Snow Angel: A Journey Home
Snow Angel was created out of a challenge we made to ourselves at Quest to tour Nationally and Internationally.
When I started creating Snow Angel, I had a few things in mind. I wanted it to look Canadian, which meant I wanted to set it in winter in Alberta. I also wanted it to be about kindness. In 2010 my son, Charlie was 5 and I wanted him to recognize that kindness was a sort of superpower in life: that being kind to everyone and can make the world a better place. I also do not consider myself a playwright, but, being a director, I feel I’m always telling stories with intentions, actions, music, lights, set designs and costumes. I didn’t and don’t feel smart enough to write a play with words, but I feel very comfortable communicating non-verbally. I decided to tell a story without text.
Armed with these parameters, I consulted the late and great Kathleen Foreman at the University of Calgary. Kathleen joined the U of C Drama Department specializing in Theatre for Young Audiences not long after I graduated. Someone suggested to me that I go talk to her about creation. I left our meeting full of bravery. She told me it would be personal and scary. She told me that there was this whole other artistic corner in me, not as a director where I interpreted plays, but as a creator where I got to tell my own story. She asked me how old I was, and I told her 43. She said, “That’s about right. Other successful artists of your age start to question if there is more to being an artist at around the age of 40.” Kathleen did not live to see the premiere of Snow Angel. I hope she knows how she inspired its development.
Although I felt encouraged to create, I needed some help. Workshops followed with the best and kindest creators I knew including Sean Kinley, Nathan Pronyshyn, Andy Curtis, Duval Lang, Jason Long, Graham Percy, Nicky Elson, and Alison Lynch. I remember Andy Curtis being especially helpful as I felt overwhelmed. Having experienced the collaborative creation process many times himself he said, “You are just sitting in a war zone of creative rubble. There may be 10 plays here, but you get to choose which pieces belong in YOUR play.” A little more torture in choosing the pieces, and a lot of help from Michelle Kneale from Alberta Playwright’s Network, and I had a script.
The next great leap came when Duval Lang was teaching at the University of Calgary; a summer TYA course and he became unavailable for three weeks of teaching. He asked me if I’d take his class. Initially I said no, I was the Artistic Director of Quest Theatre – I was too busy! He got me to agree to take the class by suggesting I could work on a new play with the students. I workshopped Snow Angel with 9 amazing students over two weeks’ time and conducting a workshop performance at an elementary school as part of it. It was a win/win! A process that I could never afford at Quest Theatre, and the students (including Andy Weir, Maya Simon, and Dani Driusso who later became Interns with Quest) dived into an authentic TYA play development process. At this point, my GM at Quest, Rose Brow, told me she thought we had something.
Nicola Elson, who now teaches TYA at the University of Lethbridge, told me it should be in mask. I retorted; this will NEVER be a mask piece. Then I met Peter Balkwill.
Peter Balkwill is one of the co-artistic directors of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, the Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry, and now professor at the U of C School for Creative and Performing Arts. I was fortunate enough to take his Banff Puppet Theatre Intensive along with the brilliant puppet maker and artisan, Juanita Dawn. This changed my artistic life. The main inspiration came from the notion that we all envision something from nothing. Pursuing that ‘something’ will never result in your original vision, but a new something it was always meant to be. So don’t get hung up on what it is supposed to be but pursue what it wants to be. I asked Pete if he would work with me on Snow Angel and he quickly became a ridiculously dedicated and playful collaborator and a lifelong friend.
Pictured (left to right): Ali Lynch and Jason Mancini in Snow Angel rehearsals 2014. Photographed by Nikki Loach.
Pete suggested a set of rehearsal masks made by Kate Braidwood from The Wonderheads for us to work with. We ordered a batch of 6 masks, and they were so exquisitely beautiful, we ended up using them in the final show. We added original music composed by Calgary’s own Juno Nominated Blue Grass superstar Tim Williams, and a beautiful production design by Montreal’s Loïc Lacroix Hoy. Juanita Dawn, of Long Grass Studios, made our sweet little bird puppet, and our final workshop got attention, and financial support, from Young People’s Theatre in Toronto.
We premiered the play in February of 2014. We subsequently toured it to Grand Prairie, Toronto, Saskatchewan, Philadelphia, Chicago, Manitoba, and proudly played an engagement at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, along with various Alberta Schools. We even received an offer to perform in China – although we declined as it was too expensive to execute. Not bad for our first kick at the can!
Snow Angel Premiere in 2014.
All in all, it has been a fascinating process and one that I am very proud of. I am very grateful to all the contributors, (not all listed here!) and by everyone’s contribution to the gargantuan effort needed to get a play up and out to the world.
Our ambition to get beyond our Alberta borders has lessened. After all, aren’t young people in Marda Loop as important as young people in China? We have lots of work to do here in Alberta to ensure every young person experiences theatre as an essential part of growing up. We produce high quality plays that can play for a national and international audiences, but we are dedicated to performing them right here in Alberta.
Play creation is not only personal and scary but it also takes much longer than you think and more help than you might imagine. Currently, the POV Ensemble and Col Cseke, Kunji Ikeda, Troy Emery Twigg, and Ali DeRegt are on similar quests to create TYA plays. Stay tuned for new, relevant, local creations for young audiences coming to an Alberta school near you!
I promise it will be worth the wait!
Nikki Loach
Artistic Director, Wife/Mom, Creator, Tinker-er, and Cheerleader of Creation
Pictured (left to right): Matthew McKinney, Jason Mancini, Alexa Elser, Nikki Loach in Snow Angel rehearsals 2022. Photograph by Serenella Argueta.