Practice
Over the last decade, I have directed, devised, and written over thirty professional productions; collaborated with hundreds of emerging and established artists in Canada and the UK; and have created work in venues as large as a 100,000 square-foot retail store, and as intimate as a university dorm room.
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While I wear many hats, my theatre practice often falls into one or more of these categories: site-specific performance, digital or audio theatre, devised art, and community-engaged creation. Threads of community and relationality, as well as notions of physical place and virtual space weave throughout my projects.
Particularly, I believe that site-specific performance, with its grounding in the local, has a unique potential to engage communities in its creation, and to make theatre accessible by bringing performance directly to the doorsteps of new audiences. In approaching a site-specific project, I ask: who are we (as artists) sharing this place with? Who lives, works, or occupies this space, and how can we ensure that our work isn’t simply non-disruptive to our neighbours, but how might our work also be of benefit to the local community?
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I offer answers to these questions in the documentation of my practice below. I've also published on my practice in TRiC and CTR. For a comprehensive list of my theatre experience--in directing, writing, producing, and dramaturgy--please see my CV.
PLAY THIS: HAMILTON
Creative Director / Co-producer with Tottering Biped Theatre
Part tour, part play, part augmented reality experience, PLAY THIS is an invitation to explore Hamilton through a growing series of site-specific audio dramas. Each iteration is found in a collision of storytelling, history, place, and immersive theatre. PLAY THIS isn’t a traditional audio guide or podcast, as each experience is geo-located to its site—meaning listeners must visit the story locations to experience the installation. Following Tottering Biped's commitment to social-justice art, PLAY THIS foregrounds the stories and voices of historically marginalized communities in Hamilton.
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Currently, five PLAY THIS iterations have launched for various Hamilton neighbourhoods-- written by Anna Chatterton, Trevor Copp, Klyde Broox, and Robert Motum. Three more are in development, written by Nada Abusaleh, Miranda Morris, and Mollie Garrett.
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TRAIN BALLET (Urban ARTeries)
Director | Produced by Theatre Gargantua and ToasterLab
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Train Ballet is a short 3-minute movement piece filmed through volumetric capture at Ontario Tech University's innovative capture lab. In volumetric capture, a series of 360° infrared cameras transform recorded content into digital 'holograms'. In the photos here, we see two actors in both physical and virtual space.
Part of Theatre Gargantua's site-specific Urban ARTeries project, the filmed piece will be available for viewing in augmented reality at Osgoode subway station this summer.
A Community Target
Playwright | Commissioned and produced by Outside the March, Why Not Theatre, and Convergence Theatre
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A Community Target is a documentary play that examines Canada's precarious retail climate through the verbatim voices of over 60 former employees of Target Canada.
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Over the four-year project, I interviewed former Target cashiers, sales associates, managers, directors, and executives; as well as lawyers, journalists, and retail experts. In a 2016 workshop production of the play (directed by Ravi Jain), former Target employees performed as themselves. In 2017, a site-specific staged reading of the work brought an audience into a vacant Hamilton Target store. And in 2018, the play received a world premiere in an immersive promenade performance directed by Mitchell Cushman, Aaron Willis, and Griffin McInnes.
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The large-scale site-specific nature of the project garnered much media attention. Press about the project can be found here.
Guidebooks from Memory
Project Manager
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What places in your town or city hold significance for you? What memories continue to linger or haunt your street, your neighbourhood, your commute to work?
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Guidebooks from Memory is a community art project toward the creation of a series of physical 'guidebooks' to communities in southern Ontario. Unlike traditional tourist guides which highlight local attractions, these books present a community-sourced anthology of memories, and invite readers to experience their city through the stories of their neighbours.
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Illustrated by local artist, Madeline Samms, Kitchener-Waterloo: a guidebook from memory was published in 2016 and launched with a durational walking of the 'memory map'.
Iterations for Hamilton and Kingston are in progress. In an attempt to locate a diverse collection of stories--representative of these communities--we're collaborating with Hamilton's Keeping Six (a drop-in centre for individuals experiencing addiction) and the Kingston Hidden Artist Collective (an organization that supports unhoused artists).
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The Site-Specific Theatre Bot
Creator | Digital Twitter-based Installation
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The Site-Specific Theatre Bot, is a ‘Twitterbot’—a simple, automated program that relies on an algorithm to string together sentence fragments to create short narratives—in this case, imagined site-specific or immersive performances.
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By far my silliest project, the bot's Twitter account (@TheatreSite) tweets an imagined site-based performance every six hours. Recent tweets include:
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"An audio performance of a poem performed in the backseat of your car."
"A rendition of your favourite aria staged as a game of telephone with 1000 strangers"
"A new devised production by Judith Thompson staged in that place you got lost"
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The Grass is Greenest at the Houston Astrodome
Director | Produced by High Park Productions and the Toronto Fringe
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The Canadian premiere of The Grass is Greenest by Dora-nominated playwright Michael Ross Albert. The piece was staged for the site-specific Toronto Fringe in a gallery on Queen West, and involved a simultaneous art show with paintings by local women artists. With great reviews, the show garnered two My Entertainment Award nominations, and a win for Best Supporting Actor (Lauren MacKinlay).
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"Robert Motum’s direction strikes a smart balance between larger-than-life and emotionally grounded. The ensemble delivers across the board with good pacing and believable motivation [...] making The Grass is Greenest one of only a handful of Fringe shows that already feels mainstage-ready." -My Entertainment World
Everything Ever
Co-Creator | Quarantine Theatre, UK
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Created in a 2015 residency with Manchester-based theatre company, Quarantine, Everything Ever was a durational, devised performance which asked its audience an impossible question:
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Can you dance every dance you've ever danced?
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My role in the project’s creation culminated in a performance, through which I attempted to recapture the embodied knowledge of playing the violin. Having not touched a violin in fifteen years, it was a task that battled gaps in physical memory, but also offered surprising insights into what my muscles still ‘knew’.
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The evolution of this piece, Wallflower, has since toured to the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Nooderzon Performing Arts Festival (Netherlands), PUSH Festival (Vancouver), and the Battersea Arts Centre (London).
Transience
Director / Creator | University of Waterloo
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My undergraduate thesis project at the University of Waterloo, Transience, was a devised performance staged on an active Grand River Transit city bus.
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Inspired by Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the piece sought to examine the various ways in which we perform ourselves in public and on public transit. In Dr. Andy McMurry's review of the piece, he writes,
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"The line between actor, audience, and unwitting bus passenger blurs. You’re no longer sure who’s in this play and who isn’t. People get on and off, some in pairs and groups, and you notice they are carrying on their own conversations and interactions. Are they part of the performance? Are they merely performing their own lives?"
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