Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
What will you Find at Found? Surprise! “Experiences you can’t find anywhere else,” says Whittyn Jason, the director of the festival of unexpected encounters with art and artists.
Common Ground Arts Society’s Found Fest is back Wednesday for a 14th annual edition. And as a Found-ling you could find yourself in a grand Masonic Hall, a warehouse video studio, the bedroom of a couple you’ve never met, a private residence in a ‘hood.… Or partying inside an original art installation in the middle of the night.
To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.
The “mainstage” production, to blithely borrow a term from considerably more conventional theatre, happens in “a secret residential location somewhere in the Hazeldean neighbourhood.” For an audience of 15 at a time.
In Lucky Charm, by and starring Louise Casemore, we’re invited into the home of Bess Houdini, the widow of the most famous magician in the world, as she continues her regular attempts to contact her late husband. Ah yes, and in the process, to throw light on the most alluring mystery of them all: is there, could there possibly be, life after death?
Lucky Charm, by and starring Louise Casemore, Defiance Thatre at Found Festival 2025. Graphic supplied.
“So cool and so ambitious,” says Jason of the show. And its intimate location means that “the magic, the illusions happen right in front of your eyes. People will be enchanted. Louise is such a captivating performer. And she’s so precise…. A unique space, a unique story, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
The Defiance Theatre production, developed during Casemore’s time as Found’s two-year Fresh AiR Artist Residency program, is presented by a first-ever partnership between Common Ground Arts and Theatre Yes. In fact it’s directed by the latter company’s artistic director Max Rubin. Stay tuned for ’s upcoming conversation with creator/star Casemore.
Like last summer’s Brick Shithouse (nominated for eight Sterling Awards), Lucky Charm has an extended run, past the festival dates. But tickets are vanishing faster than a rabbit from a magician’s top hat. Found Fest’s managing producer Mac Brock reports (laughing) that since the box office is so hot, “I asked the team if there could be one or two more seats a performance. And the looks I received!” So, short answer: nope. But there’s a waiting list, and, wait for it, other possibilities.
At the other end of the spectrum of unexpected “found spaces” at Found 2025 is the grand Masonic Hall downtown. That’s where you’ll find Reign Check by Michael Watt, half of the pair (with Jaquelin Walters) who brought the wistfully odd and funny musical clown play Let’s Not Turn On Each Other to last summer’s Fringe. For Reign Check they’re co-producers, and Walters is in the cast of Erin Pettifor’s production.
Reign Check, the third full Walters and Watt production in as many years, chronicles the fortunes of aged King Leslie, “out of touch, self-absorbed, clinging to his throne and his authority, whose subjects are trying to expel him from the kingdom,” as Jason describes. “It is chaotic. It is interactive. It is confrontational, a satirical talk on political power.” And if this isn’t sounding relevant to you, you’re not really awake.
“I love their work,” says Jason of the pair. “I saw Let’s Not Turn On Each Other at the Fringe, and I was immediately obsessed with these two. When they pitched something (to Found), I was so intrigued.” Trying to describe the nutty hilarity of the piece, Brock thinks of the duo as “the prairie Cole Escola,” the eccentrically hilarious cabaret artiste/creator/star of Oh Mary!, which found its buzz small-time and became the toast of Broadway. “It’s if a medieval king went to a powerpoint party!”
“I genuinely think they’re the funniest people in the city,” Brock says. “This is a period piece but it is somehow so unmistakably Gen Z and 2025. Or 2035.” And the ornate Freemasons venue, with its beautiful stained glass and natural light (not to mention the skull and cross bones embedded in the floor), suits the play perfectly.
S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger in Slugs, Creepy Boys at Found Festival 2025. Graphic by Bokeh Media.
A new show from S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger is an alt-theatre special occasion. And Slugs, the latest from the co-creators of queer-cult hits Creepy Boys and Something in the Water, is particularly category-resistant. Jason talks about its “techno-punk cabaret format,” but with clowns and “a puppet nightmare.” Brock, expanding, says “two techno-punk musicians set out to put together a show about … nothing. Not about anything that’s wrong in the world, not about anything that matters…. It’s ‘we’re just here to have a good time, not think or feel anything’. And as you can imagine, it’s not an easy thing to do.” Audiences are strictly 18+ for the show, which happens at Strong Coffee Studios in outer Strathcona (6571 Gateway Blvd).
Meegan Sweet and Jasmine Hopfe in Headhole, Found Festival 2025. Photo supplied
Claudia Kulay’s Headhole, also an 18+ experience, makes voyeurs of its audiences — in a bedroom in a secret residential location in Strathcona (“under 10 minutes walking from the Fringe Arts Barns” as billed). As Brock explains, “a couple, played by Jasmine Hopfe and Meegan Sweet, are trying to spice up their love life, so they experiment with having people watch them in the bedroom…. ” Jason, who saw an earlier iteration of Headhole at the 2023 Fringe, describes it as “intimate, and funny.” This new production is directed by Geoffrey Simon Brown, who’s been in on the Found Festival since its very beginning in 2011.
Duh-Bull Fee-Churr: Older Girlz & Smoke Show, which takes place at sunset in Paul Kane Park in Strathcona, pairs the free-floating performance/spoken word work of Big Al McKee and Steve Pirot. Brock calls Big Al’s Older Girlz, which had a reading at this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival, “mesmerizing.” He says “it feels like three schoolgirls plays games in the playground, sharing secrets and gossip, with all the insecurities and super-powers of it….” Jason agrees. “There’s a big coming-of-age aspect to it.” Actors Sophie May Healey and Autumn Strom have been enlisted to lead the adventure “through your dreams and your nightmares.” It’s is a roving show, says Jason. “And you can run around the park with them. But if you’re not a rover, that is also fine. You can sit watch them run around the park.”
As for Smoke Show, if you saw Pirot in Uncle Stiv’s Looping Machine at the Fringe, you’ll know to expect something kooky, poetic, and smart from this unclassifiable “new rhapsody,” as billed, from the poet/playwright/philosopher.
The Found Fest has a tradition of poetry showcases in diverse forms. This year, (un)earthed, (re)birthed is curated jointly by Philip Hackborn and Shima Robinson, joined by five other artists. So, seven poets in all responding to the prompt ‘where have we come from? what have we left behind?’.” The poets have been encouraged to bring in an object, and reflect on its meaning.
This year’s Fresh AiR artist in residence, Shyanne Duquette presents a reading of their new play Skinhead at the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns. “A really fearless writer,” as Brock describes, who takes us into the world of 12- to 15-year-old boys. “The writing is so sharp; the voices are so clear.” Skinhead will get a full production premiere next year at Found.
As always at Found there’s a music series. And new this year is AfterFound, a nightly afterparty of music and performance at the Fringe Grounds Cafe. In a partnership with Latitude 53, the space is awaiting the transformational ministrations of visual artist Alexis De Villa to become “a magical nightclub performance venue,” as Jason puts it.
AfterFound at Found Festival 2025. Graphic supplied
Afterfound has a music night, a cabaret variety night, and a big-ass summer art party, Hot Garbage — part dance party, part multi-disciplinary performance showcase, part interactive installations, part just-plain indescribable. As Jason explains, 12 artists have been enlisted, and at the outset of the festival, they’re put into four groups of three — with a 72-hour time limit “to collaborate and come up with some sort of installation/ durational something!.” All four will be revealed at the big Hot Garbage party that happens in De Villa’s installation.
As for you, my Foundling friends, prepare your glue guns and duct tape. You will be wearing “the hottest garbage of the year, your re-used, up-cycled stuff, the crazier and wackier the better.”
Found Festival 2025 runs Wednesday through Sunday in assorted venues. Further show information, full schedule, and tickets: commongroundarts.ca.
