A Window into the World of Clelia Scala
In the week leading up to the winter solstice, I sat down with a handful of local theatre-makers to reflect on the year, learn about people’s upcoming projects, and find out what was keeping them warm through the short, dark days of December. This interview with Clelia Scala is the sixth in a series which will appear on the Kingston Theatre Alliance’s Performance Blog in the early months of 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Please note this article mentions suicide.
If you’ve been out walking along Princess, Brock, or Ontario Street in the past few months, you may have spotted some whimsical window displays. In February and March, Windows on Downtown Kingston featured work by Queen’s drama students, who have been studying the craft of bringing places to life in Clelia Scala’s prop design class this semester.
When I first met Scala in 2023, she was getting ready to become a bird—that is, she was preparing to puppeteer a giant heron at the Kingston Mills locks for Calliope Collective’s Hydra: The Spirit of Water. On top of being a brilliant puppet-maker and theatre designer, Scala is a mentor to many students in the area. When we spoke in December, she shared about recent and upcoming student work, her latest filmmaking project, and what it feels like to see beloved puppets find new life on stage.
In 2018, Scala travelled from the Niagara region to eastern Ontario to teach a four-month mask-making course at Queen’s University, supporting a Drama Major production of Jennifer Wise’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ Birds. One course led to another, and theatrical work picked up in the area, with mask and puppet-making at Ottawa’s Odyssey Theatre and teaching gigs at Queen’s.
Nowadays, she’s happy to call Kingston home. “It’s a great city. It’s kind of the perfect size. I like the smaller creative community—I feel like there’s more opportunity, in a way, when you’re in a smaller community, even though it seems like there should be more opportunity in a bigger community. People are doing really cool stuff here, and a really broad range of theatrical work.”
Last year, one of Scala’s many small-community connections led to a unique opportunity for Queen’s drama students. “I do a lot of props building, and I also use my theatre skills to make installations for window displays and museums and such. I work a lot at the Museum of Lennox and Addington—it’s a great museum, beautifully curated by JoAnne Himmelman. She asked me if I supervise practicum students at Queen’s, and if there would be some interest in putting together a site-specific play.
“I felt that it would be really wonderful to have somebody guide them, because that’s a pretty daunting task if you’re a university student. Mo Horner was the obvious person to contact, because she has done so many amazing site-specific things, and she’s probably one of the loveliest people you could work with. And so she guided the students through this process.” House Guest, created by and starring Fiona Kolbuc-James, Devon Mahoney, Grace Roop, and Taylor Snelling, went up at Macpherson House in November.
Meanwhile, Scala has been working on a project of her own—a short shadow puppet film, Goatsong: a Meditation. “Like most theatre-makers, I think of myself primarily as a storyteller. I’m either telling my own stories or helping people tell their stories as a designer.”
The film takes its name from the word ‘tragedy’—from the Greek tragōidia, tragos (goat) + ōidē (song)—and examines an upsetting memory through Scala’s childhood eyes. “My sister and I were witness to this horrible incident on a school bus where this kid’s mom had attempted suicide, and the kids were so nasty to him because of it, and bullied him so horribly, and he never came back to school.”
That experience played in her head over and over again for decades before becoming the foundation of Goatsong. “It’s about how we treat each other, how we categorize people. At the beginning, I talk about how my parents pulled us out of school because they felt like school was trying to separate the sheep from the goats… There’s such a reward for children to conform, right? It’s an anxious time in life. There’s a lot of pressure on kids to basically seek out the weak and try to destroy them. You see it over and over again, and it’s a terrible human quality. I hate that it’s displayed in children. And I do think it’s encouraged in some way by schools and our culture.”
Goatsong premiered at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia last spring, followed by an appearance at the Mighty Niagara Film Festival in St. Catharines in the fall. Eventually, it will find its way to Kingston audiences, but Scala’s not quite finished with it—this year, she’ll be working on refining the film before sending it back out into the world.
In the meantime, more of Scala’s creations are finding their way to audiences—some for a second time. In January, Last Landscape by Bad New Days played at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Some of the puppets involved in this piece—including a baby sloth, originally puppeteered by Seymour Irons—were created for Return of the Megafauna, which played at the Kick & Push Festival in 2022. “This sloth is probably one of my favourite puppets that I ever made. With puppets, I always feel like—this is left over from childhood, where you love your teddies—but I can’t get rid of their heads, and I feel like they’re just alive forever. So I’m really happy this puppet’s getting another outing.”
Clelia Scala is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist whose theatre work includes mask, puppet, costume, set and story design. She teaches theatre design at Queen’s University’s DAN School of Drama & Music.
