Each year, Bard on the Beach welcomes almost a hundred new and returning Company members to our rehearsal halls and stages. Last week, we introduced our New to Bard series, which highlights some of the artists who are making their Bard debuts this Season. If you missed last week’s post, you can read more about the Acting Company here.

This week, we’re thrilled to be turning the spotlight onto our talented creative team. Learn more about some of the new faces in our creative team who are helping to bring our productions to life!

Dana Gee for the Vancouver Sun

Publishing date: Jul 29, 2022

On-set support a growing field, helping actors throw back the covers in intimate scenes

Love scenes are not that lovely for actors.

It’s the job of the intimacy co-ordinator to make those manufactured moments less nerve-wracking — and to ensure the safety of the performers.

As "an actor's advocate," intimacy coordinators help with intimate scenes on set. They also do so much more, including supporting young performers and babies and answering questions from families.

Before intimacy coordinators were an official title, parts of the work was often done by a combination of the wardrobe department, directors, and even stunt coordinators.

Last month, four B.C.-based intimacy coordinators made SAG-AFTRA's intimacy coordinator registry for film and television.

“You’ve come to the right place. Exactly where you are…. So c’mon.” – Episode 0, Would You Wander

Yesterday I went on a stroll by the river. And there was a friendly voice in my ear.

The Blue Hour, SkirtsAfire’s main stage production for 2020, is notable for bringing an emerging job description to a theatre stage in Edmonton.

The job is that of intimacy director (also known as intimacy coordinator, particularly in film and television). The position — which has gained prominence since the #MeToo movement — sees trained professionals ensuring that scenes involving nudity or sex, or other forms of touching, are done following rules of communication and conduct to ensure the safety and comfort of performers.

As cliché as it is to say, you will never experience another performance like StoneMarrow Theatre’s interpretation of Crave. This play will make you question your own understanding of memory, depression, desire, love, failure—there aren’t enough nouns in the human language. This play is all dialogue and physical movement and watching it is like playing a game of emotional squash—with all the screaming, sweating, and bodily contortions you can imagine. 

“It’s a disorienting, visceral and immersive stream of consciousness experience, made even more powerful by this quartet of performers. They’ve mastered the script…”

When Samantha Jeffery and Perry Gratton decided to form StoneMarrow Theatre, it was because they spoke the same theatre language.

After working together to produce and direct a 2017 Fringe show called A Beautiful View by Canadian playwright Daniel McIvor, they discovered a joint taste for risky, often heartbreaking material produced in a way that has meaning for both the artists and the audience.

Like all art, theatre is made to be entertaining, somewhat relatable, and most importantly, challenging. Late British playwright Sarah Kane took that last point to heart and became something of an outcast in the 1990s for her practice of ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre—a form that broke away from conventional drama and was often criticized by the upper British middle class for being extremely violent and vulgar. Kane has three plays, Blasted, Cleansed, and Phaedra’s Love, that fall under the In-Yer-Face umbrella, but her 1998 play Crave—while still touching on darker themes such as suicide, loss, and assault—is much more subtle and poetic. Perhaps this is why it caught the eye of Perry Gratton and Samantha Jeffery’s little Edmonton theatre company, StoneMarrow Theatre. 

It’s 1888, and that Swedish rascal August Strindberg has done it again. In his best naturalistic style, he’s written a play about a bored aristocratic young lady named Miss Julie, who goes searching for sexual adventure below stairs, and finds a ready accomplice with the well-travelled, cultured Jean, her father’s valet. Scandalous!

In 2003, English playwright Patrick Marber updated the tale and set it in 1945 just as Churchill’s Tory Party was defeated. It may be six decades even later but, apparently, little has changed in the effects social structures have on relationships.

The balance in this excellent Max Rubin production shifts back and forth while challenging our own perceptions of who these people are, and what they represent.

We sat down with Samantha Jeffery, one of our 2020 Nordic & Cloutier Family Innovation Award recipients. This annual award provides one local artist, group, or company with up to $2,500 in funding towards professional development, training, innovation, and/or special project development.

Sharing a first kiss with a stranger can be unnerving. Sharing that kiss in front of a captive audience can be truly daunting.

For decades, theatre and film scenes involving sex or intimacy were staged by directors with little experience in establishing safe boundaries for the performers. Or actors were left to their own devices.

Now there is a new player behind the scenes.

Since the "Me Too" movement, there's been growing demand for "intimacy directors" in stage and film productions. We talk to one about her work in the local theatre scene…

A chat with After the House Lights about the Edmonton International Fringe Festival.

Our Summer Stock series continues: We sit down with Sam Jeffery of #YEGTheatreStats to chat about the gender balance of creative teams in Edmonton theatres, and how a display of hard numbers might make a difference for representation for future seasons.

Professional theatre artist Samantha Jeffery is here to discuss her pilot project: #YEGTheatreStats - a professional theatre database of jobs in the Edmonton theatre industry based on gender. We go over how Sam collects and presents her data; the nuance of creating categories and sub-categories in order to make her spreadsheet accurate, yet readable; and we also talk about how vital a public database of this sort is for those seeking to recognize their hiring trends within the Edmonton theatre community.

An interview with Samantha Jeffery.

An interview with Kory Mathewson about the creation of Dirt City.