Jacquie P.A. Thomas

This year Jacquie P. Thomas celebrates her 25^th Season as the Artistic Director of Theatre Gargantua, which she founded in 1992. In addition to her role as founder and Artistic Director, Jacquie has served Gargantua as an actor, director, producer, composer, choreographer, dramaturge and writer, earning 10 Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations for her artistic contributions to the company. Her most recent directorial projects include the upcoming November 2017 presentation of Reflector as well as Avaricious, The Sacrifice Zone and Imprints, among others. Other selected credits include the Ossetynski Actors Lab in Los Angeles, Roy Hart Theatre in France, The National Theatre of Greece and the Gardzienice Theatre Association of Poland.

Under her leadership, Theatre Gargantua has earned over 30 Dora nominations and awards for categories including Outstanding New Play, Direction, Sound Design, Set Design and Lighting Design. She has also directed and led an 11-city tour of Phantom Limb across the UK, a headlining tour of Raging Dreams: into the Visceral to the Portland Oregon Performance Festival, and the transfer of e-Dentity to the Royal Alexandra Theatre as part of the Mirvish Theatre subscription season.

Jacquie was awarded a Harold Award for contributions to Toronto’s independent theatre community, and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013 for contributions to Canadian culture and community.

http://theatregargantua.ca/
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Transcript

[Phil Rickaby]
Welcome to episode 101 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy features conversations with Canadian theatre makers, with conversations with artists of all stripes, from actor to director to playwright and more.

You can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. This week my guest is Jackie P.A. Thomas. Jackie is the artistic director of Theatre Gargantua, which celebrates 25 years of making theatre this year.

Their 25th anniversary production, Reflector, is on now until November 18th at Theatre Passe-Muraille in Toronto. Before we start talking about Reflector, I would like to talk a little bit about Theatre Gargantua. Theatre Gargantua is a physical theatre company, and how long has Theatre Gargantua been around?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
I started it 25 years ago.

[Phil Rickaby]
And what was it that drew you to, like, why did you feel the need to start the company?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Well, I was, I spent about three years outside of Canada working with a bunch of different theatre practitioners in different parts of the world, and some of those experiences were quite intense. I spent about maybe a year and a half working in Poland, and at that time Poland had just become, well, the wall had just fallen, the Berlin Wall had just fallen, and the particular group that I was working with was a very well-known group in Europe, they’re a Polish theatre company called Garznica, and they worked in this small village in sort of Poland, a place just outside of Lublin, and the village was actually called Garznica, the same name as the company. And I spent quite an intense period of time working with this company and developing, I would say actually the whole time I was outside of Canada and working with these different theatre practitioners and gathering different sort of methodologies, I was kind of inventing sort of a hybrid in my mind of what, of these things that I loved, and when I came back to Canada I thought, you know, I really want to create something that’s different here, and I really want to use the experiences that I had, and for me the way, the vehicle for that was to create a company and find a group of artists that were interested in exploring creation in the way that I had sort of, in those different methods that I’d gathered on my journeys.

So that’s sort of what I came back, I started a company and I invited a bunch of artists to work with me. Some of those artists have remained, like some of the original artists are here from all those years ago, and you know, of course, over the past 25 years so many different people have come through the company in terms of creators that, you know, those things change, your methodology changes a little bit and grows, and the artists grow.

[Phil Rickaby]
What is the methodology of creating a show for a theatre?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
So for us, a lot of it’s kind of based on what I call a creative cycle, so for us it takes two years from start to finish, and this has been, I would say that it’s quite common today to have a theatre work that is built over a longer period of time, the standard sort of three week rehearsal period, two weeks of performances is, I would say, not practiced as much as it was 25 years ago. But certainly in English Canada, that was sort of the norm, you know, you created a work, rehearsed it for a few weeks, and then you had it up for a few weeks, and then you shelved it. But a lot of my experience in Europe, in Eastern Europe, and with the companies that I was working with in North America, they were kind of built on that ensemble tradition where you sort of create something over a longer period of time.

And certainly that was the case with the company that I worked with in Poland, and I tried to figure out how can we do that in North America and pay North American wages and sustain a company over that length of time, and I thought the solution to that would be, you know, just breaking it down into different phases. So from the onset, I thought, okay, a spring phase, sort of get the ideas out, something happening in the summertime, sort of a smaller phase to sort of check in on the work, and then in the fall of the first year would be sort of the presentation of all of the elements together, the design with the music, with the text, with like the first version of everything. And then in year two, we would basically have the same amount of time, but we would be more focused with each of those phases.

And it would really be individualized depending on what the production need. Maybe the spring of the second year, maybe it was just focusing on the text, or maybe it was just focusing on the music, or generally our summer phase has become a design phase over the last few years. And then we premiere it in the fall of the second year, and then once we premiere it, we start to tour it while we’re developing a new one at home.

So that’s sort of the cycle of the company.

[Phil Rickaby]
Do you know what the show is about when you start?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
We have an idea of what it’s about, but sometimes what it’s about reveals itself as we’re creating it. And sometimes you start with something, and something else comes up that is more urgent and more pressing. And that’s actually what happened with this show.

This show was actually supposed to be something completely different. The cycle of work was supposed to be something completely different. And then I was in my car driving, and the news of this little boy, this little Turkish boy who had washed up on the shoreline, sorry, Syrian boy who had washed up on the shoreline in Turkey.

And then just seeing that image, and it struck me so profoundly that for weeks afterwards, I just couldn’t get it out of my head. And then all the other things that followed, like my daughters both attended Doosan Street Public School, and they were one of the first schools to challenge other schools to sponsor Syrian families. I mean, it affected our election.

That war had been going on for so many years. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Millions of people were displaced.

But that one photograph seemed to galvanize the world in a way that nothing had before then. And that got me considering, okay, how does that, what is it about that photograph that did that? So it’s not really, this piece is not about the war at all, or about that particular incident.

Although that was certainly the springboard for this particular work. But it was about the idea of an image and how an image has that ability to make positive change or ability to awaken something. And we even have them that actually predate the internet.

Now it’s so different because everything is so instant. We have so many millions of amateur photographers snapping pictures all the time and sharing them all the time. But something like Napalm Girl, that predates the internet, but we all know that photograph.

And so there is something really specific about images, particularly images that are taken by war photographers, that hit us in a profound way sometimes.

[Phil Rickaby]
It’s interesting because images, I think because it’s so easy to take them now, they mean a little less. We take so many pictures during the day that we’re our throwaway. Whereas at one time you had to worry about how much film do I have in my camera?

How much is it going to cost to develop this picture? And now we’re able to just take as many pictures as we need and throw them away almost.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
But I guess that’s my point. In this world of billions of images, continuous nonstop shutter capture, what is it about those photos that actually stand out in our minds? What is it about those that freeze that time forever for us?

I remember exactly where I was when the shuttle exploded. It’s just like, exactly. And it was that image that I just couldn’t get out of my mind.

And it recalls everything about it. There’s just certain ones that just don’t leave us. And it’s curious.

And it’s like, what is it? It’s almost like the afterburn, that permanent afterburn that we have in our brains. And that was sort of the starting point for this production.

[Phil Rickaby]
And my next question might be a little bit hard to answer. How do you explore that in a process like yours?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Well, I think a process like ours is ideal for doing that because there’s one thing you cannot substitute, and it’s time. There’s just absolutely no substitution for that, right? It’s not only for allowing the artist to kind of time to sort of get their ideas into draft form, whatever that is, if you’re a musician, or if you’re a choreographer, or if you’re a designer, actually creating prototypes, and then allowing them to experiment with those ideas, and then allowing them to develop those ideas, and develop them so that they are woven in a really intricate way with the other elements in the piece. And for us, how we developed the storyline of that is that we started to think about, or the writer started to think about how we process images. And that sort of led him to read a bunch of material on that.

And he found this book that was based on these two neuroscientists who wrote this book, who actually were amateur magicians. And they started to talk about how neuroscience and magic are very similar. And the reason why magic works is because our brain is only able to process certain things.

We think we’re amazing multitaskers, but the reality is, if the magician brings his wand over here, that’s where your eye goes. Well, he creates the trick over here. And the same is kind of like that for processing images.

And they explain that. So, the playwright sort of delves into that story. So, in our story, there are four characters.

So, one character is inspired by this scientist who is an amateur magician, a neuroscientist. And he has three subjects. And one subject is this war photographer who has suffered this debilitating visual impairment where he can see things, but objects kind of don’t make sense.

And it’s based on the man who mistook his wife for a hat. So, he has this visual impairment. And he’s taken this shot and it’s not really specifically said what the shot is.

But the shot has had an effect on him and it’s had an effect on the other two characters that the neuroscientist is studying. And they meet, they all kind of meet in his office. So, there’s scenes with the three of them.

So, there’s a scientist character, there’s the war photographer character. There’s another character that was inspired by our daughters who are just very proficient with Instagram and those kind of image apps. And it’s sort of this young character who’s kind of reached this guru status online, and she just processes images.

And this one image kind of cuts through everything and she almost slips into the image. So, she imagines herself that she was there in that moment. This image had affected her so much.

And then another character who has this real life condition called hyperthymesia, which is this condition that you cannot forget. And these images, it’s actually, again, based on a real story, a woman who cannot forget. And these images that they process, like literally thousands of images a day, and they have this incredible memory where they can remember exactly the same thing.

And they have this Rolodex of just flipping images all the time in their head. So, these are the four characters and they kind of form the story. And then there’s sort of another layer of the piece where these poet characters come out at the beginning, they come again, they appear again in the middle, and they appear again at the end.

And they have this sort of like a spoken word poetry, which has another underlying narrative, which is based on images. And at the end, kind of recalls or recalls a little bit of the Curdie shot. So, that’s kind of how we put it together.

[Phil Rickaby]
And it’s interesting, the way that, like, theatre grandeur, like you said, you started the company 25 years ago, has an incredible longevity in the landscape of theatre in Toronto, in a landscape that does not do a whole lot of physical theatre.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yes, it’s true.

[Phil Rickaby]
And so, there’s this unique place for physical theatre. Do we not respect physical theatre in the same way that we respect the quote, unquote, traditional play? Or is it, why do you think we don’t see so much of it?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
I don’t know. I mean, I think artists and, I mean, I think there’s a lot more in contemporary performance, there’s a lot more movement now. And I think certainly dance companies have a lot more theatre in them.

And I think that that sort of interdisciplinary world is, I think, certainly more practiced now than it was, again, 25 years ago. But 25 years ago, you know, we were still quite young in our own evolution of creating original work. We were kind of shy about it almost, you know.

The regionals were still doing Neil Simon plays. It’s taken a while for us to build up a Canadian canon of work. But now, if you go places and you look at the kind of theatre that’s being produced in our city and in Vancouver and Montreal, all across the country, we really do produce amazing theatre in Canada.

And it’s talked about in places that I go. And I’m quite proud of the community and what we’re able to achieve. I mean, I don’t know, is that true that we don’t see as much physical theatre?

I guess it’s true that we don’t see as much physical theatre as, for example, in Quebec, where it’s sort of more of a tradition. But again, I think that there’s, you know, we’re maybe a little slower catching up in English Canada than they are in Quebec. And I think that’s as a funding thing, because they’re just better funded there.

But I certainly think that there’s an appetite for it. I think audiences enjoy it. And I think that there’s certainly an appetite, judging from the amount of audition requests that we get, there’s an appetite from the creator to explore this kind of work.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, when I was involved with Keystone Theatre starting out…

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Right, yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
We were doing this thing that was entirely physical, because you couldn’t, you know, we were limited by the lack of dialogue. And figuring that, we sort of like originally did sort of like a similar process to the one that you described. Our first show did take like four years to put together.

But we were sort of looking around, like, realizing that there was nothing really like it, which is a unique, like an interesting spot to occupy. When you’re doing theatre in this city where, and in this country where we’re so, I think, in a lot of ways, dialogue dependent. And, you know, I mean, how many shows do we see where it’s like, it’s a living room?

And to go outside that is always a really exciting thing and scary.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yes, yeah, I agree.

[Phil Rickaby]
We always found that early, I mean, when we, after we were touring The Last Man on Earth, and hearing audiences interpret the play, and hearing how their interpretation was different from ours, we had to cut, like, we fought against that for so long. Like, there was a period of time we were like, no, this is what is happening. And then after a while, we backed off.

And we’re like, no, it’s whatever they get from it, is what they get from it, which can be a difficult spot to get to. What is your theatre background? Why did you start doing theatre?

What is it that drew you to theatre?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
I mean, I studied theatre at university and I also took classes. I started taking sort of Saturday morning acting classes when I was in grade school.

[Phil Rickaby]
Do you remember why you were drawn to that?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
I think I was drawn to that because, well, I was drawn to that because there was a slight conflict in my family. My brother had become estranged from my family. And that was a bit of my escape.

To be honest, that Saturday morning, kind of just, you know, going downtown and sort of being with a group of people and playing other characters became a bit of an escape for me. But certainly when I became more serious about it, I don’t think it was necessarily an escape. It was simply just an excitement and interest in it.

And just being creative was very satisfying, somehow very satisfying. And then, so I went to performing arts high school. And out of that high school, I auditioned for the program at York.

And that’s where I trained. And while I was there, one of the professors, you know, I was asking about all of these people that we’re learning about in our theatre history class. And he was showing me some documentation of their work.

And then he sent me down to the world stage, they were showing a company from Poland. And I decided to go and check this company out. And I was really amazed by the work.

And I started thinking about, wow, it would be so amazing, actually, to be a fly on the wall of these creators that I’m reading about. Wouldn’t it be great to just sort of see how they make their work. And then I discovered this huge secret that I’d like to share with all of my young people that I talk to, I always share this, is that I discovered the secret that everybody wants to help you.

And nobody knows that. And it’s really literally, you just need to ask. Because I did, I started to write to all these people, including like Kortowski, and say, I just want to know how you make your work.

And he basically invited me. And so I spent the better part of three years outside of Canada working with different companies. And then I landed in Poland for a year and a half working with a very specific kind of company.

And that’s where I kind of grew up artistically. I, you know, from all of these experiences, and sort of taking the best of my version of the best, tossing everything else out and saying, okay, this is this is this is the kind of theatre I want to make.

[Phil Rickaby]
Can I ask about that secret that you share with everybody? Before you learned it, like, did you learn that on your own? Did somebody tell you?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
No, I learned that on my own. I just I just I just thought, well, you know, I want, you know, won’t hurt to ask. I’ll just ask.

I’ll just say like, you know, this is what I want to do. I want to come and see how you make your work. I’m really interested.

I’m willing to just be quiet in the back of the in the back of the room and just quietly observe. You know, if you want someone as a research assistant, or if you want someone to get coffee, I’m happy with that, too. And I never got to know.

[Phil Rickaby]
Because I think a lot of people I mean, probably why it’s important that you you share this secret with people is not knowing that you can actually do that. That you can ask people for help.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yeah, you know what it is? Because everyone, everyone started where you’re starting. Do you know what I mean?

If you’re a young person, they’ve all started there. And so and people are generally, people are generally kind, and they’re generally generous. They just need the opportunity to be both of those things, you know.

And sometimes you just have to ask for help. And sometimes they won’t be able to be busy or, you know, you have to be really specific about your request. But I’ve honestly found that that is the case that we’ve just always had really good luck with that.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, that’s, yeah, it’s, I mean, it is an important, an important lesson. When you sort of grew up artistically with this theatre company in Poland, is there, this may be a very vague question, but is there something that you learned there, that was like the epiphany, an epiphany for you, something that had never occurred to you before?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
I say I learned a lot of things. I learned as much of what to do as what not to do when I was there. And some of those things of what to do just involved a real specific work ethic.

And always kind of understanding that it’s not finished. Nothing is ever finished. Unless you, of course, never want to perform it again.

But it is finished, right? But the idea of searching and the idea of, you know, pushing your collaborators to, and providing them with tools, you know, it’s not just a matter of sort of pushing them to and challenging them, but allowing them to challenge you, and to make you a better artist. So those are things that I kind of took away from that.

And just, I guess, developing a discipline, and also a sincere appetite for exploring, like, you know, how can we make this better? You know, that’s where it’s at. It’s pretty good now.

How can we make that better? What do we need to change to make that better?

[Phil Rickaby]
So when you are at the end of your two-year cycle of a show, like, so for example, Reflector, once you’re done that first run, do you send it on tour? Do you revise it before it goes on tour?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Anytime we remount a show that’s premiered, we’ll always make changes. But what we won’t do, and I mean, that’s not totally true. I mean, sometimes we’ve remounted stuff, and we’ve redeveloped certain sections of the play.

And that’s certainly true for a show that we’ve remounted a number of times called Raging Dreams, where there’s just a couple of sections of that play that I, and now it’s almost a joke, that we always have to do a different version of this particular scene, because it’s just what ends up happening. But for the most part, there’s not major revisions, there’s not major rewrites, there’s not major, because the company doesn’t have a choreographer that comes in and says, this is where you move, this is what you do. The hard part for that, and same thing with composers, we kind of compose our own music.

The hard part of actually generating that stuff and designing that stuff has all happened. So I would say once a show opens, it’s tweaks, and it’s also just the actors wielding that material, and allowing them to really sit comfortably with it. And there’s no substitute for that.

You just need to perform it. You just need to practice. That is what it comes down to.

[Phil Rickaby]
And when a show goes on tour, do you have people sometimes, or you remount the show, do you usually bring back the same cast?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
As much as possible, yeah. It just makes it easier. But they’re built in such a way that other people can step into, and there’s certainly enough documentation that happens over the course of two years that we have.

[Phil Rickaby]
When somebody steps into one of those roles, what’s the process for teaching them something that they weren’t involved in the development for?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Well, I’ll give you an example for the show. We just remounted a show called Raging Dreams, which we first premiered in 96. We started developing in 95, we premiered it in 96, and we’ve remounted a number of times.

It’s quite a popular show. But it’s also a crazy show. The show involves these five ropes, these six performers, and they’re on ropes for much of the show, so they have to climb up, beat themselves in.

They’re also lighting themselves, because they’ve got these special lighting devices that are attached to their costumes. They’re drumming, they’re drumming upside down. They have to clip in these things and reorganize the set in every single scene.

They’re singing, and there’s music from start to finish. And there’s a wall of rain that separates the audience from performers, like it rains for the whole show. So it is a pretty insane show, because you’re moving for much of it, and you’re acting as your own technician, and you’re a lighting technician, and you’re a raker.

It’s a pretty nutty show. So that’s one of the most difficult shows that we have to perform, because it’s also vocally very challenging. Like I said, if you’re not speaking lines, you’re singing from top to bottom.

And it’s also physically challenging, because you’re always hauling yourself up a rope. So in a situation like that, sometimes for certain parts, we have to call in the previous actor to come and train with that other actor. But there’s enough of us that have a memory of that show, because we’ve done it a few times now, that we can also step in to help the other actors.

I generally break it down. I generally say, we’re having just singing rehearsal, just movement rehearsal, just working on, and then I start to incorporate all of them. But they are complex, because they’re intertwined, and they’re very musical.

So sometimes if you’re slightly off the beat, and I don’t just mean that in a musical sense, like the movement and the music, it’s very intertwined.

[Phil Rickaby]
Must be a real challenge for a new actor to come in.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
It is, for sure. Especially with a show like that. But they always rise to it.

[Phil Rickaby]
I’m sure that they do, because you always want to do your best. I mean, running a theatre company, even in the short term, not an easy thing to do. To do it for 25 years is a particular challenge.

Any secrets? Any tips?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
You just got to really love what you’re doing, and find some people around you. You got to surround yourself with super talented people. And you have to get a great board.

We have a really great board, a very supportive board. And what else can I say? I mean, it is hard.

It’s super hard. Somebody had said to me the other day, I think you might be the longest serving female artistic director in the country.

[Phil Rickaby]
You probably are.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
And I think that that might be true. That is a daunting statistic. It’s hard, but there’s a lot of joy.

And I’m a bit stubborn. Maybe that’s why I’ve been around so long. I don’t know.

Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
What does the day-to-day of running a theatre company look like at this level?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Well, a lot of my day-to-day now, in terms of administration, is covered off by our producer, who does a lot of that. And, you know, I was more hands-on when Yolanda had started, because Yolanda is our current producer. She actually came from a background as an artist.

So she had done her MFA in directing, and she’d done a number of successful shows, directing her own shows. And so she had some producing experience, but I think she sort of cut her chops here and learned a lot about producing, just by practicing again, by practicing the last four years. And so she’s taken a lot of that off of my plate.

So a lot of my work has to do with relationships, sometimes with sponsors, in terms of administration. Certainly anything to do with grants, I’m involved with all of that. But it’s not quite as daunting as it was in the earlier years, when I didn’t have a producer that had a lot of experience.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, it sounds like a real blessing to have somebody come in and do that.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Oh, yeah, definitely.

[Phil Rickaby]
When you’re working on a show, and, you know, you start with an idea, and you’re putting it together, and learning what that show’s going to be, do you ever come across something that you say, no, we could never do that? And the reason why I ask is because thinking about this show that you imagine, with the actors climbing on ropes and lighting themselves and singing, and there’s the wall of rain. At any time, do you ever think, no, that’s not possible?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
No. No, I don’t. I never think that.

I always know that they’re going to find a solution. And I do ask for crazy things. Like, I ask a lot of my performers.

I always ask for a bunch of crazy things. But they always make it work. And I think that that’s part of the magic of theatre, is to kind of allow the audience to go, oh, that is, how are they doing that?

Or that’s, you know, something that’s unrepeatable, or that’s what makes it, you know. But again, you can’t just do that with a two-week rehearsal period. You just have to have more time to kind of integrate stuff like that.

[Phil Rickaby]
Like when you’re talking to a group of actors and you’re, okay, so for this show, you’re going to be climbing ropes. Did they know that when they came in?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
No, we didn’t know that when they came in, you know. So the ropes were kind of introduced halfway. I’m just trying to remember that process.

They weren’t. They weren’t at the very beginning of the show. So the spring phase had no ropes in it.

And then the fall of the first year, we decided that’s what we were going to do. We’re going to include these ropes. But that first year, we were actually climbing without any harnesses or any safeties at all.

We were just literally hauling ourselves up. And then the second year, the costume designer said, okay, we’re going to make this a little easier. We’re going to build in the harnesses into the costumes.

And we’re going to get a bunch of beaners, and we’re going to integrate it into the set. And so we just, I mean, a lot of it was just sort of, you know, what’s in your imagination. I mean, my first idea for this was that we would actually create these like water bladders almost that would go this full 40 foot length where it would have this sort of gooey material in it that you could actually write into.

So you could actually write stuff. And that stuff was sort of slowly dissolved. But you know, my idea, you know, sometimes my ideas in physics are like in conflict.

So that sort of turned into this wall of rain instead of this. I definitely knew that I wanted someone, I wanted people to see that show through something, like something that would obscure the vision. And in fact, with the rain, it happens all the time.

You only ever see the rain when it’s lit. So at the beginning of the show, when people are coming in, nobody knows that it’s raining. They know when the lights go out and the rain is lit, they know that it’s raining.

And of course, they hear the sound. And sometimes they wonder, is that really rain? But they kind of forget about it.

And then they kind of wake up a little bit later. But I did want that sort of sensibility because the story is kind of, it sort of transforms from one place to another. It’s told in a very non-linear way.

And I did want that sense of like, you know, lying in a tent and hearing the rain and kind of your imagination goes to different places and almost like slips into a slight unconscious place. And so this is what we came up with in terms of the soundscape and the visual.

[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, in a two-year rehearsal process, there are always going to be ups and downs. And how do you handle moments when you think it’s not going to work?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
When I think it’s not going to work, I gather my team and I say, okay, this isn’t working. What do we change? What do we need to change to make this work?

And we usually come up with solutions to make it better. And some things that we can’t solve, we’ll solve in a later phase. Some things are just too big to solve.

And some things involve like just, I mean, there’s no way around it, money, right? So we need a certain piece of equipment that we can’t afford or we can’t find or it hasn’t been invented yet. You know what I mean?

So we just have to kind of pause the idea and find a work around, you know? And I have always said this. I think theatre artists in general are just fantastic MacGyvers.

They’ll always find a way to kind of, even with very small budgets to make ideas work.

[Phil Rickaby]
That’s one of the things that I always love about theatre is that there are constraints and you have to find a way to work within those constraints. And sometimes really magical things can happen out of really simple things.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Very simple things. That’s right.

[Phil Rickaby]
Just because we had to make it happen somehow. When you’re at that point where you’re gathering your team, have you tried several times or are you starting to get a sense early on that it’s just not going to work?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
I’ll give you an example. We were trying to, there was a show that we were doing called Imprints and we had in the summer, as I was saying, we sort of converted the summer phases into design phases of one experiment. We were trying to get the sense of, it was all about the idea of genetic memory and the idea of, is it just your hair color and your eye color that’s passed down from generation to generation?

Or in your DNA deep within there, is there actually memory? Memory of things that had happened in the past. So in this story, this character kind of has a medical procedure and she sort of slips into this sort of, Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole kind of place.

And she basically goes into her genetic memory and she meets some of these ancestors that she had. And so it had a lot of this play, it had a lot of ghosts and we had to try and find a way of experimenting with that. So one of the things we decided we would do is we wanted the idea of projection surfaces and we would dump, oh my God, we dumped so much stuff from the ceiling of the theatre center.

Different types of grains and sand we knew was too heavy and it would, you know what I mean? So like trying to find the right thing that could actually, that it could rain this image for a while while the sand or whatever poured from the ceiling and then it would go away. So this sort of image would appear and disappear.

Creeping Week, by the way, is the greatest projection service in the world. Nobody knows this, but it’s true. And one of the experiments that we thought would be really great is the idea of smoke, dried ice and how do we project these ghosts on this dried ice so you could actually wave your hand through it and they would be gone and then all of a sudden they were there or like pour them out of a bucket.

And we tried everything, we were trying to figure out what the heck, how does this go? And then all of a sudden towards the end of the session where we’re just about to throw in the towel, I walked in behind the projection and went, oh my God, guys, come on this side. And it was literally, it was just, we just needed to go, it needed to be a rear projection, otherwise it wasn’t gonna work.

So just simple things like that, you know, you just keep pushing and pushing and sometimes you get lucky. And we just got lucky because I took a walk, you know, we were about to throw the towel in, you know, for that.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think you were saying that you’re stubborn, so you tried a lot.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
I am stubborn, yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
It sounds like you have to be stubborn to make this stuff work sometimes.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Sometimes, yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
So Reflector, we’ve talked a little bit about the inspiration behind Reflector. And this is the end of the two year.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
That’s right, yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
So this is the culmination of all of this. Is there anything that you can tell me about what the show looks like?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
It is beautiful. I think this show is, this is one of my favorite shows, I have to say. 25 years, we created quite a few shows and I think this one might be my favorite.

It is, there are, the set is created from these large scale projection, screens that move. And so the space is cut in sort of different ways for different scenes. And there are these beautiful projections that Larry McDonald has created for the show.

And sorry, but the question was how it looks or?

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, what does it look like?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
What does it look like? Yeah. So yeah, it just, it looks, I think it looks really beautiful.

I think the designers have done a great job. And it sounds really good, like Thomas Rider-Payne is our sound designer. And Melanie is our costume designer and she’s done a wonderful job with the costumes.

And I’m just trying to think of who else. Those are the designers, set designers by Michael Spence and Larry McDonald. So as I said, they’ve created these screens that are kind of movable and they sort of sculpt the space in different ways.

And then they also provide a canvas for Lair to sort of create stuff on.

[Phil Rickaby]
Is it like live projection mapping or is it just?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
No, no, there’s none of that.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think that projection is an underused medium because it can be used in some very clever ways.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yeah, I agree.

[Phil Rickaby]
But I think that a lot of people get sort of frightened by the idea of it not being there, not being there, in air quotes. Something is not there.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Oh, right, yeah. Well, I mean, for me, projection is, or using any kind of film or video in your work. I mean, we’ve been using it.

It’s become a staple in our work since 2000, which we first started experimenting with it. And really it’s just another partner. It’s just like, as the set is or the music is, it’s just another tool for us to kind of help the narrative along.

It’s expensive. I would say that you need way more tech time than you normally would because of it. But for me, it’s a good partner.

It’s a good partner in the work. I like work to look rich and I think projection helps with that.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think a lot of people are afraid of it because they’re afraid of what if it doesn’t work.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Oh, I agree, yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
What if the projector breaks down, things like that.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Oh, I know, I know.

[Phil Rickaby]
Do you have backups or?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yes, I mean, generally, we’ve never had a projector break down. And the way that those bulbs work is that they don’t kind of just blow traditionally. They sort of just get there because there’s always two of them in there.

So it’ll kind of just get dimmer. But there’s plenty of other ways that… I mean, when we were doing a show at ArtWord, the first sort of first version of a show called Identity.

And it was all about the internet. And I mean, at that time, chat rooms is in 2005, I think. And we hired these two programmers, media artists who weren’t necessarily theatre media artists.

They were just media artists. And that was definitely a clash of culture because for them, programming is sort of like, it’s a fluid thing, right? So there’s no such thing as opening night for them.

Sure, yeah. But there is in the theatre, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So getting the bugs out, I remember even the first week or so of doing that, the computer would always crash in a specific place. And it would always be nerve wracking. We actually had a version two of a particular scene in case the computer didn’t boot up at a certain time.

But we haven’t really had a situation like that since then.

[Phil Rickaby]
When Keystone did The Battle of Winnipeg, we had this terror of the beach ball on the Mac. The Mac we were using would… And it happened in a couple of our tech rehearsals.

And so we were like, what happens if…

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yeah, if that happens in the show.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, one night I think things did go badly and we had to run out and get new cables and things during intermission.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
So it was a long intermission.

[Phil Rickaby]
Somebody was running over to Best Buy. It was just like this nerve wracking experience every time we got to a video element. And that may just be that when we were doing it, it’s just gotten…

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yeah, it’s caught up. It’s gotten so much better now. Literally, every year it just gets better.

We just have better equipment to work with and we can do more things. But yeah, when we were originally working with that stuff, I think we might be actually… Somebody had researched this and we might have been the first company ever to have an actor on stage.

We had a tradition in Gargantua of having a different guest musician for every performance. And when we did it again and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if we had a different guest actress every night? So there was a specific part that was written for a guest actress.

And we had actresses from all over the place, like in Australia and England, India, whatever. Like different… And the stage manager would be behind stage.

And it was basically this particular scene was a story about this guy who was chatting up this girl in this chat room. And he said, he convinced her to find a webcam and this is the first time they’d ever actually seen each other. So the stage manager would be behind the thing.

She would make sure the actress was online wherever she was, happy to be in the world at that time. And she would say, you’re on in five and go. And then the webcam would come up and that would be the actress performing in Toronto, but she would be in wherever she was, Dubai or whatever.

And that was nerve wracking because that was really… This is 17 years ago when those cameras were… They weren’t built into your computer.

They were still sort of sitting on top of your computer now. And all sorts of…

[Phil Rickaby]
There was all kinds of things that could go wrong with that.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
And people’s internet connections.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
That’s right. That was still… I don’t know.

I can’t remember if it was still dial up. I’m sure it wasn’t dial up at that time. But it was just…

This was pre-YouTube.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Did you have any nights where it didn’t go? Where somebody was not able to do it?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
No, we were… Oh, you’re so good. It just worked out.

[Phil Rickaby]
And your rehearsals for Reflector now?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yes. We’re in tech time right now. So we’re in the theatre and we have one…

Let’s see. What is now? It’s almost…

What does it say? Thursday. It’s Friday.

So we have another week and a bit before we start performances. We start some previews.

[Phil Rickaby]
Do you… I mean, your tech time. How long on average is your tech?

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Usually, we have two weeks. Two weeks and a bit in the theatre. Just because it’s complicated with all of the elements.

And we need that time to solidify. And also, that’s one thing that I try to be really… That I try to provide for my designers.

Often in production, we’ll sort of say, you got two days to load in. And you got to get your show up. And we’re opening on Thursday.

And that to me, a designer can’t really design or… I mean, they can, I suppose. But everything’s imaginary until you actually get in there.

And so for us, it’s a way of me honoring that area of the company to actually providing them with tools that they can actually play. That they have time to actually say, okay, what about this? Okay, what about that?

Or let’s try this. So we actually give them some time to think and to try things.

[Phil Rickaby]
And they can make adjustments. They couldn’t do it in like two days.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
It’d be really hard to do that in two days.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
You have to nail your idea. And sometimes you’re hostage by it. Sometimes you get in there and you go, oh, well, there’s no time to change that.

So that’s what it’s going to be, right? Wow.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, thank you so much for this great conversation.

[Jacquie PA Thomas]
Yeah. Thank you so much for the interview. I appreciate it.