(Taylor’s Version), Baker Miller Pink. Photo by Samantha Ketsa.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Anyone who’s ever looked a bit furtive while ordering a pumpkin spice latte knows this: you don’t get credit for liking what’s popular or ‘girly’. Au contraire.

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Cayley Wreggit and Samantha Ketsa, the engaging Calgary-based creators and joint directors of (Taylor’s Version), premiering on the Nextfest mainstage, wondered about that. The seed from which the play grew was fan-don, and says Wreggit, the playwright of the pair.

“Both of us are really big fans of Taylor Swift…. On camping trips we bonded,” she says of a partnership forged in Swiftian listening parties. “We both found that was a real comfort during that time when everything felt uncertain to be able to fan-girl about an incredible female artist.”

As Wreggit explains, Ketsa, a dancer/choreographer, “had the idea of a piece that celebrated all things feminine…. There’s a reason things are so popular. And it’s not a bad thing to like them.” There it is, a radical manifesto of sorts.

In a gender studies course, “I’d gone down a bit of a rabbit hole,” says Ketsa. “The aesthetics of subordination, questioning the idea that things labelled ‘for girls’, things associated with the feminine, are inherently ‘lesser than’…. So, questioning that and thinking about our own mutual Swift-y bond, and the value of that,” discounted as it is in the world.

One question led to others. “What is a guilty pleasure? And why does that put shame into what has a greater purpose of catharsis, and healing, and bonding?”

As for ‘why Taylor Swift?’, the answer has something to do with that artist’s well-known advocacy for artists owning their own work and having control over their contracts, says Wreggit. The title (Taylor’s Version) is an homage to Swift’s drive to re-record her masters, as a feisty response to “her whole body of work having been sold out from under her.” Taylor designated her re-recorded songs with that parenthetical annotation, “to note which version of a song you should be listening to, which version is owned by the artist.”

Wreggit and Ketsa met at the University of Calgary, across the ever-shrinking theatre/dance frontier. The former graduated as a playwright/director, “never an actor!” she laughs. “Jokingly I say I didn’t like to be emotionally vulnerable in front of people. More seriously, it’s that I like being a creator, having more creative agency to tell stories. Writing has always been a passion.” Wreggit’s new musical Home For The Holidays (with composer Alixandra Cowman) ran at Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre this past December. And the structural possibilities in musical theatre have intrigued both Wreggit and Ketsa.

Post-graduation Wreggit has leaned into film and TV, as a co-founder of the indie all-female film company Prairie Kitten Productions, started by U of C arts grads. “We’ve branched out separately now. But it was a great incubator for us as artists to figure out where we wanted to go….”

Playwright Cayley Wreggit and dancer/choreographer Samantha Ketsa, creators of (Taylor’s Version), Baker Miller Pink at Nextfest. Photo by Kate Boyce.

Ketsa, who grew up in Edmonton and went to Victoria, the performing arts high school, emerged from the U of C’s dance program. “By trade I’m a dancer and choreographer, desperate to do theatre and collaborate with other art forms!” Nextfest was a natural, and she has a history with the festival’s dance series, back to 2018 and Just Girly Things.

This year as part of Merge, one of Nextfest dance programs, Ketsa has choreographed (with Lizzie Rajchel) Perennial, “a stage adaptation of a short film I made a year ago.” And in Marvel, her choreography moves Visions of Lillian, with Wreggit in the three-dancer cast.

In (Taylor’s Version), Josie and Callie, both avid Swifties “go down the rabbit hole of their fan experience,” as Ketsa puts it. Abigail, the third of their trio, “gets dragged along with them, reluctantly.” And the play happens “as they’re getting ready for a Taylor Swift dance party in a bar, discussing parallels with Bob Dylan and conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift re-records, the lore of her PR and marketing….”

(Taylor’s Version), Baker Miller Pink at Nextfest. Photo by Samantha Ketsa.

“And through this there’s an undercurrent of their own personal experience and love lives, influenced by the music,” says Wreggit. “That’s what’s so magical about Taylor Swift’s music.” In that enormous canon, “you can, you will, find a song that will apply to you and your life, and will hit you very hard…. And suddenly you’re crying.”

Abigail is the skeptic, as Ketsa describes. She starts from the position that pop music is “superficial, bubblegum, no substance. What she comes to find is that Taylor Swift writes from a place of specificity … to a point that makes the themes (of her songs) universal.”

Collaborating with Ketsa, says Wreggit, “has been wonderful … to have a sounding board, to tell the stories I want to tell and exploring ways of doing that.” And in (Taylor’s Version), that exploration includes a wealth of movement possibilities. For one thing, there’s the dance party setting. For another, one of the characters “tends to go off into a sort of dream space, an imaginary space where she expresses herself and what she’s dealing with through her body and Taylor Swift’s music.”

Ketsa was inspired, she says, by the choreography of Swift’s current tour. “And she’s not a very smooth, technically trained, or even sexy, dancer…. There’s something tongue-in-cheek we played with. It pokes fun at itself.” Another choreographic inspiration was the work of Alyssa Martin of Toronto’s feminist indie dance company Rock Bottom Movement, “often very abstract, leaning into the satirical.”

Wreggit and Ketsa tried the show out in Calgary, “one night only, a year ago, on a much smaller scale.” Nextfest is an opportunity for a more fulsome premiere. “People are so excited; they want to be in something that’s really fun, and not viewed as high art. And isn’t that high art in itself?” says Wreggit.

“There are so few opportunities for indie artists to gather and cross-pollinate,” as Ketsa says. The life of an indie artist “can be so isolating.” The Nextfest experience works against that isolation. It’s an invitation “for the like-minded to gather and cheer each other on.”

(Taylor’s Version) runs at Nextfest June 6 and 8 in the Nancy Power Theatre at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St. Tickets and schedule details: nextfest.ca