Meet the cohort of our Dramaturg Launch Pad
Meet the cohort:
María Escolán is a queer theatre artist – emerging performer, director, and dramaturg – born in El Salvador and raised both there and on the unceded traditional Coast Salish Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver BC). María holds a BFA Degree in Theatre Performance from the School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University and a BA Degree in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia. Recent performance credits include Dusty Foot Productions’ Attachments[Excerpt] at Rumble Theatre’s Tremors Festival (2020), the Canadian premiere of Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderon’s B with Vancouver’s Rumble Theatre (2020), and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival’s Corazón del Espantapájaros (2019). María also recently published a translation excerpt (Spanish to English) of Corazón del Espantapájaros by Hugo Carrillo in the online journal Asymptote, Summer 2020 Edition.
Evan Medd (he/him) is a Canadian theatre artist based in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) and in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His practice primarily focuses on dramaturgical strategizing of process design, community engaged art that intersects with environmental dialogues, and collaborative new play development and production with his Calgary company the Major Matt Mason Collective. A BFA graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Performance Creation program, Evan is passionate about how dramaturgical practice can intersect with community from differing perspectives and how interdisciplinary performance can integrate dialogues from unexpected sources. For the past few summers Evan has been working in Prince Edward Island on a piece called The River Clyde Pageant, an outdoor spectacle that celebrates community while drawing attention to the unfortunate reality of PEI’s fading waterways. RCP commits to community engaged practice that integrates rural communities in the creation of a large performance work that explores different art forms such as theatre, dance, visual art, music and puppetry. Evan has also recently been adapting and performing in an online version of Re:Current Theatre’s New Societies, an interactive game where participants form small communities to rebuild society from scratch in a hypothetical scenario where Earth has been destroyed.
Dom Wakeland (they/them) was born on unceded Kwantlen Territory and graduated from Simon Fraser University in June 2019. They are a performer, dramaturg, poet, director, and Drag artist. Their practice is fundamentally movement and text-based with an emphasis on the politics we bring in our bodies and how that manifests into knowledge. As Mx. Bukuru they are the inaugural winner of Van Slam’s Drag Slam (2019) and runner up in Man Up’s Drag Derby (2019). Mx. Bukuru is the church being your mama never wanted you to meet. Let them open up your heart, and call on your ancestors. Every month is Black History Month Baby.
David Geary is a playwright, screenwriter, fiction writer, dramaturg and educator. He teaches film studies at Capilano University. He’s been the Senior Lecturer in Scriptwriting at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand; the dramaturg/director for Native Earth workshops in Toronto; and has led Block A for PTC for four years. He also collaborated in mentoring the Julius Caesar Project with PTC, The Cultch and Western Gold as well as working as a dramaturg with several writers. David believes storytelling and scriptwriting are muscles that are best developed through exercises. His yogic mantra is – Life is short, stretch it – and he writes haiku on twitter @gearsgeary. (Photo by Taehoon Kim)