. I’ve grown to see this reflected in so many of the great works of art I admire, especially in Shakespeare, who is always creating cautionary tales about the fantasy of control: The Tempest, Measure for Measure, and even Hamlet — in which I think he posits that an over-reliance on reason is actually the source of Hamlet’s tragedy.

But I also think that László was trying to prepare me for a life, and life in the theatre, of unexpected consequences and of ups and downs and triumphs and crushing failures, and to accept that all this ephemerality and chaos in theatre is part of its lifeblood.

A few years later, in 2006, my good friend and frequent collaborator — who I need thank for nominating me for this prize — and I went on a research trip to South Africa for a piece that we were working on, cleverly titled “an untitled work in progress.” The piece was in some ways inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and we had been prompted to go to South Africa by the fact that Ahab has a momentary sighting of the white whale around the Cape of Good Hope. Our piece started with a desire to understand whether political theatre — when it works — drives change in a society or whether it just reflects it. We thought that South Africa was a good place to start because of the importance of theatre during the apartheid era. We were moved and inspired by the stories we heard, and shocked by the enormous disparity between rich and poor in the country. It was my first time encountering poverty on a massive scale, and also spending time with other artists who were themselves terribly poor. Amongst the many lightning-bolt moments for me on this trip was the shameful realization that somewhere inside me I carried the belief that I deserved the privileges and opportunities that I had and they were not an accident of birth. I realized how powerfully and invisibly this had functioned as a way to shield me from the nightmarish inequities of the poverty I was now encountering. During my trip it was impossible for me to protect myself from this fact. The shock of it was profound and hard to shake. I returned home and was devastated to discover how easy it was to do just that. Even though the work that I’ve chosen to pursue as a result has been influenced by this trip, what I experienced with my friend in South Africa still haunts me — and I don’t think this is a bad thing.

As my career advances, and I’ve become more of a beneficiary of the official culture that I sometimes criticize, I experience the contradictions of my life as an engaged artist in new ways. I find that in an attempt to create balance in the politics of my work, I sometimes end up staying silent or obscuring the very thing that needs to be said out loud. When I first started dating my wife, my mother-in-law, Satu Repo, a founder of This Magazine in Toronto, gave me a framed quote by Norman Bethune. It says, “The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world…. In a world terrified of change, he preaches revolution — the principle of life. He is an agitator, a disturber of the peace — quick, impatient, positive, restless and disquieting. He is the creative spirit of life working in the soul of man.” Sometimes I look at this quote with wonder and other times I wonder whether this idea of the artist is somehow a relic of an age gone by.

When I was completing my time as the co-director of the National Theatre School’s directing program several years ago, I was asked to accompany the theatre school’s new program director on the audition tour across the country. I was essentially riding shotgun for the new program director, who was a white South African but had recently moved to Montreal for love. At the outset of each interview, she asked each applicant a simple question. The question was, “What do your ancestors demand you break the silence on?” I was shocked by question. “What do your ancestors demand you break the silence on?” The terror I felt was shared by almost all of the young directors she asked the question to. I think it’s a challenging question and has some built-in traps, but I also think it’s a very good one. When I shared the experience and the question with colleagues, it was amazing to me how many found it to be a “bullshit” question. I mean, I understand, we’re a young country without a strongly felt relationship to our own history, and many of us came here to get as far away from the ancestors as we could. So I would say… “I don’t think you need to think of your ancestors literally.” No dice. All the same it’s never a question that I was able to really answer when it was turned back on me.

So, I decided as part of my remarks tonight that I would try to answer and speak to this question today: “What do my ancestors demand I break the silence on?”

Well, to start, I’m going to choose to interpret “ancestors” to loosely mean my parents. I don’t really know my ancestors. My parents are American and they moved to Canada, and we found ourselves to be a pretty self- contained little unit. So when I think about ancestry, for some reason my mind focuses in on my parents. Maybe I’m cheating, but I don’t think so. They both came from large working class Catholic families and devoted the first part of their life to service in a very explicit way and continued throughout my life to be involved in social justice issues. Perhaps that’s why they understood something about the sense of mission I felt at a young age and the sense of possibility I felt about art.

So what do my ancestors demand I break the silence on right now? Well if my ancestors are my parents, and my father is sitting in the room right now, I know what he’d tell me to break the silence on. But I don’t mean literally what do my parents demand I break the silence on. I mean the echo of my parents’ values that resides within me. So in that spirit, I suppose that for right now, for tonight, I’ll confess that my ancestors would like me break the silence on my own fear of self- censorship. I am in the middle of a capital campaign trying to raise millions of dollars for a new home for Crow’s Theatre. So I’m talking primarily about myself here, and a more general concern second — that we, as artists, will lose our nerve, shirk our responsibility, turn a blind eye to, stay mum about, avoid tackling, dumb down, or be less rigorous on the pivotal issues of our times. I fear this, because I can feel the temptation myself. Because it is more convenient, easier, smarter, and safer to do so. I think it’s more important than ever that we work as champions of an engaged and empowered citizenry and we do this by attempting to tackle the most challenging and unwieldy issues even if we risk jeopardizing our support from corporations, government, and donors. Whether you are leading a university science program, an NGO, or any arts organization with operating funding, the challenge of remaining committed to the pursuit of truth — for example, pure science research that casts doubt on official government policy — isn’t getting any easier. This is why tackling big issues like genetically modified foods and the patenting of life-forms, and the conflict between natural resource development and the need to protect our environment, are a priority for me. It’s also why I’ve chosen to create a home for Crow’s Theatre grounded in a Toronto neighbourhood, and work with my community to create a vibrant cultural and community hub — but one also committed to using art as a platform to stimulate civic and democratic engagement.

Finally, it should be said that I really believe “it takes a village to raise a theatre director” and that whatever I have achieved, I have done so with enormous support of friends, colleagues, supporters of the arts, taxpayers, as well as the love and faith of my family. I thank you all for the tremendous support and inspiration you have given me in my career thus far. I want to offer a special thank you to my wife, Liisa Repo-Martell, who couldn’t be here tonight because she’s acting in Montreal, for really helping shape my understanding of acting over the years. For helping me to grow in wisdom and giving me unconditional support in the pursuit of my dreams.

Now my favourite part: the protégé.

Mitchell Cushman’s work first distinguished itself to me in a kindergarten classroom, and then, a second time, in a dilapidated garage in Toronto’s west end. In the first instance, the mobile audience intermingled with performers, who traipsed around the room playing kids as young as four, deftly carving out the touching and disturbing inner life of a 21st-century four-year-old girl. The second was an intimate re-contextualizing of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which Mitchell asked his audience to consider recent revelations that the play’s author had “massaged” details of his documentary about Apple’s manufacturing practices in China. While Mitchell’s work with his company, aptly named “Outside the March,” has been largely focused on “creating immersive experiences for” his audiences, this doesn’t cover the breadth of his talent. His deep understanding of the dramatic muscle of his texts seems to consistently result in productions in which one feels all pistons firing at once. This couldn’t have been more true than in Mitchell’s laser-sharp production of Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus — a production that had the distinction of being transferred from Toronto’s SummerWorks festival to the Royal Alexandra stage — not only a sign of the quality of the work, but further evidence of Mitchell’s savvy and ingenuity as a producer. As an audience member, I can always count on Mitchell’s productions to satisfy my appetite for a story well told. He is also the rare breed of young director that is miraculously polite and even-tempered, while at the same uncompromising. This aspect of his character, along with the enormous rigour in his work, has made him a director that actors are clamouring to work with. It has also helped to make him a trusted leader in my city’s indie-theatre community and someone that I have no doubt will be playing a big role on our country’s national stage in years to come. I feel lucky to be have the chance to honour Mitchell’s achievements in this way and, frankly, just to be able to cheer him on in his “full-steam ahead” journey in directing.

2013 Protégé

Chris Abraham is Artistic Director of Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre and is creating a permanent home for the theatre in the city’s East End. He’s made a name for himself through his highly successful productions seen in theatres ranging from the smallest to the largest. Recent productions include the classics The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Stratford Festival, and The Seagull for Canadian Stage. He’s developed and directed hit new plays such as I Claudia with Kristen Thomson, SEEDS and The Watershed by Annabel Soutar, and Winners and Losers by James Long and Marcus Youssef, all of which have toured widely. He was the first person to both win the Siminovitch Protégé Prize (selected by recipient Daniel Brooks in 2001) and be the Siminovitch recipient in 2013. A graduate of the National Theatre School, he later served as co-director of its Directing Program.

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Mitchell Cushman

Mitchell Cushman

Protégé, 2013

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Mitchell Cushman is a director, producer and educator, dedicated to making theatre an event for all involved. He is the founding Co-Artistic Director of Outside the March, one of Canada’s leading site-specific theatre companies. With OtM, Mitchell has staged such award-winning immersive theatrical experiences as VitalsTerminusPassion Play, and Mr. Marmalade (recipient of the 2013 Dora Award for Outstanding Independent Production). As a director, Mitchell’s work has been seen on stages as large as the Royal Alexandra Theatre, in spaces as intimate as a kindergarten classroom, and in locales as remote as Whitehorse and Munich. Also an active theatre producer, he recently curated the East End Performance CRAWL, a site-specific solo festival for Crow’s Theatre (a company for whom he also serves as Associate Artistic Director). Mitchell has received numerous awards for his theatre work, including the Ken McDougal Award, and the Toronto Theatre Critics’ award for Best Director.

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Marilène Bastien

Marilène Bastien

Protégé, 2015

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Marilène Bastien has designed sets, costumes and props for theatre, circus and dance. After almost six years stage managing the international tours of La compagnie Marie Chouinard and La compagnie O Vertigo, she became a steady collaborator of Ginette Laurin in 2011, creating sets and costumes forLe sacre du printemps (CCN – Ballet de Lorraine and l’Opéra National de Lorraine) and Khaos (O Vertigo, 2012), as well as costumes for Soif (O Vertigo, 2014). She is also a close collaborator of choreographer Manuel Roque with whom she has worked since his first creation. She is part of the creative team of the festival Montréal Complètement Cirque and in the summer of 2015 she created costumes for the homage to Beau Dommage, Le monde est fou, a Cirque du Soleil production directed by Jean-Guy Legault. She has recently participated in creations with directors Michel-Maxime Legault (Ce que nous avons fait by Pascal Brullemans), Kristian Frédric (La vraie vie de Gennaro Costagiola by François Douan and Jaz by Koffi Kwahulé) and Bernard Meney (Je ne tomberai pas – Vaslav Nijinski, an adaptation of Vaslav Nijinski’s Journal).

Acceptance Speech

What an honour to be chosen as the protégée of Anick La Bissonnière, a radiant artist, an exceptional woman for whom I have huge admiration! Architect, designer and teacher she embodies creativity, sensitivity and selflessness all at the same time. While active in theatre, she enriches her practice through her many realisations, and by sharing her knowledge and her passion. Her reach is great and an inspiration.

Being here, by her side, inspires me and challenges me. I devoutly wish to honour this prize which Anick is sharing with me tonight. I vow to never forget this unhoped for gift, this unexpected recognition, and to seize the occasion to pour into my work a renewed motivation, hope and audacity.

I have made my way thanks to several meaningful encounters, such as this. Through artistic and human dialogue, they brought on acts of creation, astonishing, demanding, sometimes confrontational, but always enriching, even essential. These encounters lead me, in remarkable ways on unexpected journeys (like this magnificent evening!)

I am quite intimidated by the attention given me, but I am very glad for this rare occasion to deliver a few heartfelt thanks.

First of all to a family who lavished love on me: my father, my mother and my sister; all, unconditional supporters. The pride of a parent has unfathomable power, at any age.

Thank you also to my professional families: dancers and choreographers, actors and directors, authors and designers, a politicized community who dreams and looks at the world with eyes wide open. To all these accomplices who make me grow and who have had confidence in me (sometimes more than myself) thank you. A very special word for my closest accomplice, with whom I share everything, my ideas, my joys, my anxieties; François, mon chéri, merci.

To Anick La Bissonnière, whose diverse interests and accomplishments leave me dumbfounded, dazzled, a huge merci!

It makes me very happy to be here tonight among people who recognize, appreciate and encourage the performing arts. In these times of a national electoral campaign, where culture is virtually absent from political speeches, no more than science, by the way, I worry. How do we communicate the value of art when our leaders show nothing but scorn for it? Standing in loud opposition to this sorry trend is the Siminovitch Prize: a reward charged with love for the arts, a unique recognition for the profession of theatre, a prize of rare generosity which encourages innovation and nourishes the vivacity of our creators.

Merci to the founders and partners of this wonderful prize.

Life is truly magic.

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Anick La Bissonnière

Anick La Bissonnière

Laureate, 2015

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2015 Laureate

Following her training as an architect in Switzerland and Montréal, Anick La Bissonnière has created close to a hundred designs for theatre on the major international, Canadian and Montréal stages and for multiple types of productions, including theatre, opera and circus. Her set designs have been produced on such renowned stages as the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Festival d’Avignon, New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. According to the jury, “La Bissonnière’s early training as an architect brings a sophisticated sculptural beauty to her set designs. Often epic in scope, her work is both eye-popping and emotionally powerful. She has worked with dozens of influential Canadian directors including André Brassard, Gilles Maheu, Matthew Jocelyn and her ongoing collaborator, Siminovitch Prize laureate, Brigitte Haentjens.”

Her work earned her a highly prestigious recognition at the Quadriennale internationale de scénographie in Prague in 2007 and the Critic’s Prize (ACMA Award) in Argentina in 2015. Since 2010, she has been sharing her knowledge in design with students at Université du Québec à Montréal. She has also played a role in the conception and building of scores of performance spaces all across the country. Her triple journey as a designer, architect and teacher has placed her in a unique position in the world of contemporary theatre, making her a formidable technician, a gifted communicator, a tireless researcher but especially, a complete, sensitive artist, one with a remarkable creative

Acceptance Speech

I love theatres.

They have a special smell; the air is thicker, the silence is deeper.

Nothing is more intoxicating for me than to sit in an empty theatre and to sense all the emotions, past and future, that might live there.

Theatres are haunted, everyone knows that.

I love theatres and I always have.

The origins of this unconditional love are not clear in my memory.

I have a distant recollection of one afternoon, sitting in Le Théâtre du Rideau Vert, watching a performance of Gulliver’s Travels. I must have been about five, no more.

Much later, there I am in a school outing at La Nouvelle compagnie théâtrale, to see an amazing production of Britannicus for which I can still describe the sets and costumes for you.

Throughout my school years, theatre was always part of my life. In fact, I must admit there are some years for which I have almost no memories of my classes! It was clear to me that I had to be in a theatre. I acted, I wrote, I did the sets, like we do in any amateur troupe, and I continued to be involved right up until starting university.

Until, that is, I met architecture.

It wasn’t love at first sight; far from it.

I was very young, barely an adult, when I was admitted to university.

I had chosen architecture because it was a “real profession,” and because I had been accepted into a program that had a reputation for being highly selective. Architecture also had the advantage of combining art and science, history and technology. In short, studying architecture struck me as being a fabulous introduction to the world.

But the penny didn’t really drop until my third year.

I spent that year in a university exchange program at L’École polytechnique fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

And I got a real cultural shock.

When I phoned my father to tell him I had survived my first flight and first train ride, I candidly declared to him, “It’s exactly like chez nous but everything is different.”

I had just discovered what culture was.

I spent two years studying in Europe, travelling and finally working in Paris at the beginning of the nineties, at a time when western architecture went through an important transformation.

I had occasion to visit hundreds of places and buildings that I only knew theoretically.

And I made a friend for life: Éric-Olivier Lacroix who remains to this day my most precious and irreplaceable collaborator.

I went to Egypt to visit the temples where the walls are covered with hieroglyphs: walls that speak, ingeniously lit by openings in the ceiling that project the light along precisely calculated paths.

To touch the stones that make up these giant constructions, for which we still wonder “how could they have been cut with such precision so many thousands of years ago,” makes for an extraordinary experience whose effect was to render me forever humble before the genius of humankind.

With my hands on those stones, I could feel the passage of time, the effort they required, and I was moved by their mere presence, mute and invisible, of those who had raised them into place.

I learned that buildings, even if they are small and not the least spectacular, contain within them all the energy and the very presence of those who built them.

It is difficult to describe this way of seeing the world that has never left me since.

When I returned to Montréal, two years later, I would walk along rue Ste-Catherine and discover an environment that I had never seen.

Everything seemed different to me, the width of the streets, the buildings, the light.

I looked at the city where I was born with brand new eyes.

I returned to the Université de Montréal to complete my final year armed with baggage that was very different from that of my fellow students.

It was then that I decided to attend the “Architecture Urbaine” workshop founded by Melvin Charney. In those days, Charney was interested in the metaphorical construction of cities and his model for the ensemble of his proposition was the theatre.

Taking inspiration from Shakespeare’s famous line “All the world’s a stage,” in his workshop the back alleys of Montréal became scenes of everyday life, the facades were masques on the street parades and the balconies mirrored those of the great operas.

I had the extraordinary good fortune of meeting one of Melvin’s assistants at the time, Alan Knight, who today is a professor in architecture at the Université de Montréal, and who delivered me into the world of creativity. This erudite man, so patient and generous, supervised my work all through my final year without ever inhibiting my imagination, while encouraging me to represent the world as I perceived it.

He saw something in me that I had never suspected.

He supported me in the conception of an urban stage design project, a kind of open-air scenography in bricks and steel, an audacious approach in a school of architecture where one is expected to see buildings with a clearly defined end use.

As it happened, not only did my project offer none of this, the majority of my plates were made up of drawings done by hand with coloured pencils.

(Which prompted my brother to say that my working space looked more like a kindergarten than a university!)

What my tutor had allowed me to do was hardly typical for the time: he had encouraged me to “live” the space that I imagined, to conceive of it at the eye level of a spectator rather than to render it abstract through the usual sections and plans. That, combined with my travel experience, has laid out the path for everything I have done since.

At the graduation ceremony, Alan predicted that I would be revisiting this project all my life.

And he was right.

What I learned under his benevolent guidance, inhabits me still.

Every day that I teach, he remains the professor whom I would wish to resemble.

I shall be eternally in his debt.

Before I was 25, I was admitted to the Order of Architects and enrolled in the training program run by the celebrated Montréal theatre company, Mime Omnibus. The training at Omnibus draws on that of French actor and teacher, Étienne Decroux, for whom the expression of the body within space is the essence of his art. There I found not only a technique that sharpened my consciousness of the body, but, especially, my first designing job.

The Artistic Director of Mime Omnibus, Jean Asselin, who knew of my profession, asked me if I would be interested in conceiving a theatrical design, urging me to read the play and to make him a proposal.

I just couldn’t believe my luck.

The play was about an imaginary meeting between Voltaire and Rousseau, which I set in a space that I knew well: the city. What other place than a city for this encounter between Culture and Nature, of which these two philosophers were the incarnation. The salon bourgeois where the two protagonists met was thus made up of miniature buildings, the bookshelves became Montréal triplexes, Voltaire’s study, a concrete parking garage.

Never discouraged by my somewhat surprising proposition, Jean and the entire team at l’Espace Go supported and encouraged me. They allowed me to realize a project that resembled me without ever demanding that I conform to the slightest convention.

Following that, Jean called on me for many other projects, allowing me to build a portfolio which in turn opened up numerous collaborations with other directors.

For his generosity and especially for having agreed to be “thrown off” by unusual proposals, Jean Asselin gets all my gratitude.

He allowed me to discover scenography.

For the first ten years of my professional life, I worked as a scenographer, I began teaching and I continued to work freelance in architectural firms. I was then part of a team that was solely devoted to designing performing arts spaces, an unbelievable bit of luck for someone who, at the same time, was designing shows for those same spaces.

I was involved in the design of some fifty theatres of all sizes and shapes, I took part in competitions, did the analyses, came to understand the needs of every element of a theatre and, in short, grew to know such buildings from top to bottom.

Then, in 1999, Brigitte Haentjens called me.

Brigitte, whose name I knew for having seen her work, offered me, for our first collaboration, the most prestigious stage in Montréal, le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. And our relationship has only grown since. Although I continue to work with other directors and on all manner of projects, my work with Brigitte remains a guiding light in the ensemble of my activity. She has allowed me to grow as an artist, to broaden my thinking beyond the constructed, but especially to engage in an artistic conversation over a long period of time.

Brigitte and I are two very different beings, but we are complementary and complicit at the same time. I admire her energy, her intelligence and lucidity, and her intransigence in the creative process. We have built a universe that expands with each project we undertake.

I was thrilled to see her receive the Siminovitch Prize in 2007 because, for me, she is without a doubt a great artist.

Part of the honour granted me tonight is in no small way thanks to her and I would like to think it is a celebration not only of the ensemble of my work but also of the extraordinary relationship I cherish with her.

Since 1993, I have designed almost one hundred spaces in which I have had the privilege of watching formidable actors perform. I have been moved by their performances but also by the collegial atmosphere that reigns in a theatre project. Without the boundless generosity of the collaborators whom I’ve had the privilege of meeting (production and technical directors, lighting, costume and prop designers, technicians, carpenters, painters and many more), I would not be standing before you now.

Nothing that I’ve imagined would have come to pass without their efforts so I would like to pay tribute here by sharing with them the honour that is given to me.

I found a poetic expression in scenography, which consequently means my own sensibilities are exposed. I would like to think it is that aspect of my work that inspired the jury. I am deeply touched by the awarding of the Siminovitch Prize, not only because it is unique, prestigious and irreplaceable, but also because it highlights an artistic research that has been developed in the course of time. It is not a recognition destined for newcomers, nor is it an end-of-career honour. It is granted to someone who is still immersed in those fundamental questions about his or her art but who has enough experience to delve deeper into them. It is a way of recognizing accomplishments thus far but also an enormous encouragement to carry on.

In my case, it could not have come at a better time.

After four nominations to the short list, I realised that almost the entirety of my work over the past 23 years has been recognised by the Siminovitch jury. That in itself, I thought, was quite an accomplishment. Upon hearing Monsieur White tell me I was the winner, I was speechless for a long moment. Especially since the finalists are all such highly accomplished artists.

I am truly honoured to share this list with Bretta, Trevor and Nancy, who merit our admiration for their devotion to their art and their exceptional talent.

It is a joy for me to share my good fortune tonight with my father (who’s celebrating tonight his 75th birthday), my mother and my brother, all of whom, in their own way have always demonstrated their belief in me and without whom I could not begin to pretend to be the person I am. Your presence here goes straight to my heart and you are always with me. I owe to mon amoureux the fact my name was submitted “for the last time!” as, clearly, without him I would not be standing here now. Thank you, Jeff, for having always believed that someday I could be the chosen one. I would also like to mention the generosity of Jean-Marc Dalpé, Matthew Jocelyn, Frédéric Dubois, Paul Savoie, Véronique Borboën as well as Brigitte Haentjens, who agreed to write support letters for me. Your beautiful words have moved me greatly.

Thank you to the Siminovitch family and especially to Lou who had the grace to create this award in honour of Elinore. I see in it a gesture of admiration and love and I am delighted to benefit tonight from such a beautiful display of romance. Thank you to the donors, members of the board and to RBC, who contribute to the enduring life of this incomparable heritage and to place art in such a glowing light. I would hope that our leaders are inspired by your generosity and your love for the performing arts. I am living proof that contact with the arts at an early age, with travel, with the meeting of cultures and with higher education can allow a shy, imperfect, sometimes terrified individual to blossom within her society.

I work with space. An intangible, indecipherable thing that remains after we remove the walls, according to a Greek philosopher. It’s an invisible material that unites us all, from which none can escape. It’s the element that makes the theatrical performance a rare experience because it can only be lived in a common and shared space. Be it constructed or virtual, scenography is the art which explores our spatial relationship with our environment. Over time and many projects, I learned that my true creative space resides in the audience’s imagination and the body of the actors: it’s at once a spiritual construction and a practical landscape. It must allow one to enter into a resonance with the actions, the emotions and the words that carry them. In this way, the theatre for me is an architectural laboratory without equal, one in which our today’s world should show a greater interest.

On the eve of an important election, I allow myself to dream tonight, that I will awaken tomorrow in a world where art and knowledge enjoy a place of privilege. A world that builds liberty, creativity, desire and, why not, while we’re at it, poetry.

The most extraordinary aspect of receiving the Siminovitch Prize is to be able to give some incredible news to someone who has asked for nothing. To have the chance to publicly celebrate an emerging talent and to encourage that person to carry on is a rare privilege. And all the more so since conditions for production today are increasingly difficult for young designers. I have selected a young woman whom I met on a project where we were collaborating and in whom I saw a bit of myself in her passion for creation. She trained in design, then did a Master’s in visual arts, which shows in the way she approaches her work. I was struck by her sharp mind, her creativity and her generosity. Inventive and ingenious in theatre, dance and the circus, she is a devoted and complete artist. Mesdames et messieurs, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you, Madame Marilène Bastien.

2015 Protégé

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Donna-Michelle St. Bernard

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard

Finalist, 2017

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Biography

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard aka Belladonna the Blest is an emcee, playwright, administrator and agitator. Works for the stage include Sound of the BeastThey Say He FellA Man A Fish, CakeThe House You BuildSalome’s ClothesGas Girls and interdisciplinary co-creation 501: Toronto in Transit with Bob Nasmith and Justin Manyfingers. Her work has been recognized with a SATA nomination, Herman Voaden Playwriting Award, Enbridge PlayRites Award, Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, and two nominations for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Recent publishing achievements include guest editing for Canadian Theatre Review and alt.theatre magazine, as well as co-editing Playwrights Canada Press anthologies Refractions: SoloRefractions: Scenes and Indian Act (upcoming). She is Emcee-in-Residence at Theatre Passe Muraille, Playwright-in-Residence at lemonTree creations and a vocalist with Ergo Sum. Upcoming: Cake at Theatre Passe Muraille in fall 2017.

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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.