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Theatre Junction

CTE photo
A scene from the Theatre Junction’s production of Playing Bare/La Répétition October, 2000

Ensemble theatre company founded in Calgary, Alberta in 1991. Theatre Junction was based in the Dr. Betty Mitchell Theatre in the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary for fourteen years, interpreting classical, contemporary, and new Canadian plays. Its founding Artistic Director was Mark Lawes.

Theatre Junction's initial mandate was to create exciting and challenging works that stimulate dialogue, to present contemporary plays from the national and international repertoire, and to bring its work to other performance spaces in Canada and abroad. The Company presented a wide range of works by Canadian playwrights, including John Murrell, Dominic Champagne, and Sharon Pollock. It also offered an annual festival of original works over a three-day period, called “Random Acts.”

Following the demolition of the Dr. Betty Mitchell Theatre space in 2016, Theatre Junction relocated to the newly restored Grand Theatre in Calgary, which was built in 1912 as a 1,350-seat vaudeville house, converted to a film house, and then a golf centre. The restored auditorium is flexible in design, and can be reconfigured as a proscenium stage, a theatre-in-the-round, or a thrust stage, and seats between 144 and 400 patrons.

 Grand Theatre, Calgary
Grand Theatre, Calgary

In 2016 Mark Lawes stepped away from the position of Executive Director to develop artistic projects including the creation of The Supernova Trilogy which received a New Chapter Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The Supernova Trilogy premiered in France at the Festival des Francophonies in Limoges and toured to the International Festival of the Arts in Bordeaux in 2018 and to Usine C in Montreal in April 2019.

After the tour of The Supernova Trilogy, it became difficult for Theatre Junction to continue to expand and flourish as an artistic innovator in the Grand theatre in Calgary due to unfavorable cultural conditions and an accumulated a deficit of half a million dollars. The Company made the decision to move its operations to Montreal in April 2019, and appointed Raphaële Thiriet as co-artistic director. Montreal has been more aligned with Theatre Junction’s cultural and artistic values, and has generously contributed to its development by hosting the Company several times over the last decade, in its theatres, in residencies, and on tour.

Since moving to Montreal, Theatre Junction has created several new works including Chaosmos, a decolonized cabaret (2021), created with the celebrated African American visual artist and vocalist Malcolm Mooney; the digital premiere of Outside/In (2022) that is being developed into a hybrid digital/live work in partnership with EMPAC in Troy NY; The End of a Dream (2021), a video art installation presented at the Yegip Museum of Art in Gunsan South Korea; and the French language première of Jordan Tannahill’s Concord Floral directed by Raphaële Thiriet (2020).

Website: www.theatrejunction.com

Last updated 2022-07-30