ABOUT CROW’S
Karen Robinson and Sam Malkin in Eternal Hydra (2009)
MISSION
To ignite passionate and enduring engagement between our audiences and artists by creating, producing and promoting unforgettable theatre that examines and illuminates the pivotal narratives of our times.
ARTISTIC MANDATE
We seed projects and collaborations with artists and companies that are engaged in the examination of our culture’s pivotal narratives in ways that are direct yet complex, entertaining and challenging; a process that happily and constantly leads us to reconsider, re-imagine and redefine the possibilities of the theatre and the world that we make.
Crow’s commits to a long-term artistic process. We provide an appropriate gestation period, with multiple moments of audience engagement, so that each work grows and is informed through its resonance with the public.
Crow’s values quality over quantity, only programming and planning events that can be delivered with rigour, precision, intelligence and beauty.
We only create work with strong potential to live beyond its premiere production. We extend the life of the work that we create through co-production, touring, remounts or promoting and brokering new productions by other companies.
We actively seek out expertise outside of the theatre milieu in order to identify or understand stories that are of vital and pressing concern for our audience and artists.
BRIEF HISTORY
Crow’s Theatre is recognized in the Canadian theatre landscape as a provocative, daring, award-winning theatre company. Founded in 1983 by Jim Millan, it established itself by winning the 1994 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Innovation and Artistic Excellence for Dali, the company’s very first original production. In 1989, Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love was an unqualified hit. Brent Carver played David, a role for which he would win a Dora Mavor Moore Award.
Crow’s Theatre spent the next decade establishing a reputation in Canada and abroad with tours and remounts of some of the most successful productions including Serpent Kills, Come Good Rain, The Cezanne Syndrome, High Life; and national and international tours of High Life and Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. After a widely praised 2001 premiere of Time After Time: The Chet Baker Project, Crow’s Theatre embarked on its largest and most successful tour in 2003 and 2004.
In 2006, Founding Artistic Director Jim Millan announced his plans to hand over the helm of the company. After a rigorous search the Board of Director’s announced Chris Abraham would lead the company into its next phase of evolution.
The 25th Anniversary Season (2008/2009) became a milestone year that would see the most activity in the company’s history. This banner year which included continued touring activity, the premiere of a new Canadian work, the creation of several artistic residencies, and the seeding and development of projects all varying in scope and stages of development demonstrated the variety of ways that Crow’s Theatre successfully and ambitiously creates and presents diverse work on stages across the country. The season concluded with 15 Dora Nominations, 5 for I, Claudia and 10 for Eternal Hydra. The Crow’s Theatre production of Eternal Hydra went on to win 4 for Outstanding New Play, Direction, Production and Lighting Design.
Eternal Hydra has since been re-mounted to critical acclaim at Factory Theatre, with journalists calling it one of the best Canadian plays of the past decade. 2011 also saw the world premiere of Michael Mackenzie’s Instructions to any future socialist government wishing to abolish Christmas in co-production with Montreal’s Centaur Theatre.
