Alexis Milligan Knows what Doctors can Learn from Theatre

About This Episode:

What does it mean to move with intention? For Alexis Milligan, movement is everything — every breath, every blink, every shift of weight tells a story. As the Resident Movement Director at the Shaw Festival, Alexis works at the intersection of physical storytelling, design, and performance, helping actors inhabit their roles from the inside out. In this episode, Phil and Alexis dig into what movement direction actually is, how it differs from choreography, and why getting rehearsal corsets and headpieces into the room early can mean the difference between injury and artistry.

But Alexis’s work extends well beyond the rehearsal hall. She is the creator and director of the Groundbreaking Theatre of Medicine program — an accredited continuing professional development program through the University of Toronto that brings performing arts skills directly to physicians, surgeons, and healthcare providers. The research is unambiguous: when patients feel heard and seen by their doctors, their outcomes improve. Alexis is building the bridge between those two worlds, using theatre games, movement exercises, and the transferable skills of the performing arts to fill critical gaps in medical education.

Alexis also opens up about podcasting — both as the host of Finding Creativity and as the host of the Shaw Festival’s own Let’s Get This Shaw on the Road podcast. She and Phil share a candid conversation about the realities of building an audience for niche arts programming, the importance of pulling back the curtain for audiences, and why Canadian theatre needs to get louder about the value it brings to communities.

This episode explores:

• What movement direction is — and how it differs from choreography
• The physical challenges of period costuming and why rehearsal corsets matter from day one
• Emotional bleed, the actor’s cool-down, and the practice of ‘taking off the mask’
• How the Theatre of Medicine is using performing arts skills to improve patient outcomes and physician well-being
• The power of pulling back the curtain to build new and loyal theatre audiences
• And much more!

Guest: 🎭 Alexis Milligan

Canadian actor, movement specialist and director Alexis Milligan practices and teaches a diverse range of work from theatre and film to movement direction and puppetry. Currently, she is the resident Movement Director at the Shaw Festival, host of the “Let’s Get This Shaw on The Road” podcast, and the director of the ground-breaking Theatre of Medicine program, created in partnership with the Canadian Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Alexis is a much sought after teacher and arts educator. Her unique approach blends the arts and science by sharing knowledge through experiential learning – which simply means learning through doing. She holds a diploma in Classical Performance from George Brown Theatre School, a diploma in University Teaching from Renaissance College, and a master’s in interdisciplinary studies, combining the performing arts, communication, education, and neuroscience, from the University of New Brunswick.

She has served as a consultant for the Canadian Medical Protective Association and has sat on the steering committees for the Canadian Network of Imagination and Creativity and the Atlantic Centre for Creativity, as well as host of the “Finding Creativity” podcast. Alexis is a regular guest teacher at NYU Tisch School for the Performing Arts, The Verbier Festival, The European Association of Urology (TIP Program), Dalhousie University School of Nursing, and University of New Brunswick, School of Nursing.

Connect with Alexis Milligan:

🌐 Website: http://www.alexismilligan.com

📸 Instagram: @milligan.spike

🎙️ Podcast: Let's Get This Shaw on the Road

🎙️ Podcast: Finding Creativity

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Transcript

[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on Stageworthy, I talk to theatre makers of all kinds, from actors to directors to playwrights to stage managers, producers, you name it.

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So if you want to help me to make this show, go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron. My guest this week is Alexis Milligan. Alexis is an actor, a movement specialist.

She’s the resident movement director at the Shaw Festival and the host of the Let’s Get This Shaw on the Road podcast. She’s the director of the Groundbreaking Theatre of Medicine program. I’m so enjoying this conversation with Alexis and you will too, because here’s my conversation with Alexis Milligan.

Alexis Milligan, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. You have many roles, many titles.

You are the movement director at the Shaw Festival. For someone who is unfamiliar with what that is, could you define that and how it differs from, say, a choreographer?

[Alexis Milligan]
Yes. And I find that the longer I do this, the more ambiguous the word movement becomes to me. I’ve really been reflecting on this the last little while.

And it’s like when you see a word and you’ve repeated it too many times and suddenly it doesn’t feel like a word, I feel a little bit like that around this word movement. And because I think on a technical level it encompasses so many things. That there is this kind of, what do we mean by that?

What do we mean by movement? Movement is everywhere. It’s everything.

It’s hard to carcel out what exactly that is in terms of defining what we mean when we say that word. But it’s interesting because I do both and I would say there’s lots of movement direction in choreography and there’s lots of in movement direction. So the way that I think about it most often is when you’re looking at specific choreography, it tends to be, and not always, but tends to be something that’s quite an isolated moment.

It tends to be something where we’re going to come in, we’re going to do this choreography, and then it’s going to go back to the play or to the musical. And so when you look at it as an isolated thing, there’s often choreographers, we all have to struggle for time. Time in rehearsals, time on the stage, trying to squeeze out that last bit of tech to make sure people hit their spots.

Whereas movement direction, I’m in conversation with the entire design team from the get-go. So from the moment that it looks like we’re going to even think about doing the play, I’m at the table as a movement director with the designers in those conversations with the director looking at the landscape of these physical bodies in the space and what story they tell as part of the overall feel, vibe, look, aesthetic, and the communication of that play. So if you look at something like Lehman’s Trilogy that I did at Cannes Stage with Philip Aiken, we were in talks about that show almost a year and a half before we hit the rehearsal hall.

Choreographers, again, do work quite closely with directors. There’s a lot of time, but not so integrated in the actual design talks. You’ll get the design, you’re like, here’s your set, you’ve got to go and make these steps, and again, isolated to that moment.

There is another second part to my job as a movement director, which I really love. So the first part being integral to the creative concept development is I get to work with the actors themselves. So once we figure out what we’re doing with those bodies in space, I can then work with those actors on what their body is communicating.

So that if we really go into details, it’s every breath, it’s every blink, it’s a move. But how that feels like it can still live in impulse, still is alive with the text. Oftentimes, it’s helping actors find ways that their little habits, like an arm flop or a shrug or throwing things away or getting really emotional and tension coming into the body, we can actually work to help those performers really align with what those intentions are.

So we can zero in on, is your whole system actually helping to drive this moment, or are we actually struggling a little bit? So I kind of have the two jobs.

[Phil Rickaby]
Another thing that I was wondering as you’re describing that is sometimes in festivals like Shaw, people are wearing clothes that are very different from what they would wear in everyday life. In many cases, women may be wearing corsets, or maybe some men do, depending on the place. And people have to learn how to move within the constraints of a costume.

Is that also something that you’re doing?

[Alexis Milligan]
Absolutely. I always challenge myself every season with something that I want to fold in for myself, like how can I really bring sort of an idea to the company that I really want to work on. And I’ll tell you, the thing that I’m up against the most with actors coming into the company, especially young ones, and actors who haven’t necessarily done a lot of work within these periods or time periods, and eras, I’m seeing a lot of this.

And it’s the forward head, the shoulders rolled in. And because we’re so in it a lot, like we’re in it for prolonged periods of time in our daily life, it’s actually subconscious now. And we are all rolling our shoulders forward, and we’ve all got this forward head.

And suddenly you go to put on a beautiful dress from a Bernard Shaw play, and you’re looking at that turn of the 20th century, those high collars or those long lines of San Eduardo, and you’re looking at this automatic kind of response that the body is unfortunately in a habit of. So I’m really working this year, my focus for this year is to just eyes, horizon, and higher. That’s the tagline for movement of the company this year, is just eyes, horizon, and higher.

We got to get up and out because it’s all coming in.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I remember when I was at theatre school, one of the things we would do in our second year is the period study. And the era that my class did, we did the English restoration, which is an extremely, in terms of like the way that you move in this space, completely foreign.

So we had so many, we had like many days of just workshops of like, how do you move when your jacket is pulling here, when the shoes are this tall, and that’s the men. And how do you move when your dress is this wide and all this sort of stuff. It’s not something that comes naturally.

You have to retrain your body, how to do it.

[Alexis Milligan]
And there’s a sort of a 360 awareness you need to get, because everything seems to catch on something as well. There’s so many layers. So even just trying to like, if you’re a lady in a big dress of long skirts, and you’re trying to just stand up out of a chair, that heel is going to get stuck under those skirts.

Just, you know, so how do you navigate all of those things? And it does take practice. It’s one of the reasons why, again, as a movement director, being embedded as part of the creative team, I can go to the designers before we even start rehearsals, knowing the time period, knowing the costumes, and especially now I have a shorthand, a language with a lot of the designers here, is they know to expect that I’m going to say, I need shoes, day one.

I need rehearsal skirts. I need corsets. I need fans.

I need hats. I need coats for the gentlemen. I need, what are we going to be using?

Because that has to be embedded really early. I remember actually, Dana Osborne, when we were working on Blind Witch in the Wardrobe, actually at Stratford. And when we were at Stratford, we had this great moment when we were designing.

I remember quite specifically, Alexis Gordon had this gorgeous eagle on her head. It was a wardrobe piece that was being designed. And we had a lot of these, the animals were being represented by these bigger pieces as headpieces.

And right away, I knew that we can’t get those for the tech dress, if we’re going to think about these actors wearing them, because I’m not having my actors go out with neck injuries, because they haven’t been muscle trained to be able to support that entity and learn how to move it without, these are a lot of micro muscles in through here. So it was really critical. And it’s like moving a puppet.

And so it was really critical that we get those things in early, so that we can train the body. And thankfully, at these bigger festivals, we are very blessed with having longer rehearsal times. And so we really had, from February until we went into previews in April, to use those.

And Dana, our designer, was right on side with me, being able to really develop these headpieces as puppets through props, which meant that we could get them in the room early. And then I’m just looking at less injuries for the actors who have to wear them.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I mean, it’s even more than just the injuries, because they’re puppets, they’re also masks at the same time. And you can’t throw on a mask at your tech dress and expect it to work.

That is part of the acting process. So absolutely, it becomes a very integral part of everything in the rehearsal.

[Alexis Milligan]
You got it. You got it. Yeah, absolutely.

And it does allow them to really go through the process of finding out their way in to that kind of level of physicality. And then more critically, again, the work of movement director is, I’m there to support the intention and the work of those actors. It has to feel like it’s coming from a genuine place, that they don’t feel out of body, that they can use their text, they can speak their text clearly.

And that is actually the priority. If we get too movie moving around, we just lose the text. The faces are going that way.

We’re not going to.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of times I think people who are outside the theatre don’t think about where voices go and all of the technical stuff that goes into making sure that people get heard.

If we’re used to TV and film, we always hear that. And whereas in the theatre, unless you’re doing a musical, nobody’s mic’d. You have to project on your own.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yes. And for again, these big festivals for long periods of time. And so you’re in a run for a prolonged period.

You need to be out there being able to be on your voice and not worried about losing it. Right. Or doing any damage to it in the process.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yep.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
Now you were in your, I think your eighth season as movement director at Shaw. How does the repertory nature of a festival like the Shaw Festival change your approach to movement for an ensemble?

[Alexis Milligan]
That’s a great question. I think the fact that I do have a language with the company now, they know that I can come in, we can get something done relatively quickly. We can lay some foundational language.

I can help with that, whatever the director wants to be kind of digging into and getting into with them. I can help to sort of facilitate a little bit of that and then leave it with them to be able to work and develop. So sometimes I’m there from the get-go like Ginnett last year, I was in the rehearsal room every rehearsal and everything was being shaped through the movement of their bodies and the way that they were using the text and the design and everything.

But something like One Man, Two Governors a couple of seasons ago, I just came in, we did some bits. I was there to help facilitate some of those scenes, working with fight director John Stead to integrate the fight work with the movement work, with the comedy and the text work and the timing through Chris. So it was, it’s that kind of integrated collaboration work was really exciting.

But I will say it was actually the One Man, Two Governors year. I was also working on the House That Will Not Stand that Phillip Aiken was directing and Ariana Moody, who was the design intern, she was also working on both the shows. And we were in the studio doing tech for House That Will Not Stand and we were in the festival doing tech for One Man, Two Governors.

And I kid you not, the two of us started in one room. We got a text from the stage manager saying going back to look at this scene, Kenny, we’d look at each other. We’d find a break and Phillip would go, go, go, go.

We’d run across from the studio to the Jackie Maxwell over to the festival, sit and watch a scene. Then we, okay, that’s done. They’re going to go back.

They’re teching, okay, up, back over. That’s sometimes my day.

[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, very athletic. You’re never bored.

[Alexis Milligan]
No, never bored. And each room is so different. Like every room is so alive in such a brilliantly creative way that to be able to dip my toe in all of those worlds.

And again, sometimes doing individual coaching sessions with actors that I’m not working on the show that they’re doing, but they are seeking me out to do something either just like bodywork wise, they just need to deescalate some of the stress or they just need to like regroup with some of their intentional work. I can easily go in and do some coaching sessions with some of the actors that I won’t even be working on the show. And sometimes I even try to not know too much about the show.

I just work with them in the isolated moments that they need help with so that I get the surprise. I always try, there’s one show a season I tried to be a surprise and I can just see it to see it.

[Phil Rickaby]
One of the things about a repertory company where, I don’t know, if somebody doesn’t know what repertory companies are, you’re basically doing show after show after show sometimes within the same day, two shows, some days, many shows a week. And it can be difficult, I think, as an actor to be able to easily differentiate like, where am I? What character am I?

And sometimes like, how does this character breathe? What is their affectation? How do they move?

These are things that an actor might need help with from somebody like you to make it easier for them to move from Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to another play. And you have to do it within like an hour or two.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yes. And we’ve had that come up. I’ve had that come up a couple of times with actors.

I remember Julie Lumsden was doing Roke here a number of years ago and then had a really quick change into a very different character in a very different play. And it was difficult in the beginning. And so what we actually did is we, and this is something I’ve been doing a lot with the company, especially because we’re such a long running festival, is working on a cool down.

And why that is so important because any athlete, any elite, top level athlete, Olympics, you know, World Cup, whatever, when they come off the field, they don’t just, you know, put on their jeans and head to the bar, say hi to your friends at stage door and walk down the road and have two whiskeys. Not that’s a bad thing. But what happens is that your body is full of adrenaline.

It’s full of cortisol. Your muscles have been worked. Your heart rate is up.

When you’re in a long running show like some of the ones that we have, you need to cool down. You need to bring your body and your nervous system down, most especially so that at the end of the night, you can go home and have proper rest. But also if it’s a matinee and an evening and you’ve got to double that day with potentially a character or in a play that’s quite challenging or difficult, and you’re having to do some deep emotional work with that, we need that time to come out of that imaginative space.

And we need to get our feet back down to do that deep breath work, to do that movement work that just gets our sensibilities a little bit more online to be able to ramp up to do it again that night.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. There’s also the matter of emotional bleed from this, from the show, right? We don’t talk about it a lot in theatre.

We should talk about it a whole lot more than we do. But the fact that your body doesn’t know that these emotions are fake, right? Like you’re portraying emotions and your body will react as though this is real.

So like you’re saying, the adrenaline goes up and the breath and the heart rate go up. And when you leave, you have to find a way, like you said, not your physical body, but like your emotional body has to be able to let those things go as well.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yeah. And I think that’s where, like I come from a movement dance and then led into puppetry and a lot of mask work. And I do really feel, and this is one of the things that we talk about in this cool down, if I happen to be working with an actor to develop a cool down with them, is we are, we need to take off the mask, right?

And there is a lot of traditional and ceremonial work in how we practice taking off a mask, which is often you would turn your back to the audience, or you would find a way to exit that space. You are on your own and you take that mask off. And that is the transference of, in your imaginative space.

And so knowing again, what that emotional bleed is, is also just drawing the line from what is imaginary. When you read a good book, there can be a lot of emotional bleed over because you can feel like you’re living that character. When you hear music that really releases emotions in all of us, there can be something that really lifts you up, that actually changes your mood from this.

And so how we look at coming down off of a show to take the mask off is really critical as well as preparing the body, preparing the spirit, preparing the imagination to put the mask on, to go on that journey and to go through that rollercoaster, right? And some characters in some plays are easier to do that with than others. And it just is, and some rooms and some spaces and some of those projects, it really is, gosh, we just have, everything is so random sometimes.

It’s like a shotgun wedding with some of the groups and the way theatre works across Canada. It’s like, I’ve never met you and now we’re in this really intense scene together. And it’s knowing how you work individually with that.

And that’s why it is such a gift to have a position like this at the Shaw Festival.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah. Does your role help to smooth those like strange moments?

Like when, like we’ve never met, but now we’ve been married for 30 years and we don’t know each other. We have to find a familiarity and that’s usually more of it on the intimacy director side, but like movement also helps with that.

[Alexis Milligan]
Oh, absolutely. And there’s lots of, I mean, it is, it’s the same world. And I would say that in my capacity here, it includes all of that because it is movement.

The biggest thing is that it’s physical communication. It is a scene. It’s a part of a scene.

And I think the danger comes when we heighten that awareness around that scene and paper sensitize it. And it becomes a very intense focus and all eyes are on you and all eyes are on this moment. And it just creates more stress and it creates tense bodies.

And what we lose is the story. We lose the intention. We lose, what are we saying in the scene?

Who pulls away from a kiss first says something. And so how does that work in terms of the language of the arc of that scene? And then ultimately, one of the things that I really encourage here is for us not to forget theatrical device.

And that I think we are oftentimes in the intimacy world and especially in theatre, we’re up against Game of Thrones on the TV. And we’re up against a lot of, you know, Bridgerton, we’re up against a lot of graphic visuals in terms of physical encounters, both in sort of a sexual sense, and then also in a violent sense, that it doesn’t necessarily translate and it doesn’t necessarily work on stage. And so I think sometimes we think that will help the audience feel those intimate moments, when in fact, a shadow on a wall, or the way that a curtain blows, if you look at some of these classic moments on stage, it’s actually creating the feeling and the sense.

And that tense moment before something happens before there’s a kiss, or the lights go out, or they just come together, there’s a lot that we can do to create a feeling in the audience, physically, and in the space. And with the text, if there is any, in those moments that I think sometimes we get a bit focused on it having to be this and it has to because that’s what it says. And then actually, in the landscape of putting a play together, there are a lot of options for us to make something really hot and steamy without it actually being really in depth and in detail on the stage.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, one of the differences between like film and television is there’s a separation, right? The actors are not in the room doing those things. And in theatre, we have to be mindful of the fact that like, things are more visceral, because everybody in the room, violence is more more visceral, because everyone’s in the room.

Sex is more visceral, because everyone’s in the room. An audience, if you try to do on stage, what they do on like Game of Thrones, that’s in many cases, that’s too much for an audience.

[Alexis Milligan]
Absolutely.

[Phil Rickaby]
You have to be mindful of that kind of thing.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yeah, we do. And I think it’s also we need to trust their imaginations. And what is more violent is the possibility of violence.

What’s more sexy is the potential of it. And so it is pulling on the that really gorgeous elastic tension that we have in live theatre. It’s the same way you draw out a laugh.

It’s the same way you draw out a gasp. It’s that moment of oh, this is electric and alive. And like you say, if we do too much, they’ll just tune out because it is just like, okay, great, I could be watching Bridgerton and seeing all of this.

And what I think we lose in the end, especially in plays is we lose the story. If that becomes like I said, like a hyper fixated moment, but that the need for it is about making sure that we’re all on the same page that the communication between everybody in the room, and the respect for yourself and the respect for the other people in the rooms. And I would say like, even at working as a young actor, and then now all of these years later, it is changing, the language is changing.

And I think if anything, it’s more in the hands of the directors and actors now, that I think it really is critical for that communication to to take place. Because ultimately, even my role as movement director that includes all of those aspects of intimacy work, when I leave the room, there can’t be a communication breakdown, because I’m not in the room telling people what to do, I need to be able to support the room, provide I mean, we can’t have teeth going in noses, that’s not a good thing. We need to map out what we’re doing.

But ultimately, that has to be, what are we doing in the scene? What does this what are the words we’re saying actually mean? Where have we come from?

Where do we need to get to? And that through line of the story is absolutely critical. So again, in those support networks, it’s facilitating that clarity of communication between the director, the actors, and then ultimately, the stage managers and the actors, because the director also leaves, and then the run continues.

And there still has to be that sense that we’re all on the same page about this. And we can check in about this and make sure everybody’s still feeling comfortable and that we’re doing our best work. That’s ultimately what we want.

We want it to be as stress free as possible. So our bodies actually relax, and we can be inside of those performances, not waiting for the moment, you know, which is hard.

[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I would love to talk a bit about the Theatre of Medicine. Tell me about what the Theatre of Medicine is.

[Alexis Milligan]
Well, it’s been a long time coming into development. It’s been a kind of a brainchild and a dream of mine for a long time. And it really comes from how can we help?

How can we as artists really help? And we do a lot to help our society, and it is profoundly under-recognized. We are always struggling.

We’re struggling for funding, we’re struggling to be recognized, we’re struggling to prove ourselves constantly. And yet, the struggle in a lot of sort of non-arts-based professions is people are struggling as well. And what I realized looking at the medical world is there is a lot of critical importance that human connection makes in your health.

And we know this. So I got real nerdy about it. And I took a master’s in interdisciplinary studies where I combined the performing arts education in terms of how we learn.

And especially as adult learners, I mostly focused on that in my literature, but also just as learners in general from early childhood on. Communication in terms of how we communicate and the science and research around communication, ways in which we communicate, and then neuroscience. And I was really looking at the linear, the lateral connections between all of these things that I see as a performing artist, that I know my fellow performing artists also experience and see.

When we encounter a physician or surgeon or nurse or healthcare provider that is actually not listening, or is struggling with just awareness of their body and space related to you as they put an IV in so their armpit isn’t in your face. There’s just these ways in which that we can really serve. We can serve a purpose that it goes beyond just our art forms, which are critical in terms of that social connection.

But we have these transferable skills. And how can we get down to the essence of those transferable skills? How can we get down to the foundation of what is it to know how your body stands in space and how it and its impact and the effect it has on people around you in the way you perceive it and in the way they perceive it, which sometimes is not the same thing.

So the Theatre of Medicine is a program that I developed looking at specific transferable skills that we have in the performing arts that I know, and through my research in healthcare, are big gaps. It happened to align, me developing this program, happened to align with a new initiative put forward by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, which is the governing body that all physicians and surgeons need to hold a certification with. As they graduate as doctors, they become members of the Royal College and every year, they need to have so many credits to be able to maintain that certification.

So professional development is a really critical thing. And they had just released their new initiative called the CanMeds framework, which is Canadian medical practice. And in the CanMeds framework, there’s like seven qualities that they want physicians to be able to understand where they align with.

And there are things like leadership. There are things like communicator. There are things like researcher.

There’s things like scholar. But we looked at all of the CanMeds, the seven, and theatre practices, movement practice, dance, music, actually hits six out of those seven targets that they want physicians to identify with. But what I realized is that there’s no support.

They’re not learning how to do this in medical school. And what we’ve seen is their focus in med school is the technical side of things. They have a job to do.

They need to make sure you don’t die. They need to know how to put needles in your arm. They need to know how to read monitors.

They need to understand surgical checklists and what’s involved. They need to understand how to hit a critical moment in surgery, which is like the moment when this is going to happen, how to build up from that. But all of that is very technical work.

And the research, as we know over the years, has been leading more and more to the fact that if you have improvements of quality of care, as in how I feel when I’m with my doctor, and I feel like I’m listened to, I feel like I’m being heard, I feel that I have enough information that I can make a decision, and that I’m feeling like I understand what’s happening to me and what will happen, that improvement of quality of care directly leads to improvement in patient outcome, including survival rates.

And the thing that’s different is we have hard numbers now. We’ve got long-term studies that have looked at this analysis, and they’ve looked at the numbers, and they’re tracking a chart right now that you gave that percentage of the graph, the increase, the potential of just that longitudinal study over, say, a year or two years. If you gave that increase, that percentage increase to the FDA, they would approve the drug.

So we know that how someone feels in a relationship with their doctor directly impacts their outcome. And that also affects the doctor’s well-being and health as well. So there’s a reciprocity where self-care is.

And again, that elevated, high performance, you’ve got to go out there and do that same show every night. Well, you’ve got to go down the hallway and do that same surgical checklist with every patient. And they need to feel that you’re seeing them for the first time, and it’s not your eighth time, and you’re just delivering it like a robot, and you haven’t looked up from your chart.

That actually affects how they feel and how they’ll heal.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I mean, I think everybody’s had an experience with a doctor where they didn’t feel listened to, where they felt like they were rushed. I’ve had it.

I think everybody’s had that experience where you’re trying to talk to the doctor, and they just aren’t listening. They’re just telling you what their thoughts are, what they need to do. But I’ve gone to doctors where I don’t even think they looked at me.

And I didn’t leave feeling good.

[Alexis Milligan]
Feeling good, right? So then you’re stressed, and you go home, and you’re more stressed. And then what happens to our body when they’re stressed?

We get sick. And I think what’s really important is what we’re doing with the Theatre of Medicine. The reason why it stands out is because we are now accredited as a continuing professional development program with the University of Toronto, the medical school there.

That is what makes our program stand out, is the physicians and surgeons from any member of the Royal College. We have people from all across Canada come to our program. It’s a weekend-long program.

We’ve also done some half-day and full days with McMaster University. We’re doing retreats with the ALS Society. We’ve got people coming that are seeking this out for their faculty, for their clinicians, for their students and resident students.

And the thing that I think is really important about, yes, we have the accreditation, which is what’s making our program stand out, is the arts and humanities in medicine is not new. So when I was doing my literature research, I happened upon an article that was called The Patient as a Person, and how taking in the feelings and taking in and how to teach doctors how they can understand the patient’s side of the story and step into their shoes, empathy, active listening, all of those things. If we can really get into a patient and see their story and see them as a person, that their outcomes will improve.

The title of the article, Canadian Medical Journal, was The Patient as a Person from August 1934. So yeah. So again, artists have been doing lots of work in medical schools and nursing schools as help in any kind of health capacity.

Artists have been there. We know that art in anything like music therapy, dance therapy, we know that it’s out there. We’re trying, we’re fighting so hard to get it covered so that you know that your music therapy is helping you with your dementia.

You see it, you feel it, and yet you can’t get the darn classes covered, even though it’s keeping you out of the hospitals and out of the bulk of those services that are really stressed at this time. So we’re sitting on this really interesting moment with all of this that the theatre of medicine is a part of, which is a really deep global movement that is looking at human connection and the power of the arts to really be a part of how we see ourselves not only in our individual health, but in our societal health and our health as a community and a broader global community. We know the arts, dancing together transcends language, it transcends culture, singing together, painting, doing murals together, projects together, social prescribing is hugely on the rise right now.

Alberta is like taking the charge on this. You’ve got incredible foundations like the Rosa Foundation and you’ve got Mount Royal that’s also doing some great work out there that’s really looking at the practice of doctors prescribing. You need to go to the theatre.

And so now I think that comes back to us as the artists and the practitioners to go, okay, we want these people to come because we need the ticket sales, but we also want them to come and see and feel and exchange ideas and look at how we actually interact because as an artist, I feel personally that it’s my social responsibility, that my work as an artist is a service and I feel called to that service. And so putting the pieces together of this program, having the Royal College back this with my dear colleague at the Royal College, Dr. Glenn Bandiera. So he and I built this program and the Shaw Festival really focusing on their Altogether Now campaign, which we are in right now with the construction of our artist village and looking at the whole landscape of why do we do what we do is we need social connection more than ever. And we can shout into the wind all we want as the artists, but we have to create that invitation for them to come to us. And as I say in the program and in the workshop that I do, we need to be on receive as much as transmit.

And I think sometimes we get stuck on the transmit and we want to help and want to do all these things. And there’s all these great ideas. And, oh my gosh, if I’m in one more meeting where we have all these amazing ideas, but it’s getting them lifted, it’s getting them off.

But if we can create the space for people to come to us as an invitation, not an expectation, then that door begins to swing both ways. And as you know, the whole slogan of the Shaw is the two-way theatre, that this is an exchange. We are breathing the same air.

We’re sharing moments. This isn’t just an isolated event that you plop into and then leave and enter back. We hope it changes you.

And my neuroscientific nerd will tell you it does. And you will grow brain cells when you go see a play, listen to music, go out with your friends. You’re developing memories.

You’re putting together new ideas. You’re creating synapses. And our brain health matters.

And our technology is doing everything it can to undermine that and actually desensitize us. So it’s about sensitizing that.

[Phil Rickaby]
If we want to talk about technology, there’s an illusion that happens with our vertical video, the short form videos, the Instagram reels, and the TikTok. And I discovered, I found this early in the pandemic, is it’s a false intimacy. Because here’s a person, and they’re basically close to your face.

The phone is close to your face. So their face is close to yours, and they’re speaking to you, but not to you. And so it feels like they are your friend.

It feels like they are speaking to you, but the closeness isn’t real, and it doesn’t really exist. And so that’s like an experiment that technology companies are running on us to separate us by fooling us into feeling like there’s intimacy. And then you have people who are falling in love with their AI chat bots and things like that.

So it’s all about, yeah, it’s all separating us from each other. And I was talking, when I was talking with Rebecca Northern, we were talking about how in the world of AI, where AI exists, theatre is the only art form where we know these people are really here. These are, everything we see is real.

Everything we see is in the room, and it is sort of an antidote to those things.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yeah. And the invitation for people to feel like they can try it if they’ve never done it before, that we, how do we open the door to people who aren’t getting off their couches and are being, again, desensitized by, you’re going to get the plot reiterated every five lines because everyone at these big streaming houses are telling the writers they have to do this because everyone’s actually still on their phones while watching their show at the same time.

You can’t do that at the theatre. You’ve got to put it down. You’ve got to actually pay attention.

And those attention spans, as we know, those are shrinking, but it’s a muscle and everything is, the more that you do it, the more it’s going to feed back and you will find your spirits lifting. You will find those connections. You’ll meet new people.

You’ll have these discussions that will stay with you. And I think critically, we have to look at for all of what we’re getting, feeling like we’re getting inundated and swamped under by all the negative, what we’ve created, what we feel we’ve created and the doomsday and that is art gives us actually hope. And I was just reading this in a lovely writing prompt earlier today, which is the things that we have, that we’ve done, we can also undo.

We have that ability and that power. We have creativity and imagination and innovation to think differently and to make other choices. So really it’s about how do we get back to where we feel like these are choices that we can actively make and not that we’re being nudged and pushed towards, but that we can choose to make these connections and we can choose to respond to them.

And so that power actually is that hope. And I think that how we look at the interactions and what art does to bring us together. And I will say again, just coming back to Theatre of Medicine is the people who have participated, what I find so striking is these individuals are, they want these skills.

They know that they don’t know or they get nervous talking to people. I’m working with some resident students at U of T who have social anxiety, like they’re 20-somethings, they’re in their late 20s, they’re in their early 30s. They had to sort through the pandemic and they suffer themselves from their own challenges with mental health.

So to force them to make eye contact, well maybe eye contact isn’t actually going to be how they are at their best as communicators, but also helping them realize keeping your nose in the chart is also not going to be effective for your patient if your patient is expecting to have some kind of engagement. And so how can we unpack the nuances and allow that agency for the individual to make those choices? And I would say that they know that they want these skills.

They know that they need these skills. They’re just, they’re not being taught. They’re being put up on a, I always say it’s like we’re PowerPoint free our whole weekend, right?

And they always go, oh my god, because it’s like you get a lecture or a talk or someone’s going to come in and talk to you about communication. It’s a one lecture and it’s just full of slides telling you, you have to have empathy. You have to be an active listener.

You have to do, so I always challenge them and I say, okay, so who thinks they’re an active listener? Well, everybody’s hands go up. We do one Theatre Games 101 exercise in listening, like count to 10 or something, repeat names or just one listening exercise that we would do at like drama camp and they can’t do it.

And I was like, okay, so let’s pause. We tried it a couple of times. You’re failing terribly.

Why isn’t this working? And out of everyone’s mouths, we’re not listening. Oh, right.

So you can think that you are this amazing active listener, but as people who have to listen as a profession, as a craft, to actually do the exerciser where you might have to hear a pitch and nuance of pitch and tone, right? To do a practical listening exercise and see how it goes on the chart, right? That they’ve never done before.

And the beautiful thing about our art forms, all of them, if you do them and you practice them, not only will you get better at them, but they’ll become second nature. So as you know, it’s pretty easy to detect someone who did ballet because they walk into the room and they sound like a ballet dancer, right? It is something to say, I, I, yeah, I’m really good at doing presentations at work.

I did drama in grade 10. Great. Let’s bring out those things, those key qualities that are, you know, we struggle to keep them in the education system even.

And yet the transferable skills and the demand for those skills is on the rise and yet we’ve cut it out. So it’s a really interesting mix of people who want to be there and who know and want to be able to learn and take that information away and take, put it inside of their practices, medical practitioners, healthcare providers. Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I want to shift gears just a little bit. I want to ask you about podcasting.

You are the host of Finding Creativity and you’ve also hosted the Shaw Festivals, Let’s Get the Shaw on the Road. How did you get started with podcasting about creativity in the arts?

[Alexis Milligan]
Oh, this is a, well, I, okay, first of all, I work as a voiceover artist quite a bit. And so that being in front of a microphone like this is, I love it. I’ve been able to voice a number of different characters, shows doing puppets, like Muppet Puppets with a couple of shows with CBC and then also doing a lot of voiceover work for like Mattel and, you know, CBC Kids.

So I feel very comfortable in front of a microphone. And I was part of this, I was a steering committee member and one of the founding members of the Atlantic Center for Creativity. And there’s also a sister organization called the Canadian Network for Imagination and Creativity.

And it’s a very like volunteer base. There’s no offices, we meet on Zoom. And I, we talked about how do we do the research.

And I was doing my master’s at the time. And I was really interested because I’m a nerd. I start asking these questions about what is it that holds so many of us back from thinking that we are creative?

And what is it and how do we define that word? And I started talking to people who, again, shop festival goers, people who are on the board who have like big bank jobs, like in Toronto, and have all of these things that would again, not necessarily, you know, but they talk about how they use creativity. And then I said, Oh, wow, you’re quite creative.

And they go, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not creative. I don’t do what you do. And I was like, that’s so interesting.

So I used the podcast with my co producer, Ian Sherwood. We got some sponsorship together from first season was McKenzie College in Moncton. And then the second season was the Cape Breton Centre for Creativity, which is part of CVU up in Sydney, Cape Breton.

And we just asked the question, like, are you creative? And if you say no, why do you say no? And what are some aspects in your life where you might find creativity?

And so we went through finding people who would not necessarily, you would not necessarily think that their job is creative. And it really landed with my lovely friend, Stan Baines, who was on the committee for the Atlantic Centre with me. And he is the director of the janitorial services at for the Ottawa School Board.

He spent his whole early years, he was a janitor for the schools. And yet he did this wonderful talk we did for an event that was finding creativity in the bottom of a mop bucket. And I was like, again, no one would think that your job mopping floors is creative.

But he speaks about that with such creative capacity about his role within the whole framework of a school, and the day to day in and outs and the students’ relationship and the relationship with the staff. And suddenly you realize like, again, it’s just those stereotypes, those stigmas, the language. So I just felt like there were more people out there like Stan.

And I started calling people up, we had the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, we had a homicide crime analyst come on, who just nerded out about her spreadsheets. And it was awesome. That is creativity, right?

We had a bunch of really interesting people on. And so that was again, I’m a researcher, my dad was a scientist. So I like going into the nitty gritty about stuff.

And I am a big nerd. So I love getting into all of that stuff. And that was kind of drive for the podcast, but it needed a question.

And then the other podcast with Let’s Get This Shaw on the Road that had been in the works for a long time, it was actually a big project that we were trying to get lift off. And I actually wasn’t part of it when this was happening during COVID. So when the Shaw was building all of these outreach ideas, how to keep our community connected, we were doing zoom readings and rehearsals, we did a whole bunch of really cool stuff through Hidden Rooms on YouTube, like we had a bunch of ways to keep our patrons and our audiences engaged during that time.

And the podcast was bubbling underneath all of that. But it was very challenging. There’s a lot of technical components to it.

And just in terms of timing and people being able to get everything. So it ended up that the season and then we came back online, and then we were doing shows again, but we really felt like it came back around again. It was actually out of doing Finding Creativity and hosting that podcast that the Shaw Festival approached me and then Kelly Wong, our beautiful Kelly, is an extraordinary producer.

His work doing any kind of video creation content, any kind of audio visual stuff, he’s really at the center of that here at the Shaw as well as being an ensemble member and a tremendous actor. And we actually got paired together because of the hosting of the podcast that I had done in the co-producing of Finding Creativity. They were like, hey, you’ve done this before.

Could you come and do this with us? And I was like, of course I would. And then having Kelly there.

I mean, he is the backbone of this. I always have to say to him, Kelly, I just feel like I’m not doing enough because I just get to sit there and have the conversation and talk to all of these amazing people. And you’re the one who organizes and edits and does everything behind the scenes that actually makes the podcast lift.

And so I will always check and be like, is there anything else I could do? Can I do more? And we had such fun with it this year and really setting up.

And again, it needed a premise. It needed like a hypothesis. It needed a push.

It needed an idea behind it. And the idea being how soon could we make that connection with our audience? And we’re a destination theatre.

You have to drive to get us because even there’s not really even a bus. There is the Shaw Festival bus, which you can catch from downtown Toronto. But in terms of most of our patrons, you have to drive.

And so what better way for us to get in touch and connect with our audience base all over North America is by podcast. So we can give them the teaser and they can listen to the podcast on their way to the show. The big thing is asking about Easter eggs and getting their Easter eggs in.

And so when you come to see the show, there’s something a little special you can look for.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think that more theatres should have podcasts. In my time doing stageworthy for 10 years, I’ve often gone looking like, where are the Canadian theatre podcasts? And so often I’d be like, oh, Tarion has one.

Oh, they used to have one. They did one season and then it stopped. And almost every theatre in Canada has that where they had like one season, they got some funding, they did it, they did eight episodes.

That’s the end of it. But it gives you the opportunity to get in people’s ear holes and talk about the shows and connect in a way that that we don’t get to do outside of that. And it should be something that more theatres invest more time in instead of just doing it for eight episodes.

And I know that’s a funding thing sometimes. I think it needs to have more priority to it.

[Alexis Milligan]
I would say yes. And I would say it’s just it’s a question of money. I think also one of the things that Kelly and I talked about early on, and I’m not sure if you feel this about this podcast as well, but it’s hard not to get hung up on listenership and be like, oh, our numbers are really low.

And we were very lucky. We popped up on the top 20 Apple podcasts like really quickly when we launched. But then it dropped.

And now we’ve petered out. But we have a steady listener base now. And it’s not massive.

But it is enough that we know people are interested. We know how they’re listening. And looking at the it’s not about how many people we connect to.

It’s about the content we’re creating in order to connect with people. And in that pressure, I think to keep to get those really high numbers, like, it’s not going to be millions of listeners. We are not Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk, who are just about to relaunch Firefly.

We’re not like it’s as much as I am a massive listener about when it’s just like, we’re not going to attract that we’re going to attract theatre nerds. And that’s our demographic. And I think the ability for small theatres, there just isn’t the people power to be able to do it.

And also the work that’s involved in setting it up. Kelly and I are also taught like we’re about to start into where we have a meeting tomorrow to go into our planning stages for season two. And it’s already so much easier in a second season than it was in the first season.

Because we have everything set up, there’s an expectation, we know the language, we know how to do things, we can get things to people. There’s a way there’s a learning curve, steep learning curve. But you know, if you don’t have the time, and the people to earn the money to be able to set that it doesn’t take a lot of money.

But it does take some investment off the top. It’s a great thing for a sponsor to jump on board. We’re very lucky we have a sponsor that has that does want to come on board for season two.

And so that was a really great feeling when we found out that they really want to support the podcast coming back. But that could take a few seasons for a small theatre. And again, it’s who are the nerds out there that are really going to want to listen in our theatre nerd group is relatively small, because we’re a relatively small industry in this country.

[Phil Rickaby]
We don’t have as many we don’t have theatre fans in the same way that there are theatre fans in the States, or in the UK. We’re Canadian theatre is an extremely niche topic. But understanding that understanding that it may be niche, but there are people who are passionate about it.

And they want to listen. And they want to learn they want to hear about theatre. That’s who you’re talking to.

And we’re as a Canadian theatre podcast, you’re not going to get millions of subscribers, but the ones that you get are will be fiercely loyal.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yeah, exactly. And I think the other part of that is we in our niche areas of the country as well, right? So I’m from the East Coast, I’m from Nova Scotia, and the theatre community there is is profoundly small, and it is in a constant state of struggle.

And our unbelievable premier has just announced that it’s just completely obliterated all of our arts and culture and tourism. I mean, it’s Nova Scotia, I just can’t don’t even get me started. But the opportunities to get an initiative like that going, it would be a great investment would be great to hear it is a lovely moment of pulling back the curtain.

That’s what we’ve been about at the Shaw Festival is we want to pull back the curtain, we’re going to show you pictures of backstage in your program. From last season, you’re going to have those backstage tours, you’re going to talk to these people in q&a. We’re going to take you through wardrobe, and you’re going to watch you’re going to actually pick up a needle and thread, because we need you to sew patches on that thing over there.

That’s your tour today is you don’t just get to come in and wander around and take pictures, you sit your butt down, and you’re going to do some work, right? And you’re going to get a sense of what that feels like. And then we’re gonna, you’re gonna come back and see the show.

And there’s the thing there it is. So there is a sense that you need to pull back the curtain. And I think a lot of theatres are, that’s not necessarily how we’ve, our mindset has been, it has been we create magic, you don’t pull the curtain behind that Wizard of Oz, you do not, you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

But now we are finding it in a way to allows the work we do in the theatre to become more inclusive, to create that, as I said earlier, that invitational space, as opposed to an expectation space. And so the actual exchange, it becomes very different. And I would love to see, I’d love to see an East Coast, West Coast, North, South, it would be great to hear what’s happening from the far reaches of Newfoundland to the tip of Vancouver Island and everything up and down in between.

But I do think that the resources and that people at this point, again, just to harpen back to the, to what’s happening, Nova Scotia, ships company and festival initiative just had to drop shows because of the funding cuts. So it’s like, we can’t make our art, we can barely get our art on the stage, let alone try to reach out to demographic, although reaching out to demographic might help. And to source some more people who could become funders, donors, ticket buyers, seasons, pass holders, it’s all that stuff.

It’s the machine that has to roll that brings the value of what we do into the center point. And some of these theatres, again, are the center points of their community. They are a gathering space for people.

And the towns have a lot of pride in these art centers. But it just doesn’t seem like, again, the social prescribing aspect of it that we were talking about, the health aspect of this, the actual elite, like alleviating the burden on the healthcare system is what the arts can actually provide. And we have the numbers now we’ve got the data, they’re hard numbers.

They’re just being ignored because they want to do other business with their best friends.

[Phil Rickaby]
We’re in Ontario, and we have our premier also just wants to do business with his best friends, right? So it’s like, it’s not an uncommon thing. In in our the idea of pulling back the curtain is, I think, just generally in terms of like, when you’re promoting shows, when you’re talking about, about what happens, people love that stuff.

People, you know, if you look at some of the videos that the National Theatre will pull out, or put out, they have like great behind the scenes stuff. And it’s like, you could look at the numbers of people who are watching it that people want to know, yes, what we do is magic, but people want to see behind the curtain. They want to know how we do it.

It’s the same reason why people watch like, how’s the movie gets made? Watch the behind the scenes feature. It’s the same impulse.

Yeah, and we need we need it. We need to do it. Yeah.

[Alexis Milligan]
Yeah. And it does. It is a it’s a great avenue for outreach and not only connecting with possible new patrons, but really maintaining and building relationships with existing ones.

And it’s those existing ones, again, that bring their friends that bring their family members and younger family members and start that rotation going again as we look at this as an intergenerational activity, but also as people who are just trying something new and maybe feel like they don’t know. That’s when actually we received that piece of feedback. We got a great letter from our podcast of someone who was like, I didn’t do theatre.

I went to Stratford in high school, and I didn’t understand a word of it. And I ran away from it. And then during COVID, I came across this.

And I went to the play the next time that it opened. And now I’m hooked, but I’m learning through your podcasts, things that I feel like I don’t understand, or I thought, actually, I do get that. Oh, okay.

So I was right about that. Oh, that’s interesting. So the way that it can, again, it’s not necessarily that you ever have had to go, you know, ever been to the theatre before.

But having that dialogue, hearing those voices, building a sense of familiarity does actually create that beautiful outreach to the broader communities. And that, again, raises the value of the work that we do.

[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Alexis, thank you so much for joining me.

I really appreciate it. This was a wonderful conversation. Thanks for your time today.

[Alexis Milligan]
Oh, my gosh. Thank you.

[Phil Rickaby]
Thank you for listening to this episode of Stage Relief. Thank you for sticking around to the end. I’m going to tell you who my guest is next week.

But first, I do want to talk a little bit about my Patreon. I can’t make this show without the people who’ve backed it on Patreon. It costs money to make a podcast.

It costs money for all the tools that I use to put this together to make this. And the thing is that right now, with the patrons I have, who I am so grateful to, because like I said, I can’t do this without them. We’re just covering the cost of those tools.

I’m not covering the cost of my time in making this podcast. It takes hours of work to put this together, not just in preparation, performing the interviews, but editing, and then assembling the episodes and doing all the work behind the scenes to make sure that this is something that you get to listen to. So if you want to help me to make this podcast, go to patreon.com/stageworthy, and become a patron. Like I said, I would be so grateful to have you helping me make this show. Patrons get early access to episodes, we have conversations about things that are happening in the theatre world. And so if you want to take part in those, that would be great too.

And the more people who join the Patreon, the more I will be able to offer to my patrons. So if that’s something that interests you, if you want to help me to make this podcast, go to patreon.com/stageworthy, and become a patron.

My guest next week is Dr. Janet McMordie. Janet is a well a doctor, who is also an actor and Janet is going to be starring in the upcoming remount of Rosamund Small’s Vitals at the Factory Theatre, and is the first medical professional to ever perform that show. I had a great conversation with Janet and you’ll get to hear that next week on Stageworthy.