Stranger Theatre Mandate
Stranger Theatre is an artist-run company that uses history, literature and folktales as a springboard through which to tell new stories through a variety of means, incorporating physical theatre, found text and objects, video, clown, various forms of puppetry, live music, song, and original writing. The group’s focus is the creation of new pieces, adapting old texts into new forms, and producing work which uses public space in unconventional ways.
Stranger Theatre History
Stranger Theatre is an independent theatre company run by core artists Kate Cayley, Lea Ambros and Sarah Cormier. Stranger Theatre was founded by Kate Cayley, Kilby Smith-McGregor, Simone Rosenberg and Lea Ambros in 2001 in Toronto. These artists came together out of a desire to create work that was unconventional, visually beautiful, and concerned with retelling and reshaping old stories into new forms. Over the years, we have developed a very specific practice that focuses on a combination of performer-driven and text-based work, borrowing from traditions of physical theatre, collective creation and devised theatre while also anchoring our storytelling in a strong narrative and vivid writing. Our work strives for a spirit of free play, collaboration and risk, married to intellectual and physical rigour and an understanding that images are only as powerful as the story they tell and the characters they illuminate. Past work includes East of the Sun, West of the Moon, a retelling of a Norse folktale combining physical theatre, puppetry and masks; The Yelllow Wallpaper Project, an adaptation of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story about motherhood, medicine and madness; The Clown of God, which re-imagined an Italian folktale as set in the aftermath of the second world war; LUZ, which combined an eighteenth century Jewish folktale with the work of twentieth century artist Jakob Steinhardt; The Counterfeit Marquise, an adaptation of a classic French “wonder tale” about a young boy who grows up to be a beautiful girl, told through performers, puppets and a number of music boxes; The World Turned Upside Down, an outdoor theatre piece telling the story of the seventeenth century revolutionaries the Diggers; Käthe Kollwitz, about the life of the German Expressionist artist, and and what Alice found there, a multi-media theatre piece based on the life and work of Lewis Carroll, using physical theatre, puppetry, slides video projection and some tap dancing to look at the history of nineteenth-century photography, cartography and popular science as seen through the bizarre world of Alice. The company has performed at the HERE Arts Centre, New York City, and as part of The Istanbul International Puppet Festival (Istanbul, Turkey), Puppet Uprising (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), The Flying Brick (Richmond, Virginia), Radicackalacky Theatre Festival (Chapel Hill, North Carolina), Catcall and Le Pocket Palace (Montreal), The Black Sheep Puppet Festival (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) the On The Waterfront Festival (Halifax), Rhubarb! (Toronto), SummerWorks (Toronto), Groundswell (Toronto), LadyFest Midwest (Chicago, Illinois), The LabCab Festival (Toronto), The Red Festival (Toronto) and The Cooking Fire Theatre Festival (Toronto), as well as staging independent indoor and outdoor work in both Toronto and Halifax, in theatres, parks, warehouses, skating rinks, bars, bookshops and studios. The company’s past work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Laidlaw Foundation and the Ontario Trillium Foundation.