PTC and the Vancouver Fringe Festival are pleased to announce that Lili Robinson has won the Fringe New Play Prize with her work Mx.  The Prize includes a free Mainstage spot at the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival , the design and execution of a development process for the play with PTC’s Project Dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel, and a free spot in PTC’s how-to-produce-theatre seminar series, Block P.

 

About Mx
What of culture and ancestry lives within us and how much is influenced by our upbringing? If a part of your identity has never been nurtured, do attempts to rekindle it amount to appropriation? Does blood equal belonging? These questions form the world of Mx, a boundary-pushing, bouffon-inspired work exploring what it means to be mixed-race and Black in the world today. As our clown protagonist ricochets through representations of Blackness from historical to present-day, notions of racial identity are cracked open in a mashup of disciplines, examining colonial narratives through the lens of a character stuck in the in-between.

Mx will be produced by Shanae Sodhi and will premiere at the 2019 Fringe Festival, September 5-15, 2019.

 

Bios

Lili Robinson is a multidisciplinary theatre artist and a graduate of the acting program at Studio 58. Her intersectionality as a queer, biracial Black woman is mirrored by her approach to devising work, which explores the creative space where poetry, music, and physical theatre collide. As an actor she has worked with companies including Boca del Lupo, Theatre Replacement, and The Troika Collective. Her first play, Chimera, co-written with close friend and collaborator Heather Barr, debuted as part of FourPlay at Studio 58 in 2018. In 2019 she will be developing a new play with the mentorship of Carmen Aguirre through the Emerging Playwright Mentorship at Rumble Theatre, as well as stepping into the position of Artistic Producing Intern at Theatre Replacement. She is the assistant director to Mike Stack at Theatre Temp, where they are developing two new collective creation pieces with students from Templeton Secondary in East Van.

 

Shanae Sodhi is a Vancouver based producer and director. As one of the establishing members of The Student Diversity Committee at Studio 58, Shanae spearheaded work to give voice and strength to marginalized groups within the theatre community, while empowering students with the tools and knowledge to engage in conversations surrounding diversity. He was the recipient of the Studio 58 Diversity Award for increasing access and opportunities for diversity and inclusion within the program. Shanae assistant directed Genevieve Fleming’s Wilderness and Rachel Aberle’s I Know What I Saw at Studio 58, and will be assistant directing Anita Rochon on 4000 Miles at The Belfry Theatre in March. Currently he works as the Associate Producer Intern with Green Thumb Theatre, Associate Producer at Diwali in BC, and Ambassador for Visceral Visions’ DiverseTheatreBC. He is also honoured to serve as the Board President for Killjoy Theatre Company.