12thNight.ca

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Where did the time go? Yes, Edmonton’s innovative, free-wheeling cross-pollinating multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists, is hitting the big 3-OH, all grown up and still asking “What’s next?”

It’s the eve of the 2025 anniversary edition, opening Thursday for an 11-day (and night) invasion of Theatre Network’s Roxy. And it’s getting hard to remember a time when there was no Nextfest to encourage, mentor, inspire, showcase, celebrate up-and-comers emerging into professional careers— and to broker artistic partnerships across theatre, dance, music, visual arts, film, video…. It’s getting harder still to find a professional artist in this theatre town whose career hasn’t been touched in some fashion by the bright idea hatched at Theatre Network in 1996.

Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss, who created the festival, says the inspiration was absence: “what there wasn’t in Edmonton” at the time. The Citadel’s Teen Fest had folded, the Kids’ Fest had moved to St. Albert…. Two important theatre schools (the U of A and MacEwan) kept graduating young artists, all at the same time…. But where would they go? Where was the place for emerging artists on the brink of a professional career to take the leap — to get experience, experiment, hone their craft, make contacts, get some momentum going?

[And for us, the audience, how could we find out what the next generation of professional artists was up to, what risks they were thinking about taking?]

Moss considered it vital that Nextfest would be a party, a gathering place for emerging artists to share ideas. Nextfest has always been serious about its playful mantra “come for the art, stay for the party.” And every Nextfest artist got some money, too, albeit a modest honorarium. It said “you are valued, we respect your contribution.”

Nextfest started small, but not that small: 100 artists, six days. And by the time Steve Pirot and Murray Utas were the director/management duo, Nextfest was an 11-day affair, celebrating the work of 500 artists.

Ellen Chorley has been the festival director since 2017. But her history with Nextfest goes back way farther than that. An award-winning playwright/ actor/ director/ dramaturg/ mentor/ teacher/ producer/ curator, who has founded both a kids’ theatre company (Promise Productions) and an experimental burlesque troupe (Send in the Girls), she’s a veritable poster child for the kind of inspiration and bonding that emerging artists discover at Nextfest.

“Nextfest is where it all started for me,” says Chorley, an effervescent spirit to whom the much-overused term “empowering” might properly be applied. Before she got the director gig she was the curator of Nextfest’s high school theatre program for four years (she herself started as a Nextfest participant as a high school kid). She’s acted in Nextfest shows, and directed them. She contributed to the famous Nextfest Nite Clubs. “Before escape rooms got popular Taylor Chadwick and I got the idea of a Nite Club where people went on missions, directed by cellphone messages.” It was a clear Nextfest gambit: “I have this weird idea….”

“My first-ever play was at Nextfest,” she says of her 20-year-old self and Bohemian Perso … not very good!” The honorarium was “my first paycheque as an artist…. It meant the world to me for  someone to say ‘you’re good at this! I believe in you!’”

Nextfest 2021. Image by Danielle Taylor.

The fire that destroyed the old Roxy in 2015 “did change the festival, of course,” says Chorley. Nextfest had shows in all kinds of far-flung places, the Gateway Theatre and La Cité francophone among them. And COVID sent the festival into the online world. But by 2022, Nextfest was live and occupying every corner of the new Roxy, the two theatres, the rehearsal room, the roof, the offices, the spanky bathroom, even the elevator.

Nextfest has always been a cross-disciplinary event. “As an artist I believe you  need to wear lots of hats,” Chorley says. “And Nextfest helps with that.” The participants tend, more and more, not to label themselves as actors, or playwrights, or directors, but “theatre artists.” Chorley agrees, “it’s more multi-disciplinary for sure. We have dance theatre with spoken text, theatre using projection and film; we’ve all learned how to edit a video….” The 10 workshops (on everything from producing a show to drag make-up) are free.

In a way, there’s no use asking “what’s new?” at this year’s edition of Nextfest. “Everything is brand new every year. That’s the point!”  declares Chorley happily. But there’s continuity, too. Nextfest follows new work from play readings and “progress showings” to mainstage premieres. And in a cross-festival venture started a couple of seasons ago, Nextfest will produce two shows at the upcoming Fringe: Jezik Sanders’ Where Foxes Lie and Stretcher Hartout’s drag/ burlesque variety show Four-Way Stretch.

On the mainstage, BatRabbit Productions unveils a much-anticipated stand-alone “sequel” to their hit bouffon show Rat Academy, which had its start at Nextfest before a year of cross-country Fringe touring. In Rat Academy 2: Gnaw And Order the worldly-wise rat Fingers (Dayna Lea Hoffmann) and acolyte rat Shrimp (Kate Yoner) are on the hunt for a home — in a province where they are clearly outsiders.

The protagonist of Kate Couture’s The Most Beautiful Man, a “progress showing” last year, is, as Chorley describes, a “20-something girl who loses her job and has to take one, as Santa’s elf. And she has to come to grips with ‘who is a good man? and who is a bad man?’.” Chorley describes the two-hander as “funny and extremely touching, a new way of looking at feminism … being in your 20s and not having a real job, everything in flux.”

“It’s my story, too…. I’ve lived it in some way,” says Chorley.” “It feels like a Nextfest show, and a homegrown Edmonton story too,” like Sheldon Elter’s Métis Mutt, Kristi Hansen’s Woody, Jeremy Baumung’s Dead Man Walking. 

Mika Boutin’s Televangelists, a Dog Bite Theatre Company production, is on a scale: 8 actors and a huge set, as Chorley describes. It takes us to the Canadian punk rock scene in 1997, “dark and very charged with that energy,” she says. “Eighteen-, 19-, 20-year-olds being new at being adults. And the loss of innocence. A very cool show, very tragic and scary…. Would I have been brave enough to program it nine years ago?” Chorley thinks maybe not.

For Peat’s Sake, which happens up close in the 30-seat Roxy rehearsal hall, “feels very current to the world we’re living in, too. But in very different ways,” says Chorley of the Wondermuck Creations production, billed as “an oral storytelling performance that taps “ecological grief.”

And that’s reflected in this year’s array of Nite Clubs, always a major Nextfest draw and “a great place to experiment,” says Chorley. They’re unpredictable pop-up performance parties with a theme,  roving artists, live music, dancing, and a sense of creative mayhem. Attendees get a map, and then they’re let loose in the building.

Friday night is the first, A Nite At The Circus, with clowns, burlesque and drag artists, magicians aerialists, burlesque, carnival games for adults — all curated by Theatre Tahanan.  The following Friday Jinxx, curated by Gemma Nye, takes as its theme “good luck, bad luck, fortune, fate,” says Chorley, and includes “immersive installations, roving entertainment, and a mainstage showcase,” followed by dancing till all hours. And for the first time, a Nextfest Nite Club goes all-ages for one night, Saturday’s Dungeons and Drag Queens. Chorley describes it as “a sort of renaissance fair.”

What’s changed in the nine years since Chorley became festival director? For one thing, she thinks, it’s become even more cross-disciplinary. For another “there’s way more space for plays about being on the threshold, people in their early 20s not knowing what’s the next step….”

And that’s your cue. The next step: for a schedule, performance descriptions, and tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.