INTERVIEW: Sarah Kitz
Jul 25, 2018
Written by Walter Strydom
When asked what her favourite childhood game was, she answers without hesitation: “Let’s-Make-up-a-story.” Today, Sarah Kitz still enjoys telling stories – her’s are just not that made-up anymore. Rather, she is drawn to narratives of power, of transformation and “of looking where you’re not supposed to look.”
The winner of the 2017 Crow’s Theatre RBC Emerging Director Prize grew up in Toronto going to the ballet and theatre with her grandmothers and remembers rehearsing and staging elaborate mega musicals in her backyard with a childhood friend. “She was always the female star and I was always the director, and often also the male love interest.” But the production that changed her relationship with theatre was David Young’s Inexpressible Island (directed by Richard Rose for Necessary Angel in 1997). “It was an astonishing show,” Sarah recalls, “The stage was mostly bare. The performers were utterly exposed. They parsed out and poured out their humanities and shames on that stage. That was the first time I thought, I want to make theatre. I want to make something like that.”
Summarizing the past year as “massive,” Sarah highlights the good fortune she’s had to “work with, talk with, build with, and dream with” many brilliant artists. “It’s a difficult thing building a freelance career as a director, and with a mandate for political work, feminist work, inclusive work, I’ve found it’s critical at this point in my life and career to be precise about where and how I spend my energy, and what I want to bring into the world. The RBC Prize is brilliant in recognizing and celebrating the personal nature of an individual artist’s work.”
We asked the director of the upcoming What I call her to tell us more about her outlook on theatre, the duty of a theatre director and directing new work. What I call her will premier this November as part of the Crow’s Theatre 2018-19 Season.
You’ve previously stated that you see the theatre as a means for a community to come to aliveness together, to have a conversation with itself. How would you define this aliveness in the theatre?
I think something really magical happens in the theatre when the audience realizes it has both agency and responsibility. When an invitation is made in the art and the audience accepts the invitation to be implicated, to be agents of activity, then we’re all in the problem together. It doesn’t mean we come to a resolution. Quite the opposite. It usually means looking at the nuances of a big question about HOW WE LIVE and opening more space and complication inside it. Pretty much every story asks, how can we live together. There’s no simple answer to that. Our greatest hope is in the uncertainty, in the grappling with possibilities, in the multiplicity of concerns that must be attended to. I think when we really get down into the uncertainty together, we become vulnerable and that breeds empathy, yes, and also the spaciousness for greater complexity of thought and feeling, which we so badly need if we’re going to think and feel our way into the future together.
I appreciate that the theatre is a place for subtlety and nuance and complicated thinking and feeling. In its best incarnations it shares space with the brightest points of democracy and community and civic engagement, keeps its roots in mythology, symbol and vision, casts its gaze on history and the future, and maintains its status as art while pushing at the parameters of art.
Art is a front-line action. Art is clear sighted. Art responds to who we are and where we are now. Art is an action at the precipice of what we recognize. Art takes us beyond. It participates in cultural shift, leading to political shift. This is aliveness in the theatre.
What do you consider is the duty of the director in the vocalization of issues that are alive within our community?
Our patriarchal institutions of art, our colonial structures, our hierarchical academies, all of these owe the working models of this kind of aliveness, this gathering, to figure it out together in new and old forms, to communities that historically (and still) have not benefitted from the power structures of this world. This is the work many of our elders knew. Indigenous, queer, black, mad, disability, racialized, immigrant, migrant communities know this. I’m excited to see the definitions of what art can be and do, changing in this country.
As a director, ask if this is your story to tell. Be withthe community that the theatre serves and the communities who are experientially living in the centre of the conversation. Really be in the conversation with them. Don't worry about not having the answer. Make space for other forms of leadership, process and story. Notice who’s missing. Invite them in to take part. Ask permission. Listen to them. Centralize them.
This is our culture, one play at a time. This is our country, one play at a time. These are our soothsayers, our prophets, oracles, poets, diviners, visionaries. How else are we to know ourselves? Being trusted to bring a new work to life for the first time is like being handed a generous mystery. It’s never been seen before. We don’t know what it is and can’t possibly have all the answers. It demands that we leap to meet it. I’m keen to listen to what the work wants and find ways to answer, respond and support.
Could you give us a sense of what you’d like to achieve in your direction for/of What I call her?
Precision and tumult. Divided loyalties. A good argument.
The Crow’s Theatre RBC Emerging Director Prize is funded by the RBC Emerging Artists Project; a project dedicated to helping artists bridge the gap from emerging to established as well as supporting organizations that provide these artists with the best platform to advance their career trajectories.
Sarah was selected for the prize in 2017 from an exceptional group of theatre innovators in the early stages of their directing practice. The jury comprised of Chris Abraham and other professional artists. “With its ongoing commitment to emerging artists in Canada,” Abrahams says, “RBC has set its sights on the most critical group in need of support for a vibrant culture - the cultural innovators who seek to shake up the complacency of the world they inherit.”