The Canadian Stage Company is no more. The theatre company is getting a new name - simply Canadian Stage - and a new vision for the 2010-2011 season under artistic and general director Matthew Jocelyn.
Since Jocelyn took over the top job last March he's been seeing out pieces programmed by his predecessor Martin Bragg, who retired after 17 seasons with CanStage. The new season, announced yesterday, will be the first completely helmed by Jocelyn - and reflects his more international vision for the company.
"What I have been extremely excited by, in returning to Canada, is the number of really professional, hard-working, innovative artists in the theatre world and dance-theatre world who strangely enough often have great international profiles, but rarely get seen in Toronto," he said.
With relatively little experience in Canada, Jocelyn was considered an "outside" candidate for Canadian Stage. Although the 52-year-old is originally from Toronto, he's spent most of his career in Europe, including a 10-year run as artistic and general director of the Atelier du Rhin in Alsace, France. Since then, he's built a stellar international résumé, much of it in French.
Now that he's back in Canada, his aim, he said yesterday, is to find the most internationally recognized works which fit within Canadian Stage's program, to "hunt out these artists … and really celebrate the greatest in new forms [of theatre]by Canadian artists. So that's people like Robert Lepage, Edouard Lock, like Kim Collier from Vancouver."
Consequently, the new season will be a mix of banner Canadian productions and eclectic plays. Two major works include the Toronto premiere of Lepage's one-man, multimedia play The Andersen Project, and a new English translation of Michel Tremblay's 1976 groundbreaking play Saint Carmen of the Main, about a nightclub singer, to be co-produced with Ottawa's National Arts Centre.
Other works include Studies In Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, a Toronto premiere of the touring production by Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre, and the Canadian premiere of The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union by Scottish playwright David Greig, to be directed by Stratford star Jennifer Tarver.
The Cosmonaut, in particular, is an example of what Jocelyn describes as a drive "to recognize the inter-relationship between Canadian art and great international theatre."
The season will also feature an opening play adapted and directed by Jocelyn himself: the Canadian premiere of German playwright Tankred Dorst's Fernando Krapp Wrote Me This Letter on Sept. 18.
Canadian Stage has been able to weather the economic dip, with ticket sales remaining steady. So Jocelyn didn't take over in the face of particularly troubling conditions at the theatre company.
"But this is a big city," Jocelyn said, "and there is room in our theatre to bring in many, many, many more people. So I think that our new program, while not scaring anyone away - it's all great art, there are funny plays, moving plays, some really vibrant theatrical expression on stage - it's the type of work that should excite people that hitherto have not looked toward Canadian Stage for the type of theatre they want to see."
"I'm interested in the vision of people who bring theatre alive," he added. "I love great authors. I love great actors. But I also think that we need to give the means to directors who reinterpret work, who bring vision to classical texts, or who reinterpret work of the present and give it a specific theatrical vocabulary. We need to have a home for that in Toronto."