Artist — Kingston Theatre Alliance

What began as a mutual admiration between neighbours has blossomed into a collaboration across artistic disciplines. Spoken word poet and storyteller Billie Kearns and visual artist and educator Jill Glatt often run into each other on neighbourhood walks in the Inner Harbour. This fall, they’ve teamed up to present Storytelling and the Land: Who is Belle Island?, a public workshop in preparation for their upcoming exhibition at the Agnes Etherington […]

Like red-tinged leaves, flannel shirts, and droves of students lining up for lattes, Kingston WritersFest has been a fixture in the autumn landscape for as long as I’ve lived in the Limestone City. This week, I sat down with Artistic Director Aara Macauley to discuss this year’s theme—Unbound—and to learn how the festival, which runs from September 27th to October 1st, plans to connect Kingstonians with literature beyond the printed […]

If you’ve been to a handful of Kingston’s jazz nights, indie shows, musical theatre productions, or music festivals in the past decade, chances are you’ve heard Michael Broadhead on the upright or electric bass. In the wake of the Labour Day long weekend, I met up with Broadhead to talk about music, labour, and how performing artists can support one another in Kingston’s arts scene.  This interview has been edited […]

Myths, musicals, Marvel movies, and the Mabinogion: Jesse Vriend is in pondering mode, and I’m along for the ride. It’s a Monday afternoon in early July and we’re sitting at Mallo, a café on Bathurst with ribbons of neon lights on the ceiling and a cute little cactus on the table.  I met Vriend in 2017 through a creative writing course at Queen’s. For a semester, I took great joy […]

On my first day in Toronto, I lugged my suitcase along Dundas and sat down at Oxtail Pho to chat with playwright and lyricist Nam Nguyen. Nguyen’s musical A Perfect Bowl of Pho (book and lyrics by Nguyen, music by Wilfred Moeschter) premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2022 and is coming to the Kick & Push Festival this August.  In the meantime, his new show CAEZUS (music by […]

Sarah Waisvisz is a playwright, dramaturge, multi-disciplinary performer, and professor at the Dan School of Drama and Music. Her plays include Monstrous, a solo script about the Afro-Caribbean-diaspora experience and mixed-race identity, and Heartlines, a two-act play about queer-Jewish activists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. I reached Waisvisz over Zoom recently for a short but lively conversation. We spoke about her upcoming play Double Helix, her work as a professor, […]

Leslie Arden is a renowned Canadian composer, lyricist, and librettist. In 2019, she was commissioned to write a new musical, The Lancashire Lass, for the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. First shown in an online preview in 2021, and then in concert in 2022, The Lancashire Lass is having its fully staged debut at this year’s Watershed Festival on May 26th and 27th at the Kingston […]

This conversation with Sarah Emtage and Shannon Kingston is the second installment of a two-part interview. To learn more about these playwrights and read the beginning of the interview, click here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Something that I found interesting about Shortwave 2022 is that the three of us—quite coincidentally, I swear this is the first time we’re sitting down as a group—had similar threads […]

Sarah Emtage is a poet, playwright, sculptor, and library technician in Kingston. She is the author of the radio play The Sound Castle (2020) and its two-part sequel, Jabberwocky and The Listeners (2022), which were produced for the Shortwave Theatre Festival. Shannon Kingston is a Kingston-born playwright currently studying children’s media at Centennial College. Her radio play Garden Of Edith (2022) was produced for the Shortwave Festival, and her previous […]

“I’ve never felt comfortable performing anything super direct, like a normal love song. But a song about an inanimate object can find an oblique way into real feelings. These songs take very minor things and put them in big, mythical terms. I like that challenge—what’s the smallest thing you can write about and still make it compelling?” This is Arden Rogalsky, songwriter and lead performer of Kingston folk-rock collective Princess […]

Last weekend, I sat down with playwright Rosemary Doyle to learn about her writing process. We were joined at the kitchen table by a vivacious three-year-old who had endless questions for me (who am I, why did I ring the doorbell, why does my skirt have sparkles, can I twirl, can I watch her twirl, too?!). Faced with this hard-hitting preschool journalism, my conversation with Doyle was conducted in quick […]

5 Q’s, 5 Femmes is a short series facilitated by writer Kemi King, interviewing five femme identifying artists; getting to know a little bit about them and their craft.  Erin Ball identifies as a white, Mad (from the Mad Pride Movement), Disabled treaty inhabitant. She is a double below knee amputee and circus artist based in Katarokwi/Kingston. She is the director of Kingston Circus Arts and is the co-founder of […]