SkirtsAfire Festival 2026. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

SkirtsAfire, Edmonton’s 10-day multi-disciplinary festival devoted to  celebrating the work of women in the arts, is back Thursday for a 14th annual edition, dubbed ‘The Maps We Make’. And as usual the festivities are an A-line swirl of theatre, dance, poetry, spoken word, art, cabaret, comedy … and workshops, panel discussions and more. They’re happening in six venues, including for the first time ever ArtsHub Ortona.

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Their mantra is diversity — ethnic, cultural, and artistic, hospitality to creative artists and audiences of every stripe (including cis and trans women, non-binary people, and the 2SLGBTQIA+ community).

SkirtsAfire found its raison d’être, and its heartbeat, 14 years ago in lop-sided statistics: the under-representation of women in theatre. And this year, as artistic producer Amanda Goldberg explains, the festival’s audiences (last year in the 3,000+ range), will be seeing new theatre, at every stage of development.

Instead of a single mainstage production running the duration of the festival, this year’s edition has made use of its resources with a variety of feature presentations in shorter runs — a deliberate choice, says Goldberg, a theatre artist herself (her production of a new Cyrano de  Bergerac re-imagining by Jessy Ardern is the Citadel season finale in May).

I Am Eagle by the Indigenous playwright/ creator Matricia Bauer, is inspired by traumatic experiences of “silence and loss” as a ‘60s Scoop survivor. As Goldberg describes, the play, produced by SkirtsAfire, is fashioned as a parable: the tale of a young eagle snatched from its home nest and placed with a hawk family.

It faces head-on “a very personal experience,” Goldberg says of the new play, with revelatory ties to Indigenous history. But the reverb is universal: “it’s being told to be something you’re not, and not belonging.”

When Goldberg read the Bauer poem itself from which the play is created, her reaction was immediate and intense: “OMG, I can’t believe this hasn’t been published!….” And she’s enthusiastic too about the striking theatricality of the play, directed by Danielle LaRose: “two life-sized puppets (by Victoria-based puppet designer/builder Jessica Hickman), music, movement…. This will be a beautiful touring show.”

Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen by Jameela McNeil, SkirtsAfire Festival 2026. Photo supplied

Set in contemporary Edmonton, Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen by the multi-talented actor/playwright/singer Jameela McNeil is a celebration of the Caribbean community here. And in its remarkably complex story of a fraught mother-daughter relationship in a Jamaican family, it also steps up to explore intergenerational and cross-cultural tensions, the immigrant experience, and the knotty problem of consent. I saw an earlier workshop production at Nextfest in 2024, further developed at the RISER new works festival. And now Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen arrives at a full SkirtsAfire premiere, directed by Patricia Darbasie at the ArtsHub Ortona, in a partnership with Common Ground Arts Society.

Playwright/ actor Louise Casemore (Lucky Charm, Un-Dress, Gemini), a bona fide theatre innovator, is unveiling a new play at SkirtsAfire. After six years of gestation, Put Your Lips Together, billed intriguingly as “surreal neon-noir,” breathes its first public air at the festival as a staged reading. Goldberg directs, and explains that it’s based on “interviews with a hundred  women, in all different jobs including the arts” about their workplace experiences, from routine harassment to violent crime. Four women, strangers, find themselves in a diner, each with a story to tell about their treatment at work — and together they hatch a plan.

As Goldberg points out, Casemore’s new play is tuned to our moment: did you know that “Canada has the lowest whistle-blower protection” of our fellow traveller nations?

Things I Shouldn’t Tell You, premiering at SkirtsAfire 2026, marks the return of the premier Canadian clown Shannan Calcutt to the world of theatre, after two decades on loan (as we Canucks see it) to circus in Las Vegas, with the Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity and Mad Apple. Fringe audiences love Calcutt from her trilogy of hit plays starring the impulsive romance-seeking clown Izzy (Burnt Tongue, It’s Me — Only Better! and Out Of My Skin). In Things I Shouldn’t Tell You, Calcutt for the first time plays … herself. Her play, full of audience interaction as you might expect, shares personal stories, funny and relatable, about the taboo mysteries of being a mid-life woman, perimenopause included. Stay tuned for a 12thnight interview with Calcutt soon.

And the festival includes the fifth return of The Shoe Project, in which immigrant and refugee women, mentored by theatre professionals like playwright Conni Massing and voice coach Alyson Connolly, tell the stories of how they got here and how they adapted to life in a new land.

SkirtsAfire 2026 runs Thursday through March 15, in a variety of venues, including the Gateway Theatre, Walterdale Theatre, La Cité francophone, ArtsHub Ortona. The full festival schedule, including show descriptions and tickets: skirtsafire.com.