“The Nikki Loach Approach”

 By Constantine Anastasakis

Let me quickly set the scene: November 2021 (after eight months of Covid-related delays, recasting two major roles, and deciding to shift gears from a full production to a hybrid live/digital staged reading,) I finally staged a three-day workshop of my original science fiction play, Imperfect Symmetry, at the West Village Theatre. This play is the first in a tryptic of gritty, transgressive, high-concept science fiction plays in the tradition of Karl Čapek’s R.U.R. and Mac Rogers’ virtuosic Honeycomb trilogy, stylistically inspired by in-yer-face theatre and contemporary tech noir film. The last person I expected to see at a performance was Nikki Loach of Calgary’s Quest Theatre, and to double down on the unexpected—after watching a play that included scenes depicting infanticide, self-mutilation, mature sexual themes, and one highly-abstract and expressionistic climactic scene from the perspective of a malfunctioning AI that the cast and I affectionately dubbed the “digital nightmare sequence”—the artistic director of the most well-established theatre for young audiences company in the city approached me afterward to commend me on the script, and a week later, invited me via email to assistant direct an upcoming remount of a touring TYA show, Snow Angel.

A little context: I completed my MFA in Directing in 2019, and in the spring of 2020, Covid-19 lockdowns necessarily cancelled all live theatre effectively halting the momentum of a number of upcoming projects that I had been planning (and what felt like my career). A PSA for non-theatre artists: making theatre doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it often takes years between inception and production—of script workshopping and rewrites, dramaturgy, more dramaturgy, failed grant applications, budgeting, equipment rentals, booking venues and rehearsal halls, not to mention the creative process of rehearsing, staging, and designing and coordinating set and sound and lights, etc.—especially for independent artists who end up shouldering many of these roles themselves. Suffice to say, the last two years were jarring for the arts and for artists. During that time, I have seized on some pretty incredible opportunities to work digitally, including a foray into writing and directing audio plays (including one particularly extraordinary podplay adaptation of Henry V with a companion app and immersive AR components that premiered at Luminato in Toronto), helming the Europa New Works Incubator with Jupiter Theatre, digital dramaturgy on a new script through Assembly Theatre with Michael Ross Albert, and assistant directing a filmed production of Spring Awakening with Storybook Theatre (with a big fat etcetera tacked onto the end of this list). Now, two years later, I am enrolled in a two-year after-degree Bachelor of Education at the University of Calgary and, for the first time since March 2020, am feeling firm ground under my feet. 

But beginning my transition to a new career in education has come with its own arc of personal dilemmas and questions, and this experience with Quest Theatre couldn’t have been better timed. I have friends who have been teaching for years, so naturally I have attended my fair share of Jr. High drama productions in schools that aren’t equipped with traditional theatre spaces—necessitating school productions being staged out of gymnasiums under static fluorescent lighting—and I have recently found myself wondering about my future making theatre with young students under these circumstances. With Snow Angel, Nikki and the cast effortlessly turned the linoleum flooring of the Morpheus space into an ice rink, a wad of red felt into a cardinal, and about 500 crumpled sheets of blank white printer paper into a fresh dump of snow. Being in the room with Nikki and the cast of Snow Angel felt like attending a masterclass in clown, puppetry, and stagecraft, and effectively refreshed my perspective on staging a play in a school gym. One particularly salient lesson I learned from Nikki through this experience was that theatre for young audiences is no more or less complex than theatre for adults: children are people, and people need theatre, and theatre is theatre. Period.

Transcendental theatre experiences don’t need to be limited to traditional theatre spaces because the space itself is seldom where the audience is: in the case of Snow Angel, the audience of elementary school students is transported to a quaint Canadian suburb (maybe not unlike their own) and introduced to a pair of hockey-loving, mischievous-but-well-intentioned siblings (in some cases, perhaps not unlike themselves) who develop a heart-warming relationship with a stern, elderly neighbour with whom they end up having a lot in common, not the least of which being a need for a friend (and, of course, hockey). It’s a story about community. It’s a story about reciprocity. It speaks to an intergenerational dissonance we’ve all felt at some point in our lives, and reminds us that we have more in common than we think and plenty to learn from one another, especially coming out of this pandemic (not to mention perhaps some of the most politically divisive years in recent history). Because this production was a remount, I came onboard just in time to help tie the bow on top, but in just a few days I learned a lot about Nikki’s process making TYA and some of the mechanics of setting up a locally touring production.

Nikki Loach is an artist who is capable of wearing a multiplicity of hats (often at the same time), and has a keened understanding of how to effortlessly touch the nerve of our collective experience while activating our imaginations and sense of play. One of the key elements that makes this play work is the audience’s role in establishing the world: a gymnasium full of elementary schoolers ball up sheets of white paper and pelt the stage with a flurry of snow that sets the stage for the top of the play. Getting to know Nikki over Snow Angel’s brief rehearsal period was a truly unique and unexpected gift, and I am grateful for the warm welcome and the opportunity to spend a little time in the world of this play.