The Power of One
Production Team
Danielle Irvine is a proud Newfoundlander who has had to travel a lot for her work. Highlights of her career include teaching at the National Theatre School of Canada; Assistant Directing at the Stratford Festival of Canada (including being the first director to study in their Birmingham Conservatory); and winning such awards as the Canada Council for the Arts prestigious John Hirsch Prize for Directing, and the ArtsNL BMO Artist of the Year. Danielle was also a participant in the World Stage Festival 2000’s Master Class for Directors; where she was honoured to study with such theatre greats as Peter Brook, Yoshi Oida and Polly Teale. In the fall of 2016, she was invited to participate in the inaugural Stratford Festival’s International Classical Directing Intensive. For over 27 years, she has been directing theatrical productions of all sizes and types in all manner of venues. Danielle has co-founded two other successful theatre companies Shakespeare by the Sea (NL), First Light Productions and is also the current founding AD of Sweetline Theatre. Her love and passion for NL culture combined with her theatre training inspired Danielle to co-develop a show with Anna Stassis which brought audiences through a theatrical experience on a bus, a ferry, around Bell Island and culminated 650 feet underground in a mine. This was listed by the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres as a Landmark Theatrical Event in 1997. She has also been a key note speaker and workshop leader at various conferences over the years and is also a casting director for television and film. Credits include: CBC’s Republic of Doyle; the Netflix series, Frontier; the CBC Series, LittleDog; the CBC mini-series, Caught; the Citytv Series, Hudson and Rex; and the feature film, Maudie. Recently, she has been nominated a YWCA Woman of Distinction for Arts and Culture and a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Excellence in Casting for Frontier. Since 2014, Danielle has been bringing her love of Newfoundland culture and community, together with her passion for Shakespeare in her role as the Artistic Director of Perchance Theatre at Cupids. There is truly no other place in the world that brings Danielle joy like Newfoundland and Labrador. Her avid love of the outdoors is fed with ample hiking on coastal trails in all weather and all seasons. She hopes that you too, come to love this province.
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Jamie Skidmore is an award winning artist with over 30 years experience in the theatre. He’s a co-founder of the Isle aux Morts Theatre Festival, and is a founding member of the St. John’s Shorts Festival. He works as a director, designer, producer, and playwright throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as in other parts of Canada, the US, and the UK. In 2006 he served as the Production Manager/Technical Director for the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, Canada’s National Festival of Contemporary Theatre in English.
Recent directing and design credits include The Brass Button Man (various venues), Moby Dick - Rehearsed (Memorial University), Apes and Grunge is Dead (St. John’s Shorts, 2017); A Fish Tale: A Puppet Lantern Play and Cod Love (Isle aux Morts Theatre Festival, 2017); Sleepers (St. John’s Shorts, 2016); Double Axe Murders (Granite Coast Theatre Festival, 2016); and Our Ancient Family (for NunatuKavut Community Council’s 250th British-Inuit Treaty Ceremony, 2015). He has worked with many prominent NL theatre companies and artists, including RCA Theatre, Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, Perchance Theatre, Grand Bank Regional Theatre, Gordon Pinsent, Andy Jones, Mary Walsh, and more. His current projects include directing a shadow puppet play, “The Kraken,” written by Darren Ivany; and shooting and editing 40 Shakespearean monologues for director Danielle Irvine and Perchance Theatre. |
Tom Cochrane is a photographer, videographer, and curator based in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tom is recognized across Canada as a digital storyteller, having received national awards for his community focused website CornerBrooker.com and for Old Crow Magazine, an arts and culture magazine based in Gros Morne National Park. In 2018 he was named Industry Professional of the Year by MusicNL. In 2017 he received MusicNL's Music Video of the Year award for directing the music video for Kellie Loder's song "Boxes." Tom's work has been featured in publications such as the Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, National Post, Canadian Geographic, Quill and Quire Magazine, CBC.ca and CBC TV, The Telegram, Saltscapes Magazine, and many more. |
Laura Bruijns is a professional event logistics coordinator who has spent the last seven years working in a number of capacities at the province's largest sports and entertainment complex, Mile One Centre. Her true passion lies with the arts and she is involved with a number of boards and committees for theatre and visual arts across the province. Her first job upon arriving in the province was with the local organizing committee for the JUNOs. This amazing opportunity gave her the good fortune to connect with some of the unbelievable talent in Newfoundland and Labrador. She has worked as an administrator for Rising Tide Theatre where she was initiated into the daily trials of theatre and was hooked.
Now that she has experienced the rugged beauty of this province out on the trails, on the waves, and in the concert halls, there is no going back. For everyone watching – Enjoy this place of remarkable beauty. |
Erika Squires (she/they) is a multi-faceted artist from St. John’s, Newfoundland. They are a student at Memorial University of Newfoundland, studying English with a specialization in Theatre and Drama as well as the Diploma in Film and Stage Technique. Erika is trained as an actor and director by Danielle Irvine, and teaches acting, piano and voice at Courtney Fowler Performance Academy. They recently participated in a Commedia Dell’arte workshop with Canadian director Perry Schneiderman as a part of the Sandbox Series for Professional Development in 2019, and was also recently a part of the Emerging Theatre Artist Collaboration Unit with Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland. Erika is currently writing her first full length play, Baby, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and ArtsNL. Favourite acting credits include: Julius Caesar (Perchance Theatre), Brooke in Be More Chill (Best Kind Productions), Disciple in Godspell (Etcetera Productions) Constance in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (MUN Drama), Elle in First Date (AD Productions), and Mary in Mary’s Wedding (MUN Drama). Erika also directed Never Swim Alone in 2019 which was produced by GroupHug Productions, a new 2SLGBTQIA+ theatre group in St. John’s, which Erika is the co-Artistic Director of alongside Nick Mandville.
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Michael Nolan is a Renaissance scholar whose speciality is Elizabethan drama. His Masters thesis was a political study of Thomas of Woodstock, an anonymous Elizabethan history play. His Ph.D. dissertation was a critical edition of The Thracian Wonder, a Jacobean pastoral-comedy, likely written by Thomas Heywood and William Rowley. The critical edition was published in 1994 by the University of Salzburg.
He has taught English literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland for over twenty-five years. He has regularly incorporated Elizabethan plays into his teaching, including works of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, and John Webster, but most particularly William Shakespeare. He has, also, taught the university’s senior Shakespeare courses, which focus on all four genres of Shakespeare’s works: comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Dr. Nolan has examined in this manner the whole corpus of Shakespeare. His enthusiasm for and understanding of Shakespeare is expressed by a life-long participation in theatre. He has concentrated a theatrical life of well over thirty years in the express practice of Shakespeare (and other Elizabethan authors; one of his unique performance experiences was the first reading of in four hundred years of Thomas Heywood’s The Golden Age at a Classics Conference in San Francisco in 2004). He has performed in ten years of MUN Drama’s Summer Shakespeare, about the same amount of time in Shakespeare by the Sea, and, more recently, three seasons of Perchance Theatre. I’ve heard music echo in the streets of London, seen the sunset shimmer on the canals of Venice, walked a mile of the Great Wall’s mighty crumbling, and thought “fine, but it’s not home.” |
Author, folklorist, and storyteller Dale Jarvis is the Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Officer for the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, helping communities safeguard traditional culture. The creator of the St. John’s Haunted Hike ghost tour, Dale shares ghost stories, supernatural stories, legends, and traditional tales from Newfoundland and beyond. He is a passionate activist for local heritage and culture.
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