Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal (PWM) in partnership with Anna Dupuis Zuckerman are pleased to announce the participants of the first-ever EstérELLE residency. Taking place from October 12 to 19, 2019, this week-long residency is focused on the development of new plays by English Language Québec female and female-identifying playwrights. The residence is located in Estérel, Quebec, where the playwrights will be offered the time and space to think, write, and exchange ideas in a quiet environment. PWM dramaturg Fatma Sarah Elkashef will be on site for dramaturgical consultation.
Find more information about the participants below.
THE PARTICIPANTS
ALEXIS DIAMOND
Play in development: Trixie Parker Finds a Boyfriend: The Musical
Alexis Diamond is a Montreal-based playwright, opera librettist, translator and theatre curator. Her award-winning plays, operas and translations for audiences of all ages have been presented across Canada, in the U.S. and in Europe. She also collaborates with several international artists on performance-installations involving text, movement and sound. In 2019, Alexis Diamond served as co-artistic director of the Jamais Lu festival, where she also presented a bilingual play, Faux-amis, with co-author Hubert Lemire, with support from the CALQ. In 2018, Alexis joined a multiyear project led by professor Erin Hurley (McGill University) on the history of Quebec’s English-language theatre.
CAITLIN MURPHY
Play in development: It takes a village. But the village is gone.
Caitlin is a writer, director and dramaturg based in Montreal. In addition to her work in theatre, she has written and directed short films, including Flushing Lacan et TOAST, which both won the Jury Award at the Montreal ACTRA Short Film Festival. She recently created a web-series called Mothers Try, which she wrote, directed and performs in. This past season, Caitlin made her professional directing debut with A Doll’s House, Part 2 at the Segal Centre, where she will direct Small Mouth Sounds in 2020 and is currently in her second season as Artistic Associate.
ÜLFET SEVDI
Play in development: Construction
Ülfet Sevdi is a writer, theatre director, dramaturge and Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner based in Montreal, Canada. She graduated from the Department of Fine Arts and Theatre at Mersin University, Turkey, in 2001. Her work deals with oral history, social narrative and is theoretically grounded in feminist theory and the social sciences. She was the co-founder and director of nü.kolektif (Istanbul, 2009-2014), an Istanbul based collective of multi-disciplinary artists working collaboratively on politically oriented performances and is the co-founder and co-director of Thought Experiment Productions (Montreal, 2015-). She is currently an Individualized Program Master student at Concordia University. Her mission is to present a reflection on some important socio-political contemporary themes. Her approach is highly conceptual, experimental and is theoretically grounded in the critical social sciences. One of her main concern is: how to make political art artistically satisfying and how to make aesthetics politically satisfying. Her last performance, Numbers Increase as We Count… (February 27-March 2, 2019, MAI) was very well received.
JULIE TAMIKO MANNING
Play in development: Mizushōbai (The Water Trade)
Julie Tamiko Manning is an award-winning Montreal actor and theatre creator. Acting credits include: Elena in Butcher (Centaur), Isabella Bird in Top Girls (Segal), and Emilia in Othello (Scapegoat Carnivale).
Sa première pièce, Mixie and the Halfbreeds (with Adrienne Wong) was recently produced by fuGEN in Toronto and her second play, The Tashme Project (with Matt Miwa), a verbatim retelling of the Japanese Canadian internment experience, has recently been published by Playwrights Canada Press.
She is currently working on Mizushōbai, a commission for Tableau D’Hôte Theatre, about the life of Kiyoko Tanaka Goto, a pre-WWII Japanese picture-bride turned ‘underground’ business woman in British Columbia.
