PTC Associates
PTC’s Associates are theatre makers at any stage of their careers with vision for new live performance. Not a commissioning program, The Associates seeds a process and provides resources to get to a production draft. Each writer defines their own way of working, whether studio based or behind the computer. Over three years, through collegial conversations, retreats and workshops, the group develops a community of mutual support and creative connection.
We are pleased to welcome four playwrights as PTC Associates 2021-24: Mercedes Bátiz-Benét, Mily Mumford, Kamila Sediego and José Teodoro.
The four Associates are developing fantastic new projects:
Inspired by controversial figure Malintzin, the Indigenous Nahua lover and interpreter of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, Mercedes Bátiz-Benét’s La Malinche uses historical events as a lens to explore what it means to be a Mexican woman today. The play is also deeply personal: Mercedes escaped ferocious violence to come to Canada, but carries with her a sense of having betrayed her homeland by escaping it.
Mily Mumford’s It Lives in My Bedroom is an immersive play about the effects of sexualized violence in intimate relationships on survivor’s experiences and subsequent relationships. It uses narrative, new media and technology to explore PTSD from a survivor’s perspective, and centres the experience of queer, female and non-binary/gender non-conforming people.
Kamila Sediego’s Engkanto is a dark fairytale, melding Filipinx folklore, the weight of family legacy, and the climate crisis all together. The play’s central character Lara deals with the revelation that her “human” dad, Dante, is actually a malevolent engkanto, a Philippine enchanted spirit, punisher, and bestower of misfortune to those who mistreat the sea.
Set within the BC interior during the wildfires of 2003, and in Buenos Aires in March 2020, just as the pandemic has begun to turn the world upside-down, José Teodoro’s Binary Star shifts from wilderness to stark architectural space, from monodrama to two-hander, as it explores the twinned limits of geography and language, and the fissures and fidelities of troubled, ardent love.
The PTC Associates will be in residence with PTC for three years beginning in the summer of 2021, developing a central project – and their practice – with PTC dramaturgs. The writers will receive a stipend, process design, dramaturgical collaboration, workshops with actors, studio space, support finding producing partners, digital and technical experience and support; and opportunities to present their work in progress directly to the communities they are in conversation with, online, and in programs like our Unscripted Series. They will participate in regular collegial discussions with each other and PTC staff.
