FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Theatre is all about knowing more about who we are. When the lights go down,
the clock stops and a different kind of time envelopes us. It stretches into an
extended moment, a moment of free response, something increasingly rare in
our daily lives. Because daily life is actually all we have; however precious it is
or we strive to make it, the imagination often struggles to be felt.
When we stand at the edge of the sea, or lift a child high against the sky,
or look deep into the eyes of another – with love or sadness or just pure
fascination – we are giving ourselves leave to experience what is outside of
time. This is precisely the gift of theatre. To give us the extended moment to
know what we think and what we feel. It gives us leave to know the beautiful,
the disturbing, the unspeakable strangeness of our selves.

When an actor or any of the artists who make this moment for us steps out of
the rehearsal room and onto the stage for the first time, it can be a terrifying
moment. Everything that was dreamed in the rehearsal room is suddenly made
real, a fully dimensional world which the actor will share with an audience,
night after night. And for you – our audience – stepping off the street and into
the theatre is no less uncanny. If it isn't, we haven't done our job!

In this, our first season of two for 2007, we steal our way into the lives of
ordinary people who've found themselves in extraordinary circumstances,
people who have tumbled their way into a life they've never imagined for
themselves. But which is suddenly made very real. This much they have in
common with us, the audience, as we leave behind what we thought we knew
only to discover we know far less than we imagined…

All the artists featured in the following pages will leave you in awe of that
complicated little thing that is humanity, and the unique ability of actors, even
when dressed in animal costumes and dancing in a spotlight, to bring
us closer to ourselves…

From the gods of Thespis to you -



Michael Kantor
Artistic Director

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