Vanessa Porteous: 'The goal is not to be hip. The goal is to do theatre about being alive right now.'
Dude. It's on.
So says the tiny button on the lapel of the otherwise all-black ensemble of Alberta Theatre Projects' Vanessa Porteous, and we're inclined to believe it. Is Porteous the artistic director of the future?
Yes, Porteous, who took over from Bob White at ATP in May and will announce her first season of programming soon, is 39, one of the youngest people to run a major theatre in Canada. And she's a woman, which is remarkable only in that it is still remarkable in a sea of male ADs.
However, what makes Porteous seem like the voice of change isn't her age or gender, but her desire to use her perch at the top of one of Canada's most important centres of new theatre to facilitate the development of "non-traditional" theatrical creations.
That is to say, plays where the playwright is just one of the creators. Plays where, for example, the director or designers or aerial choreographers are equally as important, or where the relationship between the performers and the audience is unusual.
Sitting in the Baraka café down the hall from ATP's Martha Cohen Theatre, Porteous bobbles about on her stool as she enthuses about the importance of Canada's contemporary theatres opening themselves up to artists who create outside the text-based model. (In the movie version of ATP, she would be played by Frances McDormand, one of the dramaturges tells me.)
"The goal is not to be hip," says Porteous, who was the dramaturge at ATP from 1998 to 2006. "The goal is to do theatre about being alive right now."
ATP is already a leader in this field. (Porteous describes the movement from White to her as "a curve, not a sharp shift".) The main season regularly includes the work of "adult puppeteers" such as Ronnie Burkett and the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, while the Stage 2 slot in the theatre's long-running Enbridge playRites festival of new Canadian plays is reserved for "work that pushes the boundaries of theatre in some way."
Last year, NiX - a co-production with Vancouver's The Only Animal that took place in a theatre made entirely of ice and snow - took Stage 2. The year before, The Drowning Girls, a wet collective creation staged in and around bathtubs and under running showers, premiered there.
Both are currently being showcased to the world at the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver.
It's not that most contemporary theatres in Canada aren't interested in plays like these, or that they're worried it will turn off their audiences; it's just that actually developing work like this when you're tied to certain facilities and collective agreements is tricky and expensive. It's easier for most Canadian creators who work outside text-based work to do so with their own, unencumbered independent companies, then bring it to the bigger theatres.
"Most mid- to large-sized companies aren't built to create a show with The Only Animal [the company behind NiX]" Porteous says. "We may be on the vanguard in Canada."
However, she wants to make it clear that she isn't opposed to text-based theatre, which will always be prominent at ATP. "I want every kind of theatre to flourish," she says. "I'm not interested in chasing trends. You have to be careful you're not just adjusting your hemlines."
Indeed, Porteous's one project as director this year is Greg MacArthur's Tyland, a "traditional" script that riffs on Canada's dispute with Denmark over Hans Island and is currently running as part of the playRites festival
Directing just one show in a year is quite a shift for Porteous. Last year, working independently, she helmed seven shows, notably the Old Trout Puppet Workshop's production of The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan, which premiered at ATP and is now at the Cultural Olympiad. (Notice a trend?)
But the shift is fine by Porteous: She has lots of enthusiasm for her new job, from audience-development work to dealing with lease issues. She sounds excited by it all.
Like her button says: Dude. It's on.
J. Kelly Nestruck