Pi Theatre

Archive for March, 2012

We were very excited last week to receive the full reinstatement of our Community Gaming funding for our 2011-2012 year. We’d like to thank everyone who worked so hard for the reinstatement of adult arts and culture funding eligibility. This financial support allows Pi alone to offer employment to over thirty artists and arts workers, and to provide accessible theatre to hundreds of British Columbians. This stream of funding has an overwhelmingly positive impact on the community as a whole.

A sincere thank you to Minister Ida Chong and Premier Christy Clark for the roles they had in the reinstatement. We hope that this is the first step in the revitalization of the arts sector in BC, through the renewed support of the provincial government.

We’d like to thank Skip Triplett, who facilitated the Gaming Grant review with kindness, openness and compassion.

Lastly, we would like to say a huge thank you to all our colleagues and everyone who wrote letters and emails, and gave statements in support of adult arts and culture. We hope you all receive good news too!

In collaboration with Rumble Productions and Touchstone Theatre, we have created an audience feedback form to hear from you, our valued audience members. Now is your opportunity to tell us what you think about what we’re doing now and how we can do it better! Be as honest as you like. All answers are entirely anonymous.

To show our appreciation of your feedback, those who respond before April 16th, will be entered into an early-bird prize draw for two tickets to “A Last Resort” at Rumble Productions’ TREMORS Festival. All respondents are eligible to be entered into a draw for two tickets for a show in each of Pi and Touchstone’s upcoming mainstage seasons.

The survey will take approximately 15 minutes. To complete the survey, click here.

Hello, everyone! My name is Catherine Ballachey and I’ve been working as Pi’s Administrative Intern through the Prime Placements program since September. Becky, the General Manager, asked me to introduce myself and say a few things about what I hope to do in theatre, what I’m learning through the internship and anything else interesting about me.

To start, I’m a graduate of SFU’s Contemporary Arts program in Performance Theatre and French. Since graduating, I’ve been working wherever I can in theatre, which includes front of house, stage managing, admin, directing, writing, producing and even a bit of performance here and there. In 2009, I founded a theatre company with my colleague, Stephanie Henderson, called Resounding Scream Theatre. So far, we’ve produced 3 original plays and 2 fundraisers. Our next project is Hive: the New Bees, an emerging artist version of Hive that is happening May 24-26 at The Chapel Arts. For more information, check out our website: www.resoundingscreamtheatre.com.

From our second production, “Brink: a farce tragedy”
(From left: Nikki Hockey, Victoria Lyons, Manuela Sosa and Stevie Benisch)

One interesting thing about me is that I just came back from Australia where I studied with a physical theatre company, Zen Zen Zo. We stayed in Brisbane, where the Zen Zen Zo training centre is located, for three weeks to intensively study Butoh, Viewpoints and the Suzuki Method of Actor Training. It was an incredibly worthwhile experience and I recommend it to every theatre artist, or artist in general, looking for more training opportunities. I needed something to shake my foundation and this training successfully challenged my assumptions about art and the world around me. If you want more information about the company and their workshops, visit their website: www.zenzenzo.com. Just to warn you, their intensives live up to their name… they’re very… intense.

From Zen Zen Zo’s production of “Zeitgeist,” 2008.

To close my very first blog post with Pi, I would like to talk about why I decided to intern with Pi Theatre and what I’ve been learning through the Prime Placements program. There has been a lot of bleak news about arts in Vancouver lately, but I think we have reason to be optimistic. I originally decided to intern with Pi to learn about the daily functioning of a professional theatre company in order to apply it to my own company. What I’ve learned, which I think is extremely valuable, is how to look at the arts from the business side of things. It may not be exactly creatively stimulating at times, but I think it’s what we’ll need to survive. I know we’re all convinced of the importance of the arts in our community, but we need to find new audiences who may not be and draw them into our theatres. Vancouver is not a cultural wasteland! Many interesting groups of artists from all disciplines gravitate here… and not just for the mountains. The average person just doesn’t know where to find us, so we need to find them. There’s a lot of work ahead of us to keep the arts community alive, but I think it’s worth fighting for. Maybe I already knew it, but that’s just one of many things I’ve been learning with Prime Placements at Pi.