Christian Barry
Halifax, NS
Christian Barry is a multi-award winning director and theatre-maker from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a co-founder and artistic co-director of 2b theatre company.
Christian’s productions have played at renowned festivals and theatres around the world including Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh Fringe, Sydney Festival, Tarragon Theatre, Citadel Theatre, Magnetic North Festival, PuSh, Noorderzon, Aarhus Festival, Theaterformen Hanover, Luminato, World Stage, and 59E59 (Off-Broadway in New York City).
Christian won the 2019 Toronto Theatre Critics Circle Awards for Best Director and Best New Musical. He was nominated for six Drama Desk Awards in 2018, including Best Director and Best Production. He won a Dora Award for Outstanding Production, and was nominated for an Outstanding Director Dora. Christian received the 2008 Halifax Mayor’s award for an Emerging Artist, the 2006-7 Urjo Kareda residency grant at the Tarragon Theatre, and the 2018 NS Masterworks Award — the highest honour for the Arts in the province.
Photo by Alejandro Santiago.
Ravi Jain
Toronto, ON
Ravi Jain is a multi-award-winning artist known for making politically bold and accessible theatrical experiences in both small indie productions and large theatres. As the founding artistic director of Why Not Theatre, Ravi has established himself as an artistic leader for his inventive productions, international producing/collaborations and innovative producing models which are aimed to better support emerging artists to make money from their art.
In all of his work, exemplified by projects like A Brimful of Asha and his reimagining of classics like Hamlet and Salt-Water Moon, is Ravi’s passion to inspire Canadians to look at new ways of representing Canada on national and international stages. Currently he is working on a new adaptation of The Mahabharata with the Shaw Festival and a new project with David Suzuki and his wife Tara Cullis.
Ravi was shortlisted for the 2016 Siminovitch Prize and won the 2012 Pauline McGibbon Award for Emerging Director and the 2016 Canada Council John Hirsch Prize for direction.
Photo by David Leclerc.
Christian Lapointe
Quebec, QC
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.
Photo by Julie Artacho
Maiko Yamamoto and James Long
Vancouver, BC
For over 20 years, Maiko Yamamoto and James Long have been making experimental, intercultural and interdisciplinary works of theatre. Whether working together or apart, the pair use extended processes to create performances from intentionally simple beginnings with both new and existing collaborators. Their work is about a genuine attempt to coexist. Conversations, interviews and arguments collide with Yamamoto and Long’s aesthetics, resulting in theatrical experiences that are authentic, immediate and hopeful.
They founded Theatre Replacement in 2003. The company’s work has been presented in 43 cities and venues across the world. As freelance artists, they have directed, written, taught and created performance with a diverse range of companies and institutions.
Both are graduates of SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts Theatre Program. Yamamoto has a Masters of Applied Arts in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art & Design, and Long holds a Master’s Degree in Urban Studies, also from SFU.
Photo by Stephen Drover.