Single Thread is proud to sponsor OUR HOUSE, a live performance made through collective collaboration performed at Kingston institution The Grad Club .
Through two years of development with Mariah Horner, Kyle Holleran and Tracey Guptill interviewing past bartenders and Grad Club general manager Virginia Clark, Mariah and Tracey have written a script that continues to be workshopped through Tracey’s collective creation model the coLABoratory, inviting over 30 members of the community in on sound, music, and thought LABs to create OUR HOUSE.
OUR HOUSE is a live performance meditation about generational activism housed within the Grad Club, Queen’s campus and Kingston at large. OUR HOUSE fuses sound art, performance, and movement to explore three activist timelines, discovered through oral history and archival history research. It was co-created by Kingston-based artists Mariah Horner and Tracey Guptill.
Tracey Guptill brings her recent training at École Philippe Gaulier in France back to her work in Kingston, where she has performed in shows like Ambrose , Anybody Can Be Pussy Riot and the feature film LIVE in Kingston . She has also dramaturged work for Kingston’s Kick and Push Festival and Erin Ball’s LEGacy Circus.
Mariah Horner returns to making original work in Kingston with her collective Cellar Door Project , after a few years of freelance directing, digital work with SpiderWebShow’s foldA and Theatre Kingston’s Storefront Fringe Festival . Since 2012, Cellar Door Project has made 14 original site-specific works in Kingston and Ottawa including their smash hit New & Used at Brian’s Record Option and Tall Ghosts and Bad Weather in the second ever Kick & Push Festival.
Along with Mariah Horner and Tracey Guptill , OUR HOUSE stars and was interpreted by Gananoque-based AMDA graduate Liam Bidmead as an actor and a sound designer and well-known Kingston-based contemporary dance artist and choreographer with Movement Market Kay Kenney. Ottawa artist Connor Price-Kelleher production manages and Rachel Shaen, a grad of the Dan School of Drama and Music and recent graduate of University of BC’s MFA in Lighting, lighting designs the show.
ABOUT CELLAR DOOR PROJECT
The Cellar Door Project is a Kingston based site-specific theatre collective dedicated to animating community spaces through live performance. Founded in 2012 by a collective of Queen’s Students, Cellar Door Project has since created 14 original works in Kingston and Ottawa. Be it theatre, film, or installation, CDP reflects a community’s past and present back to them by telling their stories in the spaces they originally happened. So far, these spaces have included City Park, the cemetery at Queen and Montreal, the basement of City Hall, Brian’s Record Option, The Royal Tavern, the remains of an 19th century observatory, and the Diefenbunker. CDP has produced in first two Kick & Push Festivals, the National Arts Centre Canada Scene and have been commissioned by CSArt Ottawa and the Ottawa Storytellers.
ABOUT ANARC THEATRE
anARC Theatre loves to create collaboratively, having brought to life three co-productions in Kingston: When I Get There, Anybody Can Be Pussy Riot (the Storefront Festival’s Best in Fest), and OUR HOUSE. Upcoming is Hidden Histories, a circus based piece at Lake Ontario Park this August, with Erin Ball, Jane Kirby and Deaf Spirit Theatre. Our creation method, the coLABoratory, was developed as a part of a Master’s thesis experimenting with how art can respond meaningfully to the environmental crises. We believe in the inspirational creative power of bringing people together in rooms and making beauty.