Story of the Company
Artistic Mission & History
The artistic mission of Aluna Theatre is to embrace the myriad of voices, cultures, and stories of our population, which are transforming the landscape of Canadian theatre. In our plays, works in translation, and international co-creations, people are complex individuals who exist beyond the restrictions of cultural labels. We encourage new hybrids of theatre evolved from a rich collaboration of experiences, performance traditions and media by engaging both emerging and established theatre professionals.
Our work reaches out to diverse audiences in Canada and abroad. We build liaisons that promote art as a way to empower, and a way to share with each other and the world the idea of living in harmony.
We welcome into our circle of support and celebration the TransAmerican artists living and working here, who represent the breadth of cultures and languages from across the Americas.
“This is what I know:
Aluna Theatre has been built out of love. This is my life’s work. I do it because I want artists of the coming generations to have the freedom, space, and resources to create with the entirety of who they are as individuals. To those artists I say:
Never hide, apologize, or justify your culture, the colour of your skin, or where you come from to a colonizing and patriarchal system that seeks to destroy the very essence of who you are.”
– Beatriz Pizano, Artistic Director
WE ARE…
ARTISTS.
We are creators.
We are community.
We are innovators.
We are risk-takers.
We take up space.
We are loud.
We are committed.
We are passionate.
We are political.
We are inclusive.
We are unapologetic.
WE ARE COMMITTED TO
Addressing language barriers
Building a community of artists and practices
Creating transdisciplinary and transborder performances
Consulting with communities
Engaging in conversations about art and activism
Collaborating with other racialized communities as equal partners
Offering working and training opportunities for newcomer artists
Respecting and celebrating our differences
Sharing knowledge, resources and opportunities
We are committed to creating from the understanding that we are intrinsically connected and dependent on each other.
AND SO…
We challenge the state of affairs
We unsettle our artistic practice
We prioritize non-hierarchical approaches to creation
We conceive work from a diversity of lenses, in multiple languages and across disciplines
We work within the framework of a trans-american community
We invest in the leaders of tomorrow
OUR (R)EVOLUTION TOWARD A TRANS-AMERICAN COMMUNITY- how we got here
In the wars of independence in South America at the beginning of the 1800’s, one of the Generals in the Revolutionary army was a woman named Manuela Saenz (1797-1866). She declared: “My country is all of the American continent. I was born under the Equator”. She went on to describe the peoples from the colonies as not being Europeans, nor Indigenous but criollos (born in the Americas to European parents), mulattoes and mestizos.
The term Latin America was later introduced in 1856 by writers Francisco Bilbao (Chile) and José María Torres Caicedo (Colombia) as a way of unifying the regions south of the United States (Mexico, Central America and South America) against imperialism. It refers to countries where people speak Spanish, French and Portuguese (“latin” languages).
Although many of us may define ourselves as Latin American or Latinx (a gender-neutral word that rejects binary gender politics), we are very aware of the problematic limitations of such definition. Our work at Aluna over the last two decades has revealed the huge gaps and inequities in trying to fit a number of diasporic communities into one-size-fits-all label. It does not address the many cultures and languages that exist in the continent, in particular Indigenous cultures, nor does it acknowledge who we are and aspire to be as artists. Our work was, and is, derived from our histories and experiences as migrant communities; the challenges we face as a minority peoples and racialized communities in this country; and from our desire, need, and commitment to carve a space for our stories, our voices and our communities for generations to come.
We are ourselves a new breed of theatre artists with a unique artistic voice within the continent. We embrace our similarities and our differences as our source of strength, determination and artistic vision.
Aluna Theatre was founded in 2001 as a response to the misrepresentation and under-representation of cultural diversity and the work of women on our stages. At the time, we could not have foreseen the impact and the vital role that Aluna would play in the development of a trans-american community.
At that time, diversity in theatre was being championed by a few small IBPOC companies such Native Earth Performing Arts founded in 1982, Cahoots (1986), Modern Times (1989), and B-Current (1991). Obsidian Theatre (2000) and Fu-Gen (2002) emerged alongside Aluna. At the turn of this century, Latin Americans represented one of the most recent migrant communities to Canada. There were only but a handful of us working professionally in Toronto and in the rest of the country.
For the two decades, Aluna Theatre has been guided by the vision of our two artistic leaders, Beatriz Pizano, founder and Artistic Director, and Trevor Schwellnus, Artistic Producer: to create theatre and performance informed by the rich diversity of cultures from across the Americas to develop a new artistic vocabulary that speaks to this intersectionality between Canada and Latin America.
As we look back on the work we have accomplished, and how much we have evolved in twenty years, we could define two distinctive growth phases at Aluna:
In the early years, we concentrated on the discovery of an artistic vocabulary, an approach to creation, and on gaining recognition as a Latin Canadian theatre company with a strong body of work.
Our first production was written and designed by Trevor and directed by Beatriz, a festival piece called meeting playce (2003). It became the basis for our artistic vocabulary: an interdisciplinary, polyphonic performance piece created through physical work with an Ensemble. Inspired by the work of Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar and the street life at Queen and Bathurst in Toronto, the land (represented by a homeless character) became a voice taking us through the psyche of the city, where peoples from all around the world are questioning and exploring how we live together.
This was followed by a multi-award winning trilogy about women and war written and directed by Beatriz and designed and dramaturged by Trevor. It was also a conversation between Colombian and Canadian perspectives:
For Sale (2003, two Doras of three nominations), a dream-documentary inside of a near-death experience, in which the lead character travels through the history of the Americas from colonization to the present-day armed conflict in Colombia;
Madre (2008, two Doras of five nominations), a play about the loss of memory in a country at war, where a migrant woman in Canada struggles to care for her mother, who is succumbing to Alzheimer’s back in Colombia.
La Comunión (2010, five Dora nominations), in which a young woman flees poverty by becoming a child soldier in Colombia’s rebel Guerilla, and later enters Canada illegally – only to later choose to go back. “We can’t all leave our countries and become refugees. That’s not a solution”. This play is Aluna’s first fully bilingual production, with text and surtitles in both Spanish and English.
In Madre we began to experiment with live video on stage and with how to transform a space to create alternative realities to represent memory. We also started to recognize our particular approach to stagecraft, which we refer to as the “dramaturgy of design:” a conversation between the text and scenic environment built on an intrinsic partnership between the word and the visual world of the play.
In these years we also began to create partnerships with companies such as Theatre Revolve and Kahaniya (Sisters Sharing Stories) that led to the creation of projects such as Project Entrada and Womyn and Hip Hop, fomenting the participation and leadership of young women in theatre. These partnerships also resulted in international collaborations and touring; a move that transformed the way we conceived theatre, from creation to the development of artists, to the understanding of the pivotal role that community partners play in theatre.
In 2008 we engaged with Theatre Revolve in our first artistic exchange with Colombia. Eleven culturally diverse artists travelled to Bogotá to create a new collective creation piece, Defenestration under the direction of Patricia Ariza from the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro. During this collaboration we practiced the Colombian ‘collective’ approach to creation; a methodology that dismantled Eurocentric and hierarchical theatre practices with the goal of creating a new theatre situated in the physical and cultural place where it is being created. This resonated deeply with us.
Over the next three years we continued our artistic exchanges with Colombia. We created “Photo Dairies”, a theatre and photography workshop with ex-child combatants in Medellin, Colombia; we attended the Women’s Theatre Festival in Bogotá, an event that included shows and conferences with artists, activists and community leaders, planting the seeds for our future international festival as were entering a second artistic growth phase: the development of a trans-american community of art practices, artists, and community engagement.
In 2009 Aluna became a charitable organization and began to receive over the next few years operating support from various levels of government and foundations. This stability allowed us to move into a new home, an office / rehearsal studio in Weston-Pelham Park.
By 2010 numerous artists had arrived in Toronto in search of an artistic home, marking the beginning of an important shift for the company. Many of these artists arrived in this country with long professional careers in theatre, but were unable to find work because they didn’t speak English. In trying to address such language barriers, Aluna made one of its boldest and most rewarding artistic moves: we began to create theatre in multiple languages using surtitles, or dynamic titling in both languages, as part of the visual design of the play.
Favouring collective creation with interdisciplinary ensembles, in 2011 we staged one of our most successful touring productions to date, the critically acclaimed “Nohayquiensepa“ (one Dora, four nominations). We began a long-running series of play readings, the Aluna Café, with classic canonical works and contemporary writings from Latin America, which continues to this day in various locations throughout the GTA.
During this period, we developed and produced the work of new voices through associations and co-productions: “Homegrown”, by Catherine Frid, directed by Pizano (2010 SummerWorks), “IXOK’” an ensemble creation with Mayahuel Tecozaulta – Aluna’s first production in Spanish with English surtitles (2010 SummerWorks, 2010 Women on Stage Festival in Bogotá, 2012 RUTAS Festival), and “Red Snow”, written by Diana Tso, presented in English with written Chinese surtitles (2012 Theatre Passe Muraille, tour to ACT Shanghai International Contemporary Theatre Festival, China). In 2014-15 we presented and toured “El Refugio de Freidel” (in Spanish with English titles, directed by Pizano) to Kitchener, Montreal, and Quito, Ecuador. “What I learned from a decade of fear” (in English with Spanish titles, one Dora nomination), toured to La MaMa ETC in New York, as well as festivals in Bogotá and the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro in Montreal.
In addition, we established Young Panamerican Vo(i)ces, a theatre training for Latin Canadian youth that prepares participants for entrance into theatre schools.
2012 was a landmark year. Working nationally and internationally with artists from across the continent taught us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our artistic vision and work needed to reflect the society we were part of. We had planted the seeds and now we were ready to turn our efforts toward the building of a Trans-American community as a way to connect the Americas through the arts. We needed to go beyond the walls, beyond borders, and beyond obstacles to create bridges between artists and non-artists, including interest groups, community leaders, social leaders, academia and other diverse and Indigenous arts organizations.
Inspired by our sister company in Bogotá and their international festivals, we launched the first RUTAS International Multi-Arts Festival, a signature event that addresses the need to connect both mainstream and newcomer audiences with Canadian and International work from across the Americas. As we would say during its inaugural year, “our Pan-American vision includes Canada”.
Over the three editions of the festival we partnered with Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA) as a crucial partner in this conversation. We expanded on this collaboration in 2015 to co-present a new festival of work-in-progress, CAMINOS, a domestic counterpoint to our biennial international RUTAS festival.
We continued building collaborations. In 2015 and 2017 we co-produce Blood Wedding (8 nominations, 7 Doras) with Modern Times Stage Company, “a quintessentially Canadian approach to the classics – one that isn’t about a nebulous idea of diversity, but simply emphasizes the individuality of the performers” (Kelly Nestruck, The Globe and Mail).
Next we began an investigation of the act of performing and creating from a multilingual place, called Interpretation Lab: a 2-year investigation into the use of multiple languages onstage with a bilingual ensemble. We also partner with other companies to co-present: Stones (1 Dora nomination) written and directed by Anita La Selva and the Stones Project, and Marine Life written and directed by Rosa Labordé and co-presented with the Tarragon Theatre, introducing Spanish surtitles to their audiences.
In 2019 we presented “Dividing Lines | Lineas Divisorias”, a docudrama piece about euthanasia as a result of an investigation and artistic exchange between Aluna and elders and artists in the Amazon Triangle; we supported Chicho (1 Dora, 2 nominations) co-presented with Theatre Passe Muraille and Pencil Kit production. In addition, we were awarded a New Chapter Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts that resulted in one of most ambitious collective creation productions, The Solitudes (2020, three Dora Nominations) a piece inspired by the women of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and featuring a cast of eight diverse women, questioning their relationship to this land.
In our desire to reach our audiences beyond the theatre, we introduce Radio Aluna Theatre, and present two iconic Latin Canadian plays as a Podcast in English and Spanish: Madre by Beatriz Pizano and Leo by Rosa Labordé. In addition, emerging artists Camila Diaz-Varela and Monica Garrido join us as co-producers of Merendiando, a series of conversations with national and international artists about the art of creation as artists of colour, indigenous, mestizos and mulattos.
In 2020 the world comes to a stand-still, a pause. For us at the company this became an opportunity to reflect on our journey over the past two decades. As the injustices and inequities in society and in the arts come are called out, as we stand for anti-racism and anti-oppression we believe more than ever in working as a Trans-American community to affect these changes. To make sure that we don’t create an illusion of change but that we are the change.