Best Wishes for the Holiday Season and the New Year
Teaching and mentoring younger artists in our methods has always been an important priority for Theatre Smith-Gilmour. We believe that the passing on of our methods and beliefs to a younger generation of theatre artists is just as important as creating and performing.
This year, our work with emerging artists has taken us to the 2011 Luminato Festival with Lu Xun blossoms , a co-production with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. It was the culminating point of a four-year collaboration with three young Chinese actors that had toured to Beijing, Hong Kong, Macau, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Here in Canada, we continue to work with theatre students at the Humber College Theatre Performance Program, York University, the University of Alberta and Ryerson University. Each summer, we offer a two-week master class that opens up our process to the wider arts community– this program is also an open invitation to a new generation of artists who can familiarize themselves with the process of our company.
We are exceptionally proud to have nurtured, as co-writers and directors, the work of Adam Paolozza and Ravi Jain in our co-production of the Dora Award-winning SPENT
,
which played a sold out run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this past summer. In the New Year, we will continue our work on adapting William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
with a new group of young actors. 
For us, the actor’s imagination is at the centre of the process and our young actors must risk failing in order to find a new freedom. We encourage them to be more humane, more compassionate, more vulnerable, and more refined; to find a dialogue of feelings with the audience; to write with their bodies and ask audiences to listen, see and feel with the heart.
Your investment in Theatre Smith-Gilmour can ensure that we continue to provide opportunities for emerging Canadian theatre artists in workshops, master classes and on stage. Donations of any amount are welcome: Please give during this Holiday Season whatever you can afford. Every dollar goes towards supporting our vision to create an environment that supports a younger generation of theatre artists. Click here to learn more about how you can help support our youth mentorship initiatives.
With best wishes for this Holiday Season and the New Year,
Michele Smith & Dean Gilmour, Co-Artistic Directors
