Author: nbacts2013

Creating Theatre for a Digital Audience

Jean-Michel Cliche’s play Space Girl is our Mainstage show this year and our first to be delivered as an online-only event.

This year’s NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival will be unlike anything we’ve done so far. Choosing to move ahead and program a theatre festival in the time of COVID meant we had to look at new ways of doing things. There’s good and bad in this. One positive take away from the experience is that almost our entire lineup will be made available through live streaming, helping us reach more audiences than ever before. We’ve never done anything like this before so in a way, it’s like exploring an entirely new planet. Cameras, upload speeds and YouTube have all become important aspects of our 2020 theatre process. Sadly, moving to a digital format also means we are not able to invite audiences into the stunning theatre at UNB’s Memorial Hall to see fully produced work come to life. The silver lining to it all? We have been given the opportunity to dedicate more time to the artists and their words. And when you get right down to it, that’s what this festival is all about. 

“While the festival obviously looks different this year, I think it may be exactly what many of us need. Performing live theatre can feel very high stakes and can make what is supposed to be a joyful experience quite stressful. This year, everyone is forced to slow down. We aren’t worried about spectacle or filling seats. Instead, everyone is just focused on the art,” said Jean-Michel Cliche, whose play Space Girl will be featured as this year’s Mainstage production. 

Cliche has been involved with NotaBle Acts in various roles over the years from actor to director and has served as a member of the festival’s board. 

“The expectations are different, so it’s leaving everyone more room to play and explore. I think this is a good reminder for us that NotaBle Acts is a playwriting festival. It’s intended to be a platform for writers to stretch their legs and explore. NotaBle let’s the playwright see their work come to life for the first time, but hopefully not the last time.”

His play Space Girl tells the story of a young woman who seeks to escape the Worst Year Ever on Earth for the comforts of life in space, only to discover it’s not quite so easy to leave behind all our worldly problems. The play was written as a direct response to the events of the last few months and will kick off the festival’s online programming on July 24, with audiences tuning in to follow its titular protagonist’s adventures via Zoom, and interacting with the performance to shape the narrative.

“There’s a shared sadness between theatre practitioners and audiences right now and we want to connect in whatever we way can,” said Cliche. “Digital theatre may not feel exactly the same, but I think it’s important to explore. This new medium offers some really interesting artistic opportunities that aren’t available on stage. This has made rehearsals for Space Girl more like a laboratory than a typical theatre studio. 

“Theatre is all about creating an illusion for the audience, and using a camera gives us a brand new bag of tricks. It’s created a much more collaborative and experiential process than the typical, ‘you stand here, you stand there’, business of live theatre. And once again, because everyone knows it’s an experiment – audience included – we don’t feel the pressure of blowing everyone away. We’re just happy to be geeking out about theatre and we’re excited to share our discoveries with an audience, wherever they might be,” he said.

Space Girl will receive three performances at this year’s festival July 24, 26 and August 1. 

Space Girl | July 24, 26 and August 1 | 7:30 p.m. | View Event 

19th Annual NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival Set to Launch Both Live and Online, July 23-August 1

While COVID-19 has shuttered most theatres around the world indefinitely, we will be carrying on with our annual summer theatre festival by finding creative ways to continue to make and stage theatre in the midst of the pandemic. While it won’t exactly be business as usual, this year’s festival will feature some traditionally staged outdoor productions along with performances staged for small live audiences and livestreamed for viewers at home, as well as a production created exclusively for online viewing that offers a poignant and entertaining commentary on the fraught moment we are all sharing.

That play, Space Girl by Jean-Michel Cliche, will leave the traditional stage behind and instead embrace the type of theatrical magic enabled by streaming technology to tell the story of a young woman who seeks to escape the Worst Year Ever on Earth for the comforts of life in space, only to discover it’s not quite so easy to leave behind all our worldly problems. Written as a direct response to the events of the last few months, Space Girl will kick off the festival on July 23, with audiences tuning in to follow its titular protagonist’s adventures via Zoom, and interacting with the performance to shape the narrative.

While health and safety restrictions have forced the cancellation of our site-specific play series for this year, with one play, Neomi Iancu Haliva’s Concrete and Plaster, postponed for production next year, a second script originally selected for the series, Jason McIntyre’s Art Attack, will be adapted for inclusion in Taking it to the Streets, our popular annual outdoor production staging the winners of our ten-minute play competition for 2020. The four other fun, family-friendly comedies on the program, to be staged for a physically-distanced live audience in downtown Fredericton, will be The Nine Ordinary Lives of the Infamous Catgirl by Alex Rioux, What Not to Do on a Date (When You’re Undead) by Sophie Tremblay-Pitre, Camp by Muriel Falkenstein, and McIntyre’s I Saw Nicolas Cage.

The two winners of the company’s one act playwriting competition, Every Apple in the Orchard by Noah Deas and The Kelpie by Alex Rioux, will be performed as staged readings for reduced capacity audiences at Theatre New Brunswick’s Open Space Theatre, with others able to watch the readings remotely as livestreams. Both plays are powerful and troubling works centred on crimes of passion, Deas’ the story of young man who falls under the spell of a serial killer stalking Toronto’s gay village, and Rioux’s depicting the tragic consequences of a love triangle with supernatural overtones.

This year’s festival will be rounded out by readings of six other new plays similarly presented for both small live audiences and livestreamed: one act competition runners up Meg Edwards’ Wrack and Ruin and Devin Rockwell’s Everything is Here; the winners of our Middle and High School playwriting contests; and Bluebirds, a new drama about Canadian nurses in World War One by festival Playwright/Dramaturge in Residence Vern Thiessen, an internationally renowned dramatist and past winner of the Governor General’s Award for Drama.

We are also excited to feature a pair of theatre-centred workshops open to the public, a playwriting masterclass taught by Thiessen and a course in workshop acting that will be co-led by Thiessen and Theatre New Brunswick Artistic Director Natasha MacLellan. Both will be offered online as pandemic-imposed travel restrictions have forced Thiessen’s Residency to become a virtual one, offered from his home in Edmonton, Alberta. For NotaBle Acts Artistic Director Len Falkenstein, it’s an example of how the company has been able to quickly adapt to new realities. “Like everyone else in the world, we’ve all gotten good at Zoom very fast,” he said. “It was that or close our doors for the season and we didn’t want that to happen. NB Acts has built such great momentum, with so many great young playwrights and new scripts up and coming that we didn’t want those folks to lose a year’s worth of opportunities. This will also be a unique chance for us to reach audiences outside Fredericton so we’re excited to see how that goes.”

The NotaBle Acts Theatre festival will run from July 23rd through August 1st, with the full schedule of performances and events to be released soon at www.nbacts.com For more information, email nbacts@unb.ca or phone 506 458-7406.