(VANCOUVER FRINGE)
Pyropornomania originated as a strange whim in a jilted lovers brain. After getting dumped on his ass by Des, Ben is forced to accept his inner desires as he struggles to come to terms with the wreckage of his life.
(Edmonton & Vancouver Fringe)
The 2001 Fringe Tour remount of the Vancouver Production
(Fringe 2002)
The grade Sixes of Anderson Elementary have waged a bitter war against the grade Sevens of Jacobs Junior High for as long as time can tell. Reeling from a recent attack, the Sixes are enacting a cunning and fiendish retaliation. But the Sixes are a grade divided, and the real war rages within their ranks. A Resistance has risen to counter the war, and rumors of a Prophecy have split the curtain behind which dark machinations work to consolidate power, and perpetuate the conflict once more
Wedgie was born of a collaborative workshop process organized and facilitated by Upintheair Theatre Society. Upintheair brought together an ad hoc group of six actors: Steve Handlesman, Nicole Leroux, Daniel Martin, David Mott, Melissa Robertson and Jason Rothery.
With the collaborative process underway, key issues quickly took shape.
(PRESENTATION HOUSE)
Winner: On the House Co-Presenting Program. Presentation House Theatre North Vancouver
Guy, a bright but hopelessly thin-skinned, idealistic, romantically self-sabotaging community newspaper journalist is searching for fulfillment, truth, and love. Forsaking a traditional focus on great loves or single relationships, this play examines how we grow and develop through the multitude of loves in our lives, and how the people from our past never truly go away, they just hang out in the backs of our heads and the corners of our rooms.
Men of the World is a sexy, fast paced look at seven years in the lives of four young Vancouverites searching for love and happiness. This new comedy is one part Friends, one part Sex in the City, and all parts an original Vancouver story.
(Vancouver & Calgary Fringe 2006)
Two inmates try to keep from being eaten alive in a morally bankrupt future prison system. Take one part French farce, one part existential angst, add a dash of Machiavellian survival instinct and you have Moxie.
Moxie is a ruthless social satire addressing our cutthroat corporate culture; a dystopian absurdist comedy about the prisons we’re born into, and those we create for ourselves. Jason Patrick Rothery’s script pokes holes in our collective illusion of security. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, no matter how often you do the right thing, you still end up as next morning’s breakfast.
Jason Patrick Rothery wrote Moxie as part of a twenty-four hour play festival at the Winnipeg Fringe in 2002. Drawn from frustration at the star-rating system used by media across Canada to review Fringe shows, the play lashes out at a far larger target: the ways in which we assign and perceive value and the importance of any individuals work in our society. Moxie was first produced as a site-specific installation by Upintheair Theatre as a fundraiser for the first Walking Fish. Performed in a dark industrial basement on the outskirts of downtown Vancouver to a packed audience.
What drives us to excess? And what drives us to stop? 120bpm explores the hilarious comedy, uplifting joy, mind-boggling boondoggle, and the heartbreaking consequences that come with partying all the time, within the stunning imaginative visual framework of the blossoming 1990’s rave scene.
Saturday Night. The bass beat all around you. The sweet smell of sweat and pot. People hugging, touching, clutching. Chasing cheap love from thirty dollar pills. The dance dies, night fades, lights on. Everyone looks so dirty. You enter into the morning. The sun sucking at your face. Smoke your last smoke. Sunday.
120bpm is a site-installed performance devised through a public play creation process with live DJ taking place at a Secret Warehouse Location near 2nd & Main. True stories taken from Vancouverites who participated in the cities all-night dance parties, club, and rave scenes form the core of this compelling magic-realist myth about the loss of innocence and the power of dreams.
Art making is a public act. We believe that play creation is meant to be shared with the community. In an effort to engage the public in this unique experience, we joined together with volunteers in the winter 2005 for two snowy days to share stories and life experiences in the all night dance party scene, to create the ground work for a new play based on the Rave phenomenon of the 1990’s.
The result: 120bpm a Site Specific Rave Memory
Andy Simpson, Ann Skelhorne, Billy Marchenski, Emily Nixon, Jeff Fischer, Kelsey Kilburn, Maria Isabelle Rastan, Penny Weaver, Robin Anderson, Sarah Bynoe, Sarah Edmondson, Vanessa Clark & Vic Ustare
Johnny Grant is A Rollicking Adventure Story of Mountain Men, Indian Braves, of Wars and Fortunes won and lost, of Rebellion, Betrayal, Love, Polygamy, and the Death and Birth of a Way of Life. And two guys in a 35 year old van crossing the Continental Divide, again and again. An ambitious theatrical and historical undertaking, Johnny Grant: A Rollicking Adventure Story blends traditional theatrical forms, video installation, unique puppetry, and robust physical performance. Upintheairs’ new play takes the audience on a thrilling ride into the intersection of History, the Search for Ancestry, and Good Story.
The Wagabondi is a 1973 Dodge X-Plorer van that has seen distant parts of North America: comic road trips, extensive research expeditions, extreme good times, and wild journeys through space and time. You have to get in the van to learn to love it! The only thing an audience member can be sure of in Wagabondi Ho! is: a free cup of tea and an unforgettable show.
Wagabondi Ho! is an ongoing performance for a small audience. Every 30 minutes, a 4 person audience is invited into our magical van for a cup of tea and a story. The fluid nature of Wagabondi Ho! means every performance is different: You never know what you’re gonna get and neither do we!
(Bridge Mix produced by ITSAZOO)
A man falls to his death in a desperate search for rescue. So deep in their own self-absorption, the witnesses cannot, will not or do not know how to answer. In a world obsessed with the next digital device, the Stanley cup playoffs and the puzzles of personal pondering, it’s hard to see what’s important around us. A theatrical blending of technology, physical performance and traditional narrative: Upintheair asks, “Did you get your free iPhone yet?”
(Genus Theatre Co-Production)
A father’s death reunites Deirdre with her three adult children. The eldest, Rex, is homeless. Lewis is the fussy middle child with an unhealthy attachment to expensive running shoes and their sister, Sandra, shuns emotion for designer dresses. Together they attempt to plan their father’s final passage with what one would hope to be a sense of tender urgency and intimacy. But in a play that is at once unsettling and hysterical, both bleak and hopeful, the family is so consumed with serving their own needs first that the actual funeral seems doomed from the start.
(Genus Theatre Co-Production)
Set in as sinister an old library as one is likely to come across, presided over by a portrait of a grim faced, mad eyed old man, there, a dusty lawyer reads a will to an equally sinister family. One member has werewolf tendencies, another wanders around in a toga like Julius Caesar and a third is a gentle old lady who plants more than just seeds in her flowerbeds.
By the third act, there are more corpses than live members left in the cast and nothing is as it seems to be. All is revealed as the plot twists and turns to its surprising conclusion!
Foster Bryant is a brilliant scientist who has made a startling discovery, which he imagines is destined to save a world teetering on the inevitable catastrophic consequences of extreme overpopulation. He has genetically modified a new strain of rice to ease the suffering of starving and malnourished people across the globe. In the process, his humble corporation has blossomed into the world’s single-largest agribusiness conglomerate. Now, Foster will ship his grain to Africa – free of charge – to save his fellow global citizens. And there is another lifelong dream on the way to being fulfilled: he is about to become a father.
But evidence is starting to arise implicating the grain in a serious genetic birth defect. With the clock ticking on his enormous shipment, with three recalcitrant African nations as of yet unwilling to allow his rice across their borders, with a powerful Senate aide insisting that Foster inherited toxic Army contracts that he must honour through his last hostile takeover, and with potential disaster looming on the most intimate possible front – his unborn child – Foster plunges down the rabbit-hole in a desperate bid to uncover the truth that lies inside the seed…
Inside The Seed was a proud recipient of a Residency at the Cultch in 2012, and benefited from the donation of space in the VanCity Culture Lab to develop the script and design concepts.
Winner: Outstanding New Script
Winner: Outstanding Direction – Small Theatre
Nomination: Outstanding Production of a Play – Small Theatre
Nomination: Significant Artistic Achievement – Small Theatre
Nomination: Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Lead Role – Small Theatre
After a ruthless military faction has seized power in Washington, D.C., the future of the US is in the hands of State Department bureaucrat Carlton Berg. On the run from the Capitol carrying the new administration’s top-secret enemies list, Berg is incarcerated in a police station in Lodus, Missouri – a small and backward Ozark town. As Department of Homeland Security agents close in, he must convince an unwilling set of confidants – an unsympathetic police chief, a law-abiding administration assistant, and a motor-mouthed fellow prisoner – of his plans to expose the new regime.
Inspired by real-life US government initiatives – the Readiness Exercise 1984, and Main Core – the premise of play is unnervingly plausible and highly apt in light of Bill C-51, Edward Snowden’s revelations, and Chicago’s Homan Square detainment scandal.
Winner: Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Lead Role – Small Theatre
Winner: Outstanding Direction – Small Theatre
Winner: Outstanding Production of a Play – Small Theatre
Nomination: Significant Artistic Achievement – Small Theatre
Nomination: Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role – Small Theatre
(The Only Animal Co-Production)
Presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (this link will open in a new window)”. A new co-production from two Jessie award-winning companies, Upintheair Theatre, The City and The City is an immersive, interactive theatrical experience. Like a matrushka doll, the mystery hides another mystery of who you really are, and the city in which you live. When a young woman is murdered, Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Besael Extreme Crime Squad is plunged into a perilous investigation that risks kindling long-simmering tensions between the two cities, and provoking the panoptic agents that oversee their now corroding boundaries.
Adapted from author China Mielville’s multi-award winning novel, The City and The City is a highly participatory theatrical experience; equal parts dystopic science fiction, film noir, and murder mystery. Using emergent audio technology, the audience receives clues for actions, text and characterization to bring the story to life in real time.
The City and The City unfurls across Ul Qoma and Bezel, two “split” cities which occupy the same geographical space, but operates distinct social, cultural, and political entities. Conditioned from birth, the citizens in these overlapping cities must unsee one another, and transgressors are disappeared by an invisible police force known only as Breach.
They have 1 hour to write a short script with subjects chosen by our very own audience, in the genre of speculative fiction. WHAT the F* is is speculative fiction? Narrative exploring real and important ideas about what is happening in the world right now, through an intelligent eye on the near future. Dystopian reality-esque. Examples: Black Mirror, 1984, the Handmaid’s Tale. Get it?
The playwrights write live at a table in front of the crowd, they have the option to use noise-canceling headphones. While they are writing, we will be running a SCI-FI TRIVIA competition and the bar will be open.
(Cultch Mainstage)
160 years in the future, a vastly changed climate and a creeping fungal plague has trapped the last remnants of the human race in a hermetically sealed biosphere. In a desperate gamble to preserve the species, Ever Pickwas-Holtz, the last descendant of the brave scientists of the Next Earth Project, works to complete an ark – an embryo ship that will carry Earth’s genetic legacy to a new home in space, while also caring for Ommie, the last living sea otter. With the launch looming closer and closer, Ever records messages to the potential future colonists, a cautionary history of humanity’s conflicted relationship with the natural world. But while her tales for the future children of Earth may be intended to shape our new beginning, Ever’s growing uncertainty about both humanity’s future – and her own – cannot help but leak through.
As Ever struggles to explain our checkered ecological past, Adam, her genetically-engineered childhood friend, has begun to suspect that launching the Ark will exhaust the facilities fuel reserves and condemn both of them to death. With the fate of the human race in the balance, tensions mount in their fragile Biosphere, and a series of strange occurrences outside reveal an even more terrifying possibility: There’s something alive outside the facility, and it would very much like to come in.
Using multiple forms of puppetry to evoke the natural world and our desecration of, and estrangement from it, A Brief History of Human Extinction paints a portrait of a world irrevocably altered by human progress, and asks: Is extinction a catastrophe? A natural process? The inevitable result of human progress? And if it is, what does it mean if we’re causing our own?
Four Vancouver based companies have been commissioned to create an evening of 15-20 minute short performances examining the same theme. The theme for 2019 is: The Shape of the Galaxy.
Why The Array? In Astrophysics, an array is a group of satellites and telescopes which can be trained on a single phenomena to provide a more detailed, nuances, and multi-dimensional understanding of the subject than could be gained by a single instrument. The Array proposed the teams of artists as telescopes.
A composition for slants, hand tools, gravity, and Velcro Piano. Driven by stubborn curiosity, Big Bang Bang plays irresponsibly with some pretty elemental properties of physics, with (literal) construction and deconstruction, and largely: with the properties of Velcro. We’re going to get loud, get stuck, get inverted, and try to figure out how it all began.
Relation and the unknown. Collaborators explore the precarious space between otherness and togetherness. When we find ourselves faced with fundamental uncertainty, how do we make sense of ourselves, our perceptions, and one another? Through formal experimentation with movement, text, and theatrical artifice, they use these questions to explore ideas surrounding agency and subjectivity.
Sonic array explores light and darkness. The light we’ll never see is a spacy song cycle touching on the complicated relationship between creative and destructive cosmic forces, the bond between speculation and technology, and how discovery inspires both humour and horror.
A man, his chair, and a pact to never leave his room. tarman is a dark comedy about a man and the hungry sucking loneliness that has led him to lock himself in his room for the rest of his life. Through his very unpopular VLOG – Daryl (aka Starman) will take his internet “friends” on a journey into his chosen exile. But Starman’s isolation may lead him to confront a part of himself he never knew existed.
Upintheair Theatre’s 2nd iteration of the two of three years commissioning series The Array! Four Vancouver based companies have been commissioned to create an evening of 15-20 minute short performances examining the same theme. The theme for 2020 is: First Contact.
Why The Array? In Astrophysics, an array is a group of satellites and telescopes which can be trained on a single phenomena to provide a more detailed, nuances, and multi-dimensional understanding of the subject than could be gained by a single instrument. The Array proposed the teams of artists as telescopes.
Touch. Contact. Sweat. Droplets. Jam-packed with raw, unfiltered contact (with proper protection) between Derek Chan and Pedro Chamale (co-artistic directors of rice & beans theatre), what it would take for you to take my hand again is a meditation on the absurdity of the way things were, how we have adapted, and how we continue to roll with it.
You are invited to participate in The Dead Letter Office, a theatrical letter mail experience by Popcorn Galaxies! In this interactive letter exchange, you’ll be writing and receiving mysterious handwritten letters delivered across time and space. Inspired by the phenomenon of lost, undeliverable, and misdirected mail that finds its way into the postal service’s office for “dead letters,” this strange and delightful project attempts to create curious connections and deliver otherwise impossible messages.
In this new production from the House of Rice, drag artists Shay Dior, Maiden China, Skim, and Kara Juku share the importance of human contact by navigating through a socially distant future. From early on, we are raised as social beings and encouraged to form connections with one another. When faced with social isolation, in what ways do we cope with losing so much of how we live? Through a series of performances, the narrative follows Mother of the House of Rice, Shay Dior, in exploring the depths of loneliness in an alternate space, and trying to connect with their chosen family.
Indigenous perspectives on doom scrolling and online dating.
(Presented by The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Association with Rumble Theatre)
When disaster strikes and the world we know melts away, how will you react? Upintheair Theatre and the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts have teamed up with Revelations Consulting to help you answer that question in this state-of-the-art disaster preparedness scenario.
Revelations combines live performance and an interactive game bundled in an at-home escape room kit. It’s experienced in two parts: first from the comfort of your home, then from an undisclosed location on the Shadbolt Centre’s grounds. After signing up you’ll receive your Scenario Kit and a walkie talkie, hand-delivered by one of our Revelations Consultants. That evening, you’ll tune in to our dedicated frequency for further instructions—how you choose to survive will be up to you.
Experience Upintheair Theatre’s speculative fiction performance series, The Array, returns for the third installment with three short original works presented between Dec. 1 – 3, 2022. Newly commissioned themed works will be staged by theatre companies Art Action Earwig, Wake of Vultures, and Upintheair Theatre. All performances will be based on the theme of Beyond the Knowledge of Humankind, inspired by recent discoveries in astrophysics.
What is The Array: In astrophysics, an array is a group of satellites and telescopes that can be trained on a single phenomena to provide a more detailed, nuanced, and multi-dimensional understanding of the subject than could be gained by a single instrument. The Array proposes artists as telescopes.
Art Action Earwig is an interdisciplinary multimedia and performance collective composed of Wryly Andherson, Minah Lee, and Tadafumi Tamura, based between Nanaimo and Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territories. We live and work on the lands of the Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo) and Snaw-Naw-As (Nanoose) peoples of Vancouver Island and the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Lower Mainland. Our work is also situated in South Korea and Japan where our members’ distant homes and families are. Formed in early 2020 by founding members Minah and Wryly during the early days of Covid-19, we operate in the spirit of mutual aid in pursuing and sustaining art practices through gestures that resist colonial legacies. In 2022 Tadafumi joined the team, after a series of creative exchanges and discussions throughout the pandemic, brooding over our shared concerns.
Learn more: https://www.earwig.space/
Formed in 2013, A Wake of Vultures (WOV) is a project-based interdisciplinary performance company. WOV is a research, development, and producing vehicle for the works of its three members: Nancy Tam (music, sound design, theatre), Daniel O’Shea (film, theatre), and Conor Wylie (theatre). Switching between individual and collective project leadership, we connect with local, national, and international communities through collaboration and touring.
Learn more: https://wakeofvultures.com/
Upintheair Theatre has been producing original and provocative theatre in Vancouver since 2000. The company presents rEvolver Festival each spring, showcasing contemporary performance work by emerging and early mid-career artists. Past productions include Revelations (2021), The Array: The Shape of The Galaxy (2019), A Brief History of Human Extinction (2018), The City and The City (2017) co-produced with The Only Animal at PuSh Festival, The North Plan (2016) which won three Jessie Awards in the Small Theatre category, and Inside The Seed (2013) which won Jessie Awards for Outstanding Direction (Small Theatre) and Best New Script. Recent online presentations include rEvolver Festival (2021) as well as The Array: First Contact and eVolver Festival (2020).