Incoming Concrete Theatre artistic director Brett Dahl. Photo by James MacLean

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Concrete Theatre, the award-winning 39-year-old Edmonton company devoted to making theatre for young audiences, has found a new artistic director.

The multi-faceted theatre artist Brett Dahl inherits the Concrete artistic directorship from Jenna Rodgers (who’s moving to the artistic directorship of Theatre Network).

Dahl, a Queer Métis artist who has a BFA in acting and a master’s degree in directing from the U of A , brings to this new job a startlingly diverse skill set — director/ actor/ playwright/ choreogapher/ producer/ drag artist, and artistic director of their own company, Lethbridge-based Theatre Outré. Theirs is a career that spans both indie and mainline theatre, and a resumé that leans into developing new work, and reimagining texts through a contemporary Queer lens. Witness the season just past in which Edmonton audiences have seen Dahl’s directing work at the Citadel (a Young Companies premiere of Project Andromeda) and the Persistent Myth premiere of Tough Guy (in the Fringe Theatre season). This month he’s assistant director for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival production of the musical comedy Something Rotten.

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They have a history with TYA (theatre for young audiences); “it’s always been part of my career,” Dahl says. As a graduate actor just out of U of A theatre school, “I cut my teeth doing TYA tours; it’s in my theatre DNA.” At Evergreen Theatre in Calgary, where they grew up, the actors were guest artists at high schools. “Kids would teach us their science curriculum, and we’d do a play about whatever they were studying — photosynthesis, aviation, polar bears….” During the pandemic, Dahl the playwright started writing a TYA musical, in association with Bad Hat in Toronto and Carousel in Vancouver. And this past month they authored one of three new 10-minute scripts for this year’s edition of Concrete’s annual Sprouts Festival.

“Kids are the most pure audience,” they say. “They’ll tell you right away whether something’s working or not. And they’re also ready to go on an imaginative adventure…. That’s what attracted me to Concrete.”

They talk from first-hand experience about the crazy challenges and camaraderie of multi-show days of TYA touring. At the Shakespeare Company in Calgary, for example, Dahl would be one of four actors playing all  the characters in a Shakespeare play, and setting up and taking down the show too. “You’d endure the craziness,” they laugh. “A fire alarm going off during a show. Or forgetting a set piece in the van when we were already onstage,” a test of resourcefulness not to mention improv skills, as generations of actors have discovered. “If you can survive TYA you can really work anywhere and do anything!”

And the lessons in problem-solving will be valuable at Concrete in many ways. Take  “a play with 10 characters but only four actors,” for example. “Is it going to be puppets? voice-overs? quick costume changes?” They note the theatre truism that “limited resources inspire creativity and restrictions (inspire) ingenuity. No pyrotechnics required!”

Alberta government restrictions on schools — what books can’t be read, what social issues can’t be discussed — create another kind of challenge for Concrete, a theatre that from the start has been dedicated in its creative work to supporting diversity, in both its artists and its young audiences. “Concrete has always been at the forefront of supporting equity-seeking groups, the underdogs…. I really want to ensure we are sharing all kinds of stories. What stories haven’t we been sharing? As someone from a Métis heritage, creating more Indigenous work would be a huge thing for me….”

Rochelle Laplante in Spread Your Wings, Sprouts Festival 2026, Concrete Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

The ability of kids to understand larger concepts, presented imaginatively, shouldn’t be under-estimated, Dahl thinks. Spread Your Wings, their Sprouts playlet, develops an appealing metaphor for denying gender identity: “a butterfly hatches and the first person they meet is a snail who says ‘no, you’re still a caterpillar’.”

School touring has long been a mainstay of programming at the theatre founded in the 1980s by Mieko Ouchi, Caroline Howarth, Kazimea Sokil, Jan Selman, Elinor Holt. And times being what they are, “shows they could do 10 years ago they couldn’t do any more,” as Dahl says of school censorship. “I want to make sure we’re telling stories that are important for young audiences. … So we have to be more strategic about how we tell them and where we tell them.” They’re thinking about “public presentations,” and other kinds of community partnerships” in addition to school settings. After all, its name notwithstanding Concrete is not a bricks-and-mortar operation.

“I’m not naive to the (problems)…. But we we need someone to advocate so these stories will still happen. Queer advocacy has been a big part of my work. It’s a challenge, but I want to fight for these stories to still be heard, to share them for our next generation. Because I didn’t have them.”

Concrete initiatives, a mix of submissions and commissions, in expanding the TYA repertoire of Canadian plays from a diversity of artistic sources — including emerging writers and writers from outside the theatre world — will continue in a Dahl-led Concrete, they say. “New work is very important to me.”

Even in high school in Calgary, they were part of an Alberta Theatre Projects program, as a young actor participating in new play readings at the PlayRites Festival at the time. During their time at U of A theatre school, Dahl and class-mates “spent three years inside a new play development process” when Greg MacArthur, “a mentor and a hero for me,” was the Lee Playwright In Residence. That time, they say, with its inspiring “peek into the new-play process in an intimate way, really shaped me as an artist.”

New play development, they think, “allows actors to have a new kind of agency in storytelling — the stories you’re telling and how you’re telling them…. When I transitioned into playwriting it opened up new paths — teaching, directing, producing — that I didn’t always have access to.”

The upcoming Concrete season, chosen by outgoing artistic director Rodgers, has already been announced. It includes touring The Monkey and the Turtle by actor-turned-playwright Alexander Ariate in the spring of 2027, and “change-makers” and anti-racism workshops with high school kids.  Meanwhile Dahl is concentrating on the challenges of 2027. Stay tuned.