SWAN? returns home, to the festival where it hatched, to celebrate its hundredth performance

SWAN? has flown the world.  Lauren Brady’s dark bouffon/ballet clown comedy has alighted at the world’s biggest fringe festivals, in Edinburgh and Adelaide, twice, and won awards from the High Commission of Canada and the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation.  The show has pirouetted to ovations at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

And now, for one night only Saturday at Rapid Fire Theatre, SWAN? is coming home, to the festival where it first became a hit. In the end, it’s a story of Fringe empowerment, its YES to renegade creative talents. Brady’s unique en pointe creation, the raunchy chain-smoking ballerina-clown who engages the audience to step up, be a romantic hero, and rescue the ‘damsel’ in distress from her curse, is an ultimate Fringe Hold-Over:  Saturday’s show at the Exchange Theatre is its 100th performance.

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And it’s a finale of sorts too. “My plan is to retire the show from the international festival circuit,” says Brady, whose new clown two-hander Gerald premiered at the Fringe just past, in the Mile Zero BYOV. The future, she hopes, is engagements in theatres in Canada and abroad, and SWAN! will fly away soon to New Zealand.

Clowns, much less clown theatre, never figured in Brady’s plans growing up in Calgary. As a kid she was full-on into ballet, and her dreams were ballerina dreams. “Until Grade 12, every day after school, I’d go to the studio 4 to 10 p.m. And then wake up and go to school.” After that, she got a gig as a dancer, touring with the Calgary Stampede Show Band. And I got to travel the world with them. It was a lot of fun.”

She applied to universities for placements in different disciplines. “I needed a break from dance,” she says. “On a whim” she applied to the University of Calgary’s drama department. “And I ended up loving it.”

A BFA in acting at the U of A followed. Her class graduated during COVID in 2021, “and I got a couple of gigs, but I knew I wanted to make stuff.” Music to the ears of U of A’ professor, star clown and clown mentor Michael Kennard, the Mump of Mump and Smoot fame. Brady made an appearance, in full spectral getup, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, which premiered at Theatre Network in 2024. And SWAN?, she says, has something of the same darkly comic bouffon vibe as Kennard and his stage cohort John Turner, and director Karen Hines (creator of the memorably macabre clown character Pochsy), embrace in their work.

In 2023 The immediate result of Brady’s new fascination with clowning was her first solo show @interWEBBED, directed by Kennard and coached by Karen Hines, in which we see the elaborate absurdities of the world of tech through the eyes of Brady’s addled clown character.

Lauren Brady in SWAN?, photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Its downside was that it was way too complicated — a three-technician set-up — to take on the road. The following year Owe-a-Debt premiered at the Edmonton Fringe. “I wanted a show I could teach a technician in under an hour, and it would fit into suitcase,” says Brady. “The biggest feedback I got from managers and producers was that the name was too clever, and that was why I was getting small houses.”

That’s when Brady re-christened OWE-a-DEBT (a witty take on the name Odette, the tragic princess in Swan Lake who’s been turned into a swan by a sorcerer’s curse). The following year, re-named SWAN?, its entire Adelaide run sold out, and the show was held over. Six scouts from Edinburgh arrived to see the show, and in 2025 it ran at the Underbelly, one of the Fringe’s high-profile curated venues.

SWAN? brings together two of Brady’s greatest artistic loves, ballet and clowning, by exploring a what-if? premise. What would happen if Odette doesn’t die at the end of Swan Lake, but has been trapped for 180 years in the world of the curse, waiting around for for an ultimate romantic partner to change her, make her complete, by declaring true love?

Brady was intrigued by the feminist possibilities of turning a romantic tragedy into a funny, provocative, dark rom-com. “At first I was so scared of audience interaction,” she says of her funny, bold, fearless overtures to audiences, as the character looks for her hero. “But I challenged myself!”

SWAN? runs Saturday, 9 p.m. at Rapid Fire’s Exchange Theatre. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.