Professional Development
Regional Women Lead Master Classes and Professional Development Opportunities.
We’re thrilled to be able to offer these opportunities to local artists as part of Femme Folks Fest. All Master Classes and Opportunities are offered to participants at no charge and are a core mandate of the festival. We are grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of Regional Women Lead.
Regional Woman Directing in Music Theatre Masterclass
Led by Lezlie Wade
Presented with Unwrap Theatre
March 21@ 1pm-4pm
KWLT
9 Princess St. E., Waterloo ON N2J 2H4
Lezlie Wade is a director, writer and lyricist. Her most recent directing credits include An Ideal Husband and H.M.S Pinafore at the Stratford Festival. Also for the Stratford Festival, Lezlie has been assistant director on Fuente Ovejuna, As You Like It, A Word or Two (with Chris Plummer) and Jesus Christ Superstar, which she also worked on at the LaJolla Playhouse and on Broadway.
Other directing credits include The Twelve Pound Look and The Yalta Game at the Shaw Festival, Queen Milli of Galt at Theatre Aquarius, Dream A Little Dream at the London Grand, Obeah Opera for Panamania, Dog Sees God for Rubinoff Productions, Elegies and Man of No Importance for Musical Stage, for which she received a Dora nomination. She was also resident director on The Toxic Avenger for Dancap, and Love Loss and What I Wore for Roth/Rubinoff Productions.
Lezlie is an alum of the BMI workshop in NYC. Her musical production of The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen with collaborator, Daniel Green, has been optioned by Somerled Productions in New York and is slated for a world premiere with a major regional theatre in Canada for 2020. Prince Jen was workshopped at American Musical Theatre Projects in Chicago, and chosen for the ASCAP Dreamworks workshop (with Stephen Flaherty, Stephen Schwartz and Dick Scanlan) It was also part of the Bound for Broadway concert series at the Kauffman Center in New York. The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen was short-listed for the Tom Hendry Award for best new Canadian musical.
Lezlie is currently in pre-production on Spamalot for the 2020 Stratford Festival Season.
Viktorija will lead participants to collectively explore and discover object manipulation and to consider the possibilities and the importance of incorporating puppetry into contemporary theatre and performance creation. Participants will be directed through a set of physical theatre-based exercises and encouraged to devise a “scratch” performance using puppetry. This is an inclusive workshop for artists with all levels of experience and cultural backgrounds.
Why choose puppetry in a technologically driven world? Puppetry is a specialized art-form within the Performing Arts and has a deep root in contemporary and experimental theatre, and it is an ancient craft. By animating puppets, the performer denies themselves the vanity of presenting themselves and predominantly communicates using objects. The performer can create themselves a new and be perceived themselves a new. Puppetry has the capacity to reflect our world through the image and the illusion it creates, and this reflection can somehow be better received than the uncomfortable truth we live in. In this way, puppetry can serve politicized ideas and narratives, but also emote complexities and imagined worlds, through stylization and aesthetics, offering us a unique vision of the world we wish to live in. Through interpretation, synchronisation and animation, objects such as puppets, or raw materials, can build into an experiential whole in the imagination of the audience.