HISTORY

Electric Company Theatre is a leading force in the Vancouver theatre scene: creating original work rich in spectacle and adventurous in form, strong in narrative and reaching a diverse and growing audience. The company was originally formed as a collective in 1996 by Kim Collier, David Hudgins, Jonathon Young and Governor General’s Award-winning writer Kevin Kerr, who met while training at Vancouver’s Studio 58. Their common respect for physical theatre, spectacle, adventurous narrative, new technology and visual art inspired the creation of their first show and the company that followed.

Now steered by the artistic team of Young and Collier, the company’s methodology has evolved but the creative process remains highly collaborative; blurring traditional boundaries between playwright, director, dramaturgy and design.

With a growing body of work, Electric Company has created a dozen original productions, toured eight times (Canada, USA, Scotland), wrote and directed a feature film for CBC and Screen Siren Pictures, and won the first Alcan Performing Arts Award for Theatre in 2001 in addition to multiple Jessie Awards. A resident company of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre for the past ten years, Electric Company recently moved on to co-found a 6000 sq ft theatre creation space in the Commercial Drive neighbourhood, Progress Lab 1422.

MISSION

Electric Company is dedicated to the creation of original works of theatre and the adaptation of existing texts with an emphasis on physical and visual imagery. Many of our projects are the result of collaborative writing with our scripts being co-authored by two or more members of the company. We strive to produce theatre that is life affirming, inspiring and provocative. Our work transports audiences to the frontiers of art, knowledge and human experience. We believe in theatre that is accessible financially and thematically. Our projects cross artistic disciplines and integrate new media. We wish to challenge the conventions of theatre while preserving a strong sense of story.

A key goal is to create a constructive and rewarding environment for artists, encouraging each member of a given project to think outside their traditional roles in the process of making a play. We are also committed to providing opportunities for emerging artists to work in large scale projects with established artists. We are active members of the theatre community having affiliations with several companies both large and small. Our projects have been the result of partnerships with community organizations, businesses, government, schools and individuals. We work to reach across cultures, backgrounds, economics, and ideology to find the universal elements that connect all members of our community

ARTISTIC IMPULSES: Recurring Investigations

We aim to defy audience expectations, and our love of theatrical spectacle drives us to work in expansive spaces – creating productions that go beyond the confines of the traditional stage to fully inhabit the venue and the audience. As with projects like No Exit and Tear the Curtain, the theatre itself is given a metaphoric presence and the role of the audience (the act of watching) becomes thematic content.

We have devised several plays where narrative is drawn directly from the venue; over the years our performances have inhabited a harbour, a swimming pool and a heavy equipment factory. This site-specific approach to storytelling extends to our work in traditional venues as well: our commissioned piece for the Arts Club Stanley Theatre is a film/theatre hybrid inspired by the Stanley’s dual identity as playhouse and historic cinema.

Frequently, our work looks to the past to define or uncover the present. These plays investigate the forces and historical figures that shape our perception of the modern world. We are fascinated by the role of technology in our lives, especially how it extends or replaces our physical senses. Invention, the obsession to change the world, the impulse to create, the spirit of the pioneer and the danger and promise of the frontier have been recurring themes in much of our work.

The tension between immediate and mediated remains a constant source of inspiration for a body of work that blends the boundary between stage and screen. The captivating, seductive allure of the ideal cinematic reproduction is in counterpoint with live presence, an athletic attempt at precision and the threat of the accidental. And while we are innovators in multimedia performance, we remain firm believers in the importance of live theatre to promote community interaction in the age of youtube.

As theatre-makers we continue to strive for a theatrical polyphony where narrative, choreography and design are developed in tandem, coexisting on stage without one element being subservient to the other. This continues to be a stimulating challenge within the expectation for popular theatre to be a purely narrative-driven art form.

Of course, this list is always in process. With each project we strive to build from what we know and to abandon it, jumping into territory we've never visited.