Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic visionaries shaping Canadian theatre today. In a mixture of lighthearted banter and deep dives into artistic practice, this column invites artists to voice nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlets at the feet of a glorious, frustrating artform.
Is there such a thing as a calm September? It’s so easy to find oneself carried away by the whirlwind of season premieres and festivals, and almost impossible to take in everything on offer.
One of the events I was most disappointed to miss was What The Festival, which ran September 26 – 29. The brainchild of self-proclaimed strange makers Alicia DiStefano and Byron Laviolette, What The Festival has been active since 2022, but this fall marked its first full round of programming: A smorgasbord of drag, puppetry, clown, and bouffon. Thankfully, though I may not have been there for the shenanigans, I managed to get the next best thing: An interview with Laviolette about What The Festival’s origins and values, plus his own varied career as a director, dramaturg, and storyteller. Our conversation took us from the definition of strange maker, to the concept of decorating time, to the story of how Laviolette ended up collaborating with NASA.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did you find theatre, or how did theatre find you?
I’ve always been fascinated with storytelling. Growing up, I used to have quite an extensive castle Lego set, and I would make these story worlds in the basement of my childhood home: Grand acts of betrayal and love stories and all of that. Actually, during the pandemic I wrote a seven-novel series inspired by that Lego set. My mom lived alone. I sent her some new chapters every couple of days, to try and bring some delight and joy to her during lockdown.
At York University I met Heather and Amy of the clown duo Morro and Jasp. That really cemented for me my love of what I call the strange makers. I’ve been working with them for almost 16 years now.
What does that term, strange makers, mean to you?
The term might come from the tech innovation world. In the context that Alicia DiStefano and I use it, it’s anybody who’s bringing a very stylized, audience-facing work to stages. It’s as opposite from psychological realism as you can get. Like one of the cabarets [at What The Festival] this September, it was a whole Muppet thing where there were three jellyfish, and then they transformed into three mermaids, and then it became mermaid burlesque, and then they had a fight… Absolutely delightful and weird and strange.
I ended up doing a PhD in interactivity and play theory, also at York. I helped found an experiential design agency, the Mission Business, where we worked with Autodesk, CBC, and NASA exploring future subjects through interactive experiences rather than white papers. Puppetry came through my work with Adam Francis Proulx. Drag came through my work with Justin Miller (Pearle Harbour). What The Festival was born out of the feeling that I’m entering my mentorship years. It began as a way to share my wisdom and experience through the art forms that I love.
How did you meet Alicia DiStefano, with whom you co-run the festival?
I had known Alicia from the old Toronto Festival of Clowns. Alicia independently led the Red Nose Cabaret, which was a series of 13 shows she put on pre-pandemic dedicated to red-nose clown. After the Festival of Clowns fell apart, we started talking about whether it should be restarted, and whether a new festival should be solely dedicated to clown. About four years ago now, Alicia and I did a series of clown halls where we brought a bunch of performers together over two nights to hear…what they were missing and what they needed. Then we embarked on a pretty heavy research phase, having meetings with everybody who would chat with us: the [Toronto] Fringe, the Play the Fool Festival in Edmonton, the Montreal Clown Festival, and the old festival director of the Toronto Festival of Clowns. Then we embarked on this journey together.
Alicia is the sanity to my insanity — although maybe sometimes she would think it’s the opposite.
Why interactive and audience-facing theatre in the first place?
Theatre that doesn’t allow the audience and performers to recognize each other’s presence doesn’t interest me. That doesn’t mean there’s no place for it, but it’s not for me. I find it special when people knowingly experience something together.
[Neo-expressionist artist] Jean-Michel Basquiat once said that art decorates space, and music decorates time. I think theatre is very much the same. I became fascinated, from a directorial and design point of view: How do you decorate somebody’s time over the course of 60-75 minutes? How do you get an audience to trust, share, believe, and play? To go from meeting a stranger, more or less, at minute one, to having a sort of friend-for-life by minute 60? I always describe Morro and Jasp shows as being like a sleepover with old friends that you haven’t seen in a while. That level of welcoming and inclusion and feeling a part of something matters a lot to me.
What was the topic of your thesis for your PhD on interactivity?
One element was the nature of game play and something called the narrative ludic divide. Every time you offer a player or an audience member a choice, your ability to maintain a coherent narrative is decreased, and there’s a radio to that — especially in theatre. It’s complicated because the resources are physical rather than digital.
You play so many different creative roles and work on such a wide range of projects. Do you find that they all flow into each other?
At its core, it goes back to, ‘How do you bring people out of their shells to explore the things you want them to explore, but not with such a hard agenda?’ You know, one of the things I love most is therapeutic clown, because the philosophy behind it is very much agenda-less play. You go into the patient’s room ready to play as they want to play, rather than as you think they should play. That’s a lesson I keep with me when trying to create instances of fun and delight: trying to imagine how somebody would want to interact with it versus how I would want them to interact with it. ‘You’re not playing right!’ is a failed state.
There’s a big thing in audience participation called the hero philosophy: The participant should be the hero, always, because they’re the ones who are risking embarrassment.
With that in mind, how do you think of your role as a director?
I’m definitely not the ‘big vision’ type of director, and I’m not a good jammer. I’ve even had to turn down contracts where somebody’s like, ‘We’ll just get in a room and jam on ideas!’ That’s not me. I think I’m a finisher. Most of the time, I’m working with artists who have a thing already, like Adam Proulx, Justin Miller, or Johnnie Walker. I help to polish, to find specificity. I’m also there as the audience’s advocate. I don’t need to tell Adam how to puppet; I don’t need to tell Justin how to do drag or sing. The point is, how can we take what you do, which is already really good, and make it great for the audience, so they feel like the stars of the show?
I have to ask about the project you did with NASA.
I was the creative director of an agency called the Mission Business. Co-founder Trevor Haldenby was doing his master’s in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, and was very connected to the tech world. In 2013, Trevor ended up getting us a contract to help a team at NASA in California imagine the future of asteroid mining.
We cast a group of characters, from scientists to retired military commanders to specialists, and brought in NASA people who pretty much played those roles in real life: Astronauts, scientists, marketing people, military people. There were all sorts of ridiculous clearances that had to happen!
We ran them through this scenario where we announced the return of the first asteroid sample from an asteroid belt around Mars. There were two AI entities, a brother and sister, one of whom was on earth and one of whom was up in the sky. Somehow — this project was almost 12 years ago now — they got into a fight because the designer who had made them had lost his own children, so he put their essence into the AIs Instead of bringing the asteroid back to the moon, where it was supposed to be mined, the AIs were bringing it back to Earth, which would have disastrous and fatal consequences.
There was a technical team made up of participants that had to try and solve the physics of this. There was a marketing and outreach team that had to decide how they were going to tell the world that they had messed up. There was a resources team that had to try and understand the cost-benefit ratio of losing 100,000 people but having access to cobalt, or whatever was in the asteroid.
There were these incredible professionals present as participants, like Adam Steltzner, who landed the Mars rover. I watched them run around waving papers at each other, fully committed to the scenario, like ‘We can’t tell humanity this!’ Eventually the asteroid arrived. It had this ooze in it, and we did this whole thing on the front lawn where the team smashed it open. The fact that we got away with it was pretty wild. I don’t know if that would still be the case today.
Before I started recording, you used the phrase ‘temple of fun’ to describe What The Festival. I think that’s such a beautiful idea. What does that mean to you?
Have you seen the TV show The Bear?
I have seen exactly one episode. I’m terrible.
One of the things they talk about in The Bear is the concept of unreasonable hospitality: They’ll go absurdly out of their way to please their diners. Very early on at What The Festival, Alicia and I created a core values document. The values were professionalism and polish, total artist care, and unreasonable hospitality. People play when they feel safe, when they feel respected, and when they feel like they have a status — doesn’t have to be a high status, but a reason to be there.
When I say temple of fun — which is not a trademark term, and I don’t know if Alicia would agree with it, though I think she probably would — I mean that those values have to be maintained in order to truly allow for freedom of play, delight, and joy. That means everything from making sure there’s cold water for the artists in the green room, to the volunteers having their own personalized name badges. We have a candy hat that we just constantly pass around. Getting people ready for the delight of the shows is so important. It matters almost as much as what we’re putting on the stages.
To give an example, we had our first ever Don’t Drag Me Down cabaret, which was dedicated solely to drag kings, as a response to the politics on Church Street of who gets to perform in drag shows. We spent an absurd amount of time taping packages of glow sticks under every chair, so that halfway through the show there could be this moment where everybody would break out these glow sticks. The room became a rainbow of colour and movement, and that persisted every time we went to a blackout in the space. It was so silly in terms of effort, resources, and management, but so special in terms of delight. Anything we can do to bring people in, and to differentiate our space as somewhere sacred and special, apart from — truly — the horrors of the real world.
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about Toronto theatre, what would it be?
Right now, the creation-to-production process for a lot of people is from the Toronto Fringe to — hopefully — some theatre recommender grants, to a workshop production, to maybe an actual production. But the realities of mounting a show at the Fringe don’t translate to a two-week run at the Extraspace at Tarragon. Peoples’ appetites are different. Yet we don’t train or support people to translate their shows into those different contexts.
That said, I’ll flip the question and say that one of the things I’m most delighted about in Toronto is its strange maker community. There’s a huge drag scene. Everywhere you look there’s a secret puppeteer, whether they want to admit it or not. There’s clown and bouffon that flourishes because of companies like Sweet Action Theatre. It’s a soup of creativity right now, and hopeful
What The Festival can be a part of keeping that going.
What are your dreams for the future of What the Festival?
One is sustainability. Again, Alicia and I wanted to do this once properly, so we’re figuring out what the public, private and personal funding channels are to allow this to be sustainable, and respectful of the time of the people who work with us. Two is inclusion. We were very fortunate that 43 per cent of our cabaret performers this past festival identified as IBPOC or members of a minority group. 39 per cent identified as emerging artists, aged 18-29. We also want to get better at our core values, so that people feel more welcome, more loved, and more appreciated.
One personal thing that I’ve been talking with a few people about is some kind of soft training program for strange maker directors. Lots of strange makers are amazing in that they practice their craft at home in the mirror, and then come and present their piece. That’s incredible, because they’re so good, but I want to start building a generation of people to be outside eyes for those people.
We want to continue to do workshops and panels, — our Spring Thing, which is a one-day event, a couple cabarets, and maybe add one more special event — just to be around all year. We want to be better community partners. We want to have ever cooler graphic design!
The festival’s graphic design is on point, I have to say. Thank you so much for this conversation!
Thank you for taking the time to chat with me and to talk about What The Festival. It’s definitely something we’re proud of and believe in.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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