 MEDIA RELEASE |
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MEDIA RELEASE |
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For Immediate Release
November 15, 2000
Banff playRites Colony and Alberta
Theatre Projects renew partnership
Theatre Arts and Alberta Theatre Projects announce a renewal of their
three-year partnership.
In 1997, the Theatre Arts department of The Banff Centre and Alberta Theatre Projects merged their respective playwrights development programs to form the Banff playRites Colony. The unqualified success of the program over the past three years has led current directors John Murrell and Bob White to renew this beneficial relationship. The fundamental purposes of this alliance remain the same:
About the playRites Colony
The Banff playRites Colony is an artist-driven program. It is designed to meet the particular needs of each participating playwright through work with a requested or appointed dramaturge/director, and access to a company of professional actors who assist in exploration and refinement of text. The unique atmosphere at The Banff Centre plays a significant role in the processes of the artists. The Colony provides "an excellent environment to meet writers from across the country, to discuss their work - and find out a bit more about the business of playwriting in Canada," says Colony 2000 participant Stephen Massicotte.
Selected Biographies
Bob White
He has been active as a dramaturge and director in the Canadian theatre for over twenty-five years. As Artistic Associate at Alberta Theatre Projects, he headed the annual PanCanadian playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays for thirteen years. The Festival has premiered over fifty plays since 1987, most of which have gone on to further production across Canada and in the United States and Europe. Bob is also Program Co-director of the Banff playRites Colony, an annual three-week writers retreat in the Rockies.
Bob’s activities in new play development include major attachments to the work of Paul Ledoux, George F. Walker, Lawrence Jeffery, Brad Fraser and Eugene Stickland, among many others. As a director, Bob has directed acclaimed productions from the Canadian, American and British repertoire including Wit, How I Learned To Drive, Angels In America (with Michael Dobbin), Keely And Du, Six Degrees Of Seperation, Our Country’s Good, Oleanna, Speed-The-Plow, and many others.
Before moving to Calgary, Bob was Artistic Director of Toronto’s Factory Theatre (1979-87) and Dramaturge at Playwrights Workshop Montreal (1975-78).
Born in Montreal in 1949, Bob is a graduate of Loyola College and the University of Alberta. In 1987, Bob received the first National Play Development Award for his contributions to Canadian dramaturgy. He is also a holder of the 125th Anniversary Medal for distinguished contributions to Canadian Theatre.
John Murrell
John Murrell is one of the most frequently produced of all Canadian playwrights. His plays
have been translated into fifteen different languages and performed in more than thirty
countries around the world.
Murrell completed his university education in Calgary, where he still lives, and first began writing plays when he was a teacher in public schools in Alberta, in the late sixties and early seventies.
He has worked as playwright-in-residence at both Theatre Calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects, as an Associate Director of the Stratford Festival of Canada, as Head of the Banff Playwrights Colony (1986-1989), as Head of the Theatre Section of the Canada Council (1988-1992), and, since November 1999, as Artistic Director/Executive Producer of Theatre Arts at The Banff Centre For The Arts.
Murrell’s work for the stage includes Waiting For The Parade which has become a perennial favourite with Canadian and international audiences; Memoir (about the final days of legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt) which has been produced throughout Canada and continues to be performed frequently in Europe, and in both North and South America; Farther West; Democracy; and The Faraway Nearby (about painter and feminist icon Georgia O’Keeffe). Farther West and Waiting For The Parade were filmed for Canadian television (Murrell wrote both screenplays) and are often replayed. Waiting For The Parade, Farther West, and The Faraway Nearby were all honoured with Chalmers Best Canadian Play Awards; and Democracy received the Canadian Authors Association’s and the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Best Play Awards in 1992. Murrell’s most recent play, Death In New Orleans, was premiered by One Yellow Rabbit Theatre of Calgary at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre during the 1998 International Festival Of The Arts, and won a prestigious Fringe First Award for Outstanding New Writing.
Murrell is also nationally and internationally recognized as a translator of plays into English, including The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, and Sophocles’ Oedipus The King.