David Gagnon Walker was selected as the recipient of the 2019 Cole Foundation Mentorship for Emerging Translators.
David will be translating Gabrielle Chapdelaine’s La retraite with the dramatical support from Maureen Labonté.
David Gagnon Walker
David is a playwright, performer, dramaturg, and emerging translator from Edmonton working across Canada. His plays prioritize formal experimentation, integrating text-based drama with other modes of contemporary performance. They include: The Big Ship (winner of the 2018 Playwrights Guild of Canada RBC Emerging Playwright Award), Premium Content (Calgary, Major Matt Mason Collective, 2018), Pink Moon (winner of the 2017 Wildfire National Playwriting Competition, developed with Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal), Productive Time (Edmonton, Found Festival, 2017), One of Us Must Know (Edmonton, Chinook Series, 2016), and the libretto for the operetta Little Urban Green (Toronto Laptop Orchestra, 2015). Recent writing projects have focused in one way or another on the intersections of human experience, technology, and ecology. Devising new theatrical forms for staging this stuff in all its complexity is the core of David’s ongoing artistic search.
Dramaturgy includes The Observed Flight of Birds (Montréal, 2b Theatre/NTS, 2017), Trying to Listen While not Giving a Fuck, (Montréal, Surreal SoReal/Zone Homa, 2018), and the contemporary circus show Particle # B (Grenoble, France, 2018; 2019 tour to Australia and Finland). David’s translation of Jean Genet’s posthumously published play «Elle» received a public reading in 2017 with support from Maureen Labonté and the National Theatre School of Canada, and is in development with Toronto- based director Harrison Thomas. He also sometimes works as an actor and arts educator.
David is the 2019 RBC Emerging Artist-in-Residence with Halifax’s 2b Theatre Company. He holds an MA from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, and is in the final year of the playwriting program at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montréal.
Find him online at www.davidgagnonwalker.com
