Artist Residencies

March 8-20

As we slowly make our way out of the pandemic we celebrate and make space for the creators that gave us comfort during the many days we were sequestered in our homes – the artists and storytellers. Artists are often the first to look outside the box, beyond what is expected, turning things inside-out and upside-down. This simple act of inspiration is the basis of all innovation.

In honour of these creative imaginations, Femme Folks Fest 2022 concentrates on artist creation, collaboration and things that spark delight. Come share in our artists’ offerings as we make our way out of Winter’s dark and into the new Spring.

Featured for 2022 are 10 Femme Folks Fest Artists in Residence and 3 Visiting PlaySmelter Artists in Residence from Northern ON. All 13 artists will be incubating new works of art during Femme Folks Fest.  All 13 will gift our Festival with an offering during this period of creation.

LINDSAY BELLAIRE
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Lindsay Bellaire is the co-owner of Articus Productions, a theatrical circus company that provides circus-based entertainment for events and venues across Ontario. As a classically trained actor (BFA in Acting, University of Windsor) and a professional aerialist, her work as a performer and creator focuses on using aerial arts as a tool for storytelling. She has co-created six shows under Articus, including Rough Magic, Shipwrecked, The Lumberjack Show, The Aerial Pirate Show, Camp Articus, and the company’s longest running flagship show, WEIRD, which toured theatre festivals and venues from 2015 – 2020, earning awards at several Fringe Festivals and showcasing at Ontario Contact in 2018. Lindsay also co-owns the TriCity Centre for Circus Arts in Waterloo Region (www.tricitycircus.com), a studio dedicated to fostering creative expression through circus arts.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Slipstream: Using a combination of aerial arts, music, sound, lighting, and projections, Slipstream is about finding a place of calm in the face of emotional turbulence. Inspired by the practice of meditation, this piece will bring these elements together to create an experience that calms the nervous system and provides the audience with an opportunity to step out of the stream of racing thoughts and heavy feelings to find a more passive, blissful space from which to witness them. In a highly reactive world that is suffering with a collective sense of anxiety and uncertainty, taking a moment to breathe and sit with discomfort can help us heal as individuals and as a community. I hope that this piece can be that breath.

March 11, 12, 18, 19

JESSIE BERGERON Playsmelter Visiting
Timmins, ON

ARTIST: Jessie Bergeron is a theatre creator and performer from Northern Ontario. Trained in acting at George Brown Theatre School and with a degree in Theatre from the University of Ottawa, she temporarily left the theatre scene to pursue an altogether different vocation: motherhood. As a queer artist-mother with an invisible disability, she seeks to empower these underrepresented groups through her art.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: The Madonna-Whore Project is an exploration of women’s sexuality as it evolves through motherhood. The concept is to have actors who are also mothers of young children perform with their offspring in tow. Mother-actors will unabashedly share stories of female sexuality all while they nurse, pump, soothe, change diapers, chase toddlers, kiss bobos, etc. Through the juxtaposition of the Madonna (virtuous, pure and maternal) and the Whore (carnal, erotic, desirable), this piece of devised theatre will debunk those constructs and the idea that they are mutually exclusive.

March 11

ALYSHA BRILLA
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Alysha Brilla is a 3X Juno Award nominated artist, songwriter and music producer with a special interest in sound as a healing modality. Brilla’s work is driven by a deep belief in music’s power to transform ourselves and our world. Brilla’s music, writings and spirituality are woven together by growing up with parents from two different cultural and religious backgrounds; a Muslim Indo-Tanzanian father and a Christian Irish/Scottish Canadian mother. Alysha Brilla is currently recording her fifth full length album, “Circle” will be released Summer 2022.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Technology x Spirituality, with reference to Music Production/Audio Engineering: Join Alysha Brilla for a Femme Folk Fest artist talk about the enigmatic intersection of technology and spirituality; exploring its relationship to music creation, production and audio engineering. Alysha will share her personal experiences on how these seemingly opposing worlds intersect in a recording studio. With a focus on sound as a healing mechanism, we ask what role accessible creative technologies have in shifting relationships to ourselves and each other on a global scale.

March 10

OLIVIA BROUWER
Cambridge, ON

ARTIST: Olivia Brouwer is a partially blind, emerging artist based in Cambridge, Ontario. In 2016, she graduated from the Art and Art History joint program, specializing in painting and printmaking, at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. During her undergrad, she became interested in discussing blindness as a way of perceiving and making meaning using abstraction from nature to communicate this idea, similar to the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Her current work is still based on these early studies, and is now inclusive and accessible to blind audiences through activating the senses of touch and sound.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Out of Body: Art is often a domain that is inaccessible to the visually impaired. As a result, this community can feel marginalized and forgotten about. Too often we rely solely on the viewer’s sense of sight to create meaning from artwork. As a partially blind artist, I am interested in exploring ways to make art accessible to those who have visual impairments while also bridging the accessibility gap and including sighted viewers.

In the duration of this residency, I will be experimenting with a new approach to sensory artwork involving sight, touch, and sound with the combination of abstract painting, sculpture, and audio elements that are referenced from nature. I create work inspired by nature as it is a subject matter that can be accessed freely with many variations of textures, it is aesthetically beautiful to work with, and it is something that all humans can relate to and understand even when abstracted. I’m interested in the juxtaposed perceptions between a viewer with sight and a viewer with limited vision when creating meaning from the artwork based on their experience. My hope is to enable inclusivity and raise awareness for visual art accessibility, to experiment with immersion using the senses of touch, hearing, and vision, and to encourage a unified community between sighted and visually impaired audiences.

March 18

KIM FAHNER Playsmelter Visiting Artist
Sudbury, ON

ARTIST: Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019) and her new book, Emptying the Ocean, will be published by Frontenac House in Fall 2022. Kim is the Ontario Representative for The Writers’ Union of Canada, a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: The Painted Birds: During FFF 2022, I’ll be working on finishing this novel. It’s about a visual artist in her 40s who loses her mother to breast cancer, but who uses that loss as a catalyst to her own evolution. Moving from Sudbury, to Newfoundland, to the West of Ireland and then back again to Canada, the novel traces Bronagh O’Brien’s journey to honour her mother’s final wishes, while documenting her own transformation at mid-life. Woven throughout the novel is the Irish legend of The Morrigan, a tale that dovetails Bronagh’s own story in the most woven and elemental of ways.

March 11

MADDIE LYCHEK
Guelph, ON

ARTIST: Madeleine Lychek is a queer Filipino-Canadian artist. She uses social media and performance art as a playground to engage with conversations surrounding power and play, exploring how a body and it’s consumption can be used as a radical act of self-discovery.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Bimbos of the Early Aughts: Through critical analysis of MTV’s Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica and The Simple Life Lychek will reflect on the damaging narratives of famous young women perpetuated by tabloids and producers in the early aughts. This reflection will highlight how reality TV of the early 2000’s provided a tool for surveillance, toxic consumption and celebrity ridicule that would later frame the way we navigate social media. Informed by this study of pop-culture Lychek will conduct practice-based research to embody these women, whose minds and bodies were subject to decades of scrutiny and relentless judgement. This research will culminate in a performance that captures the essence of the now reclaimed bimbo stereotype, the artist adorned in lingerie and full glam will complete a puzzle.

March 15

DAWN MATHESON
Guelph, ON

Dawn Matheson’s art is about relationships. She is a Guelph-based multimedia artist with a socially engaged practice, specializing in video and audio art, installed, broadcast and performed in public spaces. Her work can be found at festivals, galleries, museums; in national publications and on broadcast stations; but lives best in forests, train stations, fountains, barns and alleyways in your neighbourhood. Through inclusive artistic practices, Dawn seeks to interrupt civic and social spaces with unexpected moments of beauty, curiosity and joy. Her relational interventions hope to offer liberation from everyday suffering and to dismantle barriers between individuals by creating alternative stories that build compassion and kinship. You can find out more about her work at thiswasnow.com

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Makedo Studio Tour: Matheson will visit four female artists in their makedo home studios. Each artist has collaborated with Matheson through participatory projects in the past, but who themselves do not get to ‘live as artists’ as they are marginalized in society through poverty, disability or difference, yet, make art everyday for personal meaning-making, creative expression and survival. These are true artists.

Matheson will present an hour talk including video from the home studio tours followed by a Q and A with the artists.

March 16

ZEHRA NAWAB
Waterloo, ON

ARTIST: Zehra Nawab is an actor and director for film and theatre who was most recently seen as the main lead of the play ‘In Transit’ staged at the Alumnae Theatre, Toronto. She made her feature-film acting debut in 2021 with Pakistani film ‘Khel Khel Mein’ and will be seen next on our screens essaying the lead in award-winning Canadian director Shazia Javed’s ‘Second Chance Hina,’ scheduled to be released this year.

Zehra is the co-director of shortfilm ‘Farzana’ which was the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts grant, 2021. She was the second Assistant Director in Director AW Hopkins’ ‘Flypaper’ produced by the Canada Film Centre and also in Canadian Screen Awards-nominee Mary Galloway’s shortfilm ‘Better at Texting’. The experimental art film ‘Mad Mad Mad Film World’ on which she was a co-director premiered at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver in January 2021.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: A Paradise Lost: A Paradise Gained is set in the backdrop of the British colonial rule in the Indian Subcontinent in the mid 20th century. The story is based in Karachi, in the city I grew up in, a city that is my home and my muse. The tale of a day in the life of the Provincial Governor’s wife and her Indian female servant in 1937 will be based on some actual characters from history, situated in buildings that exist and inspired by research documented in books but I explore them through a human lens, imagining some of the emotions, sights, the pains and the joys. The aim is to use the residency to see how a story can be woven into a one-person script consisting of dialogue, prose, poetry and possibly movement.

March 15

SHAN POWELL
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Shan is a 2-spirit urban Inuk with Mi’kmaq and European ancestry.  A member of the Turtle Clan, she grew up on the land and sometimes off the grid.  She lived in rural and remote communities from Newfoundland to British Columbia.  Shan is an author, storyteller, multidisciplinary artist, forager, swamp hag, and chinchilla wrangler.  A lifelong student, she is currently a writer in the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, a fellow in the Lived Experience Transformational Leadership Academy at Yale University, and a student of the Storytelling Certificate program at the Story Center in Kansas City.  She studies Inuit culture and philosophy through the Alluriarniq program with Tungasuvvingat Inuit in Ottawa and is also learning Inuktitut and Anishinaabemowin.  Her writing is published in Augur, Cloud Lake Literary Journal, Feminist Studies Journal, Prairie Fire, Yellow Medicine Journal, and more.  Her visual art has been shown in the National Textile Museum, OCAD, and Porcelain Painters of Canada magazine. You can find more of her work at https://www.instagram.com/shanmonster/  and http://shanmonster.dreamwidth.org .

 

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: We Are All Made of Stories: Storytelling is a human tradition, and stories are one of the most ancient of technologies, carrying information down through thousands of years.  How do fairy tales, folktales, myths, fables, bible stories, and other ancient tales fit into modern life? Are the archetypes still relevant?  Can the stories of colonizers be subverted as tools for decolonization? Shantell studies and reworks stories from a variety of traditions to discover how they translate into memoir, social commentary, Indigenous Futurism, speculative fiction, and more.  Shan will read from her works in progress and answer questions about process, art, and storytelling.

March 17

LAURA QUIQLEY
Belle River, ON

ARTIST: Laura Quigley is a Canadian performer, playwright, director, and theatre educator. She holds a Masters in Theatre Studies from the University of Guelph, a BFA in Acting from Simon Fraser University, and she is an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®. Laura teaches voice, acting and performance creation, and has taught at Concordia University, Ryerson University, The University of Windsor and St. Clair College. In her research Laura explores the human voice: as an instrument, as a tool for creation, and as activism. Her performance work confronts the boundaries of conventional vocal expression on stage, exploring sound that is intimate, often beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable and timelessly familiar (grunts, growls, broken clicks, howls, operatic song) creating an immersive sonic experience that is felt, literally, in the bodies of audiences. The aim is to explore what might be buried beneath the surface of silence and speech in order to connect with audiences in a visceral way. Laura’s work has been performed in Vancouver, Toronto, Guelph, Montreal, New York City, and Wellington, New Zealand. She was Artist in Residence at Concordia University from 2017-2019 where she directed several Contemporary Canadian plays including Erin Shield’s If We Were Birds, a new work called Love in Seven Languages based on the writing of Jeanette Winterson’s and Charles Mee’s Big Love, and Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets, and she dramaturged and directed twenty new solo performances created by graduating BFA students. Laura lives in Belle River, ON with her husband, her two daughters and their dog called Goose.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: The Waves: The Waves is a play that has been in development for a little over five years. It is deeply personal and decidedly feminist. It dives into underrepresented territory: loss-of identity in motherhood, post-partum depression, and the rebuilding of self after giving birth. The text is poetic, raw and urgent, and explores ways the human voice can initiate understanding and connection between performer and audience, between humans. In this way, the text contains detailed description of vocal sounds that depart from language, invoking the performer to explore relationship and communication beyond the conventions of speech and silence. The Waves was originally performed and produced as part of the incubator series, Summerworks 2018, directed by Clea Minaker, with dramaturgy by Judith Thompson and Fides Krucker, written, produced and performed by Laura Quigley. The Waves also had readings and talk-backs at The University of Toronto, The Festival of Original Theatre conference (FOOT) in 2017, in New York, NY at the Martha Graham Studios, Fitzmaurice Voicework Symposium in 2018, and as part of the Revolution They Wrote Festival in Montreal in 2018.  Playwright Laura Quigley will work during Femme Folks Fest to complete a draft of The Waves for publication in The Canadian Theatre Review for their Fall 2023 issue that will focus on voice in live theatre in Canada.

March 12

RACQUEL ROWE
Sackville, NB

photo by Emma Ogman

ARTIST: Racquel Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist from Barbados currently residing in Sackville, New Brunswick. She’s exhibited widely across Ontario and holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BA in History and Studio Art from the University of Guelph.

Her practice is continuously influenced by many aspects of history, matrilineal family structures, diasporic communities, and her upbringing in Barbados. Her work takes the form of performance, video, site specific work, and installation.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Room for Improvisation: A series of cooking performances over zoom. The project consists of a performance where Rowe will attempt to create traditional Barbadian dishes with the virtual guidance of her mother/grandmothers helping along and then a live class over zoom where she will then teach the recipe to participants.

March 13

MISHA SHANTZ
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Misha Shantz is a textile artist working primarily in embroidery, based in Kitchener, Ontario. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University. Her current work uses embroidery as a storytelling medium and is building towards a completed, autobiographical graphic novel.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Embroidered Storytelling: For the past few years, my artistic practice has focused on an embroidered graphic novel telling the story of a time in my life when I was diagnosed with a chronic illness, endometriosis, and the years following where I learned how to live with what that meant. The story is told through embroidered illustration and cartoon as well as text.  My novel is still a work in progress, nearing completion, and I invite you to flip through the digital pages of the story so far.

In addition to reading the story, you can join me in person to do some embroidery of your own.  You can embroider your own piece to take home.  Materials will be provided, and you do not need any prior experience.  You can also become a part of my story by adding some stitches to one of my in-progress pieces. I have always felt like the story I am telling does not just belong to me, as it is such a common story, so I would welcome the addition of some marks made by hands other than my own.

March 9, 16

KAREN THISTLE Playsmelter Visiting Artist
Sudbury, ON

ARTIST: Karen Thistle has been a producer with the PlaySmelter Festival after participating in the 2017 inaugural Producer’s Unit. As a playwright she participated in the 2nd annual STC Playwrights’ Junction where her play “The Intermediaries” was first drafted and later included in the Public Reading Series of the 2nd annual PlaySmelter festival. She is a founding member of Inklings which has grown into the Playwright/Screenwriters special interest group with the Sudbury Writers Guild. Outside of writing she has enjoyed a career in Northern Ontario working with public libraries and non-profit arts organizations.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Calling the Rock Home: A story of three men who leave their homes in Newfoundland to work in the mines of Sudbury, Northern Ontario in the late 1960’s. Loosely based on the experiences of my father and uncle, I am interested in exploring the idea of “home”. Is home where you come from, where you are now, or where you decide to go?

I have the main structure of the play worked out, but now need to focus on encapsulating the political turmoil between unions, workers, and the mining companies at the same time capturing the energy and excitement of this point in Sudbury’s history.  I have also challenged myself to create characters and dialogue that accurately reflect the speech patterns and dialogue of Newfoundlanders to ensure that I am accurate in my dialogue.

March 11

LINDSAY BELLAIRE
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Lindsay Bellaire is the co-owner of Articus Productions, a theatrical circus company that provides circus-based entertainment for events and venues across Ontario. As a classically trained actor (BFA in Acting, University of Windsor) and a professional aerialist, her work as a performer and creator focuses on using aerial arts as a tool for storytelling. She has co-created six shows under Articus, including Rough Magic, Shipwrecked, The Lumberjack Show, The Aerial Pirate Show, Camp Articus, and the company’s longest running flagship show, WEIRD, which toured theatre festivals and venues from 2015 – 2020, earning awards at several Fringe Festivals and showcasing at Ontario Contact in 2018. Lindsay also co-owns the TriCity Centre for Circus Arts in Waterloo Region (www.tricitycircus.com), a studio dedicated to fostering creative expression through circus arts.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Slipstream: Using a combination of aerial arts, music, sound, lighting, and projections, Slipstream is about finding a place of calm in the face of emotional turbulence. Inspired by the practice of meditation, this piece will bring these elements together to create an experience that calms the nervous system and provides the audience with an opportunity to step out of the stream of racing thoughts and heavy feelings to find a more passive, blissful space from which to witness them. In a highly reactive world that is suffering with a collective sense of anxiety and uncertainty, taking a moment to breathe and sit with discomfort can help us heal as individuals and as a community. I hope that this piece can be that breath.

March 11, 12, 18, 19

JESSIE BERGERON Playsmelter Visiting
Timmins, ON

ARTIST: Jessie Bergeron is a theatre creator and performer from Northern Ontario. Trained in acting at George Brown Theatre School and with a degree in Theatre from the University of Ottawa, she temporarily left the theatre scene to pursue an altogether different vocation: motherhood. As a queer artist-mother with an invisible disability, she seeks to empower these underrepresented groups through her art.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: The Madonna-Whore Project is an exploration of women’s sexuality as it evolves through motherhood. The concept is to have actors who are also mothers of young children perform with their offspring in tow. Mother-actors will unabashedly share stories of female sexuality all while they nurse, pump, soothe, change diapers, chase toddlers, kiss bobos, etc. Through the juxtaposition of the Madonna (virtuous, pure and maternal) and the Whore (carnal, erotic, desirable), this piece of devised theatre will debunk those constructs and the idea that they are mutually exclusive.

March 11

ALYSHA BRILLA
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Alysha Brilla is a 3X Juno Award nominated artist, songwriter and music producer with a special interest in sound as a healing modality. Brilla’s work is driven by a deep belief in music’s power to transform ourselves and our world. Brilla’s music, writings and spirituality are woven together by growing up with parents from two different cultural and religious backgrounds; a Muslim Indo-Tanzanian father and a Christian Irish/Scottish Canadian mother. Alysha Brilla is currently recording her fifth full length album, “Circle” will be released Summer 2022.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Technology x Spirituality, with reference to Music Production/Audio Engineering: Join Alysha Brilla for a Femme Folk Fest artist talk about the enigmatic intersection of technology and spirituality; exploring its relationship to music creation, production and audio engineering. Alysha will share her personal experiences on how these seemingly opposing worlds intersect in a recording studio. With a focus on sound as a healing mechanism, we ask what role accessible creative technologies have in shifting relationships to ourselves and each other on a global scale.

March 10

OLIVIA BROUWER
Cambridge, ON

ARTIST: Olivia Brouwer is a partially blind, emerging artist based in Cambridge, Ontario. In 2016, she graduated from the Art and Art History joint program, specializing in painting and printmaking, at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. During her undergrad, she became interested in discussing blindness as a way of perceiving and making meaning using abstraction from nature to communicate this idea, similar to the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Her current work is still based on these early studies, and is now inclusive and accessible to blind audiences through activating the senses of touch and sound.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Out of Body: Art is often a domain that is inaccessible to the visually impaired. As a result, this community can feel marginalized and forgotten about. Too often we rely solely on the viewer’s sense of sight to create meaning from artwork. As a partially blind artist, I am interested in exploring ways to make art accessible to those who have visual impairments while also bridging the accessibility gap and including sighted viewers.

In the duration of this residency, I will be experimenting with a new approach to sensory artwork involving sight, touch, and sound with the combination of abstract painting, sculpture, and audio elements that are referenced from nature. I create work inspired by nature as it is a subject matter that can be accessed freely with many variations of textures, it is aesthetically beautiful to work with, and it is something that all humans can relate to and understand even when abstracted. I’m interested in the juxtaposed perceptions between a viewer with sight and a viewer with limited vision when creating meaning from the artwork based on their experience. My hope is to enable inclusivity and raise awareness for visual art accessibility, to experiment with immersion using the senses of touch, hearing, and vision, and to encourage a unified community between sighted and visually impaired audiences.

March 18

KIM FAHNER Playsmelter Visiting Artist
Sudbury, ON

ARTIST: Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019) and her new book, Emptying the Ocean, will be published by Frontenac House in Fall 2022. Kim is the Ontario Representative for The Writers’ Union of Canada, a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: The Painted Birds: During FFF 2022, I’ll be working on finishing this novel. It’s about a visual artist in her 40s who loses her mother to breast cancer, but who uses that loss as a catalyst to her own evolution. Moving from Sudbury, to Newfoundland, to the West of Ireland and then back again to Canada, the novel traces Bronagh O’Brien’s journey to honour her mother’s final wishes, while documenting her own transformation at mid-life. Woven throughout the novel is the Irish legend of The Morrigan, a tale that dovetails Bronagh’s own story in the most woven and elemental of ways.

March 11

MADDIE LYCHEK
Guelph, ON

ARTIST: Madeleine Lychek is a queer Filipino-Canadian artist. She uses social media and performance art as a playground to engage with conversations surrounding power and play, exploring how a body and it’s consumption can be used as a radical act of self-discovery.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Bimbos of the Early Aughts: Through critical analysis of MTV’s Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica and The Simple Life Lychek will reflect on the damaging narratives of famous young women perpetuated by tabloids and producers in the early aughts. This reflection will highlight how reality TV of the early 2000’s provided a tool for surveillance, toxic consumption and celebrity ridicule that would later frame the way we navigate social media. Informed by this study of pop-culture Lychek will conduct practice-based research to embody these women, whose minds and bodies were subject to decades of scrutiny and relentless judgement. This research will culminate in a performance that captures the essence of the now reclaimed bimbo stereotype, the artist adorned in lingerie and full glam will complete a puzzle.

March 15

DAWN MATHESON
Guelph, ON

Dawn Matheson’s art is about relationships. She is a Guelph-based multimedia artist with a socially engaged practice, specializing in video and audio art, installed, broadcast and performed in public spaces. Her work can be found at festivals, galleries, museums; in national publications and on broadcast stations; but lives best in forests, train stations, fountains, barns and alleyways in your neighbourhood. Through inclusive artistic practices, Dawn seeks to interrupt civic and social spaces with unexpected moments of beauty, curiosity and joy. Her relational interventions hope to offer liberation from everyday suffering and to dismantle barriers between individuals by creating alternative stories that build compassion and kinship. You can find out more about her work at thiswasnow.com

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Makedo Studio Tour: Matheson will visit four female artists in their makedo home studios. Each artist has collaborated with Matheson through participatory projects in the past, but who themselves do not get to ‘live as artists’ as they are marginalized in society through poverty, disability or difference, yet, make art everyday for personal meaning-making, creative expression and survival. These are true artists.

Matheson will present an hour talk including video from the home studio tours followed by a Q and A with the artists.

March 16

ZEHRA NAWAB
Waterloo, ON

ARTIST: Zehra Nawab is an actor and director for film and theatre who was most recently seen as the main lead of the play ‘In Transit’ staged at the Alumnae Theatre, Toronto. She made her feature-film acting debut in 2021 with Pakistani film ‘Khel Khel Mein’ and will be seen next on our screens essaying the lead in award-winning Canadian director Shazia Javed’s ‘Second Chance Hina,’ scheduled to be released this year.

Zehra is the co-director of shortfilm ‘Farzana’ which was the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts grant, 2021. She was the second Assistant Director in Director AW Hopkins’ ‘Flypaper’ produced by the Canada Film Centre and also in Canadian Screen Awards-nominee Mary Galloway’s shortfilm ‘Better at Texting’. The experimental art film ‘Mad Mad Mad Film World’ on which she was a co-director premiered at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver in January 2021.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: A Paradise Lost: A Paradise Gained is set in the backdrop of the British colonial rule in the Indian Subcontinent in the mid 20th century. The story is based in Karachi, in the city I grew up in, a city that is my home and my muse. The tale of a day in the life of the Provincial Governor’s wife and her Indian female servant in 1937 will be based on some actual characters from history, situated in buildings that exist and inspired by research documented in books but I explore them through a human lens, imagining some of the emotions, sights, the pains and the joys. The aim is to use the residency to see how a story can be woven into a one-person script consisting of dialogue, prose, poetry and possibly movement.

March 15

SHAN POWELL
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Shan is a 2-spirit urban Inuk with Mi’kmaq and European ancestry.  A member of the Turtle Clan, she grew up on the land and sometimes off the grid.  She lived in rural and remote communities from Newfoundland to British Columbia.  Shan is an author, storyteller, multidisciplinary artist, forager, swamp hag, and chinchilla wrangler.  A lifelong student, she is currently a writer in the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, a fellow in the Lived Experience Transformational Leadership Academy at Yale University, and a student of the Storytelling Certificate program at the Story Center in Kansas City.  She studies Inuit culture and philosophy through the Alluriarniq program with Tungasuvvingat Inuit in Ottawa and is also learning Inuktitut and Anishinaabemowin.  Her writing is published in Augur, Cloud Lake Literary Journal, Feminist Studies Journal, Prairie Fire, Yellow Medicine Journal, and more.  Her visual art has been shown in the National Textile Museum, OCAD, and Porcelain Painters of Canada magazine. You can find more of her work at https://www.instagram.com/shanmonster/  and http://shanmonster.dreamwidth.org .

 

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: We Are All Made of Stories: Storytelling is a human tradition, and stories are one of the most ancient of technologies, carrying information down through thousands of years.  How do fairy tales, folktales, myths, fables, bible stories, and other ancient tales fit into modern life? Are the archetypes still relevant?  Can the stories of colonizers be subverted as tools for decolonization? Shantell studies and reworks stories from a variety of traditions to discover how they translate into memoir, social commentary, Indigenous Futurism, speculative fiction, and more.  Shan will read from her works in progress and answer questions about process, art, and storytelling.

March 17

LAURA QUIQLEY
Belle River, ON

ARTIST: Laura Quigley is a Canadian performer, playwright, director, and theatre educator. She holds a Masters in Theatre Studies from the University of Guelph, a BFA in Acting from Simon Fraser University, and she is an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®. Laura teaches voice, acting and performance creation, and has taught at Concordia University, Ryerson University, The University of Windsor and St. Clair College. In her research Laura explores the human voice: as an instrument, as a tool for creation, and as activism. Her performance work confronts the boundaries of conventional vocal expression on stage, exploring sound that is intimate, often beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable and timelessly familiar (grunts, growls, broken clicks, howls, operatic song) creating an immersive sonic experience that is felt, literally, in the bodies of audiences. The aim is to explore what might be buried beneath the surface of silence and speech in order to connect with audiences in a visceral way. Laura’s work has been performed in Vancouver, Toronto, Guelph, Montreal, New York City, and Wellington, New Zealand. She was Artist in Residence at Concordia University from 2017-2019 where she directed several Contemporary Canadian plays including Erin Shield’s If We Were Birds, a new work called Love in Seven Languages based on the writing of Jeanette Winterson’s and Charles Mee’s Big Love, and Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets, and she dramaturged and directed twenty new solo performances created by graduating BFA students. Laura lives in Belle River, ON with her husband, her two daughters and their dog called Goose.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: The Waves: The Waves is a play that has been in development for a little over five years. It is deeply personal and decidedly feminist. It dives into underrepresented territory: loss-of identity in motherhood, post-partum depression, and the rebuilding of self after giving birth. The text is poetic, raw and urgent, and explores ways the human voice can initiate understanding and connection between performer and audience, between humans. In this way, the text contains detailed description of vocal sounds that depart from language, invoking the performer to explore relationship and communication beyond the conventions of speech and silence. The Waves was originally performed and produced as part of the incubator series, Summerworks 2018, directed by Clea Minaker, with dramaturgy by Judith Thompson and Fides Krucker, written, produced and performed by Laura Quigley. The Waves also had readings and talk-backs at The University of Toronto, The Festival of Original Theatre conference (FOOT) in 2017, in New York, NY at the Martha Graham Studios, Fitzmaurice Voicework Symposium in 2018, and as part of the Revolution They Wrote Festival in Montreal in 2018.  Playwright Laura Quigley will work during Femme Folks Fest to complete a draft of The Waves for publication in The Canadian Theatre Review for their Fall 2023 issue that will focus on voice in live theatre in Canada.

March 12

RACQUEL ROWE
Sackville, NB

photo by Emma Ogman

ARTIST: Racquel Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist from Barbados currently residing in Sackville, New Brunswick. She’s exhibited widely across Ontario and holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BA in History and Studio Art from the University of Guelph.

Her practice is continuously influenced by many aspects of history, matrilineal family structures, diasporic communities, and her upbringing in Barbados. Her work takes the form of performance, video, site specific work, and installation.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Room for Improvisation: A series of cooking performances over zoom. The project consists of a performance where Rowe will attempt to create traditional Barbadian dishes with the virtual guidance of her mother/grandmothers helping along and then a live class over zoom where she will then teach the recipe to participants.

March 13

MISHA SHANTZ
Kitchener, ON

ARTIST: Misha Shantz is a textile artist working primarily in embroidery, based in Kitchener, Ontario. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University. Her current work uses embroidery as a storytelling medium and is building towards a completed, autobiographical graphic novel.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Embroidered Storytelling: For the past few years, my artistic practice has focused on an embroidered graphic novel telling the story of a time in my life when I was diagnosed with a chronic illness, endometriosis, and the years following where I learned how to live with what that meant. The story is told through embroidered illustration and cartoon as well as text.  My novel is still a work in progress, nearing completion, and I invite you to flip through the digital pages of the story so far.

In addition to reading the story, you can join me in person to do some embroidery of your own.  You can embroider your own piece to take home.  Materials will be provided, and you do not need any prior experience.  You can also become a part of my story by adding some stitches to one of my in-progress pieces. I have always felt like the story I am telling does not just belong to me, as it is such a common story, so I would welcome the addition of some marks made by hands other than my own.

March 9, 16

KAREN THISTLE Playsmelter Visiting Artist
Sudbury, ON

ARTIST: Karen Thistle has been a producer with the PlaySmelter Festival after participating in the 2017 inaugural Producer’s Unit. As a playwright she participated in the 2nd annual STC Playwrights’ Junction where her play “The Intermediaries” was first drafted and later included in the Public Reading Series of the 2nd annual PlaySmelter festival. She is a founding member of Inklings which has grown into the Playwright/Screenwriters special interest group with the Sudbury Writers Guild. Outside of writing she has enjoyed a career in Northern Ontario working with public libraries and non-profit arts organizations.

PROJECT IN INCUBATION: Calling the Rock Home: A story of three men who leave their homes in Newfoundland to work in the mines of Sudbury, Northern Ontario in the late 1960’s. Loosely based on the experiences of my father and uncle, I am interested in exploring the idea of “home”. Is home where you come from, where you are now, or where you decide to go?

I have the main structure of the play worked out, but now need to focus on encapsulating the political turmoil between unions, workers, and the mining companies at the same time capturing the energy and excitement of this point in Sudbury’s history.  I have also challenged myself to create characters and dialogue that accurately reflect the speech patterns and dialogue of Newfoundlanders to ensure that I am accurate in my dialogue.

March 11